THE BEACON

Reading draft -- scenes only. 10 August 2026. Names fictionalised. She is never played by an actress.

Standing rules:

No score. Room tone, the heater, gravel, a pen, a phone buzzing on wood.

The mechanism is never shown. No machine, no hum, no glow. The future never appears.

The custody thread is never entered. Shot through glass, without sound, or conducted by text. No hearings, no lawyers, no villain.

Kristine exists only as objects and traces. Texts on a screen, a voice on a video that faces away from camera, a name, a rule in a card game.

Every time she is absent, something is present. The props carry her, so they are photographed like evidence -- held, turned over, close, in unflattering light.

Maya does not live with him. All in-person contact is supervised at the family centre. Everything else is a text thread.

Maya's mother is alive and is the other party in the custody matter. She is never named, never appears, and is never discussed. Kristine is not Maya's mother -- she was David's, and she was there for the whole of Maya's life with him until she died. The film never explains this and never needs to.

ACT ONE

SCENE 1

FADE IN:

BLACK.

Sound first. A phone on a nightstand, face down, buzzing once against wood. Then nothing. Then twice more, close together.

INT. BEDROOM -- NIGHT

Dark. A shape under blankets. A hand comes out, finds the phone, turns it over.

Screen light on a face we don't quite see. We see the screen.

(The room is his. She is somewhere else. The film never says where, or why, and no one in it ever remarks on it.)

The thumb hovers. Doesn't type. The screen dims on its own.

The hand sets the phone down. The shape rolls over.

Hold on the dark room. Four seconds. Five.

CUT TO:

INT. SHED -- MORNING (FOUR YEARS LATER)

A card table. A space heater. A whiteboard on the far wall with a half-finished game on it -- two hands of cards drawn in marker, a tally, a girl's handwriting: ARE WE PLAYING OR WHAT.

DAVID, fifties, sits at the table with a laptop open and a phone propped against a coffee cup. He is dressed. He has been up a while.

The phone shows a FaceTime call ringing out. MAYA.

It rings. And rings.

He watches it. Doesn't touch it.

It stops. FaceTime Unavailable.

He picks the phone up, thumbs to the keypad, dials. Puts it on speaker.

One ring. Then:

RECORDED VOICE

The person you are trying to reach --

He hangs up.

Sets the phone down. Looks at it.

Then he picks it up again, opens the camera roll, scrolls. Stops on a photograph: a plaza, skaters, a red cone. Wide, ordinary, taken from a set of steps.

He attaches it. Types.

Sends.

Watches it deliver.

Nothing.

He looks at the whiteboard. At the girl's handwriting.

DAVID

(to nobody)

Yeah.

He closes the laptop.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He doesn't leave. He sits back down and opens the laptop again.

On the screen: an article, mid-scroll. A photograph of a tunnel bored into rock. Fluorescent light. Concrete. A sign in German.

He reads. We see fragments as his eye moves -- *underground research facility... Hagerbach... an archive intended to remain legible after the institutions that made it are gone...*

He scrolls. A second photograph: a disc of glass, held in a gloved hand. Something etched into it, too fine to see.

He stops scrolling.

Sits back.

Long beat.

DAVID

Ten thousand years.

He says it flatly, testing it, the way you'd say a number you don't believe.

He gets up. Crosses to the whiteboard. Looks at the card game -- the two hands, the tally, the handwriting.

Then he takes the eraser and clears a space in the corner. Not the game. Just a corner.

He writes, small:

Stops. Marker still on the board.

Stands there.

Then, underneath it:

He caps the marker.

DAVID

(quiet)

There's no queue.

Beat.

DAVID (CONT'D)

Nobody's taking numbers.

He looks at the corner of the board for a long moment. Then he goes and gets a chair, sits down in front of it, and starts writing properly.

Hold. The shed. The heater ticking. A man writing on a whiteboard.

CUT TO BLACK.

TITLE: THE BEACON

SCENE 2

INT. SHED -- LATER

The whiteboard corner is full now. Not diagrams -- a list, in small handwriting, mostly crossed out.

David is on the phone. Speaker. He has a pen and is not using it.

WOMAN'S VOICE (V.O.)

-- and the write is femtosecond laser, so it's not on the surface, it's structures inside the glass. Voxels. That's why it doesn't degrade.

DAVID

How long.

WOMAN'S VOICE

Depends who you ask.

DAVID

I'm asking you.

A pause on the line. The sound of someone deciding whether to be careful.

WOMAN'S VOICE

The number people use is thirteen point eight billion years. That's a lab figure. It assumes nothing hits it and nothing thermally cycles it.

DAVID

And in the ground.

WOMAN'S VOICE

In the ground, honestly? Microfracture propagation is the thing nobody wants to talk about. Quartz cracks. Slowly, but it cracks. If your features are fine enough, a crack takes out a character and you don't know which one.

David writes something. First time he's used the pen.

DAVID

So make the letters bigger.

WOMAN'S VOICE

(small laugh)

I mean -- yes. That's actually the answer. Big features, low density. People don't like it because it feels like wasting the medium.

DAVID

I don't need the density.

WOMAN'S VOICE

Okay.

Beat.

WOMAN'S VOICE (CONT'D)

Can I ask what the content is? It changes the quote.

David looks at the whiteboard.

DAVID

A message.

He lets it sit. She doesn't push.

WOMAN'S VOICE

Right. I'll send you a sheet.

DAVID

Thank you.

He ends the call. Writes on the board: BIG LETTERS. Underlines it.

Beat.

He caps the marker. Looks at the board -- the whole of it. The card game in the middle, in two hands of handwriting. Hers is smaller and neater than his.

Under her last play, in her writing: ARE WE PLAYING OR WHAT.

He looks at the date he wrote next to it, months ago, when he still wrote dates.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He picks up the phone. Opens the thread with MAYA.

Scrolls up. It is mostly his side. Photographs, mostly. A skate spot. A dog. A thing on a shelf.

Her replies are short and they are not unkind. 👍 and lol and once, in June, *that's the one by the library right.*

He types:

Looks at it. Deletes it.

Types:

Sends.

Delivered.

He puts the phone face down.

Beat.

It buzzes.

He turns it over.

Beat.

Then, a second one, arriving underneath:

He almost laughs.

Types:

Delivered. Nothing after that.

He sets the phone down and goes back to the board.

Hold on the shed. One man, a whiteboard with two people's handwriting on it, and only one of them in the room.

CUT TO:

SCENE 3

INT. SHED -- NIGHT

A tripod. A phone clamped to it, camera facing a chair. The shed lit badly by the work lamp -- he has moved it twice, we can see the marks.

David sits in the chair. Adjusts it. Stands up. Moves the lamp again. Sits back down.

He looks at the phone. Reaches over. Taps record.

A red dot.

He sits back. Puts his hands on his knees. Takes a breath.

DAVID

Baby.

Beat.

DAVID (CONT'D)

Baby, it's me. I know how this --

He stops.

Long pause. He is not crying. He is doing arithmetic behind his eyes -- trying to work out what she can be told and what she can't.

DAVID (CONT'D)

(starting again, flatter)

Okay. There are some things I have to tell you and there's an order.

Beat.

DAVID (CONT'D)

You're going to be -- there are going to be people there. And they're not --

He stops again.

He looks at the red dot.

Reaches over and taps it off.

Sits.

INT. SHED -- LATER

The tripod is still up. The phone is on the table now, face down.

David is at the laptop. He has a document open. The cursor is at the top of an empty page. The title bar says REQUEST.

He types four words. We don't see them.

Deletes them.

He sits back and looks at the ceiling of the shed -- plywood, a seam, a nail head.

DAVID

(to the ceiling)

What do you say to somebody.

He doesn't mean her.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He gets up. Goes to the whiteboard. Under BIG LETTERS he writes:

Underlines it twice.

Then, beneath, a list -- he writes fast now, this part he knows:

He stops at the last one. Taps the marker against the board.

Adds:

Long beat.

He caps the marker.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He picks up the phone from the table. Turns it over. Opens the camera roll.

Scrolls past the skate photograph. Past others we don't see clearly.

Stops.

A video thumbnail. Old. The frame is a kitchen somewhere, overexposed.

His thumb hovers.

He does not press it.

He sets the phone down, screen dark, and stands there in the shed with the tripod still up and the lamp in the wrong place.

Hold.

CUT TO:

EXT. HOUSE -- MORNING

Gravel. A car in the drive that isn't his.

Through the kitchen window, from outside: DAVID at his own table. Across from him a WOMAN -- mid-forties, coat still on, a folder open, a pen.

We hear nothing. The window is closed and the camera stays outside.

She asks something. He answers. She writes.

She asks something else. He takes longer with that one.

Behind him, through the doorway, visible from this angle: the open shed door, and a corner of the whiteboard.

She glances up. Sees it. Writes.

Hold on the window from the gravel. Two people at a kitchen table, no sound.

CUT TO BLACK.

SCENE 4

INT. UNIVERSITY OFFICE -- DAY

A shared postdoc office. Three desks, two empty. A window onto a car park.

PRIYA, twenty-six, at the middle desk. Two monitors, a coffee, a bicycle helmet on the filing cabinet. She is looking at a printout David has put in front of her.

David stands. There is a spare chair; he has not taken it.

PRIYA

Sit down, you're making me nervous.

He sits.

PRIYA (CONT'D)

(reading)

Okay so -- this is the Pioneer plaque.

DAVID

It's based on it.

PRIYA

It is it. This is the pulsar map. You've redrawn it.

DAVID

Can you compute a current one.

PRIYA

Compute it -- yes. Anyone can. It's catalogue work. ATNF, pull the periods, correct for spin-down to whatever epoch you want.

DAVID

How long.

PRIYA

Couple of weeks if I'm doing it properly. Less if you want it fast and wrong.

DAVID

Properly.

She sets the printout down. Looks at him for the first time.

PRIYA

Can I say the thing.

DAVID

Sure.

PRIYA

This works if whoever's reading it does radio astronomy. That's the assumption baked into the whole design. Fourteen pulsars, periods in binary against the hydrogen line -- it's elegant, it's the standard, and it only functions if they already know what a pulsar is and what hydrogen does.

DAVID

They will.

PRIYA

Probably. But you asked me for properly.

Beat. He doesn't argue.

PRIYA (CONT'D)

Drake picked those fourteen for longevity and short period, so the timing's readable and the spin-down dates it. That part's good. That part's actually really good. But if your reader doesn't share our physics --

DAVID

Then what.

PRIYA

Then they've got a picture of some lines with ticks on them and no way in.

