Night prowler

Too scared to turn your light out
'Cos there's something on your mind
What's that noise outside your window?
What's that shadow on the blind?
As you lie there naked
Like a body in a tomb
Suspended animation
As I slip into your room...
- AC/DC, 1979

Auction stations. I needed cash more than I thought, because the take-home message from Don Richardson had been a lot of tut-tutting and a lot of ‘You’ve certainly let this place go, Angus’. So it was over the waters to the mainland and my local Bunnings for a uteload of Pre-Sale House Un-Fucking Supplies. I was looking at re-gravelling the paths around the back, repainting a few bits and pieces, and laying into the unimproved jungle that made up my garden with Ali-like fury, hacking and slashing and edging and hedging. On the way over I’d taken the home theatre to meet its new parents in Morningside, and since I was halfway to town I figured on going the whole hog, rolling into the CBD to see what the jewellers who’d originally furnished me with Bethany’s ring were likely to offer me for it, given it’d failed in its primary mission objective. They tut-tutted as well, and ummmed and ahhhed and muttered about general economic downturn and conflict diamonds flooding the market and being prepared to accept less than I might have thought, then pulled out a number some five hundred dollars more than I’d paid for it in the first place. In its secondary, hereto-undefined mission objective – that of an investment – it’d suddenly justified itself. Then again, it was getting near peak season for engagements, only a few weeks to Christmas. Peak season for engagements and suicides. Ain’t humanity grand.

So the home theatre went, as did the surfboard. The BMW didn’t meet reserve, so I phoned up Mick at Mount Road and he sledged me mercilessly for (a) riding a BMW (he’d sold me the thing in the first place!) and (b) not talking to him first about selling it, and instead trying my luck on eBay, a.k.a. TardsLotto. One of the mechanics at Mount Road had apparently been talking about getting an old G/S or Transalp as a touring/enduro mount to do the Birdsville with his mates, so he told me he’d get Bueller to give me a shout. Bueller was called Bueller not as any particular homage to the ‘80s flick (though he did get “Bueller…. Bueller… Bueller…” in monotone quite a bit around the Mount Road service department) but because he had a thing for Buells, the innovative American sportsbikes based on Harley V-Twin engines and with lots of over-engineered racebike tweaks like putting the fuel into the frame to lower the centre of gravity. About all the old G/S would have had in common with his angular, semi-slick shod XB12R weekend scratcher would have been two wheels, two handlebars and two cylinders.

The lounge suite (the nice leather one, the one that hadn’t been retired to the balcony) found new owners, as discussed - that’s discussed not disgust, unless they busted out the CSI blacklight after delivery. But the biggest auction was the one I stood to make absolutely fuck all from, as I’d already been squared for the cost of the items considered. However, Aroha and Tractor (still apparently firing on most of his cylinders, judging by his short, sharp emails) still wanted me to go kiss hands and shake babies on a meet-‘n’-greet with whoever it was who ended up buying the Atomic Mandarin II, in order to squeeze as much publicity out of the whole charity auction for cancer thing. Fair enough too, and besides, I could use a bit of non-controversial publicity as things stood. The last time I’d been in the paper, on my own terms, was being quoted giving it the ‘I never said them things’ (in time-honoured English footballer quotation style) in Mike Cross’ column in last Friday’s Age entertainment section. To be fair, it was more like ‘I never said them things, and ‘Megan’ and Kas are both fucking shit journalists, and here’s why’. Cathartic. Possibly actionable, but cathartic nonetheless. And if it meant I never again got a good writeup from the Murdoch press, who the fuck would be able to tell the difference?

Bidding went slightly silly at the end – in my opinion anyway, as I was the one who knew just how utterly flogged the goods and chattels had been over the past ten years or so – and ended up just breaching the seven grand mark. The winner was a bidder called XO_1962, and I sent them an email through the system shortly after the auction closed congratulating them for their success, and passing on the information that if they agreed, Tractor’s cancer charity (in association with the Australian and New Zealand Cancer Societies) would like to have some sort of official handing-over ceremony.

I was emailed back about an hour later.

What no mates rates?
Monday OK for photo op if OK for Tractors peeps.
Cheers
GRR

I wasn’t being growled at, even though the sender was, in a certain light, vaguely wolverine. GRR was, as I well knew having received plenty of official (and less so) correspondence so tagged, Gregory Raymond Richardson. Of ‘XO’-cet Records. How I hadn’t seen that before, God only knew. Who else would want to pay seven grand for my old busted axe and almost as old and busted amp?

