THE HEADMASTER'S FLAME, BRITISH NOVEL BY LS EVANS, 18+ ONLY

Finally, she finds herself awake before him - snoring like two June bugs are playing a trombone down his throat. She wonders how much Penderyn they drank after they put her to bed. Between each snore she can hear the sound of distant bleating, like a lamb was frolicking in a field with the June bugs. Then she remembered… Henrietta!

Gingerly she climbed out of bed, pulled on her top and skirt from the floor - looking around for her knickers - till she heard Neill stir, and hastened her way down to the shed. 

The door was open, and there was Ed in just his PJs standing next to the lamb.

‘Oh, little Henrietty! You can walk again! And oh, Ed, you sheared off the red bits, and got rid of the tag!’ 

She knelt down into the lamb’s ruffled, tufty face as her pale blue eyes squinted happily, then she sniffed and sneezed. 

‘Ahh, another day Lamb Henrietta won’t be made into Henry then,’ Ed tousled the lamb, his hand near colliding with Natalia’s as they drew away as though by mutual electric shock.

‘God, I can’t believe we’ve got a lamb in your Airbnb…’

Ed chuckled. ‘I’m totally done for if anyone finds out.’

For a moment she blushed at the thought of what Ed would say if he knew she was really a 16-year-old schoolgirl, who’d just texted her rat-haired nemesis Sam Pollock to find out if she knew the Deputy Head had dropped dead halfway to the police station with the incriminating photo she took of them. 

‘How come you’re down here so early?’ she smiled politely.

‘Heard thumping at the shed door when I was brewing a coffee. She must have been going barmy. Blimey, it’s balmy out here too, and it’s only just gone eight. Gonna be a hot one!’

Henrietta poked her spiny nose through their legs. 

‘Shut it, quick - she’s trying to get out…’

‘Let her. The gate’s closed, and she can chew the grass.’ 

Natalia watched Henrietta frisk forward onto the unmowed courtyard lawn, as they began back up the bank toward the house.

‘Rich still out then?’ Ed asked.

‘Left him snoring away,’ she giggled. ‘What time did he get to bed?’

‘Oh, not long after we dropped you. He was going on about… ah, breaking his abstinence on the rise of Hump Day, he said, and promptly went up on the stroke of midnight.’ 

‘Oh no, we didn’t,’ she laughed.

‘You escaped him this morning then?’

They stepped back inside to find Neill drinking coffee on the sofa, smoking a lumpy white fag, completely naked.

‘Blimey, Rich! I would say you could model this place for Interiors magazine but the lower half is more like for Brazzers,’ Ed snatched at the fag. ‘What have I told you about smoking indoors?’ He took a puff himself before stubbing out in the ashtray.

‘I was only finishing off your remains. Hey, Bo Peep! Where did you go?’ Neill clicked his fingers. ‘Come here at once.’

‘No way,’ Natalia slunk to the kettle. ‘I’m not curing brewer’s droop right there on the couch again.’

‘After last night’s lesson of correction, so disobedient,’ Neill muttered, as Natalia’s gaze followed to where the handcuffs lay tossed on the table next to a shard of gobstopper.

‘So what else is in that cellar of yours, Ed?’ Neill continued, thighs splayed like a blasé, slightly rotund Michelangelo whilst Natalia waited cross-armed by the kitchen island for the kettle to boil. ‘Don’t you have a police truncheon too?’

‘There’s nothing but two old washing machines and a dismantled snooker table,’ Ed sat down at the island with his coffee. ‘Let’s talk about what we want to do today. It’s roasting already—’

‘What, the lamb?’ Neill rapped. ‘Is that what we’re having for breakfast?’

‘The lamb’s up and about, having more of a grass breakfast than you. I’m for an easy day, how about we get the jacuzzi going?’

‘You really think I’m going in the pool after last night?’ smirked Natalia as she poured her tea.

‘Why, what happened last night?’ Neill blinked.

A silence fell.

‘Do you want to talk about last night?’ Ed chuckled as all three looked to each other.

‘Talk about sheepish. And she’s going to need another lesson of correction for leaving the bed when she knows it’s Hump Day.’ 

‘Well I was amazed you didn’t wake yourself snoring like a camel.’

‘How rude. Spank her, Ed. Right as she’s bending into the fridge. Pretend she’s Andrea.’

‘Pffft! I’m not that old trollop.’

‘Ooh!’ Neill guffawed.

‘She’s not wrong.’

‘Didn’t you say you handcuffed her to the staircase?’ chuckled Neill.

‘Kicking and screaming.’

‘Thing is,’ Natalia jumped back to the kettle, pressing boil again, ‘I don’t have a bikini for the jacuzzi. And I’m not wearing that old school leotard that makes me look fourteen again.’

‘The girl who laid stark naked at the castle wants a bikini?’ said Ed.

‘You said I’d make the whole town stand to attention.’

‘We should have got one in M&S. But we could try that odds and sods shop down in the village that I saw had a motley rail of beachwear. Are you making a second cup of chai already?’

‘No, I just want this tea hotter.’

‘She always does that,’ Neill remarked. ‘Adds milk till it goes cold. Tops it up again with water till it overflows!’

‘It’s the balance,’ she clinked and squeezed, ‘between milkiness, sweetness and teaness. That’s how I make yours so well, Neill—’ as Neill retorted with ‘teaness, penis; teenage venus!—’ and Ed was tearing into the cereal box singing loudly that he’d ‘rather-have-a-bowl-of-Co-co-POPS!’ and Neill was lazily calling for a bowl to ‘feel seven again too’ whilst down below, the cock of a thirty-seven-year old appeared to flop a somersault from one side to the other.

Eyes spying over her mug rim, standing between the kitchen and the stairs, she thought she might get upstairs to put some knickers on at least. But as she stepped toward the sofa to pass by, Neill was rising toward her.

She hung back and casually reached for the inch of joint in the ashtray. 

‘So… this was weed you guys had last night?’

‘Spliff,’ he nodded. ‘Baccy weed rollie.’

‘Oh. And you were right that creatives used weed, Neill! Ed - I watched a YouTube video about John Lennon, that he said Ob La Di sounded like a granny track till he came into the studio high one day and bashed out the frantic piano intro!’

‘Tip of the iceberg, dear. Does your Beatles light trivia put you in Ed’s good books enough for him to let you off lighting up indoors?’

Ed was bringing over three spoons, clattering them to the song riff, to find Natalia sharing the spliff with Neill. 

‘Give me some then, you fuckers—’

‘She lit it. She’s the naughty girl.’

‘I’m more bothered that you’re sitting on my suite butt-naked, growing a stonker under a bowl of Coco Pops,’ Ed frowned. ‘You’re going to spill it everywhere.’

‘I’ll spill it right up there. After you spank her for disobeying you, Ed.’

There was a round of bashful smirks as Ed offered Natalia a bowl of cereal and duly poured her milk, and in a few moments, there was Natalia perched on the table, and the men on each couch, their spoons tinkling in a tuneless chorus of unsaid bemusement.

‘How did you get into spanking her anyway?’ Ed said at last. ‘What did she do so wrong?’

‘She liked to pretend she was a high school girl again. On a report card. But she didn’t know I was serious about showing her how a headmaster really does it. I set fire to the card, wrapped her wet knickers round her mouth and sat having a smoke whilst she waited to be walloped.’

‘Oh my,’ Ed murmured. Natalia sucked the tip of her spoon, not knowing where to look.

‘And I didn’t fuck her,’ added Neill.

Ed shook his head slowly.

‘Another time, she laid over my lap whilst I phoned my cleaner. Flogged then bent her over the coffee table writing lines and penned her arse with a Pilot pen. And… I didn’t fuck her.’

‘Jeez.’

‘Another time with kitchen spoons. I whacked almost every tool in my kitchen drawer over her bottom till she dribbled like a cracked gutter. And I didn’t fuck her.’

‘Why…’ Ed blinked, ‘why not?’

‘Do you want me to show you?’ Neill put down his bowl, just as the weed she’d fed herself began tapping into her bloodstream, fizzling her groin, as Ed looked to her, and she looked to Neill - and her eyes flutter the affirmative of the question that emanated from his eyes, that ‘are you ready?’ before an arm the seeming length of Mr Tickle reached across the expanse of the table with the same summoning as that very first time. 

Her bowl fell to the floor - and with a little scream somewhere between nerves and thrill she collapsed into his thighs, hair dangle-dived to the rug, skirt thrown up.

‘Fucking hell! No knickers! So you do want Ed to see your party trick?’

‘Mmmm… mhm, maybe…’ Mouth auto-murmuring a moment before her whirling brain comprehended what the heck he was talking about, his palm smoothed over her buttocks, held tight together like a firm round jelly. 

‘Gadzooks, Rich, you’ve spilled the milk everywhere—’

‘Oh, a teatowel - very helpful, Ed! I think it’s time for what you once suggested, Natalia. Twist a teatowel around like a soft whip, remember? Do you want Ed to watch?’

‘Ye-eah…’

‘Tell him then.’

‘Ahhh… I… I want him… to watch…’ 

‘Sit down, Ed. Now part your legs, Natalia. Keep absolutely still. You’ve felt how wet this girl gets, well, just watch. You won’t believe it…’ HOO-TISH!— Her hair flung one way, just as another whipped an OH-AH! from the other, through a repeat, then a tight squeeze of her buttocks like bread dough - and just underneath she could feel it, feel the spanker’s rod stiffening like tin with every crack.

‘Wait, wait!’ came Ed’s voice. ‘That’s wrong.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about.’

‘You’re doing it namby pamby.’

Natalia’s face turned in surprise.

‘I am not fucking doing it namby pamby. Was that namby pamby, Natalia?’ Neill dropped the towel and smacked with his palm instead. 

‘Ohhw—ahh!’ 

‘See?’

‘You need to give it a run up,’ said Ed. ‘You’re a cricket fan aren’t you? Put her over the table, her thighs just over the edge—’

‘Tell you what, you mansplaining prick, you do it. Shall we let him do it, Natalia?’

She croaked.

‘What?’

‘Er, sure, ye-eah…’

‘Over the table with the cuffs on,’ Ed said.

‘Ed, I can hold this girl with one little finger. This is the lightest girlfriend I’ve ever had. Go on, take a run up.’

‘Er… maybe you just do it. I don’t want to hurt her.’ 

‘She’s used to it. She’s had some pretty rough ones.’

‘But you said she’s a bit… you know, at the moment.’

‘Exactly, that’s why she wants it…’ 

‘Gag her then at least. With the tea towel.’ 

So much for Ed being awkward.

‘No Ed. We need a barometer of how good your spanking is.’

‘Thought the barometer was down this end?’

‘Ed, your nearest neighbours are a mile away. No-one will hear her even if we both spanked her at the same time.’

‘I’m fucking waiting, Ed…’

Neill chuckled. ‘You get ten. Make her dribble at least an inch and you win. Take a good look at that first, we’re going to want to keep tabs on that. I mean, a lot is from last night of course—’

‘Neill,’ she spoke, ‘please can I put my hands forward…’ 

‘Darling I think it’s best like this. He’s gonna give you ten. He’s not gonna stop. Blimey, he’s serious, he’s rolling his sleeves up…’ SMACK!— Neill’s arm was round her, so she guessed, that was Ed?—SMACK! She cries out. Now she can recognise Neill’s finger swirl the back of her knee, so her arse is truly being cracked by Ed. Did she really say yes to this game? SMACK! She cries out louder. She hears: ‘See?’ And a grunt of approval. She’s not sure how she feels about— SMACK!

She buried her head in Neill’s thighs, hugging his hip, prickling in goosebumps to a soft low siren-like moan that prompts Neill to say: ‘Bit hard, Ed?’ 

‘Oh, I can see.’

‘Ok enough. Stop.’ 

‘But I only did six.’

‘I don’t know… do you want more darling?’ She feels tickling fingers, some whispering discussion, a rummaging finger in her vagina as she bolts up her head.

‘It’s ok - it’s only me. Shit, oh yeah. My god. Carry on.’ 

More spanking, more crying out, as Ed keeps going, and she devolving, into a delirious writhing wail. 

‘That’s fucking twelve, you cheat!’

‘She’s really going back here. You’re going to have to deal with that. Piggyback her to bed, daddy!’ 

Relief as her aching arms are released, and her stinging bottom turned over, swapped for a cooling waft of air at her hot soggy flaps, which she feels equally vulnerable to expose as the squashed lines in her makeup-less face now cleared of the safety curtain of hair by Neill’s soft stroking fingers. But her audience seems more engrossed by the lower display, what she now feels: the handlebar bobbing up between her legs as if it were her own stuffed sock of a cock, as her broad platform of hair-speckled femur murmurs in her ear:

‘Did you take your pill this morning?’

‘Uhh, no… I didn’t. It’s just there… in the fruitbowl!’

‘Ed—!’ Neill snapped his fingers. ‘Put Wednesday in her mouth.’

Ed rummaged at the table as Neill whispered to ‘open wide,’ shunting her thighs with his, and looming now is Ed’s forefinger and thumb to roll the pillule onto her tongue - just as she feels Neill’s hot tip pushing beneath, causing Ed to rock on his heels in incline with them like coy Dr Brown himself.

‘Keep your finger there. She’ll suck it no problem.’ She finds Neill’s prophecy ring true, legs splayed as he slithers his seven-day-starved cock inside her, and his friend stands bearing witness, still hovering a finger at her lips that have fallen open in ecstasy, allowing Neill’s best man to step back and spectate the slow consummate thrusts of Live Hump Day. 

Her top is still on, cotton nipples smooshed under his arm muscles, and her flowery skirt bunched at her hips to expose below it, raw, as if flourishing to Ed: the finest flower of the field, or rather the secret forest entirely - laid bare by the mechanism of a pink-purple plunderer mining the undergrowth for its oil. Neill is groaning in a macho display to his mate or from week-long chastity, or from the torrent he feels down there, his knees butting hers wider astride him like, well, a Sibian - the cock-machine Ed had showed her on Google Images - and now was treated to the human rival, with Neill’s commentary turning her stomach inside out like a rollercoaster someone convinced her to ride.

‘All the way in. And all the way out…’

Slowly at first: till it became a horserider’s jostle, but moderate for Neill’s ways, for he can’t go too fast supine, and the slowness seems to connect them deeper, more surface run-off, she thinks in Geography terms. Or like a teacher demonstrating Biology to a student transfixed by man machinating girl’s demi-virgin walls, fucking like he couldn’t care less that he was being watched, or was powerhoused by it. 

Drawn into the perversity herself, her moans and groans are carried on the raft of his, as self-consciousness slips into pleasure, the two men’s stoicism starts to glow inside her, their shamelessness that she coveted - what a chance this was to be impassiveness’s passenger, and she rides, and she rides! Rides the dark horse of a new position, whilst whispering love-yous tickle her ear, making her ripple in time with the thrusting and her cunt swell like a riverbank.

‘Neill, I… think I’m gonna come. My cunt, I mean, it’s… it’s… gonna come, on your cock…’

‘Ohh, how sweet of it.’

It surprises her, and pleases her, that such a thing could happen, in this circumstance: a piece of Neill is inside her in more ways than one, but her vagina seems to run from her words, spiralling a trail of star-spangled sensation that yet defied the neat category of orgasm. But his is a bulging bag of shopping, that he needs to put down - put right up inside her cupboard, as his knees gyrate to a wild tandem frisson, bobbing her like spitting oil on a pan and squeezing her tight like a handle in both arms as if he wanted to shoot deep enough to take the rest of the holiday to drip out. She chimes along with his expulsion, her thighs still levered open as he withdraws, giving Ed a graphic sight of more rolling red hills than his window’s evening display of sunset over Snowdon. 

