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

If sixteen was the cusp between girl and woman, today she was thoroughly 16-the-woman. She’d tied up her bag of teenybopper clothes and stuffed it right under the shelf of Neill’s boot, whilst they rode in Ed’s Q7 like a cruiseliner along craggy roads, wearing the chequered dress for Portmeirion that Ed had picked out pre-bombshell, as though the bombshell never happened at all. She was Daisy Miller, the book wedged in her lap as she imagined herself sailing on a boat with Mr Winterbourne.

‘Neill, there’s a Château de Chillon in this book! A medieval castle island! Wasn’t that where we were supposed to be on this holiday?’

‘No, that’s Château Chall-ain, and it isn’t an island,’ Neill caught her eye in the rear mirror from the high helm of the driving seat, as though his presiding authority had been reinstated, his passengers’ ears subjected to a playlist that had repeatedly zithered a song she hadn’t craned her neck to see the title of, but knew was The Doors. 

‘Jim’s voice is so… hard, and soft,’ she mused, ‘like a man, but an angel.’ 

Ed’s eyes were closed like he was being brainwashed with it, tapping his foot right on the car mat where he’d discovered her schoolbook. Maths was now history, the Noble ignoble - they’d signed up for the horniest holiday romance, in Neill’s words - as she watched Ed’s hand casually root down his corduroys to scratch his balls. 

‘The Lizard King. Alky, druggie,’ replied Neill. ‘Didn’t want to be a rockstar but a poet. Died in the bathtub in Paris with a smile on his face. Puer Aeternus; the Eternal Boy!’

‘Classic tortured soul,’ murmured Ed, eyes fast shut like the Dormouse at the tea party and still scratching his balls. ‘He was only, what, thirty?’

‘Twenty seven, just like Kobain and Hendrix. They call it the 27 Club. Justin claims the police on all these cases were instructed to ignore suspicions of foul play. But more importantly!’ - Neill’s voice rose to a bark, ‘the police truncheon didn’t arrive today! Gone are the twee days that the post arrives in the morning!’ 

And now, lambasting Amazon Prime as casually as he would a late pupil, the truncheon on its way to her pussy may as well already be there in ghost presence, as she crossed her legs and pondered what had happened that morning.

She’d been stretching, goose-necked over the bottom of the mattress, flitting her fingertips at the floorboards as they creaked with Ed’s feet outside passing to the bathroom, watching her own hair still curled from the tongs, twirl to the floor like Narcissus’s pool that she fancied would catch the stirring eye of Neill. 

Barely had she called ‘good morning, Ed!’ when a shadow from the front of the bed came over, her wrists seized, and two warm flesh balls upon her face like a sordid MRI scan that commanded her upward tongue flick, when the door creak and whispering rustle of Ed, suddenly mirrors her tongue’s action down at her night-marinated passage. 

And she laughed with delight, making a funny hoo sound as she licks at the same time, and the more she licks, the more her clit twitches; dog tail on dog tongue, like both ends of her are lapping Utterly Mutterly ice cream. Nose-smooshed into Neill’s blurred back crevice, her neck strains, as he nudges her further up the bed, and she resumes a deeper lick into the springy cushion of his prostate. 

And so it went: a slurping verse; chorus of groan-groan, like the feed line in church and its response: Lord lick us. Lord graciously lick us. Then the chorus of her little laugh, deep push into his God spot: Hosanna in the HIGHest! Oh, how wicked and heavenly, as she grew an orgasm on Ed’s face like a pretty flower over some ugly soil, and she knew hardener gardener Neill can feel it. Panting on his balls, they contract, pulse wildly, before a peculiar cum-shout: ‘You fucker!’ from Ed - whom evidently Neill had narrowly missed, falling back onto the footboard in laughter, or maybe didn’t quite miss - for Ed’s using Neill’s pants to mop his glistening head and throw indignantly into his face.

But Neill, ten minutes later outside mid-smoke, is hit squarely in the face by a jet of salty stream, and her peels of laughter have him running to the shower to wash off what was more than water in the gun, but from the cup that overfloweth last night.

‘I will get you back, Natalia, for what you did this morning to master.’

‘Just returning the cum-love!’ she laughed. ‘It’s now head to head! Fuck, a bit like your driving—!’ She fell to one side as Neill swerved in from overtaking a Baby-On-Board-signed Renault Scenic.

‘Easy, mate!’ Ed’s eyes were now wide open. ‘We don’t need a speeding lesson!’

‘Oh, blasting, bouncing, buckshot bollocks!’ exclaimed Neill. ‘It’s on Tuesday isn’t it!’

‘Dinkey’s funeral?’ said Natalia.

‘Or ours?’ added Ed.

‘My speeding course, of course! Not a chance in Dante’s Inferno I’m going back for that! In fact I reckon we should go on a little jaunt, a real fucking speeding course! Road trip, on me. Camper van, to keep it cheap—’

‘Mate, camper vans are steep.’

‘Camping?’

‘Haven’t got any gear.’

‘Glamping?’ 

‘We could take a look at what’s out there. Natalia! Your abundant imagination and phone-tapping idleness is tasked with finding us a place for Saturday and Sunday night somewhere in North Wales. I entrust you to spend wisely and do us proud.’ He patted his pocket. ‘Now where the devil is my wallet?’

‘It’s wedged down the crack there!’ 

‘Bit like her his morning,’ said Ed. 

‘My face or my bag of teen clothes?!’

‘Natalia!— use your nimble fingers to retrieve my Barclaycard as you’re used to.’

Beeches and sequoias towered high above them like a line of softly swaying fathers protecting precious progeny ahead. Signs with the famous village name, in a distinctive blue circle with the face of a Venus-like woman, had led them to the car park where other tourists were already dotted. Ed and Neill hastened on Natalia - still brushing her hair at the car and dumping it back ‘to be bagless, today!’ - and get ahead of three coaches loudly heaving their way in.

‘How peculiar,’ Neill remarked. ‘A ticket booth to enter a village.’

‘Entry would have been sixty quid for all of us,’ said Ed, ‘but I got wise and prebooked afternoon teas at Portmeirion Hotel which gives us free entry.’

‘How much were the teas?’

‘Thirty five a head.’

Neill almost coughed his fag out of his fingers. ‘That’s over a hundred! Do I need Natalia to give you a GCSE Maths lesson?’

‘Nah, I only booked two. The hotel said two adult teas between us is fine.’

‘Sorry sir—’ they now heard as Ed pressed his head up against the glass in consternation with the assistant. ‘You’ll have to pay for a third ticket if you’ve only booked two teas.’

‘‘Ow much?’ Ed exclaimed.

‘Adult twenty pounds.’

‘She’s a whippersnapper,’ nodded Neill in sudden matching Yorkshireman. ‘Under 16. We’re gay dads, yer see! Fifteen year ago today in fact, she were conceived in’t test tube! Completed our lives, I tell ya!’

‘Er, of course sir. Child concession is £13.’

‘Terrific!’

‘More like horrific. You’re reckless for the sake of seven quid,’ muttered Ed as he swiped a £4 guidebook whilst the cashier wasn’t looking.

‘Well you’re almost there with gay,’ said Natalia. ‘You’re splashing in each other’s boy juice like Bernard and Ryan flicking bogies at each other.’

‘Cum, love.’ 

They advanced through rusty turquoise gates up to a round sheltered grotto that looked like something from one of Alana’s holiday photos. The inside walls were painted blue and set with scallop shells and conches. A spectacular view of the vast estuary spanned out to sea, all silvery blue and shimmering in the sun, and overlooked by ‘the Hotel Portmeirion, that must be’ - in dazzling white and bordered in turquoise trim.

‘This all looks very Grecian, I must say,’ Ed slipped off his jacket. ‘It reminds me of that island, what’s it called again—’

‘Is that building where we’re having our £70 mug of tea in two hours?’ Neill rapped.

‘It’s more than tea. It’s high tea. Cakes, sandwiches, the lot - which after ticket price costs us a mere £17.’

‘Oh, sounds dreamy!’ sighed Natalia, ‘and I’ve only been dreaming about this place for ages!’

‘As in, a week since I sent you the link, Natalia?’ chuckled Neill.

‘School was a week ago, but feels like a year ago.’

‘Shall I take a photo of you to pretend to your mate you flew to Greece instead?’

‘Oh, Ed! Would you!’

Neill looked bemused as he watched them chimping the photos on her phone. ‘You’ve got more grooming to do than that, Baldilocks, if you want to make the beast with three backs!’

‘The beast with what?’ frowned Ed.

‘‘I come, sir, to tell you that your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs!’ Iago to Othello, you philistine.’

‘Ohh, why didn’t you talk about things like that in my English lesson instead of yanking magazines off Alana!’

‘I did. I flashed an advert that looked exactly like the girl in the class I most wanted to make the beast with two backs with.’

‘Oh, Neill, wait! I just thought of something!—’

‘That Lana looks a bit like Kate Moss too?’

‘Hmph! No. Neill, what if Alana shows her mum the photo I sent of me in the Bala pub on Sunday and she recognises me from the Leeds pub in February!’

‘The shot of you with Mr Sibian?’ Ed tittered.

‘Neill, Neill, it’s not funny.’

‘I’m not laughing. It was your idea to do the picture, I was too pissed by that point to think. Look, Lana Del Ray is soaking up the rays out in Asia. What’s the likelihood of her texting her mum back home in Leeds, a blurry picture of a girl below her league out in Wales?’

‘Not likely. Ok.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Below her league?’

‘Believes she is.’

‘Hmph.’

‘Don’t worry about silly things,’ Neill pulled her into his chest and massaged her hair everywhere. ‘Now are you going to send her that photo? Or are you scared she’ll see you got rid of her highlights?’

‘No. And no.’ She shoved her phone away in her pocket.

‘Good girl. Come on.’ 

Natalia took both their hands down the uneven steps, and then up some more, squeezing past an Arab family swishing down in strong designer perfume. They came up to a pinkish dome-topped building, fronted by an intricate Gothic white annex topped with bird statues, towering over a paint palette of orange, red and blue buildings.

‘Goodness, rather like St Paul’s Cathedral,’ remarked Neill.

‘The Pantheon, the village’s iconic building,’ Ed read from the guidebook. ‘Says here that the massive white annex was originally a fireplace at someone’s house that Sir William Clough-Ellis bought when it fell into ruin. It took thirty years for him to figure out it would make a great porch.’

‘Makes me feel less guilty about some of the pictures I have sitting in my loft for the past eight months!’

They continued on through tangerine and rose-pink archways, to gatehouses, dovecotes and loggias in Mediterranean colours. They passed a statue of Hercules crouching upon a plinth as the central splendour of the piazza now came into view. 

There, a giant chessboard was set before the pillars of a grand colonnade, set beside a fountain pool in which children were already dipping and splashing.

‘Now this really is Wonderland!’ gasped Natalia.

‘Chessboard was just put here last year for the 50th anniversary,’ read Ed. ‘In time for you and that gorgeous dress, young lady—’ she blushed to have them both squeeze her bottom, and ruffle her hair even more, as they sauntered the perimeter, taking in a beautiful vista, it seemed, from every angle, of the extraordinary little town. 

The place might have been hand-coloured by an infant with every hue in his paint palette, but with the wisdom and precision of exquisite detail on every mural and balustrade. Explosions of flowers and plants fused the manmade into nature, with red and yellow and pink and white and purple tulips all around them, scenting the air with serenity whilst giant palm trees buffered the sea breeze.

‘Chinese Windmill Palm. And there’s a Tasmanian Acacia.’

‘You really know your birds and trees, Ed!’

‘Don’t shag him for that. He’s reading the plaque,’ nodded Neill at turquoise signs screwed to their barks. A faux-pas that would have embarrassed her only three days ago made her run and laugh gaily at oval mural adornments and hidden little statues in the rockery. 

‘It’s like the postcards of seven different places have been chopped and glued together!’ And as they hung back their chins at the seven-storey high, baroque Bell Tower, Ed recounted from the guidebook that the town itself was born through eclecticism. 

‘That chiming clock’s from a London brewery. Whilst the Colonnade there—’ they looked to the grand pillars overlooking the piazza, ‘was salvaged from Bristol after World War II. Every stone was individually numbered, creating a bloody tricky 3D jigsaw for some monkey.’

‘And here’s the organ-grinder!’ Neill declared, as they came to a 17th-century salmon-pink building, where a larger-than-life bust was set on a plinth, now subjected to the post-humous humiliation of Neill’s long tongue feverishly gesturing up his jawline.

‘Don’t look so miserable, old Clough-ears!’

‘The guy who designed Portmeirion. He called it a home for fallen buildings, salvaging bits from all over the place.’

‘Basically a rich cunt and a hoarder,’ said Neill.

‘A genius too. Got fed up of flying to Italy for the scenery so he built an Italianate village right in Wales.’ 

‘Lucky we’ve got the Italianate weather to appreciate it.’

‘And inside the Town Hall here—’ Ed pointed to the pink building, ‘there’s a Jacobean ceiling that Clough bought from Wrexham for a bargain thirteen quid, and a grille from the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street! Hercules is from Aberdeen, and—’

‘Alright, alright Ed. You sound like the Lesbos of Llangollen.’

‘Lesbos! That’s the island this place looks like!’

‘What about the mermaids I’m seeing everywhere?’ sighed Natalia. ‘I love them.’

‘Yup,’ Ed lick-flicked the page, ‘thirty metal mermaid panels bought as a job lot from the old Liverpool Sailors’ Home in 1954.’

‘Old Clough-ears would have loved eBay.’ 

And as they wandered, they discovered more, including a statue of Buddha said to be made for a film called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness starring Ingrid Bergman. Natalia stared for a minute longer than they did. Whilst Ed cross-checked every sight for the men’s deeper cultural appreciation, it was Natalia to whom the colours and juxtapositions roused instant delight. 

To her, there was magic in the sun gleaming off a bright red gatehouse with a green balustrade, ‘like a tomato on its side,’ she mused, whilst the men devolved into muttering that the place needs a fresh lick of paint, or the gift shop ‘probably price-triples Chinese tat.’ Those were not the concerns of a Gipton girl’s eyes lighting up at so much as a tangerine archway that didn’t need a lick of paint as much as the pitted skin of a real tangerine did, nor that a cherub propped inside a rock face could possibly be ‘cheap’ when he was single-handedly holding up the buildings above him for decades.

She bore awe, not critique, for the age-worn stone boat permanently moored to the front of the hotel - which she’d pointed out was in The Prisoner’s first episode they’d watched into the small hours last night. Statues of an Admiral and Burmese dancers that the men were quick to denounce as rejects from a fun park, conjured thoughts of what they might say to her if they came to life. And now, sauntering into the gift shop with a crisp twenty note from each of Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s wallets, she’d already decided that the flimsy teapot lids with bloated price tags were ok if china was from China after all.

‘Do you know how we get to the Chinese gardens?’ She asked someone next to her whilst flicking the pages of a wieldy Portmeirion history book.

‘They’re Japanese. I’m not sure but ask that gentleman.’

The gentleman was over by a desk with a spread map, nattering away to two elderly visitors in a nasal Lancashire accent that reminded her of Joan crossed with a gameshow host. 

‘Sir William Clough,’ he enunciated slowly, ‘designed the village from 1925 to 1973…’ Waiting patiently for the drowsy visitors to finish, Natalia caught the man’s beady eye, as she smoothed her hair down hurriedly.

‘Hello? Can I help?’ 

‘Hi, yes, I was just wondering, where the parts are to walk? Are they outside of the paid boundary?’

‘Portmeirion is a private village where people come to explore the original buildings by Sir William Clough. He designed the village from 1925 to 1973—’

‘Yes, I know that,’ she smiled, ‘I’ve just been round myself. But I wasn’t sure which of the walks were inside the private village and which are outside.’