So Monday came, and I was on an early-morning flight (necessitating a licence-bending sprint across the Gateway to meet it) to Sydney and Exocet’s small but professional offices in a light commercial-industrial park in Alexandria – the Surry Hills terrace had finally been returned to residential-only status, which was good for Richie because he was now sharing it with his new missus, Daniela’s mother. The Cancer Society’s publicity girl collected me from the airport. She was blonde and pretty and chatty and funny and reminded me of Beth. Then again a lot of women were reminding me of Beth – one of the flight attendants on the trip down, the girl who served me at Bunnings last week, some smiley girl on a billboard on Kingsford Smith Drive advertising health insurance – almost solely because they were blonde and pretty and I didn’t know or understand them worth a damn. I hoped the crash landing was going OK. As they say, any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

The photo op went well; a good media contingent looking for that positive ‘kicker’ for the end of the news bulletin, or value-added column filler for tomorrow’s paper. I’d remembered to dress as badly as possible and not shave, in order to look like a respectable rock star and not a scummy out-of-work casual high school teacher. Everyone said the right things - Richie spoke about how both his parents had been lost to cancer, and how he and his company were always delighted to contribute to such a worth cause. He even plugged in the Mandarin and bashed out a few Ballistic Missiles riffs from back in the day for the cameras, though he blanched at trying to play anything of ours. I said my bit on behalf of Tractor, who’d also sent a prepared statement; the Cancer Society people were happy, and the old Atomic Mandarin II looked all shiny and sparkle-arkly as it was put up in its display case. Noone even rolled their eyes when Richie insisted on doing the handover in front of a suspiciously positioned poster in the background announcing IN THE WORST POSSIBLE TASTE: THE COLLECTED WORKS OF FLANGE GASKET would become AVAILABLE IN STORES AND ONLINE JANUARY 22 – four weeks from today, and probably at least four weeks later than Exocet would have wanted in order to cash in on Christmas, though who knew whether it’d be more likely to result in engagements than the other popular option. I had a certain car-smash curiosity in finding out how the liner notes were going to read. (Exocet didn’t do many money-spinning Greatest Hits compiles, usually because the lean-and-hungry youngsters they usually signed were off with bigger and fatter outfits by the time came in their careers to churn out a festive season cash-in). The cover art, heavily employed in the street-team posterings, music-press ads and viral web marketing which had been running for the past few weeks, was a late-afternoon festival photo of some poor munter passed out on his back on a grassy slope surrounded by squashed beer cans and other festival flotsam – Homebake at the Domain, possibly? – wearing one of our more infamous merch T-shirts which pronounced in big black letters, under the FG insignia (in this instance ripping off the old Channel Nine Wide World Of Sports logo): ROCK OUT WITH YOUR COCK OUT. Artfully, the wasted munter’s hand was obscuring the part of the writing which was likely to have us being banned from sale at family-friendly retailers like Kmart or Big W.

So in effect, Richie had bought cross-media promotion for his company, and one of their more prominent new-year releases, for the grand total of seven thousand bucks. Which was tax-deductable. And now he had a lovely wall-hanging to start conversations with, and presumably a large orange paperweight as well, or whatever he intended to do with the amp. He figured on keeping it there just in case he felt like getting the Mandarin down and cranking it up on occasion. It was sad to retire the old girl, but she’d seen better days, and lots of them. The pickups had the durability of used tinfoil and that Holley Equipped sticker was worn almost to translucency, and she’d been on her third or fourth one of those as it was. The boys at Rare Spares knew me on first name basis.

“Served you well,” Richie remarked after the media types had moved off to their next exciting adventure, and we were having a quick coffee before he had to get back to it. (Daniela had grabbed takeaways from the coffee cart in the complex. They did surprisingly good work.) He nodded up at the sparkly orange Ibanez.

“That it has,” I concurred.

“Sentimental?”

“Nah, not really,” I lied. “To be honest, for most of Gasket, it was travelling reserve, never actually got a game. Particularly with the Yamaha deal. I mean, it was the first guitar I’d bought with my own money, and you always remember your first… but I’m happy to see it here. It’s a nice, what’s the marketing wank word? Convergence? Confluence? Whatever. Anyway, it’s here in your office for all to see. The guitar which built your empire…”

Richie barely batted an eyelid, he was used to my rubbish by now, although Danno was rolling her eyes.

