Tuesday 30 April 2013
Character Voices
Choose two characters from the following list and develop their voices: a fitness fanatic; a disillusioned nurse; a bored, gifted student; a jovial social climber; a music-loving dentist; a coochie-coochie pet lover; a stern old man. Make the voices different in rhythm, sentence-length, vocabulary and degrees of eloquence. Write two monologues of up to 300 words each.
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A stern old man
ReplyDelete(A few seconds of muttering under his breath) ‘Huh? Wossat? (Shouting at the audience)What you starin’ at? Haven’t you got any respect for your elders, boy? You goin’ to be quiet now? Good. Sit down and show some respect! Let me tell you a tale of my childhood. It was a better time back then. You could play in the street without drivers shoutin’ at you when they nearly run you over. I remember school. ‘Course, it was so much better back then. We got taught useful things like readin’ and writin’, not this algebra and science. Sounds bloody foreign to me. We didn’t have so many foreigners back then, only that Mr Patel from the corner shop, and he was bloody grateful to be here. Greatest country in the world, this was, before that woman took over. What? Thatcher? Who was she? No, you bloody idiot, Elizabeth! I say we should be rid of her and the rest of the (said like a surname) Royal Family. Drain on my taxes, they are. Wossat? ‘Course I pay taxes! Everyone pays taxes! What’s a pension? What did you say? A tale of my childhood? I said no such thing…
(Smoking) You know what I do all day? I care for people. They can’t care for themselves, but I suppose someone has to do it. But why does it have to be me? I’ll tell you why. Because I put myself through years of training and university to get to this. One of the lowest paid jobs in the hospital, and now with my pension cut! There are loads of better jobs out there, but I doubt anyone would take me on. Barely anyone’s hiring now, and those who are get two-hundred applicants for each measly dishwashing or receptionist place. Now they’re planning redundancies in the ward. I work on a cancer ward. Someone generally dies every week. It’s not exactly a relaxing job. To be honest, they need everyone they can get, especially those with experience, like me. All they care about is the money, when they should be caring about the patients. Money should not be more important than people suffering with terminal cancer, for God’s sake! That’s another reason I stay – those people need me. Not just the patients – the relatives as well. They need to know someone’s doing their job. Anyway, I have to go. My break’s nearly over…
ReplyDeleteI snatch a few bites of my sandwich, keeping a distracted eye on the monitor, regular beeps reassuring my anticlockwise mind. My hands are tired and clumsy, arms bruised like haemophilia spreading beneath parchment skin.
ReplyDeleteHe enters the room, using the hurried pace quick and tense enough to stress emergency and yet slow enough not be called up for it, the pace that anyone who works here knows.
They have to.
He dashes over to the monitor, his exertion clear in his ragged breaths. He has come from the operating room, I can tell. His face is flushed, his hands still unwashed. Clean bottles of sanitizer sit like soldiers on the sill, but he does not touch them.
The steady green lines start to sink, slowly flat-lining until there is a scream like car wheels or cliffs, a mother’s scream – and the words begin their flood to drown the world.
“Not Anna, please dear God, please not Anna, not her, take me, please oh Lord Anna no anyone but her…”
I walk to the operating room, through a white corridor as pale as the skinny, wheelchair creatures that roam its depths. There is another creature, lying prone upon the sheets. Her spine protrudes like some extra limb, her mouth slightly agape. Her eyes are closed, lilac lids remembering anaesthesia, cells already beginning their disintegration.
I stand in the doorway for a while before I see the struggle.
He holds her back, trying not to hurt her, fearing for her safety – a foolish sentiment to fear for a mind that broke with her daughter’s body – and slowly I reach forward and touch her.
She stills for a moment, and I am speaking, calming words I don’t remember. It is not sincere. It is routine. There are no illusions here. Only death.
The Music loving dentist man!
ReplyDeleteAs I walk to work I place my ear phones in my ears. I stroll down the pavement. The sun is out. Although I enjoy it, my eyes start stinging from the pure light beaming off every object I put my eyes upon.
I love my job as a dentist. I also love music, can’t really decide between the two. I smile at the staff as I walk pass into my room up the staircase. My assistant walks in with an almost morning smile on her face. She passes me some papers which I quickly read through until I call down the microphone, “Mr Johnson please”.
My day starts slow and as usual. I can tell that most of them don’t brush their teeth which isn’t really a pretty sight, but it all comes with the job. I suppose it’s not as bad as some adults with their mouth full of fillings, crowns and gaps where their teeth have been pulled out. You can hardly see the teeth that they have left.
Throughout the day I listened to my music quietly through one ear phone. I ended up get back to the start of my playlist by the end of the day as it dragged so much. At some points I went off to my own world for a few seconds while waiting for the next patient to climb up the stairs and reach the door of my room.
As the day comes to a close it slows again. My last patient to see. This one woman that comes in, a Miss Day. She has almost perfect teeth. They are pure white and in a curved line with each other like a sphere. I give her a check over and she soon scurries off.