The Madness of Mr Meretrine: Chapter 1

Here's chapter one of this work. I should note that, as I originally wrote this in a word document, I have small intervals between each chapter in which the protagonist expresses his thoughts on a certain subject. I aim to post these after the chapter I post, but I'm going to have to post one at the beginning of it today as well, just because I forgot to post it on the end of the prologue. 

There's quite a bit of swearing in this chapter. Just warning you. 

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Most things concerning life go in threes; past, present and future; yesterday, today and tomorrow; start, halfway and finish. Retrospectively, I’ve realised that most people’s lives follow the pattern of ‘beginning, middle and end’, because their life is constantly moving, right from birth all the way to their death. They live throughout their life, and feel purpose during it.

But there are some people – people like me – who live lives that don’t last for as long as their biological life. By this I mean that only for a period in their ‘life’ do they feel like they are truly living – as in feeling strong and real and like all the pain they’ve ever endured actually means something. Both before and after these periods they merely exist, only putting one foot in front of the other because they don’t know what else to do. And in those cases, in those ‘lives’, they follow the pattern of ‘before, during and after’.

Before

1

So then. My life.

            Let’s start with childhood.

            I could give you the facts, the way people always do – born in Barnsley on the 18^th November 1989 to Robert and Samantha Sawhurst, but then, that doesn’t really give an accurate description of how my life has been. Facts are clear, straightforward, and simple, and I can tell you that my childhood was none of those things. These were the days before I was really living, remember? They were all a blur – a bundle of existence that I didn’t appreciate much.

            But I do remember some of it, not a lot of it good.

            Time to talk, I think.

18^th November 1996

            I stirred, beating away the fabric of nightmares that enfolded me, rolling around in the bed until my eyes suddenly snapped open, all reality swarming my senses at once. The feeling of deflation upon leaving my dream state melted away as I became aware of everything around me – the battered bedsprings in the mattress, my coarse blanket, the penetrating cold that nipped at my skin like teeth; the central heating never came on in the mornings. In fact, it never came on at all if my mother could help it.

            I felt my head swimming and the last of my panic leaving me. In my nightmare I’d been running away from a monster. Again. But the worry and anguish that had been flaring within me was then substituted with something else.

            Excitement. It was my seventh birthday.

            Children are amusing, aren’t they? All it takes is for you to tell them that they’ve survived several orbits of the sun and they’ll be jumping for joy. I was no different – not in this sense.

            I rocked around on the bed, adjusting to the cold, and began to hum a very loud, off-key version of ‘Happy Birthday to You’. The bedsprings groaned beneath me (long since trampled by endless jumping sessions on the mattress), sounding overly loud in the underlying quiet.

            I did what I always did, and reached gingerly down to the floor at the end of the bed. My fingers met the feel of paper. Not real wrapping paper - newspaper. I pulled the single gift up onto the bed and drew it into my lap, running my fingers over the soft print of the Daily Mail (it said something about stolen bins). The sheets were bound together by blue tack, and so I could see through the cracks to the present already. Not that it stopped me tearing the pages off the gift with the look of a child unable to suppress their curiosity any longer, or feigning surprise as a battered teddy fell into my lap. Its button eyes, suspended by wool, dangled a centimetre or so away from its droopy head, its face bore a wonky nose and a jagged smile and his fur was matted, but nevertheless I clenched him to my chest and let out the cliché cry of ‘it’s what I always wanted!’

            There was a bang, seemingly the result of a disturbed sleeper bashing the wall next door with their elbow.

            I kept quiet for the next half hour, face buried in the teddy’s scrubby fur. The silence was like a fog, I remember it. Fog conceals things from view, and silence conceals actions that we simply can’t hear. Take away our sense of hearing and humans would be done for – sound tells us everything, and so silence is dangerous. In a silent house an utter stranger could get in and wander round for hours, and you’d never know, because you’d be deprived of the majority of signals that could alert you to their presence. I hated the thought, and thus didn’t like quiet. I didn’t like many things.

            So I went downstairs.

            I buried my present within the folds of my scratchy blanket and padded down the staircase in my too-tight striped pyjamas, the air seeming to whisper to me. I wondered what it was saying.

            I hoped it was ‘happy birthday’.

