Contemporary Monologues for Women

Do you; have you ever actually felt any – guilt? Because it’s come as a bit of a surprise that um, that – you, one, I don’t, can’t actually feel it. Like I can’t get my body to do it, on its own, it’s not something I can generate somehow, like, I – I find myself having to actually summon it, trying to encourage myself, to summon it and even then I can’t do it, really, I can’t feel it. I thought it might be shock at first and then – grief or but I think I might not feel it. I can’t. I don’t. All I can feel is total joy, total – peace. I look at you and I sometimes actually make myself think of him, I force him into my head and I don’t feel guilty. What does that mean? What kind of person does that make me? (Pause.) Hm? Sometimes I think it’s because – what we have is love, meant to be. (Laughs.) That we love each other, yes, Mack, that is what I sometimes think. Is that ridiculous? And sometimes I even think that that love is so important that it is bigger, or equal to – what he did. That they are just two feelings, one is love and the other is despair and both just have an action. And that those actions are different but that somehow they are equal – does that make me a monster? I sat at his funeral looking at his parents and Benny but all I could think of, all I could feel – was you.

But then I look at you and I wonder if it’s actually there. I wonder if I added up the amount of minutes, hours, fucking days I have spent thinking about you, the amount of fucking longing I have done – if I added that up and weighed it against anything you have ever actually said… and – (Pause.)

But then you do the smallest thing you make me a cup of tea when I don’t ask, or you touch my hand really lightly in a room full of people and I think no, Sophie, don’t laugh – don’t laugh because it’s real and it’s so much more real because it’s unsaid and unspoken and un – un – un – it’s so much more real because I can’t touch it, because we can’t say it and I can’t see it, it’s so much more real because I don’t know if it’s there.

Pause. MACK doesn’t say anything.

Please say something. (Pause.) Please. Please tell me if…

She trails off unable to try any harder.

clue. And I feel… […] Sad. No, not sad. Worse than sad… I feel… […] Disappointed

Perve
Stacey Gregg

No Romance
Nancy Harris

Honour
Joanna Murray-Smith

Did I ever give you my CV? Don’t think so. Okay, here it is: born in a boringly respectable home. Dad on the boats, on the rigs, now he’s on incapacity benefit. Mum, a cleaner, paid cash in hand, died of breast cancer. Law-abiding, dole-dodging, ordinary people. Got my GCSEs and my Highers, did an extension course in Management which was bollocks, never been further afield than Portugal. That’s me. Hardly worldly-wise. But no fool neither.
I know we’re taking a liberal approach to the law here; I know our workers don’t swan in on Eurostar, don’t breeze through customs with a carefree smile; I know most of the money we make’ll not pass through the hands of Inland Revenue. And I can’t even believe I am saying this, even as I say it: I know what’s going on.
And maybe I am mad, but I trust you to do this the way it has to be done, right. ’Cos I know for a fact it’ll happen whether we do it or not and I guess I’m naive enough to believe you care more, ’cos you know more, ’cos you’ve been where these guys have been. And if we can do this better, cleaner and get a roof over our heads and have a wee laugh along the way, you know, I am totally utterly with you.
But if you abuse my trust – if you make this something dirty, something ugly, something cruel – I will walk out and I will not look back. Yeah?
So stick me on your letterhead, your website, your whatever. ’Cos the real question isn’t, ‘What do I know?’, but, ‘What does Grimmer know?’

People talk about guilt as if it’s an instinct. That the second you do something wrong, you feel guilty. I don’t; what I’m feeling is power. You always join the story at the bit where they’re sorry, when they’re desperately begging for forgiveness; but there’s something before that, there’s now. In the space after the act and before the consequences, when you’ve got away with it; when you’re walking out of an unknown door, back down unknown streets and it’s still thumping in you – dawn’s breaking, dew’s settling and you’re skipping back home, flying on the thrill of it, you can taste it. Even back here, the quiet click of the door, the tiptoe in – the alcohol’s wearing off too quickly, I want it back – our bed and all the stuff that makes up life, our life – and – I don’t feel like a traitor; I can lie here whilst another man’s saliva dries off my lips and I can remember another man’s face bearing over me – and I enjoy it, I enjoy that all this seems new again.
His alarm’s going off in ten minutes. He’ll roll over and grunt, curl himself round me like a monkey with its bloody mum. Just like every morning. He won’t notice that anything’s different – he won’t see that I have mascara down my face or that my hair is wet, because I’ve been running in the rain to get back before he wakes up, he won’t notice that I haven’t been here, that I’m drunk, no – for him, I became invisible a long time ago.

People talk about guilt as if it’s an instinct. That the second you do something wrong, you feel guilty. I don’t; what I’m feeling is power. You always join the story at the bit where they’re sorry, when they’re desperately begging for forgiveness; but there’s something before that, there’s now. In the space after the act and before the consequences, when you’ve got away with it; when you’re walking out of an unknown door, back down unknown streets and it’s still thumping in you – dawn’s breaking, dew’s settling and you’re skipping back home, flying on the thrill of it, you can taste it. Even back here, the quiet click of the door, the tiptoe in – the alcohol’s wearing off too quickly, I want

Charity
from Dancing Bears by Sam Holcroft

Perve by Stacey Gregg