GLADLY
Written
and created by Andrew Hawcroft
Episode One
“A Day In The Life...”
Cameron
Callendar has just reached forty, and it’s all gone wrong. At this point in his life, he was supposed to
be a successful writer of fiction, a happily married family man, fulfilled and
secure, and he certainly came close to these things in the past, but somehow it
never came together.
He
barely makes a living with sales of his early novels (back when he had an
agent, publisher, optimism, ambition, confidence and a future) as e-books, but
it’s not enough. His days are spent
trying to get the career that never came, and hopefully the richer, fuller life
that was supposed to come with it.
And
then one day, at 3.17pm at June 7th, everything changes. It changes when his doorbell rings and, like
a good chap, he answers it.
Standing
there is a bizarre-looking girl. Thin as a nail, bright blue hair that might
not be hair at all, dressed in the most garish and odd mish-mash of clothes.
She
seems barely to have the energy to stand upright, but seeing him seems to make
whatever trials she has clearly gone through to get here, worth it. She regards him as a door-stepping Jehovah’s
Witness would finding Jesus in jeans and a Blue Harbour jumper.
Whatever
she is, (and Cameron quickly suspects she might be mentally troubled) she is
clearly on the limits of her physical strength.
A large glass of milk in his kitchen later, she seems restored enough to
start talking.
She
says she is from the year 2372. That she has come on a one-way journey to find
the man whose books she discovered on an electronic book-reader lying in
junkyard. He is apparently her idol, her
hero...her reason to keep living.
Because
2372 sounds like hell. A world ruined by
the Corporation Wars, she, and the other 33, 000 humans left on the Earth
(colonising other planets never worked out) live dire, purposeless lives.
The
only reason Cameron doesn’t call the police, is when he casually asks her what
her name is.
Gladly
Higgins, she says.
The
thing is, Gladly Higgins is the name Cameron has recently come up with for a
string of trashy, quick-sell novels he reluctantly plans to write to make some
money.
Only
he hasn’t told anyone that name.
As
the day passes, Gladly will tell him more and more of her story, and these conversations
will begin to convince a lonely and jaded man that perhaps....just
perhaps...something incredible has come into his life.
And
not a moment too soon....
