Two dogs of equal strength walking in opposite directions

Two men sit on a park bench. One stares straight ahead, one looks to the side, into the wings of the stage.

LESS
How’s Ollie?

WORSE
Good thanks. Starting school in September.

LESS
And the twins?

WORSE
Still dead.

LESS
Mmm.

WORSE
What’re you looking at?

LESS
I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but there’s a man standing in the middle of the road. It looks like he wants to move, but he can’t, because he’s holding the leads of two dogs of equal strength, walking in opposite directions.

The worse cranes his neck to look offstage as well.

WORSE
So he is.

Pause.

LESS
I’ve never seen such evenly-matched dogs.


MORE
And both with exactly the same desire to walk in opposite directions

LESS
This almost seems like a thought experiment.

Pause.

LESS
Do you think they’re his dogs?

WORSE
They must be.

LESS
But if they’re his, wouldn’t he just let one go? It’d come back

WORSE
Well, they seem quite independent

LESS
Or maybe he tied them to his wrists -

WORSE
Exactly. They can’t be his dogs, otherwise he’d know about their independence, and avoid tying them to his wrist to prevent exactly this.

Pause.

MORE
Do you think they’ll rip him apart?

LESS
Well, he doesn’t look comfortable.
Actually, it looks like he’s got an itch.

WORSE
It’s going to be hard for him to scratch that, what with him being pulled by two dogs of equal strength walking in different directions.

LESS
Do you think we should help him? Go over there and scratch it for him?

WORSE
Someone else’ll do it. See, there’s a guy going over there now... No, wait, he’s just taken his wallet. And there’s nothing the man can do about it because both his hands are occupied by two dogs of equal strength walking in opposite directions.

LESS
Oh, and now his vulnerability’s been established, someone else’s taken his phone as well. Pity he’s stuck by the bus-stop; there’s a whole crowd of people with some time to kill.

Pause.

WORSE
In his position, I think I’d want one of my arms ripped off. That way, I’d just be a one-armed man taking my dog for a walk, not a two-armed man trapped in the middle of a road, at the mercy of the general public.

LESS
Yeah, the public are awful.

WORSE
Especially those two teenage lovers carving their initials into his chest.

LESS
Surprising amount of blood, there

WORSE
And yet the dogs don’t seem to be tiring. Or perhaps they are tiring, but at exactly the same rate.

LESS
Quite a pool of blood now, over there. More than a pool. A puddle. No, a puddle sounds smaller than a pool. A lagoon? Sounds too geographical. A pool. Yes, a pool.
Do you think we should do something?

WORSE (shrugging)
Well, what can we two men do?

LESS
We could call an ambulance.

WORSE
Someone else probably has

LESS
No, I think they’re just filming it on their phones.
So should we?

WORSE
Nah, their lenses are better.

LESS
No, call an ambulance, I mean.

WORSE
We could, but what would that really achieve?

LESS
They’d help him.

WORSE
Sure they’ll help him today, but this’ll just happen again tomorrow.

LESS
It seems unlikely. If I were him, I’d never take the two dogs out at the same time ever again

WORSE
No, the real problem is a system that allows things like this to happen.
And what can we two men do about a system that allows things like this to happen?

LESS
Well, we could smash the system

WORSE
Well, we could. But then there’d be bits of broken system everywhere.
Who’s going to clear them up? It’s not going to be me.

LESS
I’d never thought about it like that.

WORSE
What if someone stood on a bit of broken system? They could get Tetanus. I could get tetanus. When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?

LESS
I can’t remember

WORSE
We should get tetanus shots.
I’m off to A and E, you coming?

LESS
Sure. Do you think we should take him with us?
If we’re going to A and E anyway?

WORSE
No, he’ll just slow us down.
We could have Tetanus.