Or you could imagine Attila the Hun’s barbarians galloping across the plain and, in the middle of the line of horsemen, Mrs Tachyon on her trolley. Off her trolley, too.

‘What happens,’ said Kasandra, ‘is that if you see a UFO or a yeti or something like that, you get a visit from the Men in Black. They drive around in big black cars and menace people who’ve seen strange things. They say they’re working for the government but they’re really working for the secret society that runs everything.’

‘How d’you know all this?’

‘Everyone knows. It’s a well-known fact. I’ve been waiting for something like this, ever since the mysterious rain of fish we had in September,’ said Kasandra.

‘You mean, when there was that gas leak under the tropical fish shop?’

‘Yes, we were told it was a leak under the tropical fish shop,’ said Kasandra darkly.

‘What? Of course it was the gas leak! They found the shopkeeper’s wig in the telephone wires in the High Street! Everyone had guppies in their gutters!’

‘The two might have been coincidentally connected,’ said Kasandra reluctantly.

‘And you still believe that those crop circles last year weren’t made by Bigmac even though he swears they were?’

‘All right, perhaps some of them might have been made by Bigmac, but who made the first ones, eh?’

‘Bazza and Skazz, of course. They read about ’em in the paper and decided we should have some, too.’

‘They didn’t necessarily make all of them.’

Johnny sighed. As if life wasn’t complicated enough, people had to set out to make it worse. It had been difficult enough before he’d heard about spontaneous combustion. You could be sitting peacefully in your chair, minding your own business, and next minute, whoosh, you were just a pair of shoes with smoke coming out. He’d taken to keeping a bucket of water in his bedroom for some weeks after reading about that.

And then there were all these programmes about aliens swooping down on people and taking them away for serious medical examinations in their flying saucers. If you were captured and taken away by aliens, but then they messed around with your brain so you forgot about them and they had time travel, so they could put you back exactly where you were before they’d taken you away … how would you know? It was a bit of a worry.

Kasandra seemed to think all this sort of thing was interesting, instead of some kind of a nuisance.

‘Kasandra,’ he said.

‘Yes? What?’

‘I wish you’d go back to Kirsty.’

‘Horrible name. Sounds like someone who makes scones.’

‘… I didn’t mind Kimberly …’

‘Hah! I now realize that was a name with “trainee hairdresser” written all over it.’

‘… although Klymenystra was a bit over the top.’

‘When was that?’

‘About a fortnight ago.’

‘I was probably feeling a bit gothy at the time.’

The bus pulled up at the end of Johnny’s road, and they got off.