‘Er … yes.’

‘There you go. Have a day.’

The boys took their burgers and wandered back out into the mall.

‘We do this every Saturday,’ said Bigmac.

‘Yes,’ said Wobbler.

‘And every Saturday we work out a joke.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you always mess up the punchline.’

‘Well … it’s something to do.’

And there wasn’t much else to do at the mall. Sometimes there were displays and things. At Christmas there’d been a nice tableau of reindeer and Dolls of Many Countries that really moved (jerkily) to music, but Bigmac had found out where the controls were and speeded up everything four times, and a Norwegian’s head had gone through the window of the cookie shop on the second floor.

All there was today in the way of entertainment were the people selling plastic window frames and someone else trying to get people to try a new artificial baked potato mix.

The boys sat down by the ornamental pond, and watched out for the security guards. You could always tell where Bigmac was in the mall by watching the flow of the security guards, several of whom had been hit by bits of disintegrating Scandinavian and bore a grudge. As far as anyone knew, Bigmac had never been guilty of anything other than the occasional confused approach to the ownership of other people’s cars, but he had an amazing way of looking as though he was thinking about committing some rather daft crime, probably with a can of spray paint. His camouflage jacket didn’t help. It might have worked in a jungle, but it tended to stand out when the background was the Olde Card and Cookie Shoppe.

‘Old Johnny may be a bit of a nerd but it’s always interesting when he’s around,’ said Wobbler. ‘Stuff happens.’

‘Yeah, but he hangs around with Kimberly or Kirsty or whoever she is today and she gives me the creeps,’ said Yo-less. ‘She’s weird. She always looks at me as if I haven’t answered a question properly.’

‘Her brother told me everyone expects her to go to university next year,’ said Bigmac.

Yo-less shrugged. ‘You don’t have to be dumb to be weird,’ he said. ‘If you’re brainy you can be even weirder. It’s all that intelligence looking for something to do. That’s what I think.’

‘Well, Johnny’s weird,’ said Bigmac. ‘Well, he is. It’s amazing the stuff that goes on in his head. Maybe he is a bit mental.’

‘It’s amazing the stuff that goes on outside his head,’ said Wobbler. ‘He’s just—’ There was a crash somewhere in the mall, and people started to shout.

A shopping trolley rolled at high speed up the aisle, with shoppers running to get out of the way. It had a plastic window frame hanging on the front and was splashed with artificial potato. Johnny and Kirsty were hanging on either side.

He waved at them as he drifted past.

‘Help us get this out of the back door!’

‘That’s old Mrs Tachyon’s trolley, isn’t it?’ said Yo-less.