The phone rings again. ‘I will see what I’m doing Saturday,’ she says, more briskly this time. She puts the phone down and stares into space. ‘My phone never stops ringing,’ she says, almost despairing.

The phone rings again. ‘I will see what I’m doing Saturday,’ she says, robotically. She places down the receiver. ‘I like the cocktails and the compliments.’

The phone rings again. Each ring is louder, angrier. ‘I will see what I’m doing Saturday,’ she screams and puts down the receiver. ‘I like the cocktails and the compliments, but after a while it all starts to turn my stomach.’ She twirls a piece of her hair in her finger. There is complete silence.

The phone rings again. ‘I will see what I’m doing Saturday,’ Lucy says. She re-adjusts her negligee, squeezes her breasts. She listens more carefully. She switches the phone to her other ear. She nods. She stands up and walks around with the phone in her hand. She giggles.

‘You earn how much a week? Without tax? So what’s your take-home pay? I don’t mean to be brash but a woman has to think about these things,’ Lucy says. ‘I have a right to ask. It’s an issue I get pretty heated about. A woman has to think about her place in society. She has to rise. You sound like an upstanding citizen with prospects.’ Lucy winks at the audience, a big, exaggerated batting of her right eye. ‘So I guess I will come right over.’

Lucy exits with the telephone in her hand, as Natasha drags a carpet onstage. She unrolls it. It is a white woolly material. Natasha wears a dress, a long silver sheath. Before she lies down, she pulls a string and a large screen fills the space behind her.

‘I carry this everywhere with me,’ Natasha explains to the audience, ‘because carpet is still new to me. I grew up in a house that was all hardwood, low-ceilinged, a bungalow on a country road.’ Natasha starts laughing. ‘I was what you call dirt poor.’ She bends over as if this is the funniest thing she has ever heard. ‘I won’t put you through it; just picture death and you’re nearly there. We didn’t even have a VCR so I hadn’t seen many films before I became an actress. Anyway, enough about me.’ She turns her back to the audience and faces the screen. ‘Let’s watch a film.’

Onscreen, hundreds of clips ran together, moving from black and white to colour. In the clips, women walk in and out of rooms; they are grabbed at by faceless figures. They sprawl on furniture and are photographed: tied to train tracks, being slapped hard across their faces. Hundreds of close-ups of women with tears in their eyes, their features unmoving, their faces all strikingly similar. At the end, a single scene plays again and again: a woman is punched in the face. Blood spurts from her nose as she smiles. ‘You love me,’ the woman says, as she lies on the floor. ‘This means you really love me.’ As this scene plays, Natasha pours red liquid all over the carpet until it becomes fully red and filthy, her feet soaked with the liquid.