Cally Phillips' Another World is Possible
Episode Eleven – QUESTIONS
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: 1994 London – ROISIN
Swearwords: None.
Description: 1994 London – ROISIN
Punk has become Britpop. Mrs Thatcher has given way to John Major and in 1994 everything seems greyer and less exciting. Roisin is inclined to agree with the Blur album title ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’. It’s not just her, it’s the same for everyone she knows, everyone she works with, everyone she mixes with. Not that she mixes much these days.
It’s nearly three years since she graduated with her degree in Economics. Britain has gone through the boom and is heading into the bust. Lots of people are making it but lots more are faking it and many, many more are breaking under the strain.
Roisin has little time for either music or radical politics these days. These days it’s all work, work, work for scant reward. Oh, she has her own little one bedroom flat, nothing special, in East London (the part of Docklands that isn’t quite up and coming yet) backing onto where the aspirational yuppies are moving in on their shared purchase schemes and selling their souls to market forces. Everyone’s hanging on. By a thread. All of which gives Roisin more work.
After graduating, Roisin still wants to make a difference. There’s still a yearning to ‘Be like Che’ and so she decides to get a ‘real’ job. With the imminent arrival of the Care in the Community Act there’s plenty of work in social services. Plenty of opportunity to sacrifice yourself trying to make things better for people. But it doesn’t take long to realise that there’s no Care in this Community and that the word Act in this context has more to do with fictional realms of the theatrical than any positive action to make things better. The Law holds sway and Paul Weller’s early predictions shouted from the sweat-filled clubs come true – the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and we’d all be best to go underground, because there’s nothing left for most ordinary people in Cool Britannia.
Roisin isn’t cool any more. Doesn’t want to be cool. Doesn’t want to mix in society. May actually be on the path to clinical depression but she’s not going to admit to this. She’s determined she won’t inherit Mary’s mental health problems. She still has to deal with them second hand. It’s one reason her flat is so small. That way there’s not enough room for Mary to land on her on a whim. You’d think.
Mary is one of the Care in the Community ‘victims’ Roisin works to help. But it’s easier when you aren’t related to the people needing help. Roisin finds it extremely hard to spend time with Mary. Whatever Mary’s needs are, Roisin finds it impossible to fill them. Oh, she can spend fifty hours a week working on behalf of her organisation, trying to help people with mental health problems access their ‘rights’ but it seems that the rights of a mother don’t count for much in Roisin’s world. For Roisin, charity definitely does not start at home. It’s anywhere else but.
The landscape of Roisin’s life in 1994 is dull and grey. As dull and grey as everyone thinks John Major is, because they don’t know he’s knocking off the egg-woman Edwina Currie at this point. Like everything, until you get beneath the surface you’ll never really find the truth. They sell you what they want you to see, and myth and metaphor are all mixed up in the mid 1990’s.
Roisin doesn’t even wonder if she’s happy any more. Happy isn’t a concept she can deal with. She just hopes she’s doing a valuable job but being confronted daily by people she can’t help, in situations she can’t make better, makes her wonder whether she really can make any kind of a difference to the world. It’s hard to be like Che in East London in 1994.
Her life with Jim is a memory, like all the other memories. Her focus is on work, that’s what she wants her reality to be. But some things, some people, demand to be a part of her current reality, whether she likes it or not. Patrick shows up from time to time when he wants something. Usually money. Mary comes, too, when she needs somewhere to stay because she’s been thrown out of accommodation for drugs, or noise. For Roisin, family are like the proverbial bad pennies. Always wanting something. Money. Time. Attention.
Roisin finds herself spending too many of her spare hours trying to get Mary into secure units or sheltered accommodation, or somehow trying to pass on what might be seen as her responsibility. After all Mary gave up the best years of her life for Roisin, brought her into the world and all that, and no one can emotionally blackmail you like a mother can. Try as she might Roisin can’t help but resent it. She sees Mary more as her problem than her responsibility and as such is about the worst person to be ‘caring’ for Mary. Luckily for Roisin, working as she does in a small organisation with good networking contacts, there is always some way of pulling some strings. The aim is to get Mary some sort of life that does not require Roisin’s daily input. It’s usually successful, until things go really wrong. Then you can’t avoid them.
