Until I Get my Gorgeous Wings

by Adrian Hornsby

‘I go downstairs and get my things, though everything smells of London now — smells like everything else, like all the little houses all joined up to make a wall you can’t see past — is what that smell is. I watch them from the bus. With all those other people.’

A young woman returns to her home by the sea, after a dislocating period in London. She drags a washing machine down to the beach and loads it with the clothes she wore there, and the sheets she slept in. She sits to wait as the tide rises. She watches, and thinks back through the reasons she left in the first place, and what happened to her while away.

A man sits in the kitchen of his ground floor maisonette, wondering where his wife has gone. He looks round the perfectly white walls, and remembers a time when she cleared a fleck of paint from his eye. In his mind he sees her there, telling him to stay still; then again asking for money; and again criticising him for what he has let his life become. Tormented by these visions he gives a sudden account of the time leading up to her disappearance.

Passing connections between the two stories reveal a shadowy portrait of the capital, composed of assumed names and lost pasts.

‘And God I wouldn’t be you right now — I wouldn’t I wouldn’t — not for all the shrunken heads in Ecuador.’

Note
Until I Get My Gorgeous Wings is a mixed-media play written in a highly unique format. The actors' lines, rather than following one another, overlay and flow through each other, like the parts of a string quartet. Accordingly in book form the text is laid out like music — click here to see some sample pages. Simultaneous to the action on stage, a film runs on the back wall.