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stuck on it like the silly face your mother warned you about. It’s time, Kevin realised; somehow or other, there’s time in Heaven, and it’s jamming everything up. Now what’ll I do?
    Dad!
    Dad?
    Time in Heaven, where there isn’t any. Imagine you’d grown up on the Moon and you’d just come to Earth for the first time and had your first brush with gravity. Time, though, is worse; because gravity just tries to grind you into the dirt. Time gets you all ways at once, crushing you down and inflating you like a balloon, compressing you like a Cortina in a scrapyard and dragging at you like a rupture in the cabin wall at forty thousand feet. Worse; think what it’d be like if both sides of the cabin ruptured at once, and you were standing in the middle of the gangway.
    Dad! Help! It’s me, Kevin!
    Who?
    Dad, is that you? Look, you’ve got to come home, everything’s going wrong and it’s all my fault. Please, Dad, listen to me. It’s all going wrong and I don’t know what to do.
    Who is that, please? Is there anybody there? Hello?
    And then silence. As far as Kevin was concerned, that was it. Snap, went the camel’s back. He balled his fists, squealed like clapped-out brake drums and bashed the keyboard as hard as he could -
    - and in doing so, depressed two keys.

CHAPTER TWO

    â€˜H ello and good morning, you’re listening to the Early Bird show, my name’s Danny Bennett and if you’ve just tuned in I’m afraid you’ve just missed Prime Minister Dermot Fraud giving us his Worm’s Eye View. And I’ll be talking to my next guest, Trevor Swine, about his new book, Blood Oranges; Mafia Infiltration of the Soft Fruit Authority , directly after this.’
    Dermot Fraud leaned back in his chair and twiddled his thumbs complacently. Good interview - name mentioned (five times), plugged new cuddly animals initiative, laughed to scorn misuse of party funds allegation, side-stepped innuendo about the big redhead from the constituency committee, made jokes (two). All that, in eleven minutes net of jingles. Churchill might have handled it as adroitly, likewise Keir Hardie, Lloyd George and Pericles; but not better. All part of the daily grind of statesmanship.
    The red light in the studio went off. He stood up, shook Mr Bennett’s podgy little hand with genuine synthetic warmth, and strolled out into the corridor.
    â€˜All right?’ he asked.
    The minder nodded. ‘You got everything in except one of the extempore jokes,’ she replied, ‘so I’m rescheduling that for Thursday week. Means we’ll have to move the quicksilver repartee about the shadow foreign secretary’s haircut back till next Friday, but that ought to be okay so long as he doesn’t grow it back by then.’
    â€˜Unlikely,’ Fraud said. ‘Now then, it’s the rats next, isn’t it?’
    â€˜That’s right. The car’s out the front.’
    â€˜Speech?’
    â€˜In the car.’
    The speech turned out to be the old Mark IV ecology/ our children’s children number, which Fraud knew by heart; accordingly he was able to spend the drive to Leatherhead staring mindlessly out of the window. One thing he missed now the party was in power - the only thing, needless to say - was the long, lazy afternoons he used to spend in Parliament, snuggled down during some debate or other with nothing to do but daydream and occasionally make a few rude noises when the other lot were on. So many of his colleagues saw the House as merely a very-last-resort way of getting on telly, rather than as what it really was: a place where stressed-out MPs can go to escape from the phone and vegetate. More fools them.
    He sighed. Not likely to be much chance of that when he was Prime Minister; you had to sit at the front and answer questions, frequently with no script. Still, that was the price you had to pay for being the father of your