An extract from the pilot episode of Katherine Stockton’s radio series, Car Crash Girl, winner of the UEA postgraduate Snoo Wilson Award 2020
INT. KAREN’S KITCHEN – NIGHT
SHAKE YA ASS PLAYS AS PEOPLE CLINK GLASSES.
ANNA SPIN THE BOTTLEEEEEE!!!
LENA V/O I live a crowded life. I live a crowded life that I wish I could take a step back from more often. I don’t understand its inner-workings. I don’t understand my own.
CHARLIE Are you sure, baby?
LENA V/O The artist Stanley Spencer had a tiny art studio that overlooked a fairground in London. It was so small that he couldn’t really look at his art all at once, you see. If he was painting a big piece, and he needed to take a step back from it to take it all in at once, to assess it, he would go down to the fairground and take a ride on the helter-skelter. Do it too much and he’d get sick. Sometimes I think my mind is a very small studio.
ANNA Charlie gets to kiss Lena just once this way, don’t you baby?
LENA V/O That’s Anna. Friends since uni. Charlie’s besotted girlfriend. Met Daniel through me. She’s a total bitch, deep down. Tends to keep her distance from Daniel because, well, she knows what I can be like. Anna is beautiful. She keeps her distance because I am beautiful too and exactly like her on the inside. Except maybe worse.
LENA Ooooh fun, let’s!!!
CHARLIE Your lucky day, mate.
LENA V/O That’s Charlie, talking to Toby. Both great mates with Daniel. I’m sure they have had many conversations about my spectacular tits. Charlie lightly hits me sometimes when Anna isn’t looking. Once even across the face. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just, well, private. Something for us. Toby’s been in love with me from day dot.
DANIEL You guys are asking for drama!
LENA V/O I live a crowded life that’s about to get one person smaller. Daniel, third boyfriend. Only one I’ve ever loved, or, felt horny for at that. I find it hard not to think about him. Not to think about him falling for someone else. Not to think about walking down the aisle towards him. Hard not to think about him having sex with a corpse. Hard not to think about whether he thinks Tiara is prettier than me. She is seven, so like, has way better skin. Hard not to think about how hard he’d cry if I ever betrayed him. He’s such a pretty crier. He has a joint first in English Literature and Political Studies from a University much better than my own, though he says he thinks we are just as clever as each other. We are both spectacular liars. I’m his fourth girlfriend and ninth lover. He says I’m the prettiest one of them all, though a couple of them were thinner. But he says he doesn’t like girls that are too thin.
A bottle is spun.
TOBY DANIEL AND ANNA KISS!
LENA V/O I wonder what the inside of Anna’s eye sockets look like and how quickly it would take me to claw my way through to them.
