A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

Pamela Brown, 28 years old, tall and tanned and young and lovely, just like a girl from Ipanema.

She lives in London in a £1,000 per week flat exactly in Stanhope Place, Hyde Park Estate. This flat has 2 bedrooms, a small kitchen and a tiny bathroom. One of the bedrooms is used by her as a shelter, where she can unleash all she has inside. The other bedroom is where she receives her lovers.

The “shelter” as she calls it is quite simple I must say. There is a small bed and a square desk where she used to write letters when she was a child. There’s also a medium size-metal-wastebasket full of chips and candy wrappers, tons of twisted-shaped toilet paper, Coke cans, Red Bull cans, half written letters, cut out pictures, hospital bills, pregnancy tests, next-day pills wrappers, used dental floss and in a special little box, her shiny metal friends…the bloody blades. They belong nowhere else but to this room, to accomplish a special job: make her feel that what she is living is neither a dream nor a nightmare.

Even though she is a gorgeous woman, every time she looks herself in the mirror she hates what she sees, what she remembers and what she can’t change. She cannot forget herself the fact that they used to be 2 of them and now there’s nobody else. The toys and pacifiers are still in the black box upstairs in the attic and the nonstop voice messages on her answer machine keep raising, her ex demands some answers about the babies but he will only find some traces of them on the Thames River.

The self-esteem issues and the £1,000 per week she must pay are pushing her to the edge. On her very best days, she collected almost £25,000 per week, and she didn’t even have to pay the rent, because the landlord was her finest client.

Her days pass by slowly but every Wednesday she visits a local hospital in the morning. There is something she finds interesting by spending her time in there. She is not sick but she feels sick inside. She sits on the waiting room and sees people coming and going, some of them talk to her for hours, and she listens to them carefully, because she cares, she does care, but she doesn’t share a thing with them but with the lady in black things went in a different direction.

DIALOGUE:

On the second Wednesday of June, Pamela was sitting on the ER, reading the Daily Express when the lady in black sat next to her with her huge handbag and the always notorious umbrella.

Lady in black: There was a time when people smiled at strangers on the street and felt a sense of empathy with neighbors; when life was full and the future bright. How happy we were then; how cheerful. How is it that you never talk back when people shared their deepest secrets with you? I have never seen you smile at anyone in this place…

Pamela: Is not that I don’t want to share; it’s just that there is not much to say.

Lady in black: I know words fail, there are times when even they fail, but when you feel that everything you do is no longer worthwhile in that right moment you have to think that it’s going to be a Good day and so the next day. There’s always something to talk about, each day has 24 hours and I bet your days are not the same.

Pamela: You wouldn’t understand a bit of my shitty life.

Lady in black: Did you just say “shitty life”? How can you be so disrespectful with the most precious thing we can have?

Pamela: The most precious thing I have had is located right there between my legs, and now is worthless, useless, rubbish, FUTILE!!!!

Lady in black: you might think I don’t know what you mean but indeed I DO know. There was a time in my life when the only thing going around my mind and down there between my legs was (in a soft voice) to copulate. But all that had a new meaning when I met my recent wounded husband Willie.

Pamela: What happened to him?

Lady in black: we were on the beach, living our last happy day, just the two of us. I’ve been buried waist-deep in the center of a mound of scorched earth for a while now and behind me was Willie, sleeping or at least pretending he was sleeping. One day we started talking about how lonely we were, and how our lives would have been if I wouldn’t have aborted our three babies. I think deep inside he never forgave me, he never forgave my selfishness. I didn’t want to share my Willie with no one else.

Pamela: three babies?? Wow! And then what happened?

Lady in black: finally, he came out and stood right in front of me with “Brownie” on his hands he started yelling at me the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, that he hates me, that he has hated me since the first abortion, that he never believed none of my three different stories neither the slippery floor, the tripping on the stairs nor the God didn’t want us to be parents theory. I could see in his eyes that he was determined to shoot me so I took my umbrella and stuck it in his chest…it was what you called nowadays self defense.

Pamela: well, just for you to stop feeling soooooo damn bad, I’m going to confess what I did and why my life is so messed up… I drown my twins in the Thames River, my clients didn’t want to fuck me with a pair of crying babies in the room next door; I was losing it, I DID lose it.

Lady in black: Oh my Gosh! That’s awful, you are a horrible person.

Pamela: we are the same kind of shit so don’t pretend that what you’ve done is not as bad as my crime.

Lady in black: what I did, I did it for LOVE! But you, you did it for money.

Pamela: well, no matter how you excuse yourself, a crime is a crime, so if you excuse me, there’s a client I have to satisfy. Hope your husband gets better and shoots you next time he’ll try it. Have a happy day!