Aisling Towl
Hippolytus goes out for coffee and bagels. Says he’s feeding me up
for winter, more to hold. Asks if I’ll take his dog hunting while he’s
abroad. I tell him I’ve not felt like this for a long time. He tells me
he’s not felt like this, ever. I met the last girl so I know that can’t
be true. We’re old friends. I met him when I was eighteen and now
he’s thirty-two. Hippolytus calls to ask if I’ll come over for dinner.
He had so much fun last time. Hippolytus tells me I’m beautiful
in the lamplight and gets offended when I won’t let him take pictures.
Hippolytus fears rejection so flies into fits of rage. His dog
leaves the room to go hunting. Hippolytus tells me he wants to put
a baby in me and when I freak out, he says it’s just dirty talk.
Hippolytus cries and apologises when I say it’s too rough.
Hippolytus can hold a crowd almost as well as my father.
Hippolytus wants to meet my father but I warn him this is what
my therapist would call a Neurotic Desire. Hippolytus brings me
to meet his family on a peninsula in the suburbs of South London.
No one can get to us here. His mother can’t believe her luck.
His father is visiting Crete. Hippolytus says he loves me and when
I freak out, he says it’s just dirty talk. We’re old friends.
Hippolytus admits he made assumptions about me. That I understood
the weight of his fidelity, for example. Hippolytus apologises for being
patronising, and for being so broke. We order vine leaves, eat in separate
rooms. He watches the wrestling while I watch the news. We disagree
about the journalists’ phrasing of recent developments in the Middle East.
Hippolytus says he wants to give me the world but worries he’s not
good enough. The way I talk sometimes – arrogant – it makes him
feel dumb. Volatile Hippolytus. Subject to my whims. I remind him
I’m still heartbroken and just looking for some fun. His Phaedra waits
offstage. I curse her too. I tell Hippolytus I love him as a friend, just to see
his reaction. His reaction narrowly misses my face. His Phaedra calls that
evening, asks if I’m sitting down. Tells me how she loved him; dumb, like
an animal, and how it killed her; slow, like a beast with an arrow in its leg.
Aisling Towl is a poet and playwright from South London. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and published in Basket Magazine and Seaford Review among others. She was the 2024/25 Peter Shaffer playwright-in-residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is a 2026 Hawthornden fellow.
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