The headline leapt like a screaming victim from the top of the front page - seems like some hack caption-editor had been reading too many Thomas Harris novels. The police knew they were after a male serial killer, such was the utter ferocity of the dismemberment. Maybe they were just playing mind games laying their cards on the table so blatantly.

Did he meet her in a crépèrie, his widow? Was it on the dilapidated Eurostar still a couple miles under the shrunk back ditch they used to so proudly call the Channel? It could have been in the Gare de Lyon itself with the Casper Triffids of unhappy family outings haunting the chill waiting rooms and exposed platforms. No, this was another journey, into the night.

Tourette's face had been crushed in a childhood accident and had set in geometric asymmetry that was both alluring and abhorrent in the same double take. You could still see the plane along which his baby boy skull was sheared as the industrial press came down inexorably. You could still see the scarring left by the agony of screams.

Concrete Jungle scrolled by like a battered old stage prop. Our hero had had his fill of the bus journey into town. The crushed velvet banality of mobile phone texters on this ride really got on his nerves. The stink of cheap perfume and baby vomit leaking out of their thumbed-in witticisms. The sky was his favourite subject. Like most northerners, he could talk about the weather for hours, simply loved the sky. "Today's sky was the colour and texture of Hoover dust." He enthralled his female traveling companion with his weathery nonsense. "Imagine drawing fingertips through the fine mist of dead human skin, the powdery residue of old skin on new."

Tourette was a cunning marketer of his own personal charm despite his facial disfigurement. He was never oily, always seeming sincere. And the ladies love sincerity in a man.

As he descended from the greyhound bus, the deserted centre of town split into seventeen prefabricated slabs of ugly Sixties commerce. Shoe shops split down the middle as the ladies' and the men's sections went their separate ways. It started to rain; the sort of rain that you can't see but on winter nights like these makes the road generate specular effects that give you migraines, your ears fill with wax.

The night club was like the whitewashed entrance to the Coliseum in Rome. Having kissed his way past the female bouncers, the inside of the nightclub was a cavernous underground complex of sodden bars, sticky dance floors, secluded wining and dining, nipple-ring tearing, cock-bar teething, cunt-thrush fingering, open heart surgery fisting areas set aside for the super-surreal sleaze elite. Here only the brave or desperate ventured for voyeurism of full contact corporate-meishi exchange of bodily grease.

The clientele were like a load of screaming kids on the bouncy castle of life. Gay abandon with no parents to pour scorn on the bad lads. Yes, Tourette was a bad lad. He would only screw their lifeless brain-swapped corpses until the nearly grown-in neurone mesh started to get a foothold and twitches and grimaces of consciousness would flash across their desperate faces, mouths popping open streaming dog-spit smelling gastric juices lifted up from the jealous bile duct.

Tourette was on the pull tonight, his night of watching had just begun; relaxing into his environment, assuming the role. Though you wouldn't think to look at him, he was a direct descendant of peacock stock. He hid his living tail rainbow of mesmerizing plumage so well until - out there, buried nose deep in the swaying sweating heaving throng of beat-adulants - he literally came apart in a fluttering dance haze of utter erotic charge.

You catch glimpses of his jiving magic in strobes of temporal horror highlighting the sheer blood hunger in his eyes. The flash of drilled incisor, blood red gums peeled back to the foreign root.

Tourette moves in, testing the collective strength of the pack. First splitting off a likely sub-clientele from the herd.
Working the joint.
Manipulating mind sets.
Awaiting any chink in socio-genetic armour to make itself known.
He had whittled them down to a few weak or old one's and was refining his selection, schmoozing and moving in on Zebra Woman as if in slow motion, a perfect hunter's elegance. The visor of the executioner was coming down, growing over time, you could actually hear the glass crystallizing in its frame, the vision was focussing on his prey.
He readied himself for the coup de grace.
An old school chum of Zebra Woman charged drunkenly into the fray, his new mobile phone held out like a quartz display glowing gold medal from the Dopey Olympics.

Tourette hung back a while, considered a back up plan, got a new scent, didn't want to attract attention to himself by snapping some dopey guy's neck in public. Kept his eye on the next easy target, just in case he needed to bale.

"Sorry," Zebra Woman said."What did you say you majored in?" He knew in that instant that she would be his for surgery. Suddenly, his eyesight failed him.

