WaterLover: The Elementar Series

By TBD

River Fulton's life has become one big secret

Every girl wants him. Every boy wants to be him

Lies come easy, girls even easier

But at great cost to him ... a despicable curse he can't escape from

He can hold his breath underwater, indefinitely

He could unleash a Tsunami and part the seas, if only he kne

• Language: English
• Publisher: Essential Earth Pty Ltd
• Release date: Jan 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780648999676

TBD

Patsy Stanley is an artist, illustrator and author and a mother, grandmother and great grandmother. She has authored both nonfiction and fiction books including novels, children's books, energy books, art books, and more. She can reached at:[e-mail] for questions and comments.

Book preview

In too Deep ... and the lies begin

Contents

Chapter One

Twelve months before

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Present Day

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

About the Author

ONE

THERE’s a reason I’m afraid of my own shadow. I am a vile, cruel monster who has no rights to love and yet, here I stand, heart in hand, asking her to love me.

Every morning I wake, I ask myself why would she give me the time of day? How she can even look at me and call me her own and yet every day, I have no answers. Every day, I fail her.

Fail myself.

So far, I’ve worked out, that a hundred and forty-seven definitions describe who I am.

I’ve counted them.

Many times.

And still, there must be more.

They all fit, all justify, making me possibly the most cunning predator that ever lived.

I don’t mean in the killing sense.

I’m certainly no murderer, not of the flesh kind anyway. Of the heart, well, I’m guilty as charged, your honour. People often say that when their heart is broken, they want to die … so maybe I am a killer … to some degree. As it is, I’ve got zero chance of getting out of this world wearing a halo or at best, out on parole for good behaviour, regardless of how much good I do from now on.

It won’t matter though.

None of it will.

I can’t possibly make up for all that I’ve done. To start with, I can’t erase the last seven years of my life.

Seven deceptive, lust-filled, unscrupulous years.

You see, my problem is … in the last four months, I might have developed a conscience - something I didn’t think I was capable of having. And, something I hadn’t foreseen, altering me in such a way, I hardly recognise the person I used to be. All because I met the girl I’ve been dreaming about since my lungs felt their first breath. I say that long ago because I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t waiting for me whenever I closed my eyes. When darkness fell, and my life became a speck of dust, loneliness killing me slowly … she was always there.

When I actually came face to face with her, when I saw her in the flesh and discovered she was real, something broke inside me. Or was it that something healed inside me? I can’t tell. That moment happened in a blink – too short a time to ponder on. All I know, is it changed me.

Forever.

Never able to change back.

My one regret … I wish I hadn’t lied to her. I wish I hadn’t done half the things I’ve done to get to know her. I wish she hadn’t fallen in love with me … because it isn’t me she truly loves.

She doesn’t know the real me.

The person she sees in the flesh every day is an illusion, a hunter, an insect without remorse, without guilt, a criminal, a villain … living within my skin, seducing, manipulating, devouring everything it wants.

That one regret now watches, gleeful, allowing karma to ladle me into a large bowl, ready to make a meal out of me …

The room has no air and my chest is barely inflating. Her face is a hundred thousand hearts breaking all at once.

And it’s all my fault.

Her posture is slowly wilting under the weight of my words.

And I can’t do anything to fix it.

Her eyes are searching, searching my face for reasons, searching my hands that are wound in a tight ball of why I would be saying this, my legs that won’t stop shaking.

And I deserve every last drop.

In this bedroom of my house, Ember adopted as her own, my life is about to disintegrate around me … about to die … about to be kicked into the dirt, trodden in, and ground to a fine powder as though it never even existed. The life I fooled myself into believing I could have, is no more. My dreams, replaced with nightmares.

No more laughter.

No more chances to tuck that familiar lock of hair behind her ear that she plays with when she’s nervous. No more tender moments, where time stops because I am caught up in her smile. No more occasions when her fingers accidentally brush against my skin, breaking me, gripping me with the most intense, mind-blowing pleasure that it would take a million words and a million years to unravel.

No more …

And yet it is nothing less than I deserve.