David takes the printout back. Looks at it.

DAVID

So it needs a way in.

PRIYA

It needs a way in that doesn't assume anything.

DAVID

Like what.

PRIYA

(shrugs)

Counting? Start with counting. One mark, two marks, three marks. Then show them addition with marks. Then you've got arithmetic, and once you've got arithmetic you can define everything else.

She says it as a throwaway. She's already looking back at her monitor.

David is not moving.

DAVID

Say that again.

PRIYA

(turning back)

What?

DAVID

Start with counting.

PRIYA

I mean -- that's the only thing you can't get wrong. Marks. You can see marks or you can't.

Long beat.

DAVID

How much for the two weeks.

INT. SHED -- NIGHT

He is at the whiteboard. He has erased BIG LETTERS and rewritten it at the top, bigger.

Below it, a new list, and he is building it as we watch:

He stops. Thinks. Adds:

He steps back.

Beat.

Then he goes back and writes, above the whole list, in smaller letters:

He looks at it for a long time.

DAVID

(quiet)

Okay.

He caps the marker. It's the first thing in the film that has gone right.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sits. Opens the laptop. The REQUEST document is still open, still empty.

He looks at it.

Closes the laptop.

Beat.

Then he picks up the marker again and, in the card-game half of the whiteboard, draws a card into his own hand. Adds a tally mark.

Doesn't erase hers.

CUT TO:

SCENE 5

INT. SHED -- DAY

Laptop open. A video call, badly lit on both ends. On screen: HALVERSON, sixties, in what looks like a garage or a workshop -- shelving behind him, a coffee maker, a hard hat on a hook.

He is eating a sandwich. He does not stop for the call.

HALVERSON

-- so the honest answer is we don't fly things. We put things on other people's flights. There's a difference and people get it wrong.

DAVID

How big can it be.

HALVERSON

How big is it?

DAVID

Three hundred grams. Maybe four.

Halverson stops eating.

HALVERSON

That's nothing.

DAVID

Is that a problem?

HALVERSON

That's the opposite of a problem. That's a -- you understand people call me about safes. Somebody wants to put a safe on the moon.

He laughs at his own thing. David waits.

HALVERSON (CONT'D)

Four hundred grams rides in a corner of somebody's payload and nobody notices. You're not buying a launch. You're buying a favour and some paperwork.

DAVID

And the ground sites.

HALVERSON

Ground's easier and it's also where I'd tell you to start. We've got a facility inside a mountain -- Swiss, it's a research tunnel, they let people put things in the rock. That one survives basically anything that happens on the surface.

DAVID

Anything.

HALVERSON

War. Ice. Water coming up. Not a direct hit, but nothing survives a direct hit.

A pause. Halverson wraps the rest of the sandwich, sets it aside. This is the first thing he's taken seriously.

HALVERSON (CONT'D)

Can I give you the thing nobody wants to hear?

DAVID

Yeah.

HALVERSON

We put a library on a lander in twenty-nineteen. Israeli mission. It crashed.

Beat.

HALVERSON (CONT'D)

The archive's probably fine. Nickel foil, it's not delicate. It's just -- scattered. Somewhere on the surface, in pieces, and nobody knows where exactly.

DAVID

So it's still there.

HALVERSON

It's still there.

DAVID

Then it worked.

Halverson looks at him through the camera. Reassesses slightly.

HALVERSON

...Yeah. I've argued that. Most people don't.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

David is writing on the whiteboard while the call continues in the background -- Halverson's voice going on about paperwork and lead times, the words indistinct.

David writes:

Then, to the side:

HALVERSON (V.O.)

-- so realistically you're looking at eighteen months for a lunar slot, could be two years, and I can't tell you which mission until somebody tells me.

DAVID

That's fine.

HALVERSON (V.O.)

Most people say that and then they call me in four months.

DAVID

I won't.

INT. SHED -- LATER

Call over. The shed quiet.

David is looking at the four words on the board.

He picks up the marker. Under DEEP OCEAN he writes a number -- a cost. Under MOON, a bigger one. Under the Swiss one, a smaller one.

He adds them.

Looks at the total.

Beat.

It is not a large number. That is the point of the shot. Not a fortune. Not impossible. A used car.

He stands there with it.

DAVID

(to nobody, testing it)

That's it?

Long beat.

Something changes in the room and it is not dramatic. The thing has stopped being a thought.

INT. SHED -- EVENING

The total still on the board. He is sitting with it.

The phone buzzes. He turns it over.

Beat. He looks at it. She has no way of knowing. Then he understands -- he photographed the board weeks ago for something else and sent it without thinking.

He types:

Beat. Three dots. They stop. Start again.

He types:

Delivered.

Beat.

Then, arriving:

He looks at that for a while.

Types:

Three dots.

Beat.

He types, deletes, types:

Delivered.

Nothing after that.

He sets the phone down face up this time, and it stays lit for a few seconds, and then it goes dark on its own.

Hold on the shed. The total on the board. The dark phone.

CUT TO:

SCENE 6

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- DAY

A room that is trying. Beanbags nobody uses. A poster about feelings. A low table, two chairs, a window with a blind at the wrong angle.

DENISE, fifties, sits in the corner with a clipboard and a coffee in a paper cup. She has been doing this for twenty years and it shows in how little she looks up.

David sits at the table. He got here early; we can tell because he has already moved his chair once.

The door.

Maya comes in. Neither of them knows what to do with the room. She sits.

Beat.

DAVID

Hey.

MAYA

Hey.

Beat.

Denise writes something. The pen is audible.

MAYA (CONT'D)

(low, to David)

Does she write when we don't say anything?

DAVID

Probably.

MAYA

That's so --

She stops herself. Looks at Denise. Denise does not look up.

DAVID

Yeah.

Beat.

David reaches into his jacket and puts something on the table.

A deck of cards.

Maya looks at it.

MAYA

You brought the actual --

DAVID

The board doesn't travel.

MAYA

Okay but I have a hand. On the board. I have three cards and a jack.

DAVID

I know what you have.

MAYA

You do not know what I have.

DAVID

Three, six, nine of clubs, and a jack you drew in April to be annoying.

Beat.

MAYA

...That's actually correct.

She takes the deck. Starts shuffling -- badly, but with the confidence of someone who has decided this is her job now.

MAYA (CONT'D)

We're not starting over. We're continuing.

DAVID

Fine.

MAYA

From memory.

DAVID

Fine.

She deals. The game is nonsense -- a house rule set built over years that no outside observer could follow. The film does not explain it and never will.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- LATER

They are deep in it. Maya is winning, or says she is.

MAYA

That's a stack.

DAVID

That's not a stack.

MAYA

It's a stack because the jack was face down when I played it, which means --

DAVID

That's not a rule.

MAYA

It's been a rule since Vineyard.

DAVID

It has never once been a rule.

MAYA

Kristine said it was a rule.

The room changes.

Denise's pen stops. She doesn't look up. But it stops.

Beat.

Maya realises. Not embarrassed -- she said something true and it landed differently than she meant.

MAYA (CONT'D)

(smaller)

She did, though.

DAVID

(after a moment)

She made up a lot of rules.

MAYA

She made up all of them.

DAVID

She made up most of them.

Beat.

MAYA

So it's a stack.

DAVID

(evenly)

It's a stack.

She takes the pile. Doesn't gloat. Something has been settled that isn't about the cards.

Denise's pen starts again.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CORRIDOR -- LATER

The visit is over. Maya is gone through the other door. David and Denise in the corridor, both putting coats on.

DENISE

That went well.

DAVID

Did it.

DENISE

I write down what happens. That's the whole job. Today what happened was you played a card game for fifty minutes.

Beat.

DENISE (CONT'D)

Some people bring a lawyer's list of things to say.

DAVID

I brought cards.

DENISE

You brought cards.

She gets her bag. Pauses.

DENISE (CONT'D)

The woman she mentioned.

David waits.

DENISE (CONT'D)

I'm not asking. I'm telling you I have to write it down.

DAVID

I know.

DENISE

Okay.

She goes.

David stands in the corridor for a second longer than he needs to.

EXT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CAR PARK -- CONTINUOUS

He gets to the car. Doesn't get in.

Takes out his phone. Opens the camera roll.

The old video thumbnail. The overexposed kitchen.

His thumb hovers.

He doesn't press it.

Puts the phone away. Gets in the car.

Hold on the car in the car park. It doesn't start for a while.

CUT TO:

SCENE 7

INT. SHED -- NIGHT

The laptop, open. On screen: a plain interface. A text field. Below it, five columns, each headed with a different name.

He takes the phone out of his jacket and sets it on the table beside the laptop. Face up. He squares it to the edge without thinking about it.

David types a question into the field. We see it as he types:

He looks at it. Deletes it.

Types instead:

He does not mention himself, or her, or the beacon.

He presses return.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

The columns fill. Not fast. Text arriving in blocks, then being revised, then argued with.

We do not read most of it. The camera stays on David's face, lit by the screen, and we catch fragments as he scrolls -- a phrase, a heading, a word in bold.

He is nodding. It is confirming things.

He scrolls. Still nodding.

Then he stops nodding.

INSERT -- SCREEN

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He reads it twice.

Scrolls down. Same finding, worded differently, round two.

Scrolls. Round three.

DAVID

(under his breath)

Yeah, I know.

He scrolls faster now, looking for something. Finds it.

INSERT -- SCREEN

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sits back.

That's Priya's line. Word for word, arrived at independently, by five machines that did not talk to a graduate student in a shared office.

He looks at the whiteboard -- the list he built after her.

Beat.

DAVID

(quiet)

Okay.

He types a second question.

Return.

INT. SHED -- LATER

Colder light. He's been at it a while. There's a second coffee.

The phone is where he left it. Face up. Dark.

The columns are disagreeing with each other now, and the screen shows it -- one model saying seven, another saying five to ten, a third saying the number is unjustifiable.

Then all of them withdrawing it.

INSERT -- SCREEN

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

David looks at his whiteboard. At SALT / ROCK / MOON / DEEP OCEAN.

Four.

He doesn't change it. He writes, next to it, small:

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

The phone buzzes. Once.

He has it turned over before the buzz finishes.

INSERT -- PHONE SCREEN: a carrier notification. Data usage. Not a person.

He puts it back. Face up. Squares it again.

He types a third question. This one takes him longer to phrase. We watch him start and stop twice.

Between the two attempts he looks at the phone. Then back at the field.

Finally:

He hesitates over the return key.

Presses it.

