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countless juke boxes to feel exhilarated, tearful, turned on by love, he certainly had not expected to feel sick. It was as if he had gone mad. He was acting in a way that he despised himself for. It was fifteen years since he had tried his hand at poetry. He had thought that shameful, inexcusable episode in his life was over and forgotten forever. There is absolutely no excuse for amateur poetry writing, it should be against the law. Teenagers, CD reluctantly accepted, should be allowed a brief foray into this repulsive, self-indulgent activity. After all, every kid in the world goes through a period when they are under the impression that they are the only person who has ever suffered, the only person who has ever really truly understood confusion and rejection, and exam revision and acne. Obviously this horrid time needs an outlet other than vandalism and hence, while it lasts, every kid is clearly entitled to pen the occasional teen-anguished epic. But these should be decently burnt within a year and the habit soon dropped. At the age of fifteen CD had decided to ditch poetry to leave more time for masturbation and had never had cause to regret the decision.
    But now what had happened? Here he was trying to find a rhyme for ‘Rachel’ and coming up with ‘bagel’. Sitting there, alone, his eyes prickling, his guts churning, trying to write something that should it ever get out would force him to commit suicide out of sheer embarrassment.
    And this was not the only alarming symptom. Everything was changing, CD was definitely not the same person he had been a week before. Conversations had become a means to bring the subject round to how much he loved this girl. He didn’t want to do it, it just seemed to happen.
    ‘Are you going to watch the footie then, CD?’
    ‘Yeah, maybe, you know I’ve met this girl called Rachel. I think she’d like footie. She’s an extraordinary girl, you know I really think I’m in love and I don’t know whether to be happy or sad or what.’
    He felt an absurd affection, even loyalty, for Carlo Criminal Court, where he had first set eyes on her. He had bought a copy of ‘Money for Nothing’ which had been on the juke box in the Pissed Parrot when he had tried to make conversation. It was ridiculous but when he played it, which was often, he always felt he had to listen to the very end or somehow he was letting her down. She would never know, and she certainly wouldn’t care, but he still had to listen to every bloody note.
    It was so weird he had only met her on a couple of occasions and yet now he thought about her literally all the time, constructing little fantasies to himself as he wandered about. Lacking almost any knowledge of Rachel at all he filled in the gaps himself. Sometimes she was Doris Day, a happy little housewife with whom CD would share the domestic chores and construct a normal life. In this dream he even had a proper job and kids were on the way. She was chirpy, devoted and, of course, insatiably saucy. Other times she was a tough, committed alternative woman intellectually brilliant, artistically innovative, courageous, combative and, of course, insatiably saucy.
    These fantasy characters bore no relation to the real Rachel and, of course, they did not need to for CD had fallen in love with her whatever she was really like and it only remained to discover what he had let himself in for. This was one thing CD did know about love: it can happen regardless of personality. How often had he noticed couples who seemed totally mismatched struggling through their lives together. Couples that made you say ‘I never would have thought he was her type’, and yet there they were, a Zen Buddhist and a female mud-wrestler applying for a mortgage and looking at curtain material. CD was discovering now for himself that love is not logical. He didn’t know anything about Rachel, why was he so certain that she was perfect? And why when, as he knew he must, he discovered that