The Pillowman Read online

  KATURIAN. No.

  TUPOLSKI. No, the papers didn't say. The papers didn't say a lot of things. The papers didn't say anything about the third child, a little mute girl, went missing three days ago, the same area, the same age.

  ARIEL. The papers will be saying something tonight.

  TUPOLSKI. The papers will be saying something tonight. The papers will be saying a lot of things tonight.

  KATURIAN. About the mute girl?

  TUPOLSKI. About the mute girl. About confessions. About executions. All that type of stuff.

  KATURIAN. But ... I don't understand what you're trying to say to me. Are you trying to say I shouldn't write stories with child-killings in because in the real world there are child-killings?

  ARIEL. He wants us to think that he thinks that all we've got against him is a disagreement with his fucking prose style. Like we don't know what his brother just said to me.

  KATURIAN. What did my brother just say to you?

  ARIEL. Like we don't know what's in this box.

  KATURIAN. Whatever he said to you, you made him say to you. He doesn't speak to strangers.

  ARIEL. (Adjusting bloodied cloth.) He spoke to me. He speaks to strangers alright. He said you and he speak to strangers.

  KATURIAN. I want to see him.

  ARIEL. You want to see him?

  KATURIAN. I want to see him. That's what I said.

  ARIEL. You are demanding to see him?

  KATURIAN. I would like to see my brother.

  ARIEL. You are demanding to see your brother?

  KATURIAN. I am fucking demanding, yes. I wanna see he's alright.

  ARIEL. He will never be alright.

  KATURIAN. (Standing.) I've got a right to see my brother!

  ARIEL. You've got no fucking rights ...

  TUPOLSKI. Sit down, please.

  ARIEL. Not no more, you've got no rights.

  KATURIAN. I've got rights. Everybody's got rights.

  ARIEL. You ain't.

  KATURIAN. Why ain't I?

  TUPOLSKI. Open the box.

  KATURIAN. Huh?

  ARIEL. I'll give you your rights in a minute.

  KATURIAN. Yeah, like I bet you gave my brother his rights too.

  ARIEL. I gave him his rights alright.

  KATURIAN. I bet you did. I bet you fucking did.

  TUPOLSKI. Open the box.

  ARIEL. No, I bet I fucking did.

  KATURIAN. Yeah, I bet you fucking did.

  ARIEL. No, I bet I fucking did!

  KATURIAN. I know you bet you fucking did...!

  TUPOLSKI. (Screaming.) Open the fucking box!!!

  KATURIAN. I'll open the fucking box! (Katurian angrily wrenches the box's lid off, then recoils in horror at what's inside, shivering in a corner.) What's that?

  TUPOLSKI. Retake your seat, please.

  KATURIAN. What are they? (Ariel darts over, drags Katurian back to his seat and, holding him by the hair, forces him to look into the box.)

  ARIEL. "What are they?" You know what they are. We found them in your house.

  KATURIAN. No...!

  ARIEL. Your brothers already admitted his part ...

  KATURIAN. No!

  ARIEL. But he's hardly the brains behind the operation. You know how the girl on the heath died? Two razor blades down her little fucking throat, both wrapped in apple, funnily enough. (Tupolski reaches into the box ... ) You know how the little Jew boy died? ( ... and pulls out five bloody toes.)

  TUPOLSKI. His first toe, his second toe, his third toe, his fourth toe, his fifth toe.

  ARIEL. That poor little Jew boy's five fucking toes and they were found in your house and it's nothing to do with you?

  KATURIAN. (Crying.) I just write stories!

  ARIEL. They make a nice final fucking twist, don't they?

  TUPOLSKI. Make him swallow them. (Ariel wrenches Katurian off the chair.)

  ARIEL. Where's the mute girl?! Where's the mute girl?! (Ariel tries to force the toes into Katurian's mouth.)

  TUPOLSKI. Don't make him swallow them, Ariel. What are you doing?

  ARIEL. You said make him swallow them.

  TUPOLSKI. Only to scare him! They're evidence! Have some sense!

  ARIEL. Fuck off "Have some sense"! Don't start on me again! And quit it with that "problem childhood" shit too.

  TUPOLSKI. But you did have a problem childhood ...

  ARIEL. Quit it, I said!

  TUPOLSKI. And look at your hand, that's so obviously fake blood.

