GOODBYE JIMMY

GOODBYE JIMMY

This play was first performed at the Oran Mor leisure centre, Glasgow, in the lunchtime Play, Pie and Pint series. This ran from Monday 9th – 14th October, then transferred to the Jam House, Edinburgh from Monday 16th – 21st October 2006, in a version that presented THE HEAD as a lowland Scot. Anyone wishing to produce this play may do so without asking the author’s permission. Anyone also has my permission to rewrite it to suit the dialect and language of their own country. The following version has been revised for an Irish production.  

CHARACTERS

THE HEAD: Tall, elderly, fit. He wears sandals with socks, slacks, sweater under a green dressing gown, untied, with a mobile phone in the pocket. His accent is Belfast working class Irish honed by a university education, like that of a tolerant Iain Paisley. He has the relaxed, slightly amused manner of one who knows everything and only leaves the table where he sits twice during the play, but can twist and turn on it in any relaxed way that seems natural to an athletic, playful old man.  

JIMMY: Young, handsome, careworn. He wears a white shirt outside black trousers. His accent is crisp Dublin Irish, his manner usually cool and sometimes icy. He feels the Head owes him help and dislikes being treated like anyone else.    

SCENE

The backdrop is a screen filled by a large projection of the Stephen Hawkins’ website video The Universe In A Nutshell, played (if possible) slightly slower than the original.
Stage left, a small, elegant imitation antique table with an open laptop on it, the screen, facing the audience, also has an image of the same film, playing (if possible) slightly faster than the image on the backdrop. A swivel chair stands before the table, a waste bin beside it.
Stage right against the backdrop and partly masking it, a large blackboard with sticks of chalk on the ledge and the following equations chalked in the top left side:
     E=MC2 ?
E=HV !
5x1017
                     ( 1 = (H+J)2      
COOH
׀
            H2N – C – H
           ׀
     CH2
      ׀

The final hexagon has three short interior lines parallel with the first, third and fifth side.
Also, drawn very large, are three diagrams from the crystallography entry of the 1929 Encyclopaedia Britannica (fourteenth edition): figures 28, 37, 77. These leave room for a vertical line of figures to be chalked down the right hand side.  
Front stage but nearer the right, a large table with, crowded together at one end, a terrestrial globe of the sort that lights up inside and three cardboard models of platonic solids. The largest is an octahedron about 30 inches across painted bright yellow, with short projecting rod for ease of handling. There is an orange cube about a foot square, on which rests a tetrahedron, each side about 7 inches. The tetrahedron is painted white at the four apexes, has a large irregular blue patch in the middle of each surface, and areas of green and brown between white and blue.
       
SOUND – opening bars of Thus Spake Zarathustra as in 2001 Space Odyssey.

A darkness in which we see large moving images of nebulae on the backdrop, the smaller image of something similar on the laptop stage left, the globe of the world stage right. The HEAD enters left and is seen as a silhouette against the backdrop, which he pauses to consider for a moment, before going to sit on the big table.

Cut SOUND as light comes up. HEAD sits contemplating backdrop, thoughtfully sucking a thumb. After a moment mobile phone rings. He unpockets it, listens, speaks with an air of resignation.

HEAD: Right, let him in. (Pockets phone, continues contemplating backdrop.)

JIMMY enters left carrying briefcase, stands watching the HEAD for a while, sighs, lays briefcase on desk, then turns and waits patiently with folded arms.

HEAD: (at last) Aye, aye. There you are. (turns slightly, speaks with ironic courtesy) To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?

JIMMY: You won’t answer my e-mails.

HEAD: (gesturing to blackboard) I’ve a lot of other things to think about, Jimmy.

JIMMY: (ironically) Life on other worlds?

HEAD: Yep.

JIMMY: Any luck with it?

