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She burst into laughter as soon as she saw him. “Cousin! You look such a sight. By the gods, I’d never have thought we’d get you out of that grey old robe.” A faint flush crept up his neck and pooled in his cheeks. In his hands he awkwardly held an expensive lute. He lifted it up to his face to look into a decorative gilded panel, polished to a smooth shine. He was decked in grey still, although it was striped with lilac. His sleeves were puffy, as were the trousers that came to his knees. Beneath were lilac stockings that were lost in delicate, pointed-toed silken shoes, aglitter with silver thread. His doublet was lacy and frilly and a silver chain hung about his neck with a small circular pendant on it. At least they had not given me a hat, he thought sullenly, his grey hair sticking out in messy tufts, just long enough to start wilting at the tips instead of bristling with freshly-cut points. His face betrayed his hair, looking smooth and slender and, above all, youthful. No trace of stubble marred his pale, somewhat feminine face. His eyebrows and even lashes were the same grey as the rest of his hair, giving him a bland, colourless appearance at first glance. The irises of his eyes, though, glittered with lilac and silver, which his clothes had been designed to match.

The Jester. Or should that be Jestress? She looked no less ridiculous than he, though she always chose to wear attire such as this. A white-painted face beneath a mess of bright red hair. She was dressed in red, orange and yellow motley, save her seven-pointed jester’s hat, which was sewn together from cloths of the seven rainbow colours. Each spoke ended with a golden bell, some gold beaten into a hollow ball inside which a loose stone would jangle when she moved her head. She claimed to the court she served that each bell contained a precious gemstone, but none gave this remark any more truth than the other outrageous tales she would spin for the amusement of her king’s courtesans. She bounded up to him, tinkling as she did, coming to pause at the man’s side. Her hands were behind her back and she had an impish smile on her red lips and a mischievous glitter in her golden eyes. When she could restrain herself no longer, she whipped her hands out and rubbed them in the man’s hair. A cloud of purple dust went everywhere as she darted out of the way of the retributive swipe at her hands with his lute. Though impossible to tell with the yellow surface he was using as a looking-glass, she’d purpled his hair to match his outfit. That’s why there was no hat.

His arms fell to his sides helplessly as the Jestress once more erupted with giggles. Without interrupting her laughter, she idly performed feats of acrobatics, low tumbles and backwards-flips on the spot. She was never still; always bubbling with energy and drive. Much unlike her brother, who had been watching the unveiling of their cousin’s new clothes in stillness and in silence from the darkened corner of the room. While not entirely pragmatic — for what man would bedeck himself all in black without some dramatic purpose? — the dark man was now the most plainly-dressed in the room. Unadorned black tunic and trousers served him adequately for his former job as a distant monarch’s minister of intelligence, and there were whispers amongst his old employer’s subjects that he had once been a master thief before that. The Thief looked on intently as the man in purple gave him an exasperated and somewhat helpless shrug. The Thief never broke into smile, but some traces of amusement flickered about the lines around his thin mouth.

“Is everyone against me?” asked the formerly-dignified lilac-striped man forlornly, a hint of a whine entering his smooth and normally level voice.”

“I suppose we should call you ‘the Bard’, now,” intoned the Thief, his voice conveying the amusement his face barely registered. “No longer ‘the Scholar’, nor ‘the Sage’, but a man whose work is rhyme and whose office is a tavern common room. I do hope you’ll wear it when we go and see Elder Brother.”

“This is for the best, cousin,” began the Jestress, ceasing her handstands and jumps. “Nobody listens to old men and their heralding of doom any more. People listen to songs, though, and even invite them. We will be free to travel all over the land and spread word of what’s coming. No, they won’t listen at first, but they will hear. They will hear and they will remember, and perhaps, at the key moment, one of them will recall. Dark prophecy is easily dismissed. The Bard may not be. And who knows; if the worst should happen, at least you’ll be around to lift our spirits with a song!” He slung the lute at her as she bounded away, laughing once again.

