I growl with exasperated exasperation as I peel myself off the floor next to my bed, where I just fell off the top bunk straight onto my face. Looking in the mirror, I notice without even a jot of surprise that my hair is a state, as usual. Part of it is growing outwards like the branches of a palm tree, and some other parts look like small towns that have just been bombed and flooded and then coated in fluff, but mostly it just looks like my scalp has a horrible venereal disease. I say to myself: you're a stupid bitch for sleeping with a hat on, you're a stupid bitch for sleeping with a hat on. Luckily, after four hours of aggressive and emotional brushing and crying, I manage to comb it back into a ponytail, albeit an unruly one that no man could ever love. In my head, I'm all like, God damn you, Jillian Plumage, for making me do this.

   Jilly is my gal pal, who sleeps on the bottom bunk in my room. She is a stunner in every way imaginable - volumous blonde hair, huge tits, nice round arse, you name it. And she puts out generously. But today, she's ill with a terrifying case of some generic illness, so I'm having to go out and run an errand for her, instead of doing everything I had planned: finishing the book that'll earn me my doctorate; trying to train my feet not to fall over each other when I walk; drawing diagrams of my perfect retirement home living room layout which allows ample room for my doting husband (possibly a vampire), my seventeen cats and Jilly to all cohabit happily; and combing my ugly, ugly hair and crying some more. Damn you, Jilly Plumbago. 

   What I have to do is deliver a package to some gajillionaire who is always on TV and in the media and is young, attractive and cool, but somehow I've never heard of him. It's just a little box of anal beads, but my flatmate is so ill that she can't fulfil the requirements of her home-run, hand-delivering eBay sex shop today, so I'm having to traipse all the way over to Norwich to deliver it. 

   Walking into the living room in my frumpy dress (in which I still look attractive, but unlovable and ugly at the same time), I notice Jilly Perambulator on the sofa, with a big red nose and stinking of diarrhoea. 'Are you okay?' I ask. 

   'Yeah, I'm fine, I just can't be bothered to deliver that bullshit,' she replies, obviously joking.

   'I've fixed you some soup, it's in the fridge.'

   'I bet it's disgusting.'

   'Would you like a paracetamol?'

   'Get the fuck out.'

   'Can I get you any water or anything?' I ask. 

   'Seriously, Cinderella, leave me the fuck alone. You're hanging round like a bad smell and you look like you've just been dragged through a patch of stinging nettles backwards.'

   I giggle, but Jilly Philanthropy remains deadpan. She always has had the best sense of humour. Only for her would I deliver these anal beads. Only for you, Jilly Paralysis. 

*

   I love the drive from our tiny little flat to the swanky offices of Rainbow, Inc. I only have a beaten up old fiesta with a wheel missing, but Jilly has let me borrow her Bugatti Veyron (which she bought with her student loan, spending the change on a three bedroom house in Mayfair), so the trip whizzes by with a whizz whizz zip. And before I know it, I'm standing outside the impressive Rainbow towers. The humongous building takes my breath away, standing there as it does with an incredible three floors. I've never seen a building so big. 

   In the terrifyingly modern reception, all made of chrome and MDF, I speak to a woman who looks like a porn star, in a pencil skirt (made of actual charcoal) and nothing else. She wears a super-futuristic headset so that she doesn't have to use her hands to talk on the phone, golly gosh holy crap, and her hair is a stunning shade of red that nearly makes me vomit with envy. Now that I've seen her ultra-smart pencil skirt, I realise that maybe I haven't dressed as smart as I should have. I mean, I have worn my grey trainers, some socks I took from a sleeping tramp on the way here, shinpads, purple cycling shorts, a lime green t-shirt, a pair of 3D glasses from the cinema, and a plastic policeman's helmet from a fancy dress shop - to me, this is smart. I flatten down my unruly afro as it explodes out of the many pins and bands I've used to hold it down, and try not to look like I'm shitting myself, standing there in front of her. 

   When she looks up at me, she immediately presses a button on a console in front of her and says, 'Security...'

   'No, wait!' I cry, nearly bursting into tears because everything is such a big deal to me, 'I'm here to deliver a package to a Mr...' I have to check the package, because for some reason I don't know anything about this man who is like the biggest billionaire ever and pretty much owns the very university which I attend, '...Rainbow.'

   'Hmmm,' she says, before handing me a pass and pointing at another lobby, 'go through there then.'

   In the lobby she directs me to, two more redheads in nothing but skirts made of charcoal direct me to another lobby, where a couple of redheads in charcoal skirts direct me to another lobby, where I sit for twenty minutes on a chair made of rocks and MDF and marble and money. The girl at the desk in this foyer must be in training, because she's jittery and nervous and her hair isn't even that red. Plus, when the other redhead asks her if she's fetched me a drink yet, she screams NOOOOOOOOO and runs out of the room crying. I don't even want a drink. 

   I'm so nervous about delivering this parcel that I roll my eyes at myself theatrically (pull yourself together, holy crap) and start to wonder what kind of things would make me seem like more of a three-dimensional character. Reading British novels, maybe; or a love of curling up on sofas. Maybe if I hadn't heard of laptops or I was a twenty-one year old, clumsy, ditsy, incredibly thick but accidentally beautiful virgin, I'd be more believable...

   My train of thought is suddenly sledgehammered by the opening of huge glass doors (which I've only just realised I could see through into the CEO's office before they were even open), from which Ronald Rainbow emerges, beckoning me into his office.

   When I stand up to shake his hand, I trip over a pebble that was on the floor and roll three metres into a fireplace which I haven't mentioned before because I thought it was probably more important to mention all the materials things were made of rather than describe my surroundings. My whole body now aflame, I try to gain my balance by grabbing hold of a poker that stands next to the fire, but end up falling onto it and impaling myself. Holy crappy poo, I'm on my hands and knees bleeding from a hole in my stomach on fire in the foyer outside Ronald Rainbow's office. 

   Having put me out with a fire extinguisher and bandaged me up, he extends his hand with all its tremendously long fingers (like, at least a foot long) to help me up. 'I'm Ronald Reliant Rainbow,' he says, 'and who the fuck are you?'