She sits wedged up against the pillows, no longer cradled in my embrace, her knees drawn up, arms hugging protectively around them … trying to keep me out, trying to deflect my words. She stares at me, not blinking, hardly breathing, trying to coax some kind of explanation from my mouth, her jaw staunch, lips tight. They tremble a little before she gathers herself again. It is torture of the worst kind.

I cannot bear to watch, and yet I haven’t earnt the right to look away. Time freezes between breaths. Scaring me. A week could pass and I wouldn’t notice nights becoming days or dawn finding a place amongst the stars.

Finally, she releases me from the torment and buries her face into her hands.

I could cry out if I was capable of such a thing. I want to, except I don’t know how to make it happen. I don’t think I possess the ability to cry, having no memory of ever doing so.

Dark, diseased patches grow over my heart that no amount of forgiveness will ever heal. I slink back into the murky depths, where my true soul lies, where I deserve to be, knowing I haven’t inflicted the worst on her yet.

Every muscle inside me is bunched, cramped, tight, twisted in knots, waiting … oxygen hating me, air refusing to enter my body as though it knows I don’t deserve it. Waiting … waiting … waiting.

Her lack of response is a blunt knife, carving the final remnants of my heart into an impossible nothing. My entire existence has come down to one easy sentence.

One single sentence defining who I truly am …

I’m a liar and a thief, and I prey on girls like her for the satisfaction of my own needs.

This conversation is long overdue, but that’s not who I am, not to her anyway. She’s nothing like the other girls.

My heart falls out of rhythm.

Trying to stop, knowing it has to beat to keep me alive. Trying to stop again, to punish me, to scare me, to hammer hard and then diminish by its own will, indecisive and yet in total distress, preparing for the worst. And yet cracked wide open and vulnerable and so wanting to be loved. But only by her.

The world around me is numb as though no pain exists outside of me. And now, my biggest fear, is that it will be all too much for her and she will give up on me, and leave before I have the chance to explain how I managed to fuck up the one perfect thing in my life.

I need to tell her now, but I’m not sure I remember how to talk, or want to risk it, my throat burning from every swallow, strangling with each breath. Guilt chokes up from all the nasty, selfish areas of my body, leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

I have found hell on earth.

I am hell. Definition number twenty-seven … pure evil.

No good lives here.

She wriggles her toes, and refolds her arms. She is very much alive. And very much opposite to everything I am.

She is the life-raft in the midst of my hurricanes – winds that blow in from nowhere, memories of being kicked hard in the gut until my vision distorts, and I vomit over my schoolbag all because my family has money, making me a target for bullies at the tender age of nine. The wannabe dependable figure in my life, my father, when he inadvertently forgets to text me to say he’s away on the French Riviera for the next three months and I didn’t even get the memo he was back from his last trip. She’s always been there.

The truth is … I love her.

I love her in numbers I can’t count because they don’t exist – no more than you can count raindrops on a stormy night or the tiny grains of sand held tightly by an only child who would love a dog to play with, love for him to curl up on the end of his bed to comfort him, but never has, because dogs spread disease. I love her when nothing makes sense, when my heart wants to close, and steal itself away, if only to hide from the pain of never being able to hold her, kiss her.

Those words would mean nothing to her now if I say them, so I don’t. I lock them away in the safe behind the Monet print in my father’s study.

But … there is a fine line between loving someone and deserving them and I don’t deserve her. My search for her has been all about me, not her, never about her or what she wants or what is good for her. It’s me, and what I want. Definition number sixteen … selfish.

‘Liar? Thief? What are you saying, River? I don’t understand.’

The desperation in her voice shatters all of the carefully structured and hardened places in my heart until nothing but blank canvas’s and empty closets reside there.

Definition number one and two and three … I’m a cold-blooded. Calculated. Heartbreaker.

Undeserving and unable to look at the way her bottom lip quivers any longer, I drop my gaze to the floor. Her breathing shifts from non-existent to fast, shallow sips.

I-I can’t bear it.

I reach out my hand to her, to offer something … anything …

She refuses me.

And rightly so.

I square my shoulders, feeling the steady, unravelling thread of rejection. My chest lifts slovenly with the last hopeful breath I might take next to her, and I then let it out slowly. I raise my head.

