All this happening now, it doesn't begin here.

The last place had looked like a barn. Where bearded men gathered for sake of real ales and low hanging beams. Vintage junk cluttered onto shelves and gathering dust just out of your reach. If there'd been a choice I would have stayed and wasted my time there. It was quiet, civilised and entirely tedious.

I'd known all this the second that the event had been mentioned. Turning up three hours late had been my botched attempt at not turning up at all. Had I been put off by the creeping danger of sly questions while you were drunk? Or was it the scarlet harlot, with her unsuspecting boyfriend hanging on her arm?

There were other good reasons not to attend.

Maybe even that I'd vowed to never set foot inside a part of the Luminar leisure group again. Though technically, I wasn't going back on this. Luminar leisure had gone bust. What had filled this resulting vacuum was far from tasteful.

I was driven into that other place by popular opinion, I felt like one of the herd. The careful alcohol balancing act must have saved me from the full deshielded horror. Although the bouncers were polite and well behaved, largely because the police were stood across the street. Once inside, the truth was all too obvious. You had to shout over what ever noise was emanating from the speaker system.

The drinks had a strange taste to them. The kind of taste you get when you water down coca cola.

I'd never really understood why this messy cacophony constituted 'fun' as most people understood it. Nor that it might be listed as something they were interested in, like it was a legitimate part of culture. But judging from the attire of the people attending, it was because they were stupid or had very bad taste.

Sometime around midnight, he unceremoniously left her and went home to sleep. It seemed a bit uncouth to just leave her there and didn't make sense at first. Then when it did make sense you'd wish you hadn't thought about it.

She was naive.

That should have been the worst of it.

But when the prognosis is naivety, the classical experience is that this is rarely the case. That long and drawn out struggle. Save for the unspoken belief that nothing was ever wrong, until the last dying moments when reality shoves it's way into scene, dragging that ghastly truth behind it.