“So,” he countered, “you won’t miss it?”

“Nah. Might drop in to see it when I’m in town. Not to see you, mind, just the guitar.”

“And, say, if you suddenly need to, I don’t know, earn a living by playing the guitar in public, then what?”

“I’ll go take a cold shower,” I replied with a grin. “Or nick Jeff’s Les Paul when he’s orff drivin’ his tractor, ay.”

Richie nodded. He glanced at Danno, who seemed to anticipate what was coming next. Good, that made two of them.

“So you were serious when you told Lena about not playing with Gasket again?”

“Don’t believe everything you read in the paper,” I reminded him suspiciously. “I said fuck all of the sort, not sober anyway. Why?”

“Ken West has a problem,” he replied.

“Yes, it’s that fucking D-barrier, it’s a bunch of shit,” I replied quickly.

Thinking, this isn’t happening. Don’t be dangling the Big Day Out in my face, you short hairy bastard.

No, Richie replied, his problem was smaller. About the size of a four-on-the-floor rock band from the Shakies called Hayabusa, who I might have come across in my time. And who’d been signed to play NZ and the Australian East Coast shows. At least they had been, until their lead man had pulled up crook with a minor bout of terminal cancer. And while this had been generally understood through the industry, the organisers had assumed Hayabusa would play anyway, with or without Tractor, given a contract had been signed. Seemed the sharp decline in Tractor’s condition over the later weeks of November – midway through the month he’d apparently been expecting to play the entire Tractorfest show, but by the end he was in bed and I’d been subbed on – had taken everyone by surprise, and hadn’t really been made public. I figured Hayabusa would have had no intention of playing anywhere, other than the one-off for Tractorfest, now their talisman was approaching his final curtain call, but clearly that sentiment hadn't reached the Wests and the BDO management staff. And the BDO was this time next month – the East Coast swing of the BDO was the same week as In The Worst Possible Taste was due to hit the shelves. Convergence. And/or confluence.

“I’d have said Aroha Maxwell has a problem,” I noted. “Contracts were signed, yeah?”

“Yeah, but everyone’s trying to be as understanding as they can,” Richie replied. “This isn’t the BDO vs Limp Biskit and vice versa, everyone’s trying to be as helpful as possible, give each other breathing space, but yeah, contracts were signed.”

“Call me cynical,” I began, “but has this got anything to do with you paying well over the odds for a 1992 Ibanez RT-280 with trapezoidal pickups that don’t work a fuck, and more mileage than Joy from Lennox?”

Richie looked a little bemused. “Help me out here, Daniela.”

“Happy to,” she said. “As you know, Andrew, Exocet has always felt, as company policy, that’s it’s best to conduct business with our best clients – our friends, if you will – in person. You’d agree with that, boss?”

“Nicely put, Daniela,” he remarked.

“So, you’ve stepped in to see what you can do, I gather? As part of your agreement with Aroha?”

“Not so much an agreement. More an understanding,” Danno preferred.

“Yeah. I understood we had a deal when they stopped jacking the auction price up from their end,” Richie added flatly. “But yeah, I’ve undertaken to see what I can do to help them out.”

I looked over his shoulder, at the munter passed out on the grass – the spokesperson for The Collected Works Of Flange Gasket. I could tell which way the wind was blowing on this one. I’m not quite as dumb as this shirt makes me look.

“What if I was serious?”

“About not playing?”

“Yeah. Let’s set aside the point that Marty would never be allowed to play – he’s already playing in his own right anyway, isn’t he? And that the Duffer’s a mess and noone will want to step into McCarthy’s boots, Jeff included – not for at least a month away from the farm, rehearsals included.” I left out the bit about his marriage not being on the solidest of footings. I’m classy like that. “Set all that aside. What if I was the one who said no?”

“Well,” Richie began, “you’d be doing yourself out of a large amount of dough, which given your current financial arrangements...” I didn't thank him for bringing that up. Richie was never averse to using whatever info he could get to leverage his negotiating position. “Hayabusa’s contract was pretty healthy, and I’d understand you’d be in line for the same amount. Plus whatever sales oxygen the publicity of being on the BDO would give the greatest hits CD. And the DVD, and the T-shirt, and the matching tie and handkerchief. We’re not fucking around here, you realise.”