Which is the case in July 1994. John Smith has just died and the young pretender of all that is Cool Britannia, Tony Blair, becomes Labour leader. He’s on a mission to create a whole New Labour party (could have been worse, could have been labelled Cool Labour) and the country is in an uproar of grief. Well, those who are interested in politics. The rest have to wait another 3 years until Diana dies – that’s when they get their fix. More importantly in July 1994, Mary turns up on Roisin’s doorstep in a hell of a state. But that’s a given really, isn’t it? This time Roisin can’t ‘place’ Mary anywhere and so for a month Mary goes to work with her. Mary quite likes it. Most of the time she seems to think she’s actually got a job at the office. Roisin’s trying her best to keep Mary on the straight and narrow, on the medication and off the drugs, but even without drugs these days Mary is so distanced from any objective reality that within three weeks, someone in the office manages to pull whatever the appropriate strings are and get Mary a ‘new start’ in some sheltered accommodation, a half-way house. This is a situation like gold-dust and Roisin hopes Mary will take to it. The only problem is that it’s in Kent.
Mary’s not keen on going out of London and feels press-ganged into it. She’s happy living with Roisin, going to the office and entertaining the workers. She is living proof, after all, of the people they are working to help. This fact is not necessarily helpful to the staff. For all of them, like Roisin, it’s easier to help someone who you don’t actually know. Easier to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe their sob stories. Everyone keeps telling Mary she’s very difficult to help. Mary just thinks that Roisin is making excuses.
‘It’s your job to help people like me,’ she bleats.
‘Like you mum, not YOU,’ Roisin replies, not for the first time. ‘I’m too close to you. I can’t help you. You need proper help.’
‘If you’d put more effort into it. If you didn’t resent me so much. If you listened to me…’
‘If I could ever believe anything you told me….’ Roisin is at her wits end.
The pattern of recrimination and blame is hard to lose and cannot lead to any positive outcomes.
Then there are days Roisin really tries. ‘Mum. For once. Let me believe what you tell me. Tell me the truth.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I always tell the truth. I don’t lie.’ Mary is aggrieved.
‘So, what about my dad?’
‘What about him, Roisin? I’ve told you everything.’
‘You’ve told me all kinds of things, but I never, never know what to believe. Why did you tell me my dad was Che Guevara?’
‘Why do you think?’
Getting into a spiral of questions from questions is one of Mary’s more usual ways of avoiding things she doesn’t want to face.
‘I don’t know what to think, Mum.’ Roisin is stumped. The question is key but she’s not sure she wants the answer, or that she’d believe any answer she got from Mary, to this question now.
‘If you can’t believe me when I tell you something private, personal, something painful to me…. You’ve always been ungrateful and….’ Mary begins to resemble the young Roisin about to throw a tantrum. It’s not a pretty sight. So this is where the conversation has to end because otherwise Mary will take pills or Roisin will turn to drink and no one will be any the wiser.
Roisin is lost in a vicious cycle. She deals with Mary the best she can, then inevitably she pushes her too close to reality and Mary backs off. And that’s the only peace Roisin gets, when Mary walks away from the real world.
By August 1994 Mary has settled in Kent at least for the short term and Roisin thinks about taking a break. She’s not been abroad since the abortive China trip but she has a little money saved up and maybe she could just forget it all for a week or two.
Then Patrick turns up. Out of the frying pan and into the fire for Roisin. Somehow, and Roisin will never work out how, he gets his hands on the three hundred pounds Roisin has earmarked for her holiday. So Patrick goes to Spain and Roisin stays in Cool Britannia. Patrick is living it up in Ibiza with the dance craze (probably making a fortune selling ecstasy to kids on their first parent-free holiday) and Roisin spends two weeks finding out that London is not the great tourist destination it’s hyped up to be.
It’s true. In London in 1994 real life is rubbish. For the first time Roisin begins to find some sympathy with those who just give up on reality and find their own alternative. What is reality anyway? Who can you trust and what can you believe and what do any of us really know about who we are? Roisin is twenty-eight going on twenty-nine and she’s finally accepting that things may not work out. It’s impossible to ‘be like Che’. And maybe it’s all a fiction anyway.