  ARIEL. Oh, fuck off!

  TUPOLSKI. Pardon me?

  ARIEL. I said, "Fuck off!" (Ariel tosses the toes on the floor and exits moodily. Tupolski gathers up the toes, puts them back in the box.)

  TUPOLSKI. So moody. (Pause.)

  KATURIAN. I don't understand a thing that's going on.

  TUPOLSKI. No? Well here's where we stand as of five-fifteen P.M., Monday the fourth. Along with the evidence we found in your house, your brother, spastic or not, has, under duress or not, admitted enough about the killings for us to execute him before the evening's out, but, as Ariel said, he's hardly the brains behind the operation, so we want you to confess too. We like executing writers. Dimwits we can execute any day. And we do. But, you execute a writer, it sends out a signal, y'know? (Pause.) I don't know what signal it sends out, that's not really my area, bur it sends out a signal. (Pause.) No, I've got it. I know what signal it sends out. It sends out the signal "DON'T ... GO ... AROUND ... KILLING ... LITTLE ... FUCKING ... KIDS." (Pause.) Where's the mute girl? Your brother didn't seem to want to spill the beans.

  KATURIAN. Detective Tupolski?

  TUPOLSKI. Mister Katurian?

  KATURIAN. I've listened to your bullshit for a long time now, and I want to tell you a couple of things. I don't believe my brother said a word to you. I believe that you are trying to frame us for two reasons. One, because for some reason you don't like the kind of stories I write, and two, because for some reason you don't like retarded people cluttering up your streets. I also believe that I'm not going to say another word to you until you let me see my brother. So torture me as much as you like, Detective Tupolski, 'cos I ain't saying another fucking word.

  TUPOLSKI. (Pause.) I see. (Pause.) Then I'd best go get the electrodes. (Tupolski exits with the metal box. Door clicks shut behind him. Katurian's head slumps. Blackout.)

  Scene 2

  Katurian, sitting on a bed amongst toys, paints, pens, paper, in an approximation of a child's room, next door to which there is another identical room, perhaps made of glass, but padlocked and totally dark. Katurian narrates the short story which he and the Mother, in diamonds, and Father, in a goatee and glasses, enact.

  KATURIAN. Once upon a time there was a little boy upon whom his mother and father showered nothing but love, kindness, warmth, all that stuff. He had his own little room in a big house in the middle of a pretty forest. He wanted for nothing: All the toys in the world were his; all the paints, all the books, paper, pens. All the seeds of creativity were implanted in him from an early age and it was writing that became his first love: short stories, fairy tales, little novels, all happy, colourful things about bears and piglets and angels and so forth, and some of them were good, some of them were very good. His parents' experiment had worked. The first part of his parents' experiment had worked. (The Mother and Father, after caressing and kissing Katurian, enter the adjoining room, and leave our sight.) It was the night of his seventh birthday that the nightmares first started. The room next door to his own room had always been kept bolted and padlocked for reasons the boy was never quite sure of but never quite questioned until the low whirring of drills, the scritchety-scratch of bolts being tightened, the dull fizz of unknown things electrical, and the muffled screams of a small gagged child began to emanate through its thick brick walls. On a nightly basis. (To Mother, in a hoy's voice.) "What were all those noises last night, Mama?" (Normal voice.) he'd ask, after each long, desperate, sleepless night, to which his mother would ev
er reply ...

  MOTHER. Oh little Kat, that's just your wonderful but overactive imagination playing tricks on you.

  KATURIAN. (Boy's voice.) Oh. Do all little boys of my age hear such sounds of abomination nightly?

  MOTHER. No, my darling. Only the extraordinarily talented ones.

