Starring: A girl with balloons

A little girl is tip-toeing to hold back a mighty mass of balloons. Her black plait is flying in the air. The little ribbon tied to it is flying too. Only she is trying not to. Or is she trying to? We would never know; because the little girl is a still graphic in a poster. The boy looks at this girl on his wall all the time. Sometimes just because it's right there and sometimes because...he doesn't know why. When he goes to bed he sees her standing right at his feet and even when the lights go out the streetlight keeps her there. It's the vision he sleeps with and wakes up to. Once he dreamt the girl has flown away and he is waking up to a blank poster. Next morning he smiled to see her still there.


Years later the boy travels across the ocean and lands up in a carnival in the middle of a Nevada desert. Its bohemian air intoxicates him. He feels like it is his place, as if the world has turned to put him there. One of its evenings of delicious haze finds him dancing around a fire. A girl flashes a golden smile and comes close to him. They hold each other gently and move rhythmically to the drumbeats. When the music stops he looks down at her and sees a tattoo on her arm of the 'little girl with balloons'. And he knows immediately, this is what he would be waking up to for the rest of his life.

(A year from that, after passionate spurts of togetherness in each continent, the boy is leaving London for good to be with her in California. And he is still a regular at the event in Nevada. The tattoo is of an illustration by the street-artist Banksy.)