I love overhearing people because I can silently and smugly judge the balls out of them for the awkward shit they say to each other. On the way into university this morning some dude behind me was talking to some girl about his course. Complaining about it, I think. Turns out that after taking a course in politics, he didn’t really like politics. Except for, in his words, “development”, which, to people on undergraduate degrees in the University of Warwick’s Politics department, presumably means something more specific than the common definition of the word. Ultimately, he told her, there wasn’t much to do with development in his current year, just a module called “Development and Gender”.

and that’s less about development and more about gender and I don’t want to sit through a bunch of feminists’ opinions. I’m not anti-feminist but… I just can’t be bothered with all that

By this point I’d had him pegged as more-or-less a tosser and I missed a couple of lines in the conversation that I couldn’t hear over the sound of my involuntary but very powerful eye-rolling. Upon returning to the conversation I caught a line from the girl including the phrase “thorny caress”. The guy jumped on it for some reason with this:

A thorny caress? That’s a very poetic description. A thorny caress like what your grandma gives you.

*AWKWARD SILENCE*

Ha, yeah, sometimes I take things too far!

Sure you do, pal. I had to interject here and I turned around and laughed in his face. “Too far?” I asked him. “What do you mean by that? You want to hear some real inappropriate comments?” They looked pretty perplexed that I’d interrupted them so I carried on. “More like the thorny caress of the rough pubic area of one of your mum’s old friends from school that she used to keep in touch with against your six-year-old cheek as he rakes his sweaty, semi-erect penis across your lips from base to tip, even though he’s meant to be baby-sitting you. All the while, he’s clutching your head between his grimy hands and leering salaciously as he thumbs the tears out of the corners of your eyes, telling you not to say anything to your parents or he’ll have to hurt them and your then three-year-old sister who was curled up naked in the foetal position on his kitchen floor, shuddering and bleeding from his turn molesting her. The thorny caress that you wake up startled to the flashbacks of, drenched in cold sweat and alone in your bed.” Pay attention, guys, because if you want to impress a girl you’ve really got to show them how much better you are than other dudes, especially at this kind of thing.

Well, we’d stopped walking by now and I wasn’t about to stand there while they processed my gloriously-painted scene so I turned away and kept walking, heading to lectures.

I think the moral of the story is: don’t be a dick about gender equality. Maybe?

When I was a kid (and we’re talking infant school here), sometimes I let my imagination get the better of me. I had (have?) a really good imagination and I’m surprised it didn’t lead me to more a more theistic worldview. But I guess you need gullibility as well as imagination? Anyway:

I used to pretend that in order to get a pen working that had stopped, you could ‘trick’ it into beginning to work again by writing swear words in big letters in your school book over and over again. The pen would realise what you were doing and it would try and mischievously get you into trouble (the pens were obviously very mischievous – why else stop working in the middle of a school day for no reason?) by turning the inkflow on again just as you’d stopped paying attention to what you were writing and would unconsciously proceed to write “FUCK” in big letters across your times tables.

But I always just used to feign inattentiveness to doubly trick the pen. Once it started to produce the goods again and work for me, I’d just stop writing. And there it was, I’d outsmarted the pen. I don’t remember if the pen continued to work for a while because it couldn’t just withhold ink immediately at will or whether that was just a cover to not let me know that I’d outsmarted it, because it was too proud to concede defeat. Either way, this method got excellent results and I recommend it to anyone who needs to get a dry pen working again in a hurry. But remember, it has to be something important that you’re scrawling bad things on. The word “cunt” at the top of your mother’s day card, for example, or your girlfriend’s sister’s name on a gift tag or something like that.

Staggering up highly polished, smooth marble steps, the man covered in red clutched his stomach painfully. The red was everywhere. Was it his clothes? Was it his blood? He couldn’t tell; there was red in his eyes as well. Was that his blood? Was it his anger? All he knew was that he had to press on. The solution to everything was inside the white marble palace before him. At his back was a hideous forest that stretched in all directions. A light haze lay over the land, but through it, the man in red could have, if he’d wished, spotted the heights of other, less bright, castles. They protruded from the forest of thorned, black-leaved bushes and evergreen, dark, musty-smelling trees. None of them resembled another, but they were all unmistakably stone buildings of some variety.

If he’d wished, the man in red could have fought back through the vast and frightful wood behind him and visited any one of the other stone structures. But he did not have access to any of them. He could enter this one, however. This was the palace of his birth.

Once up the short flight of stairs, the man in red collided with a heavy, black iron portcullis that was immovably lodged in the huge archway at the front. The archway opened up into the castle’s grounds, over which one would tread on one’s way to the keep, and over which Red would hobble in order to reach his goal, which lay inside.

