Somapolis: The City Speaks - Episode 9
The ninth episode of the audio dramas we've created to accompany the songs on our last album, Somapolis; in this reading, a grieving mother imagines a still-born daughter's life lived in reverse.
Somapolis, Sweet Billy Pilgrim's sixth album, could be a musical map of an imagined city or an X-ray of the chambers and corridors of a human heart, or possibly both at the same time. As we finished making the record, we realised that we weren't ready to say goodbye to the inhabitants of Somapolis just yet, so I wrote some monologues that might gently unfold the inner lives of those criminals, lovers and avenging angels into a broader emotional map, revealing where their stories came from; how all those stories intersect, and the shapes into which the city bends them.
A mother imagines a still-born daughter's life in reverse; a man runs for his life, chased by armed gangsters; a priest remembers a love and mourns a faith, both lost to time; a woman plots the perfect revenge; a couple bicker in their car before one last drug deal; a jazz musician improvises a new shape for his own madness; with all of this bookended by the Observers - Somapolis' own guardian angels - as they record all that they've seen and heard over the course of one neon-bleached night.
These performances are probably best enjoyed with some knowledge of the songs from Somapolis, but hopefully they stand alone too. They might even lead you back to the album that inspired them: it's not for me to tell you how to listen.
We'll be releasing these recordings in order, once every couple of weeks. We can remind you of this if you'd like to sign up for our mailing list.
We hope you enjoy spending some extended time in Somapolis and we thank our talented friends for helping us become architects and town planners, as well as songwriters.
Episode 9: Pilgrim (a life in reverse)
Directed by Barnaby Kay
Written by Tim Elsenburg
Music by Sweet Billy Pilgrim
Production and editing by Tim Elsenburg and Jana Carpenter
Reader: Louiza Patikas
I am a seventy-eight year old woman coming to life again as a final breath pushes its way back into my body and re-inflates two rice-paper lungs. I reverse slowly, gently into sleep. Someone I know and love moves hurriedly from my bedside, returning a hand I barely recognise as my own to my chest as she does so. I awake in an ambulance, the city's jewelled corridor moving the wrong way past the window to my right as I look at my daughter sitting beside me, her face cycling through a dumb-show loop of panic, anger, sadness and reassurance. Tears levitate from my blanket to amplify her eyes, like lights through rain on a window, and she starts to say something to me in a half-spoken, half-sung lullaby language I can't quite understand. There's a pain in my left arm that is moving from a morphine whisper towards an agonised roar, until I'm pulled by my ankles back into something deeper than sleep where I can hide from all the noise.
I am a sixty-three year old woman un-writing her eighth novel. The man sitting beside me with his left hand on my shoulder has white hair, tinted at the crown with a faint nicotine halo. He hiccoughs something that might be laughter and looks at me quizzically, pursing his lips. Blue smoke pulls itself back into his mouth, stoppered moments later by a cigarette. This is my husband. I know him to be a kind man, and I know that when I am sixty-eight, he'll slip away from me without a goodbye after a fall in the bathroom. He un-lights the cigarette and puts it back into a once-again full packet, deftly tucking the foil back over the filter tips, and then his hand finds my shoulder again and twitches back from it twice. He mumbles something never-intelligible from the corner of his mouth, in that way that he does, and looks at his watch.
I am a forty-four year old woman sitting next to my mother. She is showing me photographs, working through the album from back to front; first, the teenaged me on some nameless beach, a face pushing back against gravity-stricken eyebrows, skinny arms folded against some outrage or another. Then, back to my first day at secondary school, wearing an optimistically outsized uniform as I grin piano keys, the cowlick in my fringe cheerfully untameable. We flip back again to my christening picture. I am gin-cheeked and dressed in a cream, crocheted one-piece gown, gripping my ankle like I'm fending off an attack from a possessed limb. My mother is speaking as she turns the pages back; her tone is light, playful, but the words are pulled away from me again and stretched into unfamiliar shapes before vanishing into her mouth. The album closes, seemingly unbidden, and she slips it back into the bookcase in one impossibly fluid movement. In eight years I'll be scattering her ashes from a favourite spot beside the river, into that vast, inevitable, rolling green.
I am a twenty-five year old woman, jumping down and up on my bed, holding a laptop; giddy with joy. I stop abruptly and consult the screen, suddenly serious. My agent has emailed to say that the publisher loves the book. My husband walks backwards out of the room. In my belly, cells un-divide, and I close the laptop.
I am a seventeen year old woman lying on my back in the grass at a music festival as a synth line evolves along a bed of kick drum, unwinding its silken chrysalis from around my limbs. A perfect moment recedes, senses crystallising from their MDMA-assisted flux where all is warmth and everything has a texture, and a body understands that its role is to interpret, not translate.
I am a nine year old girl, un-writing a story that ends with a giant squid attacking a lighthouse and killing the lighthouse keeper's son, a little boy who teases mermaids. I snarl and Nathan Banks un-pulls my ponytail.
I am eighteen months old. I walk three clumsy steps backwards away from my beckoning father, place a chubby hand on the sofa and lower my backside onto the carpet, my smile dissolving into concentration.
I am fury. I am outrage, screaming at this terrible misunderstanding, out in the cold with bright lights and shrieking, sibilant noise bearing down on me as I make my way back towards my mother. Pain envelopes me as her body tries to crush my tightly folded limbs back into stars, while each breath becomes a universe expanding and collapsing across light years.
But then, soon enough, I don't have to use my lungs: I am mermaid again. The world is dim and muted, and sounds become indistinguishable from sensations, starting with the vegetal swish-push of a heartbeat and ending with the formless vibration of a voice moving through an anchor of bones to my tiny ears. I am dreaming again. I am dreaming backwards into a golden glow that is warmth; that is welcome. A belonging unearned, but tender and true - like love. Until sleep becomes something else. Somewhere else. And I am gone.
Here’s the original song from Somapolis:
Just wow...