And the Oscar goes to…
It's all an act, you see.
Will was right, 'all the world's a stage and all the men and women are merely players'.
But, me, I am the greatest player of them all.
Yes, I have the old off day, but what great actor doesn't?
Donna, like Rose, once asked me if I was 'alright'. I said I was, that I was always alright. Donna saw through it, though, just like Rose did. But unlike Rose, Donna wasn't smart enough to keep quite about it.
The days I can't convince someone I'm 'alright'... well, those are my off days.
Some days I am more alright than others. Some days I can't wait for the next one to start, just so this one can be over. Hurt piled on hurt. Holes are dug and pain fills them like water pouring into a drowning man's mouth. Like the Thames pouring down the Racknos nest. Holes are made, sometimes more than one at a time, but pain always fills them.
Always.
But what does 'alright' actually mean? I had heard people say that to Rose, all those years ago. I remember it was just after Mickey was trapped in the other world and Parallel Pete Tyler had told her he didn't want her calling him dad. We were staying at her mums, when a woman across the street, a neighbour, asked Rose how she was. Rose, just out to put the rubbish out, was cornered.
"Alright?"
"Yeah, you?"
"Fine, fine"
It was the next day Jackie told us that the woman across the road had just found out her husband had been cheating on her, with a girl half her age. When Rose saw her she was loading the car to move to Skegness to stay with her sister.
If something hurts us, and someone asks how we feel, we don't tell the truth.
If someone asks if we're ok, alright... We lie.
Ninety five other species do, too, not just humans.
We say we're 'fine, fine'. Even though, inside, we're listing the ways we can chop off a mans genitals in the most humiliating and excruciatingly painful way possible. (Or so I've heard from a rather drunken Rose, when she told me about a man called Jimmy Stone.)
Anyway.
We lie. Because... why tell the truth?
The person who asked.
Why would they care?
No one cares about your pain; they were just being polite. They have their own pain to deal with.
No one says, "No, I'm not aright, I am seriously contemplating going round to that bastard's house, in the dead of night, with some rope, a bath and a cement mixer. And then take him to a nice trip down a very deep river."
We lie, we say 'fine fine'.
We lie, we act.
No one cares about someone else's pain, because their too busy with their own.
We all do it; we all say we're fine when we aren't.
We all deserve an Oscar.