Instinct took him by the hand, and righted him from his collision. It pulled him sideways, away from the portcullis and towards a heavy iron door to the left. That instinct reached into Red’s clothes and, from some secret inner pocket, withdrew a tiny golden key. Red set the key into the lock on the black door and turned it, feeling the soft gold bend as it grated against the stiff, rusty mechanism in the lock. After some creative persuasive force was summarily applied, the lock gave. A satisfying metallic click resonated from within the door as the locking bar was freed. Leaning heavily on the door and its handle, Red stepped into the grounds.

The seconds passed agonisingly as Red hurriedly shuffled towards the entrance to the keep. The oaken double doors were not locked, and the hinges were quite rust-free. They opened with a sturdy tug. Red did not knock.

Doubled in agony and blinded by the bloody haze in his eyes, Red could just about make out the man at the desk in the middle of a huge stone courtroom. Alternating marble and granite flagstones were angled at forty-five degrees to the walls. White pillars reached up far higher than any room needed to reach. The foyer was clean and well-kept. No ill smudges marred this front to the castle. Its cleanliness might have been suspicious to an observant visitor. One could infer that the bowels of the palace were not so well-kept as was the building’s attempt at a first impression.

Clever positioning of windows of various colours of stained glass meant that a shaft of sunlight would always point down upon the man at the desk. He was illuminated at all times. Thus, even with the dizzying effects of the chequerboard floor nauseating Red and causing his head to spin, he was able to haltingly approach the desk. With a grunt of exhaustion, he collapsed onto his knees and face on the flagstones, his arms clutched over his belly, from whence a large quantity of dark red liquid was eking out onto the clean stone floor.

The man at the desk was perched serenely and neatly upon a finely carved wooden chair. He was dressed in a bright but not vivid green, that glowed very softly in the halo of natural light that surrounded him. Upon his desk was a bound parchment book, its leather binding having been somehow dyed to match his clothing. A shallow pot of jet-black ink and a long crow’s feather quill lay within the man’s easy reach, though his arms were presently folded across the edge of the desk.

Spectacles were balancing at the end of his nose. His face was wizened but not frail. It had a touch of distinction to its aging features. Shoulder-length grey hair was combed neatly but not tied back. His eyes twinkled with unconventional knowledge and unspeakable clarity of thought. Gazing down at the man who knelt on the floor, his faced pressing into the cold stone as his life’s blood sought escape, the man calmly spoke. “Greetings, wayward traveller. My name is the Chronicler.”

I have your daughter, Craig. Now hand over all the money.

That’s right, Craig Denfold who works for Shill, in the IT department. Your days of supporting this evil coil company are over!

I understand that the belief that there is a god, or some higher power, is a comfort to people. I can’t say I quite see how that’s a comfort, since whether you believe or not doesn’t actually affect the things that happen to you that you don’t control (i.e., praying doesn’t make a difference). But to you total losers who need to feel ‘watched over,’ why did you pick the lamest god ever to idolise?

And to the second branch of people who have made this bad choice – the “just in case, I believe anyway” school of thought – here’s what I say to you: If you’re believing just in case you’re wrong, what’s to say you’re not wrong about the god you’ve picked over any other of the major religions’ gods? Wouldn’t it be best if, in your model of “hedging your bets”, you tried to appease (or deny) all gods equally, instead of putting all your eggs in one basket?

Back to point one: sure, it might comfort you to believe in a god, but you’re missing the true potential: awesomeness. I love gods; I’ve read fantasy novels by the score about other worlds with other gods and magic and mythical creatures and heroes. They are just so amazing… It’s so much fun to get lost in a fantasy world full of exotic ideas, so if you’re going to be doing that with your whole lives anyway with religion, why not pick a decent fantasy to delve into?

And now we come to the point of the post: if you’re not wholly convinced by any particular religion, but still feel some deep-seated need to look up to something, why not look up to something that’s a little more impressive than the gods we see in modern religions today?

Jesus was a total wimp, a faggot sandal-wearing pacifist… Mohammed doesn’t even let you draw pictures of him… Allah likes to send his people to blow themselves up, and the Jewish God commands dietary requirements from His followers…

Instead of following one of those, follow a god with a much harder-hitting awesome factor. Here’s a few suggestions for you:

Time God

A black-robed, heartless humanoid god who lives in a castle suspended on a black moon. In his castle is a room of mirrors from which he can observe humanity. Hanging from him are silver hourglasses, and the symbol of his church is an hourglass. He favours the sharp-minded over the the thick-bodied, and endows rewards on those who honour time’s inexorable flow by planning carefully and expecting everything. He has the power to control time.

