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You never know…

 

The breeze over the meadow was warm and gentle, the sun kissed trees rustling in the background. The two people walking across through the long grass hand in hand, looking in dreamy peace at the cornflower blue sky.

 'Do you think,' said the woman, 'that someone somewhere is feeling this free?'

 The man looped his arm around her, looking deep and long into her eyes. 'I hope so,' he said, looking winsome, 'I hope so.'

 CUT!

 The wind died, the trees stopped swaying and the embrace split. The man lit up a cigarette and glanced with barely hidden contempt at the vapid creature furiously berating the make-up girl because her hair had blown wrongly in the breeze. He took a drag, and blew smoke into the warm air, hazing the sunlamp and bringing a smell of tobacco into the meadow.

9.20 AM

Andy awoke to the smell of smoke in his bedroom. Pulling himself out of sleep slowly he tried to pice together the previous night. There was nothing in his mind to explain why he was lying in this dingy room, surrounded by cardboard boxes. Rubbing his face, he sat up slowly, painfully aware that he must have been drinking. When the world stopped it's mad spin he drew deep breaths, looking at a point on the floor between his feet, willing himself that small. His whole world became the badly varnished wood, the knot holes and the minute dens of woodworm. A foot invaded his world, with garish red nails. He pulled his head up with the care of a sculptor raising a statue until his eyes met a pair deep sunken and heavily shadowed.

 'Hello,' he said uneasily, kicking himself for not knowing a name. How could he be expected to remember a name when he had no idea where or indeed when he was? The woman lazily took a drag on the butt hanging out of one corner of the open wound of her mouth.

 'Hi. What's your name again?' She peered at him, and Andy tried to shrink into the filthy mattress. The question stumped him for a few moments, and in that time he knew he needed to get out of the room, the flat and preferably the town very quickly.

 'Andrew,' he managed to mutter before his head started to tip backwards. There was something he had to remember, he knew it. It was the one thing in the soup of his brain that he knew for sure. He sighed with relief as the woman turned away, shrugging. 'I'm going to work. Get the out of my house.' Andy saw no reason to argue with that, and looked wildly around the floor for his shoes. Hopping on one foot he followed the nameless woman out of the battered door. Standing in the chilly hallway his head snapped up as the door slammed shut.

CRACK

 The flat of his heavy hand impacted the back of the cheap novel sharply. The frightened youth leapt up, eyes running for the exit which was blocked by Constable Green. 'What have you been doing, Kevin?' asked the detective in a singsong tone which suggested that he already knew the answer. 'Er, nothing, Guv, honest. I'm clean, you got nothing on me.' He stood with his hands shaking on the table behind his back, leaning away from the burly detective and looking very, very scared. The detective nodded sagely, as though he had predicted this response from the very beginning of their little dance. 'That's not what Mr. Rogers told us.' Kevin's panicked eyes filled the mind's eye, and from somewhere music wells up to fill the room which unaccountably fades to blackness.

And the credits role.