HEAD: Nope – (waves hand to backdrop) – I’ve produced a lot of microbes in submarine volcanic vents, but climate changes keep wiping them out before they even evolve into annelid worms. A planet supporting much life needs a lot of water and a steady temperature half way between absolute zero and boiling. You can’t get that without a near neighbour as big as Jupiter to hoover up the huge meteors, a satellite like your moon to grab most of the others. In this universe (waves hand to backdrop) the chance of me getting a planet like that are a million squared to one against.      

JIMMY: (intensely: not loudly) But you got one! Why turn your back on it? The only world rich in all kinds of life? Some with the brain to grasp your intention and I am not talking about whales.

HEAD: (smiling) Calm down Jimmy.

JIMMY: I am perfectly calm and don’t call me Jimmy.

HEAD: (amused) Do you prefer your ancient titles O Lucifer, son of the morning? Prometheus, bringer of fire?

JIMMY: (seeing the joke, but wistfully) King of the Jews. Prince of Peace.  

HEAD: (wagging a forefinger at him) Prince of Darkness! Loki! Kali!

JIMMY: (delicately savouring each syllable) Meph–Is–Toph–El–Ease.

HEAD: (in broad Scots) Auld Nick! (puts fists on brow with raised forefingers wagging) (drops hands and Scots accent and shrugs) I’ve been called some queer names too.

JIMMY: (not placated) So why Jimmy?

HEAD: It suits my accent.

JIMMY: Why talk like an Ulsterman?

HEAD: (serious for once) I still get messages from that world of yours, messages from lonely, desperate people who want help. They demand help. These impossible demands . . .

JIMMY: Are called prayers!

HEAD: (raising his voice) You should stop them reaching me! These impossible demands (slight pause) are mostly from mothers . . .

JIMMY: (nodding) Mothers worry you.

HEAD: (strongly) I cannot break natural laws that keep this universe running! I cannot stop fire from burning babies and wee kids just because their skin is burned off by homicidal idiots obeying orders! (more quietly) When I answer people’s. . . (hesitates) . . . prayers in a Belfast accent they know I cannot be a strong loving father who works miracles. They know they havnae a hope in Hell.

JIMMY: Then why not sound American? (USA accent) Like Dubya?  

HEAD (turning to globe and sadly touching North America) Don’t depress me. I once had hopes of the USA.  

JIMMY: (brightly) Why not sound like a Scottish Prime Minister with an English accent? He thinks you’re one of his fans.  

HEAD: (face in hands) Don’t sicken me. (Drops hands, sighs) Supernatural folk are only heard when they use other folk’s voices. You sound Irish because you like to be liked, and (IRA apart) the Southern Irish accent usually does sound friendly to people outside Ireland. But (calmly but coarsely) God the Father must sook up to Naebody. Naebody.

JIMMY: (after a pause, calmly) Do you talk like Iain Paisley to me because I too haven’t a hope in Hell?

HEAD: (looking straight at him) Yes. But it won’t stop you saying what you want to say, so (resigned) say on MacDuff.

JIMMY: (opening briefcase and removing a sheaf of papers) Here are printouts of the e-mails you ignored.

HEAD: Bin them. I know what they say because I know everything. Everything.

JIMMY: But you don’t pay attention to everything so (brandishes papers) attend to these!

HEAD: (patiently) They say governments with enough nuclear weapons to kill everything bigger than a cockroach are working to deliver more, while planning more nuclear power stations to profit banks and investors when the oil runs out.  

JIMMY: They are also fighting wars, and threatening to fight them, to stop poorer nations doing exactly the same.

HEAD: (smiling) Miss Jean Brodie’s morality: “Do not do as I do, little girls, do as I say.” (shakes head) Don’t let the politicians fool you. The United States are not afraid of another single nation fighting it. In 2000 it zapped Saddam Hussain because he had started selling Iraqi oil for Euros instead of Dollars. Bush and Blair needed a lying excuse for that war because most folk nowadays dislike fighting for commercial profit. Iraq now sells its oil for Dollars again. Iran now also looks like selling its oil on the free market, so naturally the United States has threatened war.

