Chapter Two: Meet the bohemians

One Year Ago

A thunderous crash of plaster showers Bette as an electric generator followed by a Latina, dressed in walking socks and leder hausen, falls through the ceiling, hitting the floor with a tud. Bette leaps to her feet in shock. She doesn’t know what to do. Suddenly, the door is battered open by a blonde, costumed in a nun’s habit. The blonde nun flails ill-proportioned limbs while spluttering an endless stream-of-consciousness explanation.

It is Alice Pieszecki. The bulbous-lipped, lisping Alice sounds like Daffy Duck on speed.

“How do you do? Alice Marie Raymond Bertrand-Pieszecki-Petit-Montfa. Terribly sorry about all this, we were upstairs rehearsing the world’s first totally Bohemian Spectacular. It’s set in Switzerland and there’s a nun played by Tina; the sparkling diamond; the Moulin Rouge’s most famous can-can dancer. She’s a blonde and blondes arouse me beyond comparison. In the show she engages in all manner of healthy Bohemian outdoor sex with the Swiss poet goatherdress. It’s going to be wonderfully preposterous.”

Alice takes the typewriter. “A typewriter? You’re a writer? Anyway, Carmen – the unconscious one – she’s narcoleptic: you know, perfectly fine one moment, then suddenly,” Alice snaps her fingers, “unconscious.”

The extremely talkative blonde is interrupted as a head appears trough the hole in the ceiling. It belongs to a gal who looks like a mouse in a loud striped vest and puffy sleeves: Jenny The Poet.

Jenny calls: “How is she?”

Alice suddenly remembers Leder Hausen and says: “Oh, my goodness.” Leder Hausen moans as she comes to conscience.

“Can I help?” Bette asks. She bends to do so, but is stopped by a voice from above.

“Don’t touch her!” the voice says. Bette looks up and sees a drunk, fiftyish, mad-eyed woman has joined Jenny: The Doctor, Veronica Bloom. A bottle slips from Veronica’s hand and crashes onto the head of Leder Hausen.

“She’s unconscious, I can tell, I’m a doctor,” Veronica says.

Jenny the poet utters a thin-lipped exclamation: “Wonderful!”

Alice turns to the bewildered Bette. Jenny explodes: “The narcoleptic Latina is once again unconscious, and therefore the scenario will not be finished in time to present to the financier tomorrow!”

“She’s right, Al,” the composer, Shane McCutcheon, says. “I still have to finish the music.”