It really wasn't an easy scene for me to watch, so I didn't stand there for very long. Slowly and with a sick feeling in my stomach, I turned back into the crowd of revellers and began to make my way out of the club.

You know it wasn't as if I was just angry, there was a terrible feeling of disappointment I felt as well. I'd just seen the two people who I thought were my closest and most trusted friends standing on the dance floor kissing and cuddling each other. One, the woman I loved and I'd thought I was about to become my wife. The other, my oldest friend and confidant, the guy I was just about to set up a business partnership with. You know you really have to trust someone if you're going into business with them, the same kind of trust you need to have in a woman when you decide to ask her to marry you.

Damn it, it looked like I'm just fucking useless when it came to picking the people I put my trust in. Both of these two had let me down, just like the first woman I'd asked to marry me had.

How come I'd discovered them in that clinch on the dance floor? Well, you see, in theory I shouldn't have even been anywhere near there. It was the old story of the guy coming home unexpectedly a day early and catching the mouse... No, hang on there, the fox and the mouse at play.

Frankie and I were just about to set up as agents in the UK for a Korean company, which was planning on moving into Europe in a big way. I'd been on a visit to Holland to meet up with the Koreans and a few of the guys who were hoping to be agents for them in some of the other EU countries. Well, things had gone pretty well and, I'm going to be honest, the whole damn thing kind of turned into one big party. I'd got on very well with a couple of French guys and a Spaniard; we'd kind-a tied one on a bit.

I'm not sure how the subject had come up, but during the afternoon I'd mentioned that I'd had to cancel my engagement party to make it to the conference. Now I'm pretty sure that if Jose had been sober he'd wouldn't have suggested the idea, and if I'd been sober I'd have turned him down flat anyway. But I had vague memories of four rather drunken guy's climbing into that little Cessna so that Jose could fly us all home. Looking back, I'm surprised that no one at the airfield had realised just how pissed we all were, and didn't stop us from flying.

As it was I had jumbled recollections that we were crossing the North Sea. I believe I did get a little worried; I'm not sure if it was Jose's condition that worried me, or if it was the fact that my bottle of Scotch was empty. Anyway we made it to our town's local amateur airfield. Jose, Jacques and the other guy refused my offer to stop over and promptly took off again, disappearing in the general direction of Wales.

I'd think I called Lydia's mother, who told me that she'd gone out with her girl friends for the evening. Now as there were only three places with any nightlife in town, I'd found her at my second stop. Damned if I can remember how I got there though. The trouble was that when I did, I'd bloody found her making whoopee on the dance floor with my prospective partner.

One thing I couldn't get my head around was that Frank, the guy I'd just seen holding my intended bride in his arms, had been the one who had tried to tell me not to marry my first wife Fiona. When I'd told him we were getting married, he'd gone all quiet on me for a while and it had taken me sometime to winkle out of him that he thought I was making a big mistake. But I couldn't persuade him to enlarge.

That conversation was to cause a rift between us that lasted a lot longer than the marriage to Fiona did.

My marriage that I thought had started out very well - hey, we had a brand new house and Fiona fell pregnant within four months - lasted exactly two years from church to divorce court. It turned out that Fiona was one of those women who couldn't keep her legs crossed. Whether Frank knew or he just didn't trust her, I never did find out. When we became friends again, neither of us ever brought the subject of Fiona up again.

Okay, so you're all itching to find out how I discovered that Fiona was - well, to put it bluntly, a slut. I must tell you that it has very little bearing on this story, other than to give you an insight into my state of mind. Which is very important!

To tell you the truth, I didn't discover that Fiona was a slut who was cheating on me. The credit for that discovery has do go to our next-door neighbour Bridget. I came home from work one evening and as I turned into the street where my house was, a police car passed me. I watched the thing, as it tore down our suburban street at breakneck speed and came to a stop beside a crowd of people who were standing on the pavement outside my house.

When I arrived on the scene, one officer was restraining Bridget, whilst in the middle of my front lawn, another officer was attempting to tend to the injuries of a rather excited and somewhat dishevelled Fiona. Unfortunately Fiona was making a very good job of fighting off his ministrations. It didn't take very long for the extremely verbal Bridget to inform me that Fiona and Bridget's husband had been playing a cosy game of house together.

The occupants of the second police car to arrive were pretty quick in discovering the comatose body of Bridget's husband. He was found lying in my rear garden, stark naked and with a lump the size of a cricket-ball on his head, where apparently Bridget had hit him with a rolling pin.

A side point that has nothing to do with this story at all: Fellas, if your missis is Irish or even has a drop of the Gaelic in her blood, don't go fucking around on her behind her back! Damn, those Irish girls can have some bloody temper on them.

Anyway back to the story. It soon became apparent that Bridget had sneaked into the back door of my house, where she had discovered her husband and Fiona in flagrante delecte, no, flagrente dilicto. Oh, bugger, you know where we're going here; they were fucking like a pair of bunny rabbits from Bridget's description.

Anyway Bridget was just a little bit peeved when she discovered them and she chased her wayward husband out of the house, apparently raining blows on him with her rolling pin as she did so, until finally she'd knocked the arsehole clean out in the rear garden.