INT. SHED -- LATER

The columns are unanimous. The film shows us this not by letting us read it but by the shape of the screen -- five blocks of text, no disagreement markers, a single line at the bottom in bold.

David reads for a long time.

INSERT -- SCREEN

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He absorbs it.

This is the first thing tonight he did not already suspect.

He gets up. Goes to the whiteboard. There is a section, off to one side, that we have not seen closely before -- a small list, three or four items, one of them circled.

He looks at it.

Then he erases the circled one.

We see it as it goes: RECEIVER?

Beat.

He caps the marker.

DAVID

(to the room, flatly)

Right. So nobody's writing back.

He stands there.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He comes back to the table. Picks up the phone.

Opens the thread with Maya.

We see the whole of it in one look. It ends where it ended -- her: *is that bad.* Him: *no. thats true.*

Nothing under it since.

His thumb rests on the field.

Beat.

He doesn't type. He closes the thread, sets the phone down face up where it was, and sits back down at the laptop.

And then -- this is important -- he keeps working. No collapse. No moment. A thing he wanted turned out not to exist, and there is still a list on the board.

INT. SHED -- LATER -- DAWN

Grey through the one window. The laptop screen dimmed to standby. David asleep in the chair, head back, mouth open, glasses still on.

On the whiteboard behind him: the primer list, the four sites, the card game, and a blank space where RECEIVER used to be.

On the table in front of him, face up and dark: the phone.

The two of them in the same frame. Nobody says anything about it and nobody ever will.

Hold.

CUT TO:

SCENE 8

INT. SHED -- DAY

A cardboard box on the card table, opened. Packing foam. David lifts something out with both hands.

A plate. Nickel, about the size of a hardback book, blank. Heavier than it looks -- we know because of how he holds it, and because he has to set it down to get the second one out.

Four of them.

He stands them up against the wall, side by side.

They are unmarked. Nothing on them yet.

He looks at them for a while.

Then he picks one up again, just to feel the weight of it, and puts it back.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He photographs them against the wall. Phone. Flash off.

Looks at the photograph. It looks like nothing -- four grey rectangles.

He deletes it.

INT. SHED -- LATER

The laptop. The REQUEST document, still empty.

He types.

Stops. Looks at it.

Types:

Stops. He doesn't know it from memory.

Beat.

He opens a browser. Types her name and the word obituary.

We do not see the screen. We see his face while it loads.

He reads.

Long time.

Then he goes back to the document and types a date. Then another date. Then, on a new line:

He stops.

Closes the laptop.

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- CONTINUOUS

He comes out of the shed. Stands. It's cold.

Nothing to do. Nowhere to go.

He goes back in.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Opens the laptop. Opens the browser. Types the cemetery name.

A satellite view. Green rectangles, a road, rows.

He zooms in. Zooms in more. It goes to that flat pixelated blur that satellite pictures go to when you ask too much of them.

He keeps zooming anyway.

Until it's nothing. Coloured squares.

Beat.

He zooms back out. Sits with the whole cemetery on the screen.

DAVID

(quiet)

Which one.

He doesn't know. He has never been. The film does not say so; it doesn't need to.

He closes the browser.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He picks up the marker. Goes to the board. Under the four sites, he writes:

Beat.

Then, smaller, underneath -- the thing he actually needed to write down:

He looks at that for a moment. Then he erases the second line.

Not because it's untrue. Because it's on a board a fifteen-year-old reads.

Beat.

He stands there with the marker.

Then, off to the side, in the margin, small, in the tone of a man noting a housekeeping detail:

He caps the marker and goes back to the table.

The camera does not linger on it. It is one line among nine other lines on a crowded board, and the film moves on immediately.

INT. SHED -- EVENING

He has stood the four plates against the wall again.

He sits opposite them with a coffee going cold and looks at them the way you look at something you have to start.

Beat.

He takes out the phone. Frames one plate. Doesn't photograph it.

Lowers the phone.

Beat.

Raises it again -- and this time he puts his own hand in the frame, flat against the plate, for scale.

Takes the picture.

Looks at it. Now it reads as an object. A hand, and a thing bigger than a hand.

He attaches it. Types:

Delivered.

He waits.

Nothing.

He sets the phone down.

INT. SHED -- LATER

Later. The coffee is gone. He's working -- the primer layout, a ruler, pencil on paper.

The phone buzzes.

He types:

Three dots.

He looks at that for a long time.

Types:

Delivered.

Three dots. They stop.

Then:

He puts the pencil down.

Beat.

He types:

Delivered.

Three dots. Stop. Start. Stop.

Nothing comes.

He waits a while for it. It doesn't come.

Then, finally, arriving:

Beat.

He looks at the two messages sitting under each other. The one that let it go, and the one that didn't.

Hold.

CUT TO:

SCENE 9

INT. SHED -- DAY

Phone against the ear, not on speaker. He's standing. He does that on calls that matter.

DAVID

-- no, I understand. I'm asking what the window is.

He listens. Picks up a marker. Doesn't write.

DAVID (CONT'D)

And if I miss it.

Listens.

DAVID (CONT'D)

Then eighteen months.

Listens.

DAVID (CONT'D)

No, that's -- no. I'll take it.

Listens.

DAVID (CONT'D)

What date do you need it by.

Beat. He writes on the board -- not in the corner, not small. Across the top, where nothing else is.

A date.

DAVID (CONT'D)

Yeah. That's fine.

He hangs up.

Stands looking at the date.

The room is different now. Nothing has moved. There is a date on the wall.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He goes to the laptop. Opens a calendar. Counts.

His finger moves across weeks.

DAVID

(under breath)

Nine.

Beat.

DAVID (CONT'D)

Nine weeks.

INT. SHED -- LATER

He is working properly now. This is the first sequence in the film with any tempo to it.

The primer list on the board, being converted into a layout -- boxes, sequence, a rough grid.

The four sites, each with a note beside it now. Dates. Contact names.

An e-mail being written. Sent.

Priya's file arriving -- an attachment, a spreadsheet of numbers he can't read, and one image: the pulsar map, redrawn, current.

He looks at that image for a long time. It's the first beautiful thing anyone has handed him.

He prints it.

Pins it to the board.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sits down at the laptop. Opens REQUEST.

It has three lines in it now -- her name, two dates, the cemetery.

He puts his hands on the keys.

Nothing.

Beat.

He gets up, gets the tripod out from behind the door, and sets it up instead.

INT. SHED -- LATER -- NIGHT

Camera on the chair. Red dot.

David sits.

DAVID

Baby, it's me.

Beat.

DAVID (CONT'D)

You're going to wake up and there's going to be somebody there. And I need you to go with them.

Beat. He's got further than last time. He knows it. He doesn't stop.

DAVID (CONT'D)

I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds, and if it were me I wouldn't go either. So --

He stops.

Long pause. He is trying to find the sentence that makes it possible for her, and there isn't one, and he knows there isn't one, and he is sitting in a shed at night looking for it anyway.

DAVID (CONT'D)

(quiet)

So I don't know what to tell you.

Beat.

DAVID (CONT'D)

Except it's me asking.

He looks at the camera.

Long beat.

Then he leans forward and taps it off.

Sits back.

DAVID (CONT'D)

(to himself)

That's not it.

But he doesn't delete it. We see him not delete it. He looks at the file, and he leaves it there.

INT. CAR -- MORNING

Engine off. A flat box on the passenger seat.

David has the phone up, on speaker, ringing. He is looking straight ahead.

It rings out. Voicemail -- a carrier recording, not her voice.

He doesn't leave a message.

Hangs up.

Beat.

Types instead:

Delivered.

Beat. He puts the key in.

The phone buzzes before he turns it.

He types one-handed:

Three dots.

Beat.

He looks at that.

Types:

Three dots.

He types it. We don't see the screen. The answer is under the cut.

CUT TO:

EXT. POST OFFICE / SHIPPING COUNTER -- DAY

A queue. Fluorescent. David with a flat box under his arm, waiting behind a woman posting a parcel to somewhere that requires a customs form.

He waits his turn. Puts the box on the counter.

CLERK

Contents?

Beat.

DAVID

Metal plate.

CLERK

Value?

Beat.

DAVID

(evenly)

Eighty dollars.

The clerk types. Prints a label. Sticks it on.

The box goes into a bin behind the counter with all the other boxes.

Hold on the bin.

CUT TO:

SCENE 10 -- ACT ONE BREAK

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- DAY

Same room. Same blind at the wrong angle. Denise in the corner, clipboard, coffee.

David at the table. The deck of cards is out, squared, untouched.

He is early again.

He waits.

Beat.

He squares the deck a second time.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

Maya comes in. Sits. Something is different and it takes a moment to see what: she has a folder with her. School. She sets it on the table.

And David has something too. A flat parcel, wrapped, that he has not opened. He sets it beside the cards and does not mention it.

MAYA

Hey.

DAVID

Hey.

She opens the folder. Papers. She starts sorting them, not looking at him.

MAYA (CONT'D)

I have to do a thing on someone in my family.

DAVID

What kind of thing.

MAYA

Like a -- an interview. It's for English. You pick a person and you ask them questions about their life and then you write it.

Beat.

DAVID

Okay.

MAYA

I'm doing Grandma.

Beat.

DAVID

Gma or Nana?

MAYA

Gma.

Beat.

DAVID

That's good. She'll like that.

MAYA

She talks a lot, so.

DAVID

She does.

Maya sorts. David watches her sort.

Denise writes something.

MAYA

(not looking up)

I thought about doing you.

Beat.

DAVID

Yeah?

MAYA

Yeah.

She squares her papers.

MAYA (CONT'D)

But there's a section where you have to write what the person is working on now. And I'd have to put something.

Beat.

She looks up.

MAYA (CONT'D)

And I don't know what to put.

Long beat.

Denise does not write. The pen is still.

DAVID

(carefully)

I'm building something.

MAYA

I know you're building something.

DAVID

It's --

He stops. Starts again.

DAVID (CONT'D)

It's a message. On metal. It goes in four places and it's meant to still be readable a really long time from now.

MAYA

Readable by who?

DAVID

Whoever's around.

MAYA

Saying what?

Beat.

And he tells her. We don't hear it. The camera stays on Maya.

The sound drops to room tone -- the blind ticking against the frame, the heating.

We watch her listen.

It takes a while. She doesn't interrupt. Her face does very little, which is the point: she is fifteen and she is deciding, in real time, what to do with this.

Sound comes back on her line:

MAYA

Does it work?

Beat.

DAVID

No idea.

MAYA

But you're doing it.