JIMMY: (sitting down in chair) Iran is ruled by fundamentalists. They whipped a boy of fourteen to death because he insulted you.  He was seen eating in the streets during Ramadan.

HEAD: A pity. (shrugging) Iran once had a middle class elected parliament, but it tried to nationalise Iran oil, so the U. S. A. and Britain backed a military coup supported by fundamentalists, so the oil stayed in the hands of a global corporation. But now a fundamentalist government looks like wanting it, which is a threat to United States free trade.

JIMMY: There is no such thing as free trade!  

HEAD: Of course there is, O Lord of the Flies. Remember 1839?

JIMMY: (gloomily) The Chinese government stopped British traders selling opium in China.

HEAD: (nodding cheerfully) So the British defended free trade by sending in an army and smashing that Chinese government.

JIMMY: (covering face with hands) The U. S. A. and other Christian nations marched in too. They also wanted a slice of that rich, free market.

HEAD: (chortling) Meanwhile the Indians who grew opium could only sell it through British traders because (you see!) Britain was protecting them from greedy foreigners. Every empire, O Prince of Peace, is as greedy as its armed forces let it be. What do you want me to do? Intervene personally?

JIMMY: (nodding) I do.

HEAD: Never works. I gave Moses a few good rules for everybody – don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t tell lies. Many mothers still teach that to their kids. But along came law-makers and made exceptions to my rules – you shall not suffer a witch to live, stone to death women taken in adultery, kill men and women and children when taking over their living space. Every powerful clique on earth – especially cliques who call me God – has made laws to justify killing. Had I said to Moses, this I command thee, do what the hell you like, human history would have been just as bloody.

JIMMY: Nobody thinks your law against killing applies to the killing of foreigners. (he stands up)

HEAD: (gently) You did your best to correct them on that point, my . . .

JIMMY suddenly looks at him hard.

HEAD: (seeing this says teasingly) . . . my boy. (JIMMY looks away, disappointed) You went among them in person and told them to spread my word to the world – love your neighbour as yourself. Don’t fight enemies. Give them all they want, but don’t fight, lie, steal or kill for them. (he sighs)

JIMMY: (wistfully) These were good words to spread.

HEAD: (embarrassed for the only time in this play) There is something I’ve wanted to ask. When you were . . . hanging there . . .

JIMMY: I was nailed.

HEAD: (nodding) Yes. You told somebody in the same state that he would go to Heaven with you. Why?

JIMMY: (shrugging, spreading hands) He tried to be kind to me. I wanted to be kind back. Should I have told him there is as little justice in Heaven as on Earth? My body was in such pain that I forgot it was temporary. I was delirious. Up to the very last minute I was mad enough to think you might save everybody who suffered unjustly – and save them (desperate chuckle) through me!  

HEAD: If Heaven only existed to give eternal sweeties to the good and continual beltings to the bad goodness would be a cheap thing. There would be no decency, no heroism in it. I love heroism and you were a hero.  I am proud of what you told people and what you endured for telling them.

JIMMY: You didn’t need heroism to be crucified – the Romans did it to thousands. From the start of history down to the present day millions of men, women, children still endure worse deaths just because they exist – just because they are born in unlucky places.

HEAD: (consolingly) Your words have comforted unlucky people, especially slaves and women.

JIMMY: (nodding) Yes. When my comforting words converted so many that even policemen were christened, my Christians massacred neighbours who thought different and burned down their temples and synagogues. My Jesus was as big a flop as your Moses, which is why I want you to –      

HEAD: (snapping fingers) – Suddenly, simultaneously appear on every television and computer screen on the planet announcing (chants in an Anglican High Church voice that swiftly becomes Dalek) “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and your neighbour as yourself or! You! Will! Be! Ex! Ter! Min! Ated!”? (normal voice) They would treat me as a rogue virus, Jimmy.

JIMMY: (shaking head) You don’t understand. I want you to exterminate all the brutes.

