Loose Promise was written for a solo performance created by dancer Kate McIntosh. In 2009 Loose Promise tours to Gessnerallee in Zurich, Brut Theatre in Vienna, The National Review of Live Art in Glasgow, and Blackbox in Oslo.

Loose Promise

You are telling me something I don't want to hear. You are telling me the honest truth. We are standing in the garden and it's dusk. There are rain clouds in the sky and mosquitoes and someone is listening to a radio next door. The telephone is ringing.

The telephone is ringing. I run into the house and pick up the receiver. The telephone is pressed against my ear, someone is calling and I am answering. I am saying hello into hard black plastic and I hear the dial tone AND the ring tone happening at the same time. Someone is missing. Someone is trying to get through.

And then I remember there is a bird in the garden that imitates a telephone when it sings. I can see it now in the tree in the garden where you are telling me the honest truth. It is singing in an old fashioned ring tone, it is singing like a land line.

We are standing in the garden and it's autumn and there's a bird in the tree that imitates a telephone when it sings. Your hair is silver but you are not old. Under your soft silver hair is your skull with your central nervous system inside it.

It is dusk and it has started to rain. I am wearing cheap sunglasses. Who ever it is listening to the radio has turned up the volume. The newsreader is saying sad things but she doesn't say them in a sad voice.

You are wearing a white shirt and a suit. You are telling me the honest truth. The roots of the eucalyptus tree are spreading across the garden and under the house. Our daughter is sleeping inside the house under a photograph of the sea. She is covered in a thick blanket. Her bed stands on a green carpet. There are two stains on the carpet.

You are wearing a white shirt and a suit. While you speak the honest truth I am thinking about the time we ate horse steaks in Paris. The waiter served the plate of the day and the plate of the day was horse. It was mythic, magical, like eating a unicorn in the twenty first century. My iPod was playing a song we'd never heard before. You untangled the headphones and pressed them into your ear and you kissed my fingers that tasted of horse.

We are standing in the garden in the rain. The newsreader has stopped saying sad things. The telephone bird has stopped making calls no one answers. The car alarms and police sirens have stopped too. Silence is cruel in cities where missing people need to hide in noise. But we are standing in a garden in a city and you have not stopped telling me the honest truth.

You are saying sad things but you don't say them in a sad voice. At this very moment somewhere else, in Argentina perhaps, tomatoes are growing under white plastic, changing colour and shape like the dreams of children as they sleep under blankets and I wonder if the telephone bird will one day learn to sing in Microsoft word and hp scanner preferences?

My eyes are open under the cheap sunglasses. Your silver hair is wet. Our daughter is pretending to sleep inside the house under a photograph of the sea and she's listening to the rain, which always makes sorrow bigger and hard things softer.

You are telling me the honest truth. I take off my cheap sunglasses and I walk towards you, bumping into things on the way.

Kissing you is like new paint and old pain. It's like coffee and car alarms and a dim stair way and a stain and it's like smoke. I am looking into your eyes and I can't get in. You have changed the locks and I have an old key that doesn't fit and our daughter is making her way across the garden towards us, holding her thick blanket.

You are telling me you are dead, and I say yes, I know you are. We miss you and since you've gone I've forgotten my passwords to Amazon and Easy Jet, I can't remember the code to my gym locker or where the honey is or where I put the blue pillow case and could you tell me, again, where exactly the sea is, in that photograph?

© Copyright Deborah Levy 2009  All Rights Reserved  The above text may not be used in any other context either in part or in whole without the express written consent of the author.