‘They’re all inside. See here—’ he tapped the map as a snap of tuna breath hit her. ‘Walking right down past the hotel takes you to the woodlands and the gardens.’

‘Oh, right! Well, that’s all I need to know.’ She stepped away, but he continued talking on, finger sliding and drumming the map at various points.

‘Yep, yep. I didn’t know they were all inside the village, that’s fine,’ she repeated.

He licked his lip and stepped out from the desk. ‘Are you part of the convention?’

‘No, no.’

‘Can I see your ticket please.’

‘Huh?’

‘Show me your entry ticket madam.’

She felt at her pocket out of politeness, but Ed had it outside, and hers was a child one - not what she wanted to show him. 

‘Er, why?’

‘You are coming in here, asking about which parts you have to pay, and which are free,’ he cast a glance down her, ‘and I’d like to see your ticket.’

‘Well, I don’t have it, my, my… friend has it. But I don’t understand what that’s got to do with my question. We have—’ She hesitated to say they had teas booked. ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ 

She turned away, but he stepped in front of her.

‘Do you want me to call the manager down?’

Natalia took in his cold glare. The elderly couple looked over from the pottery and her heart began to flutter.

‘Are… are you serious? I mean, why would I come in here if I didn’t have a ticket? You’re just being rude for no reason. I’m leaving, thanks!’ She pushed past his shoulder.

‘Hey now, come back here!’

She kept walking, on out of the shop, eyes prickling and stomach throbbing, looking round to find Neill and Ed on a bench.

‘Darling! Whatever’s wrong? What happened!’

Face shining in tears, she shrunk into the pipework behind a building to hide her implosion of emotion, now met with a sandwich of sympathetic limbs, and eventually an explanation into Neill’s shoulder - that a nasty man had turned all weird on her, making her feel like a criminal when all she’d been is nice and polite - and that ‘I bet it’s because my hair’s a mess!’ - as four hands counselled further strokes up and down it with reassurance that of course, of course it’s not - and she kept her lip downturned enough for a minute’s more caress.

‘Do you think he’s suspicious?’ said Ed at last. ‘Of her, you know?’

‘Just sounds like a jobsworth to me. I’m going in there. What did he look like, Natalia?’

‘White shirt, red tie, brown beard, sharp little eyes like Coco Pops.’

‘Rich, don’t do anything stupid—’

‘Why would I?’

A few minutes later he came back. ‘Couldn’t see him. There’s only a girl there so maybe he’s clocked off.’

‘Or gender fluid?’

‘Shut up Eddie. All I can say is I can’t find the bastard who engendered fluids from the eyes of my poor girlfriend and she needs cheering up big time - are those teas on yet?’

‘Not for an hour.’

‘Let’s have some retail therapy then.’

Patted Natalia was walked man-a-breast back into the shop where she heaved a sigh of both relief and disappointment to see he indeed wasn’t there, so she went back to the big book to flick pages of monochrome photos till thoughts of the horrible Jobsworth being strung up with bunting and buggered with a broken piece of pottery left her mind.

‘Natalia, don’t buy that book if you expect me to carry it.’

‘Ed will.’

‘Ed won’t. Buy a hairbrush instead.’

‘Hmph. I’ll save my money for the road trip. It’s all triple-priced Chinese tat in here.’

‘So where’s this convention you said was on?’ Neill asked as they wandered back out down the cobbles.

‘Well there were all those coaches arriving earlier. And I see the chess board is being cordoned off.’ 

‘I can’t wait an hour for what’s going to be the smallest, ponciest sausage roll I’ve seen since the Baglioni breakfasts. Let’s eat here - artisanal, wood-fired pizzas on the premises!’

Filching the unwanted anchovies off her thin-crust Napoli, Ed bore the sympathetic recollection that someone had upset her only last week, and Natalia had begun to tell him the history of her estranged dad.

‘You said he left when you were five? Gadzooks. What kind of a parent does that?’

‘A five-year late one,’ grunted Neill.

‘Well, he did also leave when I was born,’ said Natalia.

The men fell silent.

‘Go on, Nat. Rich, keep your trap full of Sloppy Giuseppe.’

‘I never wanted to find him, and when I did meet who I thought was him, he was pretending! Then he lured me to his hotel room after the pub!’

‘Christ. Didn’t Rich do his homework on him?’

‘Oh, I’d lied to him saying I was out with Alana.’

‘Didn’t you scream for the hotel staff?’

‘I thought he would stab me. Turns out they were just his keys. I always wondered why girls on the news who’d been attacked didn’t just kick the bastards in the nuts. But how do you fight back when your body is jelly from head to foot?’

‘I can sympathise with that one,’ blinked Ed - as a man in dark glasses flew past wearing a red and black striped jumper and disappeared into a door.

‘Well I say, it’s the Beano convention,’ Neill remarked.

‘Anyway, Ed. I’d already texted Neill in the bathroom and besides, I couldn’t have the police busting Neill. I managed to slide the keycard under the door and played him till Neill arrived.’

‘Jeez. What did you think when you got her text, Rich?’

‘I was one whisky into the Bolton game. She’d just texted she’s almost ready for a taxi. So when my phone beeped again I literally was getting up Uber when I shot to my feet and almost fell over. Downed a glass of water which forty minutes later was being pissed down the bastard’s face after driving fifty miles an hour and running at least two red lights.’

‘Amazed they only gave you a speeding ticket,’ said Ed.

‘No - that was doing 8mph over on 30mph roadworks, would you believe, and only because I was necking a McDonalds milkshake.’

‘You said those things are filth!’ said Natalia.

‘Darling. I am filth.’

Ed shook his head. ‘First I find out she’s three years younger than I thought, and now—’

Neill nodded to where Natalia’s four fingers were softly hooked under Ed’s elbow. ‘Don’t. She’s happy.’ He tousled her head laying on the table. ‘Besides, we thrashed him didn’t we darling? Left him booted, bound and buggered with a body lotion bottle - just enough for him to be gone with a tail between his legs.’

‘Or rather a toilet brush,’ muttered Natalia.

‘Well you two are Dennis the Menace! Or in your case Nat, Danger Mouse!’

‘I’m the one who put myself into danger by lying,’ sighed Natalia.

‘I take it you didn’t encourage her to find her dad, Rich?’

‘He’s actually the one who ever encouraged me to find him. Ask mum where the fuck’s dad, remember?’

‘She went behind my back to use my credit card to send a LinkedIn message, so that sums it up,’ Neill exhaled.

‘But you gave her your card to book glamping, so all’s right in the joint account?’ chuckled Ed.

‘Yes, after I tied her by the throat to the table leg and threatened her with my belt till I ordered her to fuck herself with a sausage,’ Neill said casually as he pulled out his phone.

Ed almost spat his pepperoni. ‘I really can’t believe you two. I mean, I know you’re exaggerating, but—’

‘Oh I was so happy to fuck a sausage,’ said Natalia, ‘after he read my essay and gave me an A*, and this time didn’t even piss on—OWW!’  

Neill had pinched her arm.

‘Wait, are we talking chipolata or chorizo?’ Ed stared.

‘Worse. Saucisson like we have back at the house.’

‘Jeez, that thing’s a rock baton!’

‘Not as good as a truncheon. Out for delivery,’ Neill winked to his phone. ‘Then we can have a good game of Heddlu.’

‘Heddlu?’

‘Welsh for police,’ said Ed. ‘Why didn’t you just bring a vibrator?’

‘She says it makes her feel like cake mix.’

A tall figure now swept through the tables, dressed head to foot in a white sheet, his face half painted white and half black.

‘And that’s the master baker?’

Following now came a woman in a brown cloak and bowler hat, and another in a beige hat and chequered cloak. More men and women all with various striped, multicoloured cloaks and dark glasses appeared as a trumpet sounded. 

‘Here the crazies come,’ muttered Neill. 

A man was hung with a huge drum he was banging, whilst a young woman in a voluminous dress like Queen Elizabeth distributed a box of rosettes. A little boy ran along in a bright red toga, as three men in brown wool blazers with white piping strolled up.

‘Blimey. They look like a 1960s boating advert.’

Ed turned round again. ‘So, what’ll happen if you do find your dad, Natalia, and he ends up taking a truncheon to you, Rich?’ 

‘I’d sooner take one to him,’ said Natalia. ‘After abandoning me all this time I’m not letting him rule my life, and—’ 

She was drowned out by dramatic music blaring from a speaker as the crowd erupted in cheers. Colourful brollies were hoisted into the sun as a man spoke over the top balcony.

‘Oh my god!’ gasped Natalia. ‘There he is!’

‘What, your dad?’

‘The horrible man from the shop!’

‘Jobsworth?’ Neill rapped. ‘Where?’

‘In the top hat, snarling into the megaphone.’

‘Testing, testing!’ The megaphone squealed. ‘I am not a number, I am a free man!’ 

The crowd burst into histrionic laughter.

‘I’ll have that megaphone rammed down his throat and brolly up his arse before you can say ITV+1.’

‘Not if I do it first.’

Natalia glanced at Ed in surprise.

‘See, Natalia! What it’s like to have two boyfriends?’

‘Twice the chance of being nabbed by the pigs?’

‘Double trouble. You love it.’

‘Speaking of, I can see at least two men with video cameras, Neill. We might end up on the news.’

‘Oh, shit.’

They stood back as the procession moved into the piazza waving ‘VOTE’ placards bearing the monochrome face of the actor Patrick McGoohan, shouting: ‘Six! Six! Six!’

‘Don’t you think it’s odd that every year,’ Neill squinted, ‘fans return to parade here chanting the lines like they’re mentally retarded or there’s nothing else on the telly?’

‘Let them have their nostalgic fun I guess,’ said Ed. ‘Some say it was the most provocative TV programme ever made. Without it, we wouldn’t have Lost, or The Matrix, or The Truman Show—’

‘Why are they all shouting for sex?’ Natalia frowned.

‘Just look at them,’ chuckled Neill. ‘Reminds me of the oddballs dancing to the Time Warp.’

‘They’re shouting six, as in the Prisoner’s number in the episode when the village votes him as leader,’ said Ed. ‘You missed that one last night, Nat, when you fell asleep.’

‘Now keep your eyes well and truly open on Jobsworth,’ said Neill.

‘Rich, there’s a video guy coming up that way. Come over here,’ Ed beckoned. ‘In here, in here—’ 

They followed Ed through a door and boldly past a sign prohibiting admittance to non-conference registered. Inside the darkness a handful of costumed spectators were watching an episode of the idolised programme. 

‘There,’ Ed whispered to where costumes were laid out on tables at the back. ‘Time for a makeover. Nat, you first, get your kit off!’

She rather fancied herself in her red beret and skinny jumper, ‘the tastiest Red Stripe I’ve seen,’ said Ed, who sported a turtleneck jumper, scarf, and dark jacket, whilst Neill had adorned himself in what he’d dubbed ‘the Ku Klux Klan sheet’ from head to foot, his face behind a black and white mask. On the screen behind them, a jury panel of these exact cloaked characters were clapping and chanting, ‘I, I, I!’ clamorously enough for them to make a discreet exit.

Ed grabbed a couple of ‘Vote No. 6’ placards propped by the door. ‘Good to hide behind. Where’s the buggering brolly?’

Neill nodded to a lady who’d stopped to tie her laces. He walked over and began asking directions to the gift shop, whilst Ed promptly swiped her folded brolly and walked off the other way.

‘Savage,’ muttered Natalia.

‘Blend in, ok?’ came Neill’s nasal echo behind the plastic. ‘Don’t let that fiend out of your sight, and join in with everything the dumb fuckers chant. Don’t look conspicuOOOUS!—’ 

Ed and Natalia burst out laughing as he jumped like a flapping white chicken at the blast of a horn behind him. An open-topped Austin Mini Moke was rocking up the cobbled lane with a loud jingle, driven by two men in boiler suits and shades. Neill adjusted his falling mask and obliged a royal wave back as the car headed up toward where Jobsworth boomed on the megaphone, and the series soundtrack rang out.

‘Guys what are you going to do? Are you really going to thrash him? How—’

‘Ed’s got an idea. Hush now, all in good time.’

The crowd now circled the fountain pool with blows of whistles, drumbeats and calls.

‘So much for feeling like you’re in Lesbos when you’ve got ‘six for two! six for two!’ called out like a meat stall at a Kirkgate Market.’

‘Mincemeat is what we’re making, Rich.’

‘Guys, you have to be careful…’

‘That’s her getting wet voice. How wet are you getting, Natalia?’

She stared. ‘I can’t take you seriously with that horrible sheet and mask on.’

‘Yup, she’s getting as excited as when I had the boys at school beaten up for her.’

‘You did what?’ said Ed.

‘Some nasty little sexters. See how her face lights up?’

‘You do look cute in that beret. Like a little French girl, you should wear pigtails.’

A man in front turned round, wearing a black beret and black striped top.

‘Not you, mate,’ added Ed.

He stared at Ed. ‘You’re 28, aren’t you?’ he grinned in a Brummie accent.

‘If you’re referring to IQ,’ remarked Neill. 

‘I meant Peter Swanwick. Bald, glasses. Plays the controller.’

‘Er, yes!’ blinked Ed.

‘Have you ever actually watched it?’ Brummie frowned.

‘Of course, all the series.’

‘There’s only one series.’

‘Exactly. All the series.’

‘We watched three episodes last night,’ added Natalia.

‘There’s seventeen of them,’ chuckled the man.

‘Two more after she fell unconscious watching McGoohan laying unconscious in Episode 3,’ added Neill. ‘Plus the last episode just now in the auditorium. Doesn’t six of seventeen qualify us to be here?’

‘We’re Six of One,’ said the man.

‘And half a dozen of the other?’ said Ed.

‘The club,’ he frowned.

‘Right, right,’ said Neill. ‘But the last episode doesn’t answer the big question does it? Of who is No. 1!’

‘It does. It’s no. 6.’

‘Now I’m confused,’ muttered Neill.

‘We’re all No. 1. We’re the evil, inside every one of us! The last episode caused riots for not answering what the viewers wanted. Paddy McGoohan had to flee the country!’

‘The producers probably did a Beatles and took LSD to confound everyone,’ said Ed. ‘The late 60s, what a time to be alive!’

‘Wasn’t McGoohan disappointed that baby-booming Britain couldn’t take suspension of disbelief?’ said Neill.

‘Oh, he was thrilled he roused the attention!’ Brummie enthused. ‘Said the last thing he wanted was a bunch of brain-dead fanatics!’

‘Right,’ Neill’s eyes went cynically to the crowd as he pulled out his fags.

‘I like the guy in it,’ sighed Natalia. ‘Trapped in cuckoo land but marches alone like the proud rebel scorning a sea of idiots - just like Alice!’

‘She’s quite right. Beyond its time, I tell people! Speaks to the surveillance and artificial intelligence society we are moving ever towards!’ Neill frowned as he clicked his lighter. ‘Although I was rather waiting for him to pork one of those luscious ladies.’

‘Yup, he’d have made a great Bond,’ said Ed.

‘No, no, no!’ frowned back Brummie, ‘he was offered the Bond role and turned it down. He didn’t believe in guns or romping with lasses in any of his roles!’

‘Wow! That’s unusual,’ said Natalia.

Ed concurred. ‘Good old Paddy.’

‘Yes, yes!’ Neill waved his fag now, ‘precisely not the man who has the eye for the ladies, nor for gratuitous violence, but for his own goals. You can see it in the way he holds himself onscreen, begging our attention - nay, commanding it! Germaine Greer wrote of the whole woman, well, he is the sovereign, Jungian, Whole Man!’

Brummie looked lost for words.