   He stands there with scruffy ginger hair and spots and eyes that are all different colours, striped like a rainbow, and I feel so fucking turned on by him that it takes me a while to speak without it coming out like an orgasmic groan. 'I'm Cinderella Porkchops,' I reply. 

   'Are you like, selling double glazing or something?' he says, warm but obviously damaged, like a bird with a broken wing that any creepy insane woman would love to just take in and fix. Because you can change people. Really, you can. And if this feller is over twenty, I'm an idiom that hasn't been used by anyone under fifty in the last twenty years. 'Why don't you come into my office to do whatever it is you've come to do?'

   In his office, I see the walls are covered in murderous sentiments scrawled in excrement. Impressed by the spelling and grammar, I ask who wrote it. 'Oh, it was a local artist called Picasso, a personal friend of mine from back when I invented time travel. Dead now.'

   I've never heard of this guy since I haven't been out of the house since before I was born, but I mutter, 'These murderous rantings pull the extraordinary out of the arse of the ordinary,' and take a seat.

   'How profound,' he replies, 'a great writer must be typing out this dialogue.'

   I fumble around with the parcel I have to deliver, dropping it several times and cursing under my breath, as my cheeks flush because he makes me so horny. Why does this man have such an effect on me? Maybe it's his rainbow coloured striped irises, or the fact that there's a crucifix fixed to the wall behind him, with handcuffs and whips and all sorts of torturous tools scattered around it. 

   'So Mr. Rainbow,' I say, delicately, 'I wondered if you could sign here.'

   'I am the best businessman in the world.'

   'I'm sorry?' I ask, vulnerably, and blushing because his eyes are burning into my soul. He just sounds so arrogant, so I say, 'You sound like a control freak.'

   'Yes, I am. I want to control you now.'

   You are a control freak. 

   'You are a control freak!'

   'Yes, I just said that. But I'm also delicate and damaged just like you thought, and I want to change deep down, it's just that I haven't met the right woman to change me yet. Maybe that could be you.'

   'Are you gay?' I ask, still blushing. Always blushing. Sometimes trembling as well. 

   He gasps, before ripping the biro from my hands and signing the slip that says he has received the delivery. He looks like he might be about to punch my face in. Holy moly crapnuggets. I've really done it now. 

   'Maybe a bit,' he replies, 'but why is that relevant?'

   I guess it's not. I'm not sure why I even would have asked it; maybe whoever is writing the dialogue isn't that good after all. 

   We talk for a while more, and it takes up about 12 pages and it's like, 99% irrelevant, so I'll spare you. Just know that he's sexy, I'm weak and we're both flirting in the most awkward way you could ever read in a book. 

   After handing over the delivery, I stand up to leave. 'Thanks for signing for the anal beads,' I say. 

   'The pleasure was all mine. We should do the sex some time.'

   I blush, and go to put on my red leather jacket from Thriller that I haven't mentioned yet, but Mr. Rainbow puts it on me before I can do so. His skin touches my shoulder as he drapes it over me, and I faint from the excitement. When I wake up again, in a puddle, his foot-long fingers are pressing the elevator button, which takes forever to arrive. I'm just standing there thinking, I need to escape from here before I go mad with horniness and vulnerability, holy Moses holy crap.

   Before I board the elevator, I take one last look at Ronald Rainbow. He really is incredibly tasty looking; it makes me feel dizzy. 

   'Cinderella Porkchops,' he nods, as the doors close. 

   'Ronald Rainbow,' I reply, before fainting again and missing my floor. 

   After the boys are finished, they stand back, exhausted, and admire their handiwork. Within a few seconds, the smallest, Ellis, starts to feel sick and his eyes fill with stinging tears. The stench is unbearable already, a kind of warm pet shop smell mixed with blood and gone-wrong drains; but it is not this that is making him want to cry, and he knows it. He got overexcited, lifted by the eagerness of the other two boys, and easily coaxed into an action he would never choose to do; and now, he feels the stomach-turning sting of regret.

   Panting, the largest boy, Stephen, leans on his knees and points at the body with the tree branch he holds. He laughs, gasping in deep gulps of air and wiping the sweat from his brow, before saying, ‘Did you see how its eyes rolled back at the end? Like it knew it was all over.’ His hands and forearms are caked in blood, tiny pieces of minced flesh and sweat. 

   ‘Yeah,’ the chubby kid beside him says, mirroring the larger boy’s posture. ‘Freaky.’

   Ellis, the youngest of the three and the least impressed with himself and the body they have just stilled, starts to back away, dropping his own log onto the floor. 

   ‘What’s the matter with you?’ asks Stephen, standing and turning to Ellis. 

   ‘Nothing,’ he replies, ‘I just don’t like the way it’s looking. Its eyes look sad.’

   Stephen laughs and turns to the chubby kid, Phillip, who also laughs. ‘Did you hear that? Its eyes look sad. Have you ever heard anything as queer as that?’ 

   ‘So queer.’ Phillip agrees. 

   ‘It’s not queer!’ shouts Ellis, a whiny, nasal tone to his voice leaking through in his annoyance. ‘That was somebody’s pet!’

   ‘Yeah, I know whose it was, he’s not even going to miss it.’ says Stephen, flicking a blob of wet, red matter from his wrist. ‘It’s that stupid old cripple who only leaves his flat like, once a month. He lives in these flats; he can’t walk the stupid thing ‘cause his back is so hunched over, so he just lets it run around wherever the fuck it wants to.’

   ‘Not any more,’ interjects Phillip, bending to poke the ears of the corpse. 

   Stephen just laughs. ‘Yeah, not any more.’

   ‘Because he’s old and he can’t chase us, doesn’t mean he deserves this,’ snaps Ellis, his voice raising into a near-shout, ‘It’s not right. That old man is near enough blind, he probably needed that dog for company.’

   ‘Yeah. It was probably trying to run home when we chased it here,’ Stephen says, looking up at the block of flats that serves as one of the walls of the alley in which they stand. There are only a few lights on in the whole block, but they suffice to illuminate the alley in a kind of dull orange, red and blue glow. The orange of energy saving bulbs, the blue of flashing televisions through net curtains, the red of dog’s blood.

   ‘Shut up!’ cries Ellis. 

