Graham, for the first time in the last couple of days, had things perfectly in hand. He still had enough money to tide him over until he got paid the next day, and decided to have a quiet night in not doing a lot. First, of course, he needed somewhere to stay. He still had a respectable amount of money, and this time round, he was going into the city with some actual information. The train stopped at Amsterdam Centraal Station, and immediately made a phone call to a small hotel he had had suggested to him while still in Rotterdam, and found a taxi to take him there. The taxi driver was not mad, and with what little English, he could speak, was very interesting to talk to. He arrived at the hotel, paid the taxi driver, failed to do anything embaressing whatsoever between checking into his room and entering it, and was overall quite satisfied by the experience. The only problem seemed to be that he was still rather lonely, and his clothes stunk to high heaven. The loneliness was something he needed time to think about, and the clothes were something he could sort out now he was in a major shopping city. He wandered through Amsterdam, bought some clean, yet affordable clothes, and contemplated where he thought he was going, both with his life and on his journey.
He decided that, depending on how much he got for transporting the one little package, he could just stay in Amsterdam a while, get his bearings. It wasn’t a bad idea, every Dutch person he had encountered so far that day alone had been friendly, helpful, and had spoken enough English to help him get by. It was certainly tempting enough to keep him thinking about it for most of the evening. He decided, on returning to the hotel, to have dinner in its restaurant, enjoyed a braised steak, and a glass of red wine. Red wine wasn’t a favourite of his, but it went with the steak, and he found himself enjoying it. He was enjoying himself quite a bit, in fact, so he continued into the hotel bar, to have another glass. And he was really quite enjoying himself. He even decided to sample the local lady folk. However, this would have meant leaving the hotel, and gambling with the rather precarious Dutch nightlife, so he decided to stick with the contents of the hotel bar. He decided to start with the attractive young lady just down the bar to him. Beating down the sensation of “what the hell are you doing going up to some girl you don’t know and talking to her” that I have never in my life been able to break past, he sloped up to her, and surreptitiously claimed the seat next to her. He smiled, asked her how her evening was, which was a wonderful evening thank you for asking, asked what brought her to Amsterdam, discovered that she had come with her husband to an art exhibition somewhere in the city, panicked, talked for a bit longer, then made his excuses and retreated to where he started. Not a brilliant set of manoeuvres, even considering his skills were ten years out of date. Shrugging his shoulders, he moved to a different part of the bar, and observed for a bit longer. He then sidled up to an equally attractive young lady, and seemed to start on a much better note. However, even by his atrophied standards, there was something seemingly amiss about her. It was only when he discovered she’d not long broken up with her boyfriend that he rethought the entire situation. While semi-drunken rebound sex was an interesting game to play, he felt he had had enough crazy in the last few days, and adding to it with rejection issues and sadness wasn’t a good idea. Besides, he thought as he made his excuses and escaped again, it did put him in mind of Miranda. It wasn’t very kind, what he had done to her, and if he’d had a kinder option that would have worked, he would have gone with it. He wondered how much she was suffering at that moment.
* * *
Not much, as it turned out. She had gone up to the train station, been mildly thwarted by having a work experience student to deal with, and having shouted her way to someone who knew what they were doing, demanded her partners bag back. They acted very quickly, found the bag, and threw the work experience youth back out front. Thankfully for them, she had left, to go onto the police station, where she shouted her way to the chief constable for the station. Starting with attempting to lodge a complaint about how she’d been mistreated and shunned the other day, she proceeded into a missing persons claim. The chief constable had stared down drug busts, knifings, and the occasional riot at a protest before, so was not particularly intimidated. However, such a formidable sight as this angry, almost Amazonian woman did put him on edge.
“What evidence do you have that he’s gone missing, madam?” he questioned.
“What, apart from the fact that he was supposed to be back from his weekend away with work yesterday, he hasn’t contacted me, I haven’t been able to get hold of him, no hotel in London knows where he is, oh, and his boss didn’t even organise a weekend away? Not a bloody lot, I don’t think.”
“Now, you don’t have any clues where he was going?”
“None, apart from something that I did earlier. He told me he was going to London, then he got on the train to Milton Keynes.”
“What something?”
“The train station called and said he’d left a bag of stuff behind, I’d just gone and got it before coming to see you.”
“May I see it, madam?”
“Alright, I haven’t looked at it myself though.”
So they started to trawl through his bag. Changes of clothes were a common theme. As were maps of Europe, train timetables, guidebooks, a few language dictionaries that Miranda was surprised she hadn’t noticed were missing.
“It seems he’s planning a tour of Europe, madam”, said the chief constable.
“Well, why didn’t he tell me? I can guess what’s going on just at a glance!”
“What’s that, then?”
“He’s running away with some tart he’s seeing!”
“And what makes you suggest that then, madam?”
“The fact he’s run away and seems to be dead set on going round Europe without telling me!”
“And you’re sure there’s no other reason?”
“What do you bloody well think it could be then?”
“Well, how are things at home, by any chance?”
Miranda didn’t break step in switching who she was pissed off with.
“It’s none of your bloody business how things are like at home!”
“On the contrary, madam, it might prove very enlightening. But I’ll tell you what, would you like to make a statement now, answer a few questions, and we’ll get to work tracking him down?”
“Thank you, I shall.”
Having taken a statement, she made her way home, to begin starting her own investigation. The police would take too long to respond, and she wanted him back as soon as was possible. She knew she didn’t know anything about this conference, and assumed Graham was working on the same knowledge, so wouldn’t be trying to lay a false trail. This would mean he wasn’t heading to London at all, or else he’d have gotten on the London train in the first place. This meant he wasn’t taking any transport from London itself, and likely wasn’t taking the conventional seaward route out of England through Dover. And if he got off at Milton Keynes, he was either taking a coach somewhere, or going on to Luton airport. Further than that, she would need to investigate from home. Investigations did start at home, although they weren’t hers, as she found a number of voice mail messages from the Secret Service agents who were currently stationed in Hull. She picked up the phone, and was put through to Agent Stevenson.