‘Very astute, schoolgirl-shagger,’ murmured Ed as Neill blew smoke over him.

‘Oh, but that’s so like Neill too,’ Natalia squeezed Neill’s arm, just as he gawked at a woman’s large bosom squeezing past, then looked to the crowd and muttered: 

‘Has that bastard been to the lavvy yet so we can thrash him?’

‘No. I’ve been keeping my eye on him the whole time.’

Natalia eyed a bottle of Evian in the side pocket of a person’s backpack in front. She reached to discreetly pluck, then pass it to Neill, whose face flickered impressed.

Neill turned to the Brummie who was now talking to someone else. 

‘Would you care to pass this bottle of hydration to the town crier up there? Poor sod looks parched!’

‘Oh! Ok.’ 

They watched as the bottle was passed along various hands and up to Jobsworth, which he took with a surprised nod, stuffed in his pocket and retook the megaphone.

‘Good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon! The flavour of the day is chess!’

Everyone now began arranging themselves onto chessboard squares.

‘Jeez. We’ll be waiting all day for him to take a leak.’

‘Pawn to Queen Four! Pawn to Queen Four!’

A giant white balloon was now falling down onto a sea of upturned faces, which then got hit along with sticks.

‘Is that as big as the Durex you batted Alana’s bottom with in the Grotto?’

‘Almost as big as her ego.’

The balloon touched a small topiary obelisk and burst with a bang to laughter all around. Then, in mimicry of a scene from the programme, sounds of sirens came as the men in boiler suits rode in on the Austin Moke Taxi to haul a player from the chess board.

‘White Queen’s Rook moved without orders!’

‘Not allowed! The cult of the individual!’

‘Bring him in for treatment!’

‘Eddie,’ Neill whispered. ‘Change tact, back to the dressing room quick. Natalia, stay here and scream ‘I am 16!’ if anyone tries to nab you.’

They ambled off as Natalia fidgeted by the wall, watching a man in a bumblebee jumper with beads of sweat down his face as he chanted along. ‘Remove White Queen’s Rook to hospital! Call the substitute! The substitute! The substitute!—’ His chin wobble on every second syllable of the word repeated to irritation reminded her of someone. Was it someone from The Prisoner? Someone they’d seen in Llandudno? Or at school? 

She was frowning in thought when Neill and Ed, barely recognisable, reappeared at her side in dark glasses and jackets, Neill in a top hat and Ed in a yellow floppy hat.

‘Fuck! You look like the Men in Black. Sort of meets Van Gogh, Ed, or Dickens in your case, Neill…’

‘I need these,’ Neill swiped Natalia’s glasses, now looking more peculiar in cats-eye shades. ‘Right on cue, both the video guys are having a KitKat break. Eddie, be ready for when he comes down those steps.’

Natalia held her breath to watch the vile little man from the shop now descending the steps, as Neill and Ed went either side of him and to his surprise, marched him along to the pink building whilst Ed plucked the megaphone and called into it:

‘Just off for a No. 1 or No. 2!’

There was a scatter of laughs, whilst confused Jobsworth began to wriggle from the arm grip just as they disappeared through the doorway.

She moved to a small window at the side of the building, where she could hear doors thudding closed, then coughing, then a moment later, gurgling and retching. Drowned out now by the drums and trumpets going again, she fidgeted with some bush leaves, noticing the bumblebee man was now stepping over to her. 

It was too late to put the placard over her face.

‘Ello, ello! All better now, are we?’

She opened her mouth in surprise - just as Neill and Ed were behind her, breathless, Neill pulling off his top hat and spinning it into the bush. 

‘Let’s get out of these costumes fast—’

‘Eh up! It’s Mr Neill!’

‘Crikey, Mark! What are you doing here?’

The man clapped Neill on the back, both as red-faced as each other. ‘I’ve driven a whole load from Manchester ‘ere, although I’m a bit of a Prisoner fan meself! Another school trip is it?’ he grinned, just as Natalia realised who it was.

‘Yes,’ eagerly nodded Neill. ‘It’s—’

‘Oh, what am I talking about, it’s Easter hols, innit!’

‘Yee-es… she’s my niece, you see. On the Haworth coach, I didn’t say, well, I didn’t want to show favouritism at the time, I—’

‘Oh, I’m all for favouritism, like free entry they gave me just for driving the coach, I can’t grumble! But I tell you, I dint know it were gonna be so bleedin’ hot!’ Mark mopped his brow with his sleeve. ‘These Cell Block H outfits are 100% polyester! Round the crotch too, I mean it’s—’

‘Here, here - take our parasol,’ offered Ed, ‘and cover your head with this’ - as Mark staggered under the tug of the yellow hat over him - ‘there’s a drinking fountain just through there in that building. We’re late for a party, must dash!’

‘Oh! You’re an ‘elp, you are!’

Back in their own clothes again, they passed around a giant teapot with all six of their little fingers extended. The mugs were embossed with colourful birds perched on golden branches, whilst now came indeed, the smallest ponciest sausage rolls in the kingdom, and various finger sandwiches that were fast ignored for scones in a basket with jam and cream. Then a three-stack tower of treats: carrot cake set with walnuts, chocolate balls set with golden coin tops, and a most opulent, glistening choix strawberry and cream Swiss roll.

‘Well I rather think we delivered a very good thrashing. Horse riding, horse riding I’m talking about, sir,’ Ed smiled.

‘Oh indeed. Maximus needed to be taught a lesson.’

‘Six, six of the best!’

‘Oh rather, Edward, one must learn how to groom properly. In order to ride, yes, in order to ride?’

‘Boys what did you do to him!’ 

‘We made a beast with three backs alright,’ said Ed. ‘Gave him a Prisoner experience he’ll never forget. We bent over the bastard and had him tonguing the U-bend like Toilet Duck!’

‘Well his breath will have improved,’ remarked Natalia. ‘Talk about a new No. 2!’

They wheezed in laughter as Natalia murmured in thought. ‘But do you think poor Mark got thrashed?’

‘No, no, I’m sure he didn’t.’

‘And do you think, Richard, that one’s grooming will sufficiently impress wittle Mary and her wittle lamb?’

‘Not bareback, I wouldn’t think, dear,’ added Natalia.

‘Then we’d best drop by the chemist.’ Neill eyed Natalia pulling out her phone. ‘Phones at the table, madam. Or are you sending old mama Mary more pictures of cake she can’t eat?’

‘Nope. I’m googling Patrick McGoohan turning down James Bond.’ In a few moments Ed and Natalia were cooing over an article about the actor’s steadfast loyalty and following his own vision. 

‘He was a devoted romantic, wrote his wife a love poem every day of their marriage…’

‘Ohh!’

‘Goodness,’ Neill sat back and supped his Darjeeling Earl Grey in bemusement. ‘Forget the novel of the bad headmaster. You two sound like you want to start writing for The Catholic Herald. You’re supposed to be fucking her tonight, Ed. Oh, you’re both blushing now? Shall I remind you what we did last night, and this morning?’

‘Rich. Sexual energy is not to be squandered but channelled creatively.’ 

‘Don’t go all Jung on me, ball-sac head, when she’s young enough.’

‘Just a reminder that fidelity is underrated,’ said Ed. ‘Remember the episode last night when McGoohan was stroking the woman’s face but didn’t kiss her? I thought that was well odd, but it says it’s because he never wanted his three daughters see him kiss another woman onscreen.’

‘How lovely!’ said Natalia.

‘I’ll give you fidelity,’ Neill’s eyes narrowed. ‘Did you know that a woman in the parade hit on me earlier? Do you know what my response was?’

‘Meet you round the back in ten, I’ll hammer your anvil?’

‘I can’t give you my number! I’m not a free man!’

‘Well, exactly. Monogamy is sacred.’

‘Sacred? Swap a letter, Ed, and it spells scared. Monogamy does not preclude a most necessary post-violence ménage à trois, in fact, you owe her.’

‘And check out this scene in Episode 11—’ Natalia brandished her screen, ‘this blonde girl with big blue eyes and no spots comes into his room but all he wants is to know what her game is - and bark at her to get out.’

‘Don’t you start, ballmuncher.’

‘See?’ said Ed. ‘She finds it sexy that he doesn’t want sex.’

‘Probably reminds her of that time I told her she’s not ready. Lord only knows how wet that made her. Must be why she didn’t bleed when we first fucked.’ 

Neill eyed Ed shift in his seat. 

‘Do you remember Monica’s bed in Oulton Hall?’ he continued.

‘Ah… let me guess. You shagged her on it.’

‘She was still a virgin, you know that. I made her wank for me.’

Ed chuckled. ‘You were able to do that, Nat? Get off that easily, under pressure?’

‘Of course. I could probably do it now.’

Both men softly cleared their throats, eyeing Natalia’s hand slipping up her dress beneath her serviette.

‘How about a bet,’ she leaned to them slyly. ‘If I can’t make myself come at this table in ten minutes, looking right at you, Ed, then I will…’ 

She waited for the tinge of pink at Ed’s cheekbones, the shift of his pupils, the scrunch of his lips, that reminded her of exactly how she once caught herself looking in Neill’s cottage mirror.

‘You will what?’ Neill blinked.

‘Suck his cock in the toilet.’

‘No. Fuck his cock in the toilet.’

‘Manners, sir. It’s not romantic for Sex Ed in the bogs.’

‘I’ll tell you what manners are, Miss Clitlington,’ Neill whispered back sternly. ‘Manners are being polite and spreading those legs for the one who ducked Jobsworth’s face in the loo and pissed on his head - talk about Heddlu! - oh! - just for you.’ 

‘Oh, keep going…’

A waiter passed through, as they all raised their avian teacups as though talking about the weather.

‘How do we know she’s faking it?’ Ed whispered.

‘Ed, now your manners. You know her come face by now.’

‘Blushing like that cake jam. Right to the lower lashes…’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Mouth hanging. Shoulder going like a hamster wheel.’

‘Watch out. Waiter coming. Slow that clit.’

‘Clit? I’m wanking my cunt.’

Giggles at the men’s reactions took over till she licked her lips and recommenced; the back of Neill’s finger stroking her knee.

‘Gosh,’ murmured Neill. ‘Wanking her cunt. They grow up too fast these days.’

‘Says Mr Saucission-Truncheon. And banana?’ Ed muttered. ‘Did you do something with bananas?’

‘Ohh, yess… ohh, Neill… tell him… tell him about Banana Night…’

They paused as a bustle of people arrived at a nearby table.

‘Shit. I daren’t look - is Jobsworth there?’

‘No, no, just some elderlies.’

‘Go on,’ insisted Natalia, as Neill began to murmur the details of having Natalia blushing spread-eagled and double-ended with Mr South and Mr North and how much her tight virgin pussy leaked down his rug, and it was a show like nothing a man could pay for… and it was not just the incredulousness on Ed’s face that fuelled her, but the way Neill’s narration fell upon his features, at this or many other times, it was the obscene didacticism of the one she loved, that decorated the face of the one she didn’t mind, alchemised it with his essence; blessed it with his being. And just as Neill talked of how she sucked the banana till it creamed into mush:

‘Oh, she’s there.’

Her finger hammers the anvil of that deep spot, fingering a firework to detonation through a tummy of cake-mush… the table jerks, her heart races and her face flushes crimson against the white serviette she took up with the other hand.

‘Race you to the toilet,’ said Neill.

The men’s double scrape of chairs cued a look of surprise from the waiter ten feet away.

They found the Oriental gardens, Natalia racing to cross the Guzei, a red bridge over a lily-covered lake, imploring, ‘first we’re in Italy, now in Japan! Talk about jetsetting!’ whilst the men smoked idly behind, and then bundling back in the car, the men groaning as if they’d hiked Snowdon itself - Natalia was relieved to see from a distance, Mark the coach driver looking no worse for wear, other than significantly redder. 

Talking to Jobsworth. Next to a policeman, next to a police car.

‘Shit, guys. The real Heddlu are here!’

‘Let’s fucking skidaddle!’ 

In a trice Neill was roaring his engine in S-mode down B-roads like the Stig as Natalia bounced up and down excitedly. ‘Now I want to see how the programme used all the spots in the village! When we get home can we watch more Prisoner?’

‘As long you know you’re ours.’ Neill flapped a polythene bag at Ed. ‘For it’s party time tonight, boy!’

‘Is that the coke?’ asked Natalia. ‘Can I look at it?’

Neill held over the bagged white powder.

‘No, no - can I look at it properly,’ she reached her hand.

‘Do not open it.’

‘Do you sniff this up your nose?’

‘Might gum it.’

‘So you’ll taste it? What does it taste like?’

‘Nothing much. Here, pass it back,’ as he pulled them into a Gulf. ‘Need to fill up.’

‘Not when it can slip from that jeans pocket in front of everyone, Neill! Far safer this stays in my bag!’

Running to check on Hetty, and then swiftly upstairs, Ed chortling at her claim to have ‘the shits from the high tea!’ - ‘No wonder, talk about finger sandwiches!’ - it was ten minutes before Neill could retrieve the white goods from her bag, and Natalia retire smugly back upstairs with a cup of tea, scrolling her phone.

Good that they’d be gumming it then. She’ll while away another five minutes before going downstairs to check the progress. It’d be past midnight in Thailand but she’d try Alana:

She’s sounding upbeat for being blocked.

Oh? 

What a complete liar, she tossed her phone with a little laugh, and went downstairs where she could hear the men in wheezing mirth too. A mirror had been taken down and lay on its side on the table, a faint line of white powder across it and a credit card beside. They were swigging beers as they remarked on a scrolling grid of obscene video thumbnails on the TV.

‘You’ve had it then?’

‘Sit down, sit down, sex kitten!’ Neill greeted.

‘Embers all good!’ she nodded at the fire.

‘What?’

‘Embers. In the fire. It was an impression of your chimney sweep. Oh, never mind.’ 

She grimaced at a porn star crouching like a cow about to be milked. ‘God! They can’t be real!’

‘Temperature’s dropped. Thought we’d hot it up in here in more ways than one.’

‘What do you want to search, Rich?’ Ed smacked his lips. ‘Gym teacher pounds headmaster?’

‘Noo, ball licking!’ Natalia said.

‘Ooh! Here we go. Busty blonde rims her landlord.’ 

They watched as a woman wearing thick foundation, put out a long red tongue onto a leathered man’s crack, increasing the speed till her peroxide hair was a wagging mop in the camera lens. 

‘Now is that what you wanted the girl with the nice complexion to do to McGoohan?’

‘She’s doing it too fast,’ sniffed Natalia.

‘Sounds like she’s loving it.’

‘Sounds like she’s trying to make as much noise as she can.’

‘Good heavens,’ Neill stared. ‘I need her plunging my kitchen sink.’

‘Has he come yet?’

‘Probably six times over like most porn stars.’

‘I thought we were watching more Prisoner?’

‘Chaste old McGoohan’s hardly going to get us in the mood. But let’s get you out of yours.’ Neill nodded to the lines on the mirror. ‘There’s still a little left for Daisy-Dares-You!’

She glanced to Ed. ‘Will it be ok for me?’

‘Come, come—’

‘Have her gum, gum it,’ Ed said.

‘Like you did,’ said Natalia.

‘No, we racked the lines as you can see.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We snorted it, Natalia.’

‘What! Up your nose?! But—’ Her face flashed at them concernedly. ‘Do you feel ok, after that?’

‘Of course,’ Neill smiled. ‘Why wouldn’t we? Look at Ed. He’s well on his way.’ 

She looked to Ed, fidgeting like he has fleas in his ears, a smirk on his face even stupider than usual.

‘Right. So… I just rub it into my gums?’

‘It’s easy. Here…’ Neill scraped the credit card and brought a dab on his forefinger to her mouth. A few minutes later, the mirror was hung back on the wall and Natalia was sitting down with them.

