Feature. A supernatural drama
Community visitor JEZ (28) becomes obsessed with the dead wife of HAROLD (80), a cantankerous old codger who refuses to move out of the house that is falling down around him.
Jez visits Harold every week and his curiosity is piqued when he hears that Harold’s wife, AMY, committed suicide twenty years ago, on the day Harold retired. Jez becomes obsessed with her, to the point where he finds himself imagining himself into her past and, as his delusion takes hold, begins to see her ‘ghost’.
This is all transference of guilt from his relationship at home with his girlfriend, THERESA (28), who is suffering a nervous breakdown over the death of her mother.
As the obsession takes hold over a summer of visits, Jez becomes more unstable than the slowly recovering Theresa, to the point where she’s the one worrying about him.
In the end, Harold chooses to die before being forced out of his house, and Jez emerges from his obsession to face a future with Theresa, free of the deaths that have haunted them both.
The Very Thought of You… is adapted from Andy Conway’s successful short story Eyes Averted, which was selected by editor Andrew Motion for publication in the anthology New Writing 3, published by Minerva in 1994 and performed at the Birmingham Readers & Writers Festival that year.