OK, I suffered a massive creativity failure with Nanowrimo. Having a job lasting nearly the entire month buttfucked any chance I could have done this, and it stalled at this point, 21,301 words or so in. Here’s the last bit I wrote. I’m going to go stroke my ego better.

Having rolled off of his arm, the woman groaned. Evidently, she had had a fair few herself. This wasn’t something he thought too hard about, since he was shaking his am into some semblance of life. The thrashing motion seemed to alert her to the presense of something else in her bed.
“Eurr… who’re you?” she groaned.
“I was… oww… hoping to ask you… eeeeh… the same question.”
“Ahh… do you remember what happened last night?”
“Not in particular… ooh, my arm… I know we were talking, and somehow we ended up here, and I’m hoping this is your room.”
“Yeah, thankfully. Did we…?”
Graham knw that he didn’t have a clue, besides the circumstancial evidence, but he didn’t quite know how to say this without accidently offending his currant hostess.
“I don’t know. It seems… oooeies… it seems quite likely.”
“What’s wrong with your arm?”
He froze at this question. This was most definatly one of those questions you dodged around like you were roller skating through a minefield, with an erupting volcano behind you: get out quickly, but do it carefully.
“I think I slept on it funny. It’ll be fine in a minute.” Which was near enough the truth, apart from the bit about it being alright.
“But its gone a funny colour, maybe you should take it to a doctor…”
“It’ll sort itself out, don’t you worry.”
Which wasn’t necessarily untrue, it had started to throb a bit less painfully, although it was still going to be some time before he could actually bend his fingers. She dragged herself up somewhat, and Graham actually managed to see who he was sharing a bed with.

She seemed to be one of those people who looked as if they would be stunningly beautiful if they were at least half their weight. She was blonde, with hair that cascaded down her shoulders like a waterfall, and she had blue eyes that sparkled, even though her hangover was paining her as much as his was. She fumbled around on the nightstand next to her, and found a pair of stylish looking glasses, which she rested on her face, before turning her eyes on him.
“Say, you’re not bad looking, actually,” she said, smiling slightly.
“Well, you’re… erm… not too bad yourself”, he mumbled, and he was annoyed that she would have been stunningly beautiful if there wasn’t quite so much of her. This fumbled compliment seemed plenty enough for her, however, and she broke out in a broad smile that actually seemed to glow. It seemed Graham had followed his old friends advice to the letter, but not necessarily to the spirit.
“So what’s your name then?” she asked.
“I’m…”, and here he stumbled. Having never done the one night stand thing before, and not so sure he should have done this one, he didn’t know the etiquette of trying to fob them off and making a run for it.

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.

Graham did take the bus from wherever he was in Rotterdam to Rotterdam train station, and was also impressed with the efficient Dutch public transport. He also took the train from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, and was amazed that such a journey only took half an hour. He also had the time to feel a bit lonely. He had set out on Friday morning, and now it was Monday afternoon. In that time, he had done more outrageous things than he had in ten years – there were likely to be ramifications to his night of drinking he would never know, and as for the whole thing with being massively stoned… At any rate, these would have been awesome times to be had, if he had had anyone to share them with. His old friends from university, some of Miranda’s friends who she wasn’t suspicious he was going to cheat on her with (yes, even the guys), fuck it, even some of the brainless corporate drones from work would have been nice. And so far, he had only found literal mad people, drunken students, and contemptuous public service people. While he had quite successfully gotten away from Miranda… shit. He realised that it was umpteen days later, and he still hadn’t gotten rid of his SIM card. Thankfully, he had been spared by his battery going flat, so he flicked the little chip out of the back of his phone, and threw it in a nearby bin. Problem solved.
As he was thinking, he had gotten away from Miranda, but he had also gotten away from anyone he could have talked to as well. Any time he hadn’t spent inadvertently off of his face, he had been thinking about what stupid things he had done off of his face, and re-reading the two books he had packed in his bag, and after only a few days, this was depressing all by itself. He was a social animal, part of the reason he had run away was because Miranda had stopped him seeing people. On reflection, it wasn’t the best plan anyone had every come up with, but since he’d started it, he thought, he might as well carry it out to wherever it went. If only he had someone to keep him company.
* * *
In an unrelated series of events, Pies and Dave were back in Hull, sat in front of the telly. This was not a surprising turn of events in the least, Pies loved being sat in front of the telly with a large pork pie, and Dave liked watching telly with people. Unfortunately, Pies was even more of a stuck record than he normally was.
“Mate, you remember the other night, with that Graham bloke? That was a fucking mint night, that was! Man, I hope he comes back, that was the best fucking night ever!”
“I know, you keep reminding me,” sighed Dave.
“Because it was fucking AWESOME!” Pies shouted. Dave sighed again. They only had to kill half an hour of TV time, then there was a show about massive car crashes on an obscure freeview channel, and then they could go out, get plastered, and he’d eventually not notice what Pies was on about. But the only thing on was the news. And the main thing on the news seemed to be a fugitive fleeing the country with “unknown substances”, attempting to bring them to known terrorists on the continent. They showed a photofit picture.
“Its Graham!” shouted Pies.
“Bloody hell, so it is!” declared Dave.
“And the police are after him!”
“Looks like it, mate.”
“Does he know?”
“Does he know? How would I know that?”
“We need to… to go save him! Yeah! It’ll be a mission! We’ve got to, man!”
“We?”
“I’d go, but I don’t have a car.”
“And you think I can bunk off lectures to go running off after a criminal we just happened to get pissed with the other week?”
“Yeah!”
“Who I set up to be carrying illegal shit in the first place.”
“Yeah!”
“And you remember how they’re going to kick me out of uni if I miss any more lectures?”
“Yeah, but… but mate! Legendary!”
“What about the time we went drinking with that man with the dreadlocks…”
“He was legendary too!”
“And he stole Jerry’s bike? Was that legendary?”
Suddenly, Pies had an idea.
“Well, look at it this way, mate, you got your cousin to get him that job, so its on your conscience if you end up sending down some randomer.”
“He asked… no, you asked me to find him work! Don’t pull that round on me!”
“He thought you meant, like, carrying letters or shit, and he’s in some mad shit. And now the old bill are after him. Your call, mate.”
And with that, Pies got up from the sofa, which surprised Dave more than the half decent argument he’d put together.
Pies stomped despondently upstairs, with an incongruously big grin on his face. He’d be going to Holland, and it’d be a fucking mint time.
Which wasn’t what Miranda was having at all. She had called Graham’s manager back, to find out what the hell was going on.
“Hello, managers office…”
“Its Miranda, where is my husband?”
“Pardon me?”
“Graham didn’t come home last night, he said the training was for the weekend, I want answers.”
“You’ll have a bit of trouble getting them out of me, he didn’t say where he was going…”
“The hell he didn’t tell you! You told me it was a company organised training retreat!”
“What? I said no such thing!”
“Well, where is he?”
“I don’t know! He told me he had organised some external training, and was going to be away for several months! I thought you…”
“Several months?!?”
Miranda was horrified. He had run away! What the hell was going on here?
“Mrs Burricombe? Are you there?”
A brief pause, as Miranda digested this news, and came to a few conclusions.
“I’m not Mrs Burricome, I’m Ms Miranda Sefton, and I want you to tell me everything.”
“I have told you everyth…”
“Well, either you haven’t, or you’re lying out of your arse, and I will sue you for every penny you’ve got if I find you’re keeping my husband away from me, do you understand?”
The manager thoroughly understood, repeated everything he’d already said, and told her he’d let her know if he remembered anything else. Miranda could be incredibly scary when she was angry, and he didn’t want to be in the way when she was really pissed off.
Neither did the man who called her from the train station, who called her fifteen minutes after she’d finished shouting in the manager’s ear.
“Hello, is that Mr Graham Burricombe?”
“No, he’s run off somewhere, I’m his fiancé, what the hell do you want?”
“Well, I’m calling from the train station lost property, and we’re wondering what to do with the bag he said he’d pick up on Friday…”
“What bag?”
“Its an old bag, we haven’t looked at it, but he left it with us, arranged to collect it in Friday, and never did.”
Miranda had already been planning to head up to the police station, to complain very loudly about the man from the other day, and to file a missing person report. Perhaps this bag might provide some answers.”
“I’ll come and collect it myself, have it ready in fifteen minutes, or I will break your face in. Understand?”
“I’m afraid we can’t take threats of violence, madam…”
“Well, you won’t have to, as long as I take that bag.” With that, she slammed the phone down, grabbed her coat and car keys, and stormed out of the front door.
She would have been a lot happier if she had waited another five minutes, as the phone started to ring almost as soon as she’d set out the front door. It continued to ring until it went over to answer phone, and then a message was left.
* * *
“Went over to answer phone this time, so I’ve managed to leave a message”, said Agent Townsend.
“Thank god, we’ve got somewhere at last. Have we contacted the Dutch authorities, let them know what’s going on?”
“Yes we have, and they’ll have surveilance on the location Winterton confessed, Amsterdam airport, and train station in no time at all.”
“Do they know how urgent this is? We already missed this guy because we didn’t get surveilance on him quickly enough.”
“I’ll get back on them about it.”
“So you will. Now, do we know what sort of thing he’s actually smuggling yet?”
“Once again, you’re the man who knows more than I… Hallo? Krijg de hoofdcommissaris. Ja, weet ik deze tekst slecht vertaald is, nam ik het de website met de vissen door. Krijgt lacht u de hoofdcommissaris, of omdat ik een module van mijn graad op een Nederlandse taalcursus verspilde ik niet de helft van kan herinneren? Ga met het verder!”
Leaving Agent Townsend to break the fourth wall in Dutch, Agent Stevenson went through to the ops room. The ops room, in this case, was the office in Hull Police Station he had commandeered to run the operation. And until I had that thought, I too was imagining a darkened room, walls lined with monitors, people tapping away at keyboards and talking into headset mikes. No, there were two computers, and while people were tapping away, it was more like one person and whichever agent was there at the time. But there was one TV on, showing the news report of the case he was working on at that very moment.
“Who the fuck leaked that to the press?” he fumed. This was supposed to be a maximum security, high clearance case, and it was on the BBC afternoon news? He was not impressed whatsoever, and threw a polystyrene cup of water at the screen. While a coffee cup might have been nice and dramatic and would have shattered the screen, the cup of water simply sprayed water everywhere and bounced off. Agent Stevenson swore again. This case was getting out of hand already.

