Max Force lit his tenth cigarette of the morning with a gun that was actually a novelty lighter. He was careful to conceal this, however, as he didn't want the six terrified tourists in the back of the minibus to realise that they were being held hostage with something Max had bought at the Tangle Bay Bring and Buy Sale. Max picked up a small microphone and announced through the whistling speakers that they were going to visit a natural rock formation that looked a bit like a pig's head and so was called 'The Pig's Head'. When Max was 16, he had drunk a 2 litre bottle of cider up against The Pig's Head and had vomited on his new jeans after being rejected by his one true love Sally Hollicks. These days, it was one of the handful of stops on 'Tour de Force's Tangle Bay Odyssey'. Usually tourists generally agreed to go there of their own freewill, but this year things were different. "Ok folks, wagons roll" he muttered into the microphone as he had done a thousand times before. At the back of the bus the man in seat 6B quietly urinated into his own underpants.

The German boy in the heavy duty waterproof anorak stared out of the window as the rainstorm lashed the hostel. Although Bob Marley was telling people to "Get up, stand up", the boy seemed happy just to sit upright on the couch of the 'Chillout Zone' of HostelXtreme@TangleBay. Owner Rick O'Shea tried to maintain his trademark carefree grin as he stood at front desk bobbing up and down to the music, but even he couldn't hold back the feeling of contempt for this acne-ridden bespectacled nerd.

"Which time is beginning ze Honolulu Bach Barbecue Luau?" asked the German boy, clutching a brightly coloured leaflet.

"Oh, sorry dude" Rick grimaced, "It's like off-season at the moment and the weather isn't exactly like...you know, the numbers..." he said, looking left and right to point out that the hostel was empty.

"Oh..." hummed the sole guest of HostelXtreme@TangleBay. "From hostelonline.com, I am leading to believe that here ze party is non-stop, and yet I am not seeing so far ze party at zis chunchure". Rick felt himself reddening with annoyance and could tell that his smile was visibly faltering. "Bad timing man, bad timing. You should have checked in like 2 months ago. It was sweet as dude. Sweet as..."

The truth, as Rick knew only too well, is that it hadn't been sweet as. It had been late July, the height of the high season, and yet the bay had been pretty much dead. As a fine, perma-tanned, deadlocked specimen of 34 years, Rick should have been taking in a cool grand a day in rooms and booze, plus some serious chick action. For some reason this year he was barely able to cover his outgoings thanks to an abominably slow season and the only notch on the bedpost had come from a cross-eyed Lithuanian  student who had given him a hand job in the laundry room. This was not why Rick had got into the hospitality industry and it was not why he had flunked out of Marine Biology at Plymouth. The party had started when Rick had packed up his dorm room and gone travelling, and it hadn't stopped. At least til now.

Marianne Ketch could glimpse the lone sitting figure of the German boy as she peered through a pair of high-powered binoculars out of the net-curtained windows of the Tangle Bay Guesthouse. "Looks like His Nibs isn't fairing much better" she shouted at an unnecessarily loud volume to her husband, who was giving the skirting board a lick of paint five feet below her mouth. Her husband was startled, but had since learned to expect such unannounced outbursts. "Well Marianne, it's been very quiet all round" he suggested in as placating a tone as he could muster.

"I realise that Keith" she growled. "It's all right for him in his party shack, but we have rooms to fill. There's not a soul here". Keith was going to point out that his mother was due to arrive that evening and she might make a small contribution towards upkeep, but 18 years of marriage had taught him that things that sounded helpful to him merely infuriated her. Fortunately a stint in the army had given Keith a valuable lesson in life: there is almost nothing worth saying out loud.

"I've not even had the chance to put up NO VACANCIES this year and you know how it's one of the many jobs around here that I actually enjoy doing..." She looked intently at her husband who nodded enthusiastically in agreement, even though he couldn't remember the last time his wife had lifted a finger in the guesthouse – instead preferring to watch daytime TV, spy on the neighbours or run off into the village on some 'errand'. For a moment Marianne stared through Keith as if hypnotised before turning her attention back to the hostel. "Still, this should take the wind out of that little pillock's sails" she murmured, secretly wondering what it would be like to grip O'Shea's muscular arms as he ravished her. "You're not seriously painting the skirting board that colour are you?" she asked her husband without averting her gaze.

