Human Remains

until after the blowfly larvae have finished. It’s a banquet carefully stage-managed by Nature, a series of courses laid out one after the other, the perfect scent – to tempt only those guests who will enjoy each flavour – given off at precisely the right moment.
    When I finish indulging in my love of biology, I return the images and the notebooks to their hiding place and move on to the less controversial topic of NLP.
    The tutor for the NLP course is called Nigel. He worked in the City, once upon a time, initially without much dramatic success until he discovered NLP and thereafter, if you were to believe everything he says, he became so successful that he managed to retire at the age of thirty-two. He’d decided it was too stressful being a trader and had chosen to turn his hand to a bit of part-time teaching instead. And thus he imparts his knowledge to us.
    He is always quite entertaining, to be fair to him. The tutor group sessions start out with an apparent firm structure, descend into amusing anecdotes about Nigel’s time in the City – or else one of the other participants’ attempts to put into practice the techniques we’d learned – and by the end of the class Nigel will reveal with a dramatic flourish that he has been training us all along, and that what we learned today was actually something quite unexpected.
    On one particular occasion, when Nigel had claimed to be teaching us how to lead a conversation away from confrontation and towards resolution, he ended up telling us a story about how he’d used NLP to get a girl he fancied to sleep with him.
    There were six of us in the group that night. Lisa wasn’t there, for some reason, leaving just Alison and five men. Alison worked in a bank. She’d wanted to attend the class to learn how to increase her confidence when dealing with customers, particularly difficult ones. She wanted to know how to turn a complaint into a sale.
    You could tell that Nigel had been saving up this particular topic by the way he relished the telling of it. Alison was shifting in her seat, as was the elderly gent who trotted along to evening classes regularly – he’d already been in three of the courses I’d attended – as a way of escaping from the horrors of having to make conversation with his wife. But the rest of them – the two youngish guys, Roger and Darren, who were hoping for a career in sales, and the music producer who wanted to influence the critics – were hanging on Nigel’s every word.
    He’d succeeded in his quest with the woman, of course, because Nigel didn’t fail at anything, and, if he had, he wouldn’t have shared that particular story. The girl he liked had been helpless, powerless to resist his charms. He had slept with her and ended up in a relationship with her that lasted three years. And then she’d moved to the States to pursue a career as an actress and a model. It had ended amicably. And then he’d met his wife, and not used any NLP techniques to woo her, and that, too, had been a success.
    And the moral of the story was only partly that all this was immoral. NLP was a powerful tool that should be used with integrity, he said. It worked best when people used it to provide a positive, empowering result for both parties. It was all about honing techniques that every human possessed if only they realised it. It was all about being the best that you could be. If the woman hadn’t been attracted to him anyway, Nigel argued, she would never have succumbed to his carefully planned suggestions and influences. It was about maximising opportunities that already existed. Not about faking them, or making people do things against their will. You needed to lead them down a path that they might already have been intending to take. It was about encouraging them to do what they wanted to do, but lacked the courage or the focus or the determination to do on their own.
    It was, as Nigel frequently said, win-win.
    I tried my hardest, but I couldn’t see how anything he said meant that I shouldn’t also consider using these techniques to seduce a woman. Surely that would be win-win?
    I gave all of it a lot of thought. The idea grew and spread through me like treacle until it was all I could think about. I could find a woman who was reasonably attracted to me, and instead of saying the wrong thing and ruining my chances I could make her warm to me, make her like me. And maybe, yes, make her want to sleep with me. And after that,