I growl with exasperated exasperation as I peel myself off the floor next to my bed, where I just fell off the top bunk straight onto my face. Looking in the mirror, I notice without even a jot of surprise that my hair is a state, as usual. Part of it is growing outwards like the branches of a palm tree, and some other parts look like small towns that have just been bombed and flooded and then coated in fluff, but mostly it just looks like my scalp has a horrible venereal disease. I say to myself: you're a stupid bitch for sleeping with a hat on, you're a stupid bitch for sleeping with a hat on. Luckily, after four hours of aggressive and emotional brushing and crying, I manage to comb it back into a ponytail, albeit an unruly one that no man could ever love. In my head, I'm all like, God damn you, Jillian Plumage, for making me do this.

   Jilly is my gal pal, who sleeps on the bottom bunk in my room. She is a stunner in every way imaginable - volumous blonde hair, huge tits, nice round arse, you name it. And she puts out generously. But today, she's ill with a terrifying case of some generic illness, so I'm having to go out and run an errand for her, instead of doing everything I had planned: finishing the book that'll earn me my doctorate; trying to train my feet not to fall over each other when I walk; drawing diagrams of my perfect retirement home living room layout which allows ample room for my doting husband (possibly a vampire), my seventeen cats and Jilly to all cohabit happily; and combing my ugly, ugly hair and crying some more. Damn you, Jilly Plumbago. 

   What I have to do is deliver a package to some gajillionaire who is always on TV and in the media and is young, attractive and cool, but somehow I've never heard of him. It's just a little box of anal beads, but my flatmate is so ill that she can't fulfil the requirements of her home-run, hand-delivering eBay sex shop today, so I'm having to traipse all the way over to Norwich to deliver it. 

   Walking into the living room in my frumpy dress (in which I still look attractive, but unlovable and ugly at the same time), I notice Jilly Perambulator on the sofa, with a big red nose and stinking of diarrhoea. 'Are you okay?' I ask. 

   'Yeah, I'm fine, I just can't be bothered to deliver that bullshit,' she replies, obviously joking.

   'I've fixed you some soup, it's in the fridge.'

   'I bet it's disgusting.'

   'Would you like a paracetamol?'

   'Get the fuck out.'

   'Can I get you any water or anything?' I ask. 

   'Seriously, Cinderella, leave me the fuck alone. You're hanging round like a bad smell and you look like you've just been dragged through a patch of stinging nettles backwards.'

   I giggle, but Jilly Philanthropy remains deadpan. She always has had the best sense of humour. Only for her would I deliver these anal beads. Only for you, Jilly Paralysis. 

*

   I love the drive from our tiny little flat to the swanky offices of Rainbow, Inc. I only have a beaten up old fiesta with a wheel missing, but Jilly has let me borrow her Bugatti Veyron (which she bought with her student loan, spending the change on a three bedroom house in Mayfair), so the trip whizzes by with a whizz whizz zip. And before I know it, I'm standing outside the impressive Rainbow towers. The humongous building takes my breath away, standing there as it does with an incredible three floors. I've never seen a building so big. 

   In the terrifyingly modern reception, all made of chrome and MDF, I speak to a woman who looks like a porn star, in a pencil skirt (made of actual charcoal) and nothing else. She wears a super-futuristic headset so that she doesn't have to use her hands to talk on the phone, golly gosh holy crap, and her hair is a stunning shade of red that nearly makes me vomit with envy. Now that I've seen her ultra-smart pencil skirt, I realise that maybe I haven't dressed as smart as I should have. I mean, I have worn my grey trainers, some socks I took from a sleeping tramp on the way here, shinpads, purple cycling shorts, a lime green t-shirt, a pair of 3D glasses from the cinema, and a plastic policeman's helmet from a fancy dress shop - to me, this is smart. I flatten down my unruly afro as it explodes out of the many pins and bands I've used to hold it down, and try not to look like I'm shitting myself, standing there in front of her. 

   When she looks up at me, she immediately presses a button on a console in front of her and says, 'Security...'

   'No, wait!' I cry, nearly bursting into tears because everything is such a big deal to me, 'I'm here to deliver a package to a Mr...' I have to check the package, because for some reason I don't know anything about this man who is like the biggest billionaire ever and pretty much owns the very university which I attend, '...Rainbow.'

   'Hmmm,' she says, before handing me a pass and pointing at another lobby, 'go through there then.'

   In the lobby she directs me to, two more redheads in nothing but skirts made of charcoal direct me to another lobby, where a couple of redheads in charcoal skirts direct me to another lobby, where I sit for twenty minutes on a chair made of rocks and MDF and marble and money. The girl at the desk in this foyer must be in training, because she's jittery and nervous and her hair isn't even that red. Plus, when the other redhead asks her if she's fetched me a drink yet, she screams NOOOOOOOOO and runs out of the room crying. I don't even want a drink. 

