I was there to sort through her things, but there wasn't much to sort. I found myself hoping that I leave more behind when I die, then I changed my mind and thought: what does it matter really, what you leave behind?

            Strangely the flat seemed smaller, now she wasn't in it. The view from the window seemed grim today; as a kid I'd thought it was exciting, worth climbing the twenty-five flights of stairs when the lift was broken. She'd had binoculars, and let me use them to watch the people down below living their ant lives. Now the streets below were empty, abandoned to the sheets of rain rolling back and forth in high winds under a sky as grey as stone. The corner shop, which was no longer on a corner as the rest of the street had been knocked down, was the single source of light and colour below, its neon sign tireless. In the distance the town centre was colourless, a city turned to rock, languid and bleak.

            In the kitchen cupboards I found a number of pans rusted right through, mystery to me why she didn't throw them away. She was quick enough to throw away birthday cards, letters and anything else that hinted of sentiment. A rigorously unsentimental woman, my grandmother, no doubt about it. As hard as the stone above her grave, as the stone that fills the sky. Not given to affection. But then she'd had a tough life, there's no denying it, and I suppose she was always there for us in her own severe way - as long as there wasn't a family feud current at the time.

            Drawers were filled with gas bills and miscellaneous bits and bobs of no interest, nothing worth keeping. A few gold-coloured ornaments sat on the mantel as they had for years, a little owl, a shepherd boy the same height as the owl. I see the boy fleeing the gigantic golden bird, vaulting the ash tray at the end of the mantel and making a desperate leap for the big brown television while the owl swoops. The television was ancient and not worth even giving away. Snooker was what she had liked to watch most of all: A gentlemen's game, she would say, No spitting and carping and cheating like these footballers, they disgust me, horrible men. Strangely, although she always praised snooker as the last clean game, her favourite players were the drinkers, the hell raisers, Alex Higgins and his kind. He's a character, she would say, A bit of personality to him, always worth watching.

            I took her clothes from the wardrobe, made a pile for the charity shop and a bigger pile for the tip, clothes moth-eaten beyond repair, porous cardigans sagging and yellow like ancient cobwebs. At the the back of the wardrobe I found a large, sturdy cardboard box, and opened it to find it full of writing. My heart quickened; perhaps letters, love letters even? Seemed so unlike her, but maybe there was a heart somewhere beneath the carapace. I took out the papers and spread them across the bed.

            They were plays. Plays and stories and film scripts. Some of them were recent, some of them looked decades old, half-centuries old. She had been writing plays for years in secret and never told anyone, at least not as far as I knew. I couldn't believe it. A secret passion, a desire to do something else, something hardly conceivable really in the circumstances, a playwright of all things. My heart felt torn apart with sadness as I looked at the carefully handwritten pages, stapled together, and with her name neatly, demurely written in the top right corner of each page. I sat down to read them. The first few were kitchen-sink dramas, tales of life as she knew it in the town she'd lived her whole life. But over time they became stranger, more magical and far-fetched and odd. The final one, on fresh white paper and in bright blue ink as though written only weeks ago, was called The Last Cowboy, and was a film script. I could barely hold back tears as I thought of all the times I'd spoken in her presence of films and books and plays but never bothered to ask an opinion from her. She wouldn't understand, she wouldn't be interested I thought. I'd tell her about my own writing efforts, about the evening classes I went to, hardly even listening for an answer. All the time she had been pouring her efforts into her own plays and scripts, and none had ever been performed, no film ever made.

 

I AM THE LAST COWBOY

A script, for a film.

FADE IN

 

A modern city, shot from ground level. People and traffic and concrete everywhere.

 

The COWBOY is a man in his twenties or thirties. He wears all the paraphernalia of a movie cowboy – boots, hat, neck scarf, chaps  – and he carries a lasso at his belt. He wears no gloves. His face seems split in two, vertically; one half is painted tar-black, the other is painted sheet-white. One of his hands is black and one is white. He is English, with a Northern accent. 

