The Loft – a night club in the centre of a Cumbrian frontier small-town, tourist magnet for the Western Lakes – tonight, up on the mezzanine, DJ Frank Clapp is, as always, in his Perspex-shroud music booth – most of which is a mock nod to the ancestry of his job, a turntable that doesn’t work, headphones he never uses – the whole playlist now copied to a laptop snuck away in the corner; with one click he can let the whole evening run without lifting a finger further (unless its Friday or Saturday when he offers up the odd request slot, at which point he will have to trace tracks with the cursor and double click after a brief announcement of name and reason for celebration or didicatee, who will of course whoop it up down below on the dance-floor) –

Tonight however, Frank will see something that will open his weary eyes, something he never thought imaginable here in this backwater – this hill prison – but that’ll come later, for now let’s take a look at Frank’s home -

Opposite his booth, on the far wall, next to the (tonight unopened) lounge bar and above the leather smooth sofa where the VIPs (if ever they come) get first choice, is the huge picture of naked Ophelia (or as bouncer Mickey Mick calls her ‘I’d feel ya’) – it’s a gilded frame photograph blown up to 6x5 of an auburn tressed sylph, lying on her back, breasts exposed and partially garlanded with laurel leaves, one leg bent to just hide her pussy and her face turned slightly to the right where her parted lips almost kiss her own fingertips in a kind of pseudo-orgasmic moan – all this through a soft-porn soft-focus fog – it’s the only picture on any wall (there are two plasma screens, one next to Frank’s booth, the other (bizarrely) over the podium at the dark edge of the dance floor) –

Our Ophelia was once the girlfriend of ex-club owner Max Silloth – both killed themselves in a suicide pact by jumping off Ladies Edge and breaking almost every bone in their beautiful bodies on the way down – the police told local reporters that when they found them they ‘looked like puppets who’d had the strings cut’- Max had made it fundamentally clear in both a letter to all his staff and in his will that he wanted Ophelia to stay on the wall and she had asked the same in her own missive – found, incidentally, with them at the bottom of the Edge – this was meant to be seen as a symbol of her eternal beauty and a triumph of goodness over evil, at least that was how Max had put it -