‘What, like “are you a loony?”’

‘It’d be sound to go a long way back in time,’ said Wobbler. ‘Back to the dinosaurs. No chance of killing your grandad then, unless he’s really old. Dinosaurs’d be all right.’

‘Great!’ said Bigmac. ‘Then I could wipe ’em out with my plasma rifle! Oh, yes!’

‘Yeah,’ said Wobbler, rolling his eyes. ‘That’d explain a lot. Why did the dinosaurs die out sixty-five million years ago? Because Bigmac couldn’t get there any earlier.’

‘But you haven’t got a plasma rifle,’ said Johnny.

‘If Wobbler can have a time machine, then I can have a plasma rifle.’

‘Oh, all right.’

‘And a rocket launcher.’

A time machine, thought Johnny. That would be something. You could get your life exactly as you wanted it. If something nasty turned up, you could just go back and make sure that it didn’t. You could go wherever you wanted and nothing bad would ever have to happen.

Around him, the boys’ conversation, as their conversations did, took on its own peculiar style.

‘Anyway, no one’s proved the dinosaurs did die out.’

‘Oh, yeah, right, sure, they’re still around, are they?’

‘I mean p’raps they only come out at night, or are camouflaged or something …’

‘A brick-finished stegosaurus? A bright red Number 9 brontosaurus?’

‘Hey, neat idea. They’d go round pretending to be a bus, right, and people could get on – but they wouldn’t get off again. Oooo-Eee-Oooo …’

‘Nah. False noses. False noses and beards. Then just when people aren’t expecting it – UNK! Nothing on the pavement but a pair of shoes and a really big bloke in a mac, shuffling away …’

Paradise Street, thought Johnny. Paradise Street was on his mind a lot, these days. Especially at night.

I bet if you asked the people there if time travel was a good idea they’d say yes. I mean, no one knows what happened to the dinosaurs, but we know what happened to Paradise Street.

I wish I could go back to Paradise Street.

Something hissed.

They looked around. There was an alleyway between the charity clothes shop and the video library. The hissing came from there, except now it had changed into a snarl.

It wasn’t at all pleasant. It went right into his ears and right through Johnny’s modern brain and right down into the memories built into his very bones. When an early ape had cautiously got down out of its tree and wobbled awkwardly along the ground, trying out this new ‘standing upright’ idea all the younger apes were talking about, this was exactly the kind of snarl it hated to hear.

It said to every muscle in the body: run away and climb something. And possibly throw down some coconuts, too.

‘There’s something in the alley,’ said Wobbler, looking around in case there were any trees handy.

‘A werewolf?’ said Bigmac.

Wobbler stopped. ‘Why should it be a werewolf?’ he said.

‘I saw this film, Curse of the Revenge of the Werewolf,’ said Bigmac, ‘and someone heard a snarl like that and went into a dark alley, and next thing, he was lying there with all his special effects spilling out on the pavement.’