‘Jeez, guys, excuse me,’ stumbled Ed. ‘I need to go to the coh— cloakroom.’

She was a moody brunette, painted from head to thigh in a shimmering sheer gown. Long, ebony hair matched eyes like the night; only a silk bow on her head is what discerns her from the surrounding darkness. A long tan arm rests upon the table by a spray of cherry blossom.

The book was Henry James’ Daisy Miller, a Penguin classic with the same yellow-beige bordering and black lettering as What Maisie Knew. Like Maisie’s older sister, looking just as directly to the viewer. And yet the book was thinner; slimmer, simpler than she. The font was bigger - Natalia saw as she flicked through, and even the Introduction and Preface took up a third of the thickness. ‘It’s the pure note of the early James,’ it preambled, ‘like a pipe played carefully by a boy.’

She placed the book on top of a little pile she’d accumulated at the Vintage Fair they’d found happening down in Bala village. They’d gone in Neill’s car, ‘to make sure I keep the battery working,’ found a bikini in the odds-and-sods-shop, where Neill had also picked up a large plastic water gun and winked at Ed - before disappearing into the butcher’s with him, leaving Natalia convinced they were about to perform a stick-up. ‘I already did that with you’ - as Natalia winced at the pig carcasses hanging in the window and diverted to the book stall, where she’d also picked up a hardback edition of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. 

In a blue sleeve together with Through the Looking-Glass, ‘it must be an antique!’ her eyes gleamed, as they sat on a bench, Ed in his Panama hat for the sun was strong, and Neill masticating on Cornish pasty with all the etiquette of a zombie.

‘Folio Edition,’ Neill nodded, somehow managing to get away with baring carrots and mince on his front teeth for the way his lizardy tongue swiped at it like an apologetic footman. ‘Says it was printed in 1990. Good nick though, for two quid,’ he broke her off half his pasty, to her retort, ‘I did say I wanted cheese and onion,’ before Ed rummaged like a scullery maid and promptly swapped it with ‘ahh, sorry doll.’ He had twice called her doll, and she liked it, as though it was added to a list of pet names by men that she welcomed - or rather a column that was part of Neill’s chart, incapable of independent existence. 

The men munched and watched the bustle of the fair as though edifying as football, even though the moth-eaten clothes stall and a man selling dusty collectable coin sets was ‘hardly Portobello, more like a Hammersmith car boot,’ and now Ed suggests: ‘What next then, lake? Walk? Or back home for jacuzzi?’

Natalia was too engrossed in the six-panel illustrations on the front and back of her pristine Alice books to answer. ‘How doth the little crocodile!’ as she flicked one open. ‘I love this! Oh, but look at the illustrations! They’re all in red shaded etching, I’ve never seen that before!’

‘John Tenniel,’ Neill said with his mouth full. ‘Far better at drawing than Lewis Carroll was - his own attempts looked like your sketchbook. Sure proof that one should stick to what they’re best at.’

Ed stared. ‘Her sketchbook?’

‘He means my uni portfolio.’ She bit her lip at Neill.

‘What I meant is that you take his insult pretty well!’

‘Worse things than being compared to one of the greatest writers,’ she smiled.

‘So,’ Neill exhaled, ‘what else did you buy with daddy’s money?’

‘Here, I bought one for you, Neill! Antique book of war poems, also two quid!’

‘Anthem for Doomed Youth: Poets of the Great War. Another Folio edition.’

‘And for Ed, to add to his Airbnb collection especially after we creased Maisie twice. Look!’ She slid over the brunette girl’s doe eyes of Daisy Miller.

‘Ah! Another Henry James. Now that’s much better. She looks just like you! Even the dress!’

‘Her hair is all brown like mine used to be,’ Natalia sighed.

‘But I can see it’s growing out, there - at your roots. Then it’ll be just like Daisy’s again.’

‘Mum says it took two years for her perm to grow out.’

‘Perms, war perms!’ yawned Ed. ‘Guys, aren’t we going to talk about what you did earlier?’

‘And what happened earlier, Ed?’ Natalia said. ‘Tell me, in your lovely dirty words, with your bald head going all pink.’

Neill snatched up a large volume from Natalia’s pile. ‘Here’s your answer, Ed. Is it The Joy of Sex?… Ah, no. Sex In History by Reay Tannahill,’ he pronounced with disdain.

‘Do you both… normally do that?’ Ed murmured. ‘I mean—’

‘What, shag in front of someone? Only Rasputin the cat; watching rather like that,’ he nodded at Natalia’s page where the grinning Cheshire sat on the floor next to the Duchess and her screaming baby.

‘Come together.’

‘Probably thanks to that annoying Beatles track you keep playing,’ said Natalia with a mouthful of puff pastry.

‘Rich I wouldn’t dream in a million years you’d share your girlfriend with anyone.’

‘Goodness Ed, you talk like you’ve shagged her. Is there something I need to know?’

‘Keep your voice down. Listen, you shagged her right in front of me…’

‘‘Frontal sex made the human female susceptible to something that is physiologically impossible for other primates!—’’ read Neill aloud from the book, turning a couple of curious heads from the nearby stall. ‘‘Rape! In the living world,’’ his voice took on an Attenborough shade, ‘‘only one species of spider appears to share with humanity the ability to conclude a mating against the will of the female!’ …What is this claptrap? Animals’ sex is all rape! Humans are the only species who are sophisticated enough to create the notion of consent!’

‘Hm. And that human wasn’t you.’

‘What do you mean, Ed?’ Natalia chuckled.

‘I mean, was there any earlier?’

‘Consent?’ she blinked. ‘But we’re with each other, and…’

‘That doesn’t rule it out.’

‘I can tell in an instant what she wants and what she doesn’t,’ Neill lowered his voice. ‘Consent is just a new-age word used by people who’ve forgotten how to read body language. Not everything has to be stated out loud like a fucking court reading. In fact since we spawned the generation-that-asks-permission, the female orgasm has declined by 238%!’

‘Is that a real statistic?’

‘No, see, I could write my own codswallop. Natalia, take this brick back and retrieve your £2 for another pasty. Daddy’s not buying you this book.’

‘Can’t you do it? You’re braver.’

‘Keep it,’ said Ed. ‘There’s a drawing here of a Mongolian shagging his mare. I can’t say the body language bodes well when his hooves are tied up.’

‘If his hooves are tied up he’s definitely enjoying it.’

‘Are you saying you came together,’ Ed frowned, ‘because you read by her body language that she wanted to be soft-raped?’

‘Is this the same man who demanded I cuff and gag my girlfriend before he spanked her bottom into a red-etched Tweedledum and Tweedledee?’

‘Roasted!’ laughed Natalia.

Ed looked to Natalia cynically. ‘Have you ever had a boyfriend before him, for comparison to this libertine?’

‘Once, a presumptuous twat I went on a date with who definitely did not read my body language nor hear my verbal one. And another presumptuous little boy I once sexted.’

‘Ah, sexting,’ said Neill. ‘What did we call it? A live sex show without the money.’

‘Ed got one. And pre-paid handsomely for it in M&S.’

‘What are you, fucking prostitutes?’

‘No, but I’m your pimp,’ joked back Neill, and amidst a silly ensuing conversation about Great Wars and Great Whores; Through the Looking Glass and Through the Fucking Crass, Neill suddenly says:  ‘Shit. I’ve just seen Alan and his wife.’

‘Alana’s knife?’

‘April Fool’s Alan, whose cottage we gatecrashed, in the green pants - over there, engrossed by a pile of disintegrating Ford car manuals.’

‘Shit, only wearing his pants?’

‘Fuck! He’s looking over. Ed, go explain everything.’

‘He said he’s leaving today, didn’t he?’ said Natalia.

‘Not before we do. Come on—’

‘Yep, let’s go home and write. I feel like writing,’ pipes up Ed, and Natalia looks to him in surprise, crossing the road back to the car, Neill seizing her hand and Ed brushing crumbs off her arm, as she scrunches up her greasy pasty paper and votes for going home. 

‘Yes, Ed! I want to write too!’

The jacuzzi bubbled in leisurely rhythm to their smokes. Glasses of various tipples and brownies from Gerrards’ bakers, ‘not as good as she makes,’ were poised in their reach; Natalia in her navy-blue polka dot ensemble, apologising again for brushing against Ed’s foot, whilst Henrietta the lamb pottered about on the grass.

‘Thought we were supposed to be writing?’ Neill puffed.

‘We are. Here in the jacuzzi,’ Ed puffed back and spun his finger in the smoke. ‘Out loud, we will brainstorm; write ideas in the air!’

‘Oh, I love this!’ Natalia sighed. ‘Henrietta looks so happy just wandering around us, and not lonely at all!’

‘Probably because we look like sheep too with this suncream of Ed’s.’

‘She’ll be in the jacuzzi next,’ Ed remarked.

‘Not when she craps like a Great Dane. She did one just by the door that stunk to high heaven and I for one, am not clearing the next. I’ve done enough for your kitty, Miss Shitlington, you can caretake your lamb yourself.’

‘How will she be looked after when we go to Llandudno tomorrow?!’

‘We’re going to Portmeirion. And Hetty will be fine,’ Neill said.

‘Nat’s right, I reckon Portmeirion on Friday. The Prisoner convention starts then.’

‘Ooh! Sucking up to my girlfriend, are we!’

‘I’ve been to Llandudno before, I know the tram to the top of the Great Orme, I’ll take you.’

‘Yay! Thank you, Uncle Ed!’

‘What exactly is the town’s connection with Lewis Carroll anyway?’ sniffed Neill.

‘Something to do with the girl,’ Ed dried his hand and tapped his phone on the side. ‘Let’s see…’

‘God, it’s like going to the doctor. I could have googled it myself, Ed, but I thought you knew!’

‘...Llandudno is reputedly where Alice Liddell holidayed, the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll,’ Ed read, ‘even though there’s no evidence that Carroll ever visited Llandudno, there’s statues of the characters erected around the town, with plaques claiming he did. …So the truth is, not even Google knows.’

‘Ohh! We can go round hunting the statues!’

‘Fine, fine,’ said Neill. ‘We’ll do what Littlington wants. I’m more interested in your sudden resolve to actually do some writing on this trip, Ed. You told me I’m having a break from headmastering, and you’re suggesting doing something I’ve never seen you do at the soberest of times.’

‘Ah, now, see, you inspire me. What I want to know is this,’ Ed passed around a joint just as a bird in the trees started chirping madly. ‘Not you, chiffchaff!’ - making Natalia giggle.

‘That’s a thrush isn’t it?’ Neill frowned.

‘I know my birds.’

‘And mine, now.’

‘Anyway,’ Ed resumed, as Natalia earnestly puffed in mirrored seriousness - ‘the greatest romance book in the world, what is it? And not The Joy of Sex…’

‘That’s literally the only book this holidaying headmaster is interested in.’

‘Yes, I saw you asking for a truncheon in the bric-a-brac shop,’ Ed remarked. ‘They looked at you thinking you must be a police officer, till you picked up the water gun and then you were just a dickhead. Dare I ask what you want a truncheon for?’

‘I ordered one online,’ Neill filled the water gun and test-squirted the air. ‘That remote control on her bottom yesterday got me thinking. Time for this holiday to get serious.’ He pointed the gun at Natalia as she shielded the last of her brownie and squealed. 

‘Oh, oh - did you see the funny dog outfit in the shop too? All I could imagine was Henrietta wearing it!’

‘Right, anyway. More weed - let’s get as high as Lennon on his piano, eh?’ - as Natalia nodded back to Ed eagerly. ‘So, the greatest love stories. Romeo & Juliet. Wuthering Heights. Gone with the Wind. Do they have happy endings?’

‘You’ve picked three that end in separation or death,’ said Neill. 

‘Which is completely my point. The power of their love is testament to the fragility of their partnership—’

‘Ed, finish that drink. Clearly you haven’t had enough.’

‘Shut up,’ laughed Natalia. ‘He’s actually saying something interesting.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment, Little. So what I’m getting at is - you two are clearly hot for each other. He looks at you like you’re the last drop of nectar on earth - you look at him like a girl who’s never seen a fucking man before. You take a seven day break from doing what you love, and—’

‘There’s reasons for that,’ said Neill.

‘And whatever they are, the look on her face when she was laid on you was… well, aptly - like an illustration from The Joy of Sex.’

‘I’m amazed you were even looking at her face.’

‘Who says I was.’

‘Eddie, both ends would have been edifying to watch and now I wish I’d had you film it so I can too.’

‘Yep. So, my point is, absence makes the heart grow fonder—’

‘Abstinence makes the cock go stronger.’ 

‘And a cunt grow longer,’ added Natalia.

They looked at her. ‘Longer?’

‘Anyway,’ she blinked, ‘Jane Eyre has a happy ending.’

‘Why,’ Ed asked, ‘how long does her cunt get?’

‘Two years without her, isn’t it?’ Neill said. ‘Jane and Rochester separate.’

‘Why do they separate?’

‘He tells a lie and upsets her,’ explained Natalia. ‘She buggers off and he has a near death. He marries her, blind—’

‘Unable to see her tits ever again,’ said Neill. ‘But he can feel how long her cunt gets.’

‘Rochester regains his sight eventually,’ she added.

‘Ah. Just in time to see her tits saggy.’

‘Neill, I’m amused to watch you play the role of Ed and Ed play a more lucid headmaster than you right now.’

‘I don’t give a fuck. Except for the one I want to give you,’ he stubbed out his fag. ‘Right now, over here, doll—’

‘No, no, no,’ Ed splashed him. ‘You leave her alone for five minutes. We’re talking shop.’

‘Yes, we’re talking happy endings,’ Neill squirted them both. ‘Although surely we start at the beginning: what’s the great opening line to a great novel?’

‘Not the one she read out the other day.’

‘Oh!— but Daisy has a far easier opening sentence than Maisie. Let me go get it!’ 

Natalia jumped out of the jacuzzi, quickening as Neill squirted her backside, and in a moment was climbing back in, flicking through with damp fingers. ‘Here we go…’

‘I’m on the edge of my seat.’

‘You got out of the water to read that?’

‘Well I can read more.’

‘If it involves you walking your dripping pubis into my face again. What’s this book about?’

‘‘The sweetest of all his American princesses. A young man meets her in the garden of a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva and is immediately captivated!’’

‘Sounds lovely. Sounds far better than the other one.’

‘I’m reading both. They look beautiful side by side.’

‘Hm. Not the only thing. That bikini is beautiful, too, Natalia, and I’m glad we went to the village for it, and for another little tower of books - and the little jaunt has really made you bond with Uncy Eddie some more, hasn’t it? But you should really—’

She’d already flung off the bikini top where it landed draped over Henrietta. Neill gazed impressed. Then she sunk her chest half back into the water; the men cleared their throats, threw back their beers and eyeballed each other for a resumption of conversation.

‘Rich - or rather, Mr Neill,’ Ed said pompously, ‘pray, what’s your favourite opening line of a novel?’

‘How about: 

Ed screwed his nose.

‘It’s a take on 1984,’ explained Neill.

‘I know what the opening line to my novel would be,’ Natalia swigged her beer, her faint pink nipples undulating at the surface of the water as she began: 

‘What’s that?’

‘The night before I first met you. At the college Open Evening, you know.’

Ed exclaimed. ‘So you’re going to write the novel of the bad headmaster! Or shall we do it together? I mean, your story about the life drawing class was fiction anyway, right? Which pervert’s chatroom did you really meet on?’

‘I think an opening line should be more than any of these,’ Neill clicked his fingers. ‘It should be something that attracts attention, let’s see…’

‘Like the word porn in her first sentence isn’t rude enough? What porn was it anyway, Natalia?’

