Vivacious Drizzlybum came into this world on a cold and grey December’s night in 1971. She was given her strange name by her eccentric father, Mickey Murphy, who was brought to distraction on discovering that babies could not be exchanged for bullocks, which he was in greater need of at the time. His daughter would later accuse him of having given her such an irksome name solely because of its initials-VD. Mickey Murphy, who was counting his bullocks at the time, did not accept or deny the charge, but merely muttered something about ‘effective deterrents’.

Mr Murphy was greatly concerned with his daughter’s chastity, and took care to draw spots on her face with an indelible marker while she slept. He also shaved her head, long before it became fashionable, and forbade her from washing, telling her that ‘God loves a stinker,’ and reminding her that the only part of his body Jesus allowed to be washed was his feet, and even then, only by prostitutes.

To further ensure her celibacy, Mickey insisted on a religious education, and as she entered puberty, Vivacious was taken into the care of the notoriously orthodox catholic order, the Sisters of Scurvy. Their motto, ‘suffer your way to sainthood’ was branded on all new students on entrance to the college, and great care was taken to ensure all pupils knew that sex was dirty, that girls were dirty, and that the best thing that could be said about life was that when it was over, you went to heaven, provided, of course, you hadn’t done anything dirty while you were on Earth.

In her fifth year at the college, in the middle of the obligatory weekly self-flagellation session, Sister Severicus interrupted Vivacious to bring her the bad news that her father had died in a tragic accident, trampled to death by his own bullocks while innocently probing for anal parasites.

Vivacious tried to feel sad, but felt nothing but relief. The death of her father meant that she was now free to leave the Sisters of Scurvy, and free to start her life. For appearances’ sake, she tried to look sad, and as making people look sad is indeed one of the few things a catholic education can be said to achieve, she managed to carry off being mournful while secretly cheering inside.

As her father’s coffin was lowered into the dark, sodden Earth, to be buried beside his favourite heifer, Vivacious turned her mind to the future, and what she would do with it. At the reading of the will, she was perturbed to discover that her father had left most of his possessions to cattle research charities, such as the Bovine Council, but he had left her his most prized possession-Carrioneta, the carnivorous cow.

As carnivorous cows are somewhat of a rarity, even in the west of Ireland, it fetched a fine price at market, and was even featured on RTE’s top rural TV programme, Meat and Market. Armed with her new-found wealth, Vivacious headed off to the bright lights of Dublin.

Considering her unusual childhood, it will not surprise the reader to discover that she was not your average type of girl. To begin with, her IQ was the size of a minor planet. Her father believed her mental abilities to be the result of once eating some mouldy cheese she had discovered behind the fridge as a toddler, but her father also maintained that Elvis was alive and well and working in the sewers of Dublin, where nobody would ever see him. He was also convinced that when you flushed the toilet you could sometimes hear him singing, Rock around the Bal Cock.

Her father was, of course, completely mistaken, and the real reason for her astounding intellect was that her mother, who had died in childbirth, was an alien from the planet Carpetfilth. However, due to her mother’s death, her father’s overprotective nature, and the misfortune of a catholic education, even Vivacious did not realise that she was, in fact, the most intelligent being on the planet.

Her mother’s arrival on our planet was not of her own choosing. The Carpetfilthians held a weekly lottery, The Space Draw, in which the first ‘prize’ was to be sent to a distant unexplored world. All citizens were entered into this lottery by law, but no-one wanted to win it, as the journey was one-way, and your genes were forcibly altered so that if you did not impregnate or become impregnated by one of the natives with your first year on the planet, you dissolved into slime.

The Carpetfilthian government believed that this was an efficient way of spreading the Carpetfilthian seed throughout the galaxy, and it was also a useful way for parents to cajole offspring into going to bed on time, as if they refused, they were warned that they might win the lottery.

Vivacious Drizzlybum was an exceptional beauty… if you happened to be from Carpetfilth. If not, then she was one of those girls you were sure had a nice personality, but you sure as hell weren’t going to hang around long enough to find out.

Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, but her eyes were pretty gruesome too, at least by the standards of the planet she found herself on. One of her pupils was square and the other triangular, allowing Carpetfilthians to see in several dimensions, and they exuded yellowish pus when exposed to bright light. They also moved independently of each other, like a chameleons’, which many found disconcerting.