            The house was eerily still, the corridors dark and foreboding – anyone could’ve hidden in the darkened corners, moving around silently and pinching our things. Not that we had much to pinch; our makeshift home was constricted and cramped, with barely any room for us, let alone an extensive collection of possessions. Still, I didn’t like the thought that anyone could break in if they really wanted to. With my seven-year-old mind I worried that, if a person entered the house intent on performing burglary and found there was nothing of worth to steal, they might take a fancy to the little kid and nick off with me instead.

            I forced my way through the corridor and moved into the kitchen, running my fingertips along the fraying paintwork until I reached the fridge. Pulling it open, I swear the air that swept over me was warmer than the room I was currently standing in. There wasn’t much in there, I recall – just a few cans of beer, a carton of sour milk and some brick-hard cheese that you could probably have beaten someone to death with. There was also a borderline empty bag of tough bread and a jar of raspberry jam that was obviously new.

            My parents didn’t shop much.

            I lay two slices of synthetic-tasting bread upon the most posh-looking plate we owned (basically, the one that wasn’t cracked or chipped) and dipped a knife into the jam and spread each slice with a thick coating. I then pressed the bread together and cut the edges away until, upon the plate, sat a small, circular sandwich, filled with a ridiculously thick layer of jam.    

            I reached for the packet of matches. They were easy to get to.

            Carefully, I took a match out of the box, lit it, and blew it out. I repeated the action, again and again and again, until I had done it seven times.

            Then I closed my eyes and wished.

            I can’t remember what I wished for, though. Not that it mattered.

            Then I reached for the jam sandwich and ate it ravenously, finishing up the cut-away edges and licking the plate for the crumbs. After that, I spooned tablespoon after tablespoon of jam into my mouth until I felt sick.

            But it was my birthday, right? I was allowed to indulge.

            The house was still perfectly silent when I left it.

 I had been sick after eating so much jam (I nearly ate the entire jar), but luckily made it to the toilet in time. My mum wouldn’t have liked it if I’d vomited on the floor, but I suppose that’s true of everyone; I’ve never seen anyone walk in on a pile of sick and scream with delight.

After rolling around groaning on the bathroom floor for several minutes, I went upstairs once again, stomach feeling bloated, and wriggled out of my uncomfortable pyjamas and into my ‘best’ clothes – a pair of long, crumpled, camouflage-print shorts and a black t-shirt. I’d washed them out in the bath the night before – I didn’t know how to use the washing machine – to wear today, as it was such a special occasion, or at least I thought so.

The house was still quiet.

I went downstairs and opened the front door. It hadn’t been locked.

It was a clear day, the sort where the sky is so devoid of clouds and features that you don’t really know where it ends and where space must begin. The sun reflected a steely glare upon the ground, succeeding in making me squint, but it was still bone cold. Being November, the air was chilling and plucked at my skin like bird beaks or long, feminine nails, and thus it was certainly not weather for a person to wear shorts or t-shirts, let alone both. I didn’t care though, or at least pretended not to. It’s the same thing, really.

I walked out of our estate and onwards, the general shabbiness and grubby appearance of it diminishing in the distance to be replaced by halfway-decent houses on halfway-decent estates. I always looked at them rather longingly, for they were so much nicer than the grim, pebbledash council houses that dominated our street. I achingly longed to live in a particular house near the end of Avard Lane, what with its wild garden and painted brickwork. It was no neat, placid mansion, but I suppose I didn’t want it to be.

I spent twenty minutes lolling on the fence outside the said house, sure (or rather hoping) those who lived there were out as I was watching it with probably a very obsessive look on my face. Part of me was desperate to hitch over the palisades and kick the abandoned football around the lawn, although the other part was sure that to do such a thing would be a stupid idea. My mother had caught me staring at the house once, and had shot me a glace before pulling me away by my upper arm, as though worried I was going to run full-pelt into the garden and eat the lawn or something.

I then left the front of the house and continued strolling down the pavement, thrusting my hands into my pockets and trying (and failing) to whistle. I sauntered into the town eventually, giving newsagents and baker’s shops wistful looks as I caught sight of the cakes and sweets in the windows, though I had to move past because I didn’t have a penny.

I went to the one place that didn’t cost money – the park.