   ‘You know what? You need to wind your neck in, you little squirt. I didn’t hear you complaining when we were bashing its skull in. In fact, I saw you beating this thing to death just as much as we were.’

   ‘No you didn’t!’

   ‘I’m pretty sure it was your idea. Wasn’t it, Phil?’ 

   ‘Yeah,’ Phillip mutters, hooking his length of tree branch under the dog’s collar, trying to pry it out from between the folds of mangled flesh to hold it on the end of his stick. ‘Ellis told me to kill it.’

   ‘Exactly. You little prick.’

   Ellis starts to cry, so Stephen turns back to the body. 

   Around them, the cold night air carries the whisper of a light breeze. The few windows that were open on the advent calendar faces of the blocks of flats that surround the boys are gradually being closed, as the occupants turn up their central heating and get ready for bed, or else put on another layer and watch late night bingo shows or sitcom re-runs. Each block is a closed world inside of the closed world of the estate, a bubble within a bubble. The boys are as alone out here, being watched by every block in the estate, as the occupants of each flat, drawing their curtains and locking their doors and making believe that they are the only ones inhabiting the buildings. 

   Ellis realises he has no one to turn to. The two boys with whom he killed that near-blind old man’s puppy are his only hope for friends at school, now that most of his own academic year have turned their backs on him. ‘What are we going to do with it then?’

   ‘What?’

   ‘The body. We can’t leave it here; someone’ll find it first thing tomorrow.’

   ‘Oh, so suddenly it’s our problem? A minute ago you wanted nothing to do with it, and now you want to hide it?’

   It is exhaustion, rather than a lack of desire to fight back, that drives Ellis to respond with silence. 

   ‘We could move it out onto the road,’ Phillip says after a short while, ‘then people will think it was just run over.’ He scratches the back of his head for a second or two, before realising that he is smearing dog’s blood into his hair, when he promptly stops. 

   ‘Alright, are you gonna be the one to carry it out there?’ Stephen asks, pointing at the mangled body on the concrete floor, lying in a puddle of its own blood. The legs lay askew, as if they are pieces of an Airfix model that were unpacked onto a desk but never got constructed; while the body is beaten to a pulp, caved in, barely recognisable as the shell of a mammal, and appearing instead more like a sack of wet, red sand covered in fur. The eyes stare out at the boys, seeming to follow their every movement, as their sockets and the nose that sits below them remain among the only body parts left intact. 

   ‘Yeah, I guess not,’ says Phillip, taking the time to smell his fingers. 

   ‘We should bury it,’ says Ellis, staring at the dead dog and sniffing back the upset. 

   ‘Fuck that,’ Stephen snaps, ‘I’m not burying it. Who carries a shovel round, anyway?’

   ‘Well, I say,’ Phillip says, almost to himself, as he finally succeeds in lifting the collar from the body using his stick as a hook, ‘that we just find one of the big blue bins and shove it in it. It’s a pretty light dog; we don’t even need to pick it up. Just hook it on our sticks and throw the sticks away with it.’ 

   He stares at the collar suspended on the end of his makeshift weapon for a while, before a sly smile creeps across his face and he starts to poke it in the direction of Ellis. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Ellis cries, as he bats the air in front of his face and tries to hold more tears back unsuccessfully. He sobs so hard that his chest shakes with the force of hiccoughs, as Phillip flicks the collar from the end of his stick and it hits Ellis in the forehead, before dropping into a puddle.

   ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Stephen interrupts, ‘let’s just throw away the collar, or burn it, or keep it, and mince the rest of this body so that no one can even recognise what it was.’

   ‘No!’ cries Ellis. 

   ‘Yes!’ chuckles Phillip, waddling back toward the carcass.

   ‘Don’t!’ weeps Ellis, choking on his tears, barely able to catch his breath through the heaving of his diaphragm.

   But the older boys ignore him, taking up their sticks and starting to pound once again at the body of the murdered canine. Phillip bashes its legs, over and over, his corpulent body wheezing with the effort of physical exertion as he brings his log down on the cracking bones; while Stephen focuses on the head, continually attacking the same spot like an axman chopping at wood, until the skull caves in and the eyeballs fall back into the mush and out of sight; while Ellis cries No, No, Stop. Together, the two boys growl and laugh and howl as they pummel and pummel away at the bones and organs of the dead creature, each one’s enthusiasm acting as fuel for the other’s, until they are a perpetual aggression machine, an automaton of violence that powers itself, wreaking havoc on the land and holding dominion over nature and all the power it purports to possess, until...

   Suddenly, Phillip finds that he is alone in the beating. He notices that his is the only weapon coming down on the carrion, and his excitement wains quickly, until he has no option but to look up to see what has distracted Stephen. He gazes upon an unexpected sight: an alarmed Ellis, covered in tears and scarcely able to breathe, but once again brandishing his own hitting log; and an unconscious Stephen, sprawled across the concrete alleyway, open-eyed and open-mouthed, blood gushing from a wide crack in the side of his cranium. Phillip’s legs cement to the spot, his log dropping to the floor, and the blood drains from his head, leaving him feeling dizzy and sick.

   ‘You... You killed him!’ He squeals at Ellis, who doesn’t look up from the staring eyes of Stephen. ‘He’s dead! You’ve killed him! Wh-what the fuck?!’

   Ellis slowly looks up at Phillip, seeming like a light that was switched on behind his eyes has suddenly been switched off, and then down at his branch. As if only just becoming aware of its existence, he instantly becomes sick of the sight of it and drops it to the floor, before also discovering the body of the boy he might just have killed and letting out a shriek. Sobbing violently, tears filling his eyes so that he can barely see where he is going, he turns and runs off into the night, as fast as he possibly can, with no destination and no plan of action except to run away forever.

   Phillip kneels by the body of Stephen, trying to nudge his face without getting covered in his hot blood.

   ‘Steve,’ he whispers, ‘Steve, wake up. Wake up, Stephen.’ He stays for a long time like this, trying to revive his friend, before he makes up his mind to evacuate. He looks up and down the alley, checking for witnesses, before hobbling off in a jog toward home, where he intends to tell no one what has happened, out of fear that he will be suspected of the murder of both the dog and the boy. With luck, his mother won’t even be awake to ask where he has been before he manages to reach the bathroom.