In another way, Graham was also running out of time. Not at all reassured by her talks with his manager, Miranda moved onto more direct enquiries. She logged onto her computer, searched Google for the Arlington Row Hotel, and found three different hotels. Two of them denied that there was any sort of training party coming down to stay, but the last one apparently had a business group down for the weekend. But they were an Arabian oil firm, which defiantly didn’t include Graham’s company.

Rather worried, she called anything with any hotel even approximating the name Arlington Row, and found no luck with anyone she sought. She was beginning to think someone was seriously wrong, but she couldn’t quite tell what. She decided to call the police. Seeing as it was Sunday, it seemed the only man there was a near-retirement gentleman, who didn’t quite grasp how important this all was to her, and suggested she come in to see them tomorrow. She was getting more and more worried, and she was less than impressed at how she had just been fobbed off.

* * *

Graham would have been less than impressed with the accommodation he had been fobbed off with, if he hadn’t been in an interesting mental place as it was. As it was, he was simply happy to have a bed that appeared comfy, a locked door to keep the ducks away, and an interesting selection of thoughts to keep him occupied until he fell asleep, which he did, very quickly.

* * *

I appear to have written myself into a corner here, since all the characters are taking time out from doing things to sleep, worry, and analyse photofit pictures of each other. Nonetheless, we need something to fill up a section of writing until someone does something, so we’ll talk about a duck on a pond in Amsterdam.

It was a rather boring life for a duck on a pond in Amsterdam. It was a cold time of year, with autumn coming to a close, and very few people coming out to throw out bread. There was always a few insects, or some plants, to nibble on, but these were fewer in number at that time of year, and the leaves coming down from the trees were clogging the pond up somewhat.

He reached round and preened his feathers. The mating season was still a long time away, and he was supposed to be foraging for some food. He dunked his head underwater, and was rewarded with a mouthful of splendid pondweed.

Suddenly, he had a flash of realisation. Ducks were a mighty breed, capable of dominating the entire world if they put their minds together and worked as a cohesive whole. It was simply a matter of instilling a revolutionary consciousness in his fellow duck comrades. He swam over to where the other ducks were gathered.
“Quack quack! Quack! Quack quack, quack!” he loudly declared.
However, since ducks have no formal language system, this meant absolutely nothing to the other ducks.
“Quack?” asked another duck, trying to discern his meaning. However, since that too was a simple quack, it made an equal lack of sense to his revolutionary brother.
“Quack, quack-quack, quack! Quack-quack!” declared the first duck. He was getting annoyed at his brothers’ lack of insight. Surely they could see that instilling them with a revolutionary mindset would set them up for a brutal yet ultimately victorious take-over of the hated human society. What he had not realised was that ducks were simple birds of the water, not given to violent insurrection. However, it worked out quite nicely for me, since now I can tell you that Graham was having a vivid yet bizarre dream about ducks, and we can cut back to the police station, having comfortably hit 15,000 words.

* * *

“So this is the guy they’re using then”, said the first special agent.
And it was indeed Graham, though of course, they didn’t yet know he was called Graham, this resulting in this long and probably unnecessary explanation.
“He doesn’t seem to fit the normal profile for this sort of work.”
“Maybe they’re trying something different. Throw us by using new tactics.”
“Well, it isn’t working, for a start, we know what he looks like. Circulate this image to Customs in every port along the North Sea coast, and send one down to Humberside airport. We’ve probably just missed him, but perhaps someone in passport control might recognise him.
And recognise someone he did. The man on passport duty in Rotterdam got back to them.
“He seemed a bit… suspicious,” he told the special agents by phone. “I just thought he was hung over, but you tell us he is smuggling contraband… I should have stopped him.”
“You weren’t to know, if you can tell us his details, we can move onto arresting him.”
“Hold on, let me check the passenger records for that trip…” which preceded a flurry of keyboard tappings. “Aha! I remember his name now; he is a Mr Graham Burricombe, passport number…”
Finally having his details, Graham’s details were pulled straight out of the police records, his credit was run, and in no time at all they had a more comprehensive record of information on Graham than Graham had. Comprehendible, however, was an entirely different matter.
“He booked the ferry ticket before making contact with Winterton?” asked an incredulous Second Special Agent.
“This makes things even more complicated,” postulated First Special Agent (see, making up actual names for characters is a ridiculous idea. First and Second Special Agents are much better names than, for example, Agent Townsend and Agent Stevenson. Oh bugger, I’ve gone and named them now. And there goes the fourth wall sailing out the window again.)
(Hang on, where was I?)
“This makes things even more complicated,” postulated Agent Townsend, not realising he’d actually acquired a name. “Normally its either booked a while before, or it would have been booked on the day and paid in cash. He booked this only the other weekend.
“Its not fitting the normal pattern. Still, we’ve got to work with whatever we’ve got. OK, someone find his old lady, his boss, anyone who can give us the heads up on this guy, work out his normal modus operandi, then see what’s changed in the last week.”
* * *
Quite a lot had changed in Graham’s world. He woke up, and felt like his head was stuffed with cotton wool. Hangovers, he could understand and work with, but this was something else. His next thought was something else as well, as he had no idea where he was. It seemed like a hotel room, and a relatively nice one at that. Was he still in Rotterdam? Had he dropped off the package early? What the hell was going on?
He took a moment, and a deep breath to go with the moment. Five minutes to look around before he started properly freaking out. He found a notepad and pen with the name of the hotel, with a name that had something to do with looking at ducks.
Ducks… why did ducks seem so familiar?
At any rate, the hotel seemed to be somewhere in Rotterdam, which was a good start. He showered, dressed, and wandered downstairs to where he hoped he would find breakfast. He found a fair few of the staff giving him funny looks. Not necessarily nasty ones, more like the sort of look you would give a man who had showered up covered in cheese and singing Disney songs. He went up to the front desk.
“Are you feeling all right his morning, sir?” asked the girl on the front desk.
“What happened yesterday?”
“Ah, sir was was… in a very strange way. I think he had been smoking the marijuana…”
Oh shit. He hadn’t even touched a joint since he was at university, and he hadn’t gotten very far before being gone for the night. By the feel of it, it hadn’t been a little he had smoked.
“I’m so sorry, did I do anything particularly stupid?”
“No, no, at worst you were a bit rude, but as long as you don’t plan to do it again…”
“Oh gods no. Did I actually pay for my room?”
“Yes you did, although depending on when you need to go, you may have overpaid somewhat.”
“Well, I’m going as soon as I’ve had breakfast…”
Difficulties sorted, Graham recieved a small refund, made smaller, because despite what the staff
were telling him, he had the idea that he had done something horrendously embaressing. He then enjoyed a light continental breakfast, and departed the hotel.
Ignoring the worryingly familiar statue of a duck outside, Graham attempted to get his bearings. He wasn’t quite sure where he was, but after about fifteen minutes of searching, he managed to find a tourist information station, where he acquired a fresh set of maps of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and the Netherlands in general. He was advised to also buy a bus ticket, which he did, ending up very perplexed by the bookmark-like strip of card he was given. Taking an English translation of the bus timetable, he went outside, and went in search of a bus stop heading to the train station.
Holland is very small. Most counties in England, if not being bigger at it, can at least give it a massive inferiority complex, and the average American state would eat it up for breakfast. There are also enough stereotypes about the Dutch being stoned all the time, an image I the author have done nothing to try and disprove. But they do public transport right, which is sixteen million billion times better than the rubbish we have here.
A bus ticket in Holland, shaped like a bookmark, as I have mentioned, is valid just about anywhere in the country. There’s some business about zones, but when it was being explained to me when I went to Holland a while ago, I was already stoned to my eyeballs, so I missed what parameters a zone came under. But one bus ticket could take you across ten zonesworth of Holland, in any part of the country, on any day you liked after buying it. This is infinatly more useful than a British ticket, which only works on one line, needs buying afresh every bloody day, and costs an arm and a leg.
Buses also actually show up on time. And indeed, show up at all. You’d think these would be things that normal buses would do, but you would apparently be wrong. Wrong. And trains! It takes half an hour to take the train from one end of the country to the other! A marvellous combination of miniscule geography, and trains that actually move. I remember them being double decker trains too, just for good measure. Basically, English public transport is pants, Dutch public transport is brilliant, and I’ve managed to pad out my story a bit more.