Death God

A towering black skeleton is all the body that this demon-god needs. He sits atop a carved stone throne in a hot, cavernous lair in the centre of the planet, where rivers of fire swirl around him, trapping the souls of the damned. He has an army of stunted, skeletal slaves, and his white-boned generals carry the holy image of the scythe and traverse the human world for souls to condemn to their master. He awards his worshippers favours in life in exchange for the promise of servitude afterwards. He has the power to control the bodies of the dead and the souls of the damned.

Love Goddess

Pale-skinned and bright-haired, this image of a young maiden is anything but immature in her wiles. Cunning and devious, she encourages attachment in order to control the attached through acts of love and favours of the bedroom. Her boudoir is inside a pink cloud, a palace of utmost comfort on every surface. She haunts the dreams of young men and women alike with temptations of the flesh and heart. She will promise you fortune in encounters with the opposite sex in exchange for your promise to bring them into her worship. She presides over marriages, and promises between couples are also promises to her. The penalty for divorce is her wrath. She has control over the affections of the unattached.

Tree God

A kind and gentle man of the forest, this god is not so much a lord of nature as he is a part of it. His realm is the leafy canopy of the treetops, and his aged and battered skin is the colour and texture of Redwood bark. The trees are his allies and he hosts the domiciles of all who live under their protection. He offers nature’s help in exchange for yours, protecting wildlife whenever you can.

Sea God

Relentless master of the tides and mediator between continents, the hotheaded god of the sea is quick to unleash his fury on those who act against his wishes, or insult the seas he reigns over. In his ice palace on the top of the world, he surveys the waters of the planet and drags up waves and the tides. His stormy ocean surface and fierce winds are not for the frail or clumsy. He prefers those with a strong back and a worthy arm to do his bidding, and those winds and seas will support followers in return for their help.

Everyone needs a holiday. Everyone. Sometimes there’s such a thing as a partial holiday. It can look like he’s there, but he’ll be out of the office, leaving someone else in charge. A caretaker of sorts, but a caretaker of personal life.

Upon returning, if he’d left someone reliable in charge, everything would be running smoothly and there would be very little damage to repair. But TC didn’t have anyone reliable to leave in charge. He just had his wayward and unpredictable counterpart who went by the name of Ace.

“Who are you?” asked TC. “I haven’t seen you before.”

“I’m your assistant,” replied the new employee. “You can call me Ace.”

“Really? Why do people call you that?” asked TC, sceptical that anyone would have such a handle.

“It’s my name. Why do people call you ‘TC’?” asked Ace, becoming defensive at TC’s attitude.

Instead of replying, TC simply turned and left the company of his would-be ‘assistant.’ Aside from having a stupid name, the man had a stupid purpose. Since when did he need someone to assist him? Was his work not good enough? He went to see the Boss.

The Boss didn’t often respond to queries. It was his way to issue his reply through others, or if he did it in person, it was wrapped up in a cryptic hint. TC hoped he’d get a straight answer this time. He’d been confused by the Boss’s answers in the past, but after working the situation out himself, he could see how the clue should have helped.

The Boss lived at the Top. TC worked at the Bottom. It was never the case that the Boss came down from the Top, but he would send messages and messengers down to do his bidding. He never invited those from the Bottom to the Top, but still they came, unbidden. TC mounted the stairs and began the long ascent. He climbed the stairs with measured pace.

The staircase was a spiral, but it wasn’t a typically spiral staircase. The central axis was a hollow tube, and the staircase itself was very wide. It was in a flute of glass, the outer wall of the stairwell being made entirely of connected windows. As TC climbed higher and higher, his view of the world became wider and wider. His shoes made a pleasing echo as they came down on the white marble steps. There was an indistinguishable strip on each stair where the marble was unpolished, to give the steps additional grip on the shoes of those who climbed.

TC reached the top of the staircase, and set into the side of the flute was a doorway into the Top. There was no lock on this door, those from the Bottom were free to surface at any time. It used to be locked, many years before TC even awoke. But he did not think about such times, for the Boss during that period was still in training, developing to be all he was.