‘She was giggling like a loon before I even got it in there. Well, how are we all feeling? Ready for more fun?’

‘Porn to Queen Whore!’ blurted Ed.

‘No, a game! And I don’t mean football.’

‘Scrabble, on crack? Well, I guess you deserve a reward for being game.’

‘A game for being game!’ cackled Ed.

‘Settle down, Edward. I feel compos cuntis enough to play, remarkably. You ever played Scrabble whilst cooked?’ Neill leant in a whisper to Natalia: ‘He’s nervous. He really wants to be a bad boy, but he needs to let loose. All that piety talk has made him jibber like Sam in my office.’

‘Best she doesn’t drink if she’s had some,’ grunted Ed.

‘Relax. There’ll be no ambulance for a girl on PG Tips, Scrabble and three grains of blow.’

‘Tell you what, Ed,’ Natalia hooked her arm into his, ‘we’ll play and whoever wins gets to go first.’

‘Into the ambulance?’

‘To bed, with me. Whilst the other one watches.’

‘My god.’ Neill scrabbled up to the game shelf.

‘Rich—’

‘Here we go,’ Neill rattled the box over.

‘How does it feel to be coked, Nat?’ Ed eyed her.

She grinned back. ‘Good, Ed! How about you?’

‘Oh, lovely jubbly and beer all bubbly,’ he rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue as Natalia laughed and poured beer into lemonade. ‘This should help it kick in,’ she winked, as Neill spilled out the board game. 

Now Ed was scratching his head and frowning. 

‘Rich, where did you say you got that coke from?’

‘My dealer. Top notch.’

‘It’s just that… I’m not feeling too much. Other than pissed, as usual, in both senses.’

‘Give it chance. Another moment or two and you’ll be spelling crack with two Ks.’

‘Show me that bag,’ Ed said.

Natalia, quietly sipping her shandy, held out the cloth bag of letters.

‘The coke.’

Neill sighed and brought over the empty polythene bag from the table as Ed scraped the remains with his fingertip and exclaimed.

‘That is not coke. That’s fucking sweet.’

Natalia let out a squeal of laughter as they both looked to her.

‘What? Natalia?’ 

‘She did something?’

‘Let me guess. It’s fucking sherbet?’

‘Sherbet! Sher-bet?’ Ed’s voice grated. ‘We… we snorted… sugar?’ 

He coughed, then coughed again - as Natalia’s laughing face dropped. 

‘Ed, are you ok?’

‘We’ve snorted sherbet,’ Neill retched. ‘We’ve snorted fucking sherbet!’ 

Natalia shot to her feet.

‘It’s burning, it’s burning!’ They were both starting to wheeze as Natalia froze in horror.

‘Guys! I thought you were going to gum it! I didn’t mean to… oh my god! Guys! What have I done!’ 

She looked in horror to Ed gagging like a parched dog, and Neill clutching his throat. ‘Heeelp!’ he croaked, like he had three chillis down there, as Natalia began to circle the couch, cupping her mouth repeatedly in despair:

‘I don’t want you to die like Jim the Lizard! Oh no, oh no, oh no! Shall I call for that ambulance!’

‘Tell them to be quick!’ Neill rasped like a drain. ‘Snorting sugar leads to death in an hour!—’ 

‘Neill—!’ Natalia cried. ‘Ed, Neill! Oh, where’s the ph—’

The doorbell went.

‘That was quick!’

Natalia was in tears of confusion as Ed ran and opened the door, then picked up a parcel from the doormat as the sound of a van slammed its doors.

‘Cheers mate!’

‘Cheers mate.’

She stared.

‘Amazon Prime, sir,’ Ed shut the front door, brought over the box and bowed like a butler, as Natalia blinked in astonishment at both men’s sudden recovery.

‘Right on time after all. Get her cuffed over the couch for a strip search. Where’ve you hidden it, Natalia? Same place as the cuff keys?’

A stunted laugh, that they were ok, ok after all - as she, promptly bent and cuffed over the table, was bare-bottom-slapped a handful of times before something black was flashed at her face and smoothly fed into her mouth. 

‘Get it wet, get it wet. It’ll make the policeman’s search easier—’ a finger starting on her anus, to her disproval, whilst she, trying to protest the whereabouts of the real powder, let slobber to the table the taste of a dozen plastic chemicals, just before it was transferred back to Ed standing behind her, to put ‘right up there, right up there’ - whilst something else was pressed to her lips. 

‘Now that’s better,’ Neill’s voice now calmly hoarse, hers only moans, groans and stuck-grunt-ohs, as the water gun pressed at her front teeth. ‘Plenty still in this cumgun, Natalia. I said I’d get you back, didn’t I?’

She looked to him, her big wet brown eyes drying, that Neill was not dying - but more on form than ever, examining her face as the truncheon was slid, dextrously, in and out, in and out of her cunt.

‘Good try, little baby. But we know straight away when coke is coke. It’s like petrol, hmm? Acidic. Numbs your mouth like Lidocaine. You’d only come close tricking someone, only a very silly newb, with baby teething powder perhaps…’

‘I’ll… wemember that for nexsht time.’

‘Slower, Ed. Not so much. Got anything?’

Garbling the crude rectangular plastic at her lips, the sensation inside her nether ones from an object she had barely seen and that was ten minutes ago in the courier’s cool van - drilling her by Sidekick like a not so shy dick - made her eyes flicker to Neill’s observing satisfaction. 

‘Now hold it. I want her fucking herself. Fucking it whilst she spells out SORRY SIR with the Scrabble tiles.’

Obliging felt even better, as she drove it now to the sides of her insides, feeling for its touch upon her itching spots unfolding like a treasure map for her pirated Grade A joke. Was it because she knew it wasn’t there, or that they’d usurped her trick, that made mutual rebellion crackle at the contact like a kid poking metal into a mains socket? The gun re-cocked firm in her mouth as she rocked, and a slither of salty liquid from the shoot hole made a rivulet on her tongue.

‘Good trial run, Ed? Let’s see if she’s ready for you. Show me that truncheon... goodness. Ok, you can fuck her now.’

‘Consent, Rich.’

‘There it is.’ 

He pointed the juice-strewn stick to where Natalia had spelt out: 

Neill raised Natalia’s chin by the gun tip. ‘Oh?’

‘Only if…’ she blinked, ‘you both promise not to take the coke. On the holiday. Ever.’

‘Hmm.’ He pushed the gun back into her mouth and rolled her onto the table. ‘Go get those condoms, Ed.’

‘And it’s getting cold in here,’ she withdrew the gun to add.

‘Let me relight the fire.’

‘No, I want to go up to bed. Eddie in our bed. And I want him to sleep there all night.’

Neill stepped back over and replaced the gun in her mouth. ‘What did I tell you about taking something from your mouth without my permission? Swallow. All of it—’ Then chucking the gun and hoisting her over his shoulder like a coastguard rescue, she spluttering, ‘it’s sweet!’ - he replied: ‘Lucky you get a taste of your own medicine, Poppins,’ nodding to a cup where they’d stowed her sherbet, before he carried her upstairs and held open their bedroom door.

‘Eddie,’ he whistled. ‘Here, boy.’

She was trembling, a surprise to herself, for she was not nervous, or at least not in her mind. For she was laying breast to chest with Neill, more intimately than their own first time, arranged so that Ed, in the bathroom to the sound of the flush now, would arrive behind her, whilst she could look up Headmaster’s front teeth and nostrils as her moral compass, ah - everything was ok, with his face closer to her than the pillow, his eyes at their lowest muscle strain, looking down the gentle rise of his cheeks at her like she was as precious to him as his own kidneys. A paternal flicker in that slight blink and twitch of his lip, as he stroked back a frond of hair that had escaped her ponytail.

‘Now the question is. Does Ed need lubrication? Because I can shoot some up first.’

She did that chuckle of bemusement, shaking head and loosening pussy, that spelled her continuing disbelief at his possibly being a headmaster - which he’d read on her face so many times now that his response was ready: 

‘Which teacher shall we imagine he is?’ - And her smile of disbelief widens either in embarrassment or glee at the gross Harrison fantasy she once had. - ‘So there is one?’

‘I only ever fancied you, silly.’

‘Ed’s whoever you want, in our own little sleazy scenario. Dinkey? Do you think that could have cured him?’

‘Neill, don’t be gross—’

‘Let’s say Mr Khan. After drinking your piss, I bet he’d give anything to fuck you.’

‘Ohh, Neill, you are—’

‘He’s not bad, is he? Sort of an Asian Kilroy. You know Kilroy, from the early 90s? Did your mum ever put that show on?’

‘Rich you’re such a passionkilroy,’ came Ed from over her shoulder.

‘Good, because if she’s dry now it will be sort of what her virgin face should have looked like when I first had her.’ Now her face is cradled in his hands as Ed plants a stubby kiss trail down her spine, she feels a fumbling plum-tip stab at her perineum till Neill obliges to reach and squeeze her buttocks apart - ‘there you go, mate. Say thank you’ - ‘Shut up, wanker’ - and her expression is narrated right on the lip pop— ‘Aw, that’s it,’ her thighs wide astride Neill’s, Ed’s just behind hers - her clit chafing the belly hair of the irrepressible motormouth as he continues:

’Remember what a condom feels like? Take her wrists, Ed. Onto her spine. Oh that’s it, how does she feel, Ed? Doesn’t it feel fantastic?’ 

And Ed is evidently feeling too fantastic to pant back more than unfinished F-words, as she face-butts his sternum, sending her brown fronds twirling into Neill’s chest hair.

‘Speed limit on my girlfriend, please. Thirty miles an hour.’

‘I really am on his speeding course’ - Ed breathed out in one syllable, as four fondling hands meet on her breasts. - ‘You’d better believe it. That’s it. Natalia…’ as they rock up to speed forty, and Neill looks thoroughly entertained at Natalia’s disintegrating countenance, asking: ‘Are you gonna come on Ed’s cock?’

‘Only… only yours.’

‘Aww, such a shame.’ And that ‘aw’ in hypnotic huskiness to rival McGoohan’s might just make her curling cunt flesh come, come to daddy, right on uncle, as Neill’s fingers comb into her hair and his other hand squeezes her buttock and Ed’s rubber cock deepens and the three of them are contracting closer, closer, like an accordion, till her hair is messier than in Portmeirion and Neill asks: ‘Is she creaming? Right on your dick?’ 

‘I can’t see.’

‘How does it feel.’

‘Like Kilroy silk.’

‘Oh, good girl. You made him feel so welcome.’

‘Jeez, Rich, but you look fit to burst…’

‘You’re so thoughtful Ed. But don’t worry about that.’

‘Shall I put mine up her you-know-what, and you up her—’

‘No way,’ said Natalia. ‘You wank him, Ed.’

‘No chance.’

And then Neill was up on his knees, knocking Ed’s hands off her hips where they rested reverently as though she was a holy chalice, she barely has chance to queef before his fat red sheathless cock usurps Ed’s place and smugly fucks her to muffled squeals into the pillow. Then, ‘there we go. That’s more like it,’ as he sweeps aside her hair in pursuit of her mouth, and reinstates rubber Ed to the rear, and both in position, announces: ‘You bet. It’s National Speed Limit.’ 

Two men who had humiliated a man for humiliating a woman, were now taking pleasure in humiliating her into pure pleasure. She feels sandwiched like cream in the Swiss roll of their thick entwined bodies, eating Neill like one, whilst Ed jostles her body streamlined in his hands like one, and their threesome grace hits highway pace till her tongue is shot with cream as though a signal to the piping bag to follow. 

‘Aw, guys, you didn’t argue as much as last time… but you didn’t quite come together,’ the least exhausted of the three travellers laughs now, as she feeds them fresh water from the gun, compares their shrivelled cocks by lamplight, and then her own sweat-beaded, womanly breasts by moonlight as she lays between their conked out, sleep-breathing chests.

People weren’t individual, inert, like rock statues at Portmeirion. It was inaccurate to ask, ‘what is he like? What kind of a person is she?’ People were more like paints. Colours that mix in a different way with other colours, making different shades in different places and lights of day. The reason she liked Ed was because she liked the colour he made on her palette when Neill’s paint mixed with it, like their fluids mingling now with Llandudno Sweet Shop sherbet in her stomach like fizzing coke. 

Curled up in the cave made by the duvet strewn from one high man-thigh to the other, six feet under the covers together they lay as dead as logs, till the sound of one trombone came, and then another, followed by the loudest of her own.

‘You farted him away, piggy in the middle,’ came the commentary, as Ed rolled out to the toilet complaining of a splitting headache, and Neill reached over to the tied condom from the bedside and squeezed it in inspection. 

‘So where have you booked us? Shepherd’s hut? Will that be one bedroom, or I guess it doesn’t matter?’

‘Actually has two bedrooms if we need them,’ came her response as she yoga-stretched up the headboard.

‘Now that’s the glamorous glamping! How much was it?’

‘£44 a night.’

‘Jeez! You’re tight, I mean, a genius. £88 for—’ 

‘£134. Three nights.’

‘But I said two! And three nights is £132, young lady.’

‘Three nights was minimum. And no coke allowed.’

‘It’s back under the spare wheel and I’ll sell it back to Tiny next week. I just hope he won’t see the contamination of sherbet grains where you swapped the bags or it’s £300 down the swanny.’

‘Oh.’

He chucked the packet at her. ‘If you want double defence from babyifying Baldie’s balljuice you’ll have to carry condoms from now on. Remember those days?’

‘Can we take Henrietta?’

‘Of course we can’t.’

‘But we can’t leave her alone here. A day trip is ok but not three nights away!’

‘We’ll have to take her back to her mum.’

‘Are you kidding!’ stared Ed as he scraped their breakfast plates. ‘Her mum will reject her. What are you suggesting, roll up to Farmer Giles and say here you go, we healed up the roadkill we never reported?’

‘Well Edward, what was your intention? Keep a farm animal as a permanent fixture of your Airbnb?’

‘Thought we could sell her eventually to another farmer. Or even a butcher.’

‘Ed!’ Natalia exclaimed.

‘Sorry but what were you expecting, Nat? To take her home to Leeds?’

‘A happy ending of some sort!’

‘No, that’s what you are,’ Neill swooped in on her as she stood cross-armed, and his attempt to manhandle her over the table led to a stiff knee back into his crotch.

‘This one needs her tea, Ed!’ he howled.

‘She’s just had one.’

‘Well clearly it didn’t work. Make her another. Spank her. Do something!’

‘I’m fine. I’m going upstairs to pack,’ she slipped away, and sat on the bed for half an hour amid repeated calls from downstairs. 

‘Natalia! What time’s check in! Sex kitten, come down at once! You’ll get spanked sore and rotten! Last warning! Ok, we’re going out, bye—!’ 

She sprung downstairs to two cheesy grins at the kitchen island.

‘Hey! We’ve made you a nice PG Tips, for a Pretty Good Tip Out! Balanced, yes? Sweet enough? Milky enough? Tea-ee enough?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Just stay, sit down and don’t let any strangers in, ok?’

‘Can’t I go out and pet Hetty?’

‘No. She’s asleep in the shed. Here, watch some Prisoner. Go all gooey over McGoohan.’

Forty minutes later of rereading Alana’s texts whilst the TV went ignored, the front door opened again and she jumped to her feet in astonishment.

Henrietta the lamb was standing in the navy blue dog coat from the junk shop. It covered her ears and around her face, attached to a leash. Neill held out the handle. 

‘If Jim the Lizard can take a lamb mid-concert that was totally unphased by the noise and lights, I’m sure a sleepy glampsite can take our sheepdog.’

She screamed in laughter and padded the lamb’s bulky bottom.

