It’s a place where your grandad watches TV all day.

It’s where you want to be.

His mind began to go fuzzy at the edges. He thought of Thomas the Tank Engine wallpaper and the Mr Men lamp, until they were so close he could almost taste them. He could hear the place where Grandad had hung the wallpaper wrong so that there was an engine that was half Thomas and half James. It hung like a beacon in his head.

He opened his eyes. The images were still around him; the others looked like ghosts. They were staring at him.

He opened the bag, just a fraction.

Wobbler swallowed.

‘Er …’ he said.

He turned around. And then, just in case, he looked behind the table.

‘Er … guys? Johnny? Bigmac? Yo-less?’ He swallowed again, but sometimes you just had to face up to unpleasant facts, and so he bravely said:

‘Er … Kirsty?’

No one answered. There was no one there to answer.

He was all alone with the tea urn.

‘Hey, I was even holding on!’ he said. ‘Oi! I’m still here! Very funny, ha ha, now joke over, all right? Guys? Johnny? You’ve left me behind! All right? It worked, yes. Joke over, ha ha ha, all right? Please?’

He opened the door and looked out into the shadowy yard.

‘I know you’re only doing this to wind me up, well, it hasn’t worked,’ he moaned.

Then he went back and sat on a bench with his hands on his lap.

After a while he fished out a grubby paper handkerchief and blew his nose. He was about to throw it away when he stopped and glared at it. It was probably the only paper handkerchief in the world.

‘I can see you peering out at me,’ he said, but his heart wasn’t in it. ‘You’re going to jump out any minute, I know. Well, it’s not working. ’Cos I’m not worried, see. Let’s all go home and get a burger, eh? Good idea, eh? Tell you what, I’ve got some money, I don’t mind buyin’ ’em, eh? Hey? Or we could go down the Chinese and get a takeaway—’

He stopped, and looked exactly like someone who’d realized that it was going to be a long, long time before there were any beansprouts in this town. Or burgers, come to that. All there probably was to eat was meat and fish and stuff.

‘All right, fair enough, you can come out now …’

A fly stirred on the windowsill, and started to bang itself absentmindedly on the glass.

‘Look, it’s not funny any m … more, all right?’

There was a movement of air behind him, and a definite sensation that, where there had been no one, there was now someone.

Wobbler turned around, a huge relieved grin on his face.

‘Ha, I bet you thought you’d got me going – what?’

The Over-5Os’ Keep-Fit class was in full wheeze. The tutor had long ago given up expecting everyone to keep up, so she just pressed on in the hope that people would do what they could manage and, if possible, not actually die while on the premises.