Her skin could best be described as scabby, and even that description is somewhat complimentary, as scabby does not quite describe the curious way the innumerate scabs flaked off in the slightest wind and stuck like jam to whomever they came into contact with.

Her hands were covered in weeping warts that changed colour in accordance with the lunar cycle, and this allowed Carpetfilthians to exchange pus when they shook each others’ hands, and thereby judge each others’ mood. Vivacious had long ago stopped shaking hands.

As Vivacious walked around the mean streets of Dublin, she elicited shocked gasps and incontrollable wincing from everyone she made eye-contact with. She was pointed at by children, and grown men walked into on-coming traffic in their attempts to move away from her. Hardened muggers thought twice and let her be. Alcoholics and drug-addicts went to rehab clinics, appalled by how bad their hallucinations had become.

To make matters worse, Vivacious was going though the Carpetfilthian Sexup, which is somewhat akin to an animal going into heat. One’s normal sexual desires are multiplied by ten, and it becomes difficult to think of anything else.

Being an enormously bright girl, as I have already mentioned, Vivacious realised that she had very little hope of copulation. However, driven by insatiable desires, she tried picking men up in bars, but was barred from most of them for driving customers away.

Moreover, she had misunderstood the phrase ‘to pick up’ and had taken it literally, and actually did physically pick men up and carried them out of the bar, but they flayed about like fish out of water and she ended up dropping them all. Bouncers outside nightclubs simply refused to admit her. Even the priesthood said no.

One day the answer came to her. Either she would have to change her appearance, or else change peoples’ perception of her appearance.

Rejecting plastic surgery, on the grounds that plastic is a finite resource, not to mention the fact that Carpetfilthian skin digests it, she opted for the second option and resolved to find a way to make people think she was attractive.

She spent many sleepless nights studying the psychology of perception. She also investigated the physiology of arousal, and poured over the most up-to-date MPRI scans. After a month of careful analysis, she understood the issues involved and set about building a machine that would revolutionise the world of sexual attraction.

One of her essential design specs was portability. She realised that there was little hope of enticing a male back to her apartment, and after that regrettable incident with the pizza delivery boy and the police caution, she thought it best to hunt in the open in future.

However, the machine had to be inconspicuous. She decided to use the shell of an I-Phone, as it’s relatively large and you can fiddle about with it for hours without anyone noticing. Basically, her machine used an atomic Bluetooth signal to activate the endocrine system into producing massive amounts of norepinephrine and dopamine, thereby stimulating arousal.

One could increase or decrease arousal as one would increase or decrease volume on a mobile phone. The bluetooth device had a radius of 1.5 metres, but once arousal was triggered, it was maintained between 5 and 10 minutes, so one did not need to stay within 1.5 metres of one’s chosen mate at all times.

The hardest part of the machine’s manufacture had been designing the imprinting function. This meant that arousal only occurred for the first person the subject saw after arousal had been triggered, regardless of what she or he looked like. In this way, one avoided simply creating a sex-starved maniac who would attempt to copulate with any and all orifices within eyeshot. She had seen just how dangerous this could be in her experiment on Father Analicus, who had great difficulty explaining to the doctors in the Emergency Room why he had formed such an intimate attachment with the exhaust pipe of a Ford Mondeo in the first place.

It took another couple of months of painstaking work before the machine was finally ready, but eventually all her work was completed.

She decided to call her invention the I-SAD (Intelligent Sexual Attraction Device), and on a sunny spring morning she was ready to put it to use.

She headed south of the river, where all the pretty people live, and where personal hygiene standards were better.

She went into a trendy café full of men in suits with expensive phones. She ordered a cappuccino and its white froth stuck to her lip and mixed with the green mucus running from her nose. This was thought very becoming on Carpetfilth, but less so on Earth.

Like a tigress, she scanned the room for suitable prey, and saw a handsome foreign man reading a newspaper in a corner. He was sitting alone and seemed intelligent, beautiful in an austere kind of way, and appeared to be quite defenceless.

Distracted as the man was, she found it easy to creep up on him, carefully tip toeing towards him, anxious not to make any noise that might make him look up, realise he was being hunted, and allow him time to flee.

As she went from a distance of three to two metres, she took the I-SAD from her pocket and switched it on.

It powered up with a beep and she scrolled down the list of commands to the Sexual Arousal function. The antenna icon told her the Atomic Bluetooth was operational.