DAVID

Yeah.

Beat.

MAYA

Okay.

She looks at the parcel.

MAYA (CONT'D)

Is that one?

DAVID

That's one.

MAYA

Can I hold it?

He unwraps it. Nickel, blank, heavier than it looks. He passes it across.

She takes it with one hand and immediately has to use two.

MAYA (CONT'D)

Oh.

She turns it over. Runs a thumb across the blank face.

Denise, from the corner, without looking up:

DENISE

I have to write down what that is.

DAVID

It's a metal plate.

DENISE

(writing)

It's a metal plate.

Maya sets it down on the table. The sound is good -- solid, flat, dense. She squares it against the edge like it matters.

MAYA

It's blank.

DAVID

Not for long.

She pulls the deck toward her and starts dealing.

MAYA (CONT'D)

Your move was bad, by the way. Like objectively.

DAVID

I know.

MAYA

You had the jack thing available and you didn't use it.

DAVID

I forgot the jack thing.

MAYA

(dealing)

You can't forget the jack thing. It's the only good rule.

They play.

Hold on the two of them at the low table with the beanbags nobody uses.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CORRIDOR -- LATER

Coats. Denise and David.

Denise doesn't say that went well this time.

She gets her bag. Stops.

DENISE

I'm going to write down what she said and what you said.

DAVID

I know.

DENISE

I don't know how it reads.

Beat.

DAVID

Neither do I.

DENISE

(after a moment)

No. Probably not.

She goes.

EXT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CAR PARK -- CONTINUOUS

David at the car. Doesn't get in.

Phone out. Camera roll.

The old video thumbnail. The overexposed kitchen.

He presses it.

INSERT -- PHONE SCREEN: we do not see it. The screen faces away from camera.

We hear it.

A kitchen. Movement. A dish. And then -- a woman's voice, mid-sentence, laughing at something already in progress, saying a name.

KRISTINE (V.O.)

-- no, because you said -- David, you said --

And laughter. Hers and, further off, a child's.

Four seconds. Maybe five.

He stops it.

Puts the phone in his pocket.

Gets in the car.

The car does not start.

Hold. Long.

CUT TO BLACK.

ACT TWO

SCENE 11

INT. ETCHING SHOP -- DAY

Not a laboratory. A unit on an industrial estate -- roller door half up, a radio on somewhere, a kettle, three machines under extraction hoods.

RUTH, fifties, the voice from the phone in scene 2. Sleeves rolled. She has the plate on a bench under a lamp and a loupe in her hand.

David stands on the other side of the bench.

RUTH

Have a look.

She hands him the loupe. He doesn't know how to use it. She takes his wrist and puts it at the right distance without comment.

INSERT -- THROUGH THE LOUPE:

The first block of the primer. The self-identifying marker -- a geometric pattern, repeated, meant to say this is deliberate.

The edges are soft. Each mark has bled outward and slightly into the next. Under magnification the whole block reads as one grey smear with structure implied inside it.

INT. ETCHING SHOP -- CONTINUOUS

David straightens up.

DAVID

That's the part that says it's a message.

RUTH

Yeah, I know what it is. You wrote it on the order.

DAVID

It's the first thing they see.

RUTH

It's the first thing anybody sees. That's why I'm showing you and not shipping it.

Beat.

DAVID

What did I do wrong.

RUTH

Nothing. It's the metal.

She takes the loupe back. Puts the plate flat.

RUTH (CONT'D)

Nickel's soft. You give it that much energy in one place and it moves. Your features are big -- which is right, don't change that -- but big features hold more heat and the heat goes sideways.

DAVID

So less power.

RUTH

Less power and more passes. Which is slower.

DAVID

How much slower.

RUTH

For four plates? Ten days.

Beat.

He does the arithmetic and she watches him do it.

RUTH (CONT'D)

That's a problem.

DAVID

It's ten days.

RUTH

It's a problem or you wouldn't have gone that colour.

Beat. He almost smiles.

DAVID

It's ten days.

INT. ETCHING SHOP -- CONTINUOUS

She's already writing the new job sheet. He hasn't moved.

DAVID

Can I ask something.

RUTH

Mm.

DAVID

If you'd never seen the order. If somebody handed you that plate.

He points at the failed one.

DAVID (CONT'D)

Would you know it was on purpose?

Ruth stops writing.

She picks the plate up. Holds it at arm's length, tilts it to the light -- not through the loupe. The way anyone would.

Long beat.

RUTH

No.

Beat.

RUTH (CONT'D)

I'd think it was a blank that got too close to something.

She puts it down.

RUTH (CONT'D)

That's why we're doing it again.

EXT. INDUSTRIAL ESTATE -- CAR PARK -- CONTINUOUS

David at the car. The failed plate under his arm -- she let him keep it.

He puts it on the passenger seat.

Sits.

Takes out his phone. Opens the thread with Maya.

Types:

Looks at it.

Deletes it.

Beat.

He starts the car.

INT. SHED -- LATER

The failed plate is against the wall with the other three. Four objects, one of them wrong.

He goes to the whiteboard. The date is still across the top.

He counts back. Adjusts something. Writes a smaller number underneath.

Then he stands there looking at the four plates.

Beat.

He takes the failed one and turns it around, face to the wall.

Hold.

CUT TO:

SCENE 12

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- DAY

Denise in the corner. Coffee. Clipboard.

The cards are out and untouched. Maya has a stapled document on the table in front of her and her hand flat on top of it.

MAYA

It's not good.

DAVID

You said that on the way in.

MAYA

I'm saying it again so it counts.

DAVID

Noted.

Beat.

MAYA

And I'm not reading the whole thing.

DAVID

Read the part you like.

MAYA

There isn't a part I like.

DAVID

Read the part you hate least.

She looks at him. Then flips two pages in, finds a place, and reads -- fast, flat, embarrassed, the way fifteen-year-olds read their own writing aloud.

MAYA

(reading)

"I asked her how she met my grandfather and she said she didn't, exactly. She said he was at a wedding she went to for someone else, and she noticed him because he was the only person not dancing, and she assumed he was rude. She said it took her about four years to find out he was just bad at it."

She stops. Looks up to check he's still there. He is.

MAYA (CONT'D)

(reading)

"I asked if she knew. She said no. She said people say they knew and they didn't know, they just remember it that way after. She said what actually happened was that she thought about him on the drive home and then didn't think about him again for a month."

Beat.

MAYA (CONT'D)

(reading, slightly slower now)

"I asked her what it's like when someone isn't there anymore. She said you think it's going to be like a hole. She said it isn't like a hole. She said it's like the room is a different shape and you keep walking into things."

She stops.

Long beat.

MAYA (CONT'D)

(normal voice)

That bit's too long. I have to cut it.

DAVID

(evenly)

Don't cut it.

MAYA

It's over the word count.

DAVID

Cut something else.

MAYA

There isn't anything else, it's all --

She stops. Looks at him properly for the first time in the scene.

Beat.

MAYA (CONT'D)

Okay.

She squares the pages. Sets them aside.

Denise writes.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

Maya pulls the deck over. Deals.

MAYA

You're still down from the thing in April.

DAVID

I'm aware.

MAYA

I'm just saying you've had a really long time to think about it and you're still losing.

DAVID

I've been busy.

MAYA

(picking up her hand)

Everyone's busy.

They play.

The scene should run a little long here. Nothing important is said. She wins something. He objects on a technicality. She overrules him citing a precedent from Vineyard.

MAYA (CONT'D)

Grandma says hi, by the way.

DAVID

Tell her hi.

MAYA

She asked if you're eating.

DAVID

Tell her yes.

MAYA

Are you?

Beat.

DAVID

Tell her yes.

Maya looks at him. Doesn't push. Plays a card.

MAYA

That's a stack.

DAVID

That's not --

MAYA

It's a stack.

Beat.

DAVID

It's a stack.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CORRIDOR -- LATER

Coats. Denise pulling her bag onto her shoulder.

DENISE

She read you her homework.

DAVID

She did.

DENISE

That's good. That's a good sign.

DAVID

Is it.

DENISE

(matter of fact)

They don't do that if they're managing you.

Beat. She means it kindly and it lands somewhere else entirely.

DENISE (CONT'D)

See you next week.

She goes.

EXT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CAR PARK -- CONTINUOUS

David at the car.

He doesn't take out his phone.

He gets in and drives.

INT. SHED -- NIGHT

Working. The primer layout, ruler, pencil.

Beat.

He stops.

Reaches over, pulls a scrap of paper toward him, and writes something down.

INSERT -- PAPER:

He looks at it.

Then folds it in half and puts it in the drawer with the other things in the drawer.

Goes back to work.

Hold.

CUT TO:

SCENE 13

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- DAY

David comes down the drive with a flat box under one arm -- Ruth's second pass, sample plate, still taped.

He opens the mailbox one-handed. Takes out what's in it.

Circulars. A utility thing.

And an envelope with a printed address label and a return address he doesn't have to read to recognise.

He stands on the gravel and looks at it.

Then he goes into the shed with all of it.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He puts the box down. Doesn't open it.

Opens the envelope instead.

Two pages. A letter, and behind it a form.

He reads the letter standing up. It takes about twenty seconds.

We do not see it.

His face does very little. This is not news. It is a date arriving.

He turns to the form.

INSERT -- THE FORM

Not the whole page. The camera finds only the headings, in the order his eye finds them:

Three ruled rows. Empty.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sits down at the card table with the form and a pen.

Beat.

He writes in the first row, quickly, without thinking about it:

Then stops. Looks at the second column. RELATIONSHIP.

Beat.

He starts to write in it. Gets one letter down and stops.

He crosses the whole row out. One line, neat.

He tries the second row.

Second column. Same stop, faster this time.

Crosses it out.

He puts the pen down.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He gets up. Goes to the whiteboard, because that is what he does when he is thinking, and stands in front of it.

The camera stays wide. The date across the top. The primer layout. The four sites. The card game with her handwriting in it, four months old and now nearer five.

And off to the side, in the margin, small, where it has been since scene 8:

He is not looking at it. He is looking at the date.

He picks up the marker, changes a number under the date -- the second pass, ten days, already accounted for -- and caps it.

Goes back to the table.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He picks the pen back up.

Writes in the first row. Slowly this time.

Second column:

Third column he has to think about. He writes a number from memory, checks it against his phone, corrects one digit.

Fourth column.

He looks at it.

Beat.

He writes:

Two rows still empty.

He sets the pen down on top of the form and sits there.

INT. SHED -- LATER

The form where he left it. Two rows still empty.

