Themes

1.

The theme of the party is Pat Butcher.
I have come as Malibu Pat. In the toilet queue I get chatting to a nice girl
in rally fatigues. She plays with one of her earrings. She has comes as NASCAR Pat.
The phone rings. “Phonecall for Pat!” We both laugh.

At midnight, one Frank turns up. He is instantly mobbed by Pats.
“Hey,” she says “Its Dave. He’s come as Frank! Fraaank! Fraaank!”
Dave waggles his spectacles at me. I tear off my garland and throw it at the floor.

2.

The theme of the party is The Adversaries of General Victoriano Huerta.
Most of us come as Emiliano Zapata or Francisco Madero,
posing for black and white photographs by the fountain.

At twelve, I hear the sound of someone riding a horse through our plastic orange grove.
Dave appears, dressed as José Cuervo, a brace of shotglasses strung across his chest.
Another Zapata turns to me: “This is funny because Huerta died of cirrhosis of the liver”
“Bueno,” says Dave, pulling out a Bueno.
Several women swoon over the edge of the balustrade and have to be resuscitated.
I remove their moustaches before the ambulance arrives.

3.

The theme of the party is Mardi Gras.
Peacock feathers scrape across the ceiling.
I have painted myself purple and stuck my head in a bucket of glitter.

At midnight, Dave leads an armed response team into the kitchen
and arrests us for sending letter bombs to local branches of Barclays.

4.

The theme of the party is the Fibonacci Sequence
I have been handing out paper hats, cut into Fermat’s Spiral.
We dance all night: harmonic intervals going up, melodic intervals going down.

Several guests witness Dave flickering across the ceiling,
yelling something about being ‘crashed by randoms’.
“His eyes were incredible,” says one guest.
“Looking into them felt like being Rick-Rolled…”

5.

The theme of the party is Typos In the Declaration of Independence
I spend all day constructing the bonfire for my “All Men Are Cremated Beetles” hoot.

At midnight, Dave appears in the form of a giant face-shaped cloud.
“I don’t get it,” I say to Linda. But this only makes her laugh louder.

6.

The theme of the party is Dave.
The kitchen is Dave. The bathroom is Dave. I Dave up the Dave until it is Dave.
Everyone thinks this is very funny.

We wait for midnight, disposable cameras at the ready.
The door cracks. We hold our breath,
as a squeaky pimpled dog-toy bounces across the threshold,

followed by a jacknifed truck of frozen bees, a dead football team, the Opus Dei, gallows, a Piñata full of blood, the Samoans, all the Samoans, the stock market crash, a fracture unit, Saint Thomas of Kent, habits, psychic advice, pimps and prostitutes, a hand the size of a courtyard, a gay cyberman, a bodyguard with money to burn, a clown tied to a chair, a consensus of failure, a hell-dimension Kiora advert:
crypto-monarchists following reconstructivists following the unreasonably chipper,
the international guild of Diet Coke Men, the horizontal, the vertical, the heartbroke, the cabbaged, Moorfield’s Eye Hospital, a goose, a global outpouring of rainforest fog cubes, spider patrols, Coffin-coloured Mars colonists, unicorn granddads, mercurial twats, resurrected slogans, pregnant support staff,

and then eventually at the back of the conga, us.
We see ourselves, entering the party, one hand raised and waggling.

“Dave,” we screamed in agony,
“Dave, you’ve done it again—”