   As Phillip vacates the scene, the last witness remains: a small boy, no older than seven or eight, looks down on the alley from a window on the fourth floor of the nearest block of flats. He has been watching from the beginning, since the boys chased the puppy into the alleyway, and has remained their only avid viewer ever since. With the lights off in his bedroom and his pyjamas on, he witnessed the events unfold in silence, without emotion, as if watching it all through a clouded lens in a cartoon world. And now, as he sees the fat boy waddling off out of sight, he climbs back into bed, and prays for the soul of the slaughtered puppy.

   The sun beat down on the pair of them with little mercy, as they stood on the tarmac at Browning Airport waiting for the helicopter pilot to emerge from the outhouse. They hadn't spoken for hours, this young couple, so wrapped up were they in a petty argument they'd had about his mother, and the way she behaves at social gatherings. It's unacceptable, the girl had said, that you let her say those things to me. He'd replied, If you cared for me as much as you say you do, you'd understand that she's old and ill and I don't want to wake up one day and find out that she died the night after I argued with her about you. Like all youngsters, they had both been too stubborn to get it resolved. 

   And now, they were set to embark on an early evening helicopter ride over Gagarin Falls. What was set to be the highlight of their holiday, the most romantic trip they had planned, was marred by bickering that had spilled over to times it should not have wetted. And the boy regretted that.  

   He wanted to make it better. To make things okay again. To brush over the cracks and pretend, together, that everything was perfect. But he needed to know one thing before he could let go of the niggling irritation: did she really love him? Unconditionally? More than anyone else she'd ever met? It had always been a question that haunted him as he tried to get to sleep, what with her occasional musing about ex boyfriends, her incessant chatting about men at work, and her unbelievable stories about her circle of friends. And with the mood so low, he thought he might as well throw it out there, and see what she did with it.  

   When he opened his mouth to ask, the helicopter pilot waddled along to interrupt, awkwardly pulling his trousers up around his corpulent waist. Come on then guys, he said. Let's get you trained on safety.  

   The pilot didn't sense the awkwardness between them as he gave them their mandatory talk on helicopter safety. He showed them how to fasten their belts, how to activate their microphones if they needed to ask him something, what to do in the event of an engine failure; and they listened in stone cold silence. When he told them about the Jesus Bolt that holds the propellers on the roof, so named because if it snaps out Jesus is the only one that can save you, the girl laughed and the boy didn't. 

   The pilot turned the roaring engine on, and the girl climbed in. She seemed to be in higher spirits now, but the boy was still lost in thought. He stood outside the helicopter, deciding to get an answer to his question before he boarded.
   Georgina, he said. I need to know if you love me.

   What? She shouted, patting the seat next to her and struggling to place her headset on her head.

   I said, do you love me?

   What? I can't hear you.

   Do you love me?

   I can't hear you, Darren. You'll have to use your microphone. Get in.

   Do you love me?

After the success of that filthy mummy-porn trilogy that I've forgotten the name of, we've all realised that perhaps the world needs just a little bit more sexytime in print. Sylvia Day's doing it, Mills & Boon are doing it... and as much as we try to resist, if we unpublished authors ever want to succeed, then sooner or later we're going to have to do it too.

So I'm doing it. I have done it. I'm doing it over and over, and putting it on the Internet. I've written my own erotic trilogy, and it's coming soon for all your ereaders! Have a look at my irresistable, tasteful cover art, be amazed, and then pre-order all three today. Thanks everyone, for your arousing support.

Edit: Now you can also read a preview chapter of 50 Dicks! Just click here.

(click for full size)

   I landed in San Francisco on the Tuesday, suitcase trailing behind me and a hand-drawn and crumpled map to my friend's house gripped in my hand, and I found the book on the Thursday. After that, my trip as I knew it was over, and a whole new one began.

   I was sat in Starbucks, one of the two million Starbucks surrounding Union Square, when I noticed a leather-bound diary under a stool by the window. I'd seen no one sitting in that stool since I arrived and no one was sat in any of the seats around it; so I only had the staff to turn to, to identify its owner. I left my coffee and newspaper on the table, and bent to pick up the diary from its hiding place. Before I could open my mouth to alert the sickly-sweet teenager behind the counter about the lost property I had discovered, I noticed the engraving on the front cover: HAND ME ON, DON’T HAND ME IN. 

   Intrigued, I opened the book. 

   From flicking through the first few pages, I found the leaves to be filled with dated entries, each of which seemed to be a mix of instructions and accounts of experiences lived. Just as often as and then I... and then I... was written, a command like now walk to Sutter would appear. By now, I was too engrossed in the scrawl on the pages and the engraving on the front cover to hand the book in, so when the braces behind the counter noticed me standing nowhere near my own drink, reading a leather book I'd picked up from the floor, and asked me if I was okay, I just said yes and walked out.

   When I arrived back at my friend's apartment, I had a chance to read the first few pages more attentively. Apart from the diary entries, there was a page with a block capital scribble:

THIS IS NOT FICTION. 

IT'S STRANGER THAN THAT. 

   And sure enough, some of the entries were. They featured ideas and experiences I never imagined I'd have in my lifetime. Places I never knew existed. Activities I never thought plausible. My mind was made up - the next day, I would read one entry every morning, and live it out that day. Follow those instructions to the letter. I knew so little back then.

*

   I'd wake up in the Grand Hyatt. I'd wake up in the Clift or the Huntington, and have the taste of clam chowder and nicotine and sex in my dry mouth as I stared at a ceiling I'd never seen before. Not sober, anyway. This is where the book took me first: seducing the financial elite of the fourth richest city in the world. It's surprisingly easy, it said, for a good-looking twenty-something to find a spinster with millions of bucks in the bank just begging for some company for the night, if one waits around in a five-star hotel bar for long enough. My first few weeks in San Francisco were spent nursing a water at the bar of the InterContinental or the Palace, waiting for lonely fifty-somethings with money to burn and desires to satisfy to come and drag me away. And they always came. 

   I never had to buy dinner those days. They'd wine me, dine me, take me to shows, drown me in attention, and then swallow me whole back in their bedrooms. The next day, they'd invariably hate the sight of me and want me gone before they'd reapplied their makeup; but by then, I'd had my fill anyway.