“I am here to see the Boss,” announced TC as he pushed the unlocked door open. He entered into a green and blue hall that was completely round. The ceiling was painted in a monochrome blue, but the lighting of the room (one central, yellow sphere) caused it to appear to have a gradient. The walls of the room were painted in the same blue, down to about halfway, and from there started the unusual green and sand pattern. The floor was a huge mosaic of tiny tiles in a range of greens and browns, with streaks and patches of blue throughout. If TC had known a little more about life outside, he would realise that this was, in fact, a map of part of the world.

At the point of the room opposite from the doorway to the stairwell was a desk that was curved to fit the wall. Behind the desk was another door, this one had a tiny glass pane set into it. It was circular, about the size of a large coin, and it allowed the attendant who was sat behind the desk to see the Boss. The attendant was lifeless at the moment. It had no mind, the Boss just gave it directions to follow. As TC approached, however, its preprogrammed response began, and it raised its artificial face to TC, speaking in a slow, synthetic voice.

“Wait here.” The drone stood and put its eye to the tiny window set into the door that would be indistinguishable from the rest of the wall, save for the silver doorknob attached to it. Turning back to face TC, the drone spoke in a more natural tone, adding a little humanity to the situation. “What is your query?”

“I demand to know the meaning of assigning me an ‘assistant,’” fumed TC. “Is my work not satisfactory?”

“Necessity facilitates it,” replied the drone, back to its monotone.

“Damn it, don’t give me any of that cryptic bullshit,” warned TC, his temper rising. “Give me a straight answer, or, so help me, I will go in there and get a straight answer.”

“Necessity facilitates it,” repeated the attendant. Furious, TC ran to the desk and jumped across it, slamming the attendant out of his way. He grabbed the doorknob and wrenched it as hard as he could. The door gave way, but slowly. TC set one of his feet against the wall and used it to gain leverage as he pulled the heavy door open. Unnatural white light flooded the room, and TC forced the door wide enough to walk through.

“I am coming in,” he said, feeling some inexplicable need to announce himself, to warn whatever was on the other side and give it a chance to stop him progressing further. He was afraid. Blinded by the bright light, TC put his hand up to his face as he inched over the threshold.

In the same way as a camera balances out light levels, suddenly the bright light seemed no brighter than was usual, and the glare receded as TC walked into the room. Where was he? He looked around to see a huge, circular room, painted in the same colours and decorated in the same manner as the attendant’s room, with one or two distinctions.

All the colours were much darker. The ceiling and upper walls were very dark, almost purple in colour. The ground ranged from dark greens to black, and the blue streaks and patches in the floor were also very dark, now almost looking like land themselves. The single, yellow orb in the ceiling was now a much dimmer, white orb, and glittery sparks glowed on the ceiling.

There was a desk at the far end of this room too, but where the other desk was made of a deep, dark brown mahogany, this one was a bright beech wood. Behind the desk sat another dull-faced attendant sat in front of door with a gold doorknob. As TC approached, the second drone came to life.

“You will receive your answer here,” it began, and TC stopped at the front of the desk, eying the gold doorknob. Inside, he wished that the answers he got here would be unsatisfactory, just to excuse him going through that next door. The drone spoke again. “You have received appointed help. You are to share assignments with him, but each do individual reports. They will be submitted together. Sometimes we will choose one, other times we will choose both. If needs be, we may combine the two into a single report under one name.”

“Why? What’s the purpose of all this?”

“Twofold. Firstly, there are some assignments where your work is not applicable. That is not to say that what you produce is not outstanding, but it occasionally is not fit for purpose. That is fine, such purposes were not in your role description, therefore it is not expected of you. But we have attempted to use your work in other fields by disguising assignments, to no avail. So, we will simply write them exactly as we have need, and though your work will not fit the requirements, the work of your assistant will. The other purpose is for security and reliability. If there are two of you, and one fails, it is less devastating to the Boss’s work than it would be were there just one of you who failed. And you have scheduled leave impending,” concluded the drone dramatically.

“Scheduled leave?!” asked TC, horrified, who had never taken a day off in his life. “What for?”

“There are some things the Boss needs to take care of, maintenance and corrections to the system, which has developed problems we are unable to solve with you here. Therefore your will be sent on fully paid, unconditional and indefinite leave, until such time as you are required again. Your noble principles and logical mindset are worthwhile assets, and will be missed for the time you are away, but in order to complete this maintenance we will need someone who is a little less honourable.”

“Why?” asked TC once more, desperate for some closure on his dismissal.

