It wasn't every night. Every now and then there'd be a dry night, sometimes two or three, and for one month during late 2003 dry, dry, dry, like the promise of spring.

Jack was a normal, late 20s, single guy, lived alone. Moderately good looking, although more Luke Skywalker than Han Solo (certainly he was no Jabba the Hut). Moderately intelligent - more BBC Breakfast than Newsnight. Marginally succesful (lower middle management). Virgin. Bed-wetter.

What a dirty little boy. Night after night he fought sleep until it tossed him into a guilty daze. Day after day he woke up to sheet-soaked despair. Not, I hasten to clarify, soaked with the occasional teenage nocturnal emmissions that might on occasion visit a man gone too long without a woman. No. Jack awoke clammy, and with nostrils full of the smell of his own still-warm urine.

Enuresis, it's called, but what's in a name?

He'd tried everything, of course. Acupuncture (in his fingers, strangely enough, rather than the organ itself - which was, I suppose, something to be grateful for when the treatment failed to work), Hypnosis - "a winner, not a wetter", Early-wake-therapy, where he had to set random alarms through the night (on the alarm he must get up to pass urine, need to or not). He avoided all caffeine, alcohol, and was particularly monkish with regard to sex. He had in fact never had it. Ever. Not with a real woman.

Not hard to see why - after all, waking alone to wet sheets on a Sunday morning was bad enough. Waking with a woman for the first time, probably awkward in the best of circumstances. To Jack, it was absolutely unthinkable.

His puritanical life brought him no joy. He would probably have killed himself, had the thought occured to him to do so. He was desperate for a cure - even more so after tasting it during those few short weeks of dryness back in 2003. He could imagine life with no bed-wetting. He could be a winner.

The answer was buried in the classifieds. Literally. Four words, "The answer. Meagan. Clairvoyant". He called the number.

She answered on the first ring, her voice husky and sexy in the way that only a smokers can be,

"Hello, Jack".