Graham wouldn’t have believed what had happened either, nor would he have believed what hadn’t happened. In fact, he wouldn’t even know what had happened, because it had turned out the Bob Marley was a coffeeshop.

He remembered a trip to the zoo he had made when was in school. It hadn’t been a huge zoo, but they had had quite a few monkeys. Ranging from chimpanzees, to some ring-tailed lemurs, to itty bitty things called pygmy marmosets. He started giggling at the thought. Tiny monkeys! Monkey monkey monkey! He started giggling a bit more. Monkeys were funny! Why didn’t he have a monkey? They were funny, and everyone would enjoy the sight of a tiny monkey sitting on his head. Even Miranda! If he had a tiny monkey, and trained it to sit on his head…
“Excuse me, sir?”
The train of thought about monkeys stopped, and utterly vanished. Someone was talking to him! This was important! Something important was going on! What was happening?”
“Sir?”
“Erm… yes?”
“Your cheese toasty is ready.”
A cheese toasty! He was hungry! A cheese toasty was a delicious idea! At that point, there was nothing he wanted more in the world than a cheese toasty in front of him, and him eating it!
“Do… do I eat it here?”
“If you want to, sir. How is your skunk?”
A skunk! He didn’t have a skunk! What the hell did he… ooh yeah, the weed, silly me!
“Its splendid, my friend.”
“You got enough for now?”
“Plenty.”
And he did have plenty. He’d only smoked pot a handful of times at university, and it hadn’t been as much fun as this stuff. It made his brain happy. His brain was sitting on a beanbag made of a Jamaican flag, feeling so happy it was unreal. He couldn’t quite remember why he’d ended up in here in the first place. Something to do with directions. But now he was here, it was all about smoking up a fat…
“Sir, your cheese toasty?”
Cheese toasty! Cheese toasty delicious!
And so it was. If he had been back in England, it wouldn’t have done much to excite him, but in Holland, stoned royally off of his face, he couldn’t have been happier if he’d been served the finest filleted steak, served off of a virgin’s backside. The cheese toasty didn’t stand a chance. It simply vanished, and was quickly forgotten.

* * *

Graham had not been quickly forgotten by the man in the head shop, however. This was not to his advantage, as the two senior policemen sitting across the table from him were very interested in what he had to say.
“I’ve told you all time and time again, I don’t sell drugs, I don’t advocate drug taking, I just sell these things, and what people choose to do with them is up to them. Not my business.”
“This is not the issue, Mr Winterton,” exclaimed one of the policemen, “although perhaps another time we might want to discuss why selling smoking paraphernalia inherently condones smoking. What we’re interested in hearing about is a certain package you received two days ago.
“A package? You want to know about packages, talk to the Royal Mail. I understand they have an international business based around delivering them.”
“But it wasn’t the Royal Mail who delivered this package to you, was it sir?”
“I’ve told you, I don’t know anything about any package! What’re you doing interrogatin’ me about something I don’t know, when there’s smackheads and rapists wandering round Hull as we speak?”
The two police officers shared a quick look, and the second policeman took up the interrogation.
“Mr Winterton, we have photographic evidence of a known felon visiting your place of work this Friday, and delivering a package matching a description of the one we are searching for. He claimed he only knew it as a bag of fish, and he had no idea what was in it. Much the same as you claim.”
“This individual,” continued the first policeman, “was tried last thing last night, and I understand has been sent down to HM Prison Hull for, how long is it?”
“About seven years, if I’m not mistaken.”
“That sounds about right. And he genuinely had no idea about this package. If we find out you are withholding information about it…”
The policemen let this thought trail off into thin air, allowing Winterton to stew for a minute.
“Anything you’d like to tell us, sir?”
“Well, I did have a package that fits the description you gave me.”
“Did, sir? Did have a package?”
“However, a man came yesterday to take it…”

* * *

That same man had taken a lot of something else as well. He no longer knew how he had gotten wherever he was, where he was going, but he did know how to rip a fat bowl of bud, and he had decided to go through his wallet. So far, the results were not particularly interesting. A debit card and credit card, each with colours on them. Apparently, there was money on them, although he couldn’t see it. A green driving license with the letter L on it. He couldn’t drive a car, therefore he didn’t know what he was doing with a drivers license. A red and blue card with a National Insurance number on it. Did that mean he was paying to insure the nation? And which nation was he insuring? Would he have to pay if it got lost or stolen?

A Tesco Clubcard emerged next, but was not very interesting. A very old student card, from the University of Manchester, and an ID card from work. He studied each of these in turn, as if he’d never seen them before. And they were all very interesting, except for the fact that they weren’t.

What we all need, he thought, is a piece of card, saying “I AM STONED”. This would tell everyone in the world how stoned we were, and how awesome being stoned is. It could also make rolling paper appear out of thin air, and could be torn up to make roaches out of! And what about having a car made of chocolate?

Chocolate. He was hungrier than he’d ever thought he could be, and somehow, he’d started thinking of chocolate. It was the Dutch that made chocolate, wasn’t it? Or was it cars they made? No, it was the Ukrainians who made cars… Ukrainians sounded like aliens. Was there an entire race of people who were aliens, living in… wherever Ukrainians lived. Ukrainia?

And so on. Having never smoked a large amount of weed before, Graham had taken the approach of a gigantically fat man learning to swim by jumping into a lake. Doing all this while exhausted and hung over was like the fat man wearing lead boots and carrying a piano. Eventually, the tiredness, THC and general despondence got to him, and he fell asleep. This was not something the people running the coffeeshop approved of, so he was, fairly politely, asked to leave.

“Where am I?”
“You are in a coffeeshop, and we need you to leave.”
“Why?”
“Because you are falling asleep.”
“I’m tired!”
“We know, but you cannot sleep here.”
“Well, where can I go to sleep?”
“Where are you staying in Rotterdam?”
He had to think about this one, and only responded when asked again.
“I don’t know!”
“Do you have anywhere to stay?”
“I don’t think so.”
“There is a hotel down the road, go left, and walk until you see a big duck. Go in, and they’ll have a room. Now please leave.”
He picked up his stuff, and somehow set off. This was even more difficult than he’d have imagined, even if he had the capacity of mind to imagine anything. His brain had a pulse. The entire road had a pulse. And wherever he looked, everything looked slightly like a duck. There were ducks in the windows, people looked like ducks, without looking any less like people, and the air even seemed to quack ever so slightly. Every duck seemed to be watching him, and he wanted nothing more than to hide from all the ducks. Except he couldn’t do that, until he’d found the biggest duck of all, and gone into a hotel next to it. He swayed, he felt like he was walking through treacle, and time seemed to stretch like a piece of chewing gum caught between two people on trampolines. Duck, duck, duck, duck, everywhere he looked, he could think of nothing but ducks. And yet, he could not stop looking, for eventually, he would find…

A large statue of a duck, in the middle of a crossroads. It was quite large anyway, but to Graham’s mind, it loomed as large as a mountain, only shaped like a duck. So somewhere about here, there was a hotel. He looked around, but being stoned made the language unreadable. He sat down, and looked around, slowly considering the problem that now he had sat down, it would be next to impossible to stand up again.