‘It was two men pretending to be phone servicemen,’ she began, whilst Neill puffed smoke to the sky in thought. ‘And they, er… get into a woman’s house whilst she’s all alone, and have her right there on the carpet.’

‘It should be something funny,’ Neill espoused, ‘or with peculiar grammar!’

‘When people write ‘had had,’’ she laughed, ‘that’s peculiar enough.’

‘You can have four. What was it?… 

‘Four hads!’

‘Wait no - you can have more,’ Ed tapped his phone. ‘Here we go, Wikipedia: 

‘No way!’

‘Eleven hads,’ counted Ed. ‘It needs punctuation, look…’ 

They leaned to peer into Ed’s phone. ‘James and John are required by an English teacher to describe a man who had suffered from a cold in the past. John writes ‘The man had a cold,’ while James writes ‘The man had had a cold’ which the teacher approves - and thus:

‘How about… Dick dicked Dick but Cunt c’unt.’

‘Nobel Prize worthy.’

Silence as they sat back and swilled their beers.

‘Let’s play a game,’ Natalia said now, the beer and nicotine and weed whirling inside her, ‘I go down under the water, spin around a few times, and then I have to guess whose trunks I bump into.’

‘Sounds like a fabulous game,’ Neill said. ‘But how will you speak?’

‘I just guess in my head.’

‘That sounds like a ridiculous game. Let’s do it.’

‘Wait, wait guys,’ said Ed. ‘Speaking of four-hads, mine’s burning up. Where’s my Panama?’

‘You left it on the floor of my car.’

Ed was climbing out. ‘Where’s your keys?’

‘Just by the door.’ Neill squirted him till he was out of sight. Natalia was reaching for more brownie when she was promptly scooped backwards and a ledge of crumbs fell into the bubbles. 

‘Now it looks like I’ve pooed myself!’

‘You’re so sexy, sexy sexy,’ he purred down her neck. ‘And happy, I hope?’

‘Ohhh—! Happiest girl in the world…’

‘Ahh. And you like having two men looking after you, and at you, and up you?’

‘More than anything in the world…’

‘Because we’re only getting started, you know that?’

‘Neill, I can’t have sex with your best mate…’ she giggled, just as the chiffchaff up in the trees started up again chirping nine-to-the-dozen.

‘Thrush has the right idea about mates. ‘Oh, how doth the little crocodile, improve his shining tail!—’ He pulled her hand down his pants. ‘How cheerfully he seems to grin, and neatly spread his claws!’ - squeezing her breasts and tickling her round into him, ‘and welcome little fishes in, with gently smiling jaws!’ He bit her neck as she screamed in laughter, just as Ed appeared, looking rather aptly - cap in hand.

‘It only works if you put it on, Ed!’

Ed just stood by the tub, frowning.

‘What is it, Ed? Constipation is so unlike you, but if you need some Epsom salts…’

Something flat and dusty orange plopped from Ed’s hand onto the side of the pool. Something that made Natalia’s heart sink along with her chin to the surface of the water.

Neill, too, must have known what it was - but leaned over enquiringly to see:

‘They do GCSE algebra at Leeds Art University, do they?’

The water was as still as Lake Tegid, bubbles turned off by Ed. The chiffchaff had stopped tweeting as though he’d been turned into stone too. Natalia stared down at the two ‘O’s in Molova - vandalised by some boy into nipples - and she sunk down between Neill’s own, where a deep cough of awkwardness sounded in her ear.

‘That’s… er, old.’

‘Really? With this month’s dates written inside? How old is she? Fourteen? Fifteen?!’

‘Ed!’ Neill gasped. ‘She’s not a pre-pubescent!’

‘How old is she?’

‘She’s…’ Neill sighed. ‘She’s sixteen. But—’

‘I’ve seen her naked, I’ve, I’ve spanked her like a ginger stepchild!— and, and—’

‘Pardon?!’

‘I’ve seen you two fuck, like porn under a microscope, I’ve touched her…. touched her in, in… and she’s six-fucking-teen?’

‘Oh come on. It’s just like your sun cream. It might take time to sink in, but—’

‘Neill, Neill - please get my bikini…’

‘Ed, you need to calm— shit, where is your bikini?’

‘It’s still hanging off the fucking lamb!’ Ed pointed. ‘Almost as young as its owner!’

‘Don’t turn this fucking ugly, Ed’ - Neill scrambled out of the pool and ran at Henrietta, who promptly trotted off - the bikini still hanging as Neill chased it in his dripping trunks. Natalia had already got out and wrapped herself in a towel from the side.

‘Me? Me turn this ugly? She’s at your school then? She’s a girl from your school? Christ! Christ alive!’ 

‘Ed, your neighbours might be a mile away but they’ll hear if you scream your hymns any louder.’ Neill came back over, pointing a hand in which the bikini was scrunched inside. ‘Now listen—’

‘I was right all along,’ fumed Ed, flinging the exercise book into the water. ‘Cradle FUCKING snacking!’ 

‘Excuse me!’ Natalia trembled, fishing it back out. ‘You said in the same breath in the coffee shop that I’m maturer than anyone he’s been with… maturer than him!’

‘Being maturer than Rich is hardly an achievement, now I know he’s picked up someone barely legal!’

‘She’s age of con—’

‘Wait, wait!’ Ed’s eyes screwed closed. ‘In London, you lied that it was her birthday?’

‘No, not at all—’

‘She wasn’t turning 19 though. She was fucking turning 16? Oh my fucking word, I watched you turning the candle upside down and she was giggling like a… a… schoolgirl!’

‘Ed…’

‘You had a fifteen-year-old on your knee, after all our Savile jokes?’

‘Are you seriously comparing—’

‘I knew something was dodgy all along! Leeds Art College, ooh yeah uni, like she didn’t even know where she was or what she’s doing! Doing Art, when you two talk fucking Lit all the time?’

‘To be fair, she spends most of the time staring at the paintings on the covers…’

‘The amount of stuff she knows about your teachers! Your school, your fucking charity fairs? The thing she said the other day - what was it - something about your English teacher… I wouldn’t have thought it odd if she didn’t stop mid sentence!’

‘Ed, you need to calm down. Let’s all go inside.’

Natalia hurriedly slipped on her top and shorts from the sofa, as Ed paced to and fro in the kitchen, muttering. ‘Shit, shit! I’m such an idiot…’

‘You’re not,’ Neill began. ‘In fact, we were going to tell you. We can’t stand the secrecy. It’s been painful…’ 

Natalia nodded.

‘Ooh, painful! Not as painful to know what you’re landing yourselves into… and me! You two,’ Ed waved his hand. ‘Go pack your things. You need to leave. And take your fucking sheep with you.’

‘I’m not driving anywhere after all that gin you gave me.’

‘I’m going then.’

‘And neither are you after all that rum!’

‘Oh you’re all pro-legalities now, are you? You’ll have a schoolgirl stowaway, a lamb stowaway, but will only drive pissed when it suits you?’

‘Not to drive any more than two miles, you crazy fucker!’ 

Ed flew upstairs and Neill stormed after him whilst Natalia shrivelled into a ball on the sofa, wet hair pooling the back of her dress. She stared at the cuffs, then cringed thinking about the gobstopper, then moaned out loud thinking of the spanking that had been right where she lay, and jumped up.

Her chest was filling with all that Sam-Dinkey-Anton tension that had only just lifted. The lead weight of Leeds was back in her ribs. Her real identity, her age, that one number: ‘sixteen! Sixteen!’ warranted shouts and bangs upstairs by two men bellowing thunder. Two men arguing over her.

Doors were flung open and closed, the words Hannah and crazy and responsibility were shouted, then Ed appeared in trousers and shirt half buttoned, whirling down the stairs with Neill grabbing at his arm - until Ed suddenly slipped and tumbled the last five steps on his backside.

‘See! You can barely walk straight, let alone think straight, let alone drive!—’ Neill caught hold of Ed’s arms over his head as Ed nearly propelled him forward with rage.

‘Get the FUCK off me—’

‘Pass me those cuffs, Natalia. Quick.’

‘What, are you…’

‘NOW!’

Ed roared upon sight of the cuffs glinting toward him: ‘What the absolute FUCK do you think I am!’ - just as Neill’s strength matched in effort, in time to hook his wrists around two balustrades, with Ed buckling his body and snorting like a horse.

‘Are you fucking SERIOUS! Get these fucking things off me!’ 

His growl was deafening, metal clinking away as he strained at the stair poles and Natalia shrunk away, covering her ears, fearing the stairs would collapse altogether.

‘You should be the one in cuffs, you FUCKER!’

‘You need to calm down,’ Neill hissed. ‘Sober the fuck up before you go anywhere!’ After two Herculean pulls, Ed stopped and stared. 

‘Wait, is this what you did to your old deputy? Did he know?! Did you hole him up and fucking kill him?!

‘Of course not!’ exclaimed Natalia, looking to Neill. ‘Well, I don’t think he did.’

‘Ed, you’re being ridiculous. She’s sixteen, age of consent. It’s only that I’m a headmaster that makes it illegal, and I’m resigning in twelve weeks—’

‘Consent! After all that talk earlier! Grooming is the word. I was right about Rolf Harris!’

Natalia’s face creased in indignation. ‘We, love each other, you know th—’

‘Love! In his position! How do you even know it’s love, at your age, it’s—’

‘Shut the fuck up! You’re starting to sound like fucking Dinkey! Before I put a spell on him with Scrabble letters to make him die! Do you want me to do the same to you with your Scrabble game? It might be a new glossy one but I’ll put it in the fucking fire right now just like Truth or Dare!’

Ed frowned, then it morphed into a jeer. 

‘Explains why the girls were gossiping! Monica, Claire, even Max and Alice, all wondered why you were babysitting a teetotal, possibly religious, giggling adolescent—’

Natalia’s face fell. 

‘Ed. Don’t,’ Neill began.

‘I was sticking up for her! Saying she’s just like 19-year-old Jessica Alba in Dark Angel. More like Britney fucking Spears in Mouseketeers! Nineteen and never went to the clubs, and he looked like he was about to cry in Truth or Dare, probably with fucking guilt for being a perv—ffffff—’ ’

A prompt fire of the water gun from Natalia straight into Ed’s face had Neill splitting his sides with laughter. 

‘You fucking bastards!’ Ed’s dripping face roiled.

‘Who’s crying now, you bald buffoon!’ she raged.

‘But I knew it! I knew it when you came in wearing that piece of lycra bubblegum! I knew it, when you bought those Cheerios and Angel Delight. We all ate Coco Pops with you, like you really are fourteen!’

‘Well you bought them, eejit! And you fucking got them out this morning!’ She marched over, grabbed the box and showered them all over him. ‘Here! Have-a-fucking-bowl-of-Co-co-POPS!’

Neill wheezed with laughter as Ed shouted and tugged away at the cuffs again. ‘You, you little… brat! Coco shagging Pops alright!’

‘Gag him,’ Natalia suddenly said. ‘Wrap a scarf around his gob for a week.’ 

Whilst Ed hurled more abuse, repeatedly calling them fuckers, and not to dare, and to let him go right now - Neill paced over to the TV, saying that he has just the thing! - and returned with a whole gobstopper.

‘Fuck, Neill! Did you glue it?’

‘Did you really think I was going to buy just one? After I ordered the Rarebits I saw you two nattering in the cafe and thought a pair of them was needed really. How right I was!’

‘You fucking—’ Ed was shaking his head side to side as the gobstopper loomed, yelling: ‘Get that thing away from me! Nggggh—’ 

Natalia decidedly pinched Ed’s nose and the ball was stuffed fast into his mouth, when he found himself relenting to avoid choking, just as a pair of his own trousers were yanked from his spilled suitcase and stretched taut around his head. Eyes bulging with fury, head shaking like a man in a seizure, his head veins pounding, effing and blinding till he coughed and drooled and eventually hung back his head. ‘…MMM, mm! MMMGH! mm! Mm, mm!’ Natalia found that along with his owl-hooting, and the clock tick, and her racing heart, her vagina was tap-tapping, tap-tapping.

‘What… what now?’

‘Just let him calm down. If he drives away half-pissed like he is, he’ll kill himself.’

‘MMMMGHHH—!’ Ed gave a sudden lunge like he would blow the ball straight through the fabric.

‘He doesn’t look very calm. You really think he’s just going to go to sleep like a baby?’

‘What else do you suggest? Put the lights out so he does?’

‘Punch them out?’

‘I don’t want to annoy him any more than he is. I should have soaked that gobstopper in vodka. Edward, stop wriggling, calm down then we’ll set you free!’ Neill grabbed two cushions from the sofa and stuffed them under Ed’s body as an ‘MGGGGHHHHH!’ shot one leg with an almighty swing into the air, narrowly missing Neill’s face.

Natalia threw over her bikini top which he promptly wound around Ed’s shins.

‘There we go,’ Neill dusted his hands and stood back. ‘With his core strength, he isn’t lifting those anywhere. The exercise might even do him good.’

‘Depends how you’re spelling exorcise.’ 

They watched him wriggling side to side like the worst Gladiator contestant on file.

‘Pull his pants down,’ Natalia declared.

‘Jesus, Natalia - we can’t go all Russian on him. Or did you just want to laugh at his todger?’

‘Just pull them down.’

‘Et voila,’ Neill obliged - ‘le poulet!’ flourishing his palms like a butcher as Natalia stared down at Ed’s slabs of uncooked chicken. 

‘Kick him in the knackers then. But pray keep him fertile, some blind bastard with no sense of smell might still want to try reproduce with him.’

Ed’s eyes stared back at Natalia like marbles, like the chicken before slaughter, red neck exploding like a beer bottle with a monster ‘MMMGGGHHH!’ as Natalia drew a long shaking breath, wondering if she could really carry through her idea. 

She looked to Neill and back again. ‘I don’t know…’

‘What?’ Neill frowned.

She grabbed Ed’s pants from the floor and tossed them over his face. Then she crouched down next to him. A peculiar feeling of compulsion, revulsion and adrenalin as she looked to his pink-tinged sac, scattered with white-pale hairs that made them look as bald as his head. They were flinching, shrinking firm with anger like Neill’s did when aroused.

‘Jesus what are you going do, bite his knob off?’

A final look to Neill, before she dived forward with the same brave deep breath as into the lake. Except it’s her tongue doing the strokes, and just as slowly.

‘Nata—!’

A thunder flinch ran through Ed’s thighs before a gagged groan of surprise, like the lamb had sounded when it gave out after the car ride.

‘Oh, my, word…’ 

Neill’s drawl was irresistible, just as Ed’s body buckled hard and made her retreat again. She looked to Neill, whose face has softened - oh! - just like the very first time he ever looked at her!— and she dives back in, her tongue from the bottom of the sac to the top, as it shrinks and pulses and Ed groans again, realising upon this second lick that this wasn’t a joke.

‘Oh, my fucking word. Oh, my fucking word… Oh, my—’ 

Neill was pacing in a circle, running his hand through his hair and looking back again, hand covering his mouth.

‘Oh. My. God. That’s the horniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Oh, Miss Belittlington, you are my fucking girl!’ 

Ed’s balls taste vaguely of Wotsits and minty shower gel. They could be Lindt truffles for all the words falling in her ears. Their hostage quivers till the pants fall off his face and his eyes roll like a muffled puppy, legs gone limp - his whole body in fact, as the blood draws to the centre of him - without his control, but her eyes are closed, and she doesn’t see, only hear, through the yelping commentator of the most explosive ball game that year.

‘Oh. My. GOD. He’s hard! Look at that hard-on, bouncing around! Fuck me! Not literally. Jesus, Natalia!’

