Narrator 1: Why Percy lives in Queenie’s Man Cupboard

Context is the wallpaper of life and I am Queenie + Percy’s interior decorator. Before I line it up for you, let me just say that I have no interest in Quests of any kind unless they are a brand of soft furnishings featured in Wallpaper*.

Percy is a scholar-warrior-poet prince, who has fallen on hard times. He likes solitude, so he can concentrate on his Quest, which is to find the Holy Grail. Unfortunately, needs must, and due to his reduced circumstances, he is dependent on Queenie’s hospitality. As Queenie lives in a small apartment, she doesn’t have a whole pile of room, so Percy has to live in Queenie’s man cupboard.

As man cupboards go it is not too bad, as Queenie is quite fussy, but he has to share it with a rough lout from the Wold called Sean Bean, who keeps attacking him with his broadsword and singing songs about a glorious era in which a knight called Sheffield Utd. slew mighty dragons called Hotspur, which Percy didn’t think was a dragon name, and a charlatan called Clive Owen, who treats him very cruelly by telling him that he is in fact King Arthur and by claiming that the fragrant Guinevere has taken up archery and painted herself blue. As if!

Queenie is quite taken with his Quest. She has an analytical mind. She talks quite a lot about thinking outside the box. Indeed the man cupboard is a box of sorts, but Percy is not sure if that’s what she is referring to. Queenie says that the first thing to do is to define what the Holy Grail is. She undertook a magic search of all the world called a Google and said there were 800,000 possible definitions. Percy is supposed to spend his days working through this list of clues, but he finds it a little daunting.

Instead, the lull in the Quest’s activities such as dragon-slaying and maiden-rescuing has allowed Percy to explore his creative side, which is also quite solitary. He writes poetry, he paints, he sneaks out with Queenie’s Canon A75 Powershot when she’s at work and fiddles with the buttons to make swirly patterns that are quite artistic. And hide the camera shake in his sword arm. And also, he’s not very good with the Google magic, which is why Queenie posts to the blog. The blog is where Queenie + Percy marshal their thoughts (ideas are great foot soldiers, Percy, and you need an army, dude, Queenie once said) and slay Queenie’s dragons.

In fact, although he doesn’t know it, Queenie is quite taken with Percy. True, his poetry is a little mawkish, and his photographs are a bit like himself (pretty but boring, she said once when they were arguing) and he rarely changes his clothes or washes his long blonde hair, but there is something about him that softens her face when she thinks of him. And of course, she is interested in his Quest, because she is on something of a Quest herself.