   And as for having sex with middle-aged women, I won't hear a word said against it. I don't know if I'll ever experience anything as pleasurable as those nights again. 

   To detoxify after that near-month of debauchery, I was directed to cycle the Golden Gate bridge. Hire a bicycle, read an entry dated in mid-summer, and cross the bridge at midday. So with cheap brand-imitation sunglasses covering my eyes, my knees still weak from the copulation and a thin brown cigar hanging lazily from between my lips, I hired a bicycle and cycled to the bridge. Taking it slow to avoid a heart attack, I took in every metre of that damn bridge like my eyes were hungry sponges. I drank it in, recording it all in a brain that had never known such an experience. The cool air rushed past my pockmarked face and wound the smoke that trailed behind me into the sky in dancing ribbons, and I was revitalised. For a bridge with such a high suicide rate, it has the potential to make one happier than you could ever imagine.

   By the time I reached Sam's bar in Tiburon, I was apt to die from thirst. My legs wobbled with every step, and my arms were stiff from gripping the handlebars, and my veins cried out for their alcohol fix. I ate an entire crab and downed two pints of water before I met my first whiskey and swallowed the tongue of a Spanish girl who was passing through San Francisco Bay, having just won a campervan in Vegas. We spent the night in the back of said campervan exploring each other's anatomy, against the advice of the little leather book that told me to catch the last ferry back across the water before sundown.

   The next morning, I read the next page: Catch the first ferry back from Tiburon. Thank the locals for their hospitality.

   I could picture the grin on the author's face. It looked just like my own as I read it.

   The next month was spent in Chinatown. The biggest Chinatown outside of China. You could spend a year there, and not see it all. From all the nodding head toys in the shop windows to the delicious fishmongers, from Chinese Six Companies to the Japanese Tea Garden (where the fortune cookie was born), I ate and drank until my stomach inflated to twice its size. And never before had, and never again have, I eaten Chop Suey that tasted as good as that which I ate there, in the city of its invention. 

   Wearing jeans that were invented in SF by Levi Strauss, to supply gold miners with just the durability they required from their clothes.

   To nurse my hangovers every morning, I was directed to one of San Fran's three hundred coffee shops. Sometimes I'd boost myself with three espressos, and sometimes I'd go all out and have an Irish coffee. I don't want to go on about the inventions of this amazing Californian city, but Irish coffee is another one. This is what the diary told me, and I believe every word. Anyway, I'd sit every morning in the window of Peet's or Caffe Trieste (where it's said that Francis Ford Coppola wrote most of the Godfather trilogy), and watch the trendy and beautiful California girls strut past in the stunning morning sun. The diary informed me that I would be blown away by this view, and my eyes confirmed it.

   More rum and whiskey and sambuca and cheesecake later, my leather-bound advisor ordered me to ride a Segway down the second crookedest street in San Francisco. It instructed me to watch a film in one of the city's many old theatres. It had me eating seafood on Fisherman's Wharf, and riding those nightmarish cable cars up the steep hills.  It said I should eat at Tony's in North Beach (so named because it was once a beach, but now lies a long distance inland due to landfill), perhaps the best pizzeria in the world. It told me to bet ten dollars on the Giants, and hand the winnings over to one of the hundreds of homeless people wandering the streets. I did just that. 

   Did you know that AT&T Park is the windiest stadium in the world? It has a Giant fan in every seat!

   I can't claim that one. My beautiful tour guide told me that.

*

   And as the pages I had left to read thinned, I began to wish that there was space to add my own experiences. The things I'd done that didn't appear in my guide. Like when I visited the Castro district looking for fun-loving boys and girls (and regretted it, having feared for my life in the streets on the journey there); or the time I emptied the contents of my wallet into a homeless man's collection tin because he was hiding behind a handful of branches on Fisherman's Wharf and jumping out at unsuspecting passersby, much to my endless amusement; or when I ate Ghirardelli ice cream; or when I received a demonstration of the mechanical working of jail cell doors from a stunning drama student and watched the sun go down from Alcatraz island; or when I visited the sea lions at pier 39; or when I took a free dancing lesson in Union Square to a live brass band; or when I ate a breakfast burrito at the Cheesecake Factory that was the size of my leg...

   But there wasn't space. Right to the end, the entries took me to places I'd never even dreamed I would end up. And the book was right - if not that they were stranger than fiction, at the very least that they were better. Who needed imagination or falseness when the reality was this good? I took so much enjoyment in their contents, in fact, that it was only by chance that I noticed that the last of them was dated just a few weeks before I'd arrived in San Francisco. Just a month or so before I had stepped into this city where I now felt like I was born to live, someone else was living the life that I had been living over the past year and was writing the words that would allow me to start. 

   I felt like I had to meet them.

   I scoured the book looking for clues as to the identity of my own personal saviour. I scanned and scraped for an address, a website, anything. I even tore part of the leather binding off before I found it, written in the tiniest writing imaginable:

IF FOUND UNFINISHED, 

PLEASE RETURN TO M. TWAIN, 

CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE

*

   So I entered the shop, book in hand, holding it out in front of me as if to pass it to the lady behind the counter. I gazed from shelf to shelf, mystified by all the American cover art for my favourite books and puzzled by the absence of Mr Twain behind the counter, as if I expected him to be waiting for me to enter the bookstore, my tail wagging as it was. I must have looked like a child, lost in a supermarket. 

   'Can I help you, sir?' asked the assistant, looking up from her writing and smiling sweetly.

   'Erm, yes,' I replied, looking down at the book, 'is Mr M Twain here?'

   'M Twain?'

   'Yes.'

   'Mark Twain?'

   'I suppose. Quite possibly, yes.' I grinned foolishly at her, excited to hear that she knew him. 

   'Yes, we have Mark Twain. We sort our authors alphabetically by surname, so you'll find him under T.'

   I followed her pointing biro with my eye and reached a bookshelf, my heart sinking further with each heartbeat. 

   Of course. Mark Twain, the author. I should have realised. He was the one that said The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. And how wrong he was.

   I hadn’t found the author of my diary. I’d just found the next step he wanted me to take.

   'Can I do anything else for you?' the assistant asked, as I stood agape in the doorway of her shop. 

