Free Constellations by Nick Payne Page A

drink?
    Marianne    I’m fine. Thanks.
    Roland    So what do you, what do you do? For a living.
    Marianne    I work at Sussex University.
    Roland    Right. Great.
    Marianne    Yourself?
    Roland    I’m a beekeeper.
    Marianne    Really?
    Roland    Yeah, yeah.
    Marianne    You’re really a beekeeper?
    Roland    I’m really a beekeeper.
    Marianne    I fucking love honey.
    Roland    Oh really?
    Marianne    Spoon. Jar of honey. Heaven.
    Roland    What sort of honey do you normally go for?
    Marianne    I’m too embarrassed.
    Roland    How d’you mean?
    Marianne    Too embarrassed to tell you.
    Roland    Why’s that?
    Marianne whispers the following into Roland’s ear: ‘I like Tesco. The really dirty stuff, the prison stripe stuff.’
    Roland    That’s all right.
    Marianne    Really?
    Roland    Of course.
    Marianne    I’m not putting honest, hard-working beekeepers out of business?
    Roland    Wouldn’t’ve thought so.
    Marianne    Do you think I’m a honey philistine?
    Roland    Some of the supermarket stuff’s all right.
    Marianne    Really?
    Roland    Yeah, some of it’s fine, yeah.
    Marianne    So – And I mean don’t take this the wrong way, but, I mean, are you –
    Roland    Go on.
    Marianne    You – I mean do you make a living?
    Roland    I do, yeah.
    Marianne    I mean from beekeeping.
    Roland    From beekeeping.
    Marianne    How does it – I mean how does it –
    Roland    Well. I used to, I used to work for a friend of mine. In Wiltshire.
    Marianne    Very nice.
    Roland    After a while though, decided I wanted to go into business on my own. But my, my girlfriend – ex-girlfriend –
    Marianne    I’m sorry for your loss.
    Roland    What’s that?
    Marianne    No – I was – I was making a –
    Roland    Right.
    Marianne    Sorry for your loss as in –
    Gestures, sliding a finger across her throat, ‘killed’.
    Roland    Right.
    Marianne    It was just a –
    Roland    No.
    Marianne    Anyway, you were –
    Roland    Yeah, no, so, she, my ex, she wanted to move to London. So we got this one-bed place in Tower Hamlets.
    Marianne    No wonder you broke up with her, fuck me. I’d’ve broken up with her if she’d made me leave Wiltshire for fucking Tower Hamlets.
    Roland    I’m still living there, actually.
    Marianne    Lovely curries.
    Roland    There wasn’t any room. For bees.
    Marianne    I see.
    Roland    We didn’t have a garden.
    Marianne    Bummer.
    Roland    One day I was up on the roof and I realised it was perfect. So I tidied it up a bit and I got my first hive.
    Marianne    Amazing.
    Roland    Went from one to two from two to four. We, we went away. Me and Laura. We went away to Spain and when we got back, we found that the flat had been raided.
    Marianne    Raided?
    Roland    I used to keep the honey in bin bags. You know those black, plastic bin liners –
    Marianne    Yes.
    Roland    Didn’t have a lotta money, at the time, so the bin bags were just a cheap alternative. When we were away though, one of the neighbours called the police. Thought I was brewing up smack or something. They properly went for it. The police. They kicked the front door in, turned the flat upside down and they confiscated all these bin bags filled with the most amazing honey and honeycomb.
    Marianne    Did that really