It was no Disneyland, I’ll tell you that. Starting with the fact that every object beyond the park gates was sprayed mercilessly with graffiti, so much that the original colours were now concealed, you can begin to build up a picture of the park in your head. The grass upon which the park was set was worn down into bristles, poking out from a compact floor of mud, and the large majority of the ground was littered with cans, abandoned needles, cigarettes and any other kind of rubbish. You could literally run up to heaps of litter and kick through it like a pile of autumn leaves. Well, you could if you didn’t mind the risk of ending up with a filthy needle stabbing your feet.

People spat down the slides, which were dented and creaky and thus not altogether pleasant to use, and the round-about juddered as it span, making you feel ill very quickly (that was the last thing I needed after eating the jam). I wasn’t strong enough for monkey bars and couldn’t exactly use a seesaw by myself, so I settled for the swings.

They weren’t ideal – dappled with flecks of water and dry mud and a bit creaky – but they were my best bet. I selected one and sat silently, listening to the wind and letting it lift my hair, loving the way the coolness slid over my scalp like liquid.

I sat there for hours.

It didn’t take long until the sun diminished, slipping behind a black cloud swollen with water and seemingly not resurfacing until spring next year. I remember how it felt – the sudden coldness as the sun cut out, like the bit in horror films where the protagonist is creeping along corridors with a lit candle and it’s suddenly snuffed out by a chill of wind, alerting you to the fact that something bad is going to happen. That’s how it felt.

Then the downpour began.

Torrential rain is how I remember it, great droplets of water rocketing to Earth and then shattering upon impact, causing enormous pools to flood the uneven park ground within minutes. I struggled from the swing, rain lashing my t-shirt and shorts and plastering my hair to my face, and ran through swelling puddles to the shelter of the trees edging the park. I was gasping for a drink by this point (and food, but that couldn’t be helped) so braved the rain and stood out beyond the tree canopy, tilting my head back and letting water swim across my dry tongue and down my parched throat.

However, isn’t it strange how, even when it’s absolutely pouring with so much rain you can scarcely see, when you take advantage of it and open your mouth to drink from the downpour, the droplets always seem to miss you?  

By the time I’d had a sufficient amount to drink my clothes were sodden and my skin was burning with cold. I retreated to the shelter under the trees, hugging myself in attempt to get warm and stirring the empty crisp packets and cigarette butts that littered the soil with my foot.

Gradually, as I stopped shaking and feeling began to throb back into my fingers, I gripped at one of the trees and (causing pain to flare up my freezing arms) hitched myself onto one of the lowest protruding branches, one only elevated two-and-a-half foot or so off the floor. I let my legs dangle, fingering the bark and squinting at the patterns of it, the crags and grooves and splits that rendered it unique. I began flaking off small shards of it, admiring how diverse they looked, like fingerprints. I thrust several of the most interesting-looking pieces into my pocket, and then simply continued to shell the tree of its scales, peeling away bits of bark and tossing them into the mud. It did nothing to help my sore fingers, burning them red at the tips, but it was a distraction, and everyone needs distractions. Some more than most.

But no distraction is so good that it prevents you coming back to Earth when you don’t want to, at least not in my experience.

            I’d lost track of time, lost myself in the rhythm of tearing at the tree, using the throbbing of my reddened fingers as a metronome, but by the time I was alerted back to my surroundings it was long past sunset, and so the sky was dark through the leaves, high and clear after the endless rain, scattered with gritty stars and a flat, paper cut-out moon. The park was silent other than the tinkle of gently easing hinges from the swings and the sweeping rustle of leaves, shuddering under the wind’s touch.

            And so the thing – the thing that broke my distraction, the thing that brought me back to Earth and reminded me who I was and what I was doing – was a sound. The sound of people.

            I remember it – laughter. A rolling noise, one that seemed to reverberate in the air for longer that it should’ve, sweeping the ground like a lax kind of laser, and one that, for reasons I wasn’t yet sure of, made me nervous.

            I told you earlier that I didn’t like silence because it doesn’t give you cues to what’s potentially going on. Well, right from being a small child, I had developed a rather sharp ability to analyse sound and gain information from it, and, from force of habit, found myself raking over the bark of laughter for evidence about the sounder and drawing out worrying conclusions.

            They had a loud voice, deeper and stronger than a woman’s – the sounder was male, though their tone was not gruff enough for them to be a fully-grown man, so therefore they must’ve been a late teen. It was a loud laugh, but surprisingly short-lived. This indicates that the person was exaggerating the hilarity of the reason they laughed, trying to convince people that they found it funnier than it was for the sake of fun, but they couldn’t keep it up for too long. When do we sometimes do that? Around friends, when one of them makes a joke and you treat it as funnier than it really is – so the sounder was in a group, probably a large one. The way the laugh sounded – heavy, bloated and slurring – clearly showed that the sounder was drunk, heavily drunk.