‘Pampers, darling.’

‘You put a nappy on her like I said!’

‘Thought I’d need to hook the blog link off you, but googling ‘lamb in a nappy’ came up first thing. A cut pair of tights and coat over the top so she can’t kick it off, a leash we haggled for free - William Clough Ellis eat your knob off! Here’s the deal, you’re changing the shit. You’re now a mum!— But take your pill before you really are. Happy? Horny? Good. Now are we ready for this trip?’

Here come old flat top, grooving up slowly. Slowly. Araf. Every Beatles drumbeat accompanied the ‘SLOW’ writ large in white letters on the road as it came down her line of vision like the rolling credits of a film. 

She closed her eyes and replayed last night in her mind on half speed. ‘Here come old skin head,’ she muttered. ‘Cuffed to the staircase,’ and jackass, jackass over again, till her eyes snapped open to interrupt Ed’s work talk.

‘I need another word for condom. But with an ‘ee’ sound on the end.’

‘Johnnies,’ said Neill.

‘Hmm, I need three syllables.’

‘Rubber johnny. No. What about—’

‘Koozie. Cock koozie,’ said Ed.

‘Yes! That works.’

‘What are you planning?’

‘I’m just writing. Smutball… explodes like Coca Cola. No, blows. No—’

‘Boy, GCSE English has taken a dive these days,’ said Ed.

‘Sounds like her brain is holidaying inside her cunt as much as we are.’

‘Can we engage your brain again for a moment, Nat, you’re supposed to be navigator. This exit? To Rhyl?’ 

They came off the A55 and pulled into a residential area.

‘I say, this is… rather urban,’ remarked Neill. ‘Looks like an industrial estate.’ 

They passed by office and factory buildings and a boy in a tracksuit doing wheelies. 

‘Blimey, it’s like where she lives.’

‘Harrogate is this bad?’

The map announced they’d reached their destination as they pulled up to an entry barrier by a sign for Marine Holiday Village.

‘Caravan park,’ Neill groaned. ‘She’s booked us into a caravan park!’

The Mother defined the word in the sci-fi sense of a large spaceship vessel, teetering upon wedge heels strapped through thick ankle skin. Her hair was scraped from the nape as though by a fine tooth comb, and held in a top knot by a giant purple scrunchie, with what looked like an ink blot penned into her shoulder. She sucked on a little device that blew out a cloud of scent, whilst a man next to her, only assumedly Father, sucked on the same in tandem to coalesce a peculiar cloud of minty raspberry. His sports collars turned up, a map of green tats dripped from his shoulders down leathery tanned arms, his right more tanned than the left.

A boy stood in front of them, a shiny new football clamped under ten grubby fingers, his mouth a hanging O, blinkless as Ed unlocked the door of their Super Deluxe Bronze on row G.

The door gave a plasticky squeak on its hinges as they trooped in, past three closed doors and a kitchenette, into a living area lined on three sides with a flowery upholstered sofa bench. There was a tiny TV and gas fire, and a round table set with plates and glasses that had gathered a fine layer of dust. A fly buzzed somewhere inside the beige curtain that ran behind the sofa. The place smelt faintly of antiseptic and Febreze. 

‘Oh, my fucking word.’

‘Oh, it’s lovely!’

‘Technically, a lot more bang for your buck than a shepherd’s hut.’

‘Bang may be quite literal for the demographic here,’ Neill peered out through the frilly curtain as the fly flew right into his face. ‘God, they’re still staring.’

‘At my almighty Audi, or the jacketed sheep that just hopped out of the boot?’

The thin doors jittered as they were flipped open eagerly by Natalia to locate the master bedroom, which was a double bed taking up the entire space - and a second, even smaller room with two twin beds.

Ed rattled the plastic kettle. ‘Starting to wonder why we’ve come away at all for two nights when we have our place—’

‘Three nights,’ said Neill.

‘What?’

‘Three nights we’re here.’

‘Gadzooks! We’ll see about that. Look at the way this oven opens right into the bedroom door. The Feng Shui turns me cold.’

‘Like you two turned me cold yesterday with your Oscar-winning performance?’ Natalia shovelled him out of the way with a suitcase. ‘If you don’t like it you can lump it, as my mum says!’

‘Did she just say hump it?’

‘Well she has just put all our bags by the same bed.’ Neill was pushing open a window, as a little boy ran past shouting, ‘a sheep, it’s a fuckin’ sheep!’ He smiled back and waved, then flopped back on the sofa bench as Ed flopped next to him and sighed. 

‘Are we really gonna stay in this Scouser hole even for one night? The first words I heard from those neighbours was ‘fucking twazzock, yer fucking maggot.’’

‘Language no worse than yours, Ed,’ called Natalia, from where she was christening ‘Hetty’s room’ with an armful of hay, and pushing a fetid-smelling lamb into the shower room for a nappy change.

‘In five minutes we’ve turned 1984 into Animal Farm.’

‘At least we fit in.’

‘Must be the wrong caravan social strata. Let’s see—’ Neill plucked a dog-eared brochure from a pine slot under the TV. ‘We’re in a Bronze Deluxe Level 1. Can’t we upgrade to a Gold 3 or a Swan Lake View Lodge?’

‘How much is that?’

‘Fifteen times the price.’

A sharp knock came at the door.

‘Must be the warden. We can ask him now.’

Natalia hopped from the shower room to the frosted glass of the front door. ‘There’s no-one there.’

A few seconds later, another rat-a-tat-tat!

‘Now that sounds stern!’ 

She went to look again, whilst Neill peered through the window by the kitchen sink, but there was only the flap of a seagull flying over the next caravan.

‘Is that the Scouse kiddie messing about?’ called Ed.

‘We need a camera like on his office!’

A minute later, another knock - and this time Natalia ninja-crept and spotted, distorted through the glass - a fat white body and a hammering yellow beak.

‘Oh my god! It’s the park warden alright!’ She pushed the door and it flapped away. ‘Can I feed him a tortilla chip!’

‘Do not feed it, Natalia! Stick the lamb outside, she can keep him scared off! God, the pikeys must indulge the sky-rats round here. Drown out that squawking with the telly till we pick a new place to stay.’

‘Does porn work here?’

‘No! Not porn!’ Natalia was washing her hands at the sink, watching in disdain at Ed erecting his laptop on his knee, Neill joining next to him. 

‘Ha! Look how cross she looks. She needs food.’ 

‘Shove that pizza in, Little.’

‘We already had pizza in Portmeirion!’ she huffed.

‘Is there enough Calor Gas for our 16” Dr Oetker?’

‘If not, just cook it on her,’ Neill nodded to Ed’s blank screen. ‘Hot as. Phwoar!’

‘Hmph! If it’s anything like that Pat Butcher you put on last night, I doubt it!’

Neill smirked. ‘Why, Natalia?’

‘It was a shambles! There was no authenticity, no feeling, no connection to the man—’

‘She looked pretty well connected to me.’

‘No woman starts moaning like that on cue, on a random man’s arsehole! That’s why I hate porn. It’s so fake! You were talking about speed limits, National Speed Limit, let’s go like the clappers! But sometimes you have to go like Ed’s stupid fat car through a Welsh ford! You have to go slow, arafnick-naww!’

‘Now she’s giving you the Sex Ed, Ed—’

‘Tantra, they call that.’

‘Not like a cumgun! More like Ed’s jacuzzi filling, dribbling slowly!’

‘Ohh, I could do with the jacuzzi,’ lamented Ed. ‘Remind me why we came to Rhyl?’

‘What about that porn you once watched, Natalia?’ chuckled Neill. ‘Two men get into a house and have the woman right there on the rug. You want to recreate that?’

‘No, no! Think back to the song, the song!’

‘What song?’

‘The walrus gumboot! The pace of it, the tone of it, it’s—’ 

‘Swamp rock,’ said Ed. ‘They put wet tea towels on the drumkits. Lennon ripped off a fast old Chuck Berry song, slowed right down. He still got sued and had to pay in three compensation songs, and—’

Neill nudged Ed to keep quiet, as Natalia had begun umm-umming the Come Together intro, and slithering her hips to every ‘DUH-duh, UH-uh…’ Upon sight of Ed sliding his laptop away, she began in a low, almost whispering voice that grew with confidence:

The men chortled softly, putting their feet up on the two upholstered stools as she hummed her way to another verse, nodding at Neill, who’d now lit up a fag cocked through the frilly white curtain, eyeing her thoroughly now:

Then, softly, come together! Right now! Over me! ‘Put it on, put it on!’ She ran around drawing the curtains till the space was dim all for orange shards over the table crockery.

‘I can’t get onto their WiFi.’

‘Use your roaming!’

‘Turn it up, turn it up!’ The song’s pulsing, drumkit snake-rattles shimmered on, as Natalia stretched her arms into the air with an intoxicated sigh, slithering stronger till her half-buttoned shirt dress fell off altogether and her long hair hung down over her nipples flashing intermittently through the fronds, her audience entranced as she rocked to ‘SHOOT me… SHOOT me…’

‘Fuck,’ said Neill. ‘She’s never danced outside a club.’

‘I’d put her in the club.’

Neill glanced to Ed watching with lurid fascination. ‘Oh god. Now you’re gonna be his Beatles wet dream.’

‘She isn’t yours?’

‘The verses… the chorus! The way the chorus builds up! And oh!… slips back into the verse, so smoothly, so, oh!’

Holy roller!

Toe-jam football!

Walrus gumboot!

A fire inside her pelvis grew and glowed, as her hair hung, and flipped, and her eyes closed, and the guys just stared.

‘Toward the end, toward the end! When Lennon - it’s Lennon’s voice is it?’ - Ed nodded - ‘when he is like: ‘Come together. Yeah’ - all casual. ‘Come together… yeah! Come together. Yeah! Come together. Yeahh!’ Another tiny imperfect… ‘yee-ahh!’’

‘Oh, she’s magic.’

‘The slowness… it’s so sexy, so slow! It always goes back to slowness.’ The guitar twanged and she licked the air, inhaled the sound like it was oxygen to her soul. ‘Play the song again. And now I want to—’ Her eyes lowered, mouth opened.

Both men scuffled their pants straight to their ankles.

She threw back her head in laughter, collapsed to the floor and crawled to their shins. ‘…So who came first in the hotel toilet in Portmeirion? You didn’t come together? You didn’t come together last night! But now you will… now you will, you understand?’

It would be hard for an onlooker to tell between the three of them who was more bemused by Natalia’s muttering burst of Neillian commentary as she traced her lips along Ed’s thigh, hand along Neill’s, then swaps over, eyes closed, falling into the verses, in time to the drum dips, before her face buries inhaling one sac, then the other, twice overs. Like saying grace before a meal, she waits for her body to signal the go-ahead, or maybe something in that deliciously twitching, curling bollock flesh gave it. And she doubly relishes in the final contact of her wet tongue on the soft flesh as the groans they emit that are delightfully disproportionate to this mouse-like action, all the better for it, for she is the holy roller, ten timely licks on each man, comparing their growing stems in her hands before twenty more licks a-piece.

And as the song proceeds, they know, that she knows, she wants the song finale timed with theirs. And upon Lennon’s outro, she senses the glance they give each other, but also that they don’t need anything more than to lollop their heads back and respond to the touch of Danger Mouse who was intoxicated beyond what alcohol, weed or coke could do for her in this moment.

‘Come together… yeah’ - deep pressure down the smooth slide of Ed’s prostate. ‘Come together - yeah!’ repeating the same down Neill’s. Then she rises with carpet-burned knees and melts back down on the sofa between them, turning face up, a loose cock in each hand, like she’d fallen backwards whilst holding onto two doorhandles, bursting now - as they pivot onto their knees. 

She sinks further, mouth and tongue in ready receipt. And she is delighted they are simultaneous, exulting their ‘warm, warm flow!’ dribbling onto her breasts, hitting her hair, rubbing some between her lips; her soft gasps more audible than theirs, for they are still astonished, perhaps at how happy this girl looks, happier than a woman on a hairdye box, taking Neill like a dripping mic to her lips whilst Ed is pulled to her ear like a telephone, and now flitting her face between them, just as Lennon gives his delirious parting uhhhhhh, she spins rivulets across her philtrum, and nostrils, and then the bridge of her nose, giggling about Mock Turtle soup. 

‘Upon the beach, where the Mock Turtle is crying!’ she laughed, ‘his eyes streaming with tears from eating the oysters!’

‘Only three nights in this caravan, you say?’

It was not that the woman who held the door open for them was rude, but that she warranted debate of the exact nature of her coarseness, or indeed, the identification of her sex at all. She had the slender facial bones of a female, but a plum-black crewcut of a boy. There were breasts beneath her baggy black Puma t-shirt, but she walked in the same way as the men who opened the door before her. Clutching an oversized smartphone, she turned to a boy thrashing a skateboard along the drain covers behind her, and shouted in a voice like sandpaper:

‘Gar-urrth! Jib that off, you’re doing me head in! Where’s our Stace?’ 

Natalia, Neill and Ed, arms around each other like the beast with three backs but dressed up to the nines, were already tipsy on amorous silliness as they headed out in a bid to make the most of the park’s night entertainment. The hall was packed out with tables all facing a small stage stormed by two young men in sequinned outfits. Strobing lights, hoards of standing drinkers, some starting to twerk whilst their kids ran riot with glowsticks, obligated the three’s continuing proximity just to feel their way to the bar.

‘So was she non-binary?’

‘No, Ed, that sort of thing is still illegal in Liverpool!’ shouted back Neill.

‘Butch dyke then?’

‘Nope! Just rough!’

‘What a conundrum.’

‘Look around you. Plenty more!’

Women with necks as fat as Christmas turkeys had what looked like an Argos catalogue of gold jewellery strung upon them. One would think the men with gelled hair and tattooed necks were serial killers until they piped up in benign scratchy accents to buy candy floss for their toddlers. Three teens in high ponytails sat mute with eyelashes like hoover brushes lit up by flashing TikTok videos in their hands. And yet, the outside world upon perception not snobbish - but perhaps a little soberingly, ashamedly - knew, that without the tight jeans, baseball caps and lip fillers, in fact stripped of every hair extension to their bare flesh, their social class was apparent enough to be identified by their facial features alone.

‘Reckon Natalia’s right at home,’ Neill glanced to Natalia seemingly mesmerised by the two men on the stage whoop-hollering Five’s Everybody Get Up.

‘Is that Dick and Dom?’

‘Just dicks.’

‘What are you drinking, Natalia?’

‘I just said.’

‘All that talk of coke and Coca Cola has made me want a Coca Float!’

‘A coca what?’

‘Coke with a spoon of vanilla ice cream in it!’

‘Hardly a hard adult’s drink. I’ll add Malibu,’ said Ed.

‘No, no Ed—’ hastened Neill. ‘Get it with rum.’

‘Gentleman!’ Ed shouted to a barman wearing a dog leash and spangly bowtie. ‘Pint of Thatcher’s Gold, pint of Brewdog and half rum and coke with vanilla ice cream in please.’

‘We only have what’s in there, poppet!’ He nodded to a Walls chest freezer.

‘Magnums, Twisters and ice pops won’t do,’ grumbled Natalia.

‘Shop’s open till ten, boys!’ said the man, as they took their three drinks and squeezed into a free table, Ed muttering: ‘Bird over there with the tight kegs is majorly checking me out. Honey blonde.’

‘Eddie! We’re on the pull tonight, of this girl, and this girl only.’

‘Is she getting us smashed, or we her?’

‘Both ways, just like she’ll be’ - just as the room quietened to the compères bellowing thanks to the room and they quickly composed themselves like in school assembly.

‘Now let’s find out where you’re all from! Anyone from Wales?’

A few mews.