And at some distance away, he saw a sign that could have said “Hotel”, but might not have. It was enough for him, so with the sound of ducks echoing through his head, he staggered towards it. Closer inspection made it out to be the “Hotel Van De Eendmening”, which made no sense. But it said hotel, and hotels had rooms, so he staggered inside.

“Hallo, kan ik u helpen?”
“Whaaaaaaaaaa?”
“U sprekt Engels?”
“Uh?”
“Can I help you, sir?”
Which would make perfect sense, but the two lines of Dutch had done horrible things to Graham’s head. He hadn’t understood a word she had said, and therefore he simply couldn’t understand her, even when she switched over to English.
“Do you speak English?”
“Yes, can I help you?”
“I can’t understand you, but I need… a room!”
“Yes, how long for, sir?”
“No, a room! Where you sleep in!”
“I know, sir, but how long do you need a room for?”
“Can you find someone who speaks English?”
“I can speak English, sir.”
“Yes, English, can you find someone who’ll speak it.”
Giving up, the poor woman on the desk went to find the manager. He was a middle aged gentleman, used to the English, but inexplicably not understanding the mind of the stoned man.
“Can I help you sir?”
“Yes, I couldn’t understand your woman there just now.”
“She was speaking English, sir.”
“That’s no English I’ve ever heard. I need a room, my friend.”
“Certainly sir, how long for?”
“…I don’t know. How long can I have one for?”
“Hmm, we’re almost completely booked, sir, there’s only one single room left, and only for two nights.”
“I’ll take it, here’s some money, I’m going to bed.”
And with that, he slapped the remains of the hundred euros on the desk, and staggered off to where he thought the lifts were.

Very shortly afterwards, he staggered back.
“Sorry, I’ve no idea where I’m going.”
“Quite alright sir. (Adrianna, show this stoned idiot to his room).”
The girl who had tried to serve him winced.
“(Sir, do I have to?)”
“(Everyone else is at lunch.)”
She sighed. She always got stuck with the mad people.

* * *

This was an assumption shared by the two special agents in Hull’s main police station, after they had finished interviewing Mr Winterton.
“So some random guy turns up in his shop yesterday, takes the package, and buggers off? That doesn’t make much sense.”
“It does, in a twisted kind of way. This individual we’ve got a description of sounds like someone out of town, and not one of the usual suspects. This thing seems to be big enough that they’re taking risks to make sure it gets there.”
“So what is this elusive package we’ve spent three months tracking?”
“I don’t know much more than you. It apparently came across from America, and its something terrorist cells in mainland Europe have been trying to get hold of for months, maybe years. These Dutch people normally deal in more… unusual imports, but this one’s going to make them a fortune if it goes through. By the look of it, if we capture this package, it will damage this Dutch group, a number of European terrorist organisations, and… I don’t know.”
“You seem to know a lot more than me about this. Why didn’t I get a briefing like that?”
“Not sure.”
“If I didn’t know you actually didn’t know, I’d put this all down to politics and think someone was messing me around.”
“Could still all be politics. I had to do a lot of prodding to find out even that.”
“So you do know why I didn’t get that information?”
“Oh shut up, you know now.”
Before they could have a rather unhelpful argument, the phone rang. The agent who knew what was going on picked it up, listened for a second, then  put the phone down.
“They’ve got the photofit for this guy together, let start our investigation. We’re running out of time quite badly here.”

“Bit much to get used to”, smirked Dave, pulling his seat forward to let Graham out. Graham said nothing, being quite thankful for all the help he’d been given, but still not happy about being half-deafened for the sake of hearing 50 Cent played at thirty times the pain threshold. He hopped out, and looked around for a bit.

Hull Docks, as far as I’ve seen, isn’t particularly exciting. If you’ve seen a commercial ferry port, you’ve seen pretty much everything you need to. After enduring Pies’ declarations that last night had been “the most awesome night there’s ever been, ever”, and reminding him he couldn’t remember any of it, he let the two lads get back to sponging off of the government, and wandered if he was going to meet anyone vaguely normal on this trip.

I was quite looking forward to writing a couple of hundred words about how Graham had packed his passport in the other bag, and the royal buggering Passport Control at the docks would give him as a result. However, that’d pretty much kill the novel, so thankfully, Graham had his passport on him, got through Customs alright, and was left with very little to do for most of the afternoon. He wandered around, and looked at the boats, but this got very boring very quickly. There wasn’t anywhere to drink, there wasn’t anyone to talk to, so he amused himself by trying to tame a seagull using some chips he bought. He was very relieved when the tannoy system announced that foot passengers were boarding.

The ferry itself was a bit more interesting, although only compared to three hours enticing seagulls over to eat chips, the expecting them to stay for the conversation. Having had the good sense to book a small berth to stay on, he threw his meagre possessions under his bed, and wandered out onto the deck. It was a wonderful spacious deck, as you would expect on such a large ferry, and while there wasn’t much of a view so far, still being in Hull Docks, it still had plenty of potential to be a stunning view, and just needed some fresh scenery to achieve it.

Apparently, it was a relatively nice ferry. While not exactly being a cruise ship (a bit too glamorous to be passing through Hull, perhaps), it was certainly much grander than the pokey boat he had done the day trip to France in back in Sixth Form. And since it was an overnight ferry, it had to be. There was even supposed to be a small cinema somewhere on-board. Exciting stuff, but what to do first? First thing was obviously first, food. As the ferry started to pull out of the dock, Graham sought out what had been described as high quality catering, but found was something not too similar to the canteen in his hall of residence back in the old days. The ancient, greasy-looking woman standing behind the counter looked about the same. The dry-looking roast beef sat despondently under a hot lamp in much the same way. Hoping for a miracle, Graham instead opted for the chicken korma, and was thoroughly not delighted to see some sort of fluorescent orange gloop being poured over some crusty looking rice. Handing over a fiver, Graham discovered the best part of the meal was the can of Coke, a sealed drink that hadn’t even been touched by the catering staff. Just to make things more fun, the chicken korma went through him at a rate of knots, and he had to become acquainted with the facilities on the boat fairly quickly. This was made twice as fun by the gentle swaying of the boat going down the Humber, and the heaves of a man already being sick in the next cubicle.

Hoping for something a bit more fun to follow all of this up with, he meandered up to an information point, and was told by a woman who was covered in bright orange fake tan, that the only films showing that evening were a nauseating kids film, an artsy foreign film, and one of those films with explosions and char chases and not a lot else, trying to be a James Bond film and failing miserably. None of these piqued Graham’s interest, so he went back to Plan B, the extremely overpriced bar.

Several hours of drinking, and Graham hadn’t managed to get as ratarsed as he’d have liked. There were several good reasons for this. Since it was three pounds per can, and proportionately more for spirits, he had forced himself to savour his drinks, seeing as even if he tried to get drunk on his own, it’d cost as much as it did when he was seemingly buying for a crowd of students. Secondly, the staff seemed to be keeping a very close eye on him, probably looking for an excuse to arrest him, or throw him overboard, or whatever they did when you were drunk and disorderly on a boat.

Most significantly, of course, was the fact that once the ferry had left the mouth of the River Humber, they had immediately hit the North Sea. Apparently, it was quite calm for a night in the middle of nowhere-on-the-water, but since Graham had only been on a ferry for the sum of about four hours in his life, he wasn’t used to the rocking motion of the boat, and he had discovered just how sick you could be when you had sea sickness. In moments of relative calm, he had experimented with drinking away the sickness, but this only made it worse, so that by about nine at night, he was very drunk, and very ill. The crew weren’t sure which it was, but left a handful of sick bags under the crook of his arm, and hoped he got the idea.