“You’d be done out of a large amount of dough yourselves,” I pointed out.

“We’re not a charity,” he reminded me, fairly needlessly. “We are being charitable, though. I’ve got plenty of up and coming acts on the books here who’d crawl over broken glass to get a start in the BDO, even at this late notice. But because of who you guys are, because of the profile you have, and because, as you put it, that guitar paid for this building…”

“And because everyone involves stands to make a large amount of money…”

“Since when were you allergic to money?” Richie was getting tired of my smart-arse comments. We’d slipped back into our back-in-the-day personality dynamic surprisingly quickly.

“More it’s allergic to me,” I admitted. And yes, the idea of being paid very well to have one more go-around on the Gasket bandwagon – even though that was the worst possible of all motivations, I realised – appealed, considering I was running out of things to put on eBay, and would soon be turning to milk-crate furnishings a la my various St Lucia hovels. (We’d scored a bunch of old rels’ furniture by the time it came to outfit Chateau Dodgy and subsequently SOD-Off.)

Danno had watched the exchange very carefully. She picked her moment well.

“You’ll have whatever you need to make this happen,” she offered coolly. “Rehearsal space, travel funding, you name it, it’ll happen. And I’ll manage Maddy,” she pronounced bravely. “You just need to handle your boys.”

“I don’t see what you have to lose,” Richie added.

I considered my options.

“I see what I need to lose,” I replied. “At least five kilos to avoid looking like a fat fuck on stage next to Marty.”

“Duffer. Big Day Out. Gasket. NZ and East Coast. You in? Call me back. This number. Angus.”

It wasn’t the most eloquent of voicemail messages, but I wasn’t feeling that eloquent. Worked, anyway. Nokia SMS tone (still hadn’t frigging changed since back in the day):

FUCK YEH. WEHN IS IT?

Waiting on confirmation from the others, I texted in reply, still trying to get the hang of predictive text again. The list of peeps who needed to get hold of me at short notice was lengthening – Don in particular, so as such I’d picked up a cheapo prepaid mobile on my most recent trip to the mainland.

DONT HOLD UR BRETH!!!

Gee, thanks for the reassurance, Duffstar.

I figured I could wear Jeff down over Christmas, because I really couldn’t think of anyone else for the job of Other Guitar, other than the Hayabusa boys and they plainly didn’t want to do much else than stay home, chill and spend some time with their man Tractor. The Bear, for his part, had disappeared. He’d mentioned he’d been thinking of fucking off to visit his mother and sister in Margaret River, but had obviously left no forwarding address with the rest of Hayabusa. No other hired gun would do, and Jeff had one advantage over the rest: he was cheap. As was the Duffer. And the pair of them could be talked into it without too much hassle. But Marty… there was a deal-breaker. Without Marty, this wasn’t happening. Which almost definifely meant it wasn’t happening.

I called him Tuesday morning. “How’s the Beef Week Queen getting on?” he wanted to know. “Had any luck?” It was as close to a hurry-up-you-fat-fuck as he got when it came to songwriting.

“Got a few ideas,” I said, “but best share them in person I reckon, where are you going to be this Christmas?”

“Maddy’s olds,” he reported. “We just flew down from Brisbane to Sydney.”

“Cock,” I declared, in general, not of him. “I just flew the other way last night.”

“Yeah, I saw you in the paper doing your bit for the Tractor, nice work getting Richie to open his wallet. Surprised you didn’t get attacked by a plague of moths,” he grinned. “So you’re what, up on Straddie? At the farm?”

“Farm for Christmas, then back up over the border on the 26th. Mad Mick and co are having the usual Boxing Day festivities at the shop for the regulars, then they’re invading the island as well.”

The Martins had an engagingly run-down bungalow on the northern shoreline in Amity which they descended upon most Christmas-New Year breaks, filling every piece of available parking area with trucks, cars, bikes, boat and jetski trailers, turning the place into a bogan paradise. They liked their power-operated toys, those lads.

“Oh look, we’ll be back through visiting my folks for a few days from Boxing Day, should be back in Brisbane by the 29th or something – maybe sort something then?”

Sounded good, I told him. And managed to wrap the call up without actually mentioning the BDO thing, because I’d suddenly turned into a coward. Because, just as suddenly, I realised I wanted this to happen very, very much. So I ended up using the coward’s method, email. Meant I could get my entire argument out without interruption. Sure, he could just trash it, but at least it’d be uninterrupted trash.

