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down and covered you with rugs. When you fell over things in the dark and cut your knee, I was there for you with clean towels and ointment. You owe me. One little thing is all I ask. It’s at times like this you find out who your real friends are.
    For the first ten trillionth of a second, nothing happens. The knees don’t spasm into explosive movement. The back fails to unbend like a coiled spring. The arms refuse to lift and shove the oil-jar lid clear. Not unreasonably, Akram begins to get angry.
    I won’t tell you again.
    When Akram speaks, particularly in that low, quiet voice of his, people do what he tells them to. It’s something to do with innate authority and natural leadership, augmented just a touch by a storywide reputation for instinctive violence and unspeakable cruelty. When Akram speaks to himself in an equivalent tone, tendons listen, muscles jump to it.
    Go! Go! Go!
    The flesh is willing but the spirit is bolshy. Hold on, it screams, you can’t do this, against the rules, more than my job’s worth. If they catch us doing this -
    Well? What can they possibly do to you that I can’t, earlier and more sadistically?
    The spirit doesn’t answer. It’s in two minds. On the one hand, the very thought of Authority has always filled it with an unreasoning terror. On the other hand; Authority is far away, up there somewhere between the sun and the underside of the clouds, whereas Akram is very much closer and only marginally, if at all, less terrifying. It’s the old, old question; who would you rather offend, a policeman across the street or a spouse sitting a mere lunge away from your throat?
    All right, have it your own way. But don’t say I didn’t warn -
    With a rattle and a crunch of splintering terracotta, the lid rolls clear and hits the ground. Like a genie out of a lamp (except that he’s a little smaller, and genies, though sabre-toothed and fiery-eyed, are rather more reassuring to meet on a dark night) Akram erupts out of the jar, lands heavily on one knee and one elbow, curses fluently, rolls and starts to run. He clears the courtyard wall in one enormous bound - perhaps you can visualise this better if you imagine swiftly moving numbers in the bottