LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 1

       Sheila

      Turns out, marking your territory wasn’t the sole preserve of spraying tom cats with big balls. Sheila smiled at the thought as she prowled around the basement bar of M1 House in her Louboutins.

      ‘I’d like you to rearrange the seating down here,’ she told Frank, describing the space in the bowels of the super-club with a wave of her arm. Her Tiffany bangles jangled merrily, audible above the thub, thub, thub of the bass from upstairs, as the DJ and sound engineers performed the soundcheck ahead of an evening of revelry.

      Frank was nodding like one of those toy dogs you got in the rear window of crappy cars. Jumpy, as usual. Her brother-in-law had never been anything but.

      ‘Yeah. Yeah, Sheila, love. Mint. But what do you mean?’

      ‘Get one of the staff to move the furniture, Frank. Set up single tables and two chairs.’ Visualising how the space would ideally work in this debut foray into the world of speed-dating, Sheila stalked over to one of the tables in the subterranean bar, recently redubbed, ‘Jack’s bar’. On the wall hung a neon sign, styled from a lyric her nephew had apparently written on one of the toilet doors.

      In the beginning, there was Jack.

      She glanced momentarily at it. Reminded of how much Frank had lost. Grabbing the sleeve of Frank’s baggy top – an old James long-sleeved T from the band’s Gold Mother heyday – she changed tack. ‘Are you eating?’ Through the cotton fabric, worn soft and thin with use, she could feel that his forearms, always wiry at the best of times, were mere bone and sinew now, covered with skin.

      Frank cocked his head to one

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