‘It’s not too bad. Grandad does the housework most of the time anyway. He’s good at fried bread. And Surprise Surprise.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You know that stall on the market that sells tins that’ve got the labels off?’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, he buys loads of those. And you’ve got to eat them once they’re opened.’

‘Yuk.’

‘Oh, pineapple and meatballs isn’t too bad.’

They walked on through the evening street.

The thing about all of us, Johnny thought, the sad thing is that we’re not very good. Actually that’s not the worst part. The worst part is we’re not even much good at being not much good.

Take Yo-less. When you looked at Yo-less you might think he had possibilities. He was black. Technically. But he never said ‘Yo’, and only said ‘check it out’ in the supermarket, and the only person he ever called a mother was his mother. Yo-less said it was racial stereotyping to say all black kids acted like that but, however you looked at it, Yo-less had been born with a defective cool. Trainspotters were cooler than Yo-less. If you gave Yo-less a baseball cap he’d put it on the right way round. That’s how, well, yo-less Yo-less was. Sometimes he actually wore a tie.

Now, Bigmac … Bigmac was good. He was good at maths. Sort of. It made the teachers wild. You could show Bigmac some sort of horrible equation and he’d say ‘x=2.75’ and he’d be right. But he never knew why. ‘It’s just what it is,’ he’d say. And that was no good. Knowing the answers wasn’t what maths was about. Maths was about showing how you worked them out, even if you got them wrong. Bigmac was also a skinhead. Bigmac and Bazza and Skazz were the last three skinheads in Blackbury. At least, the last three who weren’t someone’s dad. And he had LOVE and HAT on his knuckles, but only in Biro because when he’d gone to get tattooed he fainted. And he bred tropical fish.

As for Wobbler … Wobbler wasn’t even a nerd. He wanted to be a nerd but they wouldn’t let him join. He had a Nerd Pride badge and he messed around with computers. What Wobbler wanted was to be a kid in milk-bottle-bottom glasses and a deformed anorak, who could write amazing software and be a millionaire by the time he was twenty, but he’d probably settle for just being someone whose computer didn’t keep smelling of burning plastic every time he touched it.

And as for Johnny …

… if you go mad, do you know you’ve gone mad? If you don’t, how do you know you’re not mad?

‘It wasn’t a bad film,’ Wobbler was saying. They’d been to Screen W at the Blackbury Odeon. They generally went to see any film that promised to have laser beams in it somewhere.

‘But you can’t travel in time without messing things up,’ said Yo-less.

‘That’s the whole point,’ said Bigmac. ‘That’s what you want to do. I wouldn’t mind joining the police if they were time police. You’d go back and say, “Hey, are you Adolf Hitler?” and when he said, “Achtung, that’s me, ja” … Kablooeee! With the pump-action shotgun. End of problem.’