He needn't have run as the bus was late as usual and while waiting, he noticed a disreputable looking woman loitering under the streetlamp at a nearby junction. She was illuminated to a sufficient extent that Stig could cleary discern her crop top, mini skirt and fishnets - the very habiliments of the sex-worker. She reminded him of his mother, for when they had lived on Jake's smallholding, Veronica had supplemented her husband's meagre earnings by working as a stripper, storming The 'Ducking Stool' – the adjoining backwater's grotty little inn - every other evening to provide its patrons with a lewd and fully uninhibited one-woman cabaret. Stig had been lucky enough never to have borne witness to any of these vulgar and shameless attempts in relieving the rural boredom: his mother, dancing on the tables whilst inching off her synthetic leopard print miniskirt, flinging it to one of the regulars before succeeding to mount the bar and parade its length several times over, her g-string rapidly accumulating the necessary; one minute she'd be throwing herself into the arms of an inebriated yokel, the next she'd be swinging from the ceiling fixtures in nothing but red stilettos.
    The woman was no different back on the farm either, and with a succession of cold shudders the unwelcome memories steadily resurfaced: the kitchen sink, cracked and grimy, overflowing with lacy black smalls stewing in murky tepid ditch water; row upon row of wet stockings aligned before the fire; bras dangling like stalactites. The shortness of everything, the thin and revealing scantiness, his mother's massive breasts lolling under flimsy translucent negligees, that inescapable stench which seemed to ooze out of every nook and cranny, so difficult to define yet impossible to ignore. Veronica hitched her skirts so high her suspender straps were permanently on display, rigorously upholding her stockings, and Stig had long ago concluded that the woman was a slut, a trollop, no better than a common or garden tart who inspired only an urge to escape in her downtrodden midget son. Yet she was nothing when compared to Jake.