‘Liverpool? Liverpool Everton, let’s see ya!’

Chorus of weyyys.

‘Manchester? Man City!’

‘COME ON!’ - came some aggression from back left.

‘Birmingham? Let’s see those Aston Villa Arseholes!’

Table drumbeats and a few threats of violence.

‘Now, where elts—’

‘Leeds!’ Ed shouted and rapped Neill on the head.

‘Aye up! We shall, we shall, we shall not be moved! We—’

‘Technically London,’ Neill interjected to guffawing boos.

‘Ooh, guv’nor!’ laughed the compère. ‘All the way up ‘ere with your Cockney accent, all rabbit and pork, eh!’

‘Well, not quite.’

‘Boss! Alright then ladies and gentleman, it’s karaoke night tonight, and the best warbler’ll as voted by you’ll bag a free drink at t’bar. Now do we ‘av any tekkers to go first? Come on! Be brave now!’

‘Get her doing Come Together,’ muttered Neill. ‘She’ll give the whole room, even those slags over there a hard on.’ 

Natalia yanked down her arm that Ed had raised. ‘Roger!’ He stood up instead, saluted and downed his drink in one.

‘Oh my good God,’ muttered Neill.

‘Go ‘ed!’ someone shouted. 

‘Indeed!’ Neill chortled. Go ‘ed!’ He clapped and whistled through his fingers. ‘Get the lad up there, like!’

‘Well well, it’s Humpty Dumpty from London town! Some Barry White? Led Zeppelin? Proclaimers?’

‘Rasputin!’ laughed Natalia.

Ed took the mic and began testing a moonwalk as Neill swiftly got up. ‘I’m off to the bar to thicken my beer goggles. Another Smirnoff and lemonade, Natalia?’

‘Another four. And a quick spliff outside?’

By the time Ed had finished caterwauling Twist And Shout, during which the other two stood half-turned to the bar, smiles creeping on their faces as they realised Ed wasn’t going to get slaughtered after all, the crowd were even enjoying it - half ignoring it - that imbued Natalia, starting to grin wickedly, to down her glass in one - eat up Neill’s look of astonishment, and high-five Ed as she passed to the stage calling out for Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough.

‘Still want to marry that, fella?’ Ed clapped Neill’s shoulder as they watched her bound around the stage in her jeans like a teenager with her hairbrush.

‘Book three tickets to Gretna Green, you can be my shitfaced witness.’

‘You have Mark to thank for that one!—’ Natalia collapsed back at the table, and next up with quadruple coercion of her, Ed, and the hosts, Neill found he was sufficiently plastered enough to oblige getting up to croon The Doors.

‘Don’t you love her madly? Wanna be her daddy? Don’t you love her face?…’

‘Well, he’s a belter, isn’t he? Still want to marry that, Nat?’

She grinned back as she caught sight of something flashing by her leg. 

‘Is it a glowstick you wouldn’t buy me? Oh no, it’s Neill’s phone. Dropped from his pocket again!’

‘He should watch out. It’ll get fast swiped by one of these pikeys.’

‘…Don’t you love her as she’s walking out the door? Like she did one thousand times before?’

Her attention, half on the gentlemanly stage charm of her headmaster-lover fondling the mic wire and pacing up and down in his camel leather Oxfords, was now absorbed by his phone screen flashing ‘JR.’

She passed it to Ed. ‘Answer it and say, go shag Cerebral-Palsy-brook!’

‘Terrible what?’

‘Oh just say, go shag your toilet-breath science teacher!’

And Ed obliged, to Natalia’s scream of laughter, quickly shoving the phone into her pocket just as Neill was bowing and the compère was blustering away about the Rasputin suggestion. ‘Can we find it? He’s got it! Get ‘em up, get ‘em all up!’ And they were bundled back up stage, along with a slew of others, Natalia now caught in a frisson of face-aching drunken line dance to the whipping chorus, a blur of flabby arms and beer breath as she reaches for Neill’s hands - and Neill is reaching for Ed’s hands, before the honey-blonde in tight kegs gets them - then shoves both Ed and Natalia through the men’s toilet doors.

Inside a cubicle, Neill pins Natalia into him, her dress is pulled back over her face, bra pinged off and the two £20 notes from Portmeirion came fluttering out. ‘Oh, that’s where you’ve been hiding them?’ - as he cajoles Ed to ‘kiss, lick and squeeze them’ - whilst she sucks a thumb-stuffed hammock of cotton and her sotted brain cells fail to fathom whose hands are on her bottom and whose on her breasts, whose mouth is on hers and whose is on her neck, melting into one big Ed-Neill-slobber with her moans like the woman in the porn. 

‘Shall we fuck her right here? Are you carrying those condoms, young lady?’ - ‘There’s a machine out there’ - ‘It’s fucking broken’ - ‘You fuck her then, daddy boy’ - ‘No, no, it’s drinking games first. Let’s go make her that Cola Float, when did he say that shop closes?’ - ‘Take one of her twenties. She can keep the other one, just somewhere a bit safer’ - as Neill sits down on the lid and bends her over.

‘Now listen very carefully to the rules, young lady.’

Her fingertips felt gingerly at her top sleeves, tied taut around her eyes. She felt the breeze from the window at her breasts and bare groin. She’d been stripped naked on the lounge carpet of the caravan, all squirming giggles, catching the sound of Hetty scratching and kicking from the small bedroom. Now with the fizz of a bottle being opened, the clink of what was probably Ed’s rum, she was directed to feel at three cushions laid out before her.

‘It’s Pin your Mouth On The Cock A’ Float. Whatever you get, goes down your throat for ten seconds. Starting now.’

Composing herself from tipsy gasps of hilarity, she leant forward on the middle cushion, to find her mouth at the flesh head of what was not a drink, machinating on her tongue - then a quick rub of two furry sacs, before she was re-impaled to her tonsils, gulping the vague taste of old socks, sucking eagerly if it was Neill, hesitating in case it was Ed, before it was pulled out with a ‘good girl’ that came far left enough for her to know who it was.

‘Try again, sucker.’

This time, opting for the left cushion, she finds another cock in her mouth, wet and tasting of her own Smirnoff, to make her fall away with ‘you cheated!’ and pull off her blindfold, to glimpse the pale hips of Ed, before she was arrested to the floor and re-blindfolded. ‘Zero tolerance, fucking cuff her’ - propped up again, the penance returned to her tonsils for a thorough twenty-seconds that sent her sultry moans to soprano gagging. And for the next go, she isn’t surprised to find a congratulatory straw at her lips with a murmuring of there-we-gos, her childhood treat corrupted by a spiced woody burn, spinning her out like jellyfish into the next round when a drier, more familiar cock curve is muscling at her palette, and now that she was cuffed, her flailing chin supported by a hand in a manner that was only her headmaster’s.

‘Bonus round. Lay your head back on the couch. Show Ed how well you take deep Daffy Daddy and you’ll have a sweet deal…’ A swish of air as he towers over and feeds down like a rat in a drainpipe, lodging whole and entire till the fourth throb makes her eyes water and the reward of frothy coke-float comes tumbling down like sweet cold nectar and she yawns open for what she knows is next. Sidekick is now jumping into the warm pool of her smiling upturned mouth, as the rum swims her bloodstream and her legs fall open for her boyfriend’s knowing hand, clit-stimming her throat wider for sword-swallowing yummy rummy cumming before tonguing the air shamelessly for more booze.

Now she’s laid back over cuffed hands like a tumour at her spine, and a bulbous helmet smears each side of her mouth, that now bends into laughter as she reminisces of her sexy stint earlier. But this is not araf, slow, tantric - she is now nailed to the floor by the pair jointly sliding in together, bursting her lips at the corners with a backwash of creamy brown fizz, her teeth gaped letterbox wide so she can barely suck, just take the force of two best friends tandem stabbing her mouth as they try catch the lizard flick of her tongue squashed at her tonsils. Her naked pelvis below them flips like a fish with a craving moan that demands the attention, finally, of something smooth pushed inside - very, very gently - too smooth to be a penis, and too hollow to be the truncheon.

‘Look at that. You can see right inside her pussy.’ 

‘Well she does always say I pronounce rum like ram. Oh, that drip! She could refill the bottle and you could cash a refund.’

‘Could? There’s a fucking twenty pound note in here!’

‘Fuck, forgot.’

‘Hey, no stealing that one—!’ she protests, wriggling to their re-dipping the bottle in her cunt till it’s wet enough to quieten her with a sample suck of ‘the finest ram-rimmed, no— rim-rammed quin—’

‘Don’t you queen rim? I mean, I mean—’

‘The finest rum of quim-rammed rim—’ they guffawed in inebriated buffoonery till the short stump of the rim barrel fell from her face and her blindfold hung loose.

‘Mghhhh— boys, wait!’ 

‘…Yes?’

‘Spin the bottle for who goes first.’

‘Oh fuck—’

‘Yes, fuck—’

‘No, the lamb’s got out.’

‘Wha—?’ She shook off her blindfold to see, now, Hetty standing there by the gas fire. ‘Hetty!’ She screamed and crossed her legs. ‘You’re too young to see this!’

‘She’s Welsh. She’s seen her mum do worse.’

‘Can a hoof spin a bottle?’

‘Kick her outside and tie the leash to the door handle. We can’t be dicking our darling’s mouth with dysentery.’ 

As Ed shoos her out, Neill flips over their prisoner, uncuffs her stiff arms and presents the bottle into her limp fingers.

‘Who’s head first or sloppy seconds? …Ooh, what a lucky guy. Bottom’s up!’

There must be a caravan door on her head, she thought. Yes, and one most certainly fallen on her forehead. Both pushing, like someone thought they were still doors, and in time to the beat of The Doors, that’s how they got their name! Don’t you love her madly? Wanna fuck her badly? Thrusting, digging like walking the plank into her skull, throb-throb went blurred memories of last night, as she fumbled her way to the toilet like she was still blindfolded.

Snore! Baaa! Rat-a-tat-tat! 

Snorrre! Baaa! Rat-a-tat-PLOP! 

Goodness, she peered, what sort of a turd was that?

‘Nata-li-A!’

She went back into the bedroom where Neill was stirring. ‘Hey,’ she frowned, ‘I’ve just had a weird—’

Neill pulled her stomach-down next to him. ‘Where’s it gone? You came four times on that badboy.’

‘Answer the door, for Pete’s sake,’ slurred Ed.

‘It’s only that fucking seagull.’

‘It’s in the toilet!’

‘Why can I still hear it knocking then?’

‘Goodness, you’ll corrode the battery compartment!’ Neill scrambled out to the toilet.

‘It was an animatronic gull after all?’

‘Oh my word!’ Neill exclaimed from the front door. ‘The seagull’s turned into a man!’ - and fumbling for his boxers, Natalia and Ed peered through the door crack at a spiky haired man with a sharp chin and eyebrow piercing, chewing a piece of gum.

‘We heard reports o’ baaing.’ 

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘That there. The sheep. You can’t ‘av a sheep on the site, mate.’

‘That’s our sheepdog.’

The man wheezed in laughter. ‘You’re a right one.’

‘You’re right. He’s wrong. It’s a poodle!’ stepped out Ed.

‘An animatronic, see? I control it with this.’ Neill pointed the buttplug at Hetty who stood staring. ‘Look, I’ve paused her.’

A grin grew on the man’s face. ‘Poofters! With a pet sheep! My, oh bloody my!’

‘Gay rights and animal rights may be fifty years behind in this part of Great Britain, my man, but I should jolly well think this won’t go down well with Denbighshire County Council should this scandal of our discrimination come to light!’

‘Wazzocks, the pair o’ yer,’ he squinted, still chewing away. ‘Listen, I don’t wanna get into trouble with the big man, like. Fraid you gotta tek your sheep off the site, or leave by the end of today, minces.’

‘Righto.’

They shut the door as Natalia sat in the lounge staring blankly at an unravelled condom over the rum bottle, listening to the sound of Ed vomiting in the shower.

‘That fucking farm smell is making me sick,’ Ed groaned as he came out.

‘No, the twenty units of alcohol you had whilst riding my girlfriend like a broken carousel horse has confirmed you already are.’

‘I should have booked the shepherd’s hut,’ said Natalia glumly, trying in vain to shake out the smeared face of Jane Austen on the £20 note at the bottom of the bottle. ‘Three times the price and the privacy.’

‘Sounds like the description of the buttplug.’

‘Where did you even get that from?’

‘With the truncheon. That’s why it came a day late. I didn’t realise I’d selected to group my items together.’

‘Never mind your fucking online purchases,’ grumbled Ed, ‘unless we can sellotape that fucking sheep up as a return.’

‘Let’s go out for the day and think about it. But first, a refund.’ Neill grabbed the bottle, smashed it in the sink and handed Natalia the money. ‘Now where the devil is my phone?’

Beyond the deserted fairground were coloured café buildings that all looked shut. Vast sandy beach and rocks one way; green hills, a cell tower, and wind turbines the other. There was the sound of distant thumping music, ocean waves, and a faraway woman’s ‘fuck off.’ They sat on a bench by a playpark next to a burnt out hole in the grass, with Hetty tied to the spindle of an overflowing bin, where for ten minutes they’d been watching a Scouse girl sitting in the middle of a hexagonal climbing net, crying nonstop.

‘This is Prestatyn?’

‘Can’t be the centre, surely.’

A dad in a Diadora hoodie, vape in one hand, stoop-chased his little daughter ambling toward their lamb. Laughing a gummy smile, her hair tied like a sprig at her crown, she fell over and got dirt all down her onesie. 

‘Ere, Chelsey, it’s not yours!’ - the dad ignored Neill and Ed’s pleasantries and scooped her up like a giant witchety grub. ‘Jackie! Where ‘ut wipes?’

‘Wipes to clean his ball and chain,’ murmured Neill.

‘Bet she’s easier to change than Hetty.’

‘It’s why we’re here. Celebrating being childless, the Eternal Boys,’ said Ed. ‘Wetting the unbaby’s head every night, eh, Rich!’

Neill was silent, blowing a smoky sigh into the grey-blue sky. 

‘‘Come to Sunny Prestatyn, laughed the girl on the poster!—

‘He’s gone all headmaster again.’

‘Rich, shut up before I slap you up. Three o’clock - two hours till tide’s in. Shall we stroll the beach?’

‘Yup, I know that crying,’ Neill stubbed out on the bin top. ‘Pure crocodile tears.’

‘Spoken like the man who knows,’ Ed winked at Natalia, to her soft protest as they padded down to the beach, that she never cries like that, as she threw off Hetty’s leash to the men’s alarm, and the lamb, by some miracle, lolloped along with them, with the occasional stop and sniff; tap-dancing away from the lapping waves, and now nosing at an abandoned sandcastle, that Natalia fell with aplomb next to, patted and smoothed over. 

The men lay down alongside, picking out pebbles and tossing them into the sea as Natalia mused on how poetic the sea makes her feel.

‘Don’t get Professor started again,’ said Ed.

‘Huge tits, and a fissured crotch were scored well in!…’ Neill promptly chimed,

He toppled Natalia between his knees, declaring, ‘oh, that line of Pip’s! Cock and balls, cock and fucking balls!’ 

‘Seems tame for you, mate.’

‘Not when I was seventeen hearing it read out by Kitty.’

‘You had a kitty better than me?’

‘My A-Level literature teacher, a magnificent, sprawling mass of flesh of a woman, installed on the chair at the front of the class in such a way that I wondered if she actually ever left the room, or if she carried the chair stuck inside her bottom—’

Natalia laughed, tickling Hetty’s ear, as he went on: 

‘She had fiery dyed red hair, flashing blue eyes, a deep onerous, nasal voice that whenever touched on a rude word, would cause me to swell in my tight Levis like a vacuum-packed Cumberland sausage.’

