“Okay, on with the fun, ladies and gents, and for our very first act, I’d like you to give a very warm Birmingham welcome . . .”

John shook out his hands and jumped up and down like a sprinter. It’s two hundred quid, you’ll be home in an hour.

“Who’s getting two hundred quid?” said Shelley.

“What?” said John, unaware he’d been speaking aloud.

“To Frank Sinatra!” said Miles.

“What did he say?” said John.

“It’s an open slot, we’re not getting paid,” said Shelley.

“Oh, sorry, that’s next week. Got my cards muddled up there.” Miles’s cards were like pulp in his hands.

“Frank Sinatra, is that your act’s name, Shelley?”

“No.”

“What’s he talking about then?”

Someone called Miles a wanker.

“John here’s getting two hundred pounds. Anyone else here getting two hundred pounds?”

“Unfunny John, ladies and gentlemen!”

John bounded out onto the stage.

The spotlight hit him like a Colditz escapee. He was glad to be blinded. It stopped him from seeing the hostility in the eyes before him.

804

. . . and my name is Stephanie Wiltshire. Stephanie. Born in 1949. Hair graying. Skin graying too. Eyes brown but shut. Pinch, pinch, pinching hard. Nails unpainted and digging into my palms.

803

. . . and my teeth are straight but chattering, and my mouth is numb but counting down, eight hundred and t-t-t- . . .

802

. . . and here’s something for you.

Any one of us is only six acquaintances away from anyone else. In 1960 Stanley Milgram, Harvard social psychologist, sent letters to randomly chosen residents of Omaha, Nebraska, and asked them to deliver the letters to a Mr. Smith in Massachusetts. If they didn’t know Mr. Smith, they had to send it to someone else with the same instructions until someone who genuinely knew Mr. Smith could post it to him. The average number of steps before Mr. Smith received his letters was six.

801

So, if you gave me a celebrity, any celebrity, Frank Sinatra, for example, if I had enough information about him I think I could find a link from me to him in six. Or less. After all, I’m a well-traveled girl.

800

I was once a stewardess and they go all over. I like to think I am the hero of this story because I’m telling it. Though, if asked, I don’t believe many of the people in it would’ve said I’d been very heroic.

799

. . . and the Ns are stuttering out. N-n-n-n-nines are a n-n-nightmare.

798

Frank Sinatra was helpful to Michael Davies on his journeys home.

He’d once found himself stranded with a broken clutch on the outskirts of Birmingham and had accepted a lift from a table tennis player returning to the city following a disappointing competition in Barnsley.