Last thing Tuesday evening, with the ute packed for tomorrow morning’s early getaway to the ferry and on to the farm (via the gaudy horror of Pacific Fair in order to buy people a few actual presents), I braved up and put together an email, couching the offer in the most welcoming, conciliatory terms I could – that Richie had a bit more to say than just ‘Cheers for the broken old guitar that cost me $7000’, that we’d been asked to step up to cover for Tractor and Hayabusa, that we (the Royal ‘we’) realised he was playing later in the day as well, so he was welcome to have as much or as little presence as he liked. We just needed him there. In any case, we could talk about it when we caught up after Christmas. No reply by next morning, so I headed off. And realised why leaving your Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve is a thoroughly shit idea, particularly at a thoroughly shit place like Pacific Fair in thoroughly shit thirty-nine degree heat.

Jeff was the first person to actually tell me he didn’t like the idea. Sure, the only other person I’d discussed it with had been the Duffer, and he’d agree to turn up to the opening of an envelope (whether he’d actually turn up was another thing altogether). It wasn’t that the Jeff was double-booked – it didn’t look like Spam Filter was going to get back into action any time soon without their lead songstress – and he understood perfectly the reasons it made sense, but equally, he understood the reasons mostly involved dollar signs, and mostly for other people – he wasn’t getting songwriting royalties, after all, just his cut of the performance fee.

“Where’s the market for this?” he wanted to know. “If people wanted Gasket on the bill, why wouldn’t they have bloody well asked you in the first place?”

I hated it when he was right, and particularly when he was right and I knew it and was pretending not to.

“We weren’t available,” I pointed out. “Noone knew we were, anyway. The first time anyone had an inkling we’d be prepared to play together was mid-November. All the BDO deals were signed long before that.”

“Yeah, but all I’m seeing is Richie bloody Richardson getting a lot of free coverage for his new year cash-ins….”

“Don’t knock it, you’re just lucky it’s not out for Christmas, it’d be all you’re getting. Christ, you’re a cynical old bastard Jeffrey.”

“Hey, I wasn’t the one who turned a charity auction prizegiving into a plug for your greatest hits album…”

“So, you’re out then?” I asked him directly.

He frowned, wincing.

“It’s all about Marty really, isn’t it? I mean, it’s irrelevant until you get him. Ask me again after you’ve heard from him.”

I did, on Christmas night. Presumably he was checking his emails while the Cohen-Lewises were down the synagogue. He didn’t seem happy about it, or maybe he got socks and undies again:

Already heard about Richie’s plans from Phil and Maddy. Not interested. And not interested in whatever you’ve written if it only comes with strings attached, like me having to play two gigs a night at the BDO. That’s poor, Angus, I thought you were better than that.
Merry Xmas.

And happy Hanukkah to you, Scrooge.

I’d only had a few days to get used to the idea in the first place – from Richie’s proposition on Monday to Marty’s harpooning of same on Thursday night – so it wasn’t that big a deal to have let the BDO deal slip. No it wasn’t. Not at all. Hmmm. I emailed Richie, Danno and the Duffer to let them know it had been canned, my language possibly a bit ripe courtesy the effects of several Christmas Day beverages. Then I went for another beverage, and to see what genius Beck had wrought for Christmas dinner from the leftovers of Chrismas lunch.

“Shot down?” Jeff asked.

“In flames,” I nodded, quoting the great Bon Scott. “Ain’t it a shame, to be shot down in flames.”

“Pity,” he conceded. “I could have been swayed, had he been in…”

“Oh, bollocks,” Beck declared, herself a few all-too-rare beverages to the good. “You would have been all over it like a bad suit, don’t pretend you’d have had any resonance.”

“Reticence,” I corrected.

“Him too,” she said. “And while you’re at it, get stuffed.”

