[Astyanax]

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. I have not tried to be pretentious in language, the colloquialisms seem to fit the tone as you'll see...

Nose Candy

Bella ‘Blitzkrieg’ Raynes had taken a roasting. With her skirt hitched and her blouse ripped, she stumbled out of the ambassador’s house on 32 Winnington Road. Having been introduced to a couple of Arab businessmen, she had invited them upstairs for a snort and sex party. Whilst Ms Raynes felt cheap and sullied, her savoir-faire repressed the guilt, instead looking forward to a life of comfort, far from what she had experienced growing up on the streets of South London.

The lucky recipients of her ‘talents’ that night indeed kept to their word and soon Bella had became an A-list British Movie star, playing the lead in films such as ‘The cunning linguist’. Although her roles were mainly promiscuous, she was seen as the darling of London, clean living and hard working boasting Keira Knightly and Kate Winslet as her showbiz pals. It was Zeno who said ‘we are cylinders, a mesh of characteristics alongside free-will rolling down a hill towards the same place’ – Bella could never shrug off the addiction that plagued her so. It was an added thrill that the media had never caught on to her excessive cocaine addiction; her dealer, a 27 year old psychopath was paid enough to never squeal and besides, she had banged him a few times for shizzles and giggles. All was about to change when she met a man by the name of Clinton Pratt.

Pratt, a small time photographer had never caught a break. An amateur magician in his spare time, he dreamed of the red-carpets and the award ceremonies but never got a whiff, so to speak, of the action. A good looking chap, Clinton had dated a combination of head-turners and brown-paper bag jobs and he had a close circle of mates who used to boost his confidence when necessary, but bring him down to earth when the time called for it. Our hero earning a decent wage didn’t believe in saving and spent his leisure time eating well and frequenting classy nightclubs Funky Buddha and China Whites. It seems the pair were destined to meet as they had been on the sauce for a few nights running without ever bumping into each other.

At a quarter to midnight both their lives were to change forever. Bella arrived looking scintillating in a sultry, low cut satin dress, her breasts making their way into every man’s w@nkbank. Clinton spotted her and urged by his friends, already half-way to being escorted off the premises, went for the jugular. ‘My boys over there bet that I wouldn't be able to start a conversation with the most beautiful girl in the room. Want to buy some drinks with their money?’ he calmly said. He oozed confidence and it occurred to Bella that she hadn’t made brownies in a week and needed the feel of a man inside her – they left through the back door after the second tequila. The sex was staggering, she got bucked from Bristol to Brighton. The pair were inseparable for a few days, just long enough for Bella to hide her addiction to the Bernie.

Some days later, Clint wondered home and started to take pictures of his house in order to experiment in his diminutive dark-room he had bought several years earlier. Dashing into the bedroom to wipe his lens he stumbled on his lover doing the devil’s dandruff with a smile on her face and her fingers down her knickers. At first Clint was stunned by what he saw but he gathered his senses and asked her what on earth she thought she was playing at. Raynes confessed all but the damage had been done – a picture speaks a thousand words and his magical fingers had done the business once again. Instead of diving for the amber nectar, he had struck gold.

They broke up a few days later with Pratt sounding the moral-brigade alarm although a sinister side had taken over him. The benefits of the selling the picture and revealing the secrets of that fateful night many years ago appeared to outweigh the negatives and it was duly snapped up by the News of the World for a princely sum of £125,000. Pratt’s career as a photographer duly took off and he quickly became the poster boy for the amateur who ‘seized the day’; his antics were not seen as malicious or voracious. Ms Raynes’ fate lay in the hands of the studio and the people of Britain. She was hung drawn and quartered; left to rot only surfacing to appear in reality television shows about reality television contestants.

Some years later they met quite by chance. Having tried to change no one had given Bella a second chance and she spent her nights in Soho as a prostitute and spent her days on the hard candy. Clint has morphed into a degenerate, so desperate for buttsecks he appeared not to notice those hazel-green eyes which had taken his breath away.

She bit his knob off.