She opens her eyes to see in macro vision now, Ed’s purple-pink pulsating compass pointing north. It’s as straight as an arrow, without the slight curve of Neill’s; off centre, as though five minutes past the hour, and bursting like her pride.

‘I’m sorry, Ed, I can’t stop her!’ Neill cawed. 

Maybe he thinks she’ll suck Ed’s cock. But she didn’t think this far. She looks at it like an alien lifeform. It’s a penis, in familiar colour and behaviour. But it’s not Neill’s. She doesn’t want to bring her hand to touch it, let alone put her mouth near it. She is almost holding her nose from breathing too deep the scent, not unpleasant, of another man. Ed’s balls are her friends for now; their texture pleasing on her nostrils and her lips and her tongue, smoother than Neill’s, but where she is happy to burrow and roost, and watch the results of the game as though from a private box on the football pitch.

‘My god! Are you… going to make him come?’

That would victoriously calm down the bulldog, but she wasn’t about to do something she didn’t want to. Can Ed come without having his cock touched? But Neill is now laying casually beside him on the steps, like a polite gentleman on the bank of a bursting river, who puts out his hand, and barely had it gripped Ed’s shaft before his thighs maraca-shake and he’s hoom-hooming throes of seawater.

‘There you go, mate…’

‘There’s your cum-sent.’

Neill guffawed. ‘Fucking skyward!’ Ed laid with his eyes closed like a dead man whilst Neill kept shaking his head and laughing in disbelief. 

‘You raped him. Well, we raped him. We’ll untie you Ed. If you promise not to do anything stupid, ok?’ 

Ed nodded, and in a moment was trudging up the stairs, rubbing his arms, with a long, sorrowful grunt. 

‘SHUH-oot me. SHUH-oot me’ - over and over again.

‘You already shot yourself, Lennon!’

‘Nooo, Ed, don’t do it! Who’s going to make our dinner later!’ Natalia’s laughter would have tapered fast into guilt, were it not for Neill throwing her in the air and spinning her till she was ‘sick, SICK’s!—teen! Oh happy unbirthday, sick-teen’s girthday… much ha-penis, for Your Teaness, you teenage fucking venus!’

Sliding down his front, unzipping his fly, she found it thick and bursting, and in seconds was swallowing thick, voluptuous nectar.

If she was ever surprised that she enjoyed doing a thing with her tongue to a certain part of a man’s anatomy that in life BC she’d recoiled to imagine, the surprise that she could do it to a man she didn’t love was a notion as unfathomable right now as Alice losing her ability to remember How Doth the Little Crocodile after falling down the rabbit hole. 

Five days ago she was belittled as ‘divotchka, little billy-att’ - she looked up that Russian word since - ‘blyad’ meant bitch or slut, and the attempted rape by a repugnant imposter of her dad had made her wince at the touch of the very man she loved like her own flesh. How now, then, had she pounced on his friend’s spud-sack and licked like it was a Flake chocolate bar and watched both men she admired most in the world, crumble like one? 

For although she didn’t fancy Ed, she was growing to like him, for he was Neill’s best friend, and anything about Neill, she adored - anything Neill was connected to, she was compelled by, and really, she was doing it for him - she may as well have been licking Neill’s balls for all his verbiage, and in the end, she swallowed his outcome. And now, his sighs go on like he’s still outcoming, whilst wrapped around her watching Fifty Shades of Grey, and she looked to the ceiling, not yet daring to venture up there to brush her spunk-chalked teeth.

‘He’s been up there for two hours now. Do you think he’s really topped himself?’

‘Not unless that creaking I can hear is his fat body swinging.’

‘Neill - what about the legal stuff, like he says, is he an accomplice? Technically, if you go down, he’ll go down too.’

‘Exactly. I need a cell mate. …Aw! Here he is! Come join us, Eddie Saunders!’

Ed was pattering down the stairs and heading straight to the kitchen without a glance.

‘Hey! Let’s play Trivial Pursuit! Who’s chairman of Norwich City F.C.?’

Ed grunted. 

‘…Ed Baaaalls!’

‘Neill,’ she tittered, ‘go easy on him.’

‘As you did? It’s like his vocal cords have been shot! Everything he wanted to say, you nuked! You nuked it right in his gonads!’ 

Ed came over sipping a glass of water. 

‘My, I’ve never seen you with such a choice of tipple, Edward! Budge up, Natalia—’

‘What the fuck are you watching?’

‘Fifty Shades of—’

‘Turn it off. I won’t have it in my house.’

‘Ooh! Too rude for Sex Ed, really?’

‘No. Because it’s fucking terrible. Andrea loved it - I hated it. It was the beginning of the end for us!’

‘Well I do concur. I got more excited by that two minutes of bottom-smacking in Secretary than probably all of this. That bloke’s face is just not right.’

‘But it’s the biggest romance book of all time, Ed! Weren’t we just talking about this?’

‘No!’ he snapped. ‘Fastest selling due to being the biggest hyped! They must have wanted to kill BDSM, they chose actors wetter than a kipper. Everything about this film… the acting, the music, the pacing, makes my fucking blood boil…’

‘Thought you said Andrea went all conservative?’ Neill frowned.

‘But she did. This film is all about signing fucking contracts for a sexual liaison. What were you saying earlier about stating everything out loud like a court reading? Turn it off!’

‘Ok, ok Ed, keep your hair on.’

‘Let’s put on Alice in Wonderland to brush up before the trip tomorrow—’ Natalia flicked on the 1951 Disney cartoon and fast-forwarded the opening credits.

‘Trip. Hmph.’

‘Well I wasn’t sure if you were coming or going Ed, but…’ A suppressed laugh from both of them, as Natalia fast-forwarded on through the first scene, till Alice was following the white rabbit.

Ed, eyes on the screen, nodded stiffly. ‘Do you think that was right?’

‘Well, it was merely Alice crooning with some bluebirds; that’s not in the book. Natalia’s right to fast-forward it, I dare say.’

‘What she did,’ he growled.

‘Not at all, Ed, not at all! She demoralised you, shamed and absolutely violated you. It was obscene, perverted, and it made you splatter your own stomach in cum. I’d say it wasn’t right, it was absolutely epic. I mean, I never thought I’d say that Ed’s cum is epic.’

‘I could end up in jail,’ Ed said soberly.

‘It would be an interesting case. Demure sixteen-year-old girl rapes crass 39-year-old idiot with her tongue! He walks about for the next day like someone’s cut out his! Meanwhile I’ll cut out and keep the headlines for you! What do you reckon, darling?’

‘Ohh, Ed,’ she chortled, ‘but you did spank me pretty hard this morning.’

The pair erupted into chest-bouncing laughter as Ed looked on. 

‘You’re both fucking perverts.’

‘Do you want to ring Rape Crisis, Ed?’

Silence.

‘Well I think you’ve got the right attitude. I think it’s revenge you should be seeking, really. Why don’t you come over here and taste her own medicine.’

‘What the fuck do you mean by that.’

‘We can’t be worried about Ed going down, when you’ll thoroughly wash his mouth out, hmm?’ The pair dissolved into laughter, muffled by snogging and groping as Ed grimaced to the sink.

‘He needs a bit more convincing. A day trip to learn about the Victorian paedophile who wrote Alice in Wonderland should do it.’ Neill pulled his buzzing phone from his pocket. ‘Oh, look who it is! Eddie, keep away from the staircase, it’ll give you PTSD! It’s Justin and Monica on FaceTime!’  

Natalia hurriedly tied up her robe. ‘Neill, I don’t know if this is a good idea, after what they said about me, and—’

‘Relax, you giggling little adolescent. They’re just jealous geriatric twats.’ Neill answered the call with the camera squarely on Ed. ‘There he is! Our Snowdonian host with the most, too grossed to make a toast!’

‘Hey, Ed!’ Monica and Justin’s voices came like they were trapped in a Drink Me bottle. 

Ed gave an awkward wave. ‘Hey,’ he pushed a smile. ‘How are you two! I’m just in the middle of—’

‘…His guests! Budge over darling; squidge up Ed. There we go.’

‘Hey guys! Oh, you’re all in Snowdonia! Ohh, we wish we could join you!’

‘Wait, wait, let me try add Claire—’

‘No, Rich—’

Claire’s face was already unfolding. ‘Well he-lloooo strangers! So you three are out in Wales?’

‘Yep, all here in Eddie’s luxury pad! Have you seen the staircase? It’s fucking orgasmic!’ 

‘Gawwd, I’m so jealous! I can’t get as far as Greenwich Park right now on my workload! Wait… are you all in bed together?’

‘No, we are not!’ Ed frowned.

‘Just a joke, mate!’ they laughed.

‘Don’t be diz-garsting!’ Neill drolled, as laughs and pleasantries abounded - mostly Ed and Neill trying to get a word in edgeways to Monica’s cooing over their wild swimming and the picturesque Dolbadarn Castle, then Justin guffawing over the miniature railway and the Ugly House. And then Ed, upon query from Claire that his sheepish expression was so unfamiliar a sight, ventured to mention that very aptly - they hit a lamb on the road, but handed it in.

‘Oh my gawwd! Did you get into trouble?’

‘No, no. Pure accident, and the lamb’s fine.’

‘Shame, you could have had a good roast!’

More silliness and sharp elbows from Ed, till the conversation resumed on Mama Monica, and a drowsy debate on how much was too much for a cot from House of Fraser, till the conversation was jumpstarted with what’s next on their Welsh itinerary.

‘Ed’s kindly touring us around a town where Lewis Carroll may or may not have visited to inspire his Alice books,’ Natalia said, as Neill turned the camera onto the TV where the fat dancing Dodo was smoking a pipe and spinning in a circle. ‘Like he may or may not have been a paedophile.’

‘We’re hoping to crack that mystery as well as others,’ said Ed.

‘Oh, Alice is a real rabbit hole,’ began Justin. ‘With all the opium they took in those days, it’s basically a drug trip. The caterpillar on the bong says it all.’

‘Well, we have some blow with us and that’s about it.’

‘Which we don’t need,’ added Natalia.

‘Ah! You’ve someone sensible with you then.’

‘Very sensible,’ grunted Ed.

After a round of goodbyes, have-funs, ‘see you at dinner next week, Ed!’ from Claire; blowing kisses of bye-bye-Monica bump - along with a lick-motion up the screen from Neill - the cacophony was over and Neill had his arms around Ed and Natalia at each side, kissing each their cheeks with gusto.

‘You’re staying then, Ed? Come onnn!—’ He shook him till his teeth rattled. ‘You promised you’d take Natalia up the tram.’

Ed pulled away. ‘But you’ll just want to see Portmeirion the day after.’

‘Exactly. And that takes us to Saturday morning, then we can all shake hands and go home, yes?’

Just their stuffy, schooly smell piqued a stab of moroseness, with a prick of pity there - perhaps for Dinkey. Four more forgotten schoolbooks, from under Neill’s car mats, now laid across the white duvet, signal more of her truth, her age, her origin of species: Thornwood High, of which the beautiful new headmaster has already declared his departure from. And now she’s encased in an affectionate back-strangle by that man himself, but the shrill mocking voice of Williams in her ear, testing her on the verb avoir. 

‘I have… you. You have… me. He has…. to get over it. For we have… forever…’ - with every squeeze of her ribs pushing a smile, till a final, ‘remember the lesson? How do you say I love you, Natalia?’ - ‘Ahhh’… - ‘Say it, say what you said back to me?’ - ‘Je t’aime, Neill’ - and suddenly Leeds didn’t feel so despicable in waiting. And she whispers that she’s glad Ed knows, she feels lighter, and he jokes back that Ed is too.

‘And God, I don’t think I’ll ever forget exploding in your mouth earlier.’

‘We leave Wales in three days,’ she sighed. ‘What’ll we do with the second week of Easter hols?’

‘I have some headmaster obligations to get on with.’ Neill walked away and rummaged for his PJs. ‘And family too, you know.’

‘Mum in London? Is she better?’

‘She’s alright. Here - look, another picture of Ras,’ he chuckled. ‘Look where he’s sitting.’

‘All the way up on their window ledge! Tell your teacher friend she’s not keeping him!’

‘I sent back a picture of lambkins. They’re very amused.’

‘Can we have lambkins indoors for a bit?’

‘No. She’ll shit everywhere.’ 

‘I saw a picture online, here look— they’ve put a nappy on a lamb’s bottom!’

‘No, Natalia.’

‘Well, can’t I come with you when you pick up Ras and meet the woman looking after her? Pretend to be Natasha, just like with Dr Brown?’

‘No, Natalia. Now down for dinner.’

Pizza and salad was eaten in that kind of dead but amicable silence that was like visiting her Uncle Andy when she was little. She and Neill fidgeting at the table, Ed at the sofa with his plate on his knee, grunting over a few times with some words about cricket, like dregs emptying from the reserves of man-brain. Eventually, she went up for a shower, then out to tend Henrietta, then stopped to watch the startling orange-pink sunset over the hills.

Ed came up alongside, passing her back her Maths book all crinkly dry again. 

‘Oh, er, thanks.’

‘Will Mr Noble mind?’

‘I’ll just say I spilled something.’ 

A pregnant pause.

‘Let’s get your little lamb back in then, Mary.’

Neill was cleaning the kitchen tops as they returned, and shortly all found themselves sitting around the coffee table. 

‘Tea truce, your Teaness?’ Ed set down Natalia’s mug.

‘Ah, now that’s better, Ed,’ as Neill squeezed her hand.

Ed took a breath and began. ‘So, why… how, a schoolgirl? I mean, yeah, I’ve long seen you’re in love. Look at you - your ankles always joined like a three-legged race on Sports Day. How did it start? …Shit! The fantasy of being a girl on her report card was real, and you spanked her for it?’

‘No, I’ve only ever spanked her once in school—’

‘The first morning I licked him whilst he slept. But he did want to spank me with the Yoga book, up on his desk with a vibrator up there…’

‘She had the red leotard on, you see. Just for me, in PE.’

A pause at Ed’s confused face as they laughed.

They proceeded to tell the story from the beginning, over sips of tea and whisky, as if transporting them into a disconnected world where the magic of meeting Neill prickled through Natalia’s fibre of being.

‘…And then he sits me down, makes me tea and asks me which teachers to fire.’

Ed chortled. ‘What a dream task! I know I’d have got rid of a few of mine!’

‘And I had the absolute time of my life helping him change the uniform, receptionist, school trips, then bust him being Santa in the Grotto, and be invited to ogle at a Headmistress he pulled at the Christmas buffet…’

‘Bragging of another woman? Weren’t you jealous?’

‘I didn’t think it right to go after a schoolgirl,’ Neill sighed. ‘Of course I adored her. Perhaps I was trying to make her jealous so she might one day jump on me and kiss me and I wouldn’t have a choice in the matter.’

She laughed modestly.

‘So she’s really moved in with you? How did you manage that?’

‘Sort of came about by accident. Her mum doesn’t give a hoot.’

‘Do you go to school together in the morning?’

‘She gets a bus from round the corner.’

‘Do you do it in school?’

Neill shrugged. ‘I fucked her once over my desk.’

Ed exclaimed. 

‘No-one could hear; I shoved a tangerine in her mouth. I spent longer another time, fingering her whilst I did a good hour of work with my other hand. That was the first time I told her I love her, so there was cunt juice everywhere. Stuck my cock up her the first time when her mum rang.’

‘You’re unbelievable. Have you been caught? By teachers? Other kids?’

‘Well, clearly not.’

‘Didn’t your Deputy find out about it? Was that why you were nabbed by the pigs? It wasn’t drugs, was it?’

‘We weren’t nabbed.’ Neill paused. ‘But you may as well know, he was onto us. Almost. He died for our sins on Good Friday. And no, I didn’t kill him, but I do dream that I’m punching his corpse till his head comes off completely, just to be sure. Anything else, officer?’