“Is that Ms Miranda Burricombe, by any chance?”
“No, its Ms Miranda Sefton, but you’re nearly right. Is this about my fiancé?”
“Yes, we need to know where he is.”
“Funny that, so do I.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
“Somewhere in Europe, can you do me one better?”
“If only. We do know where he’s going to be tomorrow afternoon though.”
“Then we need to start talking.”
“You’re quite right, Ms Sefton. How soon can you be in Hull?”
“I need to pack a bag, you need to get me somewhere to stay, I can be there in under three hours.”
She then hung up the phone, threw a few pre-packed essentials into a bag (she had never associated with anyone involved with the Boy Scouts, but agreed with their motto of Be Prepared), threw the bag into the car, and went tearing off in the direction of the M1.
Graham didn’t go tearing off in any direction that evening. He had tried with a few more ladies, but he was having any more luck than he had started off with. There were a couple more women who were taken, one of those preferring those of a more female persuasion (or as normal people might call them, lesbians), and he had been told where to get off at more than a few times.
The problem wasn’t just that Graham’s game was bad, it was that it basically didn’t exist. When he was younger, he prescribed the principle that if something was meant to happen, it would happen, and there wasn’t a lot he could do about it either way. This wasn’t a terribly good attitude to take, considering that focus groups have shown that women prefer their men to be a bit more assertive. I assume they’ve done focus groups on that sort of thing, they do focus groups for just about everything else these days. But basically, he may have been a nice enough guy, but he just didn’t try as hard as he should have done. So on the average night out, he would have had a few drinks, observed a few ladies, drunk a few more, then perhaps plucked up the courage to actually talk to one of them. But he never had the balls to take it any further than that, and thus created your everyday self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time he had realised this was a ridiculous way to attract women (or not, as the case actually was), his system had netted him Miranda, and he therefore couldn’t try out the whole “actually talking and enjoying it” system for fear of an attack of a highly jealous nature. So now he had the freedom to experiment, he didn’t have any idea what he was really supposed to do, and assumed he’d still been doing it wrong in the first place. So, despite the wisdom of several nights in a row, he fell back on the backup plan – empty the contents of the bar into his gullet.
I’m not quite sure whether you ought to be surprised by this, but this was actually quite a clever way of going forward. While beer droop might have banjaxed his plans for a finishing move, the drink made him relax a bit, and muted his inhibitions a bit too. This is regarded as a good start, but he overplayed it when he acquired his second bottle of rosé, a splendid wine in this authors opinion, finished it off, completely ignored his nerves and his concerns about taste and decency. Although wine did seem to make him a fairly quiet drunk, it did ensure he ended up cozying up to the second biggest woman in the hotel bar that evening.
The next morning appeared before the end of the night reappeared. Graham once again found himself hungover, with a blaring headache, and a sense he’d done something incredibly stupid the night before. He also didn’t quite know where he was, even though he’d gone to quite some effort to memorise his room the night before. This was because he wasn’t in it.
Something snorted in its sleep next to him, and Graham jumped at the noise. He would have jumped out of bed, but he couldn’t, because something was lying on his arm. He also noticed that he couldn’t feel his arm, and that seemed to go beyond simple “lying on your arm, it having a lack of blood, and needing three minutes of thrashing it around to get it back to life” numbness. If he was me, he would have vaguely recalled a story about the frontman of the band Megadeath, Dave Mustardpot, or whatever his name is, causing fairly serious damage to his arm by falling asleep on it funny. Months of tours had to be cancelled, and assumably Mr Mustardpot felt quite silly as well. Of course, since Graham didn’t care much for Megadeath, or even know who Dave Mustardpot was (and I know his name isn’t really Dave Mustardpot, but it is Dave MusSomething, and to be quite frank, I don’t give a tuppenny fuck), but he might have been able to draw similar conclusions as to how his arm was feeling. And as he drew conclusions, he also drew memories to explain why he was in an unfamiliar room, with enough similarities to make a proponent of the Uncanny Valley theory start drawing up fresh notes, with his arm stuck under something huge that was in bed with him.
He had been drinking, he could draw that conclusion just from the state of his head. There had been ladies involved. A lesbian, perhaps. Had he got his arm stuck under a lesbian? He thought about this properly for a moment, then realised that given his skills and experience, getting his hand caught under a lesbian like this would involve getting his hand into a lesbian at some prior point, and that was a bit less likely than him getting his hand in Jesus. So what was the obvious thing he had missed? He remembered talking to a large number of beautiful girls, without much luck, and he remembered talking to a large girl… oh gods. He remembered a mate of his at university, who had sworn by the principle of “bedding fat birds, because they’re easy, gagging for it, and cum dead good too.” And he believed he had followed this friends modus operandi to a tee – get roaringly drunk, and find the fattest bird he could find. Brilliant. What he hadn’t noticed was that relative to the previous few nights, his head wasn’t as bad as it should have been, but this was because at first he’d just noticed it was bad, and later he’d developed more important things to worry about, like a stupid night the night before, and the fact that his arm was likely to start dying any minute now. He tugged on it as hard as he could, but tugging too hard jarred his head and stomach, and didn’t do much, and tugging gently took the direct route and did absolutely nothing. He lay there, panicked a bit, and wondered what the hell he was going to do. As if to taunt the principle he had rejected some time ago, the waiting seemed to solve the problem for him. The large creature next to him mumbled something, yawned, and rolled over.