All rights reserved Titus Forbes Adam 2007 Draft 19 June 07 Millennium Hamlet or I AM THAT I AM, I AM WHO? It is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind Lawrence Oliver introducing his film of Hamlet Titus Adam 98 Glenarm Rd, London E5 0na 07733003524 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. 1 All rights reserved Titus Forbes Adam 2007 First Day March 15th 2002 Where are you? O gawd. Toe beee… To be… That voice Where are you? Again. Feel like shit. Who are you? Don’t listen. Write. To be? Or not. Read Turn over the page. 2 All rights reserved Titus Forbes Adam 2007 I AM THAT I AM…at the beginning Am I ? And the End.. And I took my stand on the seashore Then I saw a beast emerge from the sea: it had seven heads and ten horns, with a coronet on each of its ten horns, and its heads were marked with blasphemous titles…. Is it? Oh Gawd more bollocks, the man sighed. More copying. The window rattled again; a harsh wind outside buffeted the little house on the cliff. Trying to work it out… Toby? To be? Toe Bee? Where are you? Was it from outside or inside his head? Toby had got used to hearing these voices in and around him, the choir to his Condition he called it, a product of the pressure on his brain; that brain, 3 All rights reserved Titus Forbes Adam 2007 did it hold the core, the essence, or was it in his heart and what was that exactly? You can think with your heart, same cells Tina’s Professor had said, but did that make any difference? And which one was the truth? ..There is a deep hole in your being like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes… Another book, another gay priest, another gap longing to be filled. Did his brain, or heart, hold anything original? The Gap, he knew all about that now but it had taken him a lifetime to find out? To be or not to be he mouthed, that is the question, to be or not to be and he listened for an answer. More wind, waves and the low murmuring of a song, muffled, as if coming through a wall beyond his own... I love you I love you with all my heart I love you... No, he didn’t, but why couldn’t he? …The minds battle to deceive itself with all its insidious tricks and strategies can be fully appreciated only by… More self help, Addiction and Grace spread on top of his own script Millennium Hamlet draft42, … those who play out, on an extreme scale, a drama that all human beings 4 All rights reserved Titus Forbes Adam 2007 experience more subtly and more covertly...scraps of quotes beneath 'For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so'… O Gawd, did he have to, more self searching, couldn’t he just live? Toe beeeee toobee toby where are you another voice buffeting around the cove hitting the cliff then coming back again towards her Whark Whark Whark.. the gulls urgent calling mixed with a womans cracked voice, Toe beeeee toobee black scarf flaying around her head, a silhouetted noose tightening her screams out to sea… toe bee…toe beee. Then she stopped, suddenly, turned back to the caves and started to call again tooe bee too into their gaping echoing mouths Where are you Toby? I am here Where are you? that is the…..? He was sick of the question, sick of the copying, his head a tinnitus vice continually squeezing and it felt like nothing was going to shift, it’s whine and he’d have to endure it forever? …tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune the quote didn’t help or take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die...To die. What did it mean, to die, 5 All rights reserved Titus Forbes Adam 2007 exactly?...to sleep, and by a sleep to say we end the heartache… The heart, but what about the head? His fucking aching head. Whark Whark, Whark Whark… On the sheds corrugated roof gulls stood at the edge, a pair almost touching he wrote, it must be love he thought, his head cradled in his hand as he continued to scrawl Impossibility of Love. Living lie. Truth. No history. Leave or not to? End of? He crossed that out and then pushing so hard on the pen it broke the foolscap. It is as it is. Is not it. I am who is. I am that. I am who am, Who am I?... ‘Oh God’, and he screwed it up and threw it away onto the rest discarded. Beyond the shed was the cliff and then the drop, foam and waves rushing back and forth over the rocks. A drop into the darkness, into the Abyss they might have called it when the house was built. God that was a shit movie; Dark Abyss 2 the last part he’d auditioned for before it had all gone tits up, couldn’t even get the cameo of the Evil Pissed Brit... ‘the Guys a loser’ ‘emotional problems you know’, ‘Forget it Maggie he’s a lush..’ The memory blew a vacuum into his lower bowel and he felt them loosen. No, not now, hold On. 6 All rights reserved Titus Forbes Adam 2007 No, don’t. Not now, let it go, the memory, the past. No, hold on. Oh Shit. God. A red streak high up on the horizon and a bundle on the walkers back, a baby perhaps. Where was his and he stared out across the cove. A flock of black birds was flying from promontory to promontory around the bay, jackdaws wheeling between caves like homeless bats trying to get a bearing. The rockface was laced with the white dots of birds nesting or beginning to, others gliding in helixes and one breaking away flapping frantically as if coming to land, losing all elegance in not quite making it, then swooping down again toward the charging changing sea? Why did the gulls sitting on the cliff make an almost perfect circle? He felt he was watching some secret mystery unfold ancient rituals ending Winter, a riddle the answer to which was almost within his grasp, the birds forming patterns predetermined by arrangements to each other and to the land and elements they were within, precise and exact, somehow vital in allowing the beginning of Spring. Yes, no, he’d get this role right for sure though, end of. It would be perfect and he saw the body splayed there, 7 All rights reserved Titus Forbes Adam 2007 another made-for-TV movie quick and easily done. No, it wasn’t enough, he wanted no remnant of himself left, nothing, Empty Trash, then DELETE, all gone. It was impossible he knew now. ‘You can’t’, some IT geek had told him inside of Infinity, before the redundancy and collapse, ‘The hard disk retains the imprint of all information it has ever had’, he’d said, ‘always, forever, unless you had the right tool and special knowledge’ the Nerd had grinned, ‘that’s how we catch the peados and the cheats and believe me that’s how they’ll nail you at the finale’. He didn’t want to think about it, the past, he had bigger things to think out. To be? to live at all, in fact that was the question, his life one big question mark now. One loss after another, a waste, the suicide would simply be a confirmation of that, the fact that his life had been already lost, Keep it simple they said. Surrender, that’s what they’d told him in the Crypt at the start of his so called Recovery, but he’d never known what they’d meant. Hand it over. Let go, Let God. But when he did want to, finally, he didn’t know how to, his mind just couldn’t, had to cling onto, instinctual. Thy will be done not mind, but all he’ d ended up with was no will at all, deep down inside him, to live. 8 All rights reserved Titus Forbes Adam 2007 Grace, they said, would come, like that time and his little bit of Peace, but he couldn’t keep hold of it and he couldn’t see how he could in this World. The World the Flesh and the Devil they said and he thought he knew what the Devil was at least the voice on his shoulder that whine telling him that he didn’t deserve to, go on you piece of shit go on and he just couldn’t hear the other one he knew was there, Go well, the Advocate that was supposedly telling him that everything was going to be alright and in fact, he was totally loved. No, fuck it he was damned, it was too late and anyway this would be a real surrender anyway, the ultimate one, wouldn’t it? ..for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressors wrong, the pangs of deprized love...Exactly and in fact, it was funny in the end, the Samaritans was what had done him in, the rejection of those wide-eyed people making him completely inarticulate, making him feel doomed to be bad.