   Grabbing a Twain book, along with a Salinger and a couple of good Bukowskis, I placed the little black book in my pocket, and retrieved my wallet. 'I'll just take these,' I replied, before paying and shuffling out in a near-run.

   I went to The Daily Grill, ate the best New York Pepper I’d ever eaten, and left the little leather book behind. 

   I had a friend who claimed he could make women orgasm just by thinking about them. It's a pretty unusual ability, sure, but I'd never seen any proof of it.

   The man was a compulsive liar. I remember clearly the time he told me that his father was an Inuit, a skilled fisherman built for freezing environments with a hide as thick as hippo's skin and fingers that could be as articulate as an Eton graduate's mouth. He told me this Inuit-turned-Brit father of his made his own clothes, mostly out of fabric from sofas on skips and the skins of animals that he'd found dead in the road. He said that you can move an Inuit into the big city, but you can't teach him to swim with the big fishes. He'll always be stuck in his ways, he said, because he misses the land of the snowy ground (apparently, that’s what they call Alaska) like an amputated limb. He told me that his mother had met her Inuit husband when she was the site manager at the oldest oil derrick in Alaska, drilling for the last drip of oil it could find. Staying at an Inuit village for the night, she'd huddled up to one of the locals and woken up with a bun in the oven. It was love at first sight. My friend claimed she went straight on working, and the day she finally gave birth, she was still wearing her hard hat and hi-vis jacket. 

   When I finally met his parents, when I lifted him to pick up some furniture to take to the dump for them, I was met with a small, round, bald Mancunian called Steve and his frail old wife called Ethyl. Ethyl was in a wheelchair; said she had been since she was twenty-three.

   Another time, he told me he’d met Bill Clinton at a work event. They were having their Christmas party, back when companies were allowed to have Christmas parties, and it was being held at a fancy function hall up in town. He said he was standing at a window looking out over the Thames, ‘watching the world go by’ as he put it, when he felt a tap on his elbow. Turning so suddenly that he nearly spilt his martini on his elbow-nudger, he found that his attention had been grabbed by none other than the infamous player-president. Bill was a charmer, he claims, opening the conversation with, ‘I saw your suit from across the room, and I couldn’t help but come over and compliment you on your sense of style.’ They spoke about everything from taste in women to debt consolidation, my friend tells me, before Bill had them both at the bar necking premium vodka.

   This might be believable, if you hadn’t seen my friend’s sense of style. He looks like he pulls his clothes on with his teeth, in the dark, after a heavy sniff of glue.

   If you point out the holes in the plots he weaves, your words fall on deaf ears. Selective comprehension blocks out all your protestations – he only understands what he wants to.

   And because he lies so often, I didn’t believe him when he told me told me he was disappearing. That night, in a dingy bar on the overlap between London and Shitter London, he said he was leaving the continent for good, and I just laughed at him. ‘Fuck off, Keith,’ I guffawed, ‘you’ve never been further than Portsmouth.’

   I suppose I should start from the beginning. He invited me to his flat, a one bedroom number in New Cross, to pick him up so that he could drink all he wanted. When I got there, the door to his apartment was ajar and the hallway outside stank of gin. I tried not to let my clothes touch the stained brown walls and I breathed through my mouth, as I pushed his door open and wandered inside his filthy flat. I didn’t have to look much further than his living room to find him, sprawled half on the floor and half on his sofa, covered in gin and dribble and pizza tomato sauce, straddling the line between consciousness and retardation. To be honest, after years of knowing him, I should have expected it.

   I prodded him awake. ‘Keith,’ I said, ‘you still up for the pub, or not?’

   ‘Fuck you, Smokey Robinson,’ he blurted, snapping out of his stupor and straightening up. I would have laughed if my gag reflex didn’t have such a violent hold on my throat. ‘Oh, it’s you. …Have you seen Cherry about?’

   ‘Who – or what – is Cherry?’ I asked, collecting the clothing and empty alcohol containers from his floor to assist in the clean-up operation, as he just sat there dazed.

   ‘A prostitute,’ he replied almost under his breath, murmuring as he lifted up pizza boxes and papers on his coffee table, as if looking for this whore under all his trash. ‘She was here half an hour ago, definitely.’

   ‘Of course she was.’ 

   ‘She was. Asleep on the floor in front of the telly, all foetal like. I woke up and had another go on her.’

   ‘Of course you did.’ 

   ‘She’d better not have taken my fucking wallet.’ His rooting around became more frantic.

   ‘Keith,’ I sighed, ‘stop lying and get in the shower. We need to get to the pub. I’m not wasting all night watching you sweat gin.’

   And an hour or later, there we were, finally in the pub. After two more gins, that’s when he said it.

   ‘Trust me, Aaron, this is the truth. Even if I didn’t have to go, even if they weren’t literally on my tail, I couldn’t stand being in this country any longer. The taxes, the job market, the media, the residents, everything about this country just grates on me these days. I’m disappearing. After tonight, you might never see me again.’

   I kept my eyes on the girl at the bar, the one with the thick-rimmed glasses and turtle-neck jumper. Her in the pencil skirt and the high heels, looking like she’d had a shit day at work. Given half a chance, I’d make it better for her. 

   ‘Where are you going? France? Germany?’

   ‘Fuck that. I’m going to the US. People like me blend into the scenery in the US. Somewhere like LA, I was made for places like that. They’d never find me there.’

   ‘Sorry… who? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Who’s after you?’

   ‘Who isn’t,’ he replied, sniffing and eyeing the room suspiciously. More of a statement than a question, despite his choice of words. ‘It’s the drugs, mostly. Bad deals, bad debt, bad lies I should never have told. Either way, if I’m not out of the country by tomorrow I’ll be dead by Thursday.’

   To be honest, the way he was living his life at the time, it wouldn’t surprise me if that one was the truth.

   ‘Have you ever read The Boy Who Cried Wolf? That’s you.’

   He laughed, clicking his fingers at the barmaid for another gin, despite knowing that that place didn’t do table service. ‘Aaron, you’re a prick. But I love you. And I’m leaving. Tonight. As soon as possible. Just say goodbye, please. Whether you believe me or not, just humour me by having this goodbye drink with me and pretending. …What are you staring at?’