HEAD: (pursing lips and cocking head) Say that again.

JIMMY: Exterminate the brutes ! Now!

HEAD: (pretending astonishment) Michty me. Crivens. Jings Jimmy don’t be so damned Biblical! I am not the genocidal lunatic described in Genesis. There was never a deluge that drowned everyone except a single family of each species. I did not burn Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone out of heaven!  

JIMMY: You wiped out the dinosaurs and the salt water plankton. You smothered Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic ash.

HEAD: (patiently explaining) A wholly stable universe is physically impossible. Even with Jupiter and the moon to shield it an asteroid the size of Cork is bound to hit the earth every thirteen million years or so. The dinosaurs lasted a lot longer than that. They had a fair innings. Six and a half million years will pass before the next asteroid is due and it’s not my fault if folk insist on building cities beside a volcano. Your job was to stop them blaming me for things priests and insurance companies used to call Acts of God – floods, plagues and epidemics caused by ignorance of good cultivation and hygiene – and you cured that ignorance!
JIMMY: (covers face with hands, cries bitterly) O yes! (uncovers face) I encouraged Bacon and Galileo when ignorance was the main problem and true scientists were thought black magicians or heretics. And now natural science has triumphed.

HEAD: (nodding) Educated people no longer blame you and me for everything bad. A definite step in the right direction. I refuse to wipe out life on earth because the agent who should encourage it is tired of it.    

JIMMY: But I love life on Earth! I want you to save it by quickly destroying only  one kind of brute – the most selfishly greedy kind.  Get rid of men, please, before they destroy every other living thing.

HEAD: (smiling) If mankind heard you now they really would think you – (extends hooked fingers like claws) Be – el – zee – bub!

JIMMY: (flinging printouts in bin) You know what I’m talking about –

HEAD: (slightly bored) Atmosphere overheating from diesel fumes. Glaciers and ice caps melting. Sea level rising. Forests felled, land impoverished. Pure water tables shrinking or polluted. Drought increasing where thirty per cent have malnutrition and soon billions will die of that and thirst.

JIMMY: (passionately) The primitive Christians were right – scientists are black magicians. Nearly all of them work for corporations tearing up the fabric of life with the help of governments they have bribed. Half the animals alive fifty years ago are extinct. Frogs and sparrows are nearly extinct. The bumble bees are going. Some conscience-stricken biologists are freezing the sperm of threatened creatures, so they can be brought back to life when the planet is governed sanely. Mankind will never govern it sanely.  

HEAD: (with a tolerant chuckle) Aye, men have always been great wee extinguishers. Remember North America at the end of the last big ice age? A vast forest of deciduous trees with nothing dividing them but lakes and rivers and rocky mountains  – home of the biggest, most peaceful vegetarians we ever achieved – titanic browsers, tree-sloths as big as elephants and completely harmless. The first men who entered that continent across the Bering Straits had never dreamed of such easy meat. Killing bears and woolly elephants in Eurasia was dangerous work, but men easily took over America. The tree-sloths couldn’t run away, couldn’t run at all, didn’t even have to be trapped. Set fire to the trees and you had several roasted tree-sloths burned out of their pelts in a gravy of their own melted fat. The number of men expanded hugely – for two generations they were too busy eating to kill each other – they gorged themselves down to New Mexico. (He notices JIMMY staring at him in disgust) Cheer up. That’s how the Prairies came about. It made room for herds and herds and herds of buffalos.

JIMMY: Which the white men exterminated because the red men lived off them. But you know things are far worse now. Farmers are sowing genetically-modified crops that die as soon as harvested, so they must buy new seed from companies that patented them, while plants folk used to feed on vanish forever. Soon the only live creatures on earth will be the men and the mutants they eat.      

HEAD: (in a singsong voice, grinning) You’re forgetting viruses, Jimmy! They too are busy wee mutators. People are great breeding grounds for viruses, especially people eating battery-farmed meat and mutant vegetables. (with regret) Croak croak. A pity about the frogs.

