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Fiction Direct

Shane Dos

Adrenaline is a powerful drug and one Shane cannot live without - well, not forever, anyway.

It is six years earlier and Shane has a problem -

Boredom

The quiet life in rural Spain may have helped to keep him a free man but it wasn't enough.

He wanted something to give him a kick.

After all, what is life without kicks?

It was late evening and Shane was outside a small Madrid bar, near his hotel. He was drinking beer, watching the world go by and thinking about what he was going to do that night. The bar was on a corner of a busy paved square. He noticed Lola first. She came out of the strollers slim and straight up. Her short dark hair was picked out at the tips in bright red and she had the face for it. She was dressed in a blue and white fifties style blouse that almost came down to her midriff and had a nifty little stand-up collar. Her skirt was of stretchy material. It was short and had the face of some Indian god or the other on it in pale washed out colours. She had good legs. Straight off Shane wanted to touch her. He didn't even notice the the guy half a step behind her. Anyway wasn't she smiling at him ---- just a little bit, like she'd clocked him clocking her. Then the guy was in front of her and he had white legs and trainers and was wearing shite shorts and a stupid baggy vest, with the name of some baseball team on it. His skinny arms were outstretched and he was going. "Mate! Mate! You don't fucking know how happy I am to see you!" As well as knowing the gangly cunt coming towards him and trying to decide whether he wanted to be found or just fuck off or what, Shane noticed that the woman was with him. By then Rob was on him, trying to hug him like they were long lost brothers or something and Shane said. " Get the fuck off me!"

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That Bloody Female Poet
- a novel before 'Google'.

Victorian India and twentieth century London.

Love, sex, violence and poetry - perhaps not too much poetry.

Follow Victorian poetess, Lawrence Hope's passage through India - and a novelists search for the truth of her life.

Laurence Hope, AKA Adela Florence Nicolson, AKA Violet. Born in 1865 near Bath, she died at her own hand in her beloved India in 1904.

Author of The Garden Of Karma, Indian Love and Stars Of The Desert. Her poetry was considered so risqué at the time, she had to publish under a mans name of Laurence Hope.

Plenty of people have pawed through he facts of Adela's life but there is only so far you can go. Any one with a library card and enough time on there hands can find the bones of it but the meat is missing. Perhaps this is what eighty years in the grave gets you, a veil of mystery over a simple life. But don't hold that thought. In fact or fiction she led anything but a plain and simple life. She spent eighteen months dressed as a boy following her husband, Colonel Nicolson as he fought in the Hindu Kush.

Look. A glimpse. The train is moving. He beckons. Without a moments hesitation she pushes aside the whimpering, waving wives and hitching up her skirts, runs. She a picture in bruise blue organdie topped off with a porkpie hat with a veil. Hands seek to restain her but wild horses will not stop her. She sprints until there is only a few yards in it. Malcolm is hanging from an open door. A last bounding effort and Malcolm and Adela cling to each other, kiss and laugh like baboons. The station recedes. Liberated at last! With a whoop of joy,She pulls the hat from her head and sends it tumbling, Bouncing into the slipstream of the speeding train. Hair almost cropped, breasts bound, skin stained, it was a different person detraining along with the rest or the regiment: an Afridi boy.