Winter of 2003, I'm sat on the edge of the mattress in my room with Ryan Adams singing about his Sweet Carolina from out the speakers behind me and with a cigarette 'tween my yap-flaps and with a lass from the technical college up the road stood at the door there, pulling her cardigan over her shoulders and running her hands through her hair, checking the reflection in the back-side of a Wildhearts CD.

"You look beautiful" I'm saying, and she does, with her Bruce Springsteen shirt and her bright-red moon-boots and her tartan trousers with the chains hung from her hip-bones to half-way down the avenue.

"Don't" she says. "It just makes it all the more… emo, the whole thing."

"Aye" says I, "Right enough."

"I'm sorry" she says, leaning down for to kiss me on the cheek afore she leaves, "I really am."

"Me too" says I. "Me too."

As she opens the door she says "You really should see it, y'know."

"I will" I sigh. "I will do that, right enough."

"Mean, it's a fucking classic."

"Aye. It is that, now."

Me and yonder lassie, manys a grand filth we'd planned, manys a curious shaming of science we'd been set for to conjure twixt the sheets. Manys a shocking gyration, manys a biological marvel.

Two steps shy o' the bed, we'd been, and she'd said "Bejeesus I'm gon' set light your knackers like the Dust Devil set light thon house on yonder plains."

With her tongue in my ear I'd said "Oh", I'd said, "I've never seen it."

She'd stopped, put her tongue back behind her teeth and said "What?"

"Dust Devil. I've never seen it."

A silence thick as the silence 'tween God's own thighs got to swelling round about the room.

Eventually she reached to the floor, lifted her cardigan and said "I'm sorry. It's a personal thing, I… I just can't sleep with a fella's never seen Dust Devil. It's a fucking masterpiece, I… I don't know how you can, just, like, woo a girl with patter all the colors of Tigon and Amicus and Hammer and then, when she's a wrist's flick removed from your willy just casually tell her you haven't seen the best British horror film since, like, whenever. Since The Wicker Man, maybe. Certainly since Hellraiser."

I stood there with the jaw all slackened and the tweeds at the ankles, the stripy pants all jutting now and again this way, then that.

"I'm sorry" she repeats. "I just… you're not who I thought you were."