Netwrck
The Weight on the Form
Brayfold is a market town of nine thousand two hundred people on the east bank of the Foss, forty-one miles from anywhere that has a hospital with a name.
- ~300 min (estimated)
- 66086 words
- 97 scenes
- 10 branch points
- 5 endings
42 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
It has a Co-op, a surgery, a crematorium eleven miles away at Thornwick, a butcher, a solicitor who is also the coroner's deputy, and a funeral trade that has been in the same three buildings since 1911. Fennessey and Son is a chapel with a shopfront, an embalming room, a cold room, and a yard with two vans under a roller shutter. Marian Fennessy is forty-five and runs the office: the phone, the accounts, the register, the certificates, and the form. Roy Fennessey is forty-nine and is the third generation, and he is the one who lifts. The rule is this. Every client is weighed before anything else happens to them, in the cold room, on the platform scale that came with the building in 1911, in their clothes, because that is the weight the bearers will have. The number goes in the box on the form marked WEIGHT. The last four numbers are written along the top of the same page, in the same ha
Content notice6 topics · tap to review
- illness, a delayed diagnosis, and administrative failure rather than an assailant
- a funeral trade depicted in working detail, including a cold room, a plate scale, and four hundred and twelve funerals
- an obsession with weight, and a protagonist who has entered figures in a book without verifying them
- complicity that is total and spoken about openly, in which every character says what they did
- explicit adult intimacy between a husband and wife of twenty-four years, in the room where the work is done
- a hard moral choice with no option that costs nothing
Cast
- M Marian Fennessey protagonist, office manager, keeper of the pencil book and of the column of four figures no portrait yet
- R Roy Fennessey the person she wants, the third generation, the man who lifts and the man who reads a weight by ear no portrait yet
- V Verity Oyelaran single-handed GP, maker of a Monday list, and the person who decided Keith Bramwell did not need to be seen no portrait yet
- G Gareth Lowe cemetery and crematorium manager at Thornwick, and the rule with a face and a rubber stamp no portrait yet
- K Keith Bramwell the client, the loss, and the man who laughed at the four figures on his mother's certificate no portrait yet
- A Audrey Bramwell Keith's wife, and the four-line telephone call that is the worst thing in the book no portrait yet
- H Hetty Catterick the oldest client the office has had in a year, and the only person in Brayfold the office has never disagreed with no portrait yet
- P Pam Moxon postmistress at the Co-op on Old Road, nineteen years on the counter, and the town's delivery mechanism for the rule no portrait yet
- J Joss Halliday second-year embalmer, the youngest named character, and the only person who says the rule is mad in daylight no portrait yet