Sugar Baby Read online

  Alan Harris

  SUGAR BABY

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Original Production

  Note on Play

  Sugar Baby

  About the Author

  Copyright and Performing Rights Information

  Sugar Baby was first produced by Dirty Protest as part of Wales in Edinburgh with the support of Chapter, the Arts Council of Wales, Wales Arts International and British Council Wales. It was first performed on 4 August 2017 in Paines Plough’s Roundabout @ Summerhall, at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2017. The cast was as follows:

  Alex Griffin-Griffiths

  Director

  Catherine Paskell

  Lighting Designer

  Ace McCarron

  Sound Designer

  Dan Lawrence

  Assistant Producer

  Glesni Price-Jones

  Stage Manager

  Emily Butler

  Marketing Consultant

  Rhian Lewis

  Note on Play

  One actor plays all the characters.

  Italics are for real-time dialogue.

  Narrative dialogue is not in italics.

  A dash on its own line (–) indicates a pause for thought.

  This ebook was created before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play as performed.

  Prologue

  I try not to act on impulse.

  But I can’t help it.

  Which, to be fair, is the problem with impulse.

  Or the problem with me.

  –

  I’ll start again.

  I acted on impulse.

  I was sitting on a bus stop waiting for the 61 minding my own when I sees a girl standing in the middle of Fairwater Road with a Beamer coming towards her.

  I gets up, sprints the six yards and grabs her out of the road.

  Impulse gets you into trouble.

  The sort of trouble that leads to Vicci Park, murder, going on the run and Billy the Seal.

  Seriously there’s a seal in this story.

  The thing that’s always held me back is sharing – I’ve always hated it. Like when you’re out and there’s other people there and they say: shall we get something to share? No – I wants my own plate of food.

  Sharing is dangerous ground.

  I once told someone that once – once mind you – I played with a Wendy house with my cousin in Malpas, little Justine, and every times I sees him now they says, this person I told, they says ‘How’s it going, Wendy?’

  I’ve always had a vision that I’m, like, some kind of lone wolf – I know.

  And that I’m really in a movie – I’m the central character, obviously.

  A’right, my story is a bit crappy and dirty and set in Fairwater and not LA and I feels a bit of a bell-end because people like me are not supposed to have a story.

  But, anyway, that’s a load of shit.

  What I want to tell you about is what happened on August 18th last year.

  The story, really, starts before I save a girl from being run over by a Beamer.

  About thirty-seven minutes before.

  I’m sitting in Oggy’s.

  Sweating.

  Is not a bad day outside but he’s got the heating cranked right up.

  I’m sweating so much my bollocks is damp, you know?

  Part One

  I wants cash off Oggy.

  Six thousand pounds to be exact.

  As I sits in Oggy’s front room –

  The ‘waiting room’.

  The same thoughts come into my head:

  Don’t fuck this up.

  Don’t fuck this up.

  As mantras go it’s not a great one.

  Not very positive.

  I likes to think of myself as a positive guy.

  That’s why I grew a moustache.

  Not a great moustache but there it is.

  I felt it would distinguish me from the crowd.

  Really.

  It’s 10.27 a.m.

  I look up to see Gary in the doorway. Mo’s behind as they both can’t fit in the doorway together. Mo has to talk over Gary’s shoulder:

  A’right, sunshine, Oggy will see you now.

  I works as a drug dealer in Fairwater.

  It’s a drugs cooperative.

  There’s six equal shares. Everyone grows separate and then pools the gear. Then if anyone gets arrested, no biggie. You gets done but you still get a sixth of the profits. You don’t get as much cash as independents but it takes the risks out of the game. Makes sense yeah? I’m pulling down, most weeks, about two hundred quid. I know, not exactly Pablo Escobar but it keeps me going. Just.

  I grows my gear behind Stannie’s house. In a greenhouse.

  I puts in fake tomatoes and no one’s any the wiser. Serious.

  The price of toms has gone up recently which is a fucking blow.

  Stannie is a little… shy, what with his actual job being a fence for stolen goods. If you wants it, Stannie can get it: from a labradoodle to a new passport to a mobility scooter. Serious.

  After Celia (who you will meet later), left it was just me and my dad, Mark, living opposite Fairwater Fish Bar, you knows? The red-brick flats? Celia lived there till I was fourteen. If you go up the top of the road, you can see right over the city – see the Principality Stadium and down, beyond that Cardiff Bay. It’s that close.

  I don’t call him Dad, I calls him Mark or ‘the old man’. My dad Mark’s ‘Mark’ is a traditional one with a ‘K’ and when him and Celia had me they thought they’d name their boy after Mark but give it a modern twist.

  My ‘Marc’ is with a ‘C’.

  Tha’s a modern twist in Fairwater.

  Sitting in Oggy’s front room I’m thinking:

  Don’t fuck this up.

  Don’t fuck this up.

  Like my life depends on it.

  Only it’s not my life that depends on it.

  It’s Mark’s.

  With a ‘K’.

  Oggy is a twat.

  A twat with cash.

  He suffers from the desire that a lot of men round here suffers with – a desire to never be a disappointment to himself.