            So, there I am, a weak, wordless seven-year-old, dressed in crumpled clothing with messy hair and a doleful expression, and there they are, a loutish teenager surrounded by mates of a similar nature, drunk out of their mind and probably looking for something to punch.

            In that moment, I had the stupidest thought; at least he can’t punch me until I’m sick because I have nothing to sick up.

            Through the clearing of the trees I caught my first sight of them. A group of teenagers, five or six of them, all dressed in tracksuits and the usual baggy gear I’d expected, several with cigarettes poking from their mouths, all with bottles of some alcoholic variant clutched in one hand. Among the skinheads and piercings and heavy shouting, I saw something I hadn’t anticipated.

            A dog, held back by a thick leather collar and heavy lead; an enormous, brutish Alsatian with hooked claws, a snarling mouth and flickering eyes that simply screamed the words ‘inevitable, agonising death’. 

            Oh God.

            As they rambled further into the park, laughing and swearing and making obscene gestures, some of which I didn’t understand (a large amount of which I did, despite my age), I heard snatches of conversation.

And that’s when I realised that these guys weren’t drunk, they were absolutely plastered.

            Which of course was great news for me.

            Nineteen swear words and four sexual comments later, they, with their drunken vision, caught sight of me, sat rigidly on the branch.

            “Oi!” one of the boys shouted, lunging in my direction. “What the fuck do you think you’re d-doing?”

            I froze, fingers clamping at the bark like pincers.

            “This is our fucking den, you little shit,” he slurred. “Oi, g-guys, look at this little bastard in our den.”

            Another boy loped over to his side, one with heavy-lidded eyes, a studded lip and a can of larger swinging from his hand.

            “Who the fuck do you think you are, prick?” he barked.

            I didn’t answer. My brain was a pack of ice – cold, still, unresponsive. I couldn’t get it to work.

            “Oi, I’m talking to you, you stupid shit,” the boy shouted again, starting towards me.

            No words would come. Come on; stand up, move, speak, anything. I could hear the other boy laughing harshly, a grating sound that somehow hurt.

            “You n-need teaching a lesson,” he said ominously. “Lou, over here!”

            A girl, with dark hair scraped back into a painful-looking ponytail, walked over to the heavy-lidded boy.

            She was the girl with the dog. She had the dog. She was holding the dog back. She was the only thing stopping the dog attacking me.

            The heavy-lidded boy pulled the dog away from her by its collar, something it didn’t appreciate. It tugged against him, snarling, eyes alight with malice.

            If it was possible, my grip on the branch tightened. I knew what was coming.

            “He doesn’t like kids,” the girl – Lou – called out, and then she burst out laughing, cackling in a way that, in my paralysed brain, could only remind me of a witch.

            The heavy lidded boy was wrestling with the dog’s collar, trying to remove it and set the beast free. No – the one word in my brain. No, no, no – an endless chant, a useless babble that sank through my veins, sparking a frenzy of panic that would surely jerk me awake.

            Spark the panic – that’s what I had to do. I fought against the numbness humming through my mind and began to talk to myself, desperately, in my head, attempting to frighten myself out of paralysis, even though it was fear that rendered me immobile to begin with. I didn’t care; I needed to move, by use of any means possible.

            The boy’s fingers found the latch on the collar. He’s releasing it; it’s going to run for you any second.

I was still frozen.

            He loosened it; one more gentle tug and the collar – the barrier preventing attack – would fall away. Any second now it’s going to come for you, and it’ll tear you apart if you don’t move.

            I couldn’t so much as twitch.

Those claws look sharp, and those teeth could tear your skin off about three times as easily as you tore away the bark from the tree earlier.

            I briefly wondered if this was God paying me back for skinning the tree. Was this just an extreme version of give and take? I forced the thought away. I had to concentrate.

            I looked through the trees, my body numb.

            Lou and the other boy were chanting, voices melting into an endless drone that clogged every twist and synapse of my brain.

            I couldn’t think.

            “Run, f-fat boy, run!” the heavy-lidded boy yelled, and he tugged away the collar.

