A HAUNTED HOUSE
A monologue from the short play by Josie Cubie
18 year
old Isabel is sat alone at the kitchen table, her legs curled beneath
her and her head resting on one hand. With her other hand she is
playing with the one-way ticket that brought her back home from
boarding school.
ISABEL:
I didn't think it would be very different, but it is somehow. The
outside walls of the house are still the same dull yellow colour,
still filled with dark windows, and yet I don't recognise it. Even
the smell of the place has changed – thick cigarette smoke no
longer hangs burning in the air beneath my nose, tickling my top lip,
curling up into my nostrils to rest. It’s funny, really, but
without the dry tobacco leaves muddying the air…the house seems a
little more alive. That is funny right? How his death – the absence
of him and his oldest habit – has made this live-in graveyard pulse
with life.
[Stops
playing with ticket.]
My
mother sent for me a week after his death. She wrote me a letter,
vague and dry enough that she could have been talking about losing
her job or even a set of keys. It was only the last line that had
even hinted at my father's death. She had added it right on the end,
like it was an afterthought. I know what she would have said. “Oh,
perhaps I should let Izzy know that her father has died. Maybe she'd
like to know. She's peculiar like that - maybe she'll even cry. Who
knows what odd things that girl will do.”
Of
course I wanted to know. Wouldn't you? Am I the only one that thinks
it cold to tell your only daughter such an awful thing at the very
end of a letter so stuffed full of formalities that I might forgive
you for thinking it was from an employer rather than a parent?? Three
words were all she deemed necessary to break the news: Your
father's died. Thank you, mother. Thank you.
[Unfurls
legs.]
I
know it's silly or stupid or maybe both but I've been back for a week
now and I feel homesick in my own home. I'm not even sure if calling
this place my home is fair any more; I've been away at school for so
long that the word tastes funny in my mouth. It doesn't help that
there is no family here. “Home is where your family is” they say.
But if that's the case I'm not sure where my home is.
You
see, after the letter I had expected to come back to one less parent
– that was a given, he had died - but entering this house meant
peeling back an old dusty curtain that hid the corpse of my mother.
[Pause.]
It's
like she's decided that if my father's gone, she might as well be
too. But don't think of her as romantic or sad and lonely. Because
for the past few years their feelings towards each other have grown
into something more akin to distaste than affection. And if she were
lonely...well I'm here, aren't I? Shouldn't I be enough?
[Looks down at ticket.]
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