Peter and Alice (2 page)

ALICE
is utterly shocked at this voice from her past
.

CARROLL
:
(Offstage.)
Are you hiding, Queen Alice?

PETER
: Yes, of course that's how it begins: a harmless fairy tale to pass the hours…

The bookstore disappears around
ALICE
and
PETER
.

We're in their minds and memories now
.

LEWIS CARROLL
sidles up to
ALICE
. He's slanted, awkward, partly deaf and painfully shy
.

CARROLL
: I can't do it without you, my lady. What am I without you? But then,
what are you without me
? … Take my hand.

He offers his hand
.

CARROLL
: Be young again.

PETER
: Who wouldn't want that?

CARROLL
: Be young forever.

PETER
: He offers your heart's desire.

ALICE
: Stop the clocks. Turn down the lights. In the glass, the wrinkles fade away. The skin is fresh again. The bones don't ache. To be always poised on the verge of the great adventure. Everything
just ahead
.

CARROLL
: Take my hand, little Alice.

PETER
: But there's a price. He feeds on your youth.

ALICE
: Or do I feed on his experience?

This stops
PETER
.

She looks deeply at
CARROLL
.

ALICE
: Are we to have a story on the river?

CARROLL
: We shall have whatever you like.

ALICE
: Please then, Reverend Dodgson,
a story
.

She takes his hand
.

PETER
: And it's done… That first touch.

ALICE
: His skin is soft! Like a pampered man who never uses his hands. It's repulsive… But it didn't feel so then.

PETER
: Your hand was less used to other hands then.

CARROLL
strolls with her
.

It's a hot summer day, the lovely buzz of insects. It is 1862
.

CARROLL
: Well, first things being first: if we're to have a story then we must have a p-p-p–

The word doesn't come. His mouth gapes horribly
.

This is his stammer
.

He starts to panic
.

CARROLL
: P-p-p-p…

ALICE
: Pirate? Poetess?

PETER
: Protagonist?

CARROLL
: P-p-protagonist. Who shall be our heroine? Shall it be one of your sisters? Shall it be Lorina? Or shall it be Edith?

ALICE
: Me!

CARROLL
: Why you then, Alice?

ALICE
: Because I am your dream child. Because they're awfully silly and I'm not. We understand each other, Mr. Dodgson.

CARROLL
: Like two cryptographers, unlocking the same secret.

ALICE
: I don't know that word.

CARROLL
: That's a word you learn when you're eleven, along with crepuscular and cantilevered… So if we can't be cryptographers, perhaps we'd best be polar explorers, roped together lest a crevasse or snow-blindness make us lose our way.

ALICE
: I don't see how one can become blind in snow. I could see losing your way in a cave, or at the bottom of the sea.

PETER
: Or in memory.

CARROLL
: I wonder if we'll lose our way someday, Alice?

ALICE
: I would think that depends on where we're going in the first place.

PETER
: You weren't that clever.

ALICE
: I am now.

CARROLL
: It's a simple thing to get lost, you know. You glance around and suddenly everything's changed. Nothing's like it was, even you in the looking glass. Who you thought you were, you're not… And you don't need to be exploring another c-c-c-continent either. You can lose your way right here in Oxford if you're not careful. Right over that hedge.

ALICE
: Or down that rabbit hole.

PETER
: You didn't bait him like that.

CARROLL
tells a story. He's enchanting
.

The buzzing of the insects becomes intoxicating music
.

CARROLL
: So imagine a day like this and a girl like you and a sister like Lorina and you find yourself on a riverbank, and there's a rabbit hole nearby, and perhaps you had one too many jam tarts this morning, so you're ever so soporific, which is a twelve-year-old word in truth, so on this particular, peculiar day you fall asleep…

CARROLL
continues quietly
.

ALICE
: The maladroit stutter, the slanting body, the dreadful shyness all disappeared that afternoon, that golden afternoon when I was ten and we went up the river with my sisters, and we were in the shadow of a haycock because it was blazing hot, and he told the story of Alice underground,
my
story, which would have died like one of the summer midges, like all the others, only this time I
John logan asked him to write it down, because I was the heroine, that day he was
beautiful
.

Beat
.

ALICE
: That day he had all he needed… He had his story.

PETER
: But what man can live on words?

ALICE
: He was a writer.

PETER
: He was a man.

ALICE
: Not much of one.

He looks at her, the sharpness surprising
.

She moves away from
CARROLL
.
CARROLL
remains. (Once characters are introduced they remain on stage. Lingering like memories or ghosts.)

ALICE
: Not the way I've come to know men, adult men. He was a perpetual child.

PETER
: There's no such thing.

ALICE
: You didn't know him.

She moves away from him. He pursues
.

PETER
: Did you?

ALICE
: For several years he was at the very center of our lives.

PETER
: “The center of your lives?”

ALICE
: Yes. He'd tell us his stories, on the green or rowing on the river, and then off he'd go to let us dream about them.

PETER
: And where did he go?

ALICE
: I beg your pardon?

PETER
: When he left you, where did he go, what did he do?

ALICE
: I don't know… I imagine he returned home and went on with his life.

