Digby Jones, ruler of the dance floor at Seven Oaks, and owner of the finest French press coffee pot collection this side of the river Avon, was putting the moves on Little Orphan Annie. Disco was his thing, and old Jonesy, despite the tubbing waistline could still Saturday Night Fever it in a way that belied his nearly forty summers.

Little Orphan Annie, so smooth and sexy in her skin-tight leathers wasn’t in his league, but once he shredded her with the Lawnmower, she was his all night. Normally that meant the midnight closing time, but then she leant in, bit his right earlobe and whispered that she’d quite like to go back to his place and sit on him, if that was okay.

They were in the taxi home before Digby’s eyes uncrossed and he was able to say, ‘Sure.’

It was liberating. None of those awkward moments on the stairs, instead it was mad charge into messy bedroom where clothes were jettisoned in the manner of a man on fire.

Digby Jones gazed at her body, taut as a whippet, and smooth as a hairless Sphynx cat, and he gulped, adjusted his trousers and then said, ‘Eerm, Annie. How…uh…old are you?’

She moved forward, foal like, and gazed up at him with those big green eyes, and said, ‘Well, sir, I’m old enough for what you have in mind, don’t you worry.’

‘Righto,’ said Digby Jones, and followed her into bed. It was, despite the bony angles and the disconcerting sight of her boy’s chest trampolining above his sweaty body, pleasurable in all the right ways, and for the both of them too. Digby Jones filed that away in the part of his brain marked Inexplicable, but try and remember what you did for next time.

A rare moment of tender feeling rose inside him as he looked down at her little head sleepily resting upon his chest. ‘Say, Annie. Is it true, the orphan thing?’

Her sleepy voice said, ‘Hmmm?’ and then she added, much more brightly, ‘Oh yes, that’s all true.’

‘Gosh,’ said Digby Jones. ‘What happened? If that’s not too, uh, painful for-‘

Annie giggled. ‘No, silly, of course not.’ She shrugged her thing shoulders against him. ‘My parents were howwible to me, so mean. They’re weren’t nice at all.’

Digby Jones didn’t know what to say. He was beginning to feel a little creeped out by the baby talk. It had sparked something inside him at the disco, but now here, the pair of them naked in his bed. Not good.

Annie wriggled herself against him and swung herself around to sit facing him with her legs crossed. It was a pose Digby Jones remembered from his own childhood time, sitting cross legged in school assemblies. Oh God.

Annie leaned forward and took one of his big hands in both of hers.

‘But you’ll always be nice to be me, won’t you Dig?’ Her eyes were so big and so round, and so full of imagined future hurt. Digby Jones looked into those beautiful eyes and saw something looking back at him. Annie’s voice was no longer childlike, and she said to him, ‘Because I’d hate to lose you the same way I lost Mummy and Daddy.’