＃４５

… the dinner table, now a panorama of emotion.

Couple one — smug, openly smug, clearly delighted to have vomited out their storyboarded engagement story without a hitch (each romantic overture met with obligatory oohs and awhs). The man clasps his woman’s hand with the pomp of ascendant royalty, but does not look at her.

Couple two — vengeful, and equally plainly so; furious that their own engagement story (equally calibrated, mind you) had been upstaged but seconds after its deployment. A fizzled nuke £12,000 in the making, an entirely wasted munition of love. They bare their teeth at Couple One, grinding out a “lovely..!” from their molars. Only the recipients are convinced.

Couple three — helpless swimmers tumbled between competing rips of relief and consternation: relief, at having averted Couple Two’s agony by delaying their engagement till next year; then dismay, as each partner silently maths out the necessary budget redo to keep up. A temporary mitosis to be resolved in the car ride home.

Couple four — in contrast, Couple Four has ceased entirely to exist as independent individuals. A shared consciousness bites their equally collective tongue, and they do not dare engage. They sit there, statues — only their eyes flitting from one materialist trainwreck to another. Couple Four has arrived at their Moment of Disenchantment: that final crashing of a gong that marks a point of no return. If they were not radicals before, they are now… heartbroken by their friends’ self-enslavement to the Baudrillardian sign.

Couple five — the woman texts her lover while her husband takes a piss upstairs. She holds her phone under the table, too obviously suspicious for anyone to care. He is thinking (as always) about the Packers. Both are smiling faintly; they are the happiest couple there.