‘Fuck! Serendeputy! And no-one else knows? How can you be sure?’

‘Eddie, do you hear sirens? Are there numbers flashing up on my phone? No-one fucking knows. The reason Natalia was out of sorts and had to see a doctor last week was because she thought she was meeting her dad and it was a trick played on her. It made her ill and I’ve been trying to cheer her up since.’

‘Oh.’

‘On that note, what do you want to watch, darling?’ Neill offered the remote.

‘Put the football on for Ed. Peace offering.’ Natalia flicked the channel.

‘Reds vs Man City. Ooh! Look at that score! Half an hour in and 3-0 to Liverpool already?’ 

‘A Beatles win!’ added Natalia.

‘Well Edwardy woodpecker…’ Neill began, as Ed leant into the TV - ‘does that mean you forgive your little forbidden lovers, your loveliest lickle licentious pals in the whole worldly world?’ - Neill leaned back with his arm around Natalia, her robe slipping off at the sides, outlining her tanned arms and hips against the bleached white, and she fancies that it looks rather like the hatched lines of a Tenniel drawing, and that it’s ok that the curve of her breast exposes a little more, and a little more… for Ed is ‘happy’ for him, ‘mate, I really am. Listen, what happened earlier I had no control of. If you touch a man it’s involuntary like that, you know.’

‘Bollocks.’

Natalia snorted in laughter. ‘Oh Neill, maybe what I did to him was a bit… Premier Inn, you know?’

‘I wouldn’t say it was cheap. But you sure gave him a purple strip!’ 

Ed shook his head. ‘You’re hilarious, Rich.’

‘Pfft! You’re turned on by this beautiful girl, ripe at the age of cunt-scent as much as I am.’

‘I do not get turned on by 16-year olds.’

‘I said this one. And I really must apologise. This morning when I fucked her in front of you, you couldn’t see her beautiful tits. We weren’t under arrest, but they were under a vest…’ Neill’s hand stroked up and down her hips.

‘Rich…’

‘So I tell you what - if I can’t make you as hard as she did earlier, we’ll call it quits, go home tomorrow and I’ll slaughter the lamb myself.’

‘Neill—!’

‘Relax, sweetie. Do you really think we’ll fail? That you, you absolute stunning thing, wouldn’t make him harder than that goalpost? Here, Ed. Another illustration from The Joy of Sex…’

Pulling up her chin gently, Neill softly gripped her backwards and begun slipping the robe off her shoulders as his face sunk into hers.

‘Stay sitting, Ed,’ he broke snog to murmur. ‘Time for a lap dance.’ 

She found herself on her knees, face butting like a goat into Ed’s lap, her robe thrown off altogether. Ed sat, rigidly caught in limbo, as though it would be improper etiquette to pull out from being the lower half of the bread bun and leave Natalia butting the couch cushions like a wilting piece of lettuce. And now looking to her face, as though in moral support to her expression of mixed pleasure-agony as she is penetrated by the head of the Head crouched behind her, he coughs, ‘are you ok, Nat?’ as if he were not bawdy Ed, he was never bawdy Ed, but Dinkey-watchman to her wellbeing, and Neill the devil himself. 

‘I’m s-sorry— Ed— I can’t s-stoppp— him…’ 

‘Tell me when you feel Ed getting hard,’ the devil speaks.

‘His—elbow’s— in —the way…’

‘Move your fucking elbow, you cheat. Aw, he’s all embarrassed. More than you ever were…’

Her face smooshed into Ed’s crotch now, the man who mocked her for looking fourteen is now growing a stonker against her throat, almost choking her ability to push out the words, ‘he’s hard… he— he’s hard!’

‘Show us that stiffie again, Ed!’ - just as Ed began to extract himself.

‘Listen, guys. I’m having an early one…’

‘Come here Ed. I know how to finish you off.’

‘Guys, be serious. It’s a lot to take in, and—’

‘My, we saw earlier!’

‘It’s ok Ed, you go to bed!’ said Natalia, ‘but wait, where’s those cuffs, or boxing gloves! Does he get a ban!’

‘If he wants to burst like a human blueberry!’

‘Don’t you want another stiff one before bed!’

Ed smiled wryly and hurried off upstairs.

Llandudno’s promenades were lined with cafés and shops, bustling with visitors of all creeds. Easy wide roads led here, to wide streets of the town itself that drew a rare note of appreciation from Neill. Natalia drew down the window to  take in the sight of the majestic Great Orme, a large limestone headland looming at the skyline, and taste the air like salty balls filled with the squawk of spanked seagulls. 

‘I feel fine!’

‘Oh, you do indeed,’ replied Neill.

‘It’s the Beatles track that kept skipping the other day,’ said Natalia, ‘I guess it was waiting for the world to know how much of a Littlington I really am… well, at least Ed.’

‘I was onto the truth when I said you’re his colleague. Although I won’t be telling all the world but rather keeping mum.’

‘Natalia!’ Neill rapped. ‘Did you send mum a birthday message?’

‘Whose mum?’

‘Ed’s mum. Your mum, silly.’

‘Oh, you remembered!’

‘Ye-es. Did you?’

‘Yes! I texted.’

‘All good with her?’

‘Yes!’

‘Does she know you’re all mine?’

‘In… a roundabout way’ - just as Ed circled them round one, set with palm trees in the middle of a rather elegant junction of Victorian buildings whilst muttering at his phone map.

‘Does she know how good your pussy feels on this holiday? Like a firm, juicy fruitcake?’

‘Er… no.’ She tapped on her phone. ‘But I do want to bake a cake later to show Ed what a good cook as well as fuck I am.’

‘And send it to your mum?’

‘Maybe a picture of it.’ Her phone began sounding a recipe video from British TV cook Nigella Lawson, tossing in shards of dark chocolate into whisked egg white and addressing the camera in the purr of a temptress.

‘Here we are,’ Ed roared the engine up a hill. ‘Just in time! Chocs away, let’s run!’ A blue tram with gold lettering painted with the number 5 was descending, just as they grabbed wallets and slammed doors and ran in an excited tussle across the street just as the travellers were edging up the platform, Ed panting ahead for ‘two adult and one… I mean, three adult tickets.’

Natalia, ensconced around Neill’s neck all the way to the seat like an excitable monkey, found that the space left next to them was swiped by a young Japanese woman, opposite whom a Japanese man sat - next to Ed. Upon the couple’s exchange of doting whispers, Ed duly swapped to let them sit side by side, and so, the three that had fought and argued all but 24 hours ago were seated together like butter wouldn’t melt. Whilst the foreign couple gazed blankly, a sly stroke from Natalia’s finger on Ed’s neck made him cough, then a thigh stroke and jibing whisper from Neill of ‘you can’t stop thinking about it, can you?’ turned his face pink - ‘you don’t want to fucking go home, do you?’

‘Fuck off you two or I’ll cuff your legs together and throw you off the pier.’

Chugging up the hill, Natalia felt glorious, on sea air and her thick boyfriend’s neck scented by shampoo and sex, whispering sternly that she’ll do all the public display of affection whilst they could, watching the tramline behind them threading a metal worm through charming streets, up into green hills till the town became all but rooftops clustered by a bright blue sea, and the bell donged for the first platform to change trains. ‘How long?’ - ‘Six minutes’ - ‘Just enough time,’ as Neill lit up, puffed in Natalia’s face and passed it to Natalia - who puffed in Ed’s face and passed it to Ed, who was about to puff into Neill’s face when he turned the pair of them round, swiped the fag and set them onto the next tram as he stood waving.

‘Enjoy the view up there, lovers!’

Jumping back on at the last second to a look of reproach from the driver, he swiped up Natalia into his lap again until they finally arrived at the towering observatory in a blustering breeze. Natalia’s teeth chattered exaggeratedly, or with part adrenalin, to stand and take in the view of the Irish Sea, the sun lasering in and out of the clouds as children ran amok in the playpark and tourists busied in and out of the gift shop.

‘See the mountains kiss high heaven, and the waves clasp one another!’ Neill holds his phone up to the view of Snowdonia whilst Ed throws up bits of realisation like hairballs.

‘It all makes sense why you never want to be in pictures. It’s not just because it’s a uni girl…’

‘Get over it, Ed. Better to live life on the edge than die over it.’ He gave Ed a mock wrench over the precipice then reeled from a firm kick back in the crotch. ‘You’ve never blown a nut like that, have you?’ Neill teased Ed’s eyes narrow again, ‘your balls are bewitched now, aren’t they?’ And there they are, wrestling like two high school boys. Two high school boys who know she’s a high school girl. And Ed is added to the list of People Who Know - along with Becky - and their wedding list is two-strong… along with a bound and gagged Sam and Ryan, and an effigy of Dinkey… the amusement fills Natalia’s daydreaming mind on the tram all the way back down.

‘‘Education is important but beer is importanter’’! Neill read a sign outside The Snowdon pub. ‘Now that line would open a novel nicely, and that is a sign to go here. I’m starving.’

‘They’re not doing food yet.’

‘Blast!’

‘Can’t I get a cup of tea here?’ Natalia sighed.

‘No, let’s move the car down into town and see Llandudno proper.’

Rolling into town, Ed circled looking for a free space, as Neill mocked the size of Ed’s Q7 that had now clocked three roadside spaces it wouldn’t fit into.

‘Hate this song!’ Natalia grumbled from the back. ‘Toe-jam football. Juju eyeball. Walrus gumboot. What do these lyrics even mean?’

‘He keeps his spinal crackers on his Ono sideboard. Simples,’ said Ed.

‘It’s just a Beatles word salad,’ said Neill. ‘They mean nothing.’

‘Worse than his Doors! Beatles… Doors… stupid band names!’

‘She’s grumpy. She needs caffeine.’

‘I don’t ‘need caffeine,’ I just want a cup of tea. And no, it’s not the same thing.’

‘Decaf then?’

‘NO!’

‘Stick it in this Pay & Display up Market Street.’

They found themselves at a door of what looked like an old theatre, smelling it was a pub, and finding it was a heaving Wetherspoons. ‘A cut price crowd, urban yet simple!’ struck a look of repugnance on Neill, until he remembered he was both broke and parched, and Ed urged them to just sit, sit at the bar and have a pint - and Natalia her tea before hell breaks loose - whilst Neill watched the look of contentment growing on her face that Ed said ‘must be the L-theanine, I remember now, that’s the relaxing stuff in tea.’ 

By which point Natalia had spied at least ten familiar pub classics on the huge three-fold menu, and hastened them to find a seat, arriving at the only unoccupied patch of wood in the place - on a table seemingly sized for the Last Supper, where two men and a woman were already seated. One ruddy-cheeked chap with hair strewn over his bald patch beckoned them, as they cleared away three used mugs and sleeve-wiped some spilled salt - a fingering of grains tossed superstitiously over one shoulder by Ed.

‘Well, Nigella would never eat here, but still.’ They looked up and around for a moment to appreciate the sheer size and scale of the building that had once been the Palladium Theatre, with the velvet red seats of the stalls above still intact, and their table where the stage had once been. 

‘Got to be the most impressive Spoons venue,’ remarked Neill, when a moustached man in a moss-green waistcoat at the table drew a breath.

‘The Knight’s Templar on Chancery Lane beats this hands down. Marble everywhere, chaises longues, mahogany doors - even the toilets are a thing of luxury!’

‘How simply marvellous,’ nodded Neill, ‘to have marble and mahogany to eat your mixed grill off. Are you chaps on a nationwide Spoons crawl?’

The ruddy-cheeked man spoke up in a Liverpudlian accent. ‘Oh, ignore old Mendalls! He has to find any way to tell people he’s a bloody Londoner!’

‘Oh, we’re Londoners too,’ Neill raised his pint and smiled. ‘Just temporarily slumming it in the cheapest bar in North Wales. Cheers!’

Mendalls smiled wryly and raised his glass back. Natalia stared at his moustache. It looked like a sweeping brush, slicked at one corner like Salvador Dalí, whilst a burgundy bow tie pushed up tight into red lizardy neck skin. She thought he looked like a rich villain from an Enid Blyton mystery story but with twinklier eyes.

‘More Southerners, eh!’ remarked the woman now, evidently not in the men’s party, with wispy grey-blonde hair piled up on her head like an aged Brigitte Bardot. ‘We’ve just been listening to them waxing on about his well done steak. I told them, Spoons is the last place you critique a steak!’

‘Or the coffee,’ added Ed. ‘But you can’t expect much more than a hit of burnt caffeine from a machine that gives you free refills for less than the price of a Folio book at a vintage fair.’

‘Well I say Spoons is what makes the British great,’ enthused Neill. ‘Democratic in social class and prices. And always informative about the history of a place—!’ He nodded to framed clippings about Alice Liddell up on the wall, where Natalia was already gazing mid-squeezing her teabag.

‘Oh, what he doesn’t know about Lewis Carroll—’ the ruddy-cheeked man nudged Mendalls, ‘isn’t worth knowing.’

‘Oh? You’re academics?’

‘He’s a doctor of English literature. I’m just a lowly Maths teacher, which is probably why he hangs about with me!’

Mendalls put down his ale and chuckled. ‘So modest, Frank. I’m actually Professor John Mendalls, of English at Bangor. I studied Reverend Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, for two decades, after I wrote my PhD Oxford thesis on the work of the man himself…’ 

They all looked up at a colour-tinted photograph of Lewis Carroll in a black bowtie, laying down on the grass surrounded by four young girls.

‘He looks like quite the busy man,’ remarked Neill.

‘Oh, he was the Casanova of the Victorian nursery! But Victorian children were like little adults. His diaries year by year are a roll call of conquests. He would cruise at the seaside, as he did in Eastbourne in 1877, making friends with new children every day as normally I dare say we are doing now!’

‘We were talking about this very topic,’ Neill said. ‘By the way, I’m Dr Alexander - doctor of English. I currently lecture in Yorkshire.’

‘Rah! A comrade! Is your speciality Victorian?’

‘More Shakespeare, the Romantics; my thesis was the World Wars. Although I do know a good bit of Victorian lingo. This is my gigglemug of a bantling, Daisy here—’ he tousled Natalia’s head, ‘and her boyfriend,’ he nodded at Ed, ‘is my chuckaboo, er - Nigel. A bit of a foozler when he’s half corned, but afternoonified enough for my darling basket of oranges here!’

‘Har, har, har!’ An eruption spread over Mendalls’ features as Daisy and Nigel cast Dr Alexander the curious side eye. ‘Pleased to meet you!’ 

He leaned forward to shake Neill’s hand with fingers like Bonbouffe sausages whilst Natalia peered at the spidery map of capillaries on his face. His nose and ears seemed twice the size they should be. She looked to Neill’s ears wondering if they would one day grow as big as that.

‘Nige!’ Neill tapped Ed. ‘Pop along and order Daisy and I two mixed grills, now there’s a good prospective son-in-law.’ Ed grunted and got up.

‘Wait, my love!’ A mock posh voice from Natalia now rang out. ‘I’d far rather a quinoa salad!’

‘Na—No, Daisy, we spoke about this,’ began Neill.

‘You know I only eat steak blue and I won’t be getting that here Daddy. Nigel lets me eat veggie, don’t you darling? Please, oh please - Daddy!’

Neill blinked curiously at her then waved his hand. ‘Sure, sure’ - as Ed squeezed out. 

They resumed supping their drinks with benign smiles.

‘So, my fellow academic fellow! Did Lewis Carroll really visit Llandudno or is it just hogwash to impress the Japanese tourists?’

‘Well, what we know is that Alice’s family, the Liddells, spent many holidays in their house Penmorfa here, and the Great Orme appears in the background of a painting of the three sisters.’

