LOUISE: Is your life worth anything or isn’t it?

ARTY: I’m sorry.

LOUISE: It’s a question of values, Arthur. You hiding cream buns—

ARTY: Cream puffs. Lite.

LOUISE: It’s betrayal! Of me, of you, of the progress made! You hiding pastry under the bed says you don’t want to wear jeans or fit on the toilet seat. You want to end up a tabloid punch line. The dead blob reeking of faecal matter that was so grotesquely fat, two fire truck crews and a cherry picker were needed to remove it from the house. Everyone has a good laugh and then the sum total of your existence lines the litter box for some incontinent cat.

ARTY: I’m sorry.

LOUISE: I expect this kind of sabotage from your mother, but you, Arthur, have an IQ of 123. You’re an INTP personality type! For the love of Laramie—do you know what that means? If you really applied yourself, and I mean truly, you have the aptitude to become a team member in a local government department—I’m not joking. Imagine that—you, Arthur Arthur, respectable in trousers. That’s what’s at stake here.

ARTY: I’m trying. I am, I—

LOUISE: Do you want to live as a human being or do you want to die as a beached whale?

Pause.

ARTY: I wanna wear jeans, go to the loo. Guess I wanna be a human being.

LOUISE: This is the start of a great expedition, Arthur. A journey to the new you.

ARTY: The new me…

In the life Arty’s living in his head

The new him is as distant as the South Pole

And he might as well be equipped with a bikini for all the chance he has—

LOUISE: Arthur? You’ve disappeared in your head again.

ARTY: Sorry, just I was thinking, this being an expedition, like Scott crossing the Antarctic.

LOUISE: Wonderful. Use the analogy to help maintain your focus.

ARTY: Scott died, and his team, and the ponies, and the dogs.

LOUISE: There are always setbacks. But the point is to keep your eyes on the prize.

ARTY: Scott went to the last place on earth and never found his way back.

LOUISE: We don’t want to go back. We’re going forward, Arthur. On and on and on.

ARTY: Into the great abyss.

LOUISE: We have provisions.

She passes ARTY a book.

He reads the title.

ARTY: How to Win Friends and Influence People.

LOUISE: Never venture without it. We have rations.

ARTY: Five Slim Fast drinks a day. Taste awful.

LOUISE: But most importantly we have hunger—for something more than this.

ARTY: Tell me about outside. What you like about it.

LOUISE: There are lots of wonderful things about outside. Lots of things.

Pause.

ARTY: Yes?

LOUISE: There’s the park and museums and the supermarket and… when the sun’s out, and on your face, it can make you… smile. For no reason really.