‘I don’t like that acting troupe at all,’ she said. ‘They pretend to be the gatekeepers of something. What the hell are they the gatekeepers of?’ She stabbed her drink with her straw. ‘Tell me. Be honest. Was I bad up there?’

‘Lucy,’ Natasha said, holding up a page covered in red marks, ‘let’s make this a comedy.’

‘Abortion, A Love Story?’

Natasha nodded.

‘But it’s about these two girls, sisters in misery.’

‘I know.’

‘They don’t have anything.’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s a bad time.

‘It’s a woeful time.’

‘And it gets worse.’

‘How?’

‘It’s always raining.’

‘True.’

Lucy took a sip of her drink. ‘Who could find all that funny?’

‘Not me.’

‘And the pain and the suffering of the women,’ Lucy said, shaking her head. ‘The violence of what they have endured. That’s what the audience will want.’

‘Yeah,’ Natasha said, ‘and let’s not give it to them.’

Lucy was silent.

‘Comedy is tragedy sped up.’

Lucy tapped two fingers on her can. ‘That’s Ionesco.’

‘I thought it was my dad,’ Natasha said.

‘You know we’re risking our reputations.’

‘We don’t have reputations to risk.’ Natasha leaned forward. ‘Do you trust me, Lucy?’

Lucy took a long, thoughtful gulp. She nodded.

*

The room where they worked was an abandoned classroom at the back of the college, and they spent every available minute in there. The first day Lucy arrived dressed up, wearing a pretty cardigan and shirt. She looked like someone who believed in order.

‘Take that off,’ Natasha instructed. ‘There’s no room for order here.’

They spent all that first day in the room working out the shape and texture of the play. They stretched. They meditated. They rubbed crystals that Lucy had stolen. They played inspiring music. Should they start, elementally, as trees swaying in the breeze? Should they crawl from the dirt? Should they monologue their feelings? Should their characters have good intentions?

‘Let’s not do the obvious thing,’ Natasha said.

After that, they didn’t say anything for a long time. In the evening, they sat together in the computer house and watched the old comedy clips that Natasha’s father had collected – men flying off ladders, through hatch doors, men whose cars wouldn’t start, men whose businesses were failing, men being thwarted at every turn – a black and white stream of men getting energetically angry. The clips, all strung together manically, were the opposite of culture, the opposite of civilised behaviour and reason. These clowns with their bright red faces were the radical opposite of beauty. There was nothing discreet in these clips, everything was loud and frantic. They were somehow good and bad at the same time.

‘Can we get gin and tonics?’ Lucy whispered.

It took Lucy several days to turn the full focus of her attention to the clips but when she did, Natasha couldn’t believe what she could retain. Specific gestures, movements, costumes – there was nothing that escaped her attention. She recited punchlines word for word. Her mind, which couldn’t handle one bit of reality, could hold the imaginative world. To rouse themselves out of their creative stupor, they talked about what they were fighting against – earnestness of any kind, the dry, the humourless. Boredom, Lucy added. Logic. Moral dictation.