He finished smoking, got out the car and walked over. Becca dropped to her knees and reached out for his waist. He skipped back, teasing. She fell in the mud. Face-down, her purple birthmark, the length of her right calf, showed. So dirty, he thought. And then he heard the dogs from over the hill. Bounding was what he thought them to be doing. Fucking dogs.

The car stopped in the gravel park.
‘Get out,’ he said to Becka, leaning across to open the passenger door, his arm against her tub. She picked up her plastic bag and stood there awaiting his next instruction.
He wound down the window and shouted, ‘Get to the front of the car and look at me.’
She walked round in the rain. He flicked on his full beam and turned up the music, Dirty Old Town. ‘Dance bitch!’ he shouted, clicking the lights on and off in time. ‘Sexier,’ he bellowed, his head out the window.
Becka shook her hips arrhythmically, pulling her skirt up tight over her thighs. She smiled. She was hopeful.

A boy danced by the bus stop, twisting in puddles. Becka stood and watched. Russell Watson on the MP3 player. The boy's grey bottoms were lagged from the rain. The bus came and went. Becka stood and watched the boy. There would be no bus for another hour. She decided to walk home. On a good day this was 45 minutes.
She hugged walls and inched towards trees, her head covered in a clear plastic hood. Her shoes glistened. A car pulled up to her pavement. Of course it was black. The windows were steamed up. You couldn't see who was inside. The horn beeped, Becka leant over and removed her headphones. She moved back to let the door open and sat in the car. It moved off slowly, headlights dipped low, in the direction of St June's Hill.

People walked dogs on St June’s Hill day and night, even in the rain. The trees provided shelter. There were two paths trod regularly. Off the tracks were dips and hiding places in which kids drank and smoked with phones. It was here that townsfolk grew up. Becka had shared a picnic there with George from BWS last summer. He came on too strong under a pussy willow.

Becka sat at the checkout, challenged but smiling. Passing cheese over the magic square she looked out the glass and said, ‘hope the weather changes.’ Rain day after day had left the town empty, people fortressed in their homes. But the dogs stayed out. Every June when it rained, they overran the town screaming, the bitches in heat, scattering at the first sign of a rainbow.

The Big Issue seller was found dead just two days before. Flesh had been torn from her in clumps and piled up in a short mound. The old boy discovered her in the downpour, naked but for the paisley scarf she wrapped round her head. The pub said that it was the dogs and a table thought she deserved it, no right in our town.

‘I don’t want to walk home tonight. Not like this,’ Becka said, absently stroking the boy band pin under her name tag. Ah, Becka.