‘We’ve just been up on the tram,’ said Natalia. ‘Rather amazing view!’

‘Quite, young lady, quite.’

‘Was the painting one of Carroll’s nudie pictures then?’ Neill asked.

‘No, no! It was by Sir William Blake Richmond. Of course, Carroll took many photographs of children undressed. It was a way of the times! Did anyone call Julia Margaret Cameron a child molester?’

The Bardot woman at the end of the table turned in surprise. ‘Carol who?’

‘Lewis Carroll, ma’am,’ Mendalls nodded up at the photo. ‘Poet, mathematician, photographer, Anglican deacon - and author of the Alice books. Tiny Mulder said a language is not complete until it has translations of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland!’

‘Look at him with those little girls!’ she stared. ‘And you say he shot them naked? My, he’s the Victorian Jimmy Savile!’

Just at that moment Ed was walking back to the table, giving a little curtsey that only Natalia noticed and stifled a giggle.

‘Rather presumptuous,’ replied Mendalls, ‘Miss, er Mrs—’

‘Sheila.’

‘To love the little girl, Mrs Sheila, doesn’t imply base intentions. To share an affinity with the innocence of childhood, is very different from wanting to break it.’

‘Sounds like you’re just in time for another ripe old debate,’ Neill muttered as Ed squeezed to the other side of Natalia.

‘Isn’t that just what a paedo is?’ Sheila exclaimed, screwing her button nose till her jowls scored in three places. ‘Look at Michael Jackson! Gentle as a dove, they all said, but they outed him in the end!’

The professor sipped his ale quietly. ‘In my three decades of studying Charles Dodgson there was not one scrap of evidence the man did anything inappropriate. One simply cannot apply newfangled modern ideology to social norms of the 1850s. The past is a foreign country!—they do things differently there.’

‘L.P. Hartley,’ nodded Neill.

‘Was he a paedo too?’ frowned Ed.

‘Perhaps, if I may,’ began Natalia, ‘Lewis Carroll and Michael Jackson were a different sort of paedophile—’

‘Savile was a monster!’ retorted Sheila. ‘My fella even says he was demonic! He preyed on little girls, boys, the weak, old, disabled - anything with a pulse!’

‘Or without,’ said Ed.

‘The headmaster of my little sister’s school says he was the Yorkshire Ripper,’ added Natalia.

Sheila turned and stared at her with her big blue eyes, heavily pencilled like a pierrot clown, as Natalia wondered, did the amount of eyeliner women required as they aged, grow at the same rate as old men’s earlobes?

‘You are comparing apples and oranges,’ Professor Mendalls frowned as though in reply to Natalia’s thought.

‘Well, that’s what I’m on about!’ retorted Natalia, before hurriedly coughing back into dialect. ‘One can observe different breeds, that come in different personalities, shades and style…’

Sheila frowned. ‘A kiddy fiddler’s a kiddy fiddler! There’s no dressing it up and making it ok!’

‘I’m not saying that. I’m saying neither of you are right.’ 

The professor shook his head, still not looking at either female, whilst Frank swallowed his ale in quiet bemusement.

‘She’s saying there’s magnitudes of monster,’ said Ed at last.

‘My fellow, Lewis Carroll was never convicted of an offence and is therefore not comparable to anything of the sort. Besides, if he was, he would be considered a hebephile.’

‘Heeby what?’ 

‘Paedophiles are attracted to prepubescent children, but a hebephile has a preference for children at the cusp of puberty, between the ages of roughly eleven to fourteen—’

‘Goodness,’ muttered Neill.

‘But there are also ephebophiles - who are attracted to fifteen to sixteen-year-olds,’ the professor kept going, with a fixed stare on Natalia as she nodded politely - ‘and teleiophiles, who prefer those seventeen years or older…’

‘Oh—’

‘Whilst a gerontophile, likes the elderly!’ he finished with a low rumble of laughter, whilst Sheila had gone quiet.

‘Geronto? Is that the last stop before necro?’ said Ed.

‘So why, in your opinion professor,’ continued Neill, ‘did Lewis Carroll take pictures of prepubescent girls starkers?’

‘Well, it temporarily cured his speech impediment! I jest, I jest. You see, back in the 1850s a child was not considered a sexual being, and so photographs - as rare as they were, for only the rich were just dabbling in the new medium - were not considered spurious when portraying naked children. They’d send Christmas cards with their own naked children on. These days it would be as controversial as a baby’s tub-time snapshot!’

‘Don’t I recall that Alice’s family cut ties with Carroll overnight for something he did, that never came to light?’ Neill frowned.

‘Likely as little as proposing marriage to Alice,’ was the professor’s answer.

‘Ironic isn’t it,’ said Natalia, ‘the way we fret over nude pictures of children these days, sort of purports them to be sexual - like there’s something lurid behind the innocence, that the Victorians didn’t imply.’

Frank almost spat his ale. ‘Don’t think none of this matters when the Victorian age of consent were twelve years old!’

‘Twelve!’ Ed exclaimed.

‘Correct; it was the statute of consent set in 1275,’ the professor nodded. ‘It wasn’t until… ah—’

‘1885, it was raised to 16,’ finished Neill.

‘Now does it seem a big deal for me to have a boyfriend, Daddy?’ Natalia nudged Neill, looking straight at Ed who was busying himself in a particularly large gulp of ale.

‘I’d say Nigel is a very lucky man.’

‘And what do you do, Daisy?’ Frank asked.

‘I’m a mature student,’ said Natalia.

‘Who is most excellent at Mathematics as both Lewis Carroll and Frank here put together,’ added Neill. ‘We just saw her books back from high school. Nigel couldn’t believe it!’ 

‘Well,’ Ed coughed, ‘I imagine Victorian geronamo-philes were as rare as they are now. When they were lucky to outlive childhood, and their thirties were the life expectancy, they couldn’t waste any time but get stuck in!’ 

‘Unlike in our case, we had a long wait!’

Natalia took a second to realise Neill was referring to the waiter finally hovering their plates of food. The young man motioned where the cutlery and condiments were located, then after a pause, offered to grab them.

‘Would you mind awfully?’ called Ed. ‘We’re just having a spot of debate!’ - ‘Feel free to join the hoo-haa, it’s rather like Question Time!’ Natalia chimed in knee-nudging laughter with Ed, as the waiter returned with a handful of forks and basket of sauces, bashfully querying what the debate was about.

‘How Doth the Little Hebephile!’ announced Natalia, as Neill obliged to jump in:

‘Bestow his shining lens…!’

She rejoined:

And Neill finished:

‘World-class, Daisy and Daddy!’ Frank erupted into laughter, whilst Ed slow-clapped:

‘Talk about an anthem for doomed youth! You know you really ought to be on Britain’s Got Talent!’ 

The professor only gave a wry grin.

‘It’s a take on How Doth the Little—’ Natalia began to the waiter who was looking as shocked as his mop-top hair.

‘I, I do know the book—’

‘Basically they’re debating whether Lewis Carroll was a demonic monster like Jimmy Savile or just a gentle nonce like Michael Jackson,’ said Ed.

‘The author of Peter Pan faced not dissimilar accusations. A common misunderstanding,’ sighed Mendalls, just as the waiter thoughtfully swept his hair from one eye. 

‘Well, I always read the Alice books as an allegory of the ego,’ he spoke in a faint but impassioned Mancunian dialect. ‘Wonderland’s an altered state of consciousness awakening the reader to the matrix in which we exist. She falls down the rabbit hole where time fragments, she loses her identity—’

‘He’s a smart lad,’ Sheila cooed.

‘He’s been talking with Justin,’ muttered Ed.

‘Oh, yes!’ enthused Natalia. ‘I always got so freaked out by Alice’s neck growing long and her losing her mind that I never wondered why a man would choose to write about a little gir—’

‘Innocence, purity; the blank slate!’ the professor’s voice presided, ‘all I dare say Carroll fancies as coming better through the image of an infant. The Victorian idolisation of the little girl was an adult male’s best opportunity of reconnecting with his own, lost self! Are you an academic, my boy?’

‘Leave him be,’ said Sheila.

‘Oh, academics would never talk about the matrix,’ chuckled Neill.

‘The academic’s job is rather not to endorse any particular, cultish theory but to stick to the intellectual exploration of the text at hand.’ 

‘That usually involves protecting the institution from which the author was spawned,’ Neill jousted back to the professor, as the young waiter disappeared to another table beckoning his attention.

‘Oh, Carroll had a healthy anarchist in him. His love of writing Jabberwocky nonsense was to rubbish the moralist stories fed to children at the time.’

‘Sounds like our boy Lennon,’ nodded Ed. ‘Writing nonsense Beatles lyrics high on LSD to make the dry scholars shove off!’

Natalia elbowed Ed. ‘Is that why you wear sunglasses like his? Is he your hero? You sort of look like him too…’

‘No, but he did have a violent streak and almost beat his friend to death,’ Ed nudged her back, prompting giggles as they both looked to Neill like two rebels, just as Professor Mendalls was espousing more of his knowledge - into which they dipped their ears, mid-dipping Ed’s chips in ketchup - about how Carroll is featured in the artwork for the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album.

‘…In fact they wrote I Am The Walrus inspired by Carroll’s poem The Walrus and the Carpenter…’

‘Oh! Walrus gumboot!’

‘Indeed, who knew a Mock Turtle could inspire music’s greatest,’ remarked the professor.

‘No,’ Natalia frowned. ‘It’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee who read that poem.’

‘You’ll find it is the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon. It’s a scene of—’

‘No it is not!’ she said indignantly. ‘I just read it today!’

‘Upon the beach, where the Mock Turtle is crying!’ the professor exulted, ‘his eyes streaming with tears from eating the oysters!— which sounds rather ridiculous but we interpret as a critique of colonialism, as well of the education system - just like the Mock Turtle soup itself, for back then it—’

‘Here. I’ve got it here.’ Natalia pulled out Through the Looking Glass from her bag, as Neill and Ed watched in amusement at her chip-grease fingering to Chapter Four.

‘There!’

Mendalls leaned over and rubbed his moustache. ‘Ah! Two sea scenes; easily mistaken. Lovely edition, Folio is that?’

‘Been long since you’ve seen any copy, professor?’ chuckled Neill.

‘As we know Alexander, time is a fire in which we burn!  Four decades of studying the man and my mind is rather like a Spoons steak myself. And I must insist on real food at the Cottage Loaf now, Frank,’ he checked his watch. ‘My treat!’ 

The two men arose as Frank threw back the last of his ale.

‘Well, it surely has been entertaining, sitting here right on the stage!’ Natalia raised her mug to them.

‘Quite, young lady, quite. And time for these players to make our exits. It’s been illuminating talking to you all - a lively lot for debate! You should take young Daisy to the Chocolate Experience. Ten minute walk, just down Mostyn Street.’ He stepped aside for Sheila, who was smiling a goodbye too.

All five of them stared in surprise to where the young waiter was standing, coat slung over his shoulder - as Sheila approached him, took his hand in both of hers, and led him out.

Neill and Ed looked to each other.

‘Well fuck me…’

‘Geronimo!’

The Queen of Welsh Piers stretched out seven hundred metres into the Irish sea, to a view one side mountainous, the other lush green. Pop music blasted from a white Ferris wheel, whilst hanging mobiles made of shells clattered gently in the breeze. Alongside buckets and spades, crocs and paddleboards, were at least ten types of souvenir you could get your name written on, as Natalia wondered which of her growing list of names she’d even pick. Kiosks for craft beer, fresh fish and ice cream lined the wooden decking, sedately trampled by a steady traffic of smartly dressed holidaymakers.

‘Nigel, la law-son. Son in law. Was that the joke?’

‘Quite, young lady, quite.’

Natalia, excited by her first trip to any seaside town, was treated by the men to a £5 ice cream in one hand and £5 candyfloss in the other, as she absorbed each and every plaque of information between licks and mouth smears. 

‘It says here that many famous faces have sailed to the pier over the years, Ed, including Ringo Starr!’

‘Ring-erh Staaah! ...You know your posh accent in the pub was sexy, but your true Northernness is rather Beatles.’

‘Hmph! Neill still makes fun of it.’

They strolled onto the sandy beach, slipped off their shoes and walked ankle-deep in the lapping shore, the men pulling Natalia’s candyfloss like two hungry seagulls as they stared out at sailboats.

‘Could have been her son,’ said Ed at last.

‘Not the way he was waiting against that pillar like John Travolta. Not the way she took his hand like Rose West.’

‘What about all the kiddy fiddler’s a kiddy fiddler talk?’

‘People are vocal about what they must defend,’ said Neill, ‘and thus, what they are most attracted to.’

‘Exactly why Rich makes fun of your accent, Nat.’

‘And exactly why all your pederestal jibes undo you, Ed.’

‘Well that toyboy waiter’s at least twenty,’ said Ed. ‘Clearly age of consent.’

‘Let’s not think about her cunt scent. She must have been, like, sixty five!’

‘Natalia, you are terrible at telling age. She was early fifties at most. Quite a cougar actually.’

‘Oh, our receptionist Becky is a cougar, Ed! She’s 43 and loves teenage toyboys!’

‘Christ, it’s all going on in your school, isn’t it?’

‘Oh but tell Ed about Ofsted! Neill knows what a sixty-year-old woman tastes li—mggh—’ 

Neill’s hand plastered her mouth. ‘Time for the Chocolate Experience, Daisy?’

‘No way! I’m 16 not 6!’ And for the next hour they proceeded to hunt down the bronze statues through town, the men sauntering behind her. Alice was found looming with a rather wicked face outside a pub, whilst the Queen of Hearts was pointing in the earnestness of a traffic conductor in the middle of a junction. The White Rabbit was stooped over on a green by a parade of shops, and the Cheshire Cat lay upon a plinth on the corner of the West Shore, his eyes painted garish green with a Garfield grin.

‘Nice, but sort of ugly,’ after Natalia had ran up to each one in scrutiny. ‘After all our talk, Alice looks sort of demonic… ooh!’ - as they passed by The Sweet Emporium. ‘Can we go buy a haul to share like we did on the school trip, please please Neill? After saving all that money in Spoons?’

‘School trip. Dare I ask? Is the sweetshop where you groomed her?’

‘I just wanted to see a smile on that face.’

‘That’ll go down well in court.’

‘I dare say she would, if I asked her. That’s just how well groomed she is.’

‘That school trip was the best, best bestest day ever!—’ Natalia pulled at Neill’s neck, ‘Ed, guess what! He ordered the coach to take me home afterwards, I felt like fucking Cinderella!’

‘Shame, as I did too,’ Neill sighed.

‘Just don’t share the kind of coke Rich talks about.’

‘You don’t want to do the blow? Naww, Ed-No-Balls! Too many broken laws?’

‘Fuck off, hebephile.’

‘Nope, fifteen to sixteen was the next size up.’ Neill flipped out his cigarettes and lit up. ‘Heebie-jeebie-phile.’

‘Guys - you’re not really going to do that A-class white powder stuff?’

‘Probably not tonight. Ed needs another 24 hours to pass the last of his chickenshit. Then we can get cunted on coke, put on our Lennon shades and write as much Joy of Sucks as we want. Or just cuff Natalia and play Jabbercocky up her all night over your Slab-a-Rocky table.’

‘Only if I can have some money! Are we going to stand here all day?’ 

In a moment, brandishing a twenty note in her hand, she was perusing fudges, candies, gummies, sticky toffee; on the other side: flying saucers, liquorices, Flumps, Black Jacks, Candy Shrimps, fizzy cola bottles and Parma Violets. 

