Fin Keegan

An excerpt from my play, Kamchatka, published in full in Issue 2 of Third Bed

MOTHER

I have a feeling the old one is not long for this world. I saw him out in the rain one day without his hat on. Very strange behavior for a bear in his nineties. You’d think the sun was shining the way he was walking. Not a bother on him. I suppose I should have gone to the door and asked him what he thought he was playing at and him in his nineties. Even a nineteen-month old bear would know better than to go out in a deluge without some sort of headgear.

[Pauses. Frowns enquiringly at ALICE]. Did I see him since then I wonder? It’s the young bear now that comes with the sardines. I suppose he thinks he’ll be taking over the fishmongers. Well if the old one insists on going out all weathers with nothing on his head then he won’t have to wait long, will he?

[MOTHER sighs, unhappy look]. Terrible rain that day. I don’t know what’s happening to the planet at all. All the trees being knocked down I wouldn’t be surprised. Though you’d wonder do they never get rained on themselves, the ones that knock down the trees.

[Pause]. Mud slides too.

[Losing track]. Out in the rain without a hat and him over ninety years of age, I ask you! Is the bear right in the head or what? It’s the young one that should be told.

[Pause, considering]. Or would he care, I wonder? That’s not a very Mother-bear thing to think, is it, Mother-bear?

[MOTHER bites her lip, looking ever more worried and disturbed with each successive phrase]. Sure if he’d seen him he would have done something about it, put a bag on the poor old creature’s head or something, more than I did when you think about it.

[Face brightens up suddenly, flash of a smile, glances at the children] They wouldn’t let me out in the rain when I’m an old bear with the fur on my head and my floppy ears to keep the snow off me.

[Subsiding into anxiety again]. Did he just go out in the rain without his hat in the first place–which would be very strange–or did he go out when the sun was shining to go somewhere and then half-way there did the skies open up and it start lashing down on his bear head? I can’t make the pair of them out at all. You’d think with all the sardines they sell [getting very unhappy looking now] they’d have enough to buy a top hat for everyone in the country.

[A disturbed pause before her anger breaks the surface. To her daughter ALICE, standing behind her]. Exactly WHAT makes you say that a Daddy-bear wouldn’t gobble up his children if he had the chance?