Mid-wank Nina realises she has never tried to remember the name of her childhood rabbit.

Names aren’t important to Nina, except hers.

Nina thinks Nina, sounds like a siren.

She pushes her confidence through crowds on a stretcher attached to a sauvignon drip.

Elbow’s trained,

Snowplowing through un-casual drinks.

Precise fingers dance her pin number ahead of the zeitgeist,

She can’t fill her atriums, but, “these will go fabulously with the cushions.”

Nina dies of boredom every time she ascends the 8 stone steps to her house,

She’ll be getting the elevator to heaven.

Someone will put her on the list.

She uncorks arguments so often she doesn’t recognise they have hangovers.

To make herself feel better,

she likes to lick the icing off gingerbread men,

dunks them in her tea just that little bit too long,

bites their heads off and then watches them fall apart.

Robert isn’t a biscuit, more of a meat pie.

Steak and Ale. Heavily buttered. Le Creuset cooked. Top right in the Aga.

They say you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,

But Robert thinks he knows exactly what and how much he has.

On the platform, Robert’s thoughts are stuffed with cash.

His pursuit of money, a lonely howl chasing after an infinite bullet.

Buffering is for shoe shine.

He competes in pinstriped lanes

And does not see humanity as a relay race.

His parents have enough sterling, crosswords, and mild outrage to last.

And his sperm normally lands al-fresco.

He tastes women as though he’s a connoisseur, rhapsodising, smiling, swilling and then spitting them into his bucket.

Afraid to gulp.

In her dressing room, Nina, snaps her garter and plumps up her tits like sofa to be sat on.

He is on his way.

She thinks of Robert and his whiskied breath, as the impure warm breeze that arrives before the tube.

Rattling into her station, briefly she’s taken somewhere, not so far away.

His tourists’ spunk alight at Holland park, between the Bush and the Gate.

There is talk of making a journey to a club in Kings Cross where the next generation comes alive.

Fuck that, the general consensus.

While Robert showers, erection dwindling, scrubbing off any ideas of commitment.

Nina calls one of her social collaborators,

Who, everyone agrees, has put on a few pounds.

She tells Donna the girls are “slimming down.”

“To clarify Donna, that means we won’t be calling you anymore.”

And “keep your greedy mitts away from Robert.”

Donna, who know 4 Roberts, doesn’t ask.

Not that she gets the chance.

Xanaxes calm hands gently brush Nina’s eyelids close.

She falls asleep, unburdened, until one of Robert’s tourists swims into the club. Their song comes on.

The rabbit dies.

3 trimesters and a matriculation of hormones later.

Nina’s watches her niece.

Blowing out 7 birthday candles,

They re-alight with existential threat.

She blows again.

Harder.

Ensconsed in a deck chair,

Eyeing cake like a closing-time lover,

Nina unknowingly dilates another centimetre.

Burgeoning under the weight of nascence.

Robert didn’t think he’d have to go to kids parties, ever.

He spies a silver coin at the bottom of the pool,

Currency’s age old beckoning,

He’s not the only one, a jubilant youth dives for treasure.

Snaffled.

Pink flesh dawns from the water, despondent, holding some foil.

An ice cream van jingles, hypnotized, Robert marches with his carrot baton toward it like the Manchurian candidate.

Waddling over to Donna as though her knees have no joints.

Nina offers her an olive.

“Good looking baby”

“Thanks” musters Donna.

“Giving birth is horrendous, I hear you’re overdue”

Nina caesareans the windup and in return delivers:

“He has nice hair, Donna, is his father ginger?”

“I don’t know Nina, he never took his hat off.”

Poolside, a 7 year old sociopath, enlists a 10 year old policeman to reprimand the 5 year old junkies, arguing over sweets.

They all stop.

As Nina’s cackle gallops across the lawn,

It walks back lame as their eyes stay to watch her drip a puddle around her expanded ankles.

Maybe she should have worn crocs.

Maybe.

“I’ll have a 99 and a flake please.” Says Robert

“That’ll be £2.39. “

“I’ll have a £2.39 and a flake then, huhu”

Robert realises his pregnant wife might want an ice cream or two,

Robert turns and is about to shout.

“Nina, Nina”.

But an ambulance does it for him.

Parking in front of Mr Whippy, the vehicles look at each other, like a trusty horse meeting an asthmatic zebra.

The drivers catch each other’s eyes and long to switch places.

She came quickly, Robert thinks.

Nina has appears and looks more vulnerable than he’s ever known.

His heart releases like a bouncy ball that’s been submerged.

Her linen trousers sodden with beginnings.

Robert pees himself a little.

Donna was wrong.

It wasn’t horrendous.

Emptied of her guest

She’s never felt fuller.

And nor has her breast.

She’s already redecorating those atriums.

Stunned to attention

Next to his lady

Robert has forgotten about the cigars

Cradling Robert Jnr upright,

Out of the ether, the helix emerges

Spread across him.

Generations of faces flank either side

Spanned as though inside a mirrored lift.

To the left his ancestors and turning right, descendants to come.

He sees our future, and for the first time, stops, and considers it.

In that future.

Nina, watches her Roberts, crawling through the back of her garden and the front of her mind.

The big one, shouts

“Nina babe, let’s get a him rabbit.”