 

We see him walking the streets of the busy city: skyscrapers, neon, crowds.

 

We CUT to different shots of his wanderings. The impression is of time passing; we see the COWBOY on many different days and in different places, but always wandering the streets. He interacts with nobody.

 

We CUT to a MEDIUM shot of the COWBOY on an almost-empty bus. He sits at a window, looking out. The sun falls on his face, shadows pass over it as the bus moves.

 

MUSIC begins to play, softly.

 

COWBOY

(Voice Over)

I'm the last cowboy, I think. I haven't seen another one around for a long time. A long, long time. I'm fairly certain I'm the last one.

 

[BEAT]

 

We CUT to a shot of him wandering the streets again. We see him throwing his lasso forlornly over a 'Keep Left' bollard. Nobody pays him any attention.

 

COWBOY

(VO)

There isn't much for me to do any more. Times have changed. Things work differently now. Sometimes I lasso things. But that's mostly just to keep my hand in. The rest of the time, I just wander round the city. I take the bus, and the tram.

 

[BEAT]

 

I used to ride around, but my horse died, and I couldn't find anywhere to buy a new one. It was sad when my horse died. Took about three days for him to go. I sat there looking into his eyes. There was nothing I could do.

 

As he goes on we see more SHOTS of him wandering the city, sometimes sitting on benches. He interacts with nobody.

 

COWBOY

(VO)

So I ride the buses around now, and mostly keep to myself. People avoid me; they don't like me on sight, because I'm half black and half white. Don't get me wrong, things have improved; in the old days it was "nigger this" and "nigger that" from the white folks, and "cracker this" and "honky that" from the blacks. Neither saw me as one of their own. They both hated me. These days things are different; people of different colours get along fine, sometimes anyway, and that kind of language isn't heard so much.

 

SHOT of a billboard advert: a black sporting star endorsing a product. White people passing.

 

COWBOY

(VO)

But people still don't like me. I think people like things to be 'A' or 'B' and not something in-between. One thing or the other, not a combination of the two. People just naturally take against me.

 

[BEAT]

 

That's my theory anyway, but what do I know? I don't understand people. I don't understand what they do. Like, what is this thing with the heads?

 

From the window of a bus, a SHOT of a 'head temple' in a broad side-street. It is exactly as the COWBOY goes on to describe. There are people gathered round it.

 

COWBOY

(VO)

I call them the 'head temples.' They're all over the city now; grey plastic models of heads, twelve feet high, with the top of the 'skull' left off to leave exposed the yellow-painted plastic brain. They just sit there, these heads, on the pavement or in the middle of squares or parks. And people gather round them in little circles and look up at them. Hold hands sometimes, too. That's why I call them head temples, it's like people are worshipping them.

 

A few SHOTS of different head temples, all from a distance. Some with groups of people around them, some unattended.

 

SHOT: We see the COWBOY looking at the head temples, peering from buses, standing gazing from a safe distance. Baffled, uncomfortable.

 

COWBOY

(VO)

I see them all over the place, more of them all the time. I see them as I go past on the bus or the tram, or I pass them as I'm walking. Something's going on with them, and I have no idea what. No-one's ever invited me over to one of them.

 

SHOT of the COWBOY standing in a deserted park gazing out over a pond.

 

COWBOY

(VO)

I suppose I'm lonely, to put it simply.

 

[BEAT]

 

I have no friends, no-one to talk to. But the thing about being a cowboy is that you've got to be tough. If you're lonely, you can't let on that you are. That wouldn't look good. A cowboy doesn't moan about being lonely, he just gets on with the job at hand. So I never let on that I have no friends. I play it tough.

 

[BEAT]

 

That's half the problem; it makes it much harder to meet people.

 

[BEAT]

 

When my  horse was alive, I didn't feel so lonely. Pretty stupid, eh? Being friends with a horse.