   ‘What?’ My attention snapped back to Keith, like he’d caught my cock in a mouse trap.

   ‘That girl at the bar. You’ve been eyeing her up since she walked in. You’re like a dog that’s spotted a rabbit. My drinks nearly spilled, the way your erection propped the table up.’

   I laughed, shrugging off my reddened cheeks. ‘Shut up, Keith. No idea what you’re talking about. Carry on, what were you saying? Some bullshit or other.’

   He paused, just staring at me. My blush intensified, and a grin crept across his face like a caterpillar crawling across a leaf. All tooth and smugness, he downed the rest of his drink, ice and all, and said, ‘Watch this.’

   The slicing noise of drifting paper and the hard thump of dropped books distracted me, as the paperwork that my lady friend at the bar had been reading fell from her hands onto the beer-stained carpet below her stool. I wanted not to look because I didn’t want to focus on her again under his watch, but I couldn’t keep my eyes from her as her hand slapped onto the bar, drawing the attention of all seven punters in the room. Her breathing quickened gradually, that chest of hers heaving under the figure-hugging jumper as she gripped the bar for support. As her head threw itself back, flinging that shiny brunette hair all over the place, her legs uncrossed and the first groan fell from her lips, hanging in the air like Viagra for my ears. ‘Oh,’ she sighed, as her ankles curled to point her toes at the floor, ‘oh God.’

   Someone should help her, I thought. She’s having a heart attack!

   But then she groaned, ‘Oh, yes.’

   I sat there with my mouth agape, as her back arched and her sighs grew louder and louder with every passing second. Pushing her chest toward the sky, she cried out for God again as she ran her hand from her slender neck, down her gasping chest and across her stomach. The fingernails of her other hand scratched deep trenches into the wooden surface of the bar. ‘Fuck, yes,’ she cried out, at the top of her lungs, throwing her head around so the hairband that was holding her ponytail in place came loose and allowed some of her hair to escape. ‘YES!’ 

   She was having an orgasm. An intense, blissful, all-consuming orgasm that drowned her in pleasure and erased the world around her, as her insides exploded with delight and her muscles quivered uncontrollably. She was coming hard, and the world around her paused to watch.

   My breathing grew agitated to match hers as I kept my eyes glued on her, and she pushed a hand into her crotch to quell the feeling of ecstasy that was erupting down there. ‘FUCK ME!’ She cried. ‘FUCK FUCK FUCK OH FUCK YES DON’T STOP THIS IS THE BEST I’VE EVER – ’

   She screamed.

   And that’s when it stopped. Her legs stopped shaking, her back straightened up, and her breathing began to return to its normal pattern. Her intense orgasm abated, and the bar fell silent in its wake. 

   I’m not even sure she was embarrassed. To me, she just looked dazed. She bent to pick up her papers, and staggered out of the pub with them clasped under her thin arm. The rest of us replayed every filthy second of what had just happened in our heads, reliving the moment for just a while longer, holding onto the beautiful view.

   Still speechless, I turned back to Keith, and found that he had disappeared. 

   I haven’t seen him since.

   ‘If you want to go, babe,’ I said, slurring slightly, ‘we can go. We don’t have to let him talk to you like that.’

   ‘Who the fuck are you?’ She snapped back, turning away from the hand I’d placed on the small of her back and looking at me like I’d done a shit in her breakfast. ‘I don’t know who the fuck you are. I’m not going anywhere with you. Get away from me.’

   I just laughed. She was always quirky like that, old whatsherface. With her dyed black hair and her… fringe. I laughed so hard I spilt beer all down my arm, but she and all those boring fuckers that were trash talking her just stood there staring at me, all pretending not to get the joke. Which was funny and all, but after a while I wasn’t in the mood for it so I decided to walk off and talk to someone else for a bit. I’d fuck whatsherface extra hard later, just because I could.

   I saw a baby in a pram, shaking a rattle and talking gibberish to itself. Diddl-iddl-iddl-iddl-aaaaaaaah it was saying, and its parents were sitting next to its pram talking to another couple about something or other and I’m sure I knew the whole crowd from somewhere but I didn’t really know how to start conversation so I just started tickling the baby’s cheek and making funny faces at it, until the pram was pulled away from me and I found the whole table of adults staring at me. I suddenly felt an immense pressure to greet them; to look at me this intensely, they must have recognised me.

   ‘Oh, hi everyone,’ I grinned, ‘how are you all?’

   ‘Who the fuck are you?’ said the dad, a dashing young chap I must have drunk with a thousand times in this very bar. Real cutting edge banter was going down in the bar that night, and I was lapping it up. Heartily laughing, I play-punched his arm.

   ‘Oh, you,’ I said, stumbling a tad and spilling a bit more of my pint onto their table. ‘What are you like?’

   The wife – I can’t remember her name for the life of me, but it’ll come back to me at some point – was covering her nose with the neck of her jumper.

   ‘Look, you’re making my wife uncomfortable and I’m not happy with you touching my baby’s face. You’re filthy. Can you go away please?’ He play-snarled.

   I gave him a cheeky wink. He’s a riot, that guy. ‘Sure thing, mate,’ I said, backing away, ‘I’ll see you next time you’re in here anyway.’

   On my way to the bar, I bumped into a guy wearing a sweater vest and slacks, all posh like, and his four friends, all wearing the same. It took me a while to recognise them, but when I did I was so pleased that I downed the rest of my pint.

   ‘It’s you!’ I said, pointing at whateverhisnameis, the tall one who I used to play cricket with down at the wherever. ‘How’s it going, man?’

   He just looked at me, a wry smile creeping over his lips. He eyed his friends one by one, then looked back at me. ‘I-I’m sorry,’ he stuttered, ‘do I know you?’

   ‘Oh shuttup,’ I chuckled, ‘and Tony! It is Tony, isn’t it? Or Greg? Mitchell? I forget, I’ve got a shit memory these days, but it’s you as well!’

   Tony or Greg or Mitchell also looked around at all his friends, who were all stifling laughs like I was, before formulating his answer: ‘I have honestly never met you in my life.’

   Of course, we all burst into fits of laughter. All of us, in on the joke, we just stood there wetting our pants with laughter. One of them even said to me, ‘It appears none of us know who the fuck you are!’ My sides nearly split.

