Summary
Having been called a little crying piece of filth by John Tate, Brian stops crying and looks up. He says he thinks they should tell someone. As John Tate walks toward Brian, Mark and Jan and Leah and Phil enter. Phil is drinking a Coke. John Tate stops advancing toward Brian and says he’s finding it all very stressful. He warns the group not to put him under so much stress.
Leah steps forward and rambles about how she and Phil haven’t done anything, seemingly contradicting herself by then saying that if they have, they’ve done it together. John Tate places a finger on her lips to silence her. John Tate asks Mark if he’s told them. Mark says he hasn’t. Jan asks if John Tate wants them to tell Phil and Leah. Mark explains that it was Adam. They were “taking the piss” out of Adam because Adam was annoying them by hanging around and trying to be part of their group. Mark and Jan explain that Adam was laughing himself. To see how far he’d go, they got him to eat dirty leaves off the ground. They say Adam was laughing harder than any of them.
Mark and Jan say that Adam also set his sock on fire, and stole some vodka. They say he was scared, but acted tough, like he’d stolen before. To see how far they’d let him go, they started punching him in the face. They say he was even laughing, at first. Mark concedes they took it a bit far, going at him for thirty or forty minutes. They admit they could tell that, despite his laughter, he was afraid. Jan says they stubbed out cigarettes on Adam’s hands, arms, and face. Mark says that, having drunk the vodka, they kept thinking what won’t this “nutter” do. They made him run across the motorway (highway).
Jan says that’s when she went home. Mark says it’s only because she had to. Mark then says they went up the hill to the shaft with the grille on it. He says it’s a really big hole with a grille over it. They got Adam to climb the fence and walk on the grille. He was wobbling and scared, because underneath him was maybe hundreds of feet of blackness. And then, “just for the laugh,” they threw stones at Adam.
Mark says they should have seen the fear on his face, which was making them all laugh harder and harder. Eventually one stone hit him in the head and he dropped into the shaft. John Tate finishes the story by saying, “He’s dead.” John Tate says that Cathy believes Leah and Phil are very smart. He asks what they should do.
After a silence, Phil puts down his Coke. He says that Cathy, Danny, and Mark need to go to Adam’s house, wait until his mother leaves, then break in through an upstairs window. In his bedroom, they have to take a pair of his shoes and an item of his clothing, such as a jumper (sweater). But they mustn’t touch the jumper—they have to get it in a plastic bag without touching it. He says they’ll have to buy trash bags on the way, and not be tempted to use one of the ones at home, which will be covered in their DNA.
Phil says that Richard needs to take Brian to the school headmaster and say he found Brian crying in the bathroom. Brian then has to tell the headmaster that a man in the woods showed him his penis. Phil adds the details for the flasher: a fat white male in a postman’s uniform with thinning hair and sad eyes. Danny asks what the man’s teeth were like. Phil says “very bad.”
Phil admits he’s making this plan up as he goes along. He says Lou, Danny, and Jan have to take Adam’s shoes to the woods. Lou must put them on and walk into the woods from the south entrance, while Danny enters from the east while carrying Jan on his back—the weight of the two of them combined should be equivalent to that of the fat postman flasher. Lou, posing as Adam in his shoes, meets Danny and Jan in the woods, then they walk together, creating a trail of footsteps out.
Meanwhile, Phil says Cathy and Mark should find a man on a street and then drop Adam’s jumper in front of him. The man will then pick it up, getting his DNA all over it; when he gives it back, they should make sure to keep it in the plastic bag—they can say they’re taking it to donate it at a thrift store charity shop. Then they should rough it up and throw it in a bush by the south entrance to the woods. Everyone waits a day or two, then John Tate should say he thinks he saw Adam with a fat man in a uniform but can’t be sure.
Phil says the authorities will assume Adam has been abducted, and as long as they keep their mouths shut, everyone will be fine. He asks if there are any questions. The group stares at him in silence. He bends to pick up his Coke and starts drinking.
Analysis
Kelly introduces the major theme of innocence with Brian’s outburst in which he admits that he thinks they should tell someone what happened to Adam. With this comment, Brian is making the most sensible argument out of everyone. However, in the context of the cowardly group of teens, his comment comes off as naive.
Kelly builds on the themes of fear, sadism, and peer pressure with Mark’s monologue about the crisis at the center of the play. Having spent the first quarter of the play teasing out the mystery, Kelly reveals that the teens, riled up by their own cruelty, peer-pressured a classmate named Adam into doing increasingly dangerous and demeaning things for their amusement. Though Mark claims that Adam was laughing along with them, Mark can’t hide his sadistic satisfaction when he remembers the fear they provoked in their peer.
The theme of exploitation also arises in Mark’s monologue. Even as he admits to torturing Adam, Mark maintains his denial by making it sound as though Adam deserved to have his desire for friendship exploited. Because Adam was seemingly willing to do anything to spend time with the group, Mark and the others wanted to see how far they could push him. This involved hitting Adam, putting cigarettes out on his skin, making him steal vodka, and making him run across a highway.
Mark recounts how the group’s bullying escalated until Adam was standing on a metal grate suspended over a deep ventilation shaft. With complete disregard for Adam’s safety, the group threw stones at him, laughing hysterically at the look of terror on the boy’s face. Without realizing it, the teens had transformed into an angry mob and engaged in an impromptu version of an ancient method of capital punishment: death by stoning. However, this connection is lost on the teens, who know their actions contributed to Adam’s death but who refuse to face the consequences.
The theme of conspiracy returns with Phil’s elaborate plan for the group to cover up their involvement in Adam’s presumed death. With the intention of misleading forensic investigators, Phil—likely a fan of crime novels—coldly outlines a sequence of actions that will fool the police into assuming Adam must have been abducted by a “fat postman” with bad teeth. The relevance of the play’s title becomes apparent when Phil assigns Cathy and Mark to steal one of Adam’s jumpers (sweaters) and to trick a random man on the street into getting his skin cells embedded in the fibers. The scene ends with the teens staring at Phil in disbelief, shocked by the irony of such an extensive and diabolical idea flowing out of the mouth of a boy who otherwise never speaks.