JIMMY: Are you fond of the Barrier Reef?

HEAD: (reminiscently) My greatest work of art, one thousand, two hundred and fifty miles long – a masterpiece of intricately intertwined fishes, plants and insects, with the beautiful vivid colour variety of every great picture Matisse painted, and a refinement of detail even Paul Klee never achieved. I was millions of years ahead of my time when I came up with that one. (shakes head in wonder at his own genius)  

JIMMY: It’s dying. It’ll be gone in thirty years unless men die first.

HEAD: (slight shrug) Nothing lasts for ever. (sucks thumb, contemplating blackboard)

Both are silent for a moment.

JIMMY: (suddenly) What use are you?  

Startled but amused, HEAD smiles kindly at him. A pause.

JIMMY: What do you do with yourself while failing to develop annelid worms in submarine volcanic vents?

HEAD: (thoughtfully contemplates the tetrahedron) I’m preparing to generate a better universe.

JIMMY: Where?

HEAD: Outside this one.

JIMMY: How can you make a universe outside this one?

HEAD: (raising didactic forefinger) If you subscribed to Scientific American you would know how other universes happen. You see – (with enthusiastic, descriptive arm gestures) – every universe is like a carpet with a gigantic draft blowing underneath, so in places it gets rippled-up into peaks where energy and mass are so concentrated that BANG! – a hole is blown in the fabric through which mass and energy pour out, forming another universe where physical laws can bend differently.

JIMMY: (keenly) What causes the draft?

HEAD: (slyly watching him sideways) Would you think me a megalomaniac if I told you it was my breath?

JIMMY: Yes.

HEAD: (impatiently) I have to use metaphors when describing universal things. If ripples displease you, call them – (the briefest of pauses) labour pains, but I am planning a universe where planets are this shape.  

He lifts and displays the tetrahedron.  

JIMMY: (approaching, incredulous) A pyramid?

HEAD: A pyramid has five sides if you count the base: this has only four, each a perfect isosceles triangle. Get the idea?

JIMMY: No.

HEAD: (rotating the model) Four polar regions! Water collects in ice at the corners and forms an ocean in the middle of each surface – four Mediterranean seas of roughly equal size where life will evolve, and when it takes to land around the shores it will find no huge continent where an empire can grow. All nations will be small and coastal, like Scandinavia (hands model to JIMMY).  

JIMMY: (examining model) I take it these are islands. The British Empire spread from an island.

HEAD: An island with a lot of coal and iron when James Watt devised the first commercial steam engines. In my new world there will be no fossil fuels and every metal will be equally dispersed. No Gold Rushes! The machines people invent will have to be powered by oil from plants that can be grown, and harvested, and replanted.

JIMMY: This shape of planet is gravitationally impossible!

HEAD: (gesturing dismissively to backdrop) Only in this universe. I am preparing a liquid universe where the Heavenly bodies will be formed by crystallisation instead of gravitation – whole galaxies of tetrahedral planets revolving round suns probably this shape. (lifts octahedron, smiling at it and murmuring dreamily) A universe without big bangs and collisions.

JIMMY: How can a planet have seas in a universe full of liquid?

HEAD: (handing octahedron to JIMMY) My universal fluid will be light as air. (snaps fingers, suddenly struck by idea) In fact, it will be air! I’ll make it air!

HEAD jumps down onto floor and strides to blackboard.

HEAD: What a fool I was not to think about that in the first place! Never mind. No matter. Live and learn.

While JIMMY moves tetrahedron experimentally back and forward around the octahedron HEAD chalks on the blackboard the following figure – N – 78ּ1% then heavily underlines it, saying –

HEAD: When my Heavenly crystal bodies have crystallised, these chemical constituents must remain.

