Good Works by Nick Enright

Author:Nick Enright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Currency Press

END OF ACT ONE

ACT TWO

1981, the bar; and 1962, the Donovan house.

MARY MARGARET: I think you know the answer.

TIM: No. You tell me.

SHANE: Why do you reckon?

MARY MARGARET: I’ll be direct. We want Shane to move in here.

RITA: That’s direct, all right.

TIM: What if I made a body search? Right now…

MARY MARGARET: We’d like to look after him.

RITA: Just like that.

MARY MARGARET: I’m sure you can see the advantages.

SHANE: A body search…

MARY MARGARET: To Shane. To both of them. Two boys, the same age, facing the same challenges…

RITA: You want my kid.

MARY MARGARET: They could do a lot for each other.

RITA: So you want my kid.

MARY MARGARET: I want to see justice done.

SHANE: You mean a strip search?

RITA: Are you bent on taking everything off me? Everything that’s ever meant something?

MARY MARGARET: How much does the boy mean to you, Rita? I saw him the next day outside that caravan. Alone and wretched.

RITA: Wretched? He’s tougher than that.

SHANE: What do you want to find?

MARY MARGARET: If we reported you, Shane would be taken into care. You’d lose him anyway.

RITA: I’m not losing him, no way. I waited too long for him to let him go. He was my third. Did you ever lose one? Did you?

MARY MARGARET shakes her head.

My first two I lost before I knew them, but Shane I carried to term. Got him here safe and sound.

MARY MARGARET: Safe and sound…

SHANE: Well? What’s the deal?

RITA: It was him and me all the way. Don’t do this to me. It would kill me. I can’t lose him.

MARY MARGARET: You don’t deserve him.

TIM: What’s the deal? Everything’s a deal…

RITA: You won’t take him. Out of my way. I said out of my way!

She goes.

MARY MARGARET: Don’t do anything stupid. Rita!

She follows RITA out.

TIM: You want what I’ve got, don’t you? Whatever that turns out to be? So I need to know what you’ve got.

SHANE: You’ll see.

TIM: I mean, on you. What are you carrying?

SHANE produces a sachet of coke.

I’ve never seen snow. The real stuff, that is.

SHANE: This is real, mate. Uncut. Two hundred bucks a gram. But for you…

TIM: Is that all you’re carrying? John?

SHANE: I travel light. Look, I don’t give a stuff, it’s a deal, it’s no deal. I’m gone.

TIM: No. Come home with me. Show me what else you’ve got.

SHANE: It might cost you…

TIM: Finish your drink.

1962. The caravan / the convent. RITA packs as MARY MARGARET pushes MOTHER JOHN in a wheelchair, perhaps circling her. RITA has the box of letters.

MARY MARGARET: She used to bring me things, lovely things, a glass bead she’d found in the street, a peg-doll got up as a little Dutch girl. This will kill her, she says. But I can’t think about that. I have to consider only what’s best for him.

MOTHER JOHN: You have three fine boys of your own. This one is no concern of yours. He’s a ragamuffin. No better than a blackfella.

MARY MARGARET: He was beaten, Mother. There were welts all over his legs. She doesn’t deserve him.

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