David Oxley has a pretty uneventful life really. It wasn’t a bad life, all things considered.  Things could most certainly have been a lot worse if he chose to think about it, which he did on many occasions, but it never got him anywhere.

David is a healthy forty year old guy with a weakness for potato chips and red wine – a pint of Guinness on a hot day.  So, to combat such vices, David swims lengths at the public pool and works out at the gym several times a week – time permitting.  He has a job that most would think was boring – selling par baked bread products, and on most days that assumption would most certainly be correct.  You would be surprised at how many people like to complain about the size of a bread roll.  I know, it’s mental, right.

He has an ex-wife Laura and two great kids, Ben and Sarah.  Well not really kid’s, young adults I believe is the preferred term.  Arr, to be twenty again and know what we know now.  Anyway let’s not dwell on that, as much as we would all like to, we can not turn back the hands of time.  And believe me, I have tried.

David resides in a room in a high-set share house, which he rents with the landlady Bess and a guy called Brian.  He drives a company car, a Mitsubishi station wagon and likes to dabble in photography in his spare time.

The two things Dave misses most, since his divorce from his ex-wife Laura, is time spent with the two kids, sorry, young adults, and Bruce Springsteen, the family pet Alsatian.

Then there is his best mate Patrick Madigan, a Detective for Queensland’s fraud control, a good-looking charismatic fellow with a body to die for, who went missing about three years ago, and who just happens to be, me, but more about that later.

So you get the picture, life is pretty ordinary for our David.  Then out of the blue, during a run-of-the-mill sales trip to Darwin in the Northern Territory, David’s uneventful life took an unexpected turn when he offered a ride to Tracey, a blonde woman he met in a corner café early Friday morning…