PRODUCER: Cut! For Christ sakes, fix the lighting! They look like a couple of Victorian prostitutes. All rouge and yellow teeth. I’ve fucked lepers more appealing.

ARTY and LOUISE wait for the lighting to be corrected.

LOUISE discreetly checks out her teeth in a compact mirror.

ARTY: You look very nice. Not at all like a prostitute or a leper. Not that I’ve seen either but I can imagine.

LOUISE: Thank you, Arthur. You look… Thank you.

ARTY: Cream puff?

LOUISE: Er… no.

She watches ARTY eating a cream puff.

Arthur… what’s it like? Eating all that food?

ARTY: It’s wonderful.

LOUISE: But surely you must feel sick?

ARTY: Afterwards yeah, but… y’know that feeling—empty—and it sorta aches, it’s like a tooth gone sore. It niggles and you can’t shake it, it never goes away—do you know that feeling?

LOUISE: My life’s not empty.

ARTY: Oh, I didn’t mean you.

LOUISE: I suppose there’s… I mean there’s some space. No-one’s entirely full, are they?

ARTY: Sometimes it feels there’s only space and it goes on forever and you’re just this tiny speck of nothing in all that… space. So when I eat… sometimes I feel the panic ’cause I know there’s not enough food to fill all that space. But I have to try and fill it or I’d get lost, y’know? Me, this speck of nothing would just float away.

LOUISE: Do you ever fill it? Does anyone ever feel full?

ARTY: Sometimes when I’m done… yeah.

LOUISE: And what does full feel like?

ARTY: It’s like… when you breathe, you finally got enough air. And you realise before you were just breathing shallow and you didn’t even know it. And that makes you happy for a bit.

Beat.

LOUISE: Maybe just the one cream puff then.

ARTY smiles and hands her a cream puff.

The lighting state is finalised.

PRODUCER: You can roll a turd in glitter but it still stinks. Places! Rolling… Speed… Action!

LOUISE: When I look at the stars, I wonder:

Where they came from; or

Who cares? Life is lived on Earth.

ARTY: Um…

184 DAYS

DOCUMENTARY VOICE-OVER: Arthur Arthur hasn’t left the house in almost three years.

ARTY: I was s’posed to do my ’prenticeship as a butcher. When I was leaving school that’s what I wanted to do, but there’d been a mix-up, and they sent me to the slaughterhouse ’cause there were no jobs with Mr Goodwin—

JOJO: He’s the butcher—ol’ Goody.

ARTY: I thought that be okay, being a slaughterman. Everyone likes hamburgers.

JOJO: You do, don’t ya, love?

ARTY: Mum, please—

JOJO: He bloody loves the little whoppers.

ARTY: But they said I couldn’t be a slaughterman ’cause I wasn’t fit enough. They took one look at me and made me a cleaner.