He chalks underneath    –   O – 20ּ99 %
                        A         ּ9323 ˝ ˝
                        Cd      ּ03 ˝ ˝
                        H        ּ01 ˝ ˝
                        Ne      ּ0018 ˝ ˝
                        Kr      ּ0001 ˝ ˝ – while muttering –    

HEAD: This universal . . . solution . . . will make flight between worlds . . . easy. No need for people . . . to blast themselves . . . across light years of dreary, subzero vacuum . . . There! (flings down chalk, grins smugly at JIMMY)

JIMMY: But . . .

HEAD: You are going to tell me, Mr Prometheus O’Lucifer, that air is mostly nitrogen exhaled by vegetation, and how can I get enough plants to fill a universe with it? But my next universe will start with a big splash instead of a bang, so the initial chemistry will be quite different. (sits down cross legged on table with hands on knees, triumphant)

JIMMY: Okay Mister Sly-boots Clever-clogs, but I was also going to ask about this planet’s angle of rotation. (hands back the tetrahedron) It will have to perform intricate summersaults if one of the triangular continents is not to be in perpetual twilight.  

HEAD: (placidly replacing it on cube) That is a problem. I’m working on it.

JIMMY: (putting octahedron on table) So how long will it take you to get this . . . airy new universe up and running?

HEAD: (smiling to himself) I have eternity.

JIMMY: You will spend eternity dreaming up a Utopia while mankind destroys the earth in a couple of generations?

HEAD: (consolingly) That’s nonsense, Jimmy. Men cannot destroy the earth. They can only destroy themselves and other equally complex creatures. In which case insects will inherit the earth while vegetation recovers, and then, (with growing enthusiasm) – from the segmented worms – you and I will evolve a wealth of new creatures with different organs and sensations and minds. I never repeat my mistakes. (thoughtfully) It was maybe a mistake giving big brains to mammals.

JIMMY: Why deny intelligence to creatures who suckle their young?

HEAD: Freud thinks it makes folk unhealthily dependent and unhealthily greedy.  I may try hatching big intelligences from eggs. Birds, in general, seem happier than people. (thoughtfully) Tropical birds are as colourful as fishes in the Great Barrier Reef, and the world will be a very tropical planet when men have made it too hot to hold them.          

JIMMY: (explosively) But –

HEAD: (quickly) You are about to say bird brains are too small for development because their necks are too thin! But owls have short thick necks and are notoriously brainy. One day you may fly to me in the form of a dove with an eagle’s wing span and find me a gigantic owl (spreads arms) with coloured feathers like a parrot – pretty polly!    

JIMMY: Is that the most comforting message I can take back to the few on earth who listen to me? The few who care for the future of life there?

HEAD: (mildly) You recently asked me to exterminate the human race and now you want me to send it comforting messages!

JIMMY: Not comforting messages, useful messages. I lied when I asked you to exterminate humanity. I was trying to goad you into coming up with a new way of saving them. (sighs) You knew that.

HEAD: (nodding) I did, and there are no new ways of saving mankind. They can only save themselves by old things that come in threes.

JIMMY: (glumly) Faith, hope and love.

HEAD: And the greatest of these is love. But love cannot work without liberty, equality, fraternity.  

