Chapter 1

George Claybourne left the secondhand bookshop feeling a little disappointment, he had wanted to pick up a couple of good books for the weekend but nothing in the small shop had taken his fancy. Walking down the busy London high street he might as well have been walking across a dessert, despite the press of bodies all around him George felt he was adrift on a lonely and personal sea.

London in the late sixties was a busy and exciting place for most young people. But the sexual revolution and free love had kind of passed George by. He was twenty two, a virgin and in love. The reason he had moved to London was that the person he had fallen in love with was his own mother.

When George’s father was alive he had been able to keep the feelings he had for his mother under control. But after his father’s death two years ago he found himself getting more and more obsessed with his mother. A year ago he decided that he would have to put some distance between them, so he had moved to London and found a job. At first George was convinced that the distance would help him to forget the feelings he had been having and move on with his life, but instead the feelings got worse. Now he not only lusted after his mother, he missed her terribly as well.

After a year of living in London his life consisted of working in a small office as a clerk and living in a dingy bed-sit. He had no social life, he was painfully shy, mainly because George had always suffered from a feeling that something didn’t quite fit right.

Every weekend George set out on a Saturday morning and took his dirty clothes to a laundrette. While they were in the machines he would do his shopping for the week and take it back home. Then while his laundry was drying he would scour the local bookshops for a few books to last him over the weekend and some of the evenings for the next week.

Today he had been unable to find anything that appealed to him and walked dejectedly back to collect his clothes. Walking back to his bed-sit George passed a lorry outside of an old house. Several bits of furniture had been thrown in the lorry but what caught George’s eye was three books that had been placed just underneath the edge of the lorry. George felt he was somehow drawn to the books, they were large and a bit tatty in places but George knew that he had to have them.

He waited beside of the lorry until two men came out of the house with an old threadbare sofa and threw it onto the lorry.

“Excuse me,” George said to the older of the two men. “um, these books here, you wouldn’t be able to tell me who I could see about buying them could you?”

The man looked George up and down and looked thoughtful for a moment.

“Well mate, we’ve gotta clear the place and take it up the tip. But I reckon I could turn me back for a moment or two for a fiver.”

Five pounds was a sizeable portion of George’s pay for the week and he knew that after he had paid his rent he would be short of cash until next payday. But George had to have those books, he didn’t know why, but he had to.

Paying for the books George struggled home with his laundry and the three heavy volumes.