Alice by Laura Wade Read Free Book Online Page B

I’m very upset.
    The HATTER holds his watch towards ALICE .
    HATTER: Time’s a great healer, you know.
    ALICE: Stupid wild goose chase – like yeah, go find the middle and then it’s all full of mentals like you lot –
    HATTER: Look: six o’clock – time for tea.
    ALICE: For god’s sake.
    HARE: It was the best butter – tea’s mashed!
    HATTER: And then there I am, standing on a chair in front of the queen, no less –
    HARE: The queen of Hearts!
    HATTER: The very one...
    ALICE: The queen of Hearts ?
    HATTER: Demanding I sing her a song.
    The HATTER and the HARE continue their dialogue, having got back to the beginning of their eternal loop. ALICE moves away, thinking .
    ALICE: The queen is the queen of Hearts? Like on a pack of cards?
    Oh my god – that’s what it means – the queen of Hearts. ‘Go right to the Heart’ means I have to go and see the queen, right, surely?
    The queen of Hearts!
    Queens live in castles, no palaces – did the duchess mention a palace?
    There must be a palace, right? So where’s that?
    Find the palace find the palace...
    A teenage BOY (14 or 15.) appears, wearing chef whites and wheeling a strange contraption in front of him. A little like a hostess trolley, it has a fan and a conveyor belt,
along which are passing a batch of strawberry jam tarts, and underneath this, a sort of cupboard .
    ALICE goes over to him .
    Excuse me?
    BOY: Alright?
    ALICE: Is there um, is there a palace here?
    BOY: Well duh .
    ALICE: Pardon?
    BOY: Course there’s a palace, where d’you think I work?
    ALICE: OK, can you tell me where it is?
    BOY: God, d’you know nothing?
    ALICE: You hum it and I’ll tell you.
    BOY: What ?
    ALICE: Sorry, my dad says that.
    Sorry, could you just basically tell me where the palace is and then I’ll go away.
    BOY: It’s over there.
    A GIRL around the same age as the boy appears. She has an armful of red and white roses. The BOY ’s attention
immediately switches away from ALICE .
    ALICE: OK, thank you.
    BOY: Whatever.
    (To the girl.) Got enough flowers, haven’t you?
    GIRL: That your best line? They’re roses .
    BOY: Someone give them to you, did they?
    GIRL: For the queen. Didn’t know if she wanted red or white.
    Gardener just said ‘roses’.
    BOY: She’ll want red ones.
    GIRL: What, she’s your girlfriend, is she?
    BOY: She always wants red ones. Ask anyone.
    GIRL: What am I going to do with all the white ones, then?
    BOY: Keep them for yourself. I’d let you, if I was gardener.
    They move off a little, talking closely. Their conversation continues softly under the next:
    Unseen by the BOY and GIRL , a man climbs out from the cupboard under the tart-cooling trolley. This is the KNAVE OF HEARTS . He’s dressed like a burglar, and has a bag slung over his shoulder. He takes a tart from the top of the trolley and puts it in his bag, then dashes out of
sight .
    The BOY comes back towards the trolley to wind up the fan .
    ALICE: Excuse me –
    BOY: And actually chef’s said my knife skills were pretty amazing, you know, for my age. He said if I carry on like this, he’ll put me on jam
in a few years time, he can see me having a career in puddings, he said.
    ALICE: Sorry, but –
    BOY: (To Alice.) It’s over there, I told you.
    GIRL: Rory’s already on puddings.
    BOY: He said that, did he, that he’s already on puddings?
    During this, the KNAVE steals another tart, and again is seen by ALICE , but not the BOY . It happens
again a number of times .
    I mean yeah, he is, if by ‘on puddings’ you mean pudding assistant . Cause that’s as far as he can go, actually, in that job, it’s a dead end.
Unless you’ve got training, experience on all the other stations. Pudding assistant’s the highest you can go unless you’ve got the basic grounding in everything else, so
–
    Basically Rory’s on a path to eternal skivvitude and he doesn’t even know it.
    ALICE: Excuse me, but there’s a man –
    BOY: D’you know you’re really annoying? I told