It was that albino girl again, Tourette had seen her all over the place in recent weeks. The Chill ran through his body and his stomach grumbled hungrily at the sight of new blood. But he was no Hollywood Vampyre. She walked down the sliver plate spiral staircase like an angry poodle, her eyes set to infinity. The jeans were too tight, maybe that was it. They angered her.

Split peach; split peach - he was thinking of all the different ways to say split peach. He knew a few exotic languages but couldn't find a way to say split peach and make it mean what he wanted it to. Clearly some things are not for translating.

She smelled of Jasmine, even from that far away. As she got nearer and nearer to Tourette, the smell ripped into frequencies of the ear, churned on into a physical, itching sensation under his coat, which he flat out refused to deposit in the cloak room on his bouncer-kissing entrance. He could feel his arm veins begin to literally burn with need. And what a man could do with those arms, daily Immac'd of body hair and kept in peak physical form, like the rest of his hairless body, at the gym up on Acton.

Her name was Lily Veyne and she was clearly from another planet; you could see the scintillations of the light speed journey in her pink bunny eyes, her military smile.

Here are snatches of interstellar speech that form the truncated transcript of their first meeting:

Lily Veyne: Very soon, someone will come along who is altogether better and shinier than you. She sipped from her Red Witch, a trickle of juice ran down her white chin.

Tourette: What is my job description? He smiled to himself, hiding a silent burp and ordered another gin and vodka lemonade (Tourette's favourite cocktail) from a passing tray girl on skates.

Lily Veyne: We are the cheap food. Digested by the mobile stomach of the Journey and shat out at our destination. Prisoners of the road, shackled to our shuddering seats.

Tourette: If you couldn't find a manufactured cleavage to sink your hand drilled incisors into, then a homemade, blood seeping, puss dripping, raggedy old one would have to do.

It was like two rivals to the territory of the bizarre staking out their claims.

She brought him a present on their second date. A small child no more than two, three years old. Said she found it in the middle of the road. Half dead. She opened up the CO-OP forever carrier bag and showed him how she had caved in the little mite's head with the boot heel of her Swiss army surplus to end its pain. From that quick gory glimpse, you couldn't tell the sex of the thing.

She clicked her fingers and the finger nail of her right hand index finger started to pull light into it. The warping region of her fingertip
elongated, stretching the shiny red nail with it until it was easily a foot
long. Drawing the fingernail through the air, a rift opened up and Tourette's red right hand lifted involuntarily into it, up to the elbow as the insects and grass and air currents of another Earth far, far away across the galaxy played upon his flesh. He was suckered in, to the hilt.

Tourette started to forfeit pieces of himself, like Phantom Limb Syndrome where a lost limb is still physically perceived by the host, but with full consent. The first thing to go was his cock which, he claimed, no true man really needs, such was his belief that sexual pleasure was mostly in the mind of the beholder and that was where you had to score.

How wrong he was. Daily, the beasts on the other side of the rift chewed on, clawed at, swallowed and digested his isolated member. He felt crablike pincers crimping its entire length. He felt layers of silt grow upon it and the trickle of a Spring melt-stream, the highly-polished rumble of rock on shale. He had joined the legendary brokers' club, League of Gentle Men, only three days hence and already he was apologizing for his conduct. On the culinary porn planet of SZUSJI, no-one had ever tasted so good for so long.

Nobody at the office noticed Tourette's lost pounds of flesh, of course. They still existed in Tourette's here and now, only the nervous matrix had been transported across the galaxy. Over time, you could see how he twitched and shook as some alien animal of the forest gouged impossibly sharp whiskers into the muscular nerve structure of his isolated thigh.

He began swearing out loud in public meetings or corporate conferences, attracting the anti-social vibe all round him like a stink of horse manure on a stuffy summer day. The tickle of flies in the back brain where he was off on one of his other worldly sexual pleasure trips.

Lily Veyne gained great insight into the human condition from her run in with Tourette the twitcher, Tourette the charmless, Tourette the abusive, Tourette the terrifying. He lost his position in society and became totally dependent on Lily Veyne for his very sustenance, ironic don't you think. Twelve long years of sexual consumption from now she would be Tourette's Widow.