Claudio

Claudio's the chef at a local restaurant called 'Gaucho Gazpacho'. He's fat, florid and Argentinian, with longish black curly hair, balding on top (you get the impression he's going to start wearing it in a ponytail before too long) and he loves creating unusual dishes (Red Herring and Silverfish Clafouti is one of his most recent inventions). He wears a white uniform and brown boots with Cuban heels. Claudio usually has a fine layer of sweat on his forehead, and his handshake, while firm, is more than a tad clammy. He's gay, and passionate with it.

Claudio's an avid student of military history, and he's not remotely interested in soft furnishings. He's constantly studying his hands and fingers for signs of his homosexuality; doesn’t have a steady boyfriend, claims he doesn’t want one, but then is always upset when a hot night with a new guy ends in an absence of personal detail exchanging.

Miss Streatley

Okay, I guess I've always had a thing about Miss Streatley. The lank, straight, black hair, parted severely in the middle, the thick-rimmed glasses, the pallid complexion - I know I'm not much to look at, but I just hope she'll be able to see beyond my appearance to the real me.

She wears glasses too, probably because she's a librarian, and she has light brown hair, not black and greasy like mine. I’m sure I could get her to take off those glasses, unpin her hair and shake it loose and she’d be beautiful, really beautiful, only she never had the confidence to know it before she met me. She doesn’t live far from me, either. She has a ground floor flat in Fenton Gardens. She appears not to like soft furnishings, from the times I've managed to peek in through her windows, but has a great interest in window-box gardening.