A plump packet caught her eye, as she glanced to the backs of the two men smoking and talking outside. She grinned and added it to her pile, and was just finishing paying when her phone rang. 

Her face fell. It was Sam.

‘Er… hello?’

‘Nat! I’ve gotta speak to you! It’s all been kicking off here!’

‘So let’s have a look,’ Neill nosied into her carrier as she came out clasping it shut, declaring it’s a secret stash.

‘Here, have a Fruit Salad. Neill, I just heard from Sam - guess what!’

‘She fell into thin air and is never to be seen or smelt again.’

‘Her Dad rushed home because Johnny overdosed on gummy bears… and then he found porn on his phone which bonded them over The Sex Talk, and Dad’s been back sleeping in his man-cave since!’

‘Blimey! I’m a family fixer!’

‘You should do this professionally,’ she sighed.

‘I do. Did Sam say anything about Dinkey? Does she think I killed him?’

‘She just said, oh yeah phew, like she’d got out of French homework or something. Then just as casually, she said at least I can get married to Mr Neill now!’

‘What a klutz.’

‘Um, yeah. Anyway… those gummy bears! What was in them?’

‘THC.’

‘Huh?’

‘They’re cannabis sweets darling.’

‘Oh! Why have you never lured me with those?’

He shrugged. ‘I thought you’d prefer to smoke it like a grown-up. Besides, I got them as a freebie from Tiny only recently. Otherwise I’d most definitely have fed you some back in Temple Newsam car park, and got you all giggly red-eyed, polishing your peanut over my bonnet for the doggers to pay per view!’

‘Stop sniffing like a dog at my bag, Ed, there’s no TCP in these! Here, have a Wham Bar.’

‘A headmaster who doles out cannabis sweets. Now that’s the premise for a crime novel.’

‘Oh, Neill! Sam also said Mrs Coleman’s on TV tonight - and they strip her almost naked in front of the 360-degree mirror!’

‘Good fucking heavens. What time?’

‘Not sure. Check the listings. She said Johnny’s already shot a picture of the screen when the advert came on, and he’s sending the pic round his mates with fake nipples pasted on.’

‘Well I haven’t got anything.’

Ed frowned. ‘Goodness. You two talking suddenly became ten times more interesting now your dirty little secret’s out. Who’s this mate Johnny of yours?’

‘A boy in Year 8.’

‘Who’s Mrs Coleman? Is she a good catch?’

‘We’ll watch her becoming such, tonight at… 9.30. But now, it’s time to dress up this good catch—’ he swivelled Natalia, ‘into an unbelievable one.’

They weaved into every clothes shop they could find, umming and aahing in mock - or sincere, fervour - it got to a point of not being sure - groping the insides of dresses, and trying berets, sometimes not on Natalia herself, before ending up on Mostyn Street in The Body Shop, Natalia on a stool for a makeover. 

‘How old are you?’ Natalia was asked by a chipmunk-toothed girl with a blonde fringe. ‘Sixteen!’ - ‘Have you ever shaped your eyebrows? Do you mind if I…?’ As a twizzle and a tweezer and a pencil was applied, and then bronzer, and a touch of butter-this, and SPF-that, till Ed said, ‘stop - not as much as Sheila!’ and Neill stepped over from the vegan colognes and blew out his cheeks. ‘Well she was already perfect, but…’ 

A bag of wares was priced up before: ‘Wait! Lipstick! Can I?’ The shopgirl obliged to pick her out a shade in Coral Blush, in which Natalia puckered, spun, kissed both men on the cheeks and screamed with laughter. ‘Boyfriends!’ Natalia deepened the girl’s look of astonishment. ‘They’re my boyfriends. You need two, for the amount of stuff you want to sell me!’

Cue chuckle from sheepish boyfriends.

‘She wishes,’ Neill took her arm. ‘Come along, that’s quite enough…’

‘I’m cooking for them. I’m better than Nigella Lawson!’

‘Does it mean she’s a girl or a woman that she gets turned on by retail therapy?’ 

‘No. I’m turned on by truth,’ Natalia said, as they now stood in M&S in front of a line of Nice ‘N’ Easy boxes.

‘Shouldn’t we be shopping in Liddell’s?’ Ed had muttered and started Natalia on a fresh slew of giggles, looking much like the ladies on the boxes, he remarked. ‘Which one looks like your truth then?’ 

She finally selected Dark Mocha Brown, after pulling out the Daisy book to compare side by side.

‘Oh this reminds me. Maybe we should have gone to the chocolate factory after all! …I need dark chocolate! Eggs! Raspberries!’ 

She ran up to Neill in the spirits aisle. ‘Does Ed have red wine vinegar, she says you need a teaspoon to make it go gooey inside!’

‘No comment.’

‘Wait! I remember Alana used two boxes, because my hair’s so long and even longer now…’

‘Two boxes of vinegar?’ Neill frowned.

‘Dye, dye!’ - as she sprinted off, Neill looking more confused as he paced after her to the hair aisle. ‘Oh! Can we buy curling tongs too!?’ Then her back-and-forth frisson became sombre at the counter as she lamented how on earth was she going to do it?

‘Darling you’ve lost me. Your dark hair or the dark pavlova?’

‘Hair, hair!’

‘Now you do sound posh. Relax - between the three of us we’ll do it. I, as a man who’s never dyed my hair and have absolutely no experience - and Ed, who has neither experience nor hair. You’ll look like a million doll-ahs!’

Thankful for the dark marble bathroom, for she’d already dripped onto the floor twice, she managed to do most of her hair - and forehead, and earlobes. Then Neill popped in, took the second bottle - eventually donning the gloves she persuaded him to squeeze into, to do the back of her head. ‘Make sure you get all the blonde bits. She did quite a lot where the hat normally misses.’  

‘Hat? What hat?’ 

‘Ah, forget it. Just plaster it on.’ 

‘I’m plahsterin’, I’m plahsterin’.’ 

Then Ed appeared, wanting to take a leak - ‘Can’t you go downstairs, Ed?’ - ‘Nope, I’m bursting like a human blueberry. How’s the salon going?’ And he starts helping, and Natalia thought how she would dearly love Alana to see this scene, of two men dyeing over her dye job! Then Ed vacates, and Neill suddenly says:

‘Guess who I received a text from?’

‘Er… I don’t know?’

‘Your bloody lush.’

Her face flushed. ‘What? Who?’

‘You know who.’

‘Lana, why? How would she get your number?’

‘Did you give it to her?’

‘Course not. What did she say?’

‘Hi, Neill!’ he began, in a voice that sounded like Mickey Mouse, ‘hope you’re having a good Easter break, or something… I’m soooo sorry to text, but I’m helping mum with the stuff for Mr Dinkey’s memorial as she’s snowed under with work. Feel free to give me a call.’

‘No way! Are you going to call her?’

‘Of course not. Dinkey can have rats from the beck pulling his memorial parade for all I care. Besides, how do I know this isn’t a trap? That she isn’t in cahoots with Fat Cunt to see if I start chattering away with schoolgirls? Texting pupils is the most reckless thing I could do.’

‘You did it with me, most recklessly.’

‘Shows how much I ever thought you as a schoolgirl. Like I always said, you’re my dirty little dream woman who happens to be wandering the corridors of Thornwood in school uniform.’

‘Amounts to the same risk though doesn’t it?’

‘No, because you’ve never had any friends to catch you at it.’

‘Just teachers to catch me in lessons.’

‘Worth the risk. Right, hair done.’

Back aching from rinsing her hair over the bathtub, hair blow-dried for twenty minutes, preceded another twenty minutes of applying super-sleek foundation exactly like the Body Shop girl did. Finally, she was curling waves into her hair amid calls of: ‘Dais-ee, Dais-ee! Give me your answer, do!’ - to the tune she recognises from the ice-cream van that circled Gipton every summer and that everyone said was driven by a paedo.

‘Final call! Summoning DAISY LITTLINGTON, for her two boyfriends are WAITING!’

The dress was a £65 silk number in purple, blue and pink swirls, that she hadn’t been sure about when set against her orangey Mouseketeers hair earlier. Slashed down in a V just below the breast, her dark tumbling waves now punctuated each side of her olive breastbone like a Prada advert. It looked like a sewing machine had swallowed one of Wonka’s everlasting gobstoppers and spewed out a rainbow of sumptuous silk chiffon. 

High-heeled black shoes pushed up her calves into a dreamy breeze with each step she took toward the patio door, where the two men in shirts and jackets milled out on the decking, turned in surprise.

‘Now that is a divine piece of bubblegum.’ That was just Ed.

‘Well there’s your Dark Angel,’ Neill passed his fag to Ed. ‘Natalia, just stand there. Now a twirl... fucking hell. You look fucking lovely. You are back to the Natalia I know.’ He took her hands. ‘This is all perfect. We’re gonna take you out, then we’re gonna take you home.’ 

She had butterflies in every limb.

Neill in one hand and Ed in the other, she was flushing too much to wear a coat. Ed was carrying it, constantly checking if she wanted it, ‘as the breeze is up, reckon it’s gonna rain tonight,’ as they walked to the doors of The Goat. She felt like a new woman. A woman at all. She felt like she was on a first date. With the curiouser and curiouser Neill-Ed compound; a trio that had each orgasmed in front of the other on this holiday as though their tribal rite of passage had been fulfilled.

Now Neill is kissing her hair saying how nice it smells - ‘sort of ammonia, mixed with cherries?’ - and she says oh yes, that’s the conditioner - and then Ed leans in, ‘what a beautiful scent.’ - ‘Inno-cent?’ - ‘Age of.’ - ‘Age of Innocence?’ - ‘Age of Cuntscent.’ - Ed said it, he said those words himself, the spell must be complete, and it took barely the time for her Maths book to dry.

And she, squashed up between them despite there being plenty space in a booth away from the other drinkers, already has face-ache from giggling, eyes all narrow like happy Ras on the window ledge, as she clears her throat for the arduous process of choosing a drink, when Neill says he’s already ordered it.

‘Now when you said we’ll spoil her, how ruinously did you mean?’

Neill is squeezing her thigh, each breath of flattery feeding every follicle on her body - with that soft but manly, growly-grunt that she remembers he would make at his desk over paperwork, and now, is purely in desire to ‘have her. I’d have her right now over this table in front of everyone.’

‘You should have just had her before we came out.’ 

‘Eddie, manners. We are wining and dining this lovely lady tonight and that includes you. Do you know how long I waited for her?’

‘You mean by the time she finished with those tongs?’

‘Oh, we haven’t even started with tongs.’

‘Aren’t we going to eat?’

‘Like I said, I would if I could, right now.’

Puns aside, none of them were hungry it seemed - just enough to fidget-chow on peanuts, crisps and pretzels - and Ed’s hand is now on her other thigh, as Neill mock-nudges him during some talk about the match they’re missing, ‘in aid of sharing my girlfriend with you,’ whilst Natalia gulped her Smirnoff and lemonade.

‘You so fucking owe her. Are you off for a wank already?’

As soon as Ed was gone to the loos, Natalia whispered: 

‘Neill, what are you planning? We need to discuss this, you know… cos I don’t know if I want to have sex with Ed…’

‘Don’t you want to be a Daisy chain?’

‘I mean, I don’t know if I’m ready for his cock, it’s—’

‘Not as nice as daddy’s?’

‘Er, ha… well no… of course…’ 

‘Aww, so turned on by truth. But you think it’s alright, don’t you?’

‘You’d…’ she chuckled, ‘be happy for me having sex with another man?’

‘Darling you already jumped him like a rabid Rottweiler and licked his balls to orgasm.’ 

‘Technically you made him orgasm.’

‘And now I’m going to have him lick you like one. Quid-pro-cunt. I think you’d like that. Let’s face it, you’d come on Mr Noble’s tongue if you were blindfolded.’

‘Um, you think he’s up for that?’ 

‘Of course. He’s already said. Ed, not Noble. Tit for tat. Or twat for splat, he gets you back. Don’t you want him to?’

‘My god,’ she giggled. ‘But not sex…’ 

‘Of course, my little Littlington, my little Daisy darling. We do whatever you want. He’s going to be our sex toy, doing whatever we want. You’re the Princess of Wales, remember?’

‘What, about to die in a car crash?’

‘We’re only having two ales each.’ 

Ed returned. 

‘Two more IPAs, Nige!’

Ed went off to the bar as Natalia mused. 

‘Well, Neill… just one thing, please don’t cuff me.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t use the handcuffs. Cos then I won’t be able to… you know—’

‘What, stop an irrevocable flow of cunt slobber?’

‘Ne-ill… please.’

‘Ok, ok. You asked politely.’

She was glad for the extra half hour she’d spent with Mrs Clayton in Year 10, learning how to separate yolks from the whites. But now, a replay of Nigella relaxed her nerves as well as her memory gaps, for the self-professed ‘not much of a scientist,’ licking her spoon as the scenes cross fade, declaring ‘it’s not conveyor belt cookery, it’s home food,’ was unlike Clayton who frowned at so much as one sunken cupcake. 

Into Ed’s freestanding mixer she tossed six whites till they were ‘gleaming and satiny,’ then a sinful amount of sugar, one spoon at a time… ‘serenely, slowly. Unworriedly.’ Three sieved tablespoons of cocoa then a bar of dark chocolate cut into ‘wonderful dark splinters,’ keep turning the spoon round, and down! Then mound, pleasurably, slowly!… smooth as you go, until: 

‘Finally, guys! It’s in the oven.’

‘Come here Nigella Unlawsome. Sit on the other side, Nigel.’

‘Oh…. fuck.’ Neill sat her on his knee with his whisky in the other hand. 

‘Now. Tell Uncle Eddie how you’re the best cook in the whole of your Food Technology class.’

‘Oh god Neill,’ she fizzled into his shoulder. ‘I’m not sure that’s what he wants to hear—’

‘What you just put into the oven did not look like GCSE pavlova,’ said Ed. ‘And I’m not even saying that to get into your pants.’

‘Are you going to tell Ed about Mrs Clayton and her orgasms?’ she giggled. ‘About how many she missed out on?’

‘Mmm. And how many do you think you’re going to have?’

‘What…. now.’

‘In about thirty seconds when my best friend gets his revenge on what you did to him?’

‘Best fiend.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Shit… guys. Well!’ She cleared her throat. ‘Depends on whether my boyfriend lets him.’

‘Oh, he’s going to let him alright.’

‘Shall we er, play a game first?’ she laughs.

‘We are. With you right now.’ Neill pulled her jaw to his, and began kissing her neck, and she felt all her Smirnoff drop like a shelf into her legs, and Uncle Eddie was watching, and oh god, it was making her whole body weak.

‘…Wait!’ She wriggled away, spying his phone next to where he placed his whisky glass, ‘show me the text Alana sent you! She might try calling you… remember, like Joan - we need to block her!’

Ed’s eyes went to Neill. ‘Lana, the girl in Thailand? So she’s 16 too, and texting the Head?’

‘Trying to get off with him,’ grinned Natalia.

‘No,’ Neill grunted, taking up his phone. ‘Her mum is organising a school event. She is not soliciting sex.’

‘Oh she is. She told me!’ Natalia peeled into laughter as Neill looked up in surprise. 

‘Jeez mate,’ Ed tutted. ‘What a job for a man like you. You say you need a Deputy Ed?!’

Neill sighed and set Natalia forward in his lap with Alana’s message in front of them on WhatsApp. Two Xs on the end, she noticed. She’d also changed her profile picture, from one hysterically laughing with Alex - to a single, sunkissed pouting portrait.

‘Done? Blocked?’ Neill’s mouth at her jaw making her melt all over again. ‘Now are you happy? Yes? Or do you want to write the number of every other girl in the school and block her too? No..? So put this down...’ 

