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“Not again…”

“Tell them the story.”

“I don’t… you tell them, man. You’ve heard it enough you must know it off by heart by now, surely?”

“Tell them.”

“All right, all right! Just… Jesus. All right – once upon a fucking time… once upon a time, there was a girl. Her name was Melissa, and the only shortened version of that name she accepted was Millie. Not Mel, not Missy, certainly not Lissa… though one of her friends did call her ‘Sa, but that friend was a bit of a dick, you ask me. I dunno, can a woman be a dick? Or is that a male-only insult?”

“Just tell the story.”

“Hey, man, you’re gonna make me tell this fucking thing over and over, at least let me editorialise, yeah? Otherwise, tell it the fuck yourself. I’m past fucking… OK, OK. So for a while there, Millie was knocking around with this loser Bruno. Now let me tell you - this Bruno, this Bruno was a dick, man. This guy was swinging in the wind. I mean, this guy opened his mouth and out came the pee-pee. And if you want to take that further, guy was also an ass – join the fucking dots, man. Guy played polo for a start. With ponies and everything. Like Prince fucking Charlie! Never did a day’s work, just lived off his grandpa’s trust fund like everyone else in his shitawful family. Old man was a big name in freeze-dried coffee, from way back. I mean, from way back when everybody thought instant was the future – before all this French Press shit and – I mean, before anybody’d even heard of Starbucks, you know? And he drove an Audi. Bruno, this is. Some top-of-the-range piece-of-shit – I’m telling you, this guy was like one of them guys in the shaving commercials. You know the sort I mean, right? Got himself all nice and smooth then stood and admired the job in the shaving mirror. Stroke that bristle-free cheek and bing! – little glint in his eye. I mean, god knows what Millie saw in him. Some chicks, yeah, obviously, some chicks would just see the dollar signs and be done, but Millie wasn’t like that. No way. She was way too proud to take a handout, ‘specially in return for – whatever. This girl stood on her own two. And she saw the best in everybody. Gave everybody the same – a square deal, you know? Respect an’ that. Which I suppose is how come she was hanging around with this rich deadbeat fuck in the first place. She saw something in Bruno that was worth – well, worth more than all the fucking coffee in Columbia – though I guess, after a while, whatever that was, it just wasn’t enough. So yeah, eventually Millie came to her senses and the two of them, they parted ways. Only Millie, being Millie, she was one of those chicks who went in for that whole amicable separation malarkey. Now I don’t know about you, but me – I ain’t amicable with a single one of my exes. Fuck that staying in touch, sending out Christmas cards, emailing round the holiday snaps bullshit – hell, most of my exes, we only communicated via the fucking lawyers, if we had to at all – but Millie… Like I say, Millie was a good person. Millie saw the best in you, even after she’d kicked your ass to the kerb. So Millie and Bruno, they stayed in touch. Even after both of them were well into seeing other people – which obviously didn’t take long in either case, ‘cos Bruno had the fucking Audi and all that, and Millie… Millie was just Millie. Hell, they both had queues. Only Millie’s should have been way longer.”

“So anyway, the lucky guy who managed to fight his way to the front of Millie’s queue was called Jimmy, and to this day I couldn’t tell you how Jimmy achieved this feat, seeing as how he certainly wasn’t blessed in either the movie star looks or the green folding department. But like I say, Millie had this thing, she saw the pearl in the oyster, and Jimmy – well, I guess Jimmy was the luckiest son of a bitch you’re ever likely to meet, and more so because this was the real thing. Jimmy loved Millie and Millie loved Jimmy and everything was ice cream on a sunny day. Everything was… say, man, how about getting me a drink while I tell this next bit, yeah? Throat fells like it’s got rattlesnakes crawling over it. Go on, man, just a little one?”

“When you’ve finished the story, then we’ll see.”

Read the complete story here.