Prologue

Dante wonders through the concrete wasteland of south east London, railing at the world and his lot, lost, pissed off at life, sick of the drudgery and misery surrounding him and everyone he knows.

It's all shit, everywhere you turn, no one has any respect for themselves or others and the government just seems to oppress the working class for the benefit of a few ruling elite in Mayfair and Whitehall.

Three weeks ago Bea, his girlfriend of five years, was stabbed and killed when a fight broke out at a party - an accident supposedly, wrong person, wrong place, wrong time. He was there when the fight broke out and she was pushed back in a surge of people. She backed into a 14 year old boy running in from another room and the knife slid into her liver. He didn't witness the actual stabbing and can't resolve what happened in his mind. It is eating him up.

Blamed for taking her to the party and introducing her to the wrong crowd her parents, who were always wary of him as an outsider with a broken family, now shun him completely and prevent him from attending the funeral or even collecting his things from their house. This includes the locket necklace he gave her for her birthday, three weeks before she died. In it, two photos of them together in Ibiza and two drops of their blood locked in a frozen moment of happiness.

His parents never paid that much attention to him or his music and the murder has only pushed them further away. His father never listened to his lyrics, he just drank and insulted all the family, oppressing his mother and younger brothers under a regime of hideous language, threatening behaviour and drunken swipes in the dark. His mother is a broken rock, once a strong woman from a line of matriarchs, now just a shell of herself, hollowed out by years of continuous abuse in the face of blind love for a man who has lost his soul.

And now he's lost, at the arse end of some dodgy estate in Greenwich, trying to find the cemetery where Bea's buried. It took him three weeks to find out where they'd had the funeral - her parents, now barren after the loss of their only child, had left the country immediately after, seeking refuge with Bea' aunt and uncle in Vancouver. If his cousin hadn't worked at the hospital where she'd died, he'd never have seen the death certificate or the delivery notice to the undertakers, he'd never have known her grandparents came from this drab, forgotten corner of south east London.

Not that its proved much fucking help, three hours of getting lost, a broken and abandoned moped, no sign of the cemetery and night falling fast, bringing a biting chill and spits of rain to a late November night.

Fuck, he misses her so much, why can't he just find her grave and talk to her for five fucking minutes, tell her how much he loves and cares for her, ask her what really happened the night she died, hold her hand through the freezing earth in this fucking nameless wasteland?

Bea's spirit watches him as he wraps a hoodie round himself, shielding hopelessly from the wind and rain, stumbling unsure in ever decreasing circles away from the cemetery.   

She beckons him towards her and shows him the scene below them. Virgil listens as she unfolds the history of their love, their battle against her parents, her middle class friends edging away from them socially, his family always on edge, the party and that last look she threw at him before...

Only she can help him now, guide him through the broken shards of his young life back to a future worth living. Only she can show him how to deal with life without answers, life without justice. Virgil takes her hand and bows his head, pledging to be Dante's guide on the hard journey ahead.

As Dante rounds a corner on the estate, forced into a biting wind that's driving a vast belt of diagonal black rain into London, Virgil calls out to him in the night...