PETER
: No. He didn't.
You
were his life.

She stops
.

PETER
: It's just like Barrie with us… You weren't a “dream child.” You were a child of flesh and bone. He looked into your eyes and you looked back.

ALICE
: We were a diversion, no more. He was a grown man with an important career and friends of his own… Three adolescent girls, all giggles and elbows? I'm sure he was happy to go home and forget us.

PETER
:
Grown men do not “return home and go on with their lives
.” That's what children do. Children pass gaily through life with no sense of the weight of events… Grown ups look in the mirror, and then look at the clock… They walk into an empty house that feels emptier every day that passes, for it brings them ever-closer to the final and inescapable loneliness: that last echoing room where you are truly alone.

Beat
.

PETER
: There are no simple childhood memories, Mrs. Hargreaves. I told you, it's complicated. Everything's occluded.

ALICE
: How do you know he was lonely?

PETER
: Ah… If he were not, would he have loved you so much?

ALICE
: How do you know he loved me?

PETER
: Would he have written the book otherwise?

ALICE
: So…it's to be a love story.

PETER
: Aren't they all?

A voice surprises him:

BARRIE
:
(Offstage.)
No, Peter, you're wrong… There's no
love
in it! No romance, I promise you that…

JAMES BARRIE
enters briskly and goes toward
PETER
. He's a stunted, sad, inspiring Scotsman
.

BARRIE
: There's not a jot of love or moonlight to be had, except for that moon which can be glimpsed at dead midnight over the Tyburn gallows after those bloodthirsty brigands have met their end and sway from the gibbet. Gather 'round, lads…

He continues his story. It is 1901
.

Music builds
.

BARRIE
: Here at Black Lake Cottage there's a lake which – you will not be surprised to learn – is black. But do you know
why
it's black? Not the murky water, though tolerably murky it is. Not the depth of it where no light can pass, though deep it is. It's black because of the souls of all the dead men trapped at the bottom, it's been blackened by wickedness, by them that walked the plank, that felt the touch o' the cat, that had their throats slit by that fearsome captain afore his breakfast. What's his name again?

PETER
: I can't remember…

ALICE
: You mean you can't forget.

BARRIE
: What's his name again, Peter?

PETER
: Really, I don't —

ALICE
: You do.

BARRIE
: Come on now! … Feel the spray of the ocean, like you used to when you were a boy; when you wanted to sail the seas on a triple-master, like every boy does, to see the world, to have adventures, to fly and fight and fly again.

CARROLL
: Be young forever.

BARRIE
: What's his name, that piratical gentleman who had us quaking under the covers at night?!

PETER
:
Hook
!

BARRIE
: Yes, Hook! Now you're with me! You're on the deck of the mighty galleon as it rolls and pitches, and we're lashed to the wheel together, lad, through the cataracts!

PETER
: 'Round the Horn!

BARRIE
: Until the maelstrom passes!

ALICE
: Do you feel your heart pounding?!

PETER
: Yes! Like racing passion, like love!

ALICE
: So in a flash you're young again!

PETER
tears himself away. The music fades
.

ALICE
: Can't help yourself.

PETER
: You get caught up.

ALICE
: I know.

PETER
: You can't breathe.

ALICE
: You don't want to.

PETER
: That's their power, these writers, these men of words. Trap baited and sprung, and before you know it you have to chew your leg off to get free.

ALICE
considers
BARRIE
.

ALICE
: In truth he was a little man.

PETER
: Not when he told his stories.

ALICE
: Who's the romantic now? … I met him at a reception once and was surprised to find him so terribly diminutive. Famous people should not be so tiny, it seems dishonest.

PETER
: From the first day, he was all words. My brothers and I were playing in the park and the most enormous dog came bounding over. His dog, Porthos, like a lure it was.

ALICE
: There's that trap again.

PETER
: How he enmeshed himself in our lives! Before long he was following us home and staying for supper, seemed to think it was his right. He just…
acquired us
… My father was so uncomfortable with him, fully aware he was being supplanted, but what was he to do? My mother loved him, as did we boys… Snap. The trap was sprung.

He looks at
BARRIE
.

PETER
: You plain mesmerized us.

BARRIE
: I made you famous.

PETER
: I didn't ask for it.

ALICE
: Didn't you?

PETER
: For god's sake, I was a child. I didn't know anything!

ALICE
: You listened. You laughed. You sparkled for him. You wanted him to look at you most, to look at you longest. To love you best.

CARROLL
: You're my favorite, Alice. You'll always be my favorite.

ALICE
: Your brothers were
rivals
.

PETER
: Were your sisters?

ALICE
: Yes.

PETER
: It wasn't that way with us. We were a band of brothers.

BARRIE
: My Lost Boys.

ALICE
: I can see the five of you, each craning over the other, crawling over his lap like puppies. Whose eye will he catch? Who'll make him smile today?

PETER
:
Michael
.

ALICE
: What?

PETER
: He loved Michael most… Uncle Jim always said that he made Peter Pan by rubbing the five of us violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. But that's not true. It was Michael, bold and fearless Michael… I was never bold. I always had fear.