"It's dead mate. Dead as a dodo."

"As a what?" Sammi asked down the phone from Hounslow.

"As a dodo cous. It's a dead bird".

Viv had picked up this expression from his first pub quiz at the Three Headed Dog. It had been his first taste of Tangle Bay social life and his first opportunity to meet the locals. Most people seemed all right. Victor Peach, the landlord, had given him a pint of something warm and flat on the house. Rick O'Shea seemed to smile and wink at him constantly, leading Viv to suspect that he was either gay or had a facial tick. There was a balding middle-aged guy called Max Force, who wore tracksuits and smelt of cigarettes and sweat – and a few others whose names Viv had remembered and forgotten as the rounds of drinks were bought and emptied and the baffling questions came rasping over the PA system from the throaty voice of Victor Peach – who for some reason included an entire round on the subject of the Third Cod War 1975-6. Viv hadn't spotted many nice girls. Everyone seemed to be middle-aged or married, and one of the worst offenders of both categories, a red haired fright who ran the guesthouse, occasionally winked at him, and at one point had brushed his inner thigh with her nails. What with that and Rick O'Shea's constant grinning at him, Viv had worried that he had wandered into a den of swingers. Well, there had been one cute girl – a tall Chinese girl in probably in her 30s – but she had marched in at the end of the night, gulped down a triple vodka at the bar, and marched back out. By that time, Viv's muscles had turned to jelly and he had been pinned down by a fellow cab driver called Chris Cubb, who seemed to be complaining about a rival taxi firm and peanuts. Viv had been too drunk to take in the details, and so merely nodded, slurred agreement and wondered whether anyone else had noticed Chris Cubb's uncanny resemblance to early 90s TV personality Timmy Mallet. This morning, Viv's cranium throbbed. It felt like Chris Cubb had been belting him over the head with a rubber hammer every time he'd got a Cod War-related question wrong. The rain lashed on the windscreen and Viv focused his aching eyes on the train station. This was not the escape he had planned. Not the escape from the terraced house, grey streets, smog and traffic and ex-in-laws. Viv stared at the picture of his son taped to the dashboard, staring at the big brown eyes staring back at him while the DJ at Tangle Power Play 102.2 power played 'Lady in Red'. Viv started to get the impression he'd made a huge mistake.

The slow summer season in Tangle Bay seemed to have concerned everyone in Tangle Bay except young Dean Peacock. This was for two reasons. Firstly Dean Cantona Peacock was in no way linked to the economy and secondly he wasn't technically a Tangle Bay resident - living, as he did, two miles away on a rundown council estate euphemistically called 'The Meadows', in a pebble-dashed council house with his Mum. He sat huddled in the bus shelter, awaiting the bus and sucking on a Lambert and Butler. Having recently turned 18, Peacock had become a breadwinner and was en route to collect his dole money, having been reminded to ask the dole people whether disability benefit covered hangovers. Dean had followed in the proud Peacock family tradition by being expelled from school without qualifications, on the sound reasoning that exams were for "boffs" and further education was fundamentally "gay". Peacock only had a few stops to make in Tangle Bay – as he did most days. On a bad day, he'd hang around the green until hungry, before buying chips washed down with a litre of White Bastard cider, taking him nicely through to 3.15pm, when the school bell rang and kids were there for the victimising. Usually he managed to exempt enough for the bus fare home, and sometimes he could stretch as far as a packet of cigarettes for his mother. Otherwise he would steal a bike. However, today was not a normal day. Today was what his grandfather had called "D-Day" - dole day. Today he could make a grand tour: DSS, green, chips, pubs, games arcade – on days like this the necessary business of shaking down the local kids almost seemed beneath him. He was 18, he could go into the pub with an ID and say "Victor mai good fellow, a paint hoff your fainest Stella Artoys and a slim panatala if hugh schplease" and that Peach wanker would have to fetch his drink straight off without any saying he'd call the police. Besides, he didn't care about the pathetic snobs of Tangle Bay looking down their noses at him. He felt above them all now. He had a plan, and the first step involved getting a fifty million pound record deal, moving to LA and releasing his first hit rap single, "All You Gays in Tangle Bay" by AK Peacock (ft. Tupac). In fact, that very day, Peacock's fortunes were to rise dramatically, but not quite in the way he'd expected.