As she got to 1.5 metres and was now within range, her heart began to race. Pus seeped from every orifice in a kaleidoscope of colours, indicating an almost unbearable sense of arousal. She increased the Sexual Attraction setting to maximum and said ‘Hello!’

The man looked up from his newspaper and was overcome by a warm positive feeling. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He had never believed in love at first sight, but he could not deny that was what he was feeling now.

‘Hello. Please sit down,’ he said, determined to make the acquaintance of this stunning beauty, so unlike any woman he had ever seen before.

‘Thanks. I’d love to,’ she replied, knowing that her machine must be working, as no man had ever voluntarily engaged her in conversation before.

‘Do you come here often?’ he asked, kicking himself under the table at asking such a feeble opening question.

‘No, first time,’ she said.

The conversation never really got started, as Carpetfilhians don’t have small talk and the handsome foreigner had only one thing on his mind. Eventually, Vivacious brought matters to a head and said:

He got up to leave, happier than he had ever been in his life, and so over-aroused that it was difficult to walk. Vivacious too was highly excited.

Perhaps it was because of this that she accidentally left I-SAD on the table as she left the café. Carried away by emotion and desire as she was, it was not until her new beau’s body language started to change that she realised something was wrong.

The arousal took 30 seconds to dissipate, and it was the saddest 30 seconds of her life. Her heart sank as she saw his eyes lose their sense of lustful desire and become the eyes of fear and disgust that she was used to. She groaned as his smile turned to a scowl, and her head drooped as he made his excuses and left her side.

‘I’m sorry, I have to go. I’ve got to return a library book urgently…’ he said in a clipped foreign accent whose origin she never did discover.

‘Maybe you could see my mucus collection some other time,’ she said, without any real hope,

‘I’m sorry. I’ve just remembered I’m allergic to mucus. Goodbye”.

He would often remember that day though, as no emotion he experienced subsequently would ever come close to the sense of desire he had briefly experienced with that ‘creature’.

Vivacious went from ecstasy to sorrow to panic when she realised that she had left the I-SAD in the café. She hurried back, but to her alarm and dismay, the I-SAD had vanished-stolen, she was certain.

She could, of course, manufacture another, but what worried her was what would become of the stolen one. If the thief came to know its powers, who knows what hideous uses it might be put to. She shuddered when she considered what might happen if the machine started to be mass-produced.

It could, she quickly understood, spell the end of human civilisation, and herald the dawn of a new sex slave era of repression and control.

She walked the streets and cursed herself for what she had done. In a dusty unknown part of town, deep in the forgotten wastelands of Dublin’s northside, she heard the wail of an old woman and the shriek of a young man. As they grew nearer, she began to make out what they were saying.

The woman was in her sixties, her grey hair strewn madly over her face, and her eyes wild with excitement. The boy could not have been more than fifteen, and wore a shiny tracksuit, apparently oblivious to the cold weather. At that moment in time, he was oblivious to everything except getting away from Mrs Brennan, who appeared to have gone completely insane.

‘Sure I knows yis is a wee bit younger dan me, but luv is blind!’ she said, pushing him against a railing and attempting to kiss him passionately.

‘I’ll bleedin blind you if you don’t cop on!’ he warned, but his voice was quivering, and there was far more fear in it than anger.

‘And now, don’t be cruel. Hold yis me hand, will ye,’ the old woman said, trying to grab his hand, but there was a mobile phone in it.

The young boy could take no more and ran faster than he ever had before. In his panic, he dropped the phone, and as the old woman hobbled after him, Vivacious quickly picked up her I-SAD and put it in her pocket.

She made her way back to the river Liffy, to the middle of the Ha’penny bridge. It was always a rather maudlin place, but today under the leaden grey skies, and with a misty autumnal rain falling interminably, it looked particularly gloomy.

She took the I-SAD from her pocket, and let it fall into the river, her hopes and dreams sinking with it. She knew she had to destroy it; its power was too corrupting; the risk of abuse too great.

Sex, she realised, would always be something other people did.

She stayed on the bridge quite some time. As night gradually fell, shrouding the city in a way that hid its and Vivacious’ ugliness, she pondered the injustices of life, staring down into the black river, listening to its heart beat, and not for the first time in her life, she was overcome by the feeling that she was stuck somewhere she didn’t really belong.

She lifted her head, sighed to the stars, and wished she could visit one.