It wasn’t that big a night – the olds had already retired for the evening, we’d had a decent bash at the food and the grog across the day, running around after the kids had knackered Jeff and myself, and I had a long drive in holiday shitfight traffic (followed by more food and grog at the traditional Mount Road Boxing Day festivities – originally borne out of the mad post-Xmas BBQs the Martins used to run at theirs, now morphed into an event for friends, family and all their clients) ahead of me. I pulled stumps around ten, sifting through my bag in the spare room for a change of boxers and a clean shirt for after my shower, when I came the bundle of mail I’d hurriedly collected from my letterbox and tossed in my bag as I was literally reversing out the driveway on Wednesday morning. A bunch of reminder and last notice bills, something that said I could already be a WINNER!!!! (who was to say I wasn’t one anyway? Noone ever gets stuff from Readers’ Digest declaring the recipient may already be a LOSER!!!! but demographically it might be more accurate), and a small (say A4 sized?) padded bag, with my name on it – but no postage. I ripped it open along the seam using the mini Swiss army knife on my keyring (nearly confiscated at Brisbane airport on Monday).

Yup, I had one last present. Yay. No card, but a note.

Hey, rock star. I know we don’t do this sort of stuff, but I did anyway. See you when I’m making sense again.

The note was unsigned, but suffixed with a lipstick kiss – not so easy in the modern age of smear-proof lippy. The gift, once free of its wrapping, was a T-shirt. A white T-shirt with a retro, vintage-faded red-and-black logo across the front, which read ‘Holley Equipped’.

She knew.

No idea how – maybe the reportage about the charity auction, where presumably the explanation of how the bumper sticker from my brother’s old Torana ended up on my guitar as a permanent tribute to the Good Bastard that he was. But she knew.

Right in that moment, I missed her like sleep. (And there weren’t nothing romantic about the hours I kept). Which was batshit insane, because I didn’t know who the hell she was or what the hell I was supposed to be missing. I just felt a momentary twinge, like she might be the only one who actually understood about stuff. The stuff that kept me up at night.

It passed, of course, with the realisation that if the only person who understands you is a heavily medicated depressive who hides from reality by inventing her own, you’re a bit fucked sunshine.

I missed her in other, less ethereal, more earthy ways. Put simply, I wanted to fuck her. Badly. Or, at least, my subconscious did. It didn’t seem to be as concerned by how psychologically unstable, unpredictable or just plain unwell she was. In fact, it seemed to like the idea, judging by the number of occasions she seemed to be making cameo appearances in my dreams. Which seemed to be nightly, or near offer.

4:14am, Sunday morning, December 28. An hour before dawn, and I can’t sleep. I want to – I’m still getting over the excesses of Christmas and Boxing Day, not to mention crashing on the lumpy-arse couch at the Martins’ last night – but it’s not happening. It’d been stinking hot all week here, not that I’ve been here to suffer through, and the only respite is the gentle sea breeze drifting teasingly in through the screen door from the balcony. Which I was sure I’d shut before coming to bed, seeing as though the house was full of stuff that wasn’t mine and security was suddenly an issue.

Don Richardson’s response to me selling three-quarters of my household belongings in the two weeks before his first open home had been two-fold: one, mild annoyance, and two, calling his regular contact at a Gold Coast firm specializing in furnishings for high-end rental apartments. They were often contracted by Don (and other ‘premium market’ real estate agencies) for occasions such as this – outfitting houses with expensive furniture, homewares, electrical goods etc on short-term leases in order to make the property more appealing on ‘open home’ days, of which we had planned three across the Christmas-New Year period (up to the second week in January) to take advantage of the holiday ‘traffic’ through the area. It cost big bucks, but the potential returns were almost always multiple times the outlay. Don’s attention to detail went well beyond getting in a breadmaker and a coffee machine to waft appealing scents through the place as the punters traipsed around – though of course he was planning to do that as well.

As such, following this afternoon’s arrival of a truck full of smartly-dressed removalist types, I had a house full of expensive stuff that didn’t belong to me, as well as a garage full of the remnants of what did, and I was trying to work out as promptly as my mostly-asleep mind could figure, how there was a draught coming in what I was sure had been a closed, locked sliding door when I’d retired to bed some five hours before.

Still, the breeze was nice.

And so was what appeared at the end of my bed. A girl, or rather the silhouette of a girl, the sort of silhouette that only exists in dreams, her curves lit tantalisingly by shadows and the dappled luminescence from distant streetlights. It was too dark to judge the colour of her hair, but I knew she was blonde. I couldn’t tell for sure what she was wearing, but a black lace-edged bra and matching semi-see-through boyleg panties would have been a reasonable guess. And I couldn’t discern what that scent was which drifted in on the light breeze from the door, teasing and enticing at the same time. But, unless someone had bought her something different for Christmas – and I still felt bad about not having bought her anything – it was probably Stella.