  Recently there’s been this thing about Wonga clamping down and for many it’s a nightmare – you just can’t get through the week to get food. And, believe it or not, Oggy’s rates are actually cheaper than Wonga or Tangerine or whatever the fuck company. So there is a lie that loan sharks are exploitative.

  There is also a stereotype that if you can’t pay, loan sharks come round your house and fuck you up.

  That bit is true.

  Not Oggy personally – he couldn’t punch his way out of a Clark’s pie – but Gary and Mo would.

  So I’m in Oggy’s thinking:

  Don’t fuck this up and then it’s my turn.

  Oggy could have afforded a proper office but made his ‘clients’ come to his house; something about lording it over your fellow man, you know?

  For some reason, I thinks that’s why he’s got the heating on on a nice day.

  Oggy’s taken the gangster thing to heart.

  And is now playing his part.

  He has a tattoo of him and Beyoncé in bed together, wrapped in silk sheets, on his neck. When he speaks the vein in his neck moves and Beyoncé starts to jiggle back and forth.

  What a twat.

  I goes through. Oggy’s done the back room out like a quaint pub, complete with pool table.

  He waves his pool cue at a bar stool where I perches like a parrot with one leg.

  Fucking shaky.

  When I goes to speak – I just got to ask him why the heati
ng’s on – Oggy stops me with an imperious wave of his cue.

  How’s it going, Wendy?

  –

  When we was in school, Marc was in all the top sets, wasn’t you, Wendy?

  Gary and Mo do the laugh-along thing, even though they must know he’s a complete cockstain too.

  Remember when we went to Rachel Patterson’s party, brah?

  Every time I meets Oggy it’s the same stories – or a version of them.

  Wendy here had the chance to fuck the very same Rachel Patterson and you know what he did?

  Dramatic pause for Gary and Mo’s benefit.

  He came in his pants even before he got to stick it in her.

  Did I mention he was a twat?

  I gives Oggy my pitch – I’ll get straight into it as I knows you’re a busy man, blah blah fucking blah.

  Oggy actually plays a few shots while he’s pretending to think about the proposal and then stops and gives it the two-hands-onthe-edge-of-the-table-lean-forward-I’m-going-to-be-earnest shit.

  He gives it a second before Beyoncé starts to move her ass.

  You wants me to lend you six thousand pounds so you can give it to your old man so that he can pay back a debt that he already owes me?

  In a fucking nutshell.

  Are you insane? I’ll be no better off.

  I’ll owe you instead of the old man owing you.

  But I’ll still be owed the same amount.

  Can see he’s grasped the concept…

  I tells him I can see he’s grasped the concept.

  ‘Concept’? Learn that in the top sets, did you?

  Technically it won’t really make a difference to you –

  Part of the thing that marks me out from the crowd, apart from a weak moustache, is that I likes to use words like ‘concept’ and ‘technically’.

  You can take your concept and technically fuck yourself with it, brah. You tell your old man that if he can’t pay then he shouldn’t send his

  –

  his turdball of a son to try and stall for him.

  The teachers at Cantonian High School are partially to blame for Oggy’s lack of linguistic skills – they really didn’t try with him.

  Look, Marky-Marc, you don’t want to lend off me.

  Why? Cos we’re mates?

  Don’t flatter yourself, brah.

  Come on, Oggy, we goes way back.

  How you gonna pay it back?

  I’m a drug dealer.

  You’re having a laugh. Six Gs? You always did think you was more than you was.

  Come on, Oggy.

  Trust me on this, brah – I has made my final decision. You’ll thank me one day.

  Before I can plead and beg, Oggy gives me his final word on the matter:

  Now fuck off.

  My old man used to have a proper job in the paint factory near Ely Bridge. I never understood what he did there but after that went tits-up, him and the old girl went tits-up and then he started to look for other sources of income. He stole all the front doors from a new housing estate near Leckwith and when someone made a joke that our place was all front doors – we had front doors leading to everywhere; bathrooms, bedrooms, the lot – someone overheard who knew the guy that owned the site – a property developer called Bunce – and they kicked the shit out of my old man.

  I comes home late and there’s no door on the front of the flat. There’s no doors at all, no door to the old man’s bedroom and even though it was dark in there I can see he’s hurt – the way he’s lying on the duvet, sort of unnatural. His face looks like a cartoon, puffed-up… made me think of Jim Carrey, you know, in some kind of fucked-up film role. I don’t know exactly what happened that night, but I bet it’s one the old man plays over and over again in his mind. He has always thought of himself as a wheeler-dealer – but he’s a shit one and that’s led to his present predicament with – and my visit to – Oggy.

  He’s a regular at the Ex Club and Fairwater Library.

  He fucking loves it. Reading.

  No shit.

  Currently he’s reading The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming.

  I love my father.

  I also loves Fairwater – friendliest people in Cardiff and the Fairwater Fish Bar is the best. They will fry anything for you. They once deep-fried a kitten for me.

  –

  Sorry, did I say kitten? I meant Kit Kat.