  KATURIAN. (Boy's voice.) Oh. Cool. (Normal voice.) And that was that. And the boy kept on writing, and his parents kept encouraging him with the utmost love, but the sounds of the whirrs and screams kept going on ... (In the nightmare semi-dark of the adjoining room, it appears for a second as if a child of eight, strapped to the bed, is being tortured with drills and sparks.) ... and his stories got darker and darker and darker. They got better and better, due to all of the love and encouragement, as is often the case, but they got darker and darker, due to the constant sound of child-torture, as is also often the case. (Light in the adjoining room fades out. The Mother, Father and child can no longer be seen. Katurian clears all the toys, etc., away.) It was on the day of his fourteenth birthday, a day he was waiting to hear the results of a story competition he was short-listed for, that a note slipped out from under the door of the locked room ... (A note in red writing slips under door. Katurian picks it up.) ... a note which read: "They have loved you and tortured me for seven straight years for no reason other than as an artistic experiment, an artistic experiment which has worked. You don't write about little green pigs anymore, do you?" The note was signed "Your brother," and the note was written in blood. (Katurìan axes into the next-door mom.) He axed through the door to find ... (Lights rise on Mother and Father alone in room, with drills and taped noises as described.) ... his parents sitting in there, smiling, alone; his father doing some drill noises; his mother doing some muffled screams of a gagged child; they had a little pot of pig's blood between them, and his father told him to look at the other side of the blood-written note. The boy did, and found out he'd won the fifty-pounds first prize in the short-story competition. They all laughed. The second part of his parents' experiment was complete. (The Mother and Father lie down to sleep side by side on Katurian's bed. Lights fade on them.) They moved house soon after that and though the nightmare sounds had ended, his stories stayed strange and twisted but good, and he was able to thank his parents for the weirdness they'd put him through, and years later, on the day that his first book was published, he decided to revisit his childhood home for the first time since he'd left. He idled around his old bedroom, and all the toys and paints still littered around there ... (Katurian enters the adjoining room, sits on the bed.) ... then he went into the room beside it that still had the old dusty drills and padlocks and electrical cord lying around, and he smiled at the insanity of the very idea of it all, but he lost his smile when he came across ... (The bed feels terribly lumpy. He pulls the mattress off to reveal the horrific corpse of a child... ) ... the corpse of a fourteen-year-old child that had been left to rot in there, barely a bone of which wasn't broken or burned, in whose hand there lay a story, scrawled in blood. And the boy read that story, a story that could only have been written under the most sickening of circumstances, and it was the sweetest, gentlest thing he'd ever come across, but, what was even worse, it was better than anything he himself had ever written. Or ever would. (Katurian takes a lighter and sets the story alight.) So he burnt the story, and he covered his brother back up, and he never mentioned a word of what he had seen to anybody. Not to his parents, not to his publishers, not to anybody. The final part of his parents' experiment was over. (Lights fade in adjoining room, but rise slightly on the bed where his Mother and Father are still lying.) Katurian's story "The Writer and the Writer's Brother" ended there in fashionably downbeat mode, without touching upon the equally downbeat but somewhat more self-incrimimat-ing details of the truer story, that after he'd read the blood-written note and broken into the next-door room it was, of course ... (The child's corpse sits bolt upright in bed, breathing heavily.) ... his brother he found in there, alive, as such, but brain-damaged beyond repair, and that that night, whilst his parents were sleeping, the fourteen-year-old birthday boy held a pillow over his father's head for a little while... (Katurian suffocates his Father with a pillow. His body spasms, then dies. He taps his Mother on the shoulder. She opens her sleepy eyes to see her open-mouthed dead husband.) ... and, after waking her a moment just to let her see her dead blue husband, he held a pillow over his mothers head for a little while, too. (Katurian, face blank, holds a pillow over his screaming Mothers head Her body spasms wildly, but he forcefully keeps the pillow down, as the lights slowly fade to black.)

  End of Act One

  ACT TWO

  Scene 1

  A cell. Michal sitting on a wooden chair, tapping his thighs, listening to the intermittent screams of his brother, Katurian, being tortured a room away. A blanket on a thin mattress and a pillow lie a few yards away.

  MICHAL. "Once upon a time ... a long long way away ... " (Katurian screams again. Michal mimics them at length, till they fade away.) "Once upon a time, a long long way away, there was a little green pig. There was a little green pig. Who was green. Um ... " (Katurian screams again. Michal mimics till they fade, then gets up, idles around.) "Once upon a time, a long long way away, there was a little green pig ... " Or was it a long long way away? Where was it? (Pause.) Yes, it was a long long way away, and he was a little green pig ... (Katurian screams. Michal mimics, irritated this time.) Oh shut up, Katurian! Making me forget the little green pig story now with your screaming all over the place! (Pause.) And what did the little green pig do next? He ... he said to the man ... He said to the man, "Hello ... Man ... " (Katurian screams. Michal just listens.) Ah, I can't do stories like you do stories, anyway. I wish they'd hurry up and stop torturing ya. I'm bored. It's boring in here. I wish ... (Sound of next-door room being unbolted. Michal listens. Michal's cell is unbolted and the bloody, breathless Katurian is thrown in by Ariel.)