            For a moment, I swear, the world stopped along with my heart. A single tableau froze all around me – the boy with his hand swiped high above him, brandishing the collar, the dog launched into the air, fur flailing, mouth gaping, exposing a fence of teeth, and wax faces all around them – Lou and the other boy - with expressions of twisted joy warping their features. The world was still. The trees stopped moving, the wind ceased, Earth halted on its axis. Everything paused, I swear it.

            All but my brain, which managed to squeeze out one, minute word.

            Go.

            And then – pandemonium.

            Life, movement, thought, adrenalin – all the pent-up energy within me surged through my body at once, one fluid, frenzied movement that crushed through my veins and brought me back to life. I tore myself from the branch, fingers rigid and body aching, with the world around me breaking into a series of disjointed images and shattered fragments. Fast. It was happening too fast.

            I caught sight of the dog, rocketing like a missile towards the trees, several meters away from where I stood as I scrabbled at the bark in attempt to climb the crags of the trunk. I I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think – the dog’s presence was choking me, the beast itself the craved nutrition for my fear’s appetite.         

            My eyes didn’t appear to be working properly, my ears were filled with the dog’s snarling (since when was it so close to me?) and my brain was simply churning out the words ‘move move move move’ as opposed to useful thoughts, so I relied on my sense of touch, trying to feel my way to safety. I grappled desperately, fingertips brushing the branch closest to me, just out of reach. I took a deep, shuddering breath and leapt forwards wildly, miraculously managing to hook both arms around it. My legs flailed uselessly as I tried to heave myself up, kicking out with my shabby trainers and beating ineffectively at leaves.

            And somehow I knew what was going to happen before it did.

            I was aware of movement below me and the sound of disturbed leaves raking against the floor. I felt something shift and rise from the ground, a phantom from the darkness, and then a wet, breathy heat against my left leg.

 And then I felt sharp teeth edging into my skin, points plunging through my flesh on either side. I felt two jaws clamping down against my calf, and hot, thick blood pouring from deep puncture marks.

And then pain.

Fire seared through my leg, a clamping, burning feeling that tore at my insides and sliced through my skin like heated blades, twisting and warping every nook of my flesh. The intensity crushed through my muscle like a giant, white-hot hand, squeezing my calf to bursting point and drawing a scraping scream from my chest. I felt shards of glass grate through my insides as the shriek burnt through my throat and burst through my lips, piercing the night with a howl of agony sharper than the teeth that caused it.  

            Then I flailed, the spasm of pain exploding from my body and making me jerk wildly. I let out one last scream of desperation and felt my right foot slam into the dog’s face, harder than I knew how.

            Its jaws slackened, and I felt the pain dull, cutting out so suddenly that I gasped. I took advantage of the split moment, using it to once again draw back my other, uninjured leg and smack my foot into its face for the second time, so hard that I felt my ankle crack painfully.

            And then the jaws, the teeth, the searing pain, fell away as the dog released me, and burning tears, both of horror and relieif, spill over my cheeks. I heard the dog thump to the floor, dazed, beneath me, and, with the last of my strength, heaved myself onto the branch, collapsing into a racking torrent of sobs and clutching at the rugged bark.

            I was safe. I was safe. I was safe.

            I heard the dog snarling and scraping at the base of the tree, howling with the loss of my leg and the pain that I had beaten into his face, the pain that I felt such savage pleasure to have caused. The drunken teenagers in the park were jeering, a muddled torrent of words that made no sense in my shaken brain.

            I pressed my face into my legs, feeling the throbbing in my calf beat a rhythm into my left eye. Pressing my eyes into my knees stemmed the relentless tears pooling over my eyelids, but I made no attempt to staunch the wound in my leg, which was leaking far more freely. I couldn’t bear to touch it, not just because it hurt, but also because I could scarcely bear to believe that this – the teenagers, the dog, the pain – had happened.

            Why wasn’t I at home on my birthday? That was what other children did.

            I knew why.

            An hour or so later, when the teenagers had moved on, I began to try and ease myself down from the tree. I’ve still no idea how the hell I did it, what with the pain flaring through my leg with the tiniest amount of movement, but I managed, somehow. Most of the blood had dried crustily onto my skin, but the throbbing was still there, the never-ending reminder of what had happened today.