‘I am not proud to say, the first time I had sex, I was thirteen years old. It was with a girl much older than I was, and you might think I was naïve or even mature for my age or she should have known better, but the truth is ...’

I pause.

Mouth dry.

Stomach in knots and dreading my next words.

Words that will destroy her and take me apart, seam by seam, stitch by carefully constructed stitch.

‘I instigated it all, Em. I made it happen.’ Definition number fifty-five … manipulator.

Ember blinks and blinks, each time harder and longer than the one before, as though she is expecting something new to happen.

‘What does it have to do with us?’ Her cheeks have lost that pinky glow. That beautiful pink that tells me when she’s embarrassed or excited. The room start to blur around me as my world tumbles in.

I don’t know where to start … how do I explain that I’ve lived with this vile curse since puberty. Since I first heard the beast. Since I felt his evil presence inside me … running the show … dictating my intentions. How can I possibly make her understand that I only pretended to be a boy of seventeen so I could meet her – who then lied to get a fake birth certificate so I could see her with my own eyes - who lied over and over and did terrible things, hurt people, crushed an innocent girls heart in the process, a good … decent girl, just so I could reach out and touch her skin to convince myself she was real and I wasn’t going mad.

My fingers run through my hair as I search the entire world for the right thing to say, but I am still left with nothing.

Nothing.

Words keep piling up in my mouth … begging to be released. I want to say, it has nothing to do with us, and yet it has everything to do with us. My fingers find their way up to massage my temples. I can’t look at her as I drop them back into my lap. I try again.

‘I’m not seventeen, Em. I’m twenty.’ I stop to let my words marinate. I want to see her eyes, read how she’s feeling, because her emotional state screams in my head.

Breaks every bone in my body.

I hate that I can read emotions better than I can read a book. It’s also part of this fucking curse I know I’ll never be rid of.

‘I am not who you think I am.’

I glance up long enough to see a frown clouding her beautiful coppery eyes.

‘And what exactly does that mean?’ she asks. There is a dry, cutting edge to her tone and my heart rips open wider.

My fists grip tighter, and release, and then even tighter until pain echoes inside me to stop. I’ve never actually said the words out loud and now it’s come to it, I’m not sure I can. I deliberate, trying different words on for size, trying to soften the blow.

And that’s precisely the problem.

There are no words in the English language to sugarcoat having sex with over three thousand women. For that is what it must be – even if I was to say I screwed two women a day for the last three years is undercutting my calculations …

By a mile.

Sometimes it was four girls a day.

Hundreds of blurred faces of the female persuasion, zip across my vision as a haunting reminder, a carousel of easy lays and empty love.

Ember adjusts her position. Slowly. Painfully slowly. As though she doesn’t want me to see her move, give away how she is feeling. But I do see it. I see every little thing she does, every crease in her face, every measured blink, even how many breaths she might take at once. I see everything.

The words I can’t hold back any longer scratch against my tongue, trying to claw their way out. ‘I need to have sex … and lots of it.’

Thumping is all I can hear. My heart. Her heart. Both. I can’t be sure.

Ember inches further away from me.

The thumping stops.

Pain chases pain around my body, two high speed vehicles recklessly looking for the ultimate end.

Definition number twenty-one, twenty two, twenty three … Womaniser. Fraud. Imposter.

I am crippled by her expression. Find myself examining every square inch of her face.

For all the sorrow and hurt chiseled deeply into her jaw, her lips, her brow, her eyes, she is still the most beautiful person I have ever met and if she leaves, and I never see her again, I will cling to those memories until the last ounce of life leaves my body.

‘And me? Why haven’t you had sex with me? What’s wrong with me?’ She looks over herself and shakes her head. Self-repulsion fills her eyes. ‘Oh, I get it. It’s because I’m not good enough for your list, right?’ She bites down hard on her lip, her eyes closing with the pain. Tears spill out.

I am undone.

I have hurt this gorgeous girl so deeply. There is no coming back from this. How can I start to explain myself? The truth is, I can’t. But I try anyway.