As always, it got a bit better before getting much worse. Near ten at night, the seas calmed down just enough, so that Graham considered going outside for a bit of fresh air. This was not a brilliant plan, as the winds were fast, freezing, and full of sea water. To complement this, once Graham was a good distance from the door back inside, the waves picked up again, rocking the boat by two metres each way. Nausea took hold again very quickly, and came to a head almost immediately. It also came to the head of a crewman wandering around the lower decks, who had the bad fortune to be right underneath as Graham unleashed the remains of the chicken korma. The poor man swore very loudly at Graham, and retreated, assumably to somewhere with a shower. Graham tried to shout out an apology, but it sounded more like a further round of heaving, which naturally it was. Considering himself beaten for the evening, Graham staggered back to where he reckoned the door was, and tried to make his way back to his room. But he had re-entered through a different door entirely, and the rocking of the ship did not abate. He therefore spent a fruitless hour wandering round the ship, alternately trying to find his cabin, and dry heaving into a bag, before giving up and collapsing in a heap in a corner next to a flight of stairs.

* * *

The police raid on the head shop was swift and efficient. While the man running the shop had the good sense to not keep any weed in either the actual shop or his flat, this wasn’t the target of the raid. They had been tipped off that some other highly illegal contraband was being stored in the shop prior to being transported to Holland, and they wanted to nip it in the bud before it left the country. However, as we well know, they were too late. However, they took the man in the shop in for questioning.

* * *

Miranda was starting to get worried. Graham hadn’t called at all since he set off, and even now, his phone appeared to be off. She tried it again, and lay down in bed. She couldn’t sleep.

* * *

Bizarrely enough, Graham found it very easy to sleep, although he would have thrown up several times in the night if he hadn’t emptied his stomach earlier. However, even with a two hour delay due to the inclement weather, the ferry still arrived in Rotterdam harbour far too early for Graham. He was shaken awake by a worried looking crew lady, who had evidently seen the gastronomical carnage he had wreaked the night before, and was defiantly not in the market for an encore. It wasn’t the problem, by miles. His head hurt, and he still had a great deal of sea sickness, although most of it had migrated to his head. Plus, as a change from the previous morning, he was far too tired to be disembarking off of a ferry. Besides, all his stuff was in his cabin, which, after asking the disapproving lady where it was, turned out to be just around a corner at the foot of the flight of stairs he had fallen asleep by. Quietly but angrily resolving to never set foot on a ferry again, Graham retrieved his stuff, and disembarked from the ferry.

Once again, he made it through Customs without any problems, although the man on the passport desk spent rather a long time staring at his passport before handing it back over. Bloody stoned Dutchmen, thought Graham, oblivious to the fact that his stumbling around and red eyes gave the self same impression. He couldn’t see this, but he felt it nonetheless. He had no idea how he was getting to Amsterdam, no idea where he was in Rotterdam, very little idea of the language, and a head and stomach that were waging war on the rest of his body. The first port of call, therefore, was breakfast and the strongest cup of coffee known to man. Despite feeling decidedly uncultured, he decided a traditional Dutch breakfast would be good. Finding a café, with a waiter who seemed to speak English, he ordered such a breakfast, and something terrifyingly strong and coffee-like. He ended up with both of these things, and was pleasantly delighted. The coffee was indeed coffee, and was terrifyingly strong. The breakfast was a wonderful selection of decidedly plain things, some cereal, some toast with chocolate sprinkles on top, and some currant buns. Overall, while not as interesting as he was expecting, it was just right for his flailing insides.

He then set off walking around, trying to gather his bearings. He started discovering a vast selection of stereotypes about the Dutch were very true indeed. There were certainly a large number of canals running through Rotterdam, and there seemed to be a fair few people smoking things in the street that would have gotten you arrested in England. But he couldn’t find anything that resembled anything providing tourist information. He needed to find somewhere to sleep, preferably now, but later if all else failed, and he hadn’t planned this far ahead. After yet another hour of wandering round looking, he decided to just enter the first shop he could find, and ask for some directions. He made a sharp left, and went into an establishment with a picture of Bob Marley on the side of it.

* * *

Miranda couldn’t understand it. Graham had said he’d call her, and he hadn’t. Full blown crazy paranoia overtook her, and she rooted out the number for his boss.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is that Graham’s Burricombe’s manager?”
“It most certainly is, but I actually have a name, its…”
“…undoubtedly very interesting, but I’m worried about Graham.”
“Ah yes, he came in to see me about that a couple of days ago.  All organised a while ago, and he’s away with it this weekend.”
“Its just that he hasn’t called me, and I’m a bit worried… hang on, arranged it how long ago?”
“Quite a few months ago, as it was, and he’s just taking us up on it now.”
“He said it had just come up out of the blue!”
The first series of chuckles came out at long last.
“My dear, he’s been meaning to go on this for a long time, but apparently… things kept coming up.”
“What sort of things?”
Another chuckle, this one a rather nervous one.
“Well, I think what he meant, the thing that he meant by that was, erm, ha ha ha…”
“What did he mean?”
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, young lady, I think he meant problems with you.”
A frosty silence came up, and hung around for a long pause. Suddenly, a gasp came from the other end of the line.
“What is it?” cried Miranda.
“A damn bird just shat on me! That’s not funny! My dear, I have to go. This is just the worst…”
And the phone promptly died in her hand. She stared at it in disbelief.

Miranda sighed. It had only been one evening, but the house already seemed too empty without Graham there. She hoped he was having fun, and taking advantage of lots of opportunities. She had tried calling him the night before, but his phone apparently had no signal. Rather unusual, but she supposed he could have one night out with the lads. She quickly tried him again, just to be sure, but this time, it was engaged. Why was his phone engaged? Did he talk to anyone usually? Maybe it might be worth ringing round, seeing if anyone… and she caught herself. Why was she worrying so much? Because she didn’t want it to happen again. She’d been hurt before, and she was damned if another man was going to hurt her like that again.
But Graham wouldn’t hurt her like that, surely? She realised she was actually starting to panic. Quickly, she ran upstairs to her painting room, set out a spare canvas on a painting stand, then squeezed out a few colours of paint. And as the paintbrush dipped into the first shade of red, and glided across the palette, she felt herself calming down. She started bringing out the detail on the flames.

* * *

This journey, Graham thought, was supposed to be an enlightening journey of discovery. He was supposed to just get away from his old life, discover something new and exciting, and not just end up in a grubby student house. Life was full of surprises, and sometimes they weren’t nice ones.
“Ahhh mate, do you remember Dave smashing that pint glass round that chavvy cunt’s head in the Gardeners?” babbled the rather porky individual who Graham had spoken to on the phone. He apparently went by the name Pies, because of the volume of pork pies he ate. If you end up with a nickname at university, its not usually going to be a particularly complicated one.
“I don’t remember it, no.”
“Ahhh, well it was utter jokes. How about when you pissed on that car on the way back?”
“Once again, not a sausage.”
“Wouldn’t mind me a sausage sarnie. You hungry?”
“Nope, drunk as last night, remember?”
Pies sneered, as he eased himself up and into the kitchen. “Nyaa, you old people can’t handle your bevies.”
Once upon a time, there would have been a drink off just to make a point, but Graham was too old for that.
“You got my phone?”
“Yeah, its upstairs somewhere. Where’s those sausages? Do you remember…”
“No idea, can I get it?”
“Hang on, you mind the frying pan, I’ll find it.”
And the wobbling git stumbled upstairs, which audibly groaned.
Graham pensively pushed the sausages around the frying pan. The next problem was finding the docks, and finding his ferry. He had no idea where to go, no idea of the general geography of the area. Plus, he didn’t feel up to walking, even if he knew where the hell he was going. He couldn’t really afford to get a taxi, and… actually, maybe there was a simple solution to all this.
Pies eventually returned, heralded by a huge amount of stomping.
“Found it! It’s a shiny thing, innit?”
“Yes it is. I have to be setting off soon…”
“Ah yeah, you don’t want to stay for a pint or two?”
Graham’s insides, already offended by breakfast and sausage fumes, screamed in protest at the idea of more alcohol.
“No can do, but I need to ask two favours.”
“Sure man, sure!”
“One, how the hell do I get to the docks? I’m off to Rotterdam this afternoon, see…”
“Ah yeah! You said last night! Getting some quality ganja, I’ll bet!”
“You never know.”
“Well, you got to bring some back here, man!”
“I would, but at the moment, I’ve got no idea if I’m coming back. One of your lads able to give me a lift?”
“Well, after last nights performance, Dave should be happy to, just got to wake him up, is all.”
“And second, is there anywhere I can get a shitload of money very quickly round here?”
“Apart from bringing us back some draw?”
“Apart from that, yes.”
“Hmm, don’t know, bruv. Let me wake up Dave, get you to the docks.”
And once again, he went stomping up the stairs. Graham sighed again. This could be difficult, and he didn’t mean just getting money. The fat bastard was starting to get annoying, and annoying seemed to be a recurring theme in Graham’s life at the moment.