            I thought of other children’s birthdays – whirls of smoke as they blow out the candles on their cake, feverish faces as they tear at wrapping paper, mummies and daddies holding up cameras and camcorders to record the special day – and then of me, limping through a park at the dead of night with a torn-up leg.

            It couldn’t be more different.

            The town felt dead as I drifted through it, resting my hands against the walls of shops in attempt to avoid putting too much pressure on my leg. All the lights were out, like closed eyelids, the entire village put to sleep – yet it had a somehow permanent feel to it. That was one of my fears when I was very small – that morning would never come, and that I’d be the only one awake in a world trapped in darkness.

            Strange how fears can become hopes, isn’t it?

It took about three-quarters of an hour to get home, and by the time I reached the door it was 11:56 p.m. – four minutes to midnight.

I thought of my parents and my throat clenched.

There’s still time for them to say ‘Happy Birthday’.

I reached for the door and tugged at the handle easily. I knew it’d be unlocked; it always was.

I stepped into the dark corridor, but, unlike so many times before, I felt no fear at the shadowy corners, the sense of secrecy. Perhaps the ordeal with the dog had numbed me to it – after experiencing that, nothing would be frightening.

Light pooled softly into the corridor from the living room, seeping past the ajar door. I could make out movement from where I stood, shadows playing about the dark walls subtly.

And of course I heard the voices – my mother was impatient about something. For one mad, wild moment I wondered if it was because of me – she was desperate and angry because I’d been missing for so long, frantic to know where I was.

But then I listened to her tone properly, and heard her words clearly.

“So then, Robert,” she addressed my father, who I knew would be slumped on the sofa. Through the crack in the door I saw her raise a phone – his phone.

“‘Hey, Robert, can’t wait to see you this weekend, had a great time last week, love Sadie.’” She was quoting a text, not for the first time.

My father was silent – but it wasn’t a tense silence, it was a bored, just-get-it-over-with silence.

I heard my mother inhale, and then-

“Who the fuck is she, Robert? I’m bloody sick of your lies! Do I mean nothing to you, or am I just one of your fucking playthings? Who the fucking hell is she?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t know who it was that my mother was so angry about, but I did know that this had happened before, and that it’d end with my father slapping her face, leaving for a few days, and then coming back for them to ‘sort it out’.

They never sorted it out. They were rivals living under one roof, turning the house into a war zone that I just had to edge around whether I liked it or not.

I listened to them roar at each other, a surge of white noise, a record played so often that it’d lost all meaning. Their words bled together, and I lifted my watch to my face only to discover that it’d hit midnight.

It wasn’t my birthday anymore. I’d been forgotten.

Again.

I’d have ran upstairs like a true neglected child, but the pain in my leg prevented me from doing so. I had to walk up slowly, as though wading through water, listening to the meaningless blare of my parents’ shouting. I collapsed into bed fully clothed, completely numb apart from the throbbing of my injury.

I stared at the ceiling, which was spattered with patches of damp and dirty marks, and wished it were the night sky and that the stars could sweep me away.

Curling over, kicking away my trainers and tugging my rough blankets over me, I let my heavy eyelids fall closed, tears clinging to my lashes.

That night, I wished that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning.

So that was who I was, a boy who desperately hoped for affection, even if it was just a simple ‘happy birthday’. I was the boy who wrapped up his teddy bear in newspaper the night before his birthday just so he’d have something to open in the morning, the boy who hummed ‘Happy Birthday to You’ because he didn’t know the words, the boy who made himself a circular jam sandwich because it was the closest he could ever get to having a birthday cake.

My parents sure as hell wouldn’t get me one.

There were days in my childhood when I wondered why my parents even had me at all. I mean, it was common for my father to say, during arguments involving me, that I hadn’t been a planned child, and that they’d very nearly had me aborted, but I couldn’t help but think ‘why didn’t you?’ A kid once shouted at me at school, the way they do, saying that my ‘mum’s abortion failed’ and I was actually pretty inclined to believe him.

Funny, isn’t it? I haven’t even told you my name, and yet here I am, telling you things that I thought I’d never tell anyone. Shows you how unimportant names are, really, but still...

I’m Daniel. Daniel Sawhurst.

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Now, I know this is a pretty long chapter, and my suspicion is that it might be a pain to review. Some of the future chapters are even longer than this one, so just let me know if I should be posting them in two parts, something I might end up doing anyway. Thanks.