She spent the next few months creating giant party
props – enormous cakes, big paper cups, plates,
balloons and streamers…
her project culminated in a string of giant
bunting, two hundred metres long.
The triangles were tall and wide – stretched from floor to
ceiling. She wound it round and round throughout the
house and we embraced our newly festive lives.
Bunting cut across each bedroom, made a
theatre of our beds.
Two triangles flagged the toilet,
one trailed in the bath.
You had to be careful running down
the stairs to get the door in case you self-garrotted on a
ribbon.
In the kitchen, we’d brush them to the side with
wide arm-sweeps like explorers parting vines to find the
kettle.
It was weird, Ava, but leant a softness to
the house that I quite liked.
One day behind a bunting curtain, I found Molly
crying. Her boyfriend had suggested that they open their
relationship up… let other people in…
She was desolate
then angry –
he’s not that great, you know! She said.
And then she told me these three things:
One:
that she had thought
he really fancied her in sunglasses because
of the intense, romantic way he gazed at her
whenever she put some on – but that recently
she’d realised that it is, in fact,
the face he makes when gazing
at himself.
Two:
that he liked her to pretend to be
asleep – or dead – when they were having sex.
And three:
the pro-life protester who he’d