   I'm so nervous about delivering this parcel that I roll my eyes at myself theatrically (pull yourself together, holy crap) and start to wonder what kind of things would make me seem like more of a three-dimensional character. Reading British novels, maybe; or a love of curling up on sofas. Maybe if I hadn't heard of laptops or I was a twenty-one year old, clumsy, ditsy, incredibly thick but accidentally beautiful virgin, I'd be more believable...

   My train of thought is suddenly sledgehammered by the opening of huge glass doors (which I've only just realised I could see through into the CEO's office before they were even open), from which Ronald Rainbow emerges, beckoning me into his office.

   When I stand up to shake his hand, I trip over a pebble that was on the floor and roll three metres into a fireplace which I haven't mentioned before because I thought it was probably more important to mention all the materials things were made of rather than describe my surroundings. My whole body now aflame, I try to gain my balance by grabbing hold of a poker that stands next to the fire, but end up falling onto it and impaling myself. Holy crappy poo, I'm on my hands and knees bleeding from a hole in my stomach on fire in the foyer outside Ronald Rainbow's office. 

   Having put me out with a fire extinguisher and bandaged me up, he extends his hand with all its tremendously long fingers (like, at least a foot long) to help me up. 'I'm Ronald Reliant Rainbow,' he says, 'and who the fuck are you?'

   He stands there with scruffy ginger hair and spots and eyes that are all different colours, striped like a rainbow, and I feel so fucking turned on by him that it takes me a while to speak without it coming out like an orgasmic groan. 'I'm Cinderella Porkchops,' I reply. 

   'Are you like, selling double glazing or something?' he says, warm but obviously damaged, like a bird with a broken wing that any creepy insane woman would love to just take in and fix. Because you can change people. Really, you can. And if this feller is over twenty, I'm an idiom that hasn't been used by anyone under fifty in the last twenty years. 'Why don't you come into my office to do whatever it is you've come to do?'

   In his office, I see the walls are covered in murderous sentiments scrawled in excrement. Impressed by the spelling and grammar, I ask who wrote it. 'Oh, it was a local artist called Picasso, a personal friend of mine from back when I invented time travel. Dead now.'

   I've never heard of this guy since I haven't been out of the house since before I was born, but I mutter, 'These murderous rantings pull the extraordinary out of the arse of the ordinary,' and take a seat.

   'How profound,' he replies, 'a great writer must be typing out this dialogue.'

   I fumble around with the parcel I have to deliver, dropping it several times and cursing under my breath, as my cheeks flush because he makes me so horny. Why does this man have such an effect on me? Maybe it's his rainbow coloured striped irises, or the fact that there's a crucifix fixed to the wall behind him, with handcuffs and whips and all sorts of torturous tools scattered around it. 

   'So Mr. Rainbow,' I say, delicately, 'I wondered if you could sign here.'

   'I am the best businessman in the world.'

   'I'm sorry?' I ask, vulnerably, and blushing because his eyes are burning into my soul. He just sounds so arrogant, so I say, 'You sound like a control freak.'

   'Yes, I am. I want to control you now.'

   You are a control freak. 

   'You are a control freak!'

   'Yes, I just said that. But I'm also delicate and damaged just like you thought, and I want to change deep down, it's just that I haven't met the right woman to change me yet. Maybe that could be you.'

   'Are you gay?' I ask, still blushing. Always blushing. Sometimes trembling as well. 

   He gasps, before ripping the biro from my hands and signing the slip that says he has received the delivery. He looks like he might be about to punch my face in. Holy moly crapnuggets. I've really done it now. 

   'Maybe a bit,' he replies, 'but why is that relevant?'

   I guess it's not. I'm not sure why I even would have asked it; maybe whoever is writing the dialogue isn't that good after all. 

   We talk for a while more, and it takes up about 12 pages and it's like, 99% irrelevant, so I'll spare you. Just know that he's sexy, I'm weak and we're both flirting in the most awkward way you could ever read in a book. 

   After handing over the delivery, I stand up to leave. 'Thanks for signing for the anal beads,' I say. 

   'The pleasure was all mine. We should do the sex some time.'

   I blush, and go to put on my red leather jacket from Thriller that I haven't mentioned yet, but Mr. Rainbow puts it on me before I can do so. His skin touches my shoulder as he drapes it over me, and I faint from the excitement. When I wake up again, in a puddle, his foot-long fingers are pressing the elevator button, which takes forever to arrive. I'm just standing there thinking, I need to escape from here before I go mad with horniness and vulnerability, holy Moses holy crap.

   Before I board the elevator, I take one last look at Ronald Rainbow. He really is incredibly tasty looking; it makes me feel dizzy. 

   'Cinderella Porkchops,' he nods, as the doors close. 