‘No. No. That’s just it. You’re too good for me. I didn’t want to ruin things between us.’

‘How is sharing love, ruining things, River? I thought we had something special.’

‘We do and it will ruin things, love. Believe me.’

Because I know who I am, I want to say.

Because I know what I’m capable of, I want to scream.

‘Because I’m not in control … and I’m not who I want to be. I want it to be me who ...’ I’m struggling to make myself clear because she doesn’t know the half of what I’ve had to endure.

‘In case you haven’t figured it out by now. I’m in love with you, River,’ she says between sobs. ‘I have been, ever since I saw you with your stupid hands in your pockets, standing at the school gate. Do you have any idea how you make me feel … made me feel.’ Another tear runs down the crease of her nose and lands on the duvet cover. She watches the circle growing, spreading, until the dark spot reaches it’s full diameter, her fists knotted in the sheets.

She looks up at me, face tear-stained and tired. ‘And just so you know, I’m already ruined, beyond what you could ever do. What difference would having sex with me make, if you’re nothing more than a common thief.’ Her lips have tightened. I feel the burn of acid in her tone, burning through every layer inside me, melting right through to my bones.

Gutted.

Dead from the heart up, numb from the hips down.

‘You’re right, I am no good and yet, it would make all the difference in the world … to me.’ I look up, incapable of breathing.

‘You use women … for sex.’

‘Not anymore …’

Ember sighs.

It’s a soft, slow murmur of air that doesn’t say she’s angry anymore or impatient. It’s a sigh of confusion. There’s pain there too.

‘Start from the beginning, River. Tell me everything … I want to know everything.’

I don’t have to start from the beginning.

This past year is all I’ll need.

Twelve months before

I zip up my jeans.

Some cheap blonde gazes up at me, make-up smeared, hair in a nest, naked from the waist up, a black vinyl skirt barely covering the places I’ve just been. Her eyes are glassy, mouth hanging open.

I scowl at her.

I’ve seen this unfocused look before. She is love-drunk from my presence. Just like the rest of them.

Me? I feel nothing. Just like always.

Empty from the chest up. Drained from the waist down.

No lust.

No empathy.

No respect.

In fact, everything about her repulses me now. The quicker I’m out of here, the better. Definition number ten – repulsive.

Her confused plea, thinking we have something special, begging me to take her home with the promise of more sex won’t change my mind. I got what I came for and so did she. I’m a callous bastard, you see, no big news there, and I cast her aside as another score to my ever growing list.

I swing my legs over the side of the bed.

‘But, I don’t even know your name,’ she coos.

‘And that’s the way I roll.’

Like I said, callous.

Already heading back into the hallway, I slip my t-shirt over my head, not giving her another thought. Half an hour ago, I couldn’t get her in this room quick enough, my body convinced she was the sexiest chick that ever walked this side of the River Mersey. Long legs that flex like a yoga instructor, tits way bigger than a handful, and a mouth that will say and do anything I want. Less than ten seconds after it’s over, she is little more than the taste of garbage on my tongue.

Look, it is what it is.

I’ve stumbled down that dark alleyway of guilt a long time ago and it holds nothing but pain and sleepless nights. So, I tell myself, it is what it is, tomorrow will be just the same as today, so get on with it. I’ve lived with it long enough now to know, no amount of changing will make a difference and I won’t ever be free of it, so grow a pair and deal with it.

The soft moans coming from the next two bedrooms leave nothing to the imagination. Naked bodies sprawled across double beds, arses in the air, no shame, no inhibitions. The third is a little more discreet. Dark, huddled figures, fully clothed, gyrate on chairs or in corners. This is definitely my kind of gig.

The room making the most noise is the kitchen.

Looks like shots are up!

Skimpy clad girls throw back loaded cocktails and laugh, drowning out some poor drunk trying to out-sing the artist on a karaoke machine. I swipe the nearest glass and down the liquid in one gulp.

It burns.

The taste of aniseed floods my mouth. My first guess is Absinthe. It dulls my senses, switching off my memory for a few short seconds.

I am at peace.

And then I’m not.

I hear my name being chanted as I knock back another.

And that’s my limit tonight.