  ARIEL. We'll be back to work on you in a minute. I'm getting my dinner. (Michal gives him the thumbs-up. Ariel bolts the door behind him. Michal looks over Katurian, who is shivering on the floor, goes to caress his head, can't quite do it, and sits on the chair.)

  MICHAL. Hiya. (Katurian looks up at him, crawls over and hugs Michal's leg. Michal stares down at him, feeling awkward.) What are you doing?

  KATURIAN. I'm holding on to your leg.

  MICHAL. Oh. (Pause.) Why?

  KATURIAN. I don't know, I'm in pain! Aren't I allowed to hold on to my brother's leg when I'm in pain?

  MICHAL. Of course you are, Katurian. Just seems weird.

  KATURIAN. (Pause.) How are you doing, anyway?

  MICHAL. Great. Just a bit bored. Cor, you were making some racket. What were they doing, torturing ya?

  KATURIAN. Yeah.

  MICHAL. (Tuts. Pause.) Did it hurt? (Katurian lets go of Michal's leg.)

  KATURIAN. If it didn't hurt, Michal, it wouldn't be torture, would it?

  MICHAL. No, I suppose.

  KATURIAN. Did yours hurt?

  MICHAL. Did my what hurt?

  KATURIAN. When they tortured you.

  MICHAL. They didn't torture me.

  KATURIAN. What? (Katurian looks him over for the first time, seeing there are no cuts or bruises.)

  MICHAL. Oh, no, the man said he was going to torture me, but I thought, "No way, boy, that'd hurt," so I just told him whatever he wanted to hear, and he was fine then.

  KATURIAN. But I heard you scream.

  MICHAL. Yes. He asked me to scream. He said I did it really good.

  KATURIAN. So he just told you what to say and you agreed to it?

  MICHAL. Yeah.

  KATURIAN. (Pause.) Swear to me on your life that you didn't kill those three kids.

  MICHAL. I swear to you on my life that I didn't kill those three kids. (Katurian breathes a sigh of relief hugging Michal's leg again.)

  KATURIAN. Did you sign anything?

  MICHAL. Huh? You know I can't sign nothing.

  KAT
URIAN. Then maybe we can still get out of this.

  MICHAL. Get out of what?

  KATURIAN. Get out of being executed for killing three children, Michal.

  MICHAL. Oh, get out of being executed for killing three children. That'd be good. How?

  KATURIAN. The only thing they've got against us is what you've said, and the stuff they said they found in the house.

  MICHAL. What stuff?

  KATURIAN. They had this box full of toes. No, hang on. They said they were toes. They didn't look that much like toes. They could've been anything. Shit, man. (Pause.) And they said they'd tortured you too, his hands were all covered in blood. Are you saying he didn't touch you at all?

  MICHAL. No, he gave me a ham sandwich. Except I had to take the lettuce out. Yeah.

  KATURIAN. Let me think for a minute. Let me think for a minute ...

  MICHAL. You like thinking, don't ya?

  KATURIAN. Why are we being so stupid? Why are we believing everything they're telling us?

  MICHAL. Why?

  KATURIAN. This is just like storytelling.

  MICHAL. I know.

  KATURIAN. A man comes into a room, says, "Your mothers dead," yeah?

  MICHAL. I know my mothers dead.

  KATURIAN. No, I know, but in a story. A man comes in to a room, says to another man, "Your mother's dead." What do we know? Do we know that the second man's mother is dead?

  MICHAL. Yes.

  KATURIAN. No, we don't.

  MICHAL No, we don't.

  KATURIAN. All we know is that a man has come into a room and said to another man, "Your mother is dead." That is all we know. First rule of storytelling. "Don't believe everything you read in the papers."

  MICHAL. I don't read the papers.

  KATURIAN. Good. You'll always be one step ahead of everybody else.

  MICHAL. I think I'm pretty sure I don't know what you're going on about, Katurian. But you're funny, though.

  KATURIAN. A man comes into a room, says, "Your brother's just confessed to the killing of three children and we found one of the kid's toes in a box in your house." What do we know?

  MICHAL. Aha! I get it!