LEWIS: Free love is a hard concept to define.

DOUG: I believe in free love but it’s hard to practise it in here. How close are you to the slaughterhouse?

LEWIS: Next door almost.

DOUG: Smell a lot?

LEWIS: When it’s hot.

DOUG: Bet your girlfriend doesn’t like it.

LEWIS nods his head in agreement.

What’s her name?

LEWIS: Lucy.

DOUG: In the sky with diamonds.

He laughs, LEWIS smiles.

Is she pretty, your girlfriend?

LEWIS: Yes.

DOUG: Was Lucy a virgin when you first had her?

LEWIS is reluctant to answer.

I’m not prying or anything, am I? It’s just that in here you miss out on a lot of changes in society’s morals. [A beat.] So was she a virgin?

LEWIS: No.

DOUG: How many did Lucy have before you?

LEWIS: It’s not something I want to talk about.

DOUG: A few, eh? Women like to pretend they don’t play around but they’re just more secretive about it. They don’t brag about it like men. [Pause.] Going to marry Lucy?

LEWIS: Who knows?

DOUG: Don’t. Dad always said to me: you can always find loneliness in a marriage, but never solitude. [A beat.] And I like my solitude.

CHERRY: [entering] Where are the dunnies?

DOUG: Through there. They’ve got no lights. I hope you’ll fall in but you’re too fat.

CHERRY: Go burn a cat.

She goes.

LEWIS: Why are they always saying that?

DOUG: It’s what I did.

LEWIS: Burn a cat?

DOUG: Cats.

LEWIS: When you were young?

DOUG: No, no, quite recently. It was the fault of the psychiatrist. I’d been seeing him because of my pyromania—that’s a person who likes lighting fires—but you probably know that, being university educated. You know the problem with pyromania? It’s the only crime where you have to be at the scene of it to make it a perfect crime, to give yourself full satisfaction. ’Course, that means the chances of you getting caught are greater, especially if you’re standing in front of the fire, face full of ecstasy and with a gigantic hard-on. So, the cops got me and I’m sent to a shrink. He tells me that I’ve got an unresolved problem with my mother. I think, hello, he’s not going to tell me to do something Oedipal, like fuck her or something… but that wasn’t the problem. My ego had taken a severe battering from her. He said I had better resolve it, stop her treating me like I was still a child. It made some sort of cosmic sense. I had to stand up to her. So I thought about it and realised I had to treat it like a boxing match, get the first punch in, so to speak, to give me the upper hand in our relationship. She had five cats. One night I rounded them up, put them in a cage, doused them with petrol and put a match to them. Then I opened the cage door and let them loose. Well, boy, oh, boy, what a racket! They were running around the backyard burning and howling—there’s no such thing as grace under pressure for a burning cat, let me tell you. I hid in the shrubs when Mum came outside to see what was happening. Totally freaked out, she did. Five of them, running around the backyard like mobile bonfires. I figured I’d wait a couple of hours till the cats were dead and Mum was feeling a bit sorry for herself and I’d knock on the front door and say to her, ‘Hi, Mum, I’ve come to talk about our unresolved conflicts’, but, oh no, one of those cats ran into the house. In a couple of minutes the whole bloody house was alight and within half an hour there was no bloody front door to knock on. [A beat.] If it wasn’t for that damn cat, I wouldn’t be here.