   'Ronald Rainbow,' I reply, before fainting again and missing my floor. 

   After the boys are finished, they stand back, exhausted, and admire their handiwork. Within a few seconds, the smallest, Ellis, starts to feel sick and his eyes fill with stinging tears. The stench is unbearable already, a kind of warm pet shop smell mixed with blood and gone-wrong drains; but it is not this that is making him want to cry, and he knows it. He got overexcited, lifted by the eagerness of the other two boys, and easily coaxed into an action he would never choose to do; and now, he feels the stomach-turning sting of regret.

   Panting, the largest boy, Stephen, leans on his knees and points at the body with the tree branch he holds. He laughs, gasping in deep gulps of air and wiping the sweat from his brow, before saying, ‘Did you see how its eyes rolled back at the end? Like it knew it was all over.’ His hands and forearms are caked in blood, tiny pieces of minced flesh and sweat. 

   ‘Yeah,’ the chubby kid beside him says, mirroring the larger boy’s posture. ‘Freaky.’

   Ellis, the youngest of the three and the least impressed with himself and the body they have just stilled, starts to back away, dropping his own log onto the floor. 

   ‘What’s the matter with you?’ asks Stephen, standing and turning to Ellis. 

   ‘Nothing,’ he replies, ‘I just don’t like the way it’s looking. Its eyes look sad.’

   Stephen laughs and turns to the chubby kid, Phillip, who also laughs. ‘Did you hear that? Its eyes look sad. Have you ever heard anything as queer as that?’ 

   ‘So queer.’ Phillip agrees. 

   ‘It’s not queer!’ shouts Ellis, a whiny, nasal tone to his voice leaking through in his annoyance. ‘That was somebody’s pet!’

   ‘Yeah, I know whose it was, he’s not even going to miss it.’ says Stephen, flicking a blob of wet, red matter from his wrist. ‘It’s that stupid old cripple who only leaves his flat like, once a month. He lives in these flats; he can’t walk the stupid thing ‘cause his back is so hunched over, so he just lets it run around wherever the fuck it wants to.’

   ‘Not any more,’ interjects Phillip, bending to poke the ears of the corpse. 

   Stephen just laughs. ‘Yeah, not any more.’

   ‘Because he’s old and he can’t chase us, doesn’t mean he deserves this,’ snaps Ellis, his voice raising into a near-shout, ‘It’s not right. That old man is near enough blind, he probably needed that dog for company.’

   ‘Yeah. It was probably trying to run home when we chased it here,’ Stephen says, looking up at the block of flats that serves as one of the walls of the alley in which they stand. There are only a few lights on in the whole block, but they suffice to illuminate the alley in a kind of dull orange, red and blue glow. The orange of energy saving bulbs, the blue of flashing televisions through net curtains, the red of dog’s blood.

   ‘Shut up!’ cries Ellis. 

   ‘You know what? You need to wind your neck in, you little squirt. I didn’t hear you complaining when we were bashing its skull in. In fact, I saw you beating this thing to death just as much as we were.’

   ‘No you didn’t!’

   ‘I’m pretty sure it was your idea. Wasn’t it, Phil?’ 

   ‘Yeah,’ Phillip mutters, hooking his length of tree branch under the dog’s collar, trying to pry it out from between the folds of mangled flesh to hold it on the end of his stick. ‘Ellis told me to kill it.’

   ‘Exactly. You little prick.’

   Ellis starts to cry, so Stephen turns back to the body. 

   Around them, the cold night air carries the whisper of a light breeze. The few windows that were open on the advent calendar faces of the blocks of flats that surround the boys are gradually being closed, as the occupants turn up their central heating and get ready for bed, or else put on another layer and watch late night bingo shows or sitcom re-runs. Each block is a closed world inside of the closed world of the estate, a bubble within a bubble. The boys are as alone out here, being watched by every block in the estate, as the occupants of each flat, drawing their curtains and locking their doors and making believe that they are the only ones inhabiting the buildings. 

   Ellis realises he has no one to turn to. The two boys with whom he killed that near-blind old man’s puppy are his only hope for friends at school, now that most of his own academic year have turned their backs on him. ‘What are we going to do with it then?’

   ‘What?’

   ‘The body. We can’t leave it here; someone’ll find it first thing tomorrow.’

   ‘Oh, so suddenly it’s our problem? A minute ago you wanted nothing to do with it, and now you want to hide it?’

   It is exhaustion, rather than a lack of desire to fight back, that drives Ellis to respond with silence. 

   ‘We could move it out onto the road,’ Phillip says after a short while, ‘then people will think it was just run over.’ He scratches the back of his head for a second or two, before realising that he is smearing dog’s blood into his hair, when he promptly stops. 