I can’t afford to fall prey to its hallucinogenic properties again that had me up for thirty hours straight a while back. Any more alcohol than that, intensifies my carnal needs rather than sending the big guy downstairs to sleep. Unless of course I want to forget who I am and what I’ve done, and then I wind up at the bottom of a tequila bottle until I pass out.

Again, not a smart idea either – threatened with a criminal record for drunk and disorderly took a lot of phone calls and a pay-off to a not-so-honest copper. Wally tells me all too often, alcohol and I don’t mix well.

‘Hey, River, we’re going to borrow Simmo’s car. You wanna come for a spin?’

A distraction … just what I need. I’ve had my standard quota of girls tonight – three in total, enough to tie me over until tomorrow.

It should see me through.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes, I find myself in real trouble.

‘Yeah, why not.’ I follow Leo to the front door.

Three pairs of tits in short skirts block my exit. I haven’t had any of these girls tonight, but they’re the kind I usually go for. Gagging for a good time and no self-respect.

It’s true.

I don’t have any standards, but I do have rules.

No Nannas.

Over sixteen.

No married women; the irate husbands are too much to handle.

And none of the girls I go for have red hair.

‘River, don’t go,’ they whine. I have no idea how they know my name. A hand with glossy purple nail varnish slides up my arm to my shoulder. Another hand creeps up my back to my other shoulder, then a hand on my back and one on my chest.

‘Hey, Thor,’ shouts Leo. ‘Are you coming or not?’ His words have double meaning for me.

I want to do both.

I can be done with these girls in twenty minutes, if only he’d wait, but Leo hates waiting. When he wants to do something, you either do it, or you get left behind.

The decision to leave should be easy enough and yet I find myself holding back, not breathing, jaw locked tight, that familiar ache in my groin, rearing it’s ugly head.

The temptation is back. Quicker than normal.

It’s more pain now than pleasure.

Tightness pulls in my chest. Builds in my muscles. That strong addiction, begging me to give in. It’s so hard to resist when the pressure intensifies. I reach deep inside, concentrating with everything that I have, until I feel something shift. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Today it has.

I take in a shallow breath and rake my fingers through my hair. This round I win.

The car horn blasts twice.

Daniel McBride, Leo’s sidekick, and the only other person I call friend, is sitting in the front seat. ‘C’mon dude, ditch the bitches.’ His arm dangles out of the car window of some guys’ancient beige cortina, his fingers busily picking at the rusted paintwork. He also doesn’t like to wait.

The first step away is always the hardest.

Their fingers glide down my skin like steam over ice, chest burning, my body fighting me every inch of the way, still trying to convince me, I’ve made a mistake. The only way I can leave, is to tell myself I can be back here in an hour if things don’t work out. I’m confident they’ll still be here, and probably spoiled, but beggars can’t be choosers as my father would say, and in my world, sloppy seconds are better than none at all. Then I can satisfy the devil living inside my skin. Definition number five – conceited.

‘Wait up,’ I yell back.

I break contact with them.

Air freezes around me and any heat I once felt flushes away with the carnal urge. I jog towards the car, my body hating me every step of the way.

Daniel’s goofy grin widens as I draw closer. ‘I don’t know how you do it, bro. You can get any girl you want, including my girlfriend, if she was here, and yet you go for those dogs all the time.’ He gesters his chin at the three slags behind me. ‘I don’t understand it.’

‘Me either,’ I lie. Lying is easy … like I was born to do it.

I’ve never told him that I spent an entire weekend with his girlfriend when they broke up the first time. She certainly wasn’t anything to write in your diary about, even if I was into that write-your-pathetic-feelings-down kind of guy, besides I don’t know what Daniel is worrying about. He’s never short of a girlfriend. Quaffed hair, a streamline body and a Justin Bieber smile, is apparently all it takes to snag a chick these days. Poor, Leo, however, is not. He’s your typical joker, everyone’s best mate, prematurely going bald at twenty one, reminds me of Jack Black, and his crooked nose was the result of cricket bat and an irate younger brother.

‘It’s the eyes,’ says Leo.