“I am sorry. You have been informed of all that is necessary for you to continue. You are excused from the Top now.”

As much as he would have liked to have argued the point, there really was nothing that could be done when asked to leave the Top. TC suddenly found himself in the glass-walled flute again, looking out over the land. What had been a bright, sunny day before had now clouded over, and the overcast weather looked like it would only get worse…

“You must be joking… what are you, eleven?” Charlie gave her friend a condescending look. “My god, you’re actually serious? He met up with me in a park. What, so girls and boys can’t make friends these days without being accused of other intentions?” Charlie’s friend said nothing. She’d already regretted asking if Charlie liked him. Despite what she said, however, her friend still thought Charlie did have the beginnings of feelings for him.

“Uh, no! Don’t be so fucking stupid, alright?” James told Sam, the short and friendly boy who took to him so well. James was sometimes short with Sam, but he really did appreciate his friendship. James wasn’t the kind of person who made friends very easily, so having at least one easily-made friend was his safety net if working up the courage to talk to other people was too much for a day. They were discussing a girl he sat with in class. He’d offered to go and meet her and her mother’s friend’s kid who she looked after sometimes. He’d looked up where to meet on a street map and taken the long way around, much to Charlie’s amusement. They’d spent the evening talking over the child and having a good time. Now, of course, word had gotten around somehow, and as they always did within a closed environment like school, rumours had bred. James told Sam the truth, he didn’t want to date her, he was just meeting a friend casually. Right?

Charlie had no idea what she was going to say when she next ran into him. She wasn’t very good at expressing her feelings. They usually came out as angry defensive comments, or in extreme cases, angry aggressive comments. This might be one of those cases. She was young, she was only just developing emotionally, and she was confused. She wasn’t certain how she felt, and that would only put pressure on her to remain neutral in her conversation. But doing that might put him off, and what if it turned out that she did like him? As the time approached for the class they shared together, she began to get more and more uptight, snapping at the smallest irritation and tiring her friends.

Having had most of the day to think about it, James had decided that he did feel a little towards her. But he would only act upon it if she seemed receptive. He wasn’t going to suffer a rejection, because from someone like her, it would be quite painful. He wanted to know what she was thinking and feeling, and so he was looking quite forward to it when he queued up outside the classroom, ready to start the lesson, but ready to talk to Charlie and try and guess how she felt about him.

Charlie was really worried now. Common sense was telling her that she must like him, otherwise why all the fuss and stress? But the irrational, uncontrollable part of her mind that dealt with her emotions was having none of that hard, relentless logic. She was going to worry and her brain was going to be damn well happy with it. She braced herself for the meeting in the classroom.

Rachel sat down with her best friend, Michelle. They confided in one another. They shared secrets and hopes and dreams like most girls grew out of doing after school. They never did, however. They were as much a part of each others’ minds as they ever had been as children. They’d known each other for all but two years of their lives.

Michelle sat down with her best friend, Rachel. They were sitting on a low wall. It barely reached two feet from the ground and it was built from red bricks that were worn and broken. Moss coated the strips of mortar that held them in the long array in front of the churchyard. The pair of girls had picked up warm, toasted Panini rolls from a small shop on the outskirts of the shopping centre they were visiting. They’d found this wall to sit upon, because the air outside was cool but the sun was pleasantly warming. Inside, the air was stuffy and hot from the multitude of people milling about inside.

Rachel sat down with her best friend, Michelle. She was troubled. The otherwise tasty snack she was methodically consuming tasted like ashes. There was something that she had to ask, to be sure of, and she was uncertain whether she’d like the honest response. She knew that Michelle would be honest if she asked her, but she was reluctant to try.

Michelle sat down with her best friend, Rachel. Michelle could tell that Rachel had something on her mind from the way she stared at the cracked pavement in front of them. Her eyes were unfocussed; she was concentrating on something far off in her mind. There was going to be a question soon, and Michelle would have to be honest. Not that it was a problem that she felt she couldn’t lie to her best friend. Even if she did lie, however, they had been friends for too long for one not to notice the telltale signs.

“Michelle,” began Rachel, her attention returning to the present.

“You know I’ll be honest with you, Rachel. Tell me what’s on your mind,” replied the caring Michelle.

