Bachelor Number One, are you ready?

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She came out to the balcony, to watch them go, the wagons piled high with jellyfish friends, cut one in half and blah blah blah: it was Saturday night and the river awaited. What about a shotgun? BOOM! and the mango tree lost one of its hearts. BOOM! and the towel dropped from her waist, cowering at her ankles and the daisy-faced stars turn their backs on the leering universe. Where was a plinth when you needed one? Lock and load. BOOM! The weather girl wondered where the cameraman had gone. ’Twas a shame. The stars were in a firefly mood. No one would ever know, not on a Saturday night, at the riverbank museum, the river was the place to be. BOOM! not really. Even the river was lost to jellyfish friends, those sticky-fingered gigglers and their womp-womp carry-on, more like rivals, double-breasted suitors, said to be, more like brothers taking their turn with a spoon, not yet with a sword; it was a relief, they’d abandoned their vigil, sneaking out with the chambermaids and potato peelers, it was, after all, it’s a Saturday night and the stars were in a firefly mood, the weather girl washing her hair, the river was waiting, lapping up the ribaldry that bounced down the hill and splashed in the mud and minced among the frogs and the eelery and eventually, not just a rumour, not just a song, there was intimacy. She appreciated the intimacy in the way they attended to their hair, their fingernails, honeying their tonsils and oiling their feet, their knees, the thoughts of their mothers, those womping inamoratos, sloshing along the bank to meet the boat, efforting on the dock to subdue the incontinence of their manners, careful and considerate in their raid upon the fairytale buffet (cut one in two and the cousins turn up a day later) and all the while, when they’re inevitably banished to the chlorinated pool that trails behind the stern, where a view of the horses from history was obscured, there’s one, and one only, sumptuously gowned, rubber-duck queen to pass around. It’s just no good otherwise.

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