I’ll be honest, it was definitely thight ren.

I’ve had a fair bit of experience getting drunk but much less in the area of sobering up in a hurry. I was determined to give it my best shot, though. I had to down two pints of brain-freezingly cold lemonade in quick succession before the room even stopped spinning, but it was a start.

Dom and George hadn’t given me a chance to put forward any theories about where I thought Wolfie might have gone. I didn’t actually have any, but at that point it didn’t take much to turn it into an ‘I’ll show them’ type of situation. I had no idea how to do it, but I decided I was definitely, absolutely, without a doubt going to be the one to find her and bring her home. Prove that the new me hadn’t been a phoney, that my temporary tumble from grace had been a mere hiccup and that Danny Mulberry was back in the game.

Speaking of hiccups, by the time I’d doused my head under the cold tap in the men’s and downed another pint and a half of lemonade, I had the seed of an idea. And, as my dear old dad always said, one good idea and the gumption to follow it through is all you need. I kind of wish I’d been able to recall that a little sooner in my life.

I stepped out of the Lamb and Flag and took in a huge lungful of fresh North-West London air. I ran my fingers through my damp, newly tufty hair and remembered the concentration on Lou’s face as she’d chopped away at it. When I thought about George telling her he’d been right about me being in the pub I tried to shake the image out of my head, which had its own effects.

I felt light-headed, queasy and still nowhere near clever, but at least I could just about manage to stay upright. When I saw a black cab dawdling along the road with its light on, I raised my arm and it pulled over in front of me. I opened the door, took what I thought was a well-judged step, missed, and landed inelegantly on the floor on both knees. But I was in.

‘Err, all right, mate?’

‘Tottenham please, my good sir.’

40

Danny

It took me a good five minutes to realise that the cab driver wasn’t anyone’s good sir, let alone mine, and was actually a woman called Jaz. Luckily, having an extremely drunk man launch into her cab and tell her not to spare the horses every couple of hundred metres didn’t seem to faze her in the least. In fact, she seemed to find it quite entertaining, particularly the embarrassing moment I realised she wasn’t the ‘geez’ I’d been calling her.

‘Oh, shite, you’re a lady. Sorry about that, mate,’ was delivered with my face squashed up against the glass partition between us. I’d shuffled forward on my knees to introduce myself, which I thought was only polite having just spent the first couple of minutes trying to tie my shoelace, before tipping forward and sliding off the seat. Jaz was extremely gracious and said no apology necessary, most people wouldn’t notice if there was a giant panda up front driving them around, but please would I be so kind as to sit back and put my seatbelt on.