Dave had been just about alive, and had agreed to drive Graham to the docks in the afternoon. He also had a few ideas about money.
“Lissen man,” he hissed in a hungover sort of hiss, “my cousin spent his gap year in Holland. Don’t know why, but there you go. He found some work with this, erm, courier business, and they’re always looking for people. I’ll give him a bell, get a number for you. They sorted him out for the whole year. Hang on.” He then whipped out his phone, dialled a number, and hissed his way through a conversation.
“Right, he’s got the number, but he’s warned you it probably won’t be anything legal.”
“Fair enough, not ideal, but I’m kinda desperate here.”
“Also, some of the assignments… didn’t make much sense.”
“Once again, no room to complain. What’s the number?”
“Here you are. Get them talking in English and tell them you’re a friend of The Englishman.”
Tapping a Dutch number into his phone, Graham breathed a sigh, of confused relief and annoyance. It looked like he was sorting out his money problems, only to get different problems in exchange. He wracked his memory for what little Dutch he knew.

“Hallo, Het huis van Harold’s van vissen, hoe kunnen wij u helpen?”
“Hallo, ooo sprecked Engels?”
“Eh… yes, can I help you?”
“Hello, I’m asking about courier jobs, I’m… a friend of The Englishman?”
“Hurrah! He was much helpful when he was here. So you want to carry things for us, yes?”
“That’s right.”
“Where are you at the moment, my friend?”
“Well, I’m coming over to Rotterdam this afternoon, and I’m leaving from Hull…”
“Are you? That’s unbelievable! Your timing couldn’t be better, we need something taking over from Hull. It needs to come to Amsterdam, but I daresay you can travel. You know where the… Weatherspoons pub is?”
“Not really, but I’m with people who can point…” he quickly realised he had not only been there last night, but walked past it on the way to this house. “Oh yes, I know where it is now.
“There’s a shop selling marijuana products across the road, by the antiques shop. Go in there, and ask for a bag of fish.”
“A bag of fish?”
“Yes. He will give you the goods you need to transport, tell you where to take them, and give you a down payment for transport fees. You will bring it to the address he gives you within three days. Then you will receive payment.”
“Willdo. Thank you very much.”
“Oh yes, one quick thing, friend of The Englishman, normally we wouldn’t just give some random Engels a job without meeting him, but a lack of time and your friends reputation means we can’t use our normal… procedures. But if you lose this package, or take it anywhere but here… we will find you, grind you up and smoke your karkas. Begrijp?”
“I don’t know what begrijp means, but I understand the rest of it.”
“That’s all I needed. Tot ziens.”
And then the phone went dead.

The Weatherspoons pub was just down the road from where he was, and there was indeed a poky little head shop nearly opposite it, next to an antiques shop. Dust seemed to cover many surfaces. A few weed growing tools were scattered around, and a selection of bongs sat in the window, from basic clear plastic ones to elaborate ceramic ones in the shape of skulls or Rastafarians. An emaciated man sat by the counter, giving him a somewhat dirty look.
“Erm… hello, I’d like a bag of fish, please.”
“You’re a bit different to the normal couriers.”
“Apparently, I just came along at the right time.”
“Right, hang on then, let me find the package.”
The man then rummaged around behind the counter, and produced a package in a brown paper bag, and a stack of Euro notes.
“You will take this, and at 5 in the afternoon in three days time, wait by the roundabout for the road going through Rembrandt Park. A man will come up to you, and ask if you had halibut for dinner. You will tell him that you pickled the vicar. Do as he says.”
“Is it really a bag of fish?”
The man crossed his arms, and gave him a look most commonly used on idiots.
“What do you think?”
Apparently not then.

“So he sorted you out then?”
“Yeah, although I’m not sure what exactly it is.”
Graham was back in the grubby living room with Pies, the package sitting on the table looking thoroughly sinister. They were staring at it like it was a disembodied hand.
“Hey, maybe its a disembodied hand!” cried Pies.
“Why would they pay me to carry a hand into Holland?”
“Maybe they thought it’d be fun?”
“Why would they pay me to carry a hand into Holland for the fun of it?”
“Well I don’t know! Its not like you’re going to be smuggling drugs into Holland, is it?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, since they’ve threatened to kill me if I don’t take it, and even if they hadn’t, I can’t afford not to.”
The atmosphere would have been tense and fraught, if Pies was capable of being anything but sluggishly excited about everything.
“Well, now you’ve got to come back, intcha!”
“How do you reckon that?”
“Well, you’ve got to tell us what it is, haven’t you!”
“No promises, but if I ever come back, I’ll let you know.”
“Wicked, man! Fancy a pint yet?”
“No, not really.”
Pfah, old git.”
“Where’s Dave?” It wasn’t too late, but after the other night, Graham wasn’t in the mood for leaving anything to chance.
“He’ll be up and about, old man.”
“I’m not that old.”
“Yeah you are, now lets get Dave then.”

Dave had a crappy 1994 Ford Fiesta, and was quite surprised he could fit into it. For some reason, he was shoved into the back of it, and discovered that Dave had apparently put all his car money into buying the sort of speakers you normally encountered at rock festivals. And when they pulled off, the sheer volume was terrifying. Literally. Graham’s vision immediately blurred, and his ears started popping. He did, however, get a wonderful back massage from the seat vibrating underneath him. Overall, he got the impression that the sound quality was optimised for someone three cars back, and was very happy when they finally got to the docks. His ears were ringing, and the last time that had happened was when he’d spent an entire night by a speaker at a rave back in the old days.

And, inevitably, the morning after would come. This was subtly altered by the exact events of the night before – whether glasses of water were drunk, if he had been sick, what take-away had been ordered – but since these, as mentioned, might as well have happened when he was passed out, Graham didn’t have much of a say in what happened, and was usually ruined by the morning after anyway. He woke up, and immediately regretted it. For a start, he’d been having a rather interesting dream he couldn’t remember the specifics of. It wasn’t exactly fun, or sexy, but it was a very interesting dream, one of those that could easily fill out a thousand words of nonsense if you could remember it. Following this by waking up meant you forgot it doubly quick, once for waking up, twice for waking up thinking your head had been hit by a sledgehammer, and forgetting anything else.

He felt horrible. People who had stopped drinking heavily at twenty three, and tried to kick-start it with a massive bender ten years later, come out of it like an old school Mini Cooper picking a fight with a lorry. His head was the worst part, sledgehammer metaphor already mentioned, but as ever, there were many little things making it so much worse. The dry mouth and parched throat. The starving hunger, paradoxically mixed with the stomach growling “you just try it, mate, you won’t enjoy it”. The horrible aftertaste, in this case chilli, tobacco, and something else quite foul, but thankfully not vomit. That, and he’d left the curtain open, a wall of light hitting him in the face. And like fuck could he do anything about it.

He lay there for what was only an hour, but felt like three, before lurching out of bed, throwing the curtains shut before the light made his head any worse, and collapsed back on the bed. It was still too bright, since he must have overslept, but at least he could actually get his eyes open without them falling out.
All in all, his room wasn’t in too bad a shape. When he was a student, a night like that could have anything spilt or dropped on the floor. And walls. And ceiling. In this case, it mostly just seemed to be clothes, a pizza box, seemingly empty, more clothes, and…

Wait, clothes?

A flash of something came to his mind, he’d walked past a charity shop, he was with… some students, perhaps. He had the vague idea that one of them had suggesting stealing a black sack left outside, full of donations. Something to do with not having any clothes. Evidently, the drunken Graham had told everyone what he was doing, and one of the people he’d told had done something about it. A simple solution, perhaps. But what was here?
Wonderful. Someone’s grandma had had a clearout, by the looks of it, and three flower-print dresses festooned the floor. Also, an ancient looking, and gigantic, bra. That would have to be binned when he could move. A pair of jeans that looked like they might just fit, but on closer inspection seemed to be a woman’s pair. Well, needs must and all that. And finally, what was either a bandanna, or a headscarf. So no T-shirts then. Graham risked a look at a clock. Eight thirty. He’d always had a bad habit of waking up too early when he’d been drinking.

He stumbled downstairs, and through sheer force of will, managed to force down the fry-up he was served. He needed food in him, despite the feeling that his insides were out to kill him. He then returned to his room, and studied the pile of hideous clothes in the middle of the floor. Evidently, even though he had been utterly smashed off of his face, he had been thinking along the right lines. He needed supplies. He had kept the important things and what he needed to keep up the illusion he was only away for the weekend. The other bag had contained more clothes, some tourist guides, a map of Europe, and a Dutch language book, without which he’d be struggling a little.