I reached for the bedside light but a hand stopped me. Now she was closer, the luminescence of the alarm clock illuminated her with an other-worldly glow. Her hair seemed darker, maybe even shorter – probably just the light, or lack of it - but those intense, wide eyes of hers hadn’t changed. Her pupils were large and dark. She squeezed my hand gently as it lay across the bedside table, and rose a finger from her other hand to her lips.

“Shhhh,” she coaxed.

My hand decided it’d much rather be tracing my fingers down the outside of her thighs, and hers decided they wanted to let me. I wanted her like oxygen. The girl leant over me and kissed me searchingly, her right hand tugging away the sheet over me and smoothing her palm over my chest, gently raking her fingernails downwards to my boxers. If I’d been worried about seeming forward by the way my fingers were beginning to slide under the mesh fabric of her panties, she didn’t seem similarly concerned. In moments, she’d negotiated my boxers out of the equation, no mean single-handed feat as I was now harder than integral calculus and very aware of the urgency in her eyes. Her tongue flickered in my mouth as her delicate fingers squeezed my cock and my hands grasped for her underwear. She assisted, reaching behind herself to help ease her knickers over her gorgeous thighs, down to her ankles, dextrously kicking one ex-gymnast leg out of her panties and straddling me, with nothing between our newly-naked bodies but anticipation.

She wasn’t interested in waiting any longer, she said. She’d been waiting for weeks since our last time – it wasn’t much more than ‘week’, but technically it was weeks – and she’d had enough dirty dreams about me to fill a Cosmo sealed section. She gripped me firmly with one hand, grasping the bedframe with the other as she lowered herself towards me, guiding me into her, pretty clearly needing no further invitation or excitation. She moaned as she rubbed herself against me, not to tease, just to smear enough of her copious wetness over me to enable penetration, and as much of it as quickly as possible. She was only a little girl, she reminded me, and I was a big boy, bigger than she’d ever been accustomed to. Whether it was true or not, I didn’t really care, but I appreciated the sentiment. She knew she was putting on a show, and had a history of being a performer – ballet, drama, social actress – but even so she didn’t need to fake the way her breath quivered, the way she shut her eyes and bit down on her bottom lip as she took me deeper and deeper, each slithering moment of progress met with a moan, equal but opposite in intensity, as though the air was being crushed from her lungs. Tonight – this morning? – she was so intense, so urgent, that I was worried about hurting her, but again, she wasn’t worried about that. She let out a little cry as it finally went all the way in, but it was a cry of pleasure more than pain, and if anything, of relief.

“So long,” she murmured. I took that to mean ‘it’d been’ so long rather than she was planning to leave.

“Ten days, Beth,” I reminded her with a smile. I could afford to, I was getting what I wanted.

“I know, I’m bad,” she admitted. “I break into your house, interfere with you sexually… I need correction. Discipline.” She pressed her hands against mine, on her thighs as they rose and fell on the rhythm of our fucking. On a whim I spanked her, once, hard, on her bare backside. Judging by the way she squirmed and bared her teeth at me I’d guessed correctly as to the sort of ‘discipline’ she was after.

“It’s your fault,” she contended. “You were spanking me in my dream.” It wasn’t the first time I’d been blamed for something I’d done to a girl in a dream and it probably wouldn’t be the last. “You didn’t like the way I was talking back to you in class, so you pulled me out of my chair, pulled my panties down and spanked me in front of all the other girls… And then they all gathered around and watched while you had your way with me with your big strong hands and your big strong cock… while they cheered you on and and yelled and called me names while you spanked me more as you fucked me, and fucked me… aaahhoww, that’s it baby,” she murmured. “Harder…”

6:14am, Sunday morning, December 28. An hour after dawn. Too late for the early, too early for a decent lie-in. I lay among the sweat-scented sheets, still dazed, still craving that gorgeous little girl with the magnificently twisted sense of purpose. Half-asleep and lost in dreamland, I could have sworn I could have still tasted her lips on my mouth, smelled her body in the sheets. As the early-morning sun pierced through my languor like those intense feline eyes of hers, I realised there was a very good reason why I almost felt like it hadn’t been a dream, it was too good to be a fantasy. Because, judging by the lacy black bra still lying wantonly across the floor where it had been flung by its brazen owner, it hadn’t been.

The fact I was still glued to the sheets in intimate areas was also a bit of a giveaway.