The box from Ruth is still taped shut on the floor.

He is not working. He is sitting with his forearms on the table looking at the middle distance, which the film has not let him do once until now.

Beat.

Then he reaches over, pulls the box toward him, and cuts the tape.

Lifts out the plate.

Turns it to the light.

INSERT -- THE PLATE

The first block of the primer. The repeated geometric marker. Clean edges. Every mark separate from the one beside it.

It is correct.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at it for a long time.

He sets it against the wall with the other three -- good side out -- and stands the failed one back where it was, face to the wall.

Then he sits back down in front of the form.

Hold.

CUT TO:

SCENE 14

INT. UNIVERSITY OFFICE -- DAY

The same shared office. Three desks. Two of them are occupied now -- a man with headphones, a woman on a call in another language. The bicycle helmet is gone.

Priya at the middle desk. She has a different coffee cup and the same monitors.

David stands in the doorway with a cardboard tube.

PRIYA

Sorry -- hi. Which one were you?

Beat.

DAVID

The pulsar map.

PRIYA

The pulsar map. Yes.

She clears a corner of the desk with her forearm.

PRIYA (CONT'D)

Sit down.

He sits. Takes the print out of the tube and unrolls it. Puts a stapler on one corner and his hand on the other.

PRIYA (CONT'D)

Is something wrong with it?

DAVID

No.

Beat.

DAVID (CONT'D)

It has to be worse.

PRIYA

...Okay.

INT. UNIVERSITY OFFICE -- CONTINUOUS

He explains it badly and she gets it before he finishes.

DAVID

The etch bleeds. Anything fine, the heat goes sideways and the edges close up. She can guarantee me a mark this wide --

He shows her with his fingers. It is not a small distance.

PRIYA

And your tick marks are about a tenth of that.

DAVID

Yeah.

Priya looks at the map for a while.

PRIYA

So make them bigger.

DAVID

There's no room. It's fourteen pulsars, fourteen sets of ticks, on a plate this size.

He shows her the plate size with his hands. Also not large.

PRIYA

Then it's not fourteen pulsars.

Beat.

DAVID

How few.

PRIYA

Geometrically? Three. Three timings fix a point in space, if they're the right three and if whoever's reading has them all in their catalogue and has identified them correctly.

DAVID

And if one of them is wrong.

PRIYA

Then the point is wrong and there's nothing in the map that tells them it's wrong. That's what the other eleven are for. They're not precision. They're the check.

She turns the print around to face him.

PRIYA (CONT'D)

Fourteen is the version where they can catch their own mistake. Anything less and they get an answer either way.

Long beat.

DAVID

What's the number where they can still catch it.

PRIYA

Six. Maybe seven.

DAVID

Six or seven.

PRIYA

Six is defensible. Seven's better and I don't think seven fits.

Beat.

DAVID

Six.

PRIYA

Okay.

She writes it on a post-it without ceremony. Sticks it on her monitor.

PRIYA (CONT'D)

Which six, do you want to pick, or do you want me to?

DAVID

You.

PRIYA

Good. You'd pick the bright ones.

INT. UNIVERSITY OFFICE -- CONTINUOUS

He is rolling the print back into the tube. She is already back on her monitor.

PRIYA

It's a week. Maybe less, I've got the notebook still.

DAVID

Thank you.

PRIYA

Same invoice line?

Beat.

DAVID

What did it say.

PRIYA

(not looking up)

Astronomical illustration.

DAVID

Yeah. Same.

He gets to the door.

PRIYA

Hey --

He stops.

PRIYA (CONT'D)

Did you actually get it made? The thing?

DAVID

Getting it made.

PRIYA

Huh.

She nods, in the way people nod at something that has just become slightly more interesting than they expected and is not going to stay that way.

PRIYA (CONT'D)

Send me a photo.

DAVID

Okay.

She is already typing.

INT. CAR -- UNIVERSITY CAR PARK -- CONTINUOUS

Engine off. The tube on the passenger seat where the failed plate used to be.

David sits.

Takes out his phone. Opens the thread with Maya.

He photographs the print, badly, half of it rolled -- and sends it.

Delivered.

Beat. Three dots.

He starts to type. Stops.

Types instead:

Three dots.

Beat. Then, arriving:

He looks at that.

Types:

Three dots. They stop.

Start again.

Beat.

He looks at the two messages.

Types:

Delivered.

Nothing after that.

He puts the phone down on the tube.

Doesn't start the car.

Hold.

CUT TO:

SCENE 15

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CORRIDOR -- DAY

Saturday. The building is quieter than we have seen it. One other door open, nobody behind it. A vacuum cleaner somewhere, stopping and starting.

David comes down the corridor with the deck in his jacket pocket.

A woman is waiting outside the visiting room. Forties. Cardigan. A clipboard held against her chest rather than under her arm.

TRISH

Mr -- sorry. David?

DAVID

Yes.

TRISH

Trish. Denise doesn't do Saturdays.

Beat.

DAVID

Okay.

TRISH

Is that all right?

He looks at her. It is not a question anyone has asked him in this building.

DAVID

It's fine.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

The room, same as ever, with the light different because it is a different time of day.

Trish takes the corner chair. Sits. Puts the clipboard on her knee, then on the floor, then picks it up again.

David sits at the table. Doesn't move his chair.

The door.

Maya comes in. Sees Trish. Stops for a quarter of a second.

MAYA

Where's Denise?

TRISH

She's off Saturdays. I'm Trish.

MAYA

Okay.

She sits. Looks at David. He gives her nothing back, which is what she's asking for.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

Cards out. Maya deals.

Trish watches. She is not writing.

TRISH

What are we playing?

Beat.

MAYA

It doesn't have a name.

TRISH

Is it like rummy?

MAYA

No.

DAVID

It's a bit like rummy.

MAYA

It is not like rummy.

Trish laughs. It is a real laugh and it is not unkind.

TRISH

Can I learn it?

Beat.

Maya looks at David. David looks at his hand.

MAYA

Sure.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- LATER

Trish has pulled her chair over. She has cards. She is playing.

She is enjoying herself and she is good company and the room is warmer than it has been at any point in the film.

TRISH

So -- I take one from there, or from there?

MAYA

There, unless it's a stack.

TRISH

What's a stack?

MAYA

When the face-down one gets played on. Then it's a stack.

TRISH

And then what?

Beat.

MAYA

Then you can't split it.

TRISH

Why not?

Beat.

Maya opens her mouth.

MAYA

Because.

Beat.

MAYA (CONT'D)

That's just the rule.

TRISH

Okay!

She plays. She plays wrong. Maya corrects her, kindly. Trish plays again.

David watches this.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- LATER

They are three-handed and the game has become something else. It is being played correctly and it is dead.

Maya is explaining as she goes now, which she has never done, because until today the rules only ever had to be true for two people.

TRISH

Who made all these up?

Beat.

The pen is not moving. Trish is not writing. She asked it the way you ask anything.

Maya deals a card.

MAYA

We did.

Beat.

She does not look at David.

David does not look at her.

DAVID

(evenly, to Trish)

Your go.

TRISH

Sorry -- yes.

She plays. It is a good move and nobody says so.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- LATER

The game ends. Nobody has won in the way anyone would recognise. Maya squares the deck and puts the band on it herself, which David usually does.

TRISH

That was really nice. Thank you for letting me.

MAYA

S'okay.

She stands. Puts her chair back where it was, which she has never done.

MAYA (CONT'D)

See you.

DAVID

Saturday next week?

Beat.

MAYA

Probably Sunday.

She goes.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CORRIDOR -- LATER

Coats. Trish is writing now, standing up, using the wall.

TRISH

I'll write it up today so it's in before Monday.

DAVID

Okay.

TRISH

It was lovely. Honestly. Some of these are very hard and that was not hard.

Beat.

DAVID

Thank you.

TRISH

I'll say she was completely relaxed and you were both -- you know. Easy with each other.

She smiles at him. She means all of it.

TRISH (CONT'D)

That's a good one to have on the file.

DAVID

Yeah.

Beat.

DAVID (CONT'D)

Thanks.

She goes.

David stands in the corridor for a second longer than he needs to.

EXT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CAR PARK -- CONTINUOUS

He gets to the car.

Gets in.

Starts it.

Drives.

INT. SHED -- LATER

He comes in still wearing his coat.

Goes to the whiteboard. The date across the top. Everything under it.

He looks at the card game.

Two hands, drawn in marker. A tally. Her handwriting and his.

Two hands. There have only ever been two.

He takes the marker out of the tray.

Beat.

Puts it back.

Sits down at the table with his coat on and starts working.

Hold.

CUT TO:

SCENE 16

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- DAY

A courier van, already pulling away. A wooden crate on the gravel, too heavy to be carried casually.

David gets a hand under each end and walks it in the way you walk something you don't want to drop.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He gets the lid off. Foam. Four plates, separated by card.

He takes them out one at a time and stands them against the wall.

Then he turns the first one to the light.

INSERT -- THE PLATE

Not through a loupe. At arm's length, the way anyone would.

Blocks of marks, big and separated, running the length of it. A field of ticked radial lines at the bottom -- six of them now, spaced out, obvious.

And at the head of the plate, the marker: a geometric pattern, repeated, edges clean.

It reads as deliberate from a metre away.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at it for a while.

Then he props it against the coffee cup on the card table, sits down opposite it, and gets out a pencil and a sheet of paper.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He does the primer.

Not as its author -- as its reader. Marks on the paper. One, two, three. Then two groups of marks and a third group that is both of them together. Then the same thing with a symbol standing in for the groups.

He works through it properly, in order, checking each block against the one before, and he does not skip anything.

It takes a long time and the film should let it.

It works.

Every block gives him what the next block needs.

He gets to the end of the sequence and sits back.

DAVID

(to the plate)

Okay.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

The last block on the plate is short. Marks in a row, spaced out, each group bigger than the last. One. One. Two. Three. Five. Eight.

Then a gap the same size as the others, and nothing in it.

He looks at it.

He knows what goes in the gap. He knew before it was etched. He has known since the night he wrote the list.

Beat.

He takes a sheet of paper and lays it over the upper half of the plate, covering everything above the test.

Sits back.

Tries.

Beat.

It doesn't work. He can see the covered blocks with his eyes shut.

He moves the paper anyway, down a bit, as though the problem were the paper.

Beat.

Then he takes the paper off and puts it down and rubs his face with both hands.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He photographs the plate. Properly this time -- flat on the table, the work lamp moved, his hand out of frame.

Looks at the photograph.

