“I certainly will not,” I said. “I’m not getting Tears on my Trenchcoat”.[15]

“What’s the trouble?” asked a broad-shouldered dame in a pale pink peplos and Day-Glo dungarees. She had the kind of face that you generally see only on a platter with an apple stuck into its gob.

“Butt out, Miss Piggy,” I told her. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

The porcine dame burst into tears.

“Now look what you’ve done,” said Fangio.

“And you keep out of it too, skeleton boy.”

“Waaah,” went Fangio, breaking down upon the bar.

“Blubb blubb blubb,” went Colin.

“Boo hoo” and “snort” went the pig-faced lady.

“Can I be of assistance?” asked a solitary cyclist who’d just popped in for a Perrier water. He wore one of those figure-hugging Lycra suits that only look good on Lynford Christie, and one of those streamlined bikers’ helmets that don’t look good on anybody.

“Clear off, you Spandexed poseur,” I told him.

“Sob sob sob,” went the cyclist.

Now I don’t know what it is about crying. It must be infectious, I guess. A bit like yawning really, I suppose. Somebody yawns and you want to yawn too. Perhaps that’s a conditioned reflex. Or something atavistic, dating back to our tribal ancestry. When, if the headman yawned, everybody yawned and the tribe all went to bed. Or, if the headman cried, you joined him too, in a good old howling session. I’m not too hot on the history of man, so I couldn’t say for a certainty.

What I could say for certain was this, however.

It wasn’t my fault.

OK, I might have started Colin off, but he was only faking it. And Fangio is a sissy boy and the pig-faced dame had it coming. And as for the solitary cyclist and the three students and the retired colourman and the two young women from Essex and the humpty-backed geezer and the continuity girl from Blue Peter and the lady with the preposterous bosom and that oik with the mobile phone, who said he’d call for an ambulance, well sure, OK, I might have pointed out their shortcomings, when they came muscling in to what clearly was none of their business. But for them all to start bawling their eyes out and saying that it was all my fault, that was laying it thicker than a concrete coat on a Baghdad bombproof bunker.

I mean, blaming me?

I could have wept.

In fact, I nearly did.

“Shut up!” I shouted. “Shut up the lot of you.”

“Waaaaaah,” they went, in chorus.

“Will you stop all this weeping, you bunch of witless wimps?”

“Waaaaaah!” they reiterated, somewhat louder this time.

“He called me Quasimodo,” whined the humpty-backed geezer.

“He said I had a face like a cow’s behind,” squalled a woman with a face like a cow’s behind.

“He impugned my manhood,” snivelled a closet shirtlifter.

“He referred to me as a pretentious ninny,” ululated a thespian.

“He murdered my daddy!” howled Colin.

There was a lot of silence then.

“He did what?” asked the guy with the sore on his lip, which, I’d mentioned in passing, was probably the pox.

“He murdered my poor dear daddy. Shot him down in an alleyway.”

“I did nothing of the kind,” I rightfully protested.

“Assassin!” cried a crying lady, who, let’s face it, did look a lot like Jabba the Hutt.

“Murderer!” shrieked the bloke with the birthmark that I’d drawn attention to.

“String him up,” yelled the woman with the questionable hairdo that I’d well and truly questioned.

“I’ll get a rope,” hollered Fangio.

“Oi, Fange,” said I. “Turn it in.”

“Sorry, Laz, I got carried away.”

“Murdered my poor dear daddy,” went Colin again.

And would you believe it?

Or even if you wouldn’t.

The whole damn lot of them went for me!

“If you ask me,” said Johnny Boy, “we’re lost.”

“I’m not asking you,” said Icarus Smith.

“No need to be shirty,” said Johnny Boy. “Just because I put you straight about the relationship you have with your brother.”

“It isn’t that,” said Icarus Smith, even though it was. “But actually, I think you’re right. We’re lost.”

They had wandered a goodly way amongst the corridors of the Ministry of Serendipity. They had left the barber far behind, strapped into his chair with his Velocette in his mouth. But now, somewhere in the middle of what might have been anywhere, they were well and truly lost, which wasn’t a nice thing to be.

“Perhaps we should retrace our steps.”

“No,” said Icarus. “We’ll go on. We’ll leave this to fate. Which way would you choose?”

“How about turning left here?”

“Right it is then,” said Icarus.

As they walked and wandered, Johnny Boy tried to lighten things up with tales of the music halls. But Icarus darkened things down again with a tale of a film he’d seen about miners who got trapped underground.

“We might be going in circles,” said Johnny Boy. “You do that, you know, if you try to walk in a straight line. One of your legs is always a tiny bit shorter than the other, so eventually you walk round in a big circle.”

“Does that work if both of your legs are short?” asked Icarus.

“Don’t be horrid,” said Johnny Boy. “You’ll make me want to cry.”

The crying howling mob closed in upon me, but I wasn’t going down without a fight. I was prepared to stand my ground and dish out as good as I got. I’d raise my fists and fight a fair fight and devil take the hindparts.

But I was severely outnumbered here.

So I whipped out the trusty Smith and Where’s-this-all-gonna-end and let off a couple of shots at the ceiling.

Which started the sprinkler system.

And set off the fire alarm.

Way down deep in the Ministry of Serendipity, other alarms started ringing.

“I think the barber’s broken free,” said Johnny Boy. “What should we do now?”

“I would say, run,” said Icarus. “But I’m not sure just in which direction we should run.”

“Up might be a good plan,” said Johnny Boy.

“Run up?”

“Head up. Up and out of here.”

Sounds of running footsteps could now be heard.

“There,” said Icarus. “There’s a ladder fastened to the wall. It leads up some kind of shaft.”

“That would be the one then. Let’s get a move on before the guards get us.”

“Get him!” shouted the bloke with the bulldog jowls which I’d said could be cured by surgery. “Get the murderer, batter him good.”

And suddenly I found myself in a maelstrom of flailing fists and battering boots.

“I can hear their boots getting nearer,” said Johnny Boy, halfway up the shaft that led to somewhere. “How are you doing up there, Icarus? Can you see daylight?”

“Er, not exactly,” the lad called back. “Just a sort of manhole cover. And I can’t seem to get it open.”

“They’re getting closer, Icarus, I can hear them. They’re coming from all directions.”

They came at me from all directions, down as well as up and all about. I pride myself that with my daily workout regime[16] I am always in peak condition and can take a blow to the solar plexus without even flinching. However, I’d never quite planned on taking quite so many blows and all at the same time.

“I’ll have to blow it open,” called Icarus.

“You’ll have to what?”

“Blow open the manhole cover.”

“How?”

“I took the liberty of relocating a stick or two of SHITE from the captain’s pocket while we were in my brother’s office. I thought they might come in handy one day. Do you have a box of matches?”

“Sadly no,” called Johnny Boy. “How about you?”