Oh fuck, not this again. The depth, brightness, colour, vibrancy, alluring and hypnotic capabilities of my eyes have been discussed at length, not only by friends, but strangers too. Eyes have a lot to answer for.

They are my weapon.

Most predators have something that attracts their prey, and I’ve come to understand, for me, it’s my eyes. The rest of me isn’t bad, according to what girls have said, but I can’t, won’t, don’t, believe them. I can’t believe them because what they see in me isn’t real.

Girls can’t keep away from me.

And not just one or two chicks– it’s all females, from fifteen to fifty five.

I am a magnet for them.

I don’t have to say or do anything.

They come and seek me out.

They’re all under the same spell.

And I have no idea how to break it.

It’s a curse I’ve lived with, that I haven’t told anyone about, not even Wally.

It keeps me dark and hidden and in pain.

And I don’t feel many emotions either. Not like everyone else does. Mostly, they are non existent – except for anger, lust and love, and all have their limitations.

Anger is my constant companion and generally my first reaction to any given situation. It’s always been there, as long as I can remember, but I’m learning a lot about it through Wally.

Lust moved in and changed me in a single blink when I was twelve. It has dominated and controlled every action, been behind every decision and takes up all available space in my head. It requires endless feeding.

Love is subjective - I don’t feel it when people express it to me and I don’t sense it when regarding anyone. The closet form of love that I cling to, or what I desperately hope is love, is to one solitary human – but I’m not a hundred per cent sure she’s even real.

That’s another part of the curse.

And pain … I feel pain in every form.

I take a breath and climb in the back of the car. ‘Where are we off to?’

‘Going to see a man about a dog,’ says Leo over his shoulder. That’s code for going to the Rasta’s lair to score. Leo isn’t big into it, mostly because living at home with his gran, and working part-time as a lifeguard, means he doesn’t have the money for it. Occassionally though, when he’d won at the tracks, he liked to get high.

Leo floors it and the first thing I do is zip up my jacket. Daniel does the same.

‘It’s the middle of winter, Leo, for fuck sake, man. Why the fuck do we have to have the windows down when its minus four outside? In case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t exactly live in the Bahamas, you know?’ Daniel rolls his eyes at me when Leo doesn’t answer. He probably can’t hear anything above his doof doof music which is breaching the Neighbourhood Watch’s loud noise curfew. Daniel shakes his head and mouths the word ‘dickhead’ to me as we speed along Chase Parade.

The street we turn into, on the other side of town, is dark for a reason. Glass lays scattered at the base of a lamppost, a large stone amongst the debris. Most areas in England, especially in Sheffield, have a dodgy end. The Rasta’s Lair is in the better part of the dodgy end.

The off-white terraces are a bit more up market than your standard council house terraces, but not by much and at least here, the end houses aren’t stewn with graffiti. Concrete steps lead up to a highly-polished black front door, complete with a brass knob, and if this was our destination, I’d be thrilled. Instead, I look to the mossy staircase leading down to the basement level. A black, wrought-iron fence, something you might have found Emily Pankurst chained to, partially surrounds it.

Leo swings around in his seat. ‘You guys wanna wait here? I’ll be five secs.’

‘No way,’ says Daniel, already reaching for the door handle, ‘I’ve always wanted to see in there.’

I get out of the car, and decide it’s probably not a good time to draw attention to the huge boot-print on the front door near the letterbox. The red paint-job is invitation enough that hell, or something similar, lurks within. I get the feeling, this isn’t going to end well.

‘Can’t be too bad, if they’re playing reggae music down there.’ That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard Daniel say.

The poor lad has led a sheltered life from what I can gather. His parents are devout Christians, and Daniel and his twin sister, Juliette, had spent a lifetime wrapped up in Saturday and Sunday School, no mobile phones or Facebook and seven o’clock curfews until the day before their eighteenth birthday. One of the first things I remember him telling me was that he was surprised he’d even graduated puberty the way his mother had stunted his life. He’s more than made up for lost time, and hanging out with me has only accelerated his new found love of trouble.