‘You wore tight Levis!’

‘Oh, quite, Miss Molova, quite.’

‘Is that your surname? Molova?’

‘Yes, Ed.’

‘Natalia Molova. Sweet name, like a film star. So at least you have your dad to thank for something.’

‘No, my dad’s name was Tretchikoff. Not Tretikoff like the imposter last week! Well I always thought mum and dad were married, till that time I was driving to London with Neill and he actually made me go check!’

‘What, you got home and said your headmaster demands to know your basic family facts?’

She laughed. ‘Actually it was Bill the bloke at church who said they weren’t married, and that dad’s name was something very awfully long and awfully Russian!’

‘Bill the bloke at church! Gets even more like a soap opera. But how is Tretchikoff awfully long and Russian?’

‘Because it has a retch in it,’ said Neill. ‘Went on longer than you this morning - or last night, sick boy.’

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

‘Three syllables. It’s as simple as Molova, surely.’

‘Not to a woman like her mum,’ remarked Neill.

‘Two boyfriends means a second opinion,’ she mused, as four boys traipsed by, tossing an empty crisp packet and squinting at Hetty. ‘As well as twice the protection,’ she added, when Neill heckled in full headmaster mode at the boys to ‘pick up your rubbish, do you expect the sea fairies to do it!’ - and she was hiding behind their jacket flaps till the swearing boys ruefully retrieved their wares.

‘And when you’ve got two boyfriends, Natalia, exempting the occurrence of today’s brutish hangovers, you don’t leave the bed in the morning till we’ve both done fucking you.’ 

‘What if I need the loo!’

‘Always be back in thirty seconds. You’ll get three calls, any more than that, pitbull Eddie will be sent to go fetch. No mercy, you’d get it bad. I wouldn’t recommend it.’

‘Badder than last night?’ she blinked. ‘I can’t remember much after I spun the bottle. Why was it wearing the condom in the end?’

‘Because Eddie won the prise - so to speak, to fuck the bucking bronco bareback. He didn’t come inside you, I made sure of it. But you came four times on the bottle and twice more, shuddering all over like the caravan chassis once we stuck that badboy up your bottom even without an AA for full throttle.’

‘AA is what you two bloody need.’

‘And you, soon.’

‘Could have taken a battery from the remote,’ said Ed.

‘They’re triple As. I checked.’

‘Anyway Nat, check this out—’ Ed flashed up his phone screen. ‘How about we take Henrietta to a sanctuary, only ten miles away? ‘We give a safe haven for sheep where they can live out their full, natural lives in a peaceful, stress free environment…’’

‘He so wants to play Fuckaroo again tonight darling.’

‘Go one better than that, mate.’

‘Well I was suggesting taking Hetty home to meet Ras.’

‘No way you did!’ Natalia exclaimed. 

‘But if you don’t want to change any more nappies—’

‘Or get kicked out of the campsite,’ added Ed, ‘then let’s do the right thing, Natalia?’

‘Yeah. Ok,’ she said after a pause. ‘I’m sick of changing nappies.’

‘That’s our Eternal Girl.’

‘Let’s call this sanctuary first—’ Ed raised his phone. 

No answer. 

‘Forgot. It’s a Sunday.’

‘Christ, no wonder I’m starving looking at Hetty. Roast time!’

‘I just hope she’ll fit on an instant barbecue,’ Ed said, ‘because there’s no way we’re getting into a pub.’

‘Come on. It’s Wales! They love sheep!’

‘Absolutely no chance, fella. We don’t even let dogs in here.’

‘But in the beer garden, it’s—’

‘Get out of it. Why do you even have a sheep on a lead?’

‘I told you. They ran out of Guide Dogs. My sister here turned blind last week - look, that’s why she picked up Eddie as her boyfriend here. Another year and they’d name a film after him!’

‘The Forty Year Old Virgin?’ said Natalia.

‘Edward Scissorhands. Anything he picks up has to be half cut.’

‘Comedians, you are,’ the barman heaved his beer pump. ‘Unless you want to give that lamb to the chef to cook your roast with—’

‘You could pull off a leg.’

‘But not mine. Off you trot.’

‘Pfft! Natalia, get your phone up and write a review of The Royal Oak. Most inhospitable to the woolliest Welsh demographic! It’s worth trying another…’

‘Oh come on Rich.’

‘You come on. I’m not rushing back to the gypsy wagon to eat a ham sandwich.’

‘I have Branston Pickle.’

‘Ooh, that changes it!’

‘And she’ll eat us afterwards.’

‘I’m banking on a post-roast-roast regardless. Don’t you know how romantic Sundays have always been for us, ever since I had her staring terrified at a spit roast at Borough Market on her 16th birthday? Here we go, The Swan Inn. That’s exactly what we do, swan in. All the way to the beer garden - yup, just act like it’s a dog. Dogs allowed! See the sign.’

‘What, the red circle with a line through it?’

‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ Neill caught hold of the arm of a lady mopping a table. ‘We’re from the RSPCA. We have a lamb, on its way to a sanctuary. It promises it won’t poo till we get there and we’re desperate to eat, otherwise we’ll keel over from hunger and she’ll run loose and die. May we sit in the beer garden and order £100 of your food and ale whilst the lamb sits quietly reading The Rhyl Advertiser?’

‘Yeah, go for it.’ She went on mopping.

‘I say! Get ordering, Ed.’

‘Can’t you check with the manager?’ frowned Ed to the lady.

‘I am she.’

‘I double say! Talk about a Sunday roast with lamb!’

‘You can’t eat lamb in front of Hetty,’ Natalia said.

‘She’ll appreciate her charmed life that bit more.’

Settled down at an outside back table, with one dispute from a neighbouring table as to why they have a farm animal near food - to Ed’s retort that they have managerial permission, the prompt removal of the disgusted party’s proximity prompted Neill to wind Hetty’s leash tightly around the table stem and warn Natalia to keep her hands well away.

 ‘A line she’s used to.’

‘Along with a line of coke, as long as it’s last night’s kind.’

A bashful group pause.

‘Did we put her off Cola Floats for life?’

‘Oh no, I lurve cock,’ she mouthed her J20 bottle hole.

‘Even if we told you that every bit of gob you made on ours last night, went into your drink?’

Her tongue shot back in.

‘Forget lamb, she’d like a cock-a-two,’ chuckled Neill, as the food arrived and Natalia promptly dropped down something to Hetty.

‘After last’s night piss up, just be glad that lamb’s still a virgin.’

‘Well if this is her last supper I’d better make sure she joins in now,’ she said.

‘We don’t know yet if the sanctuary will take her,’ reminded Ed. ‘And what’ll we do with her tonight?’

‘Stuff her back into the spare room. I’ll probably get fined for a caravan fumigation so eau-de-lamb-dung will be least of our problems.’ Neill peered down. ‘Are you sure lambs can eat pork crackling?’

‘Is that a Russian thing,’ chuckled Ed.

‘Well Ed, on that note… I was wondering, do you think Tretchikoff was short for something?’

‘You-whatt-ee-koff?’

‘Tretchikoff. My dad’s name.’

‘How would he know,’ chuckled Neill. 

‘Well, either of you. You said my mum would find Tretchikoff hard to spell, but she’s not the one who said it was awfully long and Russian. It was Bill who said that, and he’s not thick, and—’

‘I did not say her mum was thick,’ chuckled Neill.

‘Just two short planks?’ said Ed.

‘I mean what if it was something like, Tretchikoffovovavitch?’

‘You tell us, Russian bird.’

‘I’m not saying that’s real, I just—’

‘Let’s google it, like your mum did.’ Neill pulled out his phone. ‘Let’s see…’

‘Phones at the table, Rich.’

Neill frowned. ‘Had either of you been messing about on my phone last night?’

‘No, no,’ said Natalia. ‘I just switched it off to save your battery.’

‘Hm.’

‘Well, Rich? We’re all ears.’

‘Ok. Variations on Russian name Tretchikoff: Tretchikov. Tret-ikov. Tretchykov, with a ‘y.’ Tret-YA-kov. Nothing comes up longer.’ He continued mulling at his screen.

‘Go back to Bill,’ said Ed. ‘At least check if Tretchikoff rang any Bill-bells or if it was different entirely. …Two more, my darlin’!’ - hoisting his beer glass to the waitress as Natalia waited for the stunted attempts at Welsh to be over with.

‘Do you think my mum lied? And wound me up in a hotel room getting molested?’

‘Isn’t his name on your birth certificate?’

‘Never seen it. And mum says it’s not on there.’ 

Neill scoffed. ‘Of course she would, if she was hiding his real name!’

Natalia was starting to look despondent.

‘Someone in your family must know?’ frowned Ed.

‘Can’t you clarify with Uncle Andy?’

‘Now we’re talking two short planks, Neill. I haven’t dared ring him since McDonalds. I’m annoyed he told mum he saw me with an older boyfriend, and daren’t talk about it with either of them in case they’ve clocked on it’s the Head of my school and I’ll bloody die on the spot.’

Silence.

‘When you get back to Leeds,’ said Ed, ‘get old Bill to come round and ask your mum to confirm dad’s name in front of him.’

‘Bill or the old bill?’ muttered Neill. ‘I tell you, she’d hiding more than a surname.’ 

Both men’s jaws churned meat in contemplation as Neill glanced at Natalia staring to the ground. 

‘Hey, Daisy Doldrums! Coocoo-coo-choo!’ - he pinched her cheek, curling her smile - ‘don’t be down in the dumpy wumpies! You liked the boat in Portmeirion didn’t you, hmm? Shall we go boating? Just like Daisy Waisy and Mr Winterbrook?’

‘Winterbourne. He’s not our football teacher.’

‘But at least you’re smiling.’

‘Ten days I’ll be wondering whether my mum is evil or just hopelessly thick.’

‘Hey, baby. Don’t let her ruin your holiday.’ 

Hetty strained at her leash as the manageress approached, stood and began scratching under the frisky lamb’s chin as the three of them smiled back politely.

‘Naw, what a petal. She got a CPH number? Cleared the ARAM?’

Neill hesitated. ‘We’ve never done CPR on a ram, but—’

‘He does work for the RSPCA but his brain’s not working on Sundays,’ Ed added as Natalia picked nervously at the label on her J20.

‘Oh I could smell that was a lot of cobblers! I used to be a farmer myself, she can probably smell that too! I’m Suzie. As in, Suzie’s Flock, we shut shop a year ago, if you ever heard of us?’

‘Oh! No, we’re not local.’

‘Where’d you find this wee one then? I can see she’s been marked. You said you’re on your way to which sanctuary?’

‘She’s a stray. Er, it’s ten miles away. The Woolpack.’

‘You mean the Woolpatch! Past Trefnant?’

‘Er, yes.’

‘They’ll want to know a lot more than you’re telling me,’ she chuckled. ‘My old place, it’s just two miles down the road, run by the Barnetts now - I know them well enough to ask if they’d take her. It’ll save you the agg. As long as she’s all clean.’

‘Oh, yes. Natalia’s completely clean—’

‘A bit of a crust there,’ Suzie took a napkin to Hetty’s eye.

‘Oh, don’t we all when we’re tired!’

‘I just hope she doesn’t have orf,’ she frowned, pulling off what was a bit of pork crackling from Hetty’s whisker.

‘Oh, no orf. She’s been checked for all infections,’ said Natalia.

‘Suzie, it would be an orrf-ful help if your friend takes her,’ nodded Neill.

‘Let me give them a call.’ She smiled and walked away.

‘How on earth did you know what she was talking about?’ Ed asked.

‘Orf is a viral infection!’ said Natalia. ‘Thanks to playing Scrabble with him!’

‘Christ you need protection for everything these days.’

‘I won with arcane old words,’ said Neill, ‘she lost with Yorkshire words. Then I stuffed her loser mouth with foam and her coocha with a chick-trembler and she was literally lost for words.’

‘Yorkshire does sound like a mouth stuffed with foam,’ said Ed.

‘Don’t they say speaking posh is like having a mouth full of cherries?’ said Natalia.

‘Schoolgirl muncher should know!’

‘Touché, Edward.’ 

‘Professor Mendalls is the poshest man I’ve heard,’ sighed Natalia. ‘Very authoritative, I’d love him to ring up my mum and demand to know my dad’s name.’

‘Like Ed when he talks to Max. Totally ponces up his accent.’

‘Par-ss me her number!’ Ed declared. ‘Professor will get to the bottom of it!’

‘Ed!’ she stared. ‘What would you say?’

‘I have no idea.’ He hicked.

‘Are you even being serious?’ she frowned.

Silence fell, till Neill piped up. ‘Census inspector. Needs to know the name of everyone who’s ever lived in her house otherwise she’ll be fined ten bob.’ 

Natalia stared into space as Suzie returned. 

‘The Barnetts will have your lamb!’

‘What luck! And hopefully not pot luck. Eat up, Natalia!’

It had taken no more than ten minutes, and because Natalia didn’t want it to appear as though she’d been keeping it a pet, she made her ‘big kiss goodbye’ a mere pat of the head when no one was looking. Once she’d washed her hands in the Barnetts’ bathroom, she scrolled her phone for a picture of Ras and sat musing so deep in thought about her dad’s name that she began to wonder whether it might actually be Rasputin, the way her mum screwed her eyes when she first announced it.

‘Nat! It’s the song, the song!’

‘Huh!’

‘The walrus gumboot,’ guffawed Ed. ‘The song neither of us will ever hear again without getting hard!’

‘Oh.’

‘She’s sad about Hetty. Give her time.’

‘No, give her a fun time,’ Ed pulled them into a Pay & Display. ‘To boldly go where we could not go with lamb in tow!’

The flashing lights of Mr B’s Amusements were set to hypnotise - or induce migraine - before you even entered the huge, doorless side of the building. Whilst Neill and Ed made a boyish beeline for Bump ‘N’ Smash cars, Natalia held onto her £20 as the lights and sounds of thirty machines, all speaking and jangling at once, beckoned to strip it from her quicker than the men in the loos last night.

She watched a lanky boy insert 10p piece after 10p piece to shift a Justice League keying by no more than a centimetre. After twenty insertions, out dropped a reward of 10p which was swallowed up again before he ran off screaming for more money.

Turning to a similar, budget version with 2p pieces, cheap plastic trinkets were balanced in a way that would take £3 worth of coppers to triumph something worth 20p. Now this was Made in China.

‘No entry here, doll,’ Ed winked as he passed through an over-18s barrier to a dark, twinkling higher realm of money loss. She stuck out her tongue and turned to a droll woman’s voice loop-recording on Whittaker’s Roulette, to place her bets for two consecutive wins of 40p, before transferring her luck to The Derby where five plastic jockeys scored up a track to win up to £1.40.

‘Bet on Gay Lord, bet on Gay Lord,’ Neill hissed over her shoulder. 

‘There is no Gay Lord.’

‘There was in 1995. How anti-progressive! Look at that broken mechanical swagger of Mr White. That must be poor Gay Lord back in the closet.’

Three lost bets later, she joined the men on Allstars Basketball and a Wild-West shootout and beat them both. ‘Do I get a prize?’ And off they went to the soft toy grabber, seeing out the rest of Natalia’s precious money, till she prised from them ‘the £7 we saved on my Portmeirion ticket!’ for Neill to finally win her a sizeable Hello Kitty, that she promptly stuffed under his arm ‘to remind you of your sweet cuddly English teacher!’ before she headed for baskets of bright plastic of a souvenir shop, to spend the last £3 on ‘something special for Ed.’

Ed chuckled to Neill. ‘Prestatyn, certainly has the tat in. A class below Llandudno, y’know?’