It’s nearly three years since she graduated with her degree in Economics. Britain has gone through the boom and is heading into the bust. Lots of people are making it but lots more are faking it and many, many more are breaking under the strain.
Roisin has little time for either music or radical politics these days. These days it’s all work, work, work for scant reward. Oh, she has her own little one bedroom flat, nothing special, in East London (the part of Docklands that isn’t quite up and coming yet) backing onto where the aspirational yuppies are moving in on their shared purchase schemes and selling their souls to market forces. Everyone’s hanging on. By a thread. All of which gives Roisin more work.
After graduating, Roisin still wants to make a difference. There’s still a yearning to ‘Be like Che’ and so she decides to get a ‘real’ job. With the imminent arrival of the Care in the Community Act there’s plenty of work in social services. Plenty of opportunity to sacrifice yourself trying to make things better for people. But it doesn’t take long to realise that there’s no Care in this Community and that the word Act in this context has more to do with fictional realms of the theatrical than any positive action to make things better. The Law holds sway and Paul Weller’s early predictions shouted from the sweat-filled clubs come true – the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and we’d all be best to go underground, because there’s nothing left for most ordinary people in Cool Britannia.
Roisin isn’t cool any more. Doesn’t want to be cool. Doesn’t want to mix in society. May actually be on the path to clinical depression but she’s not going to admit to this. She’s determined she won’t inherit Mary’s mental health problems. She still has to deal with them second hand. It’s one reason her flat is so small. That way there’s not enough room for Mary to land on her on a whim. You’d think.
Mary is one of the Care in the Community ‘victims’ Roisin works to help. But it’s easier when you aren’t related to the people needing help. Roisin finds it extremely hard to spend time with Mary. Whatever Mary’s needs are, Roisin finds it impossible to fill them. Oh, she can spend fifty hours a week working on behalf of her organisation, trying to help people with mental health problems access their ‘rights’ but it seems that the rights of a mother don’t count for much in Roisin’s world. For Roisin, charity definitely does not start at home. It’s anywhere else but.
The landscape of Roisin’s life in 1994 is dull and grey. As dull and grey as everyone thinks John Major is, because they don’t know he’s knocking off the egg-woman Edwina Currie at this point. Like everything, until you get beneath the surface you’ll never really find the truth. They sell you what they want you to see, and myth and metaphor are all mixed up in the mid 1990’s.
Roisin doesn’t even wonder if she’s happy any more. Happy isn’t a concept she can deal with. She just hopes she’s doing a valuable job but being confronted daily by people she can’t help, in situations she can’t make better, makes her wonder whether she really can make any kind of a difference to the world. It’s hard to be like Che in East London in 1994.
Her life with Jim is a memory, like all the other memories. Her focus is on work, that’s what she wants her reality to be. But some things, some people, demand to be a part of her current reality, whether she likes it or not. Patrick shows up from time to time when he wants something. Usually money. Mary comes, too, when she needs somewhere to stay because she’s been thrown out of accommodation for drugs, or noise. For Roisin, family are like the proverbial bad pennies. Always wanting something. Money. Time. Attention.
Roisin finds herself spending too many of her spare hours trying to get Mary into secure units or sheltered accommodation, or somehow trying to pass on what might be seen as her responsibility. After all Mary gave up the best years of her life for Roisin, brought her into the world and all that, and no one can emotionally blackmail you like a mother can. Try as she might Roisin can’t help but resent it. She sees Mary more as her problem than her responsibility and as such is about the worst person to be ‘caring’ for Mary. Luckily for Roisin, working as she does in a small organisation with good networking contacts, there is always some way of pulling some strings. The aim is to get Mary some sort of life that does not require Roisin’s daily input. It’s usually successful, until things go really wrong. Then you can’t avoid them.