   ‘Alright, are you gonna be the one to carry it out there?’ Stephen asks, pointing at the mangled body on the concrete floor, lying in a puddle of its own blood. The legs lay askew, as if they are pieces of an Airfix model that were unpacked onto a desk but never got constructed; while the body is beaten to a pulp, caved in, barely recognisable as the shell of a mammal, and appearing instead more like a sack of wet, red sand covered in fur. The eyes stare out at the boys, seeming to follow their every movement, as their sockets and the nose that sits below them remain among the only body parts left intact. 

   ‘Yeah, I guess not,’ says Phillip, taking the time to smell his fingers. 

   ‘We should bury it,’ says Ellis, staring at the dead dog and sniffing back the upset. 

   ‘Fuck that,’ Stephen snaps, ‘I’m not burying it. Who carries a shovel round, anyway?’

   ‘Well, I say,’ Phillip says, almost to himself, as he finally succeeds in lifting the collar from the body using his stick as a hook, ‘that we just find one of the big blue bins and shove it in it. It’s a pretty light dog; we don’t even need to pick it up. Just hook it on our sticks and throw the sticks away with it.’ 

   He stares at the collar suspended on the end of his makeshift weapon for a while, before a sly smile creeps across his face and he starts to poke it in the direction of Ellis. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Ellis cries, as he bats the air in front of his face and tries to hold more tears back unsuccessfully. He sobs so hard that his chest shakes with the force of hiccoughs, as Phillip flicks the collar from the end of his stick and it hits Ellis in the forehead, before dropping into a puddle.

   ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Stephen interrupts, ‘let’s just throw away the collar, or burn it, or keep it, and mince the rest of this body so that no one can even recognise what it was.’

   ‘No!’ cries Ellis. 

   ‘Yes!’ chuckles Phillip, waddling back toward the carcass.

   ‘Don’t!’ weeps Ellis, choking on his tears, barely able to catch his breath through the heaving of his diaphragm.

   But the older boys ignore him, taking up their sticks and starting to pound once again at the body of the murdered canine. Phillip bashes its legs, over and over, his corpulent body wheezing with the effort of physical exertion as he brings his log down on the cracking bones; while Stephen focuses on the head, continually attacking the same spot like an axman chopping at wood, until the skull caves in and the eyeballs fall back into the mush and out of sight; while Ellis cries No, No, Stop. Together, the two boys growl and laugh and howl as they pummel and pummel away at the bones and organs of the dead creature, each one’s enthusiasm acting as fuel for the other’s, until they are a perpetual aggression machine, an automaton of violence that powers itself, wreaking havoc on the land and holding dominion over nature and all the power it purports to possess, until...

   Suddenly, Phillip finds that he is alone in the beating. He notices that his is the only weapon coming down on the carrion, and his excitement wains quickly, until he has no option but to look up to see what has distracted Stephen. He gazes upon an unexpected sight: an alarmed Ellis, covered in tears and scarcely able to breathe, but once again brandishing his own hitting log; and an unconscious Stephen, sprawled across the concrete alleyway, open-eyed and open-mouthed, blood gushing from a wide crack in the side of his cranium. Phillip’s legs cement to the spot, his log dropping to the floor, and the blood drains from his head, leaving him feeling dizzy and sick.

   ‘You... You killed him!’ He squeals at Ellis, who doesn’t look up from the staring eyes of Stephen. ‘He’s dead! You’ve killed him! Wh-what the fuck?!’

   Ellis slowly looks up at Phillip, seeming like a light that was switched on behind his eyes has suddenly been switched off, and then down at his branch. As if only just becoming aware of its existence, he instantly becomes sick of the sight of it and drops it to the floor, before also discovering the body of the boy he might just have killed and letting out a shriek. Sobbing violently, tears filling his eyes so that he can barely see where he is going, he turns and runs off into the night, as fast as he possibly can, with no destination and no plan of action except to run away forever.

   Phillip kneels by the body of Stephen, trying to nudge his face without getting covered in his hot blood.

   ‘Steve,’ he whispers, ‘Steve, wake up. Wake up, Stephen.’ He stays for a long time like this, trying to revive his friend, before he makes up his mind to evacuate. He looks up and down the alley, checking for witnesses, before hobbling off in a jog toward home, where he intends to tell no one what has happened, out of fear that he will be suspected of the murder of both the dog and the boy. With luck, his mother won’t even be awake to ask where he has been before he manages to reach the bathroom.

   As Phillip vacates the scene, the last witness remains: a small boy, no older than seven or eight, looks down on the alley from a window on the fourth floor of the nearest block of flats. He has been watching from the beginning, since the boys chased the puppy into the alleyway, and has remained their only avid viewer ever since. With the lights off in his bedroom and his pyjamas on, he witnessed the events unfold in silence, without emotion, as if watching it all through a clouded lens in a cartoon world. And now, as he sees the fat boy waddling off out of sight, he climbs back into bed, and prays for the soul of the slaughtered puppy.