“David and I were together for almost sixteen months before we finally slept together,” began Rachel. Michelle stopped eating. Ex-boyfriend worries were very important, and she wanted to be as much help as possible with her friend’s desire to deal with the break-up in the least painful way. The two had almost reached two years together, and it was Rachel’s first and only serious boyfriend. She’d told Michelle herself that she could realistically see them married. Then, seemingly out of the blue, David had ended the relationship. He said he’d been feeling differently for a while, but had kept it to himself. Rachel was fairly cut up about it. Within two months, she was with another man, Freddy, but she was looking for a continuation of her old relationship, not the start of a new one. Michelle had warned her that she was moving too fast, and it couldn’t work out this way, but Rachel had maintained she wasn’t looking for anything serious.

“David and I waited ages. But I was dating Freddy only two months before we had sex. We’re moving so fast, and it doesn’t seem to bother him, but…”

“Michelle, am I a whore?” Rachel turned her eyes up to Michelle’s. She was genuinely worried people were judging her on how quickly she was moving through her relationship.

“Rachel, I’m your oldest friend, and you wouldn’t want me to lie, so I’m going to tell you exactly what I think. You being so forward with Freddy is the equivalent of treating David like shit. The fact that he was your first and you waited for so long must have meant something to you both at the time, so rushing in with the first guy you meet after that strange break-up is pretty much an insult to how happy David made you. But it doesn’t make you a whore. You’re with Freddy because he’s a stand-in for you to project your feelings for David onto. You should have waited much longer before dating again. I’m not saying that David doesn’t deserve to be treated badly, but you have to respect your past relationships in order to learn from them.”

Rachel stood up with her best friend, Michelle. She’d had the answer she wanted, and she had a lot of thinking to do. She was going to leave the shopping centre and go home. She had to think over what she was going to do about Freddy, and how to let him down if that’s what her eventual decision was.

Michelle stood up with her best friend, Rachel. She hoped she hadn’t hurt her friend with her cold analysis of her new relationship, but that was the way she felt about things. Maybe it wasn’t the right way of feeling, but one can’t help one’s feelings. Michelle herself didn’t believe in just throwing sexual intercourse at anyone who buys her dinner. She was considered prudish by some, and sexually liberal by others. She wasn’t at either end of the scale, but she was happy where she was. It meant that those few who shared her bed were truly special to her, and while the more brash of boyfriends she’d had were disappointed or put off by the fact she didn’t “put out,” as they put it, most of them agreed with her position that such practices should only happen between people who were mature enough to realise when they were ready for the bond.

Lucy pushed her head up into the gloom.

“Keep going,” urged a voice from below her. She soon lost all sight as she stepped up the regularly spaced metal rungs on the ladder. She felt about for the surface of the loft’s floor. She crawled forwards a little, moving slowly as the darkness began to frighten her. She was in a strange new house in a strange new place and she wanted to be able to see what was going on. Her breath became quicker and slightly louder, but she was still calm. She looked behind her. The light from below was blocked out be the body of the person following her up. She heard him climb out into the room and stand up. He took a few steps and there was a warming click as the lights turned on.

Entering the room at about one-third of the way along its length and in the middle of its width, one was set upon immediately by the almost intrusive asymmetry of the room. Divided lengthways, the left half of the room had the slanted ceiling that came with living pressed up against the top of the house. The other half was about as tall as an average second-storey room’s height. The paint on the walls was blue. It wasn’t dark, yet not quite bright either. It looked as though it was perhaps meant to be bright, but then mixed with a darker colour to make the room’s glow softer on the eyes. Set about halfway along the slanted ceiling was a roof window. An opaque navy blind was drawn to the bottom of the frame, blocking out all natural light. That’s why it was dark when Lucy entered.

The light now came from three spotlights set into the corner of the ceiling where the slanted plane met the horizontal. They were pointed in different directions, one into the rear right-hand corner of the room, in which there was a desk supporting a dusty computer monitor and a bookshelf. The other two were pointed at an unfolded sofa bed that was against the far wall. Also hanging from the ceiling was a support bracket for a large cathode-ray television. It was black, not particularly new, and the wires trailed crudely down from where it was suspended. Some of them trailed into a black games console that sat below it, also covered with a thin layer of dust, and others led into a white six-way power-splitting extension cord.

In addition to the spotlights, there were three unlit blue striplights along the right side of the room. They were set into the corner of the room, and had three quarter-pipes inlaid with a silvery, reflective coating, like that inside a torch.