It reads.

He opens his mail, attaches it, and types four words to Priya. Sends.

Then he sits with the phone in his hand.

INT. SHED -- LATER

Working. The pencil, the paper, the plate still propped against the cup.

The phone lights.

He turns it over.

INSERT -- PHONE SCREEN

Beat.

Nothing under it.

He puts the phone face down.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He picks the plate up again and turns it over in his hands.

And we see, for the first time, the thing the film has been careful not to show us until now.

Low on the plate, below the test block, there is a rectangle. Ruled, bordered, sized. Roughly a third of the surface.

It is blank.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He puts the plate down and picks up the note that came taped inside the crate lid. Handwritten. Ruth's.

INSERT -- THE NOTE

He reads it twice.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He opens the laptop.

REQUEST.

It has three lines in it. Her name. Two dates. The cemetery.

The cursor is under the third line, where it has been since the day the metal came.

He puts his hands on the keys.

Beat.

Beat.

He closes the laptop.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He gets up and goes to the whiteboard.

The primer list, in his handwriting from the night after Priya. He takes the marker and ticks them off, one at a time, and it is the most straightforwardly satisfying thing he has done in the film.

He gets to the seventh.

He holds the marker against the board.

Beat.

Doesn't tick it.

Caps the marker.

Above all of it, across the top, the date.

Hold.

CUT TO:

SCENE 17

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- DAY

Sunday. The room, the blind at the wrong angle, the beanbags.

David at the table. Early. The deck out of his jacket and squared in front of him.

Denise's chair in the corner is empty.

He waits.

Beat.

He squares the deck a second time.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- LATER

The light has moved a little. Nothing else has.

He is sitting exactly as he was.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

The door.

Denise. Coat still on. She does not go to the corner chair, which is how he knows before she says it.

DENISE

She's not coming today.

Beat.

DAVID

Okay.

DENISE

I got the call about twenty past.

He looks at the clock. It is well past twenty past.

He doesn't say anything about that and neither does she.

DAVID

Is she all right.

DENISE

I don't know. That's true, I'm not being careful with you.

Beat.

DENISE (CONT'D)

They said she couldn't make it. That's the whole of what I have.

DAVID

Okay.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

Denise stays in the doorway. She has other things to do and she is not doing them.

DENISE

I read Saturday's.

DAVID

Yeah.

DENISE

It's a good one.

Beat.

DENISE (CONT'D)

I have to log today as well.

DAVID

I know.

DENISE

Non-attendance. It doesn't have a box for whose.

He takes that.

DAVID

No.

DENISE

It'll sit under Saturday's.

Beat.

DENISE (CONT'D)

I'm not telling you that to be unkind. I'm telling you because you'd rather know.

DAVID

I would.

She nods. Goes.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

He sits a moment longer in the empty room.

Then he puts the band round the deck and puts it back in his jacket.

EXT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CAR PARK -- CONTINUOUS

He gets to the car.

Takes the phone out. The thread with Maya.

Nothing. Delivered, from him, days ago, and nothing under it.

He puts it away.

Gets in.

Drives.

INT. SHED -- LATER

Coat off this time. The plate on the card table where he left it. The pencil, the paper.

He works.

The film should let this run without event. He is not distracted. The work goes fine.

INT. SHED -- EVENING

The phone buzzes.

He turns it over.

Beat. He looks at it.

Three dots.

They stop.

He waits.

They start again.

Beat.

He types:

Delivered.

Beat.

Then, arriving:

He looks at that for a while -- the question mark, which she has not used before.

Types:

Delivered.

Nothing after that.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He puts the phone down.

Takes the deck out of his jacket pocket, where it has been all day, and sets it on the table.

The plate. The pencil and paper. The deck.

Beat.

He gets up and goes to the whiteboard.

Not to the primer list. Not to the date.

To the card game -- the two hands, the tally, and underneath her last play, in her handwriting, from five months ago:

He looks at it.

He does not pick up the marker.

He goes back to the table and works.

Hold.

CUT TO:

SCENE 18

INT. SHED -- NIGHT

The plate propped where it has been. The pencil. The deck of cards, still on the table from the last scene.

Ruth's note is under the coffee cup, where he can see it.

He opens the laptop.

REQUEST.

INSERT -- SCREEN

Three lines. The cursor under the third.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He puts his hands on the keys.

Types a word. Deletes it.

Sits back.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He gets up and goes to the whiteboard -- not to the primer list, and not to the date. To the oldest thing on it. The list he wrote in the first week, in a hurry, when he thought he knew what the message was:

He reads it the way he read the plate in the last scene. Slowly. In order. As though somebody else wrote it.

Beat.

He picks up the marker.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He draws a line through WHERE SHE IS BURIED.

Beat.

Then a line through WHAT NOT TO DISTURB.

He steps back and looks at what's left.

DAVID

(to nobody)

She's not there yet.

He says it flatly. It is not a discovery, it is an accounting error he has just found -- the difference between a woman in a grave and a woman in a house, and which one he is asking them about.

He caps the marker.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Back at the laptop.

He puts the cursor at the end of the third line and holds delete.

We watch the cemetery go, backwards, character by character.

Gone.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He types.

An address. Number, street, city, state, zip.

He does not look it up. He does not pause anywhere in it.

He sits back and looks at what he has just done.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Under the address he types a date. Then a time -- not a moment, a window. Two figures with a dash between them.

Then, on separate lines:

He stops.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at the whole document.

INSERT -- SCREEN

Nothing under the last heading.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at it.

It is shorter than it was this morning.

Everything he has accomplished tonight, he accomplished by deleting.

He puts his hands on the keys.

Beat.

Beat.

INT. SHED -- LATER

He has not closed the laptop. It is still open, still on the same document, and he is not sitting at it.

He is at the card table with the pencil and the primer layout, working on the thing he already knows how to do.

The screen dims on its own.

Hold.

CUT TO:

SCENE 19

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- DAY

Gravel. A car in the drive that isn't his.

The camera is outside, in the same place on the gravel it stood in scene 3, and it does not move for the rest of the sequence.

Through the kitchen window: two figures at the table. No sound.

Behind them, through the doorway, at an angle across the yard: the open shed door.

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- CONTINUOUS

She stands up.

Through the window we watch her cross the kitchen. Then she is in the doorway.

Then she is outside.

She walks across the yard, unhurried, and goes into the shed.

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- CONTINUOUS

The camera stays where it is.

An open shed door, twenty yards away.

Hold.

One minute.

Two.

Real time. Nothing in the frame moves except a weed in the gravel in the foreground.

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- CONTINUOUS

She comes out.

Stops on the threshold of the house. Takes out a pen. Writes something on the folder, standing up, with the folder against her forearm.

Goes back inside.

Through the window, she sits down again.

CUT TO:

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- LATER

The car is gone. Fresh marks in the stone.

David comes out of the back door with his coat over one arm.

He stops.

Then he walks out onto the gravel and stands where the car was.

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- CONTINUOUS

He turns and looks back at his own house.

The kitchen window. The doorway. The yard.

And the open shed door, and through it, at this distance, a corner of the whiteboard.

He looks at it for a long time.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He comes in and stands in the middle of the room.

The four plates against the wall. The laptop, closed. The pencil and the layout. The deck of cards.

He turns and looks at the board.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He takes the eraser out of the tray.

Holds it.

Beat.

His thumb moves along the felt edge.

Long beat.

He puts it back in the tray, between the red marker and the black one, and squares it against the lip.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He crosses to the door.

The handle sticks. He has to lift it.

He pulls it shut.

It closes badly and loudly and the plywood takes a second to stop.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Dark now, except the one window.

He stands inside it.

He does not open the laptop. He does not pick up a marker.

Hold. The heater ticking as it cools, and a man standing still in his own shed with the door closed.

CUT TO BLACK.

SCENE 20

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- DAY

Sunday. Denise in the corner. Coffee, clipboard.

David at the table. Early, and the deck stays in his jacket.

He sits with nothing in front of him.

The door.

Maya comes in with the folder from scene 12, thinner now. She sits, puts it on the table between them, and does not open it.

MAYA

Hey.

DAVID

Hey.

Beat.

MAYA

I got it back.

DAVID

And?

MAYA

It's fine. It's a good grade.

Beat.

MAYA (CONT'D)

She wrote a comment.

DAVID

What did it say.

MAYA

(flat)

"Lovely detail."

Neither of them does anything with that.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

Maya puts one hand flat on the folder.

MAYA

I did it again.

DAVID

Did what again.

MAYA

The interview. I did you.

Beat.

DAVID

You did Grandma.

MAYA

I did Grandma. Then I did it again.

DAVID

When.

MAYA

(shrug)

After.

Beat.

DAVID

You didn't ask me anything.

MAYA

I know. I did both sides.

Beat.

DAVID

Which one did you hand in.

MAYA

Both. She let me.

Beat.

DAVID

So it's in.

MAYA

It's in.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

She opens the folder, takes out four or five stapled pages, and folds them in half and then in half again, which nobody does to a graded assignment.

Holds them out.

MAYA

Not here.

DAVID

Okay.

MAYA

I mean it. Not in the room.

DAVID

Okay.

He takes it. Inside pocket.

DENISE

(from the corner, not looking up)

I have to write down what that is.

Beat.

DAVID

A school assignment.

DENISE

(writing)

A school assignment.

Beat.

MAYA

(to Denise, not hostile)

It's English.

DENISE

(writing)

It's English.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

Maya reaches over to the back of his chair, takes the deck out of his jacket herself, and slides the band off. She has never done that.

Deals.

MAYA

There's a section where you put what the person's working on now.

DAVID

I remember.

MAYA

I put something.

Beat.

DAVID

What did you put.

MAYA

(dealing)

It's in there.

She picks up her hand.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- LATER

Late in the game. She is not winning and is not mentioning it.

MAYA

Is there still a date.

DAVID

There's a date.

MAYA

Is it soon.

Beat.

DAVID

The fourteenth.

MAYA

Of this month?

DAVID

Of this month.

Beat.

MAYA

You said it was longer than that.

DAVID

That one's longer. This one's the metal.

Beat.

MAYA

Okay.

She plays a card, and looks at it for a second after she's played it, the way you do when you've made a mistake you're not taking back.

MAYA (CONT'D)

That was bad.

DAVID

That was bad.

MAYA

Don't take it.

DAVID

I'm taking it.

MAYA

Fine.

He takes it.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CORRIDOR -- LATER

Coats. Denise has her bag on her shoulder already.

DENISE

Fifty minutes and she dealt.