‘I’d say your poetry is hardly Larkin level. But the rainbow colours on her dress in Llandudno and the drinking games last night got me thinking. Does your snooker table have legs?’

‘Yeah…?’

‘Balls and cues?’

‘Cues yeah. Balls, no.’

‘Here, for the best game of snooker you’ve ever had…’

‘Oh?’

‘Oh.’

‘Well come here,’ Ed beckoned, ‘she’ll love this too.’

Neill and Ed opened the windows in the lounge as promptly as they wind down the car’s, but she rather liked the caravan’s ‘festering’ stuffy smell from being out all day. She moved to the bedroom where it mingled with the fresh smell of the bed linen, with no more baaing to worry about, no more unwanted attention than normal; that stink of dung in the shower would fade for good now. Running her toes into the bits of hay on the carpet - she’d sweep those later - she was busy right now, writing down her full address, her mum’s full name: Mary Katerina Molova, whilst the men tinkled teaspoons at the kettle.

‘SEE-EX!—’ Neill suddenly hollered.

‘…Pardon?’ came Ed’s mutter.

‘Earl Grey or normal!’

‘Normal!’ Natalia called back.

‘Sex?’

‘Sex kitten is a whole three syllables, Ed, which I’ve told you, is too much for Molova females.’

‘Could be worse, I could be called cunt!’

‘Nope, that’s Rich!’ 

She tore the page from her notepad, ran it to Ed, then sat hugging her knees and inhaling her mug’s bergamot steam as Neill warned to make sure the number is withheld.

She bit her lip hard through all six phone rings.

‘Nope. Gone to BT Answer.’

‘Try again. She sometimes doesn’t get up from the couch quick enough.’

‘That will look dodgy. I’ll try in five. Gonna try some Aber Falls then, Rich?’

She watched as they poured their tipples.

‘Try now,’ she said.

‘We just did.’

‘The phone, not the bloody gin.’

‘That was not five minutes sweetheart. But ok, here goes—’ Ed pulled up his phone again.

Now the caffeine made her heart palpitate six times.

‘Nope. Well, time for our tee, Masters starts at seven. Can we get Sky?’

Natalia plucked two bags of crisps and slunk back to the bedroom as the men groaned and whooped at golf, till half an hour later she re-emerged and pushed Ed’s phone to him.

‘She was probably watching Corrie… actually no, that’s not on Sundays. Well, whatever crap’s on TV, it’s past the hour now—’

‘Gadzooks, smell those wank hands, Rich!’

‘I was eating Skips, idiot.’

Neill kicked him. ‘Come, come sit down honey.’ But Ed was twenty glugs into stupidity, and Neill not far off, as she sat down between them, her legs and arms wrapped up like a noodle, forcing a weak smile as Ed leaned in to tipsily serenade: ‘We’ve lost her good old mama! Oh, must have whisky, oh you know why!’

‘Show Mary the way to the next little lamb,’ Neill chuckled.

‘The next whisky baaa!’ 

They both guffawed till Neill broke off. ‘Whoops! Better stop. She’s still grieving the parting.’

‘It’s not the lamb she’s thinking of, it’s the mutton. …Ooh! Now that’s a clinching putt, Reed smacked it! …Meant to ask, how’s your Jill, Rich?’

‘Drunk as a skunk when I last saw her.’

‘When was that, Christmas?’

‘Trying to get dad under the mistletoe when he was busy playing the X-Box I bought him. Probably with the length she harps on about her joint pains when we all know she’s fit as a fiddle.’

‘Who’s Jill,’ Natalia said flatly.

‘His old lady, natch.’

‘Don’t we want to go to the entertainment?’ Natalia kicked at the brochure showing the solo act on tonight. ‘It’s Jim Velocity.’

‘More like Grim Atrocity. My IQ’s still getting over last night. Come and lay across our laps, Sex, and I’ll tell Ed how I stuffed your mouth with the golfball when he was on the phone, remember how you came like a—’

‘Fuck off, no way. I need a walk.’ She jumped up.

‘I don’t know if it’s safe,’ Neill began, when she was already putting on her trainers. 

‘I’ll take my phone and if anyone approaches me I’ll just run back here.’

‘Rich - everyone saw her with us last night. They won’t touch her knowing she has two bulldogs round the corner in Row G for guts and garters.’

‘Take Ed’s deodorant can at least.’

He looked as though he might have wandered out from his sales office on a lunch break, with no chance to change from his shirt and tie. Dancing like a dad at a wedding, he sipped from a glass of beer balanced on the speaker before lapsing his limbs back into Phil Collins. 

There was barely a fifth of the people than last night. Up front was a girl with a disability of some sort, in jam-jar spectacles, dancing to the host’s encouragement - and comment at one point of how impressed he was with ‘the moves up ‘ere!’ that Natalia thought she might cry with cringe. 

He broke from the song and heckled to a woman at the back.

‘Carla! Carla! Come dance w’ meh! Come dance w’ meh! You promised meh!’

‘Ah din’t say ah were cummin!’ called back the woman in that typically Northern, overly-affronted manner, Natalia thought, as she unpicked the line:

Ah, for I. Dint for didn’t. ‘Ah din’t say ah were cummin.’ It was like a different language, one that she would speak to her mum at home, but in life with Neill - ‘I didn’t say that I was going to come,’ she whisper-mouthed to herself - came as naturally on her tongue as she did on his.

Three boys were arriving with Bacardis next to her as she stared into space. ‘Ah din’t say that we were married. Ah din’t say that he were dead!’ Her life was characterised by what her mum din’t say. ‘Tretchi, it were Tretchi-summat!’ Her mum din’t say dad’s name was Tretchikoff - till they got out Google. Maybe it was Tretchi-summat else entirely? Maybe it wasn’t mum’s fault after all?

Her phone pinged. New friend request: Stuart Hanley. One mutual friend, Alana Reynolds. So she’d already made fair prey of the Maya organiser on Facebook, and he’d snooped her friends to find her? 

She hesitated, trying to zoom into the tiny picture of him. Then she just pressed accept out of curiosity to view his profile.  

A slew of recent marathon pictures. 154 likes and applauding comments from tanned and fashionables. ‘Go babe, fitter than a freakin’ flea!’ - ‘When I grow up can I be Hot Stu!’ - ‘How was Tokyo, globe trotter?’ Post shares…The Perfect Morning Smoothie. What Alcohol Does To Your Concentration. End Elephant Tourism Abuse in Colombo. He’d even commented on some Cosmopolitan article about the Me Too movement. The young, teetotal, Jungian man, who had remembered his Natale domini, bus-stop acquaintance… maybe just because she played hard to get?

‘Get you a drink, gorgeous?’ 

One of the Bacardi boys with spiky gelled hair was grinning at her with badly erupted canines. She gave a polite but emphatic no thanks, slipping back out into the sharp breeze and the surprise of puddles at her toes, through the dark rows of caravans to the door light of her Two-Tweedler Deluxe, where staggering Dum was being demoted by Dee to the second bedroom.

‘You’ve blown it by getting pissed. Census time tomorrow, boy, as you promised. Sober up. Night night.’ 

Neill climbed in bed behind her as she muttered to the wall. 

‘I was thinking maybe there’s… no koff.’

‘Pardon?’

‘In dad’s name. Problem is, my mum doesn’t get up early, but by evening she’s pissed like Ed is.’

‘Two peas in a pod. Don’t worry honey. I’ll do it if I have to.’

‘She might recognise your voice. Or the way you cough.’

‘There’s… no cough.’

‘You’ve been coughing more lately. Smoker’s cough. You have like, what, ten a day?’

‘Oh, at least twelve.’

‘Bet that dents your wallet more than coke. And I don’t believe nicotine is good for you.’

‘Don’t you start, Miss Barnes.’

‘Surely they’d tell you at school if it was.’

‘Natalia, they don’t teach some things precisely because it’s truth. I had to get high just to approve those Pastoral worksheets on cannabis. The corporates have a lot to protect.’

‘Now you sound like bloody Justin.’

‘They once found a way to make smoking tobacco clean, you know? And the man who discovered it was killed, and—’

‘So why do you keep smoking if you know it’s dirty?’

‘It’s rather like your pill and your Coca Floats.’

‘Well I’d quit them for you. Would you quit smoking?’

Silence, all for Ed mumbling and knee-bumping the side of the caravan.

‘Well, that answer is promising.’

‘Natalia, I’ll quit smoking one day, perhaps. If you’re still with me.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? If I watch you smoke another thousand fags then you’ll quit?’

‘Since when are you bothered about my smoking,’ he chuckled. ‘You’re always grabbing my Marlboro filth.’

‘I just don’t want you to die like my gran with emphysema.’

‘I never knew your gran died of emphysema?’

‘She didn’t. She just died. But I don’t want you to die of emphysema.’

‘You funny fucker. Come here…’

The rain was falling fast now, tip-tapping all over the caravan, with one distinct plop-plop-plop just by their window.

‘Well there’s our jacuzzi,’ sighed Natalia.

‘No, here’s my jacuzzi…’ And his head nuzzled down between her legs, licking to the drip like a metronome, as she fell asleep dreaming of riding a boat, in a blanket, over the sea gushing inside her. Out flows a bottle with her birth certificate inside, and she’s calling out, inside her head, in climax, in urgency - but what name to call! Call mum, to find out what to call! She’s lost her bad old dadda. I want information. Information! Not a substitute, a substitute! Her phone was a megaphone, blaring her mum’s voice back: We’re the evil, inside every one of us! 

Now Ed and Neill step out all oompah-oompah from the beer bar, driving the way to the next little girl, Alana, kneeling up on the sand in tautened white wool over her eyes. CRASH! The thunderous sea is made of coke and sherbet, water-gunning McGoohan’s face, that turns into her own, watching two monkeys sticking Scrabble tiles up each other’s buttholes with Branston Pickle.

‘What was that! Thunder?!’

‘Something’s fallen!’ 

They both scrambled out of bed naked and into Ed’s room. 

He’d fallen off the bunk into the sprigs on hay on the floor, slurring. 

‘Morning, Miss Moldova!’

‘Molova, you prick. Get up, get up… Christ, you’re one big brewer’s droop—’ Neill dragged him up by his arms as Natalia grimaced.

‘I’m… gonna heave,’ Ed staggered out, whilst Neill went after his ringing phone, and Natalia crept out of the front door in her dressing gown, sat down on the outside step and began to cry, silently, so they wouldn’t hear.

Eternal Boys. Eternally Plebian. We’re celebrating being childless, wetting the unbaby’s head! They didn’t get it. They didn’t get what it’s like to be estranged from a parent. She was 16-the-child, the child they couldn’t know the pain of crying in a dirtied onesie or alone in a climbing frame when their own old-timers kissed under the mistletoe as safe as houses.

She was laying next to Hetty’s soiled jacket under the caravan, drying a second round of tears, as the caravan shimmered under heavy footsteps and Neill’s sockless feet inside his brown Oxfords came down the steps.

‘Like I said, I’m in an industrial complex by a council estate! Colleagues took me down the pub, I must have sat on it, there’s pikeys everywhere! Ras? Rasputin? Yes! Boney M was playing—’ His voice tailed off. 

When she saw his feet return, she slowly crept out and followed him back inside, where he was having a glass of water at the sink.

‘Oh, there you are. Thought for a moment the seagull carried you away.’

‘Where’s Ed?’

‘Walking off his stupidity.’

‘Who was on the phone?’

‘No-one, no-one.’

‘Alana?’

He shot her a cynical look.

‘Joan, wasn’t it?’

He sipped again and gazed out of the window.

‘What does she even want? Surely she’s ruined the school enough, grassing to having the million quid taken away?’

‘Well. There’s still loose ends to be cleared…’

‘Why tell her anything about your life? When you’re on holiday? Just tell her to fuck off.’

‘Things can be smoother if I’m not rude to her,’ he frowned. ‘Keep in her good books a little bit.’

‘Hmph! The brown-nosing never ends!’

He shot her a glance. ‘No, it’s not that. She has… a pool…’

‘A fucking pool?’

‘…Of recommended candidates to take the next role of Head and Deputy that will save me recruitment fees I can use instead to continue Sports Day at Elland Rd, and—’

‘I don’t give one infinitesimal damn about Sports Day!’

‘No darling, but the rest of the school does. Do you realise what kind of summer term I, we, have ahead of us? Hanging in the perpetual gallows for everything I’ve promised everyone going to shit, and I fast need a morale-boosting shot of charlie up the big hairy nostril of Thornwood.’

‘How can you trust her? Who are these stinky people she’s recommending?’

‘People she owes backhanders, I imagine. I’ve already received a list. You, Ed and I can look over them together, yes? Heading a board meeting with your two boyfriends, won’t you like that?’

‘Mmm, maybe. When?’

‘Tonight, if you want. Remember I was supposed to be back in Leeds, this very moment in fact, at a recruitment meeting, and instead I’m here, lording it up with my girlfriend, best friend and a laundry list of sordid whims.’

She sniffed. ‘I want a dirty Sports Day with you and Ed.’

‘Indeed. I’ve already got snooker on there. Ed’s also got something…’

‘I hope not, after you let him shag me without a condom.’

‘You literally tore it off him. He’s fine, clean through sheer celibacy. You’ve given him a second puberty, a gorgeous girl like you, it’s like Christmas for him daily—’

‘We have nothing but playing cards here in the caravan.’

‘So we’ll teach you Poke-her. Now listen. Eleven weeks and Thornwood is history. Leeds is history. Joan is a fossil, artefact in a museum of our memory—’

‘Not even that.’

‘Not even that. Joan is burnt at the stake, the whole school is. And by then we’ll locate the real Daddy-Long-and-Short-Of-It, extinct old tetchy T-Rexikov. How’s that?’

‘And we get to stay together?’

‘Yes… if you want to.’

‘Of cou— how can you say it like that.’ She whacked him, just as the front door squealed open and there was Ed, wearing just his bright Oddballs boxers covered in orange crabs. 

He squeezed past them - swiping Neill’s glass of water, and sat down on the stool.

‘Ed—!’

‘Wipe your muddy feet at least.’

‘Did he walk round the site like that?!’

‘Great, he’s given us crabs!’

Ed put his finger to his lips, raised his phone to his ear, and motioned them to sit down.

‘Neill, what’s he doing? Who’s he—’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know - just sit down.’

‘Good morning,’ said Ed. ‘May I speak with Mrs Molova?’

She hung off Neill’s neck as Ed commenced his census speech in a voice so contrapuntal to his appearance, that every time she turned to look at him, she had to bury her face back into Neill’s hair and stuff her mouth with it to stop a nervous fit of giggles. 

‘And any others. A male partner, Anton, we have here? Yes, the surname, please. Anton—?’

Natalia’s breath had stopped, as had it seemed, Neill’s too.

‘Chris? Christopher?’

A triangle ping-pong of stares.

‘Chrees-toh-ferrr? The exact spelling would be needed, ideally - ok, well…’ 

Ed muted the phone and muttered. ‘She’s getting antsy. She thinks I’m the police.’

‘Drop it,’ Neill did the cut-throat repeatedly. ‘Now.’

‘Ok, ok, madam, that’s quite alright - we’ll have to retrieve the information from the electoral roll records, it’s just takes more of our time and costs… no, no need to worry you further, I appreciate your time - yes, good day, good day.’

They sat and stared at Ed. 

‘Christopher!’ 

‘Chrees-toh-ferrr,’ Neill whipped out his phone. ‘Spelt something like K-h-r-i-s-t-o-f-o-r?’    

Natalia threw the entertainment brochure so hard that it fell from its staples.

‘Fucking Christopher. Fucking Christopher! She fucking lied, the lying fucking maggot! He’s not Molova, he’s not Molov, he’s not Tretchikoff! Talk about a beast with three backs, and none of them with a spine!’