The Flirt. Kathleen Tessaro

       La Vie Bohème

      The ad appeared in the Stage in the second week of September, when the Edinburgh Festival was officially over and real life made its unpleasant appearance again in the collective consciousness of the large number of unemployed young actors who populate the London area.

      It read:

       Unique situation available for an attractive, well-mannered, morally flexible young man. Hours irregular. Pay generous. Discretion a must.

       Please send photo and brief romantic history to:

       Valentine Charles

       111 Half Moon Street

       Mayfair, London

      Hughie Armstrong Venables-Smythe was sitting at his usual table, next to the window in Jack’s Café, armed with a pen he’d nicked from the waitress, a strong cup of builder’s tea and his mobile phone, which was running out of credit. Outside, the sun was radiant, the air sharp with a brisk autumn breeze. Elderly shoppers, dragging battered tartan trolleys, paused to examine the merits of the half-price bleach in pink plastic baskets outside the Everything For a Pound shop on Kilburn High Road. Others hurled themselves into bargaining sessions with the red-faced Irish butcher, his bacon suspiciously reasonable.

      Here, Hughie was among his people; living the front-line, hand-to-mouth existence of a jobbing actor in NW6, still quite a rough neighbourhood according to his mother, despite the recent boom in house prices.

      Spotting the ad, he circled it and leant back, satisfied. In his trade, buying the Stage and circling ads was considered an entire day’s work. He lit a fresh cigarette to celebrate.

      He’d only just started smoking; Marlboro Lights. It was a disgusting habit. He’d picked it up from his girlfriend Leticia, who was full of the most delightfully disgusting habits known to man, of which smoking was easily the most socially acceptable. At twenty-three, it made him feel sophisticated. But then Hughie needed all the help he could get, especially as Leticia was a great deal older than him and more sophisticated than he was ever likely to be. Although they’d only been (he was thinking of calling it ‘going out’. But was it really going out if in fact you never went anywhere or did anything but just met several times a week in strange, dark places to have wild, wordless, pornographic sex? Probably not. The proper social heading was more likely to be ‘seeing one another’, which they’d only been doing for about two weeks), Hughie was already violently in love.

      Ah, Leticia!

      What was not to love?

      Everything about her was perfect—from her glossy, black bob, doe-like brown eyes and soft, pink Cupid’s bow lips, to the way she screamed, ‘Spank harder, you horny little bastard!’