DAVID

She did.

DENISE

That goes in.

Beat.

DENISE (CONT'D)

The paper goes in too. What you told me and nothing else, because I didn't see it.

DAVID

Okay.

DENISE

If somebody asks me what was on it I'll say I don't know.

Beat.

DAVID

Will somebody ask.

DENISE

(getting her coat on)

Probably.

She goes.

EXT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CAR PARK -- CONTINUOUS

David at the car.

He gets in. Drives.

He does not take it out.

INT. SHED -- LATER

Coat still on. The plate propped against the cup. The pencil, the layout. Ruth's note under the cup where it has been.

He sits down at the card table, takes the pages out, and unfolds them.

Flattens her folds with the side of his hand.

Reads.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

The camera stays on him and does not cut.

It takes a long time. Four pages, read at the speed of a man who knows he is not going to get to read them twice with this face on.

He turns a page.

Turns another.

Near the end he stops, goes back up the page, and reads something again.

Gets to the bottom.

Sits.

He does not say anything. He does not put his hand over his eyes. A man in a coat at a card table holding a fifteen-year-old's homework.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He squares the pages on the table.

Folds them back along her folds -- in half, and in half again.

Opens the drawer. The scrap of paper from scene 12 is in there, folded once, with the other things in the drawer.

He puts the pages in.

Beat.

Doesn't shut it.

Beat.

Shuts it.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He takes his coat off and hangs it on the back of the chair.

Sits down. Picks up the pencil.

The laptop is closed at his elbow and stays closed.

He works.

The phone is face down on the table and does not go over.

Hold. The pencil, the heater, the drawer shut.

CUT TO:

SCENE 21

INT. SHED -- MORNING

The door open. The layout on the table, further along than we have seen it.

He is working.

The phone rings. Not a buzz -- a call.

He turns it face up and answers on speaker without picking it up.

RUTH (V.O.)

It's Ruth. I'm doing my week. Am I moving you.

DAVID

No.

RUTH (V.O.)

That's not the same as a file.

Beat.

DAVID

It'll be there.

RUTH (V.O.)

Some people leave it.

Beat.

DAVID

Leave it.

RUTH (V.O.)

Send me nothing for the panel and I run the rest. You get four plates with a clear rectangle on them.

He looks across at the plate propped against the cup. The bottom third of it. Ruled, bordered, empty.

DAVID

What does that look like.

RUTH (V.O.)

To me?

DAVID

To anyone.

A pause on the line. She stops doing whatever she was doing at her bench.

RUTH (V.O.)

It looks like something was taken out.

Beat.

RUTH (V.O.) (CONT'D)

You rule a box and put nothing in it, that's not empty, that's a gap. Whoever finds it spends their time on what used to be in there.

Long beat.

DAVID

Okay.

RUTH (V.O.)

File and the metal, both by the 14th. I can't run a panel on a plate that's in your shed.

DAVID

It'll be there.

She goes. The call ends itself.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sits with it.

INT. SHED -- LATER

The form is on the card table under the circulars, where it has been since scene 13.

He moves the circulars off it.

Three ruled rows. The first in his handwriting: Rachel Ellicott / mother / a number / N.

Two empty.

He picks up the pen.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Second row:

Second column. He stops the way he stopped in scene 13.

Beat.

Writes:

Third column, a number off his phone, no correction this time.

Fourth column.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Third row:

Second column.

Beat.

Third column, an e-mail address. It does not fit the box. He writes it smaller, it still does not fit, and he runs it up the margin.

Fourth column.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He puts the pen down.

INSERT -- THE FORM

Three rows. Three names. Two occupations and a mother.

A column of three N's straight down the page.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at it.

He does not add anyone. He does not try a fourth name in the margin.

He puts it in the drawer, flat, unfolded, on top of the other things in the drawer.

Shuts it.

INT. SHED -- LATER

He clears the card table. The layout, the ruler, the cup.

Wipes it with his sleeve, which is not enough. Then with a rag, which is.

He brings the plates over one at a time and lays them face up in a row.

Three good. One with the grey smear at the head of it.

Beat.

He picks the failed one up, carries it back to the wall, and stands it face to the wall where it was.

Three plates on the table.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Flat-packed boxes, packing card, a roll of tape.

He builds the first one. It takes longer than it should.

He labels the lids with a marker out of the whiteboard tray, in capitals:

He builds the fourth and leaves the lid blank.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He goes to the board. DEEP OCEAN, in his handwriting, since scene 5.

Beat.

He does not erase it.

He comes back and writes it on the fourth lid.

Four boxes. Three plates.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He stands over them.

Picks up the tape. Sets it down without pulling any.

Beat.

Then he goes and gets the wooden crate from behind the door -- Ruth's, from scene 16, the foam still in it.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He puts the three plates back into the foam, one at a time, separated by card, the way they came.

Fits the lid.

Picks the tape up again and this time pulls it, and the sound of it is the loudest thing in the scene.

Two strips. He runs his thumb along both.

He carries the crate to the door and sets it down there.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Four boxes on the table, built and labelled and empty.

INT. SHED -- EVENING

The laptop.

REQUEST. Four headings. The cursor under the fourth.

He puts his hands on the keys.

Beat.

He types.

The camera is on him. We do not see the screen. He types steadily, does not stop to think, and it goes on past where we expect it to stop.

He stops.

Reads it back.

Changes something -- a short backspace, four or five characters, a retype.

Reads it again.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He attaches it.

The address line fills with Ruth's name.

The cursor sits in the subject.

Beat.

He leaves it empty.

Sends.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sits back.

The window drops to the sent folder on its own, the way mail does.

He looks at it.

Beat.

Then he closes the laptop.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He goes to the whiteboard.

The primer list. Six ticks and a seventh, unticked since scene 16.

He picks up the marker.

Ticks it.

Caps it.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He stands a moment with the marker in his hand.

Then he puts it back in the tray, between the red one and the eraser, and squares it against the lip.

Turns the light off.

Hold. The shed dark, the door open, four empty boxes on the table and a crate by the door.

CUT TO:

SCENE 22 -- ACT TWO BREAK

INT. SHED -- NIGHT

The tripod, up.

The work lamp is where it should be. He does not move it.

The chair. The phone clamped and framed.

He sits down, reaches over, and taps record.

A red dot.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

DAVID

Baby, it's me.

And the sound goes.

Room tone. The heater. Nothing else.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

The camera is behind him and slightly to one side, so we have the back of his head, the lamp, and the red dot.

He talks.

We do not hear a word of it.

He is not stopping. He gets past where he got last time and keeps going, and there is a stretch in the middle where his hands come up off his knees and he is explaining something, in order, with the order mattering.

It goes on a long time.

The film gives us all of it and none of it.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He stops.

Sits back.

Reaches over and taps it off.

Beat.

He does not say that's not it.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He takes the phone off the tripod. Sits down at the laptop.

Plugs it in. A file transfers. He saves it somewhere and types a name for it, and we do not see the screen.

He sits with it.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Then he opens REQUEST, to check something.

INSERT -- SCREEN

Four headings. All four filled now.

He reads it from the top, in order, the way he read the plate and the way he read the list -- slowly, as though somebody else wrote it.

WHO. WHERE. WHEN.

He stops at WHEN.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He does not move.

He is doing it in his head and the film does not help him. No cutaway, no flashback, no insert. A man at a table with his hand still on the trackpad.

It takes about fifteen seconds.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks up.

Not at the board. At the room.

The four boxes on the table, labelled and open and empty. The crate by the door. The tripod with nothing on it. The pencil. The layout. The heater.

All of it.

Beat.

DAVID

(to nobody)

Then I'm not there.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sits there.

The film holds it and does not cut away and does not go to the board.

He does not get up. He does not pick up a marker. He does not open the laptop again.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

The phone buzzes on the table.

Beat.

He turns it over.

INSERT -- PHONE SCREEN

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at it.

Beat.

Three dots appear on her side, then stop.

Then:

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He puts his thumb on the field.

Beat.

Beat.

He doesn't type.

He sets the phone down, face up, and it stays lit for a few seconds, and then it goes dark on its own.

Hold. The shed. The heater. Four empty boxes, a crate by the door, and a man not moving.

CUT TO BLACK.

END OF ACT TWO.

ACT THREE

SCENE 23

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- MORNING

A van. A driver with a handheld.

David comes out of the shed with the crate, both hands under it, and walks it the way you walk something you don't want to drop.

He puts it in the back.

The driver scans something. Holds the handheld out. David signs it with a finger.

The van pulls away.

He stands on the gravel until it is gone, which does not take long.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He comes in.

The tripod is still up. The clamp is empty.

He does not take it down.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

The card table. Four boxes, open, labelled, nothing in them.

The layout, the ruler, the pencil.

He sits down and picks up the pencil.

Beat.

There is nothing to draw. The layout has been finished for a week.

He sets it down.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He gets up and goes to the board.

He changes the number under the date. The new one is small.

Caps the marker.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He does not go back to the table.

He stays in front of the board and looks at it the way he looked at the plate in scene 16 -- from the top, slowly, in order, as though somebody else wrote it.

The primer list, ticked.

The four sites.

The card game, five months old.

And then, off to the side, in the margin, small:

INSERT -- THE BOARD

The camera is close on it for the first time in the film.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He reads it.

Beat.

He does not erase it.

He does not add to it.

He stands there with his hands at his sides and reads it again, and the film does not cut for as long as it takes.

INT. SHED -- LATER

He is at the table with the pencil, not using it.

Beat.

Then he gets up and goes back to the board, to the primer list.

Seven ticks.

He looks at the seventh.

Beat.

He puts his thumb on it and wipes it off.

The mark goes. The line stays.

He looks at what he's done.

Then he wipes his thumb on his trousers and goes back to the table.

INT. SHED -- LATER

He picks up the phone.

Opens contacts. Scrolls.

RUTH MAHONEY passes under his thumb and keeps going.

He stops at MAYA.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Opens the thread.

It ends where it ended. *did she get it.* *the metal lady.* Nothing under it since last night.

He types:

Sends.

Delivered.

Beat.

He puts the phone down face up.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sits.

The heater. The room.

He does not open the laptop and does not pick up the pencil and does not go back to the board.

INT. SHED -- LATER

The light has moved.

He is sitting where he was.

The phone buzzes.

He turns it over.

Beat.

Then, arriving:

He looks at that.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

His thumb goes to the field.

Beat.

Beat.

He types:

Delivered.

Three dots. They stop.

Start again.

He looks at it for a long time.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He types, and we see it:

Looks at it.

