Mark and Hilary.
Mark So you got on the Tube?
Hilary Yes.
Mark You took the escalator down?
Hilary Yes.
Mark And you weren’t thinking anything in particular?
Hilary Nothing. Except –
Mark Except?
Hilary Nothing.
Mark It must have been / something.
Hilary No. / Well.
I was remembering the time I took the dog to Hyde Park. For some reason I couldn’t remember the rules about dogs and escalators and I thought, Christ I’m going to have to carry it.
Mark He wouldn’t have liked that.
Hilary No. He wondered what the hell was going on. He hadn’t left ground level for a considerable number of years. It was a nightmare. I was sweating, the dog was doubting.
Mark That’s what you were thinking this morning?
Hilary Yes.
Mark You got on to the Tube, sat down. And then.
Hilary It wasn’t immediate. It starts with a random thought. I don’t want to tell you what it is in case it’s viral.
Mark Tell me. I’ll be immune.
Hilary There’s this thought that there’s a lot of earth above my head –
Mark I wouldn’t think that.
Hilary – that I was in a tunnel bored deep down.
And above me earth, heavy, dark, between me and –
Mark The top.
Hilary Yes.
Mark Air.
Hilary Yes.
Mark Outside.
Hilary Yes. And this feeling became.
Mark What?
Of panic
Which was unbearable
And I thought if I don’t get off this train –
Mark What?
Hilary I’ll die.
Mark That’s not good if you have to go to work every day.
Hilary I know. It’s shit. It took me two and a half hours to ride five stops. After work I had to get a cab home.
Mark How will you be tomorrow?
Hilary No idea. Might try my bike. Stress.
Mark Yes.
Hilary Job stuff.
Mark Yes.
Hilary Worst-case scenario it happens to us both. Your business bottoms out. I get made redundant. And there are fuck-all jobs out there.
There’s no point worrying.
Fifty sounds too old to put on an application form.
I might lie. No one would know. I don’t look fifty. I don’t act fifty. I could get away with forty-three. Don’t you think I could get away with forty-three?
Pause.
Mark Depends.
Hilary On?
Mark If the person you’re talking to happens to be forty-three they might think you look a little older.
Hilary What’s the likelihood of saying I was forty-three to a person who happens to be forty-three?
Mark Quite high.
Hilary What would it have cost you, Mark, to say I look forty-three? If it made me happy?
Would it have cost you the earth?
Mark It’ll muck up your CV. You could drop a year, two at most. What’s the point?
Pause.
Hilary What time is it?
Mark 8.18.
Hilary Are you going to walk the dog?
Mark Yes. I’ll take it round the block.
Hilary We don’t work in car plants. Didn’t mind when they went – too many cars on the road anyway, melting the icecaps, but a bloody Educational Reading Support Unit. How dare they?
Mark It might not come to that.
Don’t think about politics when you get on the Tube.
Hilary She has no idea.
We mustn’t tell her.
Mark What?
Hilary Anything. Telling her stuff like losing our livelihoods will only destabilise her further. Give her more fuel for disturbance to turn into her own brand of exquisite torture to inflict on us, her parents.
What I’m hoping, Mark, is that what happened today was just a wobble.
Mark I think it is.
Hilary You know what else I was thinking? That time we took Tilly and her friends down to Brighton for the day right at the end of primary school and in the back of the car they were playing a game. They closed their eyes and took it in turns to tickle the inside of each other’s arms, wrist to elbow, and Tilly said that’s the equivalent of a quarter of an orgasm.
Beat.
Would we have said that when we were eleven? I wouldn’t. An orgasm.
Beat.
Hilary You’d still have been playing with your Scalextric.
Mark I may have looked like I was playing – I was cognitively developing.
Hilary Where are you going now? I’m still talking.
Mark Dog.
He exits.