The Canal

A woman wakes in a park, while another goes to work. By the end of the day their lives will have changed in unexpected ways.

Katie is a runaway, escaping a suffocating family life she has grown to despise. Janey is a one-time drifter who, cleaned up now and settled down, finds everyday routines stagnant and unfulfilling, until Katie erupts in her life.

Through hot summer days and nights, their angry mistrust locks them in to a razor-edge life of drug deals, squat parties, brutal encounters and insistent recollections of a past not fully buried. Around them, violent squatters and greedy developers battle for control of the warehouses and waste land that stand in the way of malls and apartments to obliterate the women’s hard, hothouse world.

And cut through febrile days and poisoned earth, the constant presence of the canal.

This story tells of intrusions of past and future on the present, of a need to make peace with memories when the only way out is to run.
It is set in Kings Cross, in tribute to a once-feral fringe of London,
now fenced off, sold and buried.

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