Twelve Just-Abouts

Sogmarsh Wireless Presents — being thirty minutes of parish justice, carried forward.

A municipal room. Rain on a high window. Twelve chairs scrape. Somewhere a clock that has never once struck the hour clears its throat and thinks better of it.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless presents Twelve Just-Abouts; in which Mr Horace P. Dudgeon, President for Life of No. 4½ Sump Lane, is called to parish justice, and declines, alone and magnificently, to let it end.

Interior. The kitchen, that morning. MERCY hands HORACE a folded summons.

MERCY. Summons. You're wanted on the parish panel. Twelve of you, to settle a matter.

HORACE. (unfolding it, thrilled) A panel. Twelve sober persons of judgement, and I am summoned among them. (beat) No — above them. It says here the panel elects a foreman.

MERCY. It doesn't say you.

HORACE. It does not say not me, Mercy, and in the law that is as good as a coronation. What is the case?

MERCY. (reading over his shoulder) "To determine whether Sixways Lane, being underwater since the year of the great wet, does still lawfully exist, and is open, or is closed."

HORACE. A profound question. A question of being. They will need a firm hand.

MERCY. They'll need to be home by four. That road's been drowned forty years, Horace. It's a show of hands and a swift pint. Don't make an afternoon of it.

HORACE. (already gone, coat swirling) Justice, Mercy, is always an afternoon.

Interior. The panel room. AUBREY VANE — the Murkminster official who decides whether a thing legally exists — presides with a great ledger. SOL and BILLY are among the twelve. A brass foreman's ring is produced.

VANE. (wearily) The panel will settle. You have elected a foreman. (holds up ring) The foreman wears the ring of office. Whose finger?

HORACE. (seizing it) Mine. (forcing it on) A snug fit. The sign of a man born to — (strains) — born to — (pause) — it's a little — no, it's on. It's on. Splendid. We proceed.

VANE. The question. Sixways Lane. Underwater. Does it exist, and is it open or closed. A show of hands will —

SOL. Closed. Home. (half-rising) Right, that's me —

BILLY. (earnest) It's wet, though. Is wet closed? Our privy's wet and that's open.

VANE. (rubbing eyes) The panel will please not reason. Reasoning has never once shortened a matter in this room. All those for "closed" —

HORACE. (rising, ring glinting) STOP. (the room stops) Eleven of you would drown a road on a show of hands, on a wet Thursday, to make a public house by four o'clock. Not I. I will not send a road to its death without I am satisfied. A road, gentlemen, is a road.

SOL. (groaning) Here we go.

HORACE. (warming, magnificent) You call it closed. Yet the signpost at Old Sixways still points to it — points, this very morning, in the rain, at a place. Does a signpost point at nothing? And the map — (snatching it) — the parish map says the lane is open. (snatching another) The Committee's map says it never existed. Two stamped papers, gentlemen, in flat contradiction, and you would settle it with your fingers in the air.

VANE. (a small, tired admiration) ...He's not wrong about the maps. The maps have never agreed. That's why the matter keeps coming back.

BILLY. How many times has it come back?

VANE. (consulting ledger) This is the forty-first year it has been settled.

HORACE. (triumphant) Settled forty times and here it is again! Because it was settled falsely, by tired men! I say the road exists!

SOL. It's underwater, Horace!

HORACE. So is half the realm, and we don't strike that off the map! (beat) Well. The Committee does. But we don't believe them.

A stalemate. Eleven for closed. One — ring stuck, chin out — for open. VANE turns to a fresh page with the ease of long practice.

VANE. Very well. As the panel cannot agree — as the panel has never, in forty-one years, agreed — I shall record the finding this room always records. (writing, reciting) "The matter of Sixways Lane is neither open nor closed, but is carried forward, as is proper." And we may all —

HORACE. (horrified) Carried — you can't carry it forward! That's not a verdict! That's just — that's just deciding not to decide, and calling it Latin!

VANE. (gently) It is the only verdict the realm has, Mr Dudgeon. Nothing here is permitted a clean ending — not the year, not the bell, not a road. We do not close things. We carry them.

HORACE. (genuinely anguished, and for once not performing) But that's — that's monstrous! Somewhere a thing is true! Either the road is there or it is not! Give me a straight answer, man, the realm must be able to give ONE straight —

And here HORACE, straining at the stuck ring, at the drowned road, at forty-one years of tired men, blurts the thing under it all —

HORACE. — the road is there! It's there because Widow Rush still sets a lamp at her window of a night for her Tom, who went up Sixways in the wet and never came back, and she has lit it forty years, because to her that road is open, it is the openest road in the realm, and her Tom is just about to come down it — and you'd tell that woman her road is CLOSED? On a show of hands? By four o'clock?

A silence of an entirely different weight. Even SOL sits back down.

VANE. (very quietly, after a moment) ...No. No, we would not. (and he draws a line through his own recording, and writes fresh, slowly) Let the record read: "Sixways Lane is carried forward — being closed to the cart, and open to the ones who still walk it." (beat) ...That is the truest thing this room has recorded in forty-one years, and it took a man who could not bear to carry a thing forward to say why we do.

BILLY. (softly) That's nice, that is.

SOL. (gruff, moved, covering it) ...Right. Well. I'm having a pint for Tom, then. Anyone's coming.

Interior. The kitchen. Evening. The bucket drips. HORACE sits, subdued, holding up his hand. The ring is still on.

MERCY. Home, then. Did you close your road?

HORACE. (quietly) ...No. We carried it forward, Mercy. (beat) I fought it all afternoon. Turns out it's the kindest thing we do. Nothing here finishes — so nothing here is ever quite lost. Not a road. Not a Tom. (looks at his hand) ...Not a ring, apparently.

MERCY. (coming to look) Stuck?

HORACE. Foreman for life, it would seem. (a small return of grandeur) Which, when you consider it, is no less than —

MERCY. (already reaching for the butter dish) Give us your hand.

HORACE. (as she works) ...Leave it a little while.

SFX: the drip. The clock, once more, thinks about striking, and, as is proper, carries it forward.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless has presented Twelve Just-Abouts. Sixways Lane remains carried forward, and will be settled again next year, and every year, for as long as one lamp is lit. Mr Dudgeon is foreman for life, or until the butter works.

— end —