NEAPTIDE by Sarah Daniels

Part 2, sc. 4



VAL
I think now, that I knew I was getting ill, losing control. I remember when the boys were just
babies and we lived in hard-to-let flats with the railway track running behind our block and lifting
one of them up to see a train go past - it all seems so insignificant now. He was fascinated and
as I held him I started to cry and repeat over and over ‘This is a little person’. I felt happy and
overwhelmingly sad at the same time, I don’t know why and from then on it was like getting
drunk. No, nothing dramatic, like swinging naked from chandeliers, not that I suppose I wouldn’t
have been tempted had any swung my way - like when you start to get drunk, you relax, tell
yourself you can sober up in a minute, only you can’t and when confronted with sober people
you know you’re losing ground, so you appear more drunk, not that you could appear sober if
you wanted to anyway. It’s very difficult to remember being unhappy — the actual feeling, like
when you’re freezing cold in the middle of winter — you can remember lying on the beach
boiling hot but you can’t imagine enough to feel it. And when you’re lying in the sun you can
only remember being cold but not what it felt like. (Pause.) I haven’t got an old self. I haven’t
got a new self to be cast on and off like a winter and summer coat. What I am is me.