‘Didn’t you tell the police?’

‘No—’

‘Honestly, I don’t know what would happen if I wasn’t around! You’ve got to tell them now. I’ll meet you at the police station in half an hour. You know how to tell the time? The big hand is—’

‘Yes,’ said Johnny, miserably.

‘It’s only two stops on the bus from your house. You know about catching buses?’

‘Yes, yes, yes, of course I—’

‘You need money. That’s the round stuff you find in your pockets. Ciao.’

Actually, after he’d been to the toilet, he felt a bit better about it all. Kirs— Kasandra took charge of things. She was the most organized person Johnny knew. In fact she was so organized that she had too much organization for one person, and it overflowed in every direction.

He was her friend. More or less, anyway. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been given a choice in the matter. Kirs— Kasandra wasn’t good at friends. She told him so herself. She’d said it was because of a character flaw, only because she was Ki— Kasandra, she thought it was a character flaw in everyone else.

The more she tried to help people by explaining to them how stupid they were, the more they just wandered off for no reason at all. The only reason Johnny hadn’t was that he knew how stupid he was.

But sometimes – not often – when the light was right and she wasn’t organizing anything, he’d look at Ki— Kasandra and wonder if there weren’t two kinds of stupidity: the basic El Thicko kind that he had, and a highly specialized sort that you only got when you were stuffed too full of intelligence.

He’d better tell Grandad where he was going, he thought, just in case the power went off or the TV broke down and he wondered where Johnny had gone.

‘I’m just off to—’ he began, and then said, ‘I’m just off out.’

‘Right,’ said Grandad, without taking his eyes off the set. ‘Hah! Look, there he goes! Right in the gunge tank!’

Nothing much was going on in the garage.

After a while, Guilty crawled out from his nest among the black plastic sacks and took up his usual position in the front of the cart, where he was wont to travel on the offchance that he could claw somebody.

A fly banged on the window pane for a while and then went back to sleep.

And the bags moved.

They moved like frogs in oil, slithering very slowly around each other. They made a rubbery, squeaky noise, like a clever conjurer trying to twist an animal out of balloons.

There were other noises, too. Guilty didn’t pay them much attention because you couldn’t attack noises and, besides, he was pretty well used to them by now.

They weren’t very clear. They might have been snatches of music. They might have been voices. They might have been a radio left on, but slightly off station and two rooms away, or the distant roar of a crowd.