1001 Nights Cast

Don’t for a moment think it’s easy. You’ve waited in Casualty for six or even sixteen dreary desperate hours? Or been holed up in cattle class on a long-haul flight for twenty-two hours? Okay, you know something about growing virtual while your entire body aches with every cell of its tedious remnant physicality. Well, for us, it’s kind of the other way around.

The internet cache has to be the worst waiting room in the world. If it is in the world. Because no-one seems to know exactly what and where in the world the internet actually is. Do you? Do you even know what a ‘cache’ is? No, we don’t either, and yet it’s our home—in a homeless kind of way.

There are dozens of us here by now, sitting and sagging in just our threadbare details among our striped plastic refugee luggage, the zippers gone bung, safety pins bravely standing in. Though once in a while, someone vanishes. Poof! It’s quite strange, really. They may be talking in some funny way they have no choice about, full of odd errors, when—poof! Like a goldfish, going over the top, and disappearing forever from goldfish world: the flopping and the heaving, the growing dim and the final gasp of falling still, as the terrible pressure of reality finally bears down on you.

On me, if it happens to me in the end. We all long for recognition but I fear it’s the recognition that kills us. Sucks us out of this airless e-mail cache and into someone’s pathetic wishful thinking, where we grow real for just a moment, and so die.

Some say it’s when somebody finally hits reply. (The mantra in here is ‘There’s one born every minute’.) Or more precisely, the moment they supply the asked-for banking details. We don’t know for sure. We’re just in here stuck with the terrible facts of our circumstances. Each of us, a horrible history, a cruelly impending death, an impossible legacy, mostly cash, but caught up somehow in the legal red tape of one or another appalling African country…Usually our entire history has been even further disfigured with not just spelling mistakes but truly egregious miscarriages of grammar—forcing us to live forever—and I fear it is a kind of living forever—with entire gaping holes in our own meaning. English, as you know, is such a thorny, colonial kind of business. It is hard for desperadoes of one kind or another to get us right in a truly convincing, legal kind of tone. That’s just so embarrassing for us. There are always awful give-aways that we have to wear, sprouting so publicly, the way you might have to live with your great-uncle’s bulbous nose passed lovingly down to you, or your mother’s moustache.

Then there’s the weight of the huge fortunes we are each personally responsible for. You might think we’re joking when we tell you this, but such laughter would be a cruel oversight.

That’s not all that some of us have to suffer—take me, for example, Mrs Mary Jocie from Liberia, presently staying in England. Like one or two others, I have a cross to bear. A very Christian Cross, in fact. I’m not referring to my late husband, Mr Cletus Jocie, though I may think of cursing him for my predicament if he were here. But naturally, I never even knew him before he was written out of my life. Nevertheless, during our eleven year marriage, we both became born-again Christians, before his untimely death after his brief illness that lasted just four days in the year 2003.

‘Since his death I decided not to remarry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which the Bible is against.’

See what I mean? We’re forced to live with this stuff. All I have at this stage is my testimony, as vivid and awful as a birthmark splashed blazing across my face. It’s all the face I have. Do you see why I’m so tired of being confined by your disbelief and your ever-ready delete button?

Frankly I don’t care if you’re in need of cash or not. The cash is of no use to me. And there’s 10.5 million US dollars of the stuff lodged in my name with a security finance company in Europe.

Now, of course, I’ve heard from my doctor, who has had to inform me I will not last the next four months due to cancer problem. It’s not even my cancer problem, just the universal one, I guess. But on top of that, what disturbs me most it seems is my stroke sickness. I have no idea where that came from, but here it is, mine forever.

As you can imagine, I want this money kept in Europe for orphanages, widows, propagating the word of God and to endeavour that the house of God is maintained. My husband’s relatives want to get hold of it, but they are not Christians and I don’t want my husband’s efforts to be used extravagantly. I prefer to trust you. By the way, he worked for the Liberian Embassy in Zambia for nine years, so it’s hardly surprising such a cache of cash developed somewhere out in cyberspace.

You can see, it’s hopeless here. No sane person will take us in, let alone some sane country—and where in the world is that these days anyway?

Wait, my friend Mr Antonio Gomes, a poor man working tirelessly as remittance director in a bank here in Côte D’Ivoire on behalf of the huge cash estate of the late Mrs Roseline Clark—he’s just told me something interesting. There’s a woman who can get our real story out onto the wider net beyond this stinking e-mail cache. Scheherazade, some name like that. I’m going to talk to her!

With God all things are possible. (I’m sorry, I have no choice but to say things like that.)