Revelation

Prolouge

Once it started, Kieran wrote, I couldn't stop. It couldn't stop. I was constantly drunk, constantly high. What he made me feel addicted me. I was an addict for him - I search for him and hoped for him every day. The things I would have done....

"Russian?" Kieran looked up as one of his fellow class students, a girl named Anna, with bright red hair and silver contact lenses with circle-framed glasses, barged into his room, that, miraculously, had did not have to share with one, or five other students. 

"Hm?"

"Someone on the phone for you. Didn't say the name, just asked for you, mate." She had an Vietnamese step-father that had been raised in Australia, who had been her step-father since she was small. She talked like he, as he did in Australia, with a strange likeness in her accent, to a natural Australian flow of high and low tones, and sweet, high laughter.

"Thank you."

She laughed. Her laughs changed with her mood; but they were always sweet and higher-noted.

"Pardon?"

"I thought you'd say - what do you lot say? Spasiba?" Her lips upwardly curved in a smile, showing her braces. 

Kieran smiled back at her. "You're a wonderful energy, Anna."

"It's all the sweet potatoe and rice and cabbage I've been fed since out of the blue." She winked at him, and her breasts swung heavily as she  turned around and left Kieran's room, leaving his door open ajar.

"Dobryy vecher, kto eto i kak ya mogu vam pomoch'?" Kieran glanced up the hallway as a few people turned around, idling in the hallway, as he spoke Russian down the line.

"Darling, it's your mother." He flushed slightly at his mother's soft Gloustershire accent and her sigh filled up all he could hear.

"Sorry -"

"Oh, don't worry about that. I love how well you can speak Russian - I could never quite pick up the language and I'm married to you Dad! Anyway, I called to ask you if you got my package?"

"Greg down at the office put a card under my door, saying he had things for me this morning. It must be that - Mum, please tell me you didn't -"

"Now, don't worry about that at all - I remember you have had enough cabbage to scare all the girls away when it is on your breath." Kieran bit down a laugh as his mother's chuckle made all the sudden apprehension disappear. "I put other things in there that will last in the fridge - some cured meat - and easy things you can heat up in the microwave, things you don't need my aga for."

"Thanks, Mum - sorry, it's just -"

"That assignment, don't stress." Her tone interrupted. "And when you come home for a few hours on Sunday, I hope you have kissed a girl at the least at Oxford, otherwise your Father will burst a vein. And he knows if you lie as well, chicken. Love you."

"Love you too." Kieran sighed, and pushed his glasses further up his nose. "Or, better still, I might have company, tell the sod that." This time he laughed, as his mother did again. When he hung up, he knew then it definitely had not been the moment to tell her he was not worried about the assignment of re-creating an en visage of one that had been done by a former - and well celebrated - female student of five years ago, of Oscar Wilde's, The Picture Of Dorian Grey. He was thrilled with the work he had been given and completed. It was something else, from the previous week.

Yeah, that thing - rather handsome thing - that will be on top of you tonight, you sly dog, a voice that was reminiscent of Frank Sinatra's whispered in the back of Kieran's head. It made him feel as though he had drowned.

"Jesus Christ." He murmured to himself.