Free Rock 'n' Roll by Tom Stoppard Page A

getting you in and out of the car?
    MAX Do you want to know something terrible?
    ESME No. What?
    MAX I thought about voting for Thatcher.
    ESME Why?
    MAX To keep the issues in plain sight. Sharp enough to cut. Draw blood. Widen the gap and rub the workers’ faces in it, reward the fat and the smug. Anything to wake the buggers up—anything—
anything
better than five years of amelioration and accommodation calling itself the Party of Labour. But I voted for them. Did you?
    ESME I lost the form, the postal thing. Pa—(
She takes the plunge.
) Alice is worried that—
    MAX Don’t worry about her. You’ll have to find something to occupy yourself.
    ESME I’m not the problem, it’s Alice.
    MAX No, it’s you.
    ESME (
gives up again
) Let’s wait and see when she gets her results. Can we go in?
    MAX The college doesn’t care about her results, it knows what it’s getting.
    ESME Is that fair?
    MAX No, but it’s just.
    He has been easing himself to get up. He relapses.
    MAX (
cont.
) Give me a minute. Where’s that … (whisky)?
    ESME How is it?
    MAX Hurts.
    Esme starts to get up. Alice enters from indoors with the ‘small whisky’, and a mug of tea for Esme.
    ESME You can have a couple of Nurofen ahead of time, it won’t do you any harm.
    MAX No, I can’t …
    Alice arrives and gives Max the whisky, then the tea to Esme.
    ALICE (
to Esme, disingenuously
) All done?
    MAX … I’m not allowed the Nurofen with alcohol.
    ESME Pa—
    MAX That’s what the doctor said.
    ESME No, he didn’t! He said you aren’t allowed alcohol with the Nurofen.
    MAX Same thing.
    He drinks half the whisky.
    MAX (
cont.
) Your mother and I have been talking about your gap year.
    ALICE Oh yes?
    MAX A gap year in Cambridge is a nonsense. You’d be bored silly.
    ALICE So, you’ll …
    MAX I spoke to the college. You can matriculate in September. You won’t be the youngest undergraduate at Cambridge. What do you think? You’ll get your degree sooner and have a gap year when you can enjoy it.
    Pause.
    ALICE Yeah, okay. Cool.
    ESME (
with relief
) Darling, are you sure?
    MAX (
handing Alice his empty glass
) Would you oblige me, Alice? It’s helping.
    ESME (
to Alice
) Don’t you!
    ALICE (
playing along
) My leg’s gone to sleep.
    MAX I’ll get it myself, then.
    Max feints, Alice takes his glass and a crutch.
    ESME Is it all right about your friends?
    ALICE They’re boring.
    Alice hobbles indoors using the crutch.
    ESME Honestly!
    MAX There’s more of you in her than you think.
    ESME Is there? A man at the shops today … a bit rough-looking, with his head almost shaved but balding anyway … he saw Alice and said, ‘Hello, it’s you.’
    MAX Why?
    ESME He thought she was me. He used to be in a band, he was quite famous, with wild black hair, you know, a great face, he looked, well, he looked like a rock star, but he blew his mind and the band sort of dropped him … and one night, just round that time, before I knew him, before I knew it was him, I saw him in the garden. Just up there. I had my ‘O’ level results in my underpants—the envelope—which I’d, you know, opened but I thought, ‘Well, all in good time’—and I’d gone out to the Dandelion to see who was playing, and when I came home late through the garden, he was on the wall tootling on a pipe, like Pan. (
pause
) I wasn’t always sure it happened, like a lot of things. But later he had a solo album, and … well, I went to see him play once, at the Corn Exchange, in my red-leather bomber jacket I gave Alice. He was in the support band. It turned out to bethe last gig he ever played, and he was all over the place … The bass player and the drummer tried to stay with him, they’d find him and he’d lose them again, so they left him to it but he wouldn’t give up, he botched his way