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he’s hoping you’ll tell Flora how dreamy he is, and what witty conversational skills he has?”
    We both sniggered at that. I know it’s not nice.
    Dodi says she’s disappointed in Zach in real life. She says that when he’s not singing or casting smoldering looks at Flora, he looks like a bit of a loser. I said that he reminds me of the poet Keats, who we studied in English before the Bwontës, and who died tragically young in Italy of tuberculosis. Dodi, who never lets anything she learns at school follow her into real life, said she would never have thought about that but that she supposed he did remind her of all sorts of doomed rock stars, and perhaps that is what Flora saw in him.
    Dad has spent the whole day cleaning. The house is draped with drying bed linen from basement to attic, and I have never seen it sparkle so much. At dinner, he announced again that we had to get rid of the kittens, but Mum said no.
    Dad said the kittens kept disturbing him when he was trying to work.
    â€œIn this family,” Mum said, “we look after the weak and the vulnerable. In fact,” Mum added, “we don’t just look after them, we
welcome
them.” She sounded really fierce, and also like she wasn’t really talking about kittens at all. I think Dad realized that too, because he didn’t answer but looked down when she glared at him.
    The kittens have been rolled in flea powder like two little doughnuts in icing sugar, and they are not allowed out of the kitchen.

THE VERY MUCH ENHANCED FILM DIARIES OF BLUEBELL GADSBY
SCENE FOUR (TRANSCRIPT)
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
    INTERIOR. AFTERNOON.
    ZACHARY SMITH sits on a chair, playing his guitar. His surroundings (the Richmond Hill Retirement Home) have vanished in a misty haze. All background noise has been edited out. The only sound is that of his singing and strumming. Picture cuts to FLORA, gazing at him. A ribbon of pink cartoon hearts floats from her mouth to form a bubble above her head, inside which, in yellow letters, is the single word SIGH. Zach, in his misty haze, is enveloped in a cloud of baby blue songbirds. Think Disney’s Cinderella and all the little animals. His speech bubble says, YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL. When the song reaches the chorus—
and the waves draw lines along the sand
,
the sand
—picture switches briefly to a tropical sunset, and a couple running together in the water, then returns to a split screen with Zach on one side, looking poetically tragic, and Flora on the other, smiling with her eyes closed in apparent ecstasy. Picture melts away as music fades and the following words take over the screen:
    ZACH AND FLORA
    LOVE
    AT
    FIRST
    SIGHT
    Â 
    SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24
    It was all Dodi’s idea. I’m not saying I didn’t want to go along with it, and that I’m not glad I did. We spent the whole day turning Zach and Flora gazing at each other at the concert into a full-length music video. I learned a ton of things. The end result was fabulous.
    It just wasn’t my idea to put it on YouTube.
    Flora has a history with YouTube. Last year, her then horrible boyfriend’s even more horrible friends uploaded a film of Flora playing one of Snow White’s seven dwarves in a Christmas show, when her leather shorts split as she was doing a forward bend. It was a very poor quality video, but it was unmistakably Flora, and she was unmistakably not wearing anything under the shorts.
    â€œBut this is not humiliating at all,” Dodi reasoned. “This is tasteful and romantic.” And then she said that our clip could be seen by millions of people, and that this could be the beginning of a whole new career for me as a director of pop videos.
    â€œI’m not sure that I
want
a career directing pop videos,” I said. “I want to do something meaningful, like make undercover documentaries exposing crime and corruption. Or award-winning nature programs. And one day, feature films.