Scene III: Lust

In the stairwell Dante can see shapes of figures again but no defined faces. He cranes his neck round and out across a corridor of balconies but only shapes, no faces. Turning back he stops fast, eyes fixed, breath drawn in, gasping and unable to call out.

Virgil has disappeared and a couple stand in front of him frozen on the top stair, the woman, in a white dress, clutching a lifeless dried up bride's bouquet, the man staring confused up the stairwell as if nervous of what's up there, a large pronounced hole through to the back of his skull, above his right eye brow.

Fran stares at Dante and tells him the story of how she met and fell for Troy when their crowd all went to Sahara Nights three years ago. They were inseparable for months and soon Troy asked Fran to move in with him in the flat he shared here with his brother Paul, number 93, up the way.

A year went by and life was great. Troy and Fran would hang out all the time with Paul and his girlfriend Maggie and the four of them would get smashed, go clubbing and never argue.

But Paul and Maggie had a fiery relationship and there were nights when the thin apartment walls couldn't hide their raised voices and her tears. One day, when she came home in the afternoon after teaching, Paul was sitting on the sofa staring into a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels. Maggie had left him after he'd taken a blind swipe at her during a fight last night. She'd taken her stuff and gone. He knew she wasn't coming back.

As she listened and drank with him on the sofa her pity and sadness swirled with the Jack Daniels and his watery blue eyes. She reached over and cupped his head in her hand pulling him towards her. That was the beginning.

Paul turns slowly towards Dante, looks at Fran, back again to Dante, and continues the story, the hole in his head beginning to bleed, a single thin line of dark red drawn the length of his face as he speaks.

After their first encounter, they both lay there dishevelled and sweating, part-terrified at what they'd just done, part-exhilarated at the danger and wrongness of it all. She'd just fucked her boyfriend's brother. He'd just shagged his brother's missus.

Fuck it was sexy, let's do it again!

They began to work out what time of the day was best to meet up at the flat and fuck. The times they weren't together became unbearable. Paul lay there at night in his room, broken by the sounds of the occasional sex Fran and Troy still shared together.

She lay beneath Troy thinking of Paul, her insides torn with guilt and an inevitable sense of dread. Their world twisted into tighter and tighter coils, both of them incapable of telling anyone else about their deal or running away together and leaving it all behind.

It went on for a year before Troy, never ill, ate some bad eggs out of the fridge that morning and went to work only to start retching continuously, shaking with the onset of salmonella poisoning an hour later.

As he got home he thought he could hear voices but assumed someone had left the telly on. He stumbled, sweating, stomach buckled, into the living room and found Fran on top of Troy, her hair pulled back, riding his brother like Seabiscuit.

Neither of them had any time to react. In a fit of rage and fever Troy lunged forward, snapped her neck round and she fell limp off Paul's body on to the floor, taking a can of beer with her so it glugged out across her lifeless body, before Paul could swing round and up towards him Troy pulled back his brother's head and drove the sharp end of his favourite Parker ball point pen deep into Paul's skull, freezing his expression in a terrified, gaping stare.

Paul stares at Dante, then back at Fran who squeezes the bouquet tight in her hand. A dried petal dislodges and fell to the floor. Paul looks back up the stairwell as if unsure if he should take another step forward.

From a few floors above, Dante hears Virgil calling his name and slowly, carefully, he slid past the doomed couple and up towards Virgil's voice.

On the floor directly above, the door to number 93 swings open on its hinges and Dante realises what Paul was staring up at from the floor below.