JIMMY: (explosively) Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what are you on about? What do these words mean? I’ve been so mixed up with – (brief pause with hand snatching for something) – POST-MODERN people that I’ve forgotten.  
HEAD: (shrugging) Liberty is not having to obey others just because they’re stronger or richer.  
JIMMY: Equality?
HEAD: Is what everybody enjoys with good friends, or in groups where everyone knows they need each other.
JIMMY: Fraternity?
HEAD: Brotherhood. The brotherhood of man.
JIMMY: (ironically) Exclusively masculine?
HEAD: A good point Jimmy. Call fraternity love also, love that makes your world the centre of the universe.
JIMMY: Don’t talk shite! My wee world is near the edge of an average galaxy among a million million galaxies! I helped Galileo destroy the Jewish notion that the whole shebang revolved around them. How can my wee world be a universal centre?
HEAD: (patiently) A centre of the universe is wherever somebody opens their eyes, and the earth is still the only place where that happens. I hoped mankind would take life to my other worlds. (gestures to backdrop) They have the technology. (shrugs) If they use it to wipe themselves out we’ll start again with another species. (absentmindedly) To-whit-to-woo. Pretty pol.
JIMMY is sitting down looking totally defeated. HEAD claps hands, rubs them together, stands for the first time and goes to him briskly.
HEAD: (cheerfully) And since we now see eye to eye I must waste no more of your valuable time. Tell folk the competitive exploitation of natural resources is a dead end. Nuclear power, used wisely, will give access to all the space, raw material and energy they need without fighting nasty aliens for it. (claps JIMMY on shoulder to raise him, talking faster) Less than five miles beneath the earth’s surface is heat that, rightly channelled, will drive their motors and machines without poisonous emissions. (turns JIMMY towards the exit) Fossil fuels should be exclusively used as fertiliser. Goodbye Jimmy.
JIMMY: (resisting departure) Nobody with wealth and power will believe me. They know the damage they’re doing but they’re still extending motorways! Making and selling cars! Nobody owning one will change to a bicycle! Nobody who flies will go by boat! Owners of companies wrecking the ecosphere are buying self-sustaining bunkers where they and their like can survive when everyone else is poisoned!    

HEAD: (chuckling) They won’t survive. Only those who work to save others have a chance. Perhaps. (propels JIMMY toward entrance) So workers of the world unite! (mischievously) Remind them of co-operative Socialism, Jimmy – William Morris, Bernard Shaw, John Connelly.

JIMMY: (frantic) I’ll be laughed at!  

HEAD: (highly amused) Then all laughter will become screams of hysterical despair. Don’t forget your briefcase. (lifts it up and holds it out) Goodbye son.

JIMMY: Son! (stares at HEAD, then speaks with difficulty) I’m glad . . . you occasionally admit . . . I’m in the family (accepts briefcase).

HEAD: (quietly) Goodbye son. (turns back on him, returns to table) Good luck.

JIMMY: Which is not something you need, is it dad? (he leaves)  

HEAD sits down, sighs, contemplates blackboard. Stage starts to darken.
HEAD: He thinks I don’t need luck. (sigh) Green . . . grow . . . the rashes-o. (sings) I’ll give me one-o, green grow the rashes-o, What is my one-o? One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so. (speaking sadly) One is one. (sighs) And all alone. (sighs) And evermore shall be so.

It is now nearly completely dark. Suddenly: –

SOUND: A melodious chord struck on a harp.

HEAD is lit by a spotlight from above. He looks up.

A WOMAN’S VOICE: (not severe or tender but amused) You silly wee man.

HEAD: (questioningly) Mother?

END

NOTES TO ACTOR PLAYING HEAD: In five places Head puts on an untypical accent. On page 3 he uses a coarse Scots working class dialect to say – God the Father must sook up to Naebody. Naebody – not to be humorous, but especially emphatic. Different accents elsewhere are only for fun:  
Page 2 – Auld Nick . . . Auld Horny – is in Robert Burns Scots.
Page 5 – You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and your neighbour as yourself – in a Church of England chanted monotone followed by, on the same note but mechanised into Dalek speech – or! You! Will! Be! Ex! Ter! Min! Ated!
Page 5 also – Michty me. Crivens. Jings – is couthie, kailyard, Sunday Post Scots, but shifts to posh Kelvinside or Morningside with – Jimmy, don’t be so damned Biblical!.  
Page 6 – Be – el – zee – bub! – in hollow, mock-bogeyman tones.  
Page 7 – Frog, sparrow, bee impersonations are tinged with regret.
Page 9 – Pretty polly is playful.
Page 10 – To-whit-to-woo. Pretty pol. is purely thoughtful.    

NOTE TO ACTOR PLAYING JIMMY:
Jimmy only becomes seriously agitated on page 10 with – Jesus, Mary and Joseph!.