Leo is first down the steps, me bringing up the rear. He knocks on the door twice before a giant of a man opens it. He’s bald, at least six six, and wearing an impressive two inch black spear through his bottom lip. His voice though, is surprisingly soft.

‘And you’re here to see …?’

‘Mandrell,’ says Leo confidently, ‘we’re here to see Mandrell.’ The giant opens the door wider and ushers us into a bright yellow hallway glowing like the inside of a lemon. The place stinks of ganja and week old chicken masala.

‘This way.’

The giant leads us to the end of the corridor and pushes us through a hanging, beaded doorway. ‘Wait here.’

People of all classes are packed into a dingy room that doesn’t smell any better than the one we’ve just came out of. A distinguished looking gentleman, wearing a suit and tie, stands in one corner chatting to a dirty cheap brunette with holes in her stockings. A middle-aged woman, wearing an apron and slippers is sitting in an antique armchair to my left, bouncing her knees up and down as she knits one, pearls one, and four young lads, still in high school by the look of their acne, huddle closely, one biting his nails. They don’t take much notice of us as we push past them.

A seedy looking fish-tank, glass green with algae, omits the only light in the room, casting an eerie, zombie like glow across these dropouts that don’t interest me in the slightest. That is until my attention snaps into gear – my brain yells out, check out the redhead. She is standing beside a cute Asian girl in Doc Martens. She shakes her head, her hair a blaze of fire down her back.

The colour is a perfect match.

The length is spot on.

My body follows suit, the same way it always does in these situations; it locks into position, my muscles cease to work, blood refuses to flow. I hold my breath, not sure whether moving will stimulate her to notice me. Normally, that’s all it takes. I’ve waited a long time for this moment, and as much as I want to indulge in it, I hold back.

As though she is suddenly aware of my presence, she spins around to face me. Adrenaline pools in my feet bringing my heart to a skidding, deathly halt.

Another letdown.

‘Fuck,’ I mumble.

It isn’t her.

It isn’t the girl I’ve been dreaming about – the one girl responsible for stealing my heart, convincing me I am capable of some form of love, even though I’ve never met her.

Daniel frowns, his eyes searching every inch of my face. ‘What’s up, bro?’

‘Nothing,’ I say, although it sounds more like a growl. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to head back to the party so I can release my frustration on the three willing victims I’d left on the doorstep. A menage et trois plus one sounds cool. ‘How long is this going to take, Leo?’

‘Half an hour, at the most. Why? You got some place you need to be?’

Daniel raises his eyebrows at me.

‘I guess not.’ The girl with the red hair, is now staring at me. I try to tune her out, half-hating myself for the attention I’m creating, half-unintentionally driving the desire forward. In less than ten minutes, the females in the room won’t be able to stop themselves from coming over and slipping their phone numbers into the back pocket of my jeans, most compelled to have a cheap feel while they’re at it. If I’m lucky, that’s all that will happen.

I’m now counting seconds.

I need to leave.

The giant is back and beckons to Leo. ‘Just you.’ Leo nods to us and follows the giant through a second beaded doorway.

A few seconds later, an irate voice extends from the same entrance. ‘I said, get your fucking hands off me.’ A lad, my age, or perhaps a year younger, is escorted out by the giant and his manhandling twin. Apart from the spear in his lip, the two are identical. ‘I know the way out, you fucking retards. You don’t have to drag me out by the neck.’ There’s a twang to his accent. He’s definitely not from around here.

The two heavys’ let go of the boy’s shirt and drop him two inches to the floor. The boy re-adjusts himself and flips back his blond hair. A stupid, childish grin spreads across his face. First impressions … I think he’s a tosser and deserves everything he gets.

The redhead takes to him straight away, and he threads his arm around her waist and pulls her into him. ‘Where have you been hiding, gorgeous?’

She giggles.

I hate her even more.

‘Are you wearing contact lenses?’ she asks him. I don’t know why it interests me to hear what he has to say, maybe because it’s a question I get asked a lot. I find myself waiting for his response.

‘No, babe. They’re the real thing. Just like me.’

Yeah, tosser … like I thought.

Wearing her like a scarf, he walks towards me. I have to admit it, his eyes are kind of freaky in this low light, like