He sits and thinks, and thinks. Thinking is easy, so he thinks some more.

After a fair bit of thinking he stands and walks, after a fair bit of walking, he finds that he's thinking again, he stops.

He hasn't gone very far.

But he's there.

He's here.

It hit him like a fly on a windscreen, not a huge splat, he hadn't been thinking at full speed after all, but certainly an audible splodge, enough to stop him thinking, enough to make him realise.

Carlos Bohemios is of average height and a little overweight. He is not well travelled but has holidayed in the sun since he was 7 years old. He makes his living by selling his labour to the council, in the housing department. He likes to drink with his colleagues on a Friday but doesn't actually like many of them. He likes to drink at home, he likes Pimms, people don't know this. He reads Science Fiction novels and surfs the internet for porn, he has no preferred fetish. He craves excitement but is scared of it. Girls like him but he thinks they don't. He still hasn't figured out who sent him the disc but he has figured out exactly what he needs to do with it. Carlos Bohemios isn't his real name.

His real name is Robert.

It's Saturday.

He's in the stairwell of his tenement flat in his pants thinking about flies on his windscreen. Mrs Jackson from upstairs is not impressed, she tuts loudly as she passes him with her messages. She can't resist looking at his packet though, she's a tortured soul. She'll take this out on her cat, poor Mr Fluffington.

The disc. That's why he's here, on the stairs, tipping his neighbour into repressed sexual turmoil. He got this disc in the post 3 days ago. At first he thought it was a joke, but he didn't get it. It had taken him until now to work out that it couldn't possibly be a joke because there was nothing even remotely funny about it. A disc with a bunch of blank word documents, addressed to him with a telephone number and a wad of £10 notes, it's just not comedy.

At 7.00 a.m on Wednesday morning the postman buzzed, Robert sat up, looked confused, turned "off" his alarm and slowly stumbled to the front door.

"Hello," he slurred

"Postman," said the voice on the intercom. He had no reason to doubt it.

The postman, he decided, was a cunt. He consistently buzzed Robert and not any of the other residents of his piss-scented stairwell. He resented the responsibility of allowing the postman in to deliver mail to the entire block. Did no-one else care about their post? Did they not want letters? Sod them. But what if they didn't get their bills? He hated the responsibility but couldn't bear thinking that one of his neighbours might get cut off.

He waited by the door. The cunt postman came and pushed some letters through the letterbox. Bastard!

There were three envelopes. One was his telephone bill and one was from Readers Digest exclaiming that he was lucky enough to have made it through to the money-spinning second round of a Cash Prize Draw. He could win a car! The third envelope clattered on the floor.

Envelopes didn't normally clatter on Roberts floor. Clattering envelopes were the domain of businessmen receiving free pens with their name on them, or hobbyists who order bits of obscure models which inexplicably hadn't been included in their 1967 Vulcan bomber scale replica.

Maybe he had got a pen. He allowed himself to become excited for a few moments, a pen with his name on would be cool.

It wasn't a pen, it was a disc. And a phone number. And £270 in £10 notes.

He was surprised it had clattered. The money was pretty good padding to be honest. The edge of the disc jutted out just a little at the end of the wad, it must have landed on this end producing the clattering noise which had sent him wistfully of into the realms of personalised pen ownership.

Couldn't be for him. That was his logical first thought. It must be for someone else on the shared stairwell. Mail often got mixed up and delivered to the wrong flat. It was probably for the young speccy guy on the second floor. He looked like the type that would get discs delivered to him. Robert couldn't decide whether to keep the money. The speccy lad would just think it got lost in the post. These are risks you take when you get people to send you money. He'd just have to take it on the chin. Robert deserved it anyway, really. He was the one who always let the postcunt in, without him no-one would ever get any mail. This would be like his wages for being the bastard postman letter inner. The very nature of this job though would make him the first port of call when speccy came looking for his loot. Wasn't worth it really. Robert resolved to drop it round to him on the way out when he went to work.

This would be daft though, seeing as it was addressed to Robert Andrews, 17(flat 5) Polwarth Terrace, Edinburgh. That, quite plainly, was his address, and his name. The intriguing parcel was for him.

What do you do when you get sent something like this? Phoning the number would be a good start. It was a mobile phone number. He hated phoning mobile phones from his land line. In fact he hated mobile phones, he didn't have one and he never missed it. If he was out and about doing his thing he didn't want to be contactable, he was a free spirit, didn't want to be burdened.

He didn't get out much.

He rang the number.

"beep bop bee bop bop bee bee bop beep bop bop," went the phone.

"brrp brrp," went the phone, a few times.

"Robert," went the phone, "do you know that it's 7 in the morning?"

Not a familiar voice. A nice voice, but not familiar. A womans voice. A nice, unfamiliar womans voice. He kind of liked it.

"Ummm, I got your parcel, I think there has been some sort of a mix up, I.....who is this?"

"I'm the person who has just sent you two hundred and seventy quid"

Factually correct as that statement was, it didn't really get him anywhere. He had this part of the story pretty much straight. He really wanted an answer to the 'who is this?' bit. He could tell she was English though, or posh Edinburgh. Actually more likely to be posh Edinburgh but to be honest he didn't really care. He wanted to know who she was.

"Thanks, but I'm sure that there's been a mistake. Why have you sent me two hundred and seventy quid? And who are you?"

"I'm........yo.......me..........twenty f...............ill there?"

Robert hated mobile phones. How predictably dramatic, he receives a strange parcel and when he is being told about it the phone mysteriously cuts out. Why didn't this mystery unfamiliar nice voice just put a note in with the money and the disc?

"You're cutting out."

"-"

"Are you still there?"

"-"

"Bugger."

He rang back but just got her voicemail. She sounded sexy on the message. He sort of imagined how she might look. Tall and dark, or short and dark, or blonde. Curvy or flat chested. He decided he didn't care, she sounded sexy, he liked her. Maybe they'd met sometime when he was drunk. When was the last time he went to a party? Or to a nightclub? Hmmmm.

He probably hadn't met her. Maybe online? Unlikely, he didn't really do the chatting with strangers over the internet thing. All seemed a bit creepy to him. The chances were that all these people were lying to each other and falling in virtual love with each others completely falsified personas. He was impressed that this was definitely a woman though. He kind of wished he had met her on the internet now. He resolved to try and chat to weirdo strangers more often. But for now he thought he'd better check the disc.

After a pause for a pleasant shit followed by a cup of coffee and some Golden Grahams, Robert sat down in front of his steam powered P90 PC. State of the art when he bought it, he had to get a one and a half grand loan to get it, on bad terms due to his dodgy credit history. He used to play all the top games that his mates couldn't run on their 486's; it was the dogs bollocks. Now it was pants. It did have a CD drive though, he used this to put the first disc in.

He double-clicked on his D: drive. “Error! This is disc is not readable” or something. What's all that about? He'd seen this recently though, it meant something, something the IT technician at work had known that time he tried to open a disc that a friend had sent him. What the hell was it again?

He remembered.

It was a Mac disc. Great!