   But soon they got boring too, so I eloped with my empty to the bar, where I called the bartender over in the jovialest of tones. ‘The usual please, mate,’ I grinned.

   ‘You don’t have a usual,’ he replied, maintaining a deadpan expression with much more skill than I could have mustered in his shoes, ‘you’ve never been in here, and frankly, we’d like you to leave now anyway. You’re scaring away our real customers.’

   I pointed and winked and guffawed a little more as I walked away from the bar. Real, tangible, world-class banter was going on that night. All round mental bant. I decided that if he was going to keep up his act (and he was keeping it up brilliantly and hilariously, so who could blame him), I should wait for another barman if I hoped to get served. I realised I should probably take a break anyway, since I’d had eight pints already.

   So I just leant on the bar for a while, looking around the pub and baring my teeth in a big grin at the room. I looked around until I spotted whatshername, that bird with the huge jugs from a couple of weeks ago, the one who did that thing with the wine bottle. Instead of greeting her, I thought I’d give her a pleasant surprise – a cheeky snog. Grabbing hold of her arse with one hand and her neck with the other, I locked my lips onto hers before her eyes had even focused on me.

   She must have recognised who it was straight away though, because she screamed in pleasure straight away. She screamed and screamed and struggled and struggled, but I just kept laughing and snogging. That is, until the barman from before grabbed my collar and bent my arm behind my back and wrenched me off her.

   ‘Who the fuck are you?!’ she screamed. Looking at her more closely, I realised that maybe I had the wrong woman. But I still definitely knew this one.

   ‘Right, get the fuck out,’ barked the barman, pushing me into this strange little porch thing by the doors, ‘and don’t come back.’

   This was all part of the plan anyway. I’d been planning to leave soon, so they’d done me a favour by chucking me out. I’d go home, have a little cry, have a big wank and then go to bed.

   But when I got outside, I realised that it was only midday, and the sun was blistering hot, and I had no home to go to. So I downed a half-pint I found on the windowsill (swallowing the floating fag butt too), and moved on to the next bar.

   'Here, that's great, lad,' mumbled Derek, barely audible over his grandson's babbling. His eyes remained inches away from the blue glow of his computer screen. He was Googling donkey shows.

   Derek's grandson Harry was reciting the fourth division table out loud, making sure his grandfather could hear every result. Although Derek's hearing was starting to buckle under the pressure of passing time, he never let on to the kids that it wasn't bad enough yet that he couldn't hear the television unassisted because then he couldn't pretend not to have heard them when they asked a question he didn't want to answer or brought up a subject he didn't care to discuss. He was happy for Harry to read the table out to him, as long as he didn't start reading what was on the computer screen.

   'Charlton nil, Crystal Palace three,' Harry practically shouted across the room. He accented certain syllables in a way that Derek had heard many teenagers do in recent years, putting on some accent he was never brought up with just to fit in with friends that Derek can never imagine himself choosing when he was Harry’s age. Harry was fifteen, an age at which boys are normally loth to spend time alone with their grandfathers; but since the death of Ethyl, Derek’s wife, Harry’s mum has never been the same. She spends one half of her time staring into space, and the other half crying and yelling incomprehensible curses at Harry without reason. Grief has turned her into a wreck, a shell of the mother she once was; and as such, Harry avoids her like the plague.

   ‘Chelsea two, Bromley three,’ he shouts, typing a text message into his phone.

   Ethyl’s death was three years ago now, and although Derek still grieved for her, he had dealt with it in a far different way than his daughter. At first, he had sunk so far back into his shell that he feared even leaving the house. He would lock himself in his bedroom and hardly explore the house at all. When the mail came, he would throw it straight in the bin, fearing that it might hold more bad news he wasn’t ready for. Danger lurked around every corner, in every cupboard, in the face of every stranger that wandered past in the street. He read books, he wrote short poems about the pain he was feeling, and he lost two stones in those months.

   Then he found a present that his daughter and her son had bought him the Christmas before Ethyl died. Still boxed, never even looked at for longer than a few minutes, it was a laptop computer that Derek had no idea how to use and no idea what to use for. He unwrapped it that day, and invited his grandson round to teach him what to do with it. He’d heard somewhere that you could send letters to people on the other side of the world for free, in seconds, using one of these; and he wanted to learn how to do that, and then more.

   Over the weeks that followed, Derek gradually discovered the Internet. Having become a terrified skeleton following the death of his wife, he fattened up again into a chubby explorer, emerging from his shell and surfing everywhere from the Amazon to Expedia, from Adult Friend Finder to Flickr. He found out about karate and yoga, LCD screens and time travel, cats and literature, religion and India and hacking and boilers and Canada and wars and pregnancy and everything else that exists in the bottomless pit of the blogosphere. Even stuck inside his house, he was freed by the world inside his computer screen.

   And after it dragged him out of his shell, the Internet dragged him out of his house. He arranged French lessons for himself, cookery classes, a writing club, a skydiving trip, and holidays to every European city you or I could name off the top of our heads. He learned to play guitar (although not that well), he bought a games console that he never even played, and he went to plays he never even knew had been written. He even fucked a prostitute, a lovely young lady who it turned out had been in the year above his own daughter at the very same school. And now, the same Internet that had brought him all those new experiences had Derek discovering his favourite new topics yet: donkey shows and Tijuana.

   Derek had always heard that curiosity killed the cat. But for him, curiosity killed the pussy. The terrified wretch he had become was slaughtered mercilessly by his newfound thirst for knowledge.

   ‘Grimsby four, Man United one,’ mumbled Harry.

   ‘YES!’ Ejaculated Derek, at the top of his rusted lungs. Harry jumped out of his skin, and Derek couldn’t stop coughing until his laughter broke through as the more powerful convulsion.

   ‘Is you alright, granddad?’

   Derek looked up from his laptop screen. Still chuckling and coughing and spluttering and guffawing, he met Harry’s eye across the room that hadn’t been tidied or vacuumed for the last three months, what with Derek spending so little time in it; and he said, ‘Yes, son. I just like Grimsby, that’s all.’

   But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t a love of Grimsby at all. It was the amazing price that Derek had just got for a return flight to Tijuana, Mexico.