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Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls
It’s an early May morning in 1996 in The Port, a small town somewhere on the North West coast of Scotland. Fionnula, Kylah, Chell, Manda and Orla, along with the rest of the choir from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls, have arrived early at school for their trip to Edinburgh, where they will compete in a televised choir competition. Fionnula declares her plan for the choir to scupper any chance they might have of making it to the second round. A submarine has docked in the Port, and the girls want to get back from the competition as soon as possible so they can have a chance of pulling sailors on shore leave from the sub in the local Mantrap disco. They gossip about Michelle MacGregor, a former pupil at the school who's left due to her Teen Pregnancy, and discuss the behaviour of semen in a pressurised atmosphere, before Sister Condron, their music teacher, arrives. She tries to get the girls to warm up by singing one of the numbers in their repertoire, Forth Let the Cattle Roam!, but instead Manda and Fionnula instigate a rendition of Good King Wenceslas to wind the Sister up, and the rest of the choir all join in.
Lord Bolivia
The choir visit the chapel attached to the school for mass before they head off for their trip, where Sister Fagan, who will also be chaperoning on the trip along with Sister Condron, is waiting. The Sopranos zone out while parish priest, Father Ardlui, delivers a homily he had clearly planned for the local Seaman's Mission, relating the arrival of the submarine to the Book of Jonah and distractedly giving thanks for Orla's apparent deliverance from her recent bout of lymphoma. Lord Bolivia, a parrot that Sister Fagan brought back from a sabbatical in Venezuela, interrupts the mass by squawking out a string of Spanish obscenities.
No Snogging Through Tennis Fence
Following mass, the choir assembles in a classroom in the school while Sister Condron rattles off a list of rules to be adhered to during the trip and lectures the girls on various uniform infractions, all the while struggling to maintain control of the room. She warns the girls about prioritising their own self-indulgence ahead of the competition. She confirms that the Sopranos will be allowed to allowed to have some free time in the city before the final pre-competition rehearsal at the concert hall.
Hymn to Orla Johnstone
The Sopranos head to an out-of-the-way set of toilets where they can smoke their last cigarettes before getting on the bus for the trip.
Elsewhere, Father Ardlui is in his house at St Oran's church, working on the novel he's been writing, in which the Sopranos apparently feature. He's unsure about how to continue with the characterisation and anxious about the prospect of another author living in the area being able to produce something before him.
The Sopranos squeeze themselves into two toilet stalls and light up, except for Orla who only pretends to smoke her cigarette, and chat about celebrities.
What follows is series of flashbacks. We see Orla finding out about her cancer diagnosis and her appointment with a consultant before her first radiotherapy session. She completes her course of treatment, but knows that it hasn't actually cured her. Later, she has a night out at the Barrels bar back home at the Port on the night before she heads off for a trip to Lourdes. Everyone tries hard to pretend as though everything is normal, but Chell and Fionnula in particular struggle to hold themselves together. We then flashback even further to twenty years or so before Orla's birth to a horrific miscarriage that Orla's mother suffered in the middle of the night back when they were living out in one of the little villages outside the main town of the Port.
Another, longer flashback to when Orla was still in hospital. She's just been moved into a ward made up of private rooms, which she knows means nothing good for her prognosis, even if her parents or the doctors won't talk to her about it directly. Also on that ward is an unidentified sailor, probably from somewhere in Scandinavia, who is in-and-out of consciousness in the final stages of a painful death from pancreatic cancer.
Elsewhere, Father Ardlui is in his house at St Oran's church, working on the novel he's been writing, in which the Sopranos apparently feature. He's unsure about how to continue with the characterisation and anxious about the prospect of another author living in the area being able to produce something before him.
The Sopranos squeeze themselves into two toilet stalls and light up, except for Orla who only pretends to smoke her cigarette, and chat about celebrities.
What follows is series of flashbacks. We see Orla finding out about her cancer diagnosis and her appointment with a consultant before her first radiotherapy session. She completes her course of treatment, but knows that it hasn't actually cured her. Later, she has a night out at the Barrels bar back home at the Port on the night before she heads off for a trip to Lourdes. Everyone tries hard to pretend as though everything is normal, but Chell and Fionnula in particular struggle to hold themselves together. We then flashback even further to twenty years or so before Orla's birth to a horrific miscarriage that Orla's mother suffered in the middle of the night back when they were living out in one of the little villages outside the main town of the Port.
Another, longer flashback to when Orla was still in hospital. She's just been moved into a ward made up of private rooms, which she knows means nothing good for her prognosis, even if her parents or the doctors won't talk to her about it directly. Also on that ward is an unidentified sailor, probably from somewhere in Scandinavia, who is in-and-out of consciousness in the final stages of a painful death from pancreatic cancer.
Hymn to Single Parents
‘The sense of gigantic transition, of going Southward, downward’ MALCOM LOWRY
Rest, and Be Thankful
Post-Seventh-Hooch-Syndrome
‘Leave the Capital Exit this Roman Show.’
The Anchored Submarine
Citadel
A Bloody Mary Theory in Tequila Heaven
It’s a Marsupial Thing
You Are Now Entering a Drug Friendly Zone
That Taken Glow
Night Comes On
New Face on the Mental Scene
Ice and the Pearl
The Sopranos
Orla sees Stephen at the railway station where he boards his train back to Edinburgh.