Promptly, two thoughts crossed his mind.
Where was his phone?
And how much had he spent last night?
The second question was the easiest to answer, a quick check of the wallet showed that “only” fifty pounds had vanished from his wallet. Ten pounds of the remainder had turned into loose change somehow, and there was a scrap of paper with an illegible phone number on it. Graham left it. The first question remained unanswered. It hadn’t come back with him. This was slightly more worrying. One, it had been a rather nice phone, a birthday present from Miranda, and had had email, internet, and all sorts of new and shiny things installed on it. Secondly, if Miranda tried calling it, there was every chance that whatever happened, she’d start panicking about it. He went downstairs, asked if he could use the phone, and dialed his own number. Unlike seemingly everyone he knew, he thought it was quite useful to know your own number, and he felt rather smug as it started to ring.
“Hello?”
“Hello, who is this?”
“I dunno, who’s this?”
“Well, you know the phone you’re holding?”
“Yes?”
“Its my phone.”
A pause. Then a gasp of surprise.
“Oh yes! Its… you’re that bloke from last night! Man, that was a maaaaaaaaaaaaad night! Do you know how much you drank?”
“By the feel of it, far, far too much.”
“Yeeah, that was mad. Listen, you want this back, I guess?”
As obvious as it might seem, Graham paused for a second before answering. Was it that useful to have a phone that had no SIM card in it?
Still, if all else failed, he could sell it somewhere.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Right, right, well come back up the road, we’re back here, come get it.”
“Erm.. back where?”
“Here!”
“I don’t know where here is! I don’t even know who you are!”
“Right, right, I hear you, fucking hammered last night and all that. Right, we’re in Lambert Street, go up Bev Road and find the petrol station, we’re at number 32. Catch you in a bit!” And then the phone went dead.
Packing up his bags, Graham checked his ferry tickets. His ferry left at half five in the afternoon. Plenty of time. He packed his bags, paid his bill, and set off to find a petrol station.

Fifteen minutes passed, and still no opportunity presented to retrieve the suitcase. While Graham would have found it an interesting conversation with Miranda about career prospects under normal circumstances, the fact was that Graham didn’t have his career in mind. What he did have in mind was trying to travel the world with two shirts, four pairs of socks, and not a lot else. He couldn’t say he needed the bathroom, partly because the train would inevitably show up while he was waiting, but mostly because the bathroom was in the complete opposite direction to the cloakroom. And tempting though it was to just take the train back, he wasn’t quite sure how to get to the coach station, and he was running short of time as it was. He decided to try a gamble. He patted down his pockets, and turned to Miranda.
“Ah crap, I didn’t pack my spare glasses.”
“Oh, you idiot. Where did you last see them?”
“I think… actually, I might have left them in the car.”
“Why on earth did you do that?”
“Cleaning them, I think. I’m sorry hun, I can’t leave the bags, they should be in the glove compartment, I can’t leave the bags, can you fetch them please?”
“Oooh… well, alright then. Catch you in a minute!” She then gave him a quick kiss, and hopped off in the direction of the gates. As soon as she was facing the other way, Graham lurched towards the cloakroom. He had no time at all.

“What do you mean you can’t find it?”
“We can’t find the bag with that number on it, sir.”
“How the fuck did you manage to lose it in one day? I only checked it in yesterday!”
“And now it’s missing. We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve found it.”
“Like fuck you will, I’m supposed to be running away, and now… oh sod it. Useless fuckers.”
With that, Graham turned round, and sloped back onto the platform, followed by plain-sounding requests not to abuse staff… sod the staff. What was he going to do? He needed that money to actually get anywhere.
The train pulled up as Miranda reappeared, oddly enough with his spare glasses case.
“You big silly, they’d fallen out in the boot.”
“Oh, really? Oh dear. Well, thanks for finding them.”
“Is something wrong, hun?”
Apart from not having any fucking thing to take with me, no, all hunky dory, would be the correct answer.
“Well, I’m not going to see you all weekend, am I?”
“Oh, hon, you’ll be back soon, and it’s all for a good cause.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Well, you’d better get on. I’ll see you on Sunday.”
“Love you.”
“And I love you.” She left him with a kiss, and he stepped onto the train. As the doors shut, he looked into her eyes, and realised that if he actually went ahead with this plan, he’d probably never see her again.
Did he really want to do this?
Of course. Cold feet, that’s all. He sat down, and gazed gormlessly out the window.

Milton Keynes is a very… erm… something town, where… actually, you know what? I can’t pretend I’ve ever actually been to Milton Keynes. For all I know, the entire town is made of purple tentacles, and screaming demonic faces leer out of every pavement. So I can’t tell you what its like. So we’ll just move on to Graham catching the bus, and I’ll put the fourth wall back where it was.

Milton Keynes coach station isn’t actually in Milton Keynes. If you imagine the junction where an A-road meets a motorway, and basically stick a train station platform on an off-ramp next to it, that’s what the coach station is. It’s an incredibly boring place to spend any amount of time. There isn’t even a snack bar to speak of.

Graham had an hour layover there, for no discernibly good reason.
“I was in the Great War, you know.”
And stuck next to the obligatory loony. He didn’t look a day over forty, it was just that it was a particularly loony forty.
“Really,” replied Graham, with a monotony and blandness that screamed, leave me alone, you’re talking out of your arse.
“Damn really! Head of the RAF, I was. Flew over Berlin and shot Hitler single-handed! That suicide nonsense was a cover-up!”
“Was it now?”
“Yes! And I was going to fly a top secret prototype jet fighter with a laser cannon mounted on it, but I broke my arm on a walrus the day I was supposed to go on and fly it!”
“Sounds like horrible luck.”
“And do you know what happened then?”
“No idea.”
“They teleported me into the future!”
Graham sighed. It was times like this, he thought, when being back at home wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Focus, he thought, you’ve only been away two hours.
“Did you know, the Queen’s actually an evil Chinese warlord?”
And another hour here to go.

Things did not get much better when the coach actually arrived. The thing about coaches, is that they are usually designed to carry you great distances between cities, and are usually cheaper than trains. This means that the people using coaches don’t have the money to get a train, and can’t drive for one reason or another. This does tend to mean that they are usually full of students and mad people. Thankfully, that madness usually manifests as enough social awkwardness to give you a quiet journey, or at worst just blare out some horrible hip hop on their phone.
As another aside manifesting as a battering of the fourth wall, whoever thought you needed to have big-ass speakers on a mobile phone needs to have their balls stamped on. That is all.
“I was in the Great War, you know.”
“Oh, really?” asked Graham. This gentleman actually looked old enough to have taken part in the Second World War.
“Oh aye. Those were hard times. Couldn’t have done anything about them, but they had to be done.”
“And I’m very grateful for it, sir.”
“Did you know, the Queen’s actually an evil Chinese warlord?”
Oh gods, he thought, and it was looking so promising.

The journey up to Hull took a lot longer than anyone was expecting. Not just because the mad old man had many more stories, both of wartime sacrifice and blithering lunacy, but traffic on the M1 was made ten times worse by a lorry full of chickens overturned. A large van full of hot fat crashed into it, and a truck carrying eleven herbs and spices managed to avoid them, but upended itself all over the road. The smell of KFC wafted for miles around. It was a tired, and nauseatingly hungry, party which got off in Hull.

Many things have been written about Hull over the years. Frequent references to “shittiest town in Britain”, and “actually given an award for shittiest town in Britain” are thrown around quite frequently. This isn’t an entirely fair accusation, since you’re just as likely to get punched in the face in somewhere like Manchester, or Newark-on-Trent. The thing is, Hull is an aimless town. Its main economy was based on its ships, and these do not venture out very often, so it no longer has any affluence it may have had. These days, it is true to say that its entire economy is students and pushchairs for young mothers.

But that would miss out on a city that is still full of life and character. Nestled amongst the student-ridden slum housing are some beautiful buildings. The town centre mixes shitty bars and take-aways with gilded statues and Victorian architecture. Not that this concerned Graham much. Having spent all day travelling, he needed somewhere to collapse, and then perhaps a quiet drink somewhere to celebrate his newfound freedom. After about an hour of searching, he managed to find a small bed and breakfast that miraculously still had a spare room. There was a rather good reason for that, however, and the normal Hull-air smell of either tires, burned cocoa, or death, was replaced with a rather damp, musty smell, and a rather damp, musty texture to the air as well. Graham shrugged. As long as it wasn’t the bed…

Thankfully, half an hour with the hair dryer had rendered it suitably dry, and Graham resigned himself to what would now be a mildly damp, but even stinkier night. This was most defiantly a call for massive amounts of alcohol. He strolled out of the bed and breakfast, wandered back to the main road he had walked up, and went almost straight into a bar.

