Not James, though. He stuck the notebook in his jeans, grabbed a thick black felt-tip pen off Slim’s desk and wrote something down on the back of a piece of paper. Then he stuck the note right in the middle of the desk where nobody would ever be able to miss it, even if they were almost totally blind. Which I bet Slim probably wasn’t. Then he goes, right, adios, amigos. Come on, Norman, we’re oot! I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to be leaving a room, but that didn’t stop me from having a quick look at the note before we left:

Slim, you robbing bastard, I’ve taken my moped, my dad’s money and your cooked-up blackjack book. If you or your goons come after me, it goes straight to the cops. PS You really are a total bloody robbing bastard.

Isn’t that just the coolest?

James held the office door open so I could go under his arm, and when I went to step out into the hallway he goes, you’re pure barry, ye are, Norman. And even though I didn’t have a clue who Barry was, by the way James looked at me when he said it I reckon he must have been someone pretty cool. I felt so proud that for a squillionth of a second I thought I was going to cry like a baby all over again, and then I thought, well, how would that look. Not like someone who was pure Barry, that’s for sure.

I didn’t cry. But that was mainly because me and James were too busy running down the hallway toward the fire stairs at a zillion miles an hour with a huge, ugly-looking, most definitely dodgy geezer right behind us shouting, oi! Stop! Get back here, yous!

James reckoned later it was stonking bad luck that bouncer just happened to be going for his dinner at the exact minute we were breaking out of Slim’s office or we would probably have made a clean getaway. It was even worse luck that he was one of the guys that had actually put James in the tumble dryer in the first place, so there was no way no how we were going to stop, even if he’d asked nicely. Which he didn’t.

He was still yelling at us as we charged out the fire door and into the alley behind the club then up to behind the bins where James’s moped was parked. And even though he sounded a lot more puffed out he was still shouting at us to bloody well stop as James shoved a helmet on my head and picked me up and plonked me right on the back of the bike before I even knew it. Me, Norman Foreman, who can’t even ride a push-bike that well, on an actual moped!

Hold on tight, Norman, this could get rough, he goes. And it did, too. Because James took off at top speed down the alley right back toward where Slim’s goon was standing with his arms out. Still yelling at us to stop. But James didn’t stop, no way no how. He just kept right on going until we got to the top of the alley. Even though the moped was bouncing all over the place, I held on tight to James and dared to turn around for a look. The last thing I saw was Slim’s goon lying face-first in a pile of black bin bags with his arms in the air and his big old bum poking out a split in his pants for all the world to see.