I apologise to Shakespeare, the mod and rocker subcultures, and the English language in general for what I am inflicting upon them. Also deserving of an apology are the excellent actors of my school's production of Romeo and Juliet, who would probably claw their eyes out if they knew they'd inspired this.

And thus I present Romeo and Juliet as mod and rocker, respectively, in a version of the play that leaves out almost every event of note, and distorts what's left beyond recognition. Any gross misrepresentations of the period this is set in are entirely due to my only doing the scantiest of Wikipedia research before writing.

Star-crossed lovers it certainly ain't. It's the swinging sixties, and down on Brighton beach, love is the last thing on anyone's mind. The sun's too hot for comfort and the air throbs with the kind of persistent tension that can only be relieved by fighting or fucking. And in the midst of it all is Juliet Capulet, swinging through the crowd with her leather jacket stretched tight across her back, heading for the promenade where her bike stands. There's a party tonight: drink and music and the possibility of a brawl to burn away some of the growing friction between them and the mods.

She first sees him across a crowded room, or the back of him, at least. With the can of beer and that arrogant swagger, he almost fits right in. Almost. There's something just a shade too clean-cut about him; Juliet can feel it from where she's standing. His clothes – black jeans and the obligatory leather jacket – are carefully nondescript, but his hair's too sharply cut, too soft, for him to be a rocker. (Juliet fingers her own lank, slicked-back mop, and tries to remember the last time she washed it.) There's a mod in their midst, and a party-crasher at that. Juliet puts down her drink and slips through the crowd towards him.

He's here with friends: a guy who's clearly more rocker than mod, hair greasy, off his head on she doesn't know what; and another, with a knife tucked too-obviously into his boot, darting nervous glances around the room. He's clearly desperate to get out of there before someone realises that they're the enemy. Juliet ignores them, because even the high one doesn't have a swagger like Mr Clean here, and the kind of man who'd barge headfirst into the opposing camp apparently on a whim is the kind of man she's interested in. She grabs the back of his shirt and yanks hard. He spins, hand raised, presumably to fend her off. She drinks him in for a second: clear blue eyes, clean-shaven and clean-cut, with that soft neat hair that she wants – badly – to ruin. Then she pulls him down and kisses him.

His name is Romeo Montague, he says later, which is maybe the most ridiculous thing Juliet's ever heard, but then, she didn't drag him into a bathroom stall because she cared about his name. He's different from the rockers who surround her, different in a way that goes deeper than the superficial quirks of dress and manners that distinguish them. Either that, or it's just the nice-guy image that makes her want to fuck him till he'll never be clean again.

They spend the next day in a haze of drugs and sweat in a cheap boarding-house. Romeo's scored some kind of pills off his junkie friend; Juliet has all the booze she can charm out of the pimply kid in the off-licence. The sun beats down through the window as they writhe on the cheap nylon sheets. Down on the beach, mods and rockers murmur and shift, old tensions flaring in the heat.

The next day, headlines blare, 'MURDER ON THE BEACH'. A mod and a rocker, both fatally stabbed, found by a nice local couple who chose exactly the wrong place for their romantic night-time walk. The police conclude that they killed each other, and it's all wrapped up with a moralising editorial on the behaviour of Young Folk Today. One of the men is Juliet's cousin. One is Romeo's friend.

Juliet wakes to a phone call from her mother. She's read the editorial and she wants Juliet home post-haste. Juliet hangs up before she's even finished speaking, shrugs on her jacket and goes looking for Romeo. They spend the day pacing the beach, taking a perverse pleasure in yelling obscenities at each other whenever a member of their own gang comes along. Scuffles break out wherever they walk, spreading like ripples on water, like oil, like plague. More than one person is bleeding, or worse, by the end of the day.

There's another call that evening; her father this time. Her mother is very upset and if she doesn't come home right now, young lady, she'll never be welcome in the house again. This seems a little excessive, but Juliet's so high she doesn't care. She yanks the telephone cord from the wall and skips off out again. It's too hot for leather, trademark though it may be, so she rides down to the seafront in a cut-off T-shirt, just in time to hear the local police chief read the riot act to a beachful of not-remotely-chastened mods and rockers. If there's any more violence, they're all – and he means all – under arrest, even if they have to be shipped back to London to a prison big enough for them all. The opposing tribes exchange glances: divided in everything else, they nonetheless come together in resentment at the authorities. They point and sneer as they shuffle slowly off the beach, mouthing one word at each other: tomorrow. The real fight will go down tomorrow, and god help any policeman who gets in their way.

Romeo's standing gazing out to sea. "Ready for tomorrow?" he asks when Juliet grabs his tie. She nods, then shakes her head, faintly uneasy, or perhaps just faintly bored, with the whole thing. He laughs. She drags him off to bed.

That night, they get higher than ever before, combining the pills with booze and fags and a hundred types of illegal herb. This turns out not to be the best of ideas, and, in fact, they never make it to the fight at all.

As she dies, Juliet reflects that there's something anticlimactic about this whole situation, but then, what was she expecting, poetry?