Beat.

Sends it.

Delivered.

Three dots. They stop.

Start again.

Beat.

Then, underneath:

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He does not answer that either.

He sets the phone down face up and it stays lit and then it goes dark on its own.

Hold. The shed, the tripod up, four empty boxes and a man with nothing left to build.

CUT TO:

SCENE 24

INT. SHED -- MORNING

The crate is back.

It is on the floor inside the door, where the courier left it. Taped, both strips, a new label over the old one.

David comes in with his coat on.

He looks at it.

Beat.

He does not open it.

He goes out and pulls the door to behind him.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- DAY

Sunday. Denise in the corner. Coffee, clipboard.

David at the table. Early. The deck out and squared in front of him.

The door.

Maya comes in.

MAYA

Hey.

DAVID

Hey.

She sits. Pulls the deck over without asking and takes the band off.

Deals.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

They play.

The film should let this run. It is a normal game and it is being played by two people who know the rules, and after scene 15 the audience will feel the difference without being told.

MAYA

I'm doing the thing on Thursday.

DAVID

What thing.

MAYA

The county thing. For the essay.

Beat.

DAVID

They read it?

MAYA

They read all of them. Mine's one of four.

Beat.

DAVID

Which one.

MAYA

Grandma's.

She plays a card.

MAYA (CONT'D)

Not the other one. I didn't put that one in.

Beat.

DAVID

No.

MAYA

No.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- LATER

Further in. She is winning and this time she says so.

MAYA

That's two.

DAVID

That's one and a half.

MAYA

There's no half.

DAVID

There's a half when the jack's face down.

Beat.

MAYA

...That's actually correct.

She writes something on the pad she is keeping score on, which is a napkin.

Beat.

MAYA (CONT'D)

Can you send me a picture of the board.

He stops.

DAVID

The board.

MAYA

The whole thing. Not just the game.

Beat.

DAVID

Why.

MAYA

(shrug)

I want to see what it looks like.

Beat.

DAVID

Okay.

She deals again.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CORRIDOR -- LATER

Coats. Denise, bag on her shoulder.

DENISE

Same time next week.

DAVID

Same time.

She goes.

He stands in the corridor for a second longer than he needs to.

EXT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CAR PARK -- CONTINUOUS

He gets in the car and drives.

INT. SHED -- LATER

Coat off. The crate on the floor inside the door, still taped.

He goes past it.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He stands in front of the board with the phone up.

Frames it.

Lowers the phone.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

The whole board, as he sees it: the date across the top. The primer list, one tick short. The four sites. The card game, two hands, five months old.

And in the margin, small, off to the right.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He raises the phone again.

Takes a step to his left.

Frames it again -- and this time the margin is outside the shot.

Takes the picture.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at it.

Beat.

He attaches it and sends it, and does not type anything with it.

Delivered.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He puts the phone down face up on the table.

The crate is still by the door.

He sits.

Beat.

The phone buzzes.

He turns it over.

Beat.

He types:

Three dots.

Beat.

Then, underneath:

He looks at that.

He does not answer.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He gets up, crosses to the door, and gets a hand under each end of the crate.

Carries it to the table.

Sets it down.

Beat.

He does not cut the tape.

Hold. The shed. The heater. A crate on the table and a man sitting in front of it.

CUT TO:

SCENE 25

INT. SHED -- MORNING

The crate on the table where he left it. Taped.

He comes in.

Stands over it.

Gets the knife off the shelf -- the one he cut the tape with in scene 13 -- and cuts both strips.

Lifts the lid off.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Foam. The card separators, back the way he packed them.

He takes the first plate out with both hands.

Turns it to the light.

INSERT -- THE PLATE

The blocks. The six radial lines. The marker at the head.

And at the bottom, in the rectangle that was ruled and empty: marks. Big, separated, clean-edged, filling it corner to corner.

It reads as one thing now. Nothing on the surface says which part was etched second.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at it a long time.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sets it down on the table and gets the second one out. Turns it to the light. Sets it down.

The third.

Three plates in a row, face up, complete.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sits down opposite them.

Beat.

He does not read it.

He knows what it says. He wrote it, corrected four characters of it, and sent it, and there is nothing on that plate he has not already seen except the shape of it in metal.

He sits there anyway.

INT. SHED -- LATER

The four boxes, open, labelled.

Packing card. He cuts it to size with the knife, badly at first, then better.

He wraps the first plate. Card, then foam, then card.

Puts it in the box marked SALT.

Fits the lid.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Tape.

He pulls it and runs it across and cuts it with his thumb, one strip, and presses it down with the heel of his hand.

That is the whole of it. It takes about nine seconds.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

ROCK.

Same. Card, foam, card. Lid. One strip.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

MOON.

Same.

He writes something small on the MOON lid under the label -- a weight, in grams -- and puts the pen down.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

Three boxes closed on the table.

And the fourth, open, with DEEP OCEAN on the lid and nothing in it.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at it.

Beat.

He picks the lid up and fits it anyway.

Does not tape it.

INT. SHED -- LATER

He goes to the wall.

The failed plate, face to the wall since scene 11.

He turns it around.

Holds it at arm's length and tilts it to the light, the way Ruth did.

The grey smear at the head of it. The blank third at the bottom.

Long beat.

He puts it back. Face out this time.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He gets his coat.

At the door he stops and looks at the table.

Three sealed. One with a lid on it.

He turns the light off and goes.

EXT. HOUSE -- GRAVEL -- LATER

The three boxes on the gravel by the car, in a row.

He puts them in the boot one at a time.

Shuts it.

Gets in.

Drives.

INT. SHED -- EVENING

Empty room. The one window. The tripod up.

The card table with a single box on it, lid fitted, untaped.

The board on the far wall, too dark to read.

Hold. Long. The heater.

CUT TO:

SCENE 26

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- DAY

Sunday. The blind at the wrong angle. Denise in the corner with her coffee.

David at the table.

He is not early. He comes in and Maya is already there, sitting, the deck out in front of her and the band off.

DAVID

Hey.

MAYA

Hey.

He sits.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

She deals.

They play.

Nothing is said for a while and the film should let that be comfortable rather than heavy.

MAYA

Grandma got a letter.

DAVID

What kind of letter.

MAYA

The county thing. They send one to everyone who got picked.

Beat.

MAYA (CONT'D)

It's got my name spelled wrong.

DAVID

Which way.

MAYA

The good way. With the i.

Beat.

DAVID

Keep that one.

MAYA

I am.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- LATER

Deep in the game.

MAYA

Did they go?

Beat.

DAVID

Thursday.

MAYA

All of them?

DAVID

Three.

Beat.

She plays a card.

MAYA

There were four.

DAVID

There were four.

Beat.

MAYA

So what happens to the fourth one.

DAVID

Nothing yet.

Beat.

MAYA

Okay.

She does not ask again.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- LATER

Near the end of the hour. She is winning by whatever the count is and neither of them has mentioned it in a while.

MAYA

Can I ask something and you have to actually answer.

Beat.

DAVID

Okay.

MAYA

Is it for her or is it for you.

The room does not change. Denise does not stop writing. It is a question a fifteen-year-old asks across a low table.

Long beat.

DAVID

Her.

Beat.

MAYA

Okay.

She deals.

MAYA (CONT'D)

That's what I put.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

He does not react to that.

He picks up his hand and looks at it and does not play anything for a moment.

Then he plays.

MAYA

That's a stack.

DAVID

That's a stack.

They keep going.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- VISITING ROOM -- LATER

The hour ends the way it ends.

Maya squares the deck.

Beat.

She puts the band round it and holds it out to him.

He takes it.

MAYA

Next week.

DAVID

Next week.

She goes.

INT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CORRIDOR -- LATER

Coats. Denise, bag on her shoulder.

Beat.

DENISE

That's the fourteenth one of these I've written for you.

DAVID

Is it.

DENISE

It is.

She gets her keys out.

DENISE (CONT'D)

I don't tell people how it's going. I want to be clear that I'm not doing that.

DAVID

Okay.

Beat.

DENISE

Fourteen is a lot of Sundays.

She goes.

EXT. FAMILY CENTRE -- CAR PARK -- CONTINUOUS

David at the car.

He gets in.

Beat.

He does not start it.

He takes the phone out and opens the camera roll.

Scrolls.

The old video thumbnail. The overexposed kitchen.

His thumb hovers.

Beat.

He puts the phone away without pressing it.

Starts the car.

Drives.

INT. SHED -- LATER

The room as he left it. The one box on the table, lid on, untaped.

He comes in with his coat still on and stands there.

Beat.

He takes the deck out of his jacket and puts it on the table next to the box.

Sits down.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at the box.

Beat.

He does not say anything.

Hold. The shed. The heater. A box, a deck, and a man.

CUT TO:

SCENE 27

INT. SHED -- DAY

Weeks later. The film does not say how many and nothing in the room announces it.

The card table. The box, lid on, untaped, where it has been.

The deck beside it.

David comes in. No coat. It is warmer than it has been in the film.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He puts a coffee down and sits.

The laptop is closed. He does not open it.

Beat.

He picks up the deck, takes the band off, and shuffles once, badly, the way he does.

Puts it back down.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He looks at the board.

Not close. From the table, where he is sitting, the way he has looked at it three hundred times.

The date across the top. Everything under it.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He gets up.

Goes to the board.

Picks up the marker.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He does not go to the primer list. He does not go to the date. He does not go to the margin.

He goes to the card game.

Two hands. A tally. Her handwriting and his, and under her last play, from months ago:

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He draws a card into his own hand.

Adds a tally mark.

Caps the marker.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He takes out his phone.

Frames the board.

He does not move his feet this time. The whole thing is in the shot -- the date, the list, the sites, the game, and the margin.

Beat.

He lowers the phone without taking it.

Puts it in his pocket.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He sits back down at the table.

Beat.

The phone buzzes.

He takes it out and turns it over.

INSERT -- PHONE SCREEN

Beat.

He looks at that.

She means the photograph. He sent it weeks ago and she has it on her phone and she is looking at it now, on a Tuesday, for no reason she gives.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He does not type.

Beat.

Three dots on her side.

They stop.

Start again.

INT. SHED -- CONTINUOUS

He reads it.

Beat.

He puts the phone down face up on the table.

It stays lit.

He does not pick up the deck and does not go back to the board.

He sits there with the phone lit in front of him and the box beside it and the shed around him, and the film holds it, and holds it, and does not cut.

The screen goes dark on its own.

Hold.

FADE OUT.

THE END