Chapter One

Prologue

For as long as he could remember, Samienne Leluna had been known as Twinkle. He didn’t know why, or who started it, and it hadn’t occurred to him to ask people why. He simply accepted it, and wore a blue star around his neck, neither oblivious nor interested that the charm held inside its points an answer or two for him.

His real name was not ‘Leluna’, it was Tsezeya, and one would have thought that he would have kept it as a testament to his father, a Tsezeya, an ex-soldier from Zaraysk, who died when Twinkle was just a baby.

Nikolaus died in a road accident, narrowly escaping causing a larger one. He was on his way back from the shops to the quaint, yet large, Victorian home he shared with his wife, Emelyn, and their newborn, when he noticed a penny lying in the gutter. Believing it to be lucky, he bent down to pick it up, and was knocked down by a speeding car. The car skidded to a halt and the driver emerged to see a tall, pale-skinned man lying in the middle of the road, breathless and dying, surrounded by broken eggs and shocked pedestrians.

As he was only very young when it happened, Twinkle was never given the opportunity to get to know his father, and so he kept his mother’s surname; Leluna, a product of his hippie grandparents; and kept all memory of who came next, his mother’s boyfriend, hidden well away.

Twinkle’s childhood was a mish-mash of colours, imagination games, far too many books for a young boy, and licking the spoon after his mother had finished icing the cupcakes she regularly baked. His mother never had any more children, and Twinkle was her golden boy. He could do no wrong. She spoiled him with toys, the promise of a chippy tea every Friday night, and the answers to any question he had.

Thanks to his mother’s offbeat way of raising him, Twinkle grew up doe-eyed, and often found the real world a shock to his system. He avoided the newspapers and radio, and even began to hide away from the television, knowing that the ten-o-clock news every night would tell of famine, wars, and yet another rape, murder or other offence to somebody apparently innocent. He hid his head in books, finding himself prone to colds and flu thanks to the dust that they carried in their yellow, moth-eaten old pages, and found comfort in playing records in his room, delighting in the friendly way they crackled and whirred underneath the needle.

Though his view of the world around him was somewhat askew, Twinkle was no stranger to the things that the average young male knew of. He knew what he liked, and he was fond of it. He enjoyed the company of girls, and secretly kept his eyes peeled for boys that may or may not exist – those who looked somewhat like Robert Smith from the Cure mixed with an old movie star.

Twinkle lost his virginity when he was just fourteen, in a manner some would have been jealous of him for. It was with a girl called Heather, a buxom, blonde Goth, who wore an extravagant top hat as they had sex, squashed up in the cubicle of the ladies’ toilets at their school’s summer disco.

He could not say that the experience had not been enjoyable. Heather was four years older than him, and had a rather large body count before she discovered him. She knew what she was doing, and somehow, she also knew what he liked. She was beautiful, albeit brash, and Twinkle found himself saddened when she admitted to him afterwards that the whole affair had just been ‘a bit of fun’.

“These things aren’t serious,” she had told him, while wiping away remnants of purple lipstick, “They’re just for fun. You know that.”

“Of course,” he replied, looking at himself in the mirror – tall and awkward, with a mop of green hair on his head, “I just thought…”

Heather said nothing. She knew exactly what he thought, and so she approached him with a small peck on the cheek to compensate.

“You’re a handsome boy, you’ll be just fine,” she reassured, before adding, “By the way. Keep the green. I don’t really like blonde boys.”

Twinkle smiled sadly.

“I’m not blonde,” he answered her, “but thank you.”

So that sold it. From that day on, Twinkle decided not to have sex on ‘the first date’, however much he might want to or feel like it would work out. Heather might have only been eighteen, but he considered her advice sage, and the next person he was with, an Irish brunette named Abigail, stuck around for a little while longer.

He and Abigail had only been together for two weeks, but he had already fallen for her. He hadn’t said it, but he was sure that he loved her. He felt there was something strong between them, and though he didn’t quite understand it, he wanted to go with the flow, to see what would happen.

On the night that he and Abigail crossed that line, he felt stronger. Waves of some kind of passion surged through him. They might have been love, or possibly just the waves that often came with lust, but whatever they were, they urged him to open his mouth and tell her how he felt. Despite the conviction he had in his head, the words just would not come. He watched Abigail as she lay underneath the sheets, delicately breathing, a soft, pink smile upon her face as she slept – tired out by their first night as a ‘real couple’. As the music from her CD player began to fade out into nothing, in the moment between the silence and the electronic humming of the CD starting itself up again, Twinkle counted the beats of his heart in his head – considering just leaning in and kissing her once on the cheek.

“If she kisses back,” he thought, “She feels the same way. If she doesn’t, then…” He paused. What if she didn’t? He frowned. The adrenaline had messed with his head. He decided to ignore the whole thing, to try saying it again another time, when it seemed less clichéd.

Abigail and Twinkle broke up two days later. There was a massive argument, a lot of tantrums and tears, and he was never given a real reason why it had to end. For a long time, he swore off relationships entirely, retreating once again into his bedroom with his vinyl records and old novels. Given sufficient healing time, he came to the conclusion that he and Abigail had been too young, just nineteen, to have had a proper relationship anyway, and how would he have loved her in just two weeks?

When Twinkle turned twenty, his mother dropped a bombshell on him. She had cancer, and although she was going to have chemotherapy and any other treatments they could offer, it was still cancer. The very word scared both Twinkle and Emelyn, though neither of them would let on in full just how much. A well-meant hug of support and a trickle of warm tears from her son told Emelyn that she would be looked after. Twinkle knew that after two decades of being waited on, it was about time he grew up and started taking more care of her.

Emelyn kept herself fit. She continued to do the things she loved, in some cases even more so, and kept smiling. Despite feeling fairly upbeat and confident for somebody in her condition, Emelyn couldn’t help but worry for Twinkle. He seemed to disappear within himself, curling up into a shell he once wore when he was younger, even though he no longer fit into it, and the walls weren’t comforting any more. They were suffocating.