Which is the case in July 1994. John Smith has just died and the young pretender of all that is Cool Britannia, Tony Blair, becomes Labour leader. He’s on a mission to create a whole New Labour party (could have been worse, could have been labelled Cool Labour) and the country is in an uproar of grief. Well, those who are interested in politics. The rest have to wait another 3 years until Diana dies – that’s when they get their fix. More importantly in July 1994, Mary turns up on Roisin’s doorstep in a hell of a state. But that’s a given really, isn’t it? This time Roisin can’t ‘place’ Mary anywhere and so for a month Mary goes to work with her. Mary quite likes it. Most of the time she seems to think she’s actually got a job at the office. Roisin’s trying her best to keep Mary on the straight and narrow, on the medication and off the drugs, but even without drugs these days Mary is so distanced from any objective reality that within three weeks, someone in the office manages to pull whatever the appropriate strings are and get Mary a ‘new start’ in some sheltered accommodation, a half-way house. This is a situation like gold-dust and Roisin hopes Mary will take to it. The only problem is that it’s in Kent.
Mary’s not keen on going out of London and feels press-ganged into it. She’s happy living with Roisin, going to the office and entertaining the workers. She is living proof, after all, of the people they are working to help. This fact is not necessarily helpful to the staff. For all of them, like Roisin, it’s easier to help someone who you don’t actually know. Easier to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe their sob stories. Everyone keeps telling Mary she’s very difficult to help. Mary just thinks that Roisin is making excuses.
‘It’s your job to help people like me,’ she bleats.
‘Like you mum, not YOU,’ Roisin replies, not for the first time. ‘I’m too close to you. I can’t help you. You need proper help.’
‘If you’d put more effort into it. If you didn’t resent me so much. If you listened to me…’
‘If I could ever believe anything you told me….’ Roisin is at her wits end.
The pattern of recrimination and blame is hard to lose and cannot lead to any positive outcomes.
Then there are days Roisin really tries. ‘Mum. For once. Let me believe what you tell me. Tell me the truth.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I always tell the truth. I don’t lie.’ Mary is aggrieved.
‘So, what about my dad?’
‘What about him, Roisin? I’ve told you everything.’
‘You’ve told me all kinds of things, but I never, never know what to believe. Why did you tell me my dad was Che Guevara?’
‘Why do you think?’
Getting into a spiral of questions from questions is one of Mary’s more usual ways of avoiding things she doesn’t want to face.
‘I don’t know what to think, Mum.’ Roisin is stumped. The question is key but she’s not sure she wants the answer, or that she’d believe any answer she got from Mary, to this question now.
‘If you can’t believe me when I tell you something private, personal, something painful to me…. You’ve always been ungrateful and….’ Mary begins to resemble the young Roisin about to throw a tantrum. It’s not a pretty sight. So this is where the conversation has to end because otherwise Mary will take pills or Roisin will turn to drink and no one will be any the wiser.
Roisin is lost in a vicious cycle. She deals with Mary the best she can, then inevitably she pushes her too close to reality and Mary backs off. And that’s the only peace Roisin gets, when Mary walks away from the real world.
By August 1994 Mary has settled in Kent at least for the short term and Roisin thinks about taking a break. She’s not been abroad since the abortive China trip but she has a little money saved up and maybe she could just forget it all for a week or two.
Then Patrick turns up. Out of the frying pan and into the fire for Roisin. Somehow, and Roisin will never work out how, he gets his hands on the three hundred pounds Roisin has earmarked for her holiday. So Patrick goes to Spain and Roisin stays in Cool Britannia. Patrick is living it up in Ibiza with the dance craze (probably making a fortune selling ecstasy to kids on their first parent-free holiday) and Roisin spends two weeks finding out that London is not the great tourist destination it’s hyped up to be.
It’s true. In London in 1994 real life is rubbish. For the first time Roisin begins to find some sympathy with those who just give up on reality and find their own alternative. What is reality anyway? Who can you trust and what can you believe and what do any of us really know about who we are? Roisin is twenty-eight going on twenty-nine and she’s finally accepting that things may not work out. It’s impossible to ‘be like Che’. And maybe it’s all a fiction anyway.
About the Author
Cally Phillips has written fiction and drama in English and Scots, much of which is published through HoAmPresst. She also currently works as editor for Ayton Publishing Limited and runs a number of online projects, including The Galloway Raiders, which is the online hub for Scots writer S. R. Crockett. Her latest project to hit the virtual shelves is the #tobelikeche serial, which started in October 2016.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.