Whilst Bridget was otherwise occupied, Fiona had decided that making herself scarce would be the prudent thing to do. Fiona had thrown some clothes on, and was in the process of making her escape through the front door when Bridget, having dealt with one of the adulterers, found the time to deal with the other. Somehow Bridget had lost her rolling pin, when it had become imbedded in the windscreen of Fiona's car. It was apparent that the two women then entertained the growing crowd of concerned(?) neighbours, with a traditional catfight.

From the look of the two girls' clothes, or should I say the lack of them, it had nearly got to the point where it could be called pornographic. It appears that besides trying to pull each other's hair out and scratch their opponent's eyes out, they had tried to remove each other's clothing as well, one small piece at a time; from what I could see they very nearly succeeded, before the police arrived and stopped play. It took three ambulances to take all the protagonists to three separate hospitals, for safety's sake, the police informed me later me later.

For economy of words and as this story isn't really about Fiona and me. Both women were charged with public order offences and with assaulting police officers. The police did ask me if I wanted to charge Fiona with assaulting me as well, as it had fallen to me to calm her down in the end and I hadn't gotten away completely unscathed. Actually when she saw it was me she was fighting with, Fiona fainted, probably because she realised the bubble was about to burst.

Anyway Bridget was charged with GBH on her husband as well. Fiona and I divorced pretty quickly, although the arguments over maintenance slowed things down a bit and the paternity case went on for a year or so. But DNA tests were to prove that I was no relation to Fiona's son, or the daughter she bore seven months after her fight with Bridget. Quite a disappointment really, as I was just about getting used to the idea of being a daddy.

Oh, neither child had the same father and out of interest, Bridget's husband didn't sire either of the children either. God only knows what happened to Bridget's marriage and I didn't really care. I did kick the shit out of Bridget's husband outside one of the local pub's one night; strange but there were never any ramifications to that one. I never could understand that, as he knew full well who it was that worked him over that night. Perhaps the bastard found a conscience, or maybe he was just relieved that he didn't have to keep looking over his shoulder any more.

Fiona does have a bit of a habit of turning up at my place now and again, asking me whether I can forgive her and take her back; some bloody hopes she's got.

Thinking about that, and what I'd discovered about Lydia and Frank in that night club, I'm beginning wonder whether I've got a bloody big sign on my back that says "MUG" in great big letters. You know, is there something about my personality that tells folks this stupid bastard can be taken for a bleeding ride?

Okay, enough of the history; back to the real story. There I was walking out of the club, totally pissed-off with the world and just about everyone in it, when Sharon, one of the girls who's always kicking around the local club scene comes up to me. Sharon's a nice, pretty girl, but she appears to spend most of her time in a state of permanent inebriation. Christ knows how the girl ever finds her way home at night. No, that's a silly question, Sharon probably gets a "ride" home quite easily; she just has to figure out who's bleeding bed she has woken up in, in the morning.

Damn it, there I go digressing again. Anyway Sharon comes up - correction, "staggers" up to me - mumbles her normal greeting, "Hello, Handsome." And then she throws her arms around my neck and proceeds to try to lick and suck my tonsils out; you get the general idea. Now this wasn't actually an unusual thing for Sharon to do, because she is a very friendly girl, but it always is a little disconcerting. You never knew who or what had been in that mouth of hers earlier in the evening. No, not me. I'd always treated Sharon as a friend; besides one course of penicillin jabs in the arse when I was young had been enough for me to get a little careful over the years.

"What wonderful news. Congratulations to you and Lydia," Sharon slurred at me after she removed her tongue from my throat. Then releasing me from her grasp and, before I'd recovered my breath enough to say anything to her, she promptly disappeared into the crowd again.

"Damn it, that's old news now, Sharon," I thought to myself. At Lydia's mother's insistence the official announcement of our engagement had been posted in the local newspaper that very week. Sharon didn't know that that engagement had just come to a sudden and unexpected end.

Out in the car park, I found Frank's car and kicked both headlights in. Yeah, well, it's the kind of thing you do when you're pissed off and drunk. Well, I think it was Frank's car anyway; you know you don't really think straight when you're in the condition I was that night.

I was about to kick in the headlights on Lydia's car, when the thought entered my mind that it wasn't a very good idea, when you consider that it was actually my car. I let Lydia use my car when I was out of town. So instead, I dug the keys out of my pocket and drove the damn thing home. No, not really a clever thing to do, when you'd drunk as much as I had that day, but I wasn't in any condition to think sensibly.

I stormed into the house and to start with, I was knocking the place about a bit. You know breaking ornaments and the like. But then it struck me that it was my fucking house I was busting up, so that wasn't a good idea either. Although Lydia had been staying there most of the time for the previous six months or so. It was my bleeding house I was smashing up.

I'm not sure what happened after that, I must have fallen asleep on the bed. Anyway I think it was about two AM when my bloody mobile phone started ringing and woke me up. You know what it's like when you waken from a drunken stupor. I knew I could hear the bloody phone, but I was buggered if I could find the damn thing. The phone went to the message service before I found it in the laundry basket. How did it get in there? Well, I'm buggered if I know, but that's where it was. I tracked the fucking thing down by calling it from the landline.