“They’re UV lights… you know, the ones that make you glow when you wear white?” The dark haired boy noticed where Lucy was looking and gave her a description. “I got them because, well… they’re just cool!”

She naturally came to about his eye level. Her thick-soled boots pushed her higher, though, and the top of her head was almost level with his. She liked that little height-boost they gave her. It was yet another reason for them to be her favourite pair. She had on long socks; they were almost stocking-length. They were striped black and white, and they were frayed and patchy from wear. They were pulled to different heights on her smooth, long legs. One of them almost reached her knee, and there was no more clothing for another few inches. Her faded black leather skirt brushed the region just above the knee, and it was adorned with a fake belt; a strip of metal-studded leather that hung from her waist while not actually supporting her clothing.

She had a tight black and dark grey t-shirt on underneath a jacket made of the same leather as her skirt. Due to much more frequent use, however, light and time had faded the leather jacket to a lighter shade than the material of the skirt. The zip that should have hung from one set of teeth at the jacket’s front had long since broken off, but the garment still hung lovingly about her shoulders, a comfort wherever she was. Various synthetic bands encircled her wrist. Some were peppered with the dull glint of metal studs; she loved the look of them, even if the stereotypes that usually sported such trinkets were less than favourable.

She had bright green eyes. There were many times she’d been complimented on them, and more than a few had lost their gaze in them adoringly. She wondered whether this new one would be the same. She ran her fingers through her choppy red hair and sighed. She’d heard all the lines. Sometimes she wondered if these guys got them from the same book, whether somewhere out there, there was a “Little Book of Bad Lines to Use when Attempting to Pull Girls,” and all the boys had a copy in their pockets next to the hopeful pair of condoms and the emergency chewing gum. Lost in her own thoughts, she didn’t pay much attention to her host, and just checked a self-induced eye-roll in time to catch what he was saying.

“Hold on a second and I’ll fold the bed back in. We can sit down and talk or something?” Lucy said nothing, she went back to inspecting the room. Some of the layers of dust couldn’t be more than a day old, but others, like the coating on top of the boy’s computer screen, indicated a far less considerate approach to maintenance.

The room was hardly lavish, but Lucy would feel out of place in a lavish room. Here she felt quite at home, or she would, were it not for the clumsy attempts at attention her host was giving her. She had to admit to herself that she was a little bit drunker than was perhaps very wise when she handed out her phone number last night and agreed to come over. But the thought of the boy living in his self-maintained loft room had a special appeal to her. The poor, unimpressive ones were usually the most genuine, and while she was as likely as any teenaged girl to fall under the spell of a dreamy, broad-shouldered charmer, she tended to try and look for the ones that truly meant well, but wouldn’t usually be very successful in their attempts to chase girls. A nice boy was better than a nice-looking boy.

He had told her that the extra climb up and down every day was a small price to pay for the independence and privacy offered by his self-funded loft conversion. He’d saved for two years working at a local supermarket for as many hours as he possibly could. She even recalled him saying something about missing school and someone’s wedding so he could fit in all the hours he needed to in order to raise the thousands needed to pay the contractors and buy the materials for his piece of property development. This dedication and diligence made her smile at the time, and opened her up a little more than she’d usually allow. Maybe that’s how he ended up with her phone number and the promise of a visit.

He’d finished fumbling around with that stupid sofabed. Lucy’s eyes itched to hit the sky again, but she maintained her composure and went to sit with him. Immediately, his sweaty palm closed over her slender fingers and his other meaty fist closed on her left shoulder as he pulled her to her right, towards him. She stiffened at his touch, but he didn’t notice right away.

“What should we get up to today, hmm?” he asked her in what she thought he’d see as a seductive tone, but what actually came out as a nasal drawl. “There are lots of things I could show you,” he maintained, concluding the statement of his intention with a slow wink. Lucy stiffened further. She pulled out of his grasp – easy to do; his sweaty fingers slipped right off her clothes. She stood up.

“Look, I can’t do this. I was a little too drunk last night, and I shouldn’t have agreed to come here. I’ve got to go. Please don’t call me again.” She took off out of the room that was lit by “cool” UV striplights, down the extra climb that was worth the privacy and independence, out of the house and out into the brightly-lit streets.

What had all been going so swimmingly had fallen apart in his hands. The failed Romeo sat there, his hands lying limply where they’d fallen from about her body when she stood, and any onlooker would see his total helplessness as he sat there and wondered what had gone wrong…