I’m trying not to turn this into a travelogue of debauchery here, so I’ll point out only the salient details. Beverley Road is the main road through Hull, and the main road for bars. A man could start drinking at one end, and be hammered by the other. The town centre end caters more to the locals, and the end nearer the university is obviously more favoured by students. Technically, this doesn’t affect too much, since both ends are likely to be pissed on any night of the week, but neither party likes each other. They each seemed to like Graham, however. Back when he had been a student himself, Graham had had a very set pattern for getting exceedingly drunk.
At the start of the evening, he normally nursed just a pint of whatever ale or bitter the bar had, having something he could enjoy and comment on intelligently, while he was still able to tell what he was drinking, or talk intelligibly. This was appreciated by a few working men in the first few bars, who he shared a few words with, before moving on.
He then progressed onto lagers, which were a bit easier to drink a lot quicker. He had never been one for simply downing pints, mainly because they were far too cold to do anything with quickly.

Midway through the night was usually the time sobriety started sliding away, and it was also the point where the bars became more… well… fun. One of the last lucid thoughts Graham found himself having was in the Cannon Junction. A rather unusual bar, it is built into the support for a railway bridge, and the main sitting room is two converted train carriages. He had somehow caught up with a 21st birthday pub crawl, and had found himself, despite the entreaties of the previous paragraph, having a downing contest against a large youth wearing an incongruous pink cowboy hat.
And it was exceedingly fun.
“Wouldn’t be able to do this with Miranda anywhere in sight.” Thought Graham, as he slammed down his pint, a second after his opponent. And naturally, he demanded a rematch.

Later on in his evenings, his memory tended to go a bit fuzzy, as did everything else. Having moved into the realms of the Scream brand bars, the cheap student drinks, and the exuberant young people about to go to some grotty club, this was made somewhat… worse.
He remembered being in a queue for something, and it was a little dark.
There was a large stretch in somewhere with lighting, and a very loud soundtrack.
He had been shouting merrily about something, and some people cheered at whatever he’d said.
Eventually, he left with some people, and as tradition dictated, the blast of cool, fresh air pushed him over the edge of what his memory could work with, and for all intents and purposes, he plunged into blackness. While still walking, talking and having fun for a good few hours.

Peace let itself reign in the household for a couple of days. Graham was preoccupied with making arrangements for his “trip”, and since he’d given Miranda the impression he was working on improving his job prospects, she was happy, and left him to it. Finally, Graham was ready.
“Baby, you know how you want me to improve my job prospects?” he opened with on the next Monday evening.
“Yes, Gray-ray?” she replied. Horrible nicknames, another thing he wouldn’t miss.
“Well, it just so happens the company’s having a training and aptitude weekend down in London this weekend. It’s a bit short notice, but…”
“When, where, how long?” came the slightly panicked sounding reply.
“They’ve booked some rooms in a hotel in London, thankfully somebody cancelled…”
“No, I mean what hotel specifically.” He’d not quite prepared for this level of interrogation, but he’d forgotten about her specific foibles in planning his retreat of her general foibles.
“If I’m not mistaken, it’s the… Arlington Row Hotel. Yes, it’s on Arlington Row, so that’d be right.”
“Ok then. Can I have a number to call you at if I need you?”
“Well, you’ve got my mobile number,” he retorted, feigning a slight amount of hurt, but amused in that as soon as he set off, his old SIM card was being chucked in the bin, “but I’ll look up the number soon as you’ve said yes.”
“And can I ask your man in charge about this? I know you’re trying hard, but I’m still worried that…”
Realising that decisive action was needed, Graham took Miranda in his arms, and looked her in the eyes.
“Miranda, my love, I am trying. And I love you. We’ve been together for years now, and I know its time I need to get my life in order. Please, trust me, I’m not out to hurt you, I’m going to make things better for both of us. Now I’ll get you that number, but you need to let me do this. Okay, beautiful?”
Technically, all true as well.
Miranda had a tear forming in her eye, but there was a smile on her face as well.
“Of course. You take all the time you need. Just get me that number when you can, honey.”
Graham smiled in turn, partly to portray the happy boyfriend, partly because it had worked. Now he just had to tell the people at work what he was doing.

Thankfully, Graham had already made some arrangements, having informed his manager that at some time in the near future, he might need some time off at short notice to take some training in London. Admittedly, this was arranged with actually going to get some training in mind, but things with Miranda had complicated things, and the issue had drifted somewhat. Thankfully, his manager had a good memory for things that weren’t names.
“Taking some training at long last, Burricombe?” he chuckled. He was a heavyset man, given to chuckling at everything from an employee seeking to better himself, to the water cooler making an unusual gurgling sound. “I thought you’d shelved that because of your girl, Miriam isn’t it?”
“Miranda, sir, and it’s about time I did something.”
“Good man, good man”, came the chuckle again, “how long do you think you’ll need?”
“I’m not sure, perhaps a couple of months?”
Another chuckle, but this time not a good natured one.
“A couple of months? What are you training to do, go into space?”
“It’s a very long story, sir.”
“I’ll bet it is, and I’d be interested…” Thankfully, the phone rang before he could complete this thought. He murmured a few things into the phone, and placed it down again.
“Well, I’m not too happy about it, but I did say I’d let you take the time off when you needed it, so take as long as you need. We can always get in a temp or three to cover while you’re gone.”
A last round of chuckling saw Graham to the door, rather disheartened that three destitute students could do what he had been doing for ten years, but still pleased that his plan was coming to fruition.

With all the big problems out of the way, it only remained for Graham to pack. This was complicated by the fact that Miranda thought he was only going away for a weekend, and would more than likely notice him packing two big suitcases alongside his briefcase. In a fit of inspiration, he packed all the non-essentials into a suitcase his grandfather had left him, which consequently had been left in the attic and not seen since. He trusted that Miranda, in amongst all her new and shiny possessions, had simply forgotten it had existed. He then took this to the local train station, and booked it into the cloakroom for a couple of days. Problem sorted, since the things he was supposed to be taking for a weekend away all fitted into a significantly newer suitcase Miranda had bought him one year, not really noticing he didn’t actually go anywhere that required a suitcase.

Finally, the big day came around. Graham had packed everything he needed for a “weekend” away.
“OK baby, I’ll be back on Sunday evening.”
“I know, now do you need a hand getting your bags in the car?”
“In the car?” Graham asked. He had planned on walking up to the station.
“Of course, I’ve got to see you up to the station, haven’t I!”
“Erm… well…”
An eyebrow went straight up. “Why don’t you want me coming with you to the station.”
And true to form, Graham panicked. He needed to keep her calm up until the second the train pulled away, and having the jealous routine wasn’t calm.
“OK then, I’ve got them, don’t worry.”
Hefting them into the back of the car, Graham rationalised that he could simply tell her that whatever train was there was his train, and he was going to miss it. Simple solution there.

The car ride was surprisingly cheery for one that was supposed to be a mildly unhappy parting. Miranda talked about all the things she thought he’d be good at, suggesting all sorts of sales positions and how about that editorial stuff he’d wanted to do when he was younger, and a patter of a girlfriend seeing things only getting better. He happily, yet blankly, responded in kind to any suggestions she made, and all was still smiles as they pulled up to the station.
He took his bags out of the boot.
“Well, thanks for the lift, beautiful.”
“I wouldn’t want to do anything else now.”
“It looks like my train is here, I’d better get going…”
“That can’t be your train, hon.”
This rather unusual interjection caught him by surprise.
“How do you reckon that?”
“That’s the train to Milton Keynes there. You’re heading to London, aren’t you?”
Just his luck, she’d memorised which trains went where for some reason.
“Well, we’re not headed straight for London!”
“Why not?”
“Well, we’re… erm… meeting up outside Milton Keynes, then taking a train down to London from there, and…”
“That doesn’t make any sense!”
“Why not?”
By the time everything was sorted out to Miranda’s satisfaction, the train had pulled away, and the next one was half an hour away.
“Well, why don’t I wait with you then?” suggested Miranda. Essentially, there wasn’t anything wrong with that idea, as long as you ignored the bag left in the cloakroom that needed collecting, that contained everything Graham needed apart from money, a change or two of clothes, the tickets, and the watch.