  My old man has two weeks to pay back Oggy. Then the interest piles up, then… I don’t think he can take another Jim Carrey moment. As I walks out of Oggy’s waiting room I wonders how much Wonga has tightened up.

  Too much for me.

  I knows I only has one alternative – and it’s a horrible one.

  I decide to put a final decision off for a bit, I’ve got to go up to Stannie’s and check on the crop and on the way there I’ll decide whether I make the trek over to Cyncoed to humiliate myself in pursuit of the six grand.

  And then I sees her.

  Lisa.

  Lisa Short loves Marc Chapps.

  Always has.

  She sat behind me at registration at Cantonian.

  Staring at my neck. I could fucking feel her eyes on the back of my neck every day for five years.

  If you sits behind someone and stare at the back of their neck every week-day for five years you will fall in love with them – it’s inevitable.

  She wrote Lisa loves Marc on every exercise book she ever had and on every desk in the reg class. LS heart MC.

  I even got in trouble for it!

  Yeah, it’s not me, Mrs Stapleton – Marc’s a little obsessed with me, aren’t you, Marc.

  In school I’d always been… aware of Lisa but had always thought she was a bit of a nutter, you knows the type. She was nothing great to look at but now she’s blossomed, while I was fantastic-looking at school but now, yeah, I’ve maybe not had as many vitamins as I should have…

  A tables-turned sort of thing.

  Before I’m able to say ‘Hi, Lis, been ages, good to see you, what the fuck are you in this shithole for?’ she’s up and away and into Oggy’s inner sanctum.

  Part Two

  I’m on the bus stop waiting for the 61.

  The little red electronic letters reads four minutes. It’s said four minutes for eighteen minutes.

  Lisa comes out of Oggy’s house.

  I half sees her coming towards the bus stop and think: does she have to? I just wanna be left alone.

  Sees her cross the road.

  But she’s stuck – it’s as if she can’t cross the white line.

  Get out of the road.

  Get out of the –

  You knows what happens next but, honest, it was like, you know that bit in The Matrix when the universe goes a bit funny?

  On Llandaff Road there’s this glitch in The Matrix, there’s a ripple that… ripples the world when I grabs her. Everything, including the air, is liquid.

  Then we snaps back to real time:

  Fucking hell, Lisa, what you playing at? You could have been… you know. You okay?

  It’s a stupid question to ask a crying girl but there you go.

  Fuck, what did he do to you?

  Yeah, hi, Marc?

  I really wants to ignore her – if the 61 comes now I’m saved from speaking to her but the time’s gone up, incredibly, to six minutes.

  She’s doing the crying thing but trying to keep it in.

  Sobbing.

  Making unnatural noises. Torture.

  She hasn’t even thanked me for saving her life!

  I have enough shit of my own to deal with so I tries to hold back the flood of tears with:

  Let me buy you a cuppa, yeah?

  Isn’t that what people are supposed to say in these situations?

  Actually, Marc, I could do with a proper drink.

  In the Ex Club, Lisa drank, rather surprisingly, cava.

  There aren’t many cava-drinkers in the Ex. They had to go to Spar next door to get a bottle.r />
  I stick to the IPA – lower alcohol than SA, you never know what an afternoon like this will lead to.

  After her third glass Lisa tells it. I doesn’t want to hear it – got enough on my plate – but we’re here now and the pints are sailing down my neck.

  He wants what?

  Pay off my debt little by little.

  A – ?

  Sugar baby.

  Is like, what? A…

  Paid girlfriend. Every time I goes out with him he’ll knock a ton off my debt.

  How much do you owe him?

  Six grand.

  Does everyone in Cardiff owe Oggy six grand?

  Six grand? Fuck. That’s a lot of time to spend with Oggy.

  What choice do I have, Marc? – she tells me this as a fact, not a question.

  And do you have to, you know? Fuck him?

  That wasn’t discussed but…

  Everyone knows that Oggy is never going to get a woman like you so if you goes out with him everyone knows you’re only with him cos he’s paying you. What does that do for him?

  Is what gangsters do.

  I knows what Oggy dreams about when he settles into his king-size waterbed at night and pulls his black-satin sheets up around his scrawny fucking Beyoncé decorated neck and closes his eyes – he sees himself in a Jay-Z video.

  I knew why Lisa had taken six Gs off Oggy – everyone in Fairwater knows, it was in the Echo, but that’s a subject to avoid: sharing is not fucking caring.

  Lisa finishes her glass of cava and does a little burp as the punters in the Ex say nothing to each other.

  Basically, Lisa killed her mum. She’d taken her mum, who had some kind of weird wasting disease, to Switzerland to have her put down. And I fucking do not want to talk to her about that!

  You want another, Marc? My shout.

  I shouldn’t… but why the fuck not?

  Why people who wants to kill themselves just don’t kill themselves I don’t know – why drag their families into it? Why do people share the shit around?

  I bought some nuts, Marc.

  Right, I really do have to ditch her. I consider my options – if I go to the gents, can I fit through the window? But for some reason I say:

  Fancy an ice cream, Lis?

  They don’t even have cava here, Marc.