 

Another SHOT of the COWBOY watching a head temple in the distance, a ring of people around it.

 

COWBOY

(VO)

What are they doing there? There seem to be different head temples for different kinds of people. Like, sometimes the head will be surrounded by rich-looking people in business suits. Sometimes it will be hippies.

 

[BEAT]

 

Hippies. Do they still call them that? I think I'm out of touch. I've been around such a hell of a long time, it's no wonder if I am.

 

SHOT of the cowboy on a bus.

 

SHOT of him standing looking at another head temple, this one deserted in the gathering dusk.

 

COWBOY

(VO)

They're funny looking things. Each one the same. Grey, like I mentioned, with an average looking face, eyes closed, lips together. And the whole top of the head missing, from just above the ears. And these great yellow brains, ugly things. Who built them? Was it the council maybe? The government? Or some company? Do the people have to pay to stand around them? I'd love to know what they're doing.

 

[BEAT]

 

In the old days, if a cowboy had come to the end of his time, he could just ride off into the sunset, the great orange sunsets that flamed on the horizon in those days. But there's no horizon any more. The city ate up the horizon.

 

The COWBOY is in a zoo in a large park, watching the sunset. There is a stretch of horizon where he can watch the sun go down. In some directions the massed buildings of the city are still visible.

 

COWBOY

(VO)

They made the horizon extinct, or almost extinct. To see it you have to visit a nature reserve, like this place. I come here sometimes to lasso things. To look at the horizon. In the old days you could see it everywhere, all the time. You could stand and just...drink it in. For hours. Never realised at the time I would miss it.

 

 

 

There are cages with animals in. SHOT: he is standing at the bars and looking at the animals.

 

 

 

Seems a damn shame to me, somehow, to see these animals in cages. But maybe they like it. Maybe the horizon likes it. Maybe they're tired. Nature is hard work, and nature is old. This is nature's retirement home. Not too dignified, but at least someone brings you food.

 

 

 

[BEAT]

 

 

 

SHOT of him back in the city, walking the streets.

 

 

 

COWBOY

 

 

(VO)

 

 

It seems like a new skyscraper goes up every day around here. They seem to get taller and taller. I think they're building extra floors on the older ones. The whole city gets taller, stretching up, sheer concrete walls on every side, getting ever higher.  [He looks up] One day they'll meet in the distance, and there'll be no more sky.

 

 

 

SHOT: he is sitting on the pedestal of a large statue. The statue is a man on horseback. It is outside a large public building, a museum maybe. The COWBOY is gazing out on a broad plaza. We cut to a SHOT of the plaza, from his point of view: in the distance is a head temple. A group is beginning to congregate around it.

 

 

 

COWBOY

 

 

(VO)

 

 

This place is a mystery to me these days.

 

 

 

[BEAT]

 

 

 

One of the great things about my horse was that he was so stupid, so I always knew that there was someone more confused than me. And my horse never seemed unhappy, as long as he had food, so it made me feel as though it wasn't that important to understand anything after all.

 

 

 

A pause.

 

 

 

FADE OUT.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

I thought about reading one of the plays at the funeral but I didn't think it would go down well with the people there. It wasn't what they would be expecting. I thought about trying to get one of the plays performed but I had no idea how to go about doing something like that, and I didn't think getting a film made was even a remote possibility. I suppose the scripts were doomed to be forgotten. Maybe it didn't matter, now she was dead. They would follow her to oblivion.

 

 

            But I couldn't leave it, it felt wrong to just pack them away and forget. In the end I decided to duplicate them for fear the ageing manuscripts wouldn't survive much longer. For some reason I didn't want to photocopy them, and instead ended up copying them out by hand, every one. It took me almost six months, and I can't say it achieved anything, but somehow I felt happier for having done it. I felt like her memory was served in some obscure pointless way, and the fact that she would have considered it such a sentimental waste of time did nothing to change my mind.