And he began kissing down her neck, so sweetly, so tenderly, she thought she would burst with longing, then she was laid down on the couch, and Ed had put a pillow behind her and Neill was peppering kisses over her eyelids, and suddenly she felt as if she were Princess of Wales, Diana herself, laid out in a morgue, treated with the reverence of two undertakers.

Her dress gets peeled away, revealing writhing mounds of lacey lingerie, and she is all perfect eyebrows and swept hair and busty lace, feeling as womanly as they declared her, and Ed is in front of her, tilting his face one way and another with a sort of admiring look as though he might be buying her in a market, and after a few seconds when she feels she’s had enough of watching that look, he was crouched down kissing her ankles. 

And she has two men kissing her body, and oh, this feels nice, this feels more than nice. Tingles everywhere as the two men’s soft, prickly mouths travel down her stomach and up her shins. 

‘Oh, you smell lovely… she is lovely, Rich.’ 

Her knickers are still on and she’s glad for their hot moist fabric couching against her wet pussy that might shiver into a cold snail lest they be pulled off too soon. She hears Neill whispering something in a tone of instruction, a susurration of something, that she realises is ‘say sorry, Ed. Say sorry, right on there.’ And Ed’s warm mouth is on her hot groin, saying sorry, and it’s like bathwater tickling a giggle in her thighs.

‘Do you forgive him? Do you want to lose these for him?’ And the knickers come off, and Neill is rearranging himself up behind her, hooking her upper arms.

‘Hold her ankles - tight. Not by halves. She doesn’t like anything by halves. Keep going down, and do exactly as I say, Ed.’

‘Oh I know what I’m doing.’

Neill’s hands are splicing her breasts from her bra as Ed’s face nears her bush.

‘Of course, er… I don’t shave, Ed.’ 

‘Of course, I know.’ Ed chafed his jaw over it.

‘Of course, Ed’s jealous of any hair,’ chuckled Neill softly. ‘And you can thank me for the renaissance that au natural nether-land is lovely, soft, and downy, for it’s I who told her to quit shaving.’

‘I’ve never shaved,’ her eyes went to upside-down-Neill. ‘Only trimmed it.’

‘What,’ Ed whispered, ‘so… it’s, like, the original?’

‘Yes.’ 

His eyes shifted in pause to Neill.

‘What are you waiting for, a certificate? Bury your lucky fucking pucker in it.’

And now Ed is licking, oh fuck, he is licking like a hot laser. Compared to Neill he’s like a dog that has a nervous twitch eating stolen sausages. She starts to rock, more from disbelief than fervour, and giggling spasms of ticklishness, not helped by the thought that Ed looks a bit like Humpty Dumpty now without his glasses on - his mouth in a O, like Tenniel’s drawing of him shouting down the messenger’s ear. And her rocking persists, till Neill’s grunts of approval cease with a halting hand.

‘Ed, Ed. You’re hitting her clit too head on.’

‘I know how to go down on a woman, Rich.’ 

‘But I know this woman, and I know you’re hitting her clit too head on.’ Neill draws himself out from behind Natalia and she flops back bemused as Neill’s fingers arrive to spread her labia in instructional earnest. 

‘Don’t lick right in the middle’ - a finger draws a circle around her clitoris. ‘she’ll flinch like she has multiple sclerosis. Round the edges, see, round the edges...’

‘Who’s being a mansplaining prick now?’

‘Just do the fuck I say. Think of it as an oyster—’

‘Precisely, her clit is the pearl.’

‘I meant an Oyster card, you oaf. Stick to Zones 5 and 6. Central is where it gets chaotic.’

‘Guys—’ Natalia tried to sit up and got as far as her elbows. 

‘You lay back down there, darling. Now Ed, do this properly, or not at all…’

‘Ok. Not at all.’ Ed sat up.

‘No, no. She’s spread her legs for you - goodness, don’t be so impertinent. Or is this because you can’t make her come?’

‘Fuck right off,’ he began, ‘I know what I’m dooimmmh—’ just as Natalia lifted her groin in a Yoga bridge right back into Ed’s face, whilst he follows Neill’s exhorting to ‘go slower, lick longer’ - fuelling every lick with a power that makes her tingle.

‘And you - you keep your hands down at your sides if you don’t want to be cuffed.’

‘Rich is a right old bossy pants in bed, isn’t he,’ Ed mumbles.

‘No, I’ve just fed you a fine dribble, can you taste that? A few seconds and you should…’

‘Mmm…’ from Ed.

‘Put your tongue right up her cunt and get it quicker.’

‘Mm-MHH-ahh’ now from Natalia. ‘Serenely, confidently… keep turning the spoon round and down…’ she murmurs.

‘Mmwhat?’ 

‘Mound, pleasurably; slowly. Smooo-oth as you go…’

Neill claps his hand over Natalia’s mouth, stiffens the other arm around her forearms and opens his knees wider with his. ‘That should have her cunt rushing.’

‘Thought she already was.’

‘No, it’s you who was rushing.’

‘I meant Russian—’

‘Shut the fuck up and put that tongue right up there. Right up. Ohh, that’s it. Nigella’s washing Nigel’s mouth out, right before I fuck her’ - with the confirming thud of her ascending orgasm right on his word ‘fuck’ - just as Ed’s jaw must be locking, whilst her own is still locked by Neill.

‘She’s coming. Be ready…’

Ed’s face is her toilet, that oh, she’s pissing her pussy into, his face is a great big wanking hand. And oh, bugger bugger bugger! For shudder shudder shudder, goosepimples over her chest, arms and beige skinny thighs either side of his red pulsing-veined bald head as she muffle-mews into Neill’s fingers till he lets go and she gasps out. 

‘Ahhhh. All friends again. My two favourite cunts in the world.’ 

And now Neill’s hand is down there, stealing that second orgasm like an open target.

‘Good god, Ed. You’ve made this soaking wet for me.’

Neill’s pants are down and she’s now lifted on a cloud of cock, moaning three or four thrusts in from a stake unseen, and neither can she see Ed’s but it becomes apparent by his chiming breaths that Neill has permitted him to pleasure himself right there between her knees. But not for long, before:

‘Get your mug back down there. Lick her whilst I fuck her rotten.’

‘Rich, I’m not sure, I’ll be practically licking your cock…’

‘Listen - I’ve fantasised about Natalia being licked and fucked at the same time. Help out a mate, won’t you?’

‘Well you’ll have to slow down fucking her, or I’ll headbutt your groin to death, and you’ll… cockbutt my head to death.’

‘Wait—’ Neill withdraws and she finds herself landing back down on a thump at her anus.

‘Oh!—’

‘It’s fine. She learnt anal sex last week.’ A few more nuzzles and pushes, thus spells the answer, that this allowed the speed and space for Ed, and her gasps are band-aided by delight of clit-licking, whilst her cunt, vacant at the centre of it all, seems to speak the loudest in its quiet language of rushing thrill.

‘Talk about creaming over chocolate pavlova. Are you sure you don’t want Ed to put his cock inside you?’ 

‘Rich—’ 

‘I can’t,’ she pants, ‘I can’t, do two at once…’ 

‘Or just his fingers? Damn that truncheon - it was supposed to arrive today, what the hell use is Amazon Prime! Ed, go fetch a banana!’

‘No, no! No bananas,’ said Natalia, ‘just… just tongue… please, please.’

‘Lick her then. Lick her like that Cornish ice cream on the pier. I want to feel her explode trying to shoot my King of Welsh Piers out of her arse.’ 

Neill is slow fucking her ass whilst a soft soggy tongue builds and pushes, builds and pushes till a holy-moly orgasm builds like a feverish bowel movement; her anus expanding and contracting and finally throbbing in a mix of pleasure and pain as her moans taper out and Ed’s face retreats.

‘Ed, come finish what she started. She had your scallops now give her the main.’

‘Ha, ahh…’ Ed shifts hesitatingly.

‘Put your fucking cock in her mouth.’ 

His words cast the spell to send Natalia leaning forward hungrily at Cock-o’-Not-Neill, and Ed’s particularly angry red-purple erection crashing into her face whilst Neill slid up her cunt, her mouth unable to voice whether it’s ok it goes up her arse and then in there… it must be ok, two men didn’t question it and one is daddy, rutting the same position as yesterday - but faster, as though he’d upped his prowess, and this time with Ed’s cock, not finger, shovelling back and forth over her tongue.

Ed’s cock has a narrower top than Neill’s and tastes like salty mint. She can only concentrate on his lower half. She hasn’t looked up to see his face; he may as well not even have a head. He is Edless, hard probe in her mouth, hands are rested on her head, courteously guiding rather than shovelling, making Eddie-sighs that were usually at Beatles songs or beer pumps and now she prickles with goosebumps to realise, is pleasure she is giving him.

The oven started beeping. ‘My… my Pabloba’s rebby to be creabed…’

‘You don’t say.’

They kept going. The oven kept beeping. In a moment, it became a useful rhythm to deploy, seesawed between them, there was a good thirty seconds of their making satisfactorily breaths like two swimmers whilst she went glump, glump on Ed’s cock, her cherry-ammonia hair swinging whilst her mouth was well and truly having sex with Ed, and saliva began to drool to the floor.

‘Rich, Nat - holy hell I’m going to come, the way she’s slurping like that—’

‘Want Ed to come in your mouth?’

‘I dunnummmphh…’ She pulled off.

‘Ed,’ Neill panted, ‘I’m about to shoot, are you gonna—’

‘She doesn’t want me to come in her mouth.’

‘Where then?’

‘On your face, Rich.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Hers then…’

‘No,’ they say together - just as Neill comes inside her. And her face slides back down Ed, catches and cups his helmet, whilst reaching for a glass from the table - just as a squirt drips over her loose bed of tongue.

‘Ed! I said don’t fucking come in her mouth!’

‘But, but… she went for it, I thought—’

‘Neill, it’s fine, I…’ she spat into the glass, ‘thought I’d let him have his comeuppance.’

Unlike Mrs Coleman’s cratery splinters, the ones in this meringue weren’t to be alarmed at, the raven-haired TV cook had lovingly counselled. They stay like molten nuggets, underneath the tumbling ‘crimson madness’ of raspberries - as Natalia placed the final one, then groaned that she’d run out of chocolate to decorate with shavings, and instead sprinkled the last of the Coco Pops from the bag that had since been stuffed in the bin after she’d showered Ed in them. 

A tealight candle she found in the cutlery drawer was lit and plopped in the middle of the cream before she photographed it. Happy birthday, mum - before she carried the tray, naked, to the coffee table, wondering if Nigella got licked and fucked by two men before each of her cook scenes. And if she didn’t, she certainly should.

Neill and Ed were lounging by the fire naked, as though the clothes of all three of them had been blown off by the surrounding tornado of fag smoke. She stood slicing and spooning the mush onto three plates and handing it round to an enthusiastic chorus of thank-you-sex-kitten as Neill re-topped three glasses of wine.

‘Natalia. You’re drooling.’ He tossed her a tissue.

‘Your chromosomes,’ she wiped and tossed it back. Then she squeezed herself in between them, legs on Ed.

‘That’s your English teacher? Looks alright…’

‘She hasn’t had the makeover yet Ed.’

‘Sort of like Julie Andrews. I’d drink her with jam and bread.’

‘Oh my god, Eddie fancies my English teacher!’

‘Ed. You’ve just licked and face-fucked my girlfriend and downed half a bottle of scotch. Clearly you’re not thinking nor seeing very straight.’

‘You’re right, mate.’ Ed patted her ankle.

‘What she really means is,’ said Ed, ‘she wants more eyeballing action from the new womanising headmaster.’

‘You’re not wrong. Do you know, Ed, that Neill convinced her to go on this programme?’

‘So I could get to see that,’ nodded Neill, at Kate standing in her bra and knickers in front of the 360-degree mirror, all lumpy thighs and leathery chest skin inside an ill-fitting bra. ‘One by one, I’ll have every teacher stripped like an onion whilst continually schtupping the top student.’

‘You’re telling me you haven’t schtupped a teacher?’ said Ed.

‘Only the Yoga ogre I told you about. The rest are rotten oranges.’

‘What was Emma like in bed?’ Natalia puffed casually, ‘I didn’t hear much smut about her?’

‘Sex was another aerobic workout for her. She’d get on top and pound away like one of those sadistic Chinese masseuses till she almost put out my sacrum. Another woman who was shaved like a clam.’

Mrs Coleman was now in hysterical laughter by a rack of sexy thongs, with a close-up of her huge pants.

‘How’s she going to live this down!’ chortled Ed.

‘Although that reminds me that I did once want to fuck Miss Francis,’ continued Neill. ‘She came into my office one day with a red thong flashing through her skirt thinner than an amniotic sac. Then Natalia knocked, stuttering away about how great a Head I was, so I chucked her a cookie, and watching her get chocolate around her mouth, like you Ed right now, gave me a bigger hard-on than you had yesterday.’

‘Shame we’re going on Saturday,’ Ed put down his plate. ‘I could get used to licking your girlfriend’s desserts as well as her.’

Coleman was now wincing at a botox injection right between her eyebrows.

‘Fucking knew it! Her forehead is like your bottom,’ Neill remarked just as Natalia sat up in a huff. ‘Heyy, sex kitten. Did I offend you with what I said a moment ago?’

‘Yes, by being reminded we’re going back to Leeds in two days.’

‘Hey, we’ve got a magical day in Portmeirion tomorrow,’ Neill pulled her back and tickled her chin. ‘Sell it to her, Ed.’

‘Ohh, Portmerigum is a private village, lovely jubbly colourful houses… built by Sir Cloth-Ears Willy-Head… like a little piece of Greece! Or Italy! Or - well, Wales, if it rains!’

‘But what’ll we do with Hetty when we go home on Saturday.’ 

‘We’ll have to find her a farm…’ Neill stroked her spine as she sat back up in silence. ‘Darling, you know Hetty has to go back.’

‘Don’t darling me when I know that.’

Silence as Neill drew a breath. ‘What do you want, Natalia?’

‘I want more.’

‘More cock? More tongue? More cuff keys up your bum?’

‘More time for her to get better before she rejoins the flock.’

‘You or Hetty?’

‘You said you would wipe it all from me. All the sadness, all the shit from last week. Well, we only have one day left and it’s not enough. Hmph.’

‘Maybe another couple?’ slurred Ed. ‘Go home Monday?’

Natalia’s head turned a little.

‘What were you rushing back to London for, Ed?’

‘A few last files for Arnie’s.’

‘That you could email?’

‘Probably.’

‘Is that all?’

‘That singles dinner with Claire.’

‘Singles? Like fucking cheese? Big cheesy hairy bouncing bollocks to that. Let’s spend the rest of the holidays here.’

Natalia turned. ‘What! Another week?’

Neill looked to Ed then back to her. ‘Ask your two boyfriends, very nicely, for another week.’

‘Ohhh… god…’ Now smoosh-gyrating her face into the cushions, ‘please, please, boys…!’

‘Are you sure you know what you’re in for?’

‘No,’ she giggled. ‘Yes. I don’t know! Just… oh my god. What about your work?! The family stuff, all that?’

Neill shrugged. ‘Car broke down, in muddy water. Toe jammed in football. Abducted, by Welsh walruses in gumboots...’ Natalia was now a flashing ball of flesh over the coffee table squealing ‘one and one and one is three!’ just as onscreen, Coleman was stepping out in a final flourish of ringlets and stilettos. 

‘What am I signing up to?’ Ed slurred.

‘The horniest holiday romance. The vilest vacation. It’s a Neill-Ed-you-cation! We don’t go home till she, we— have come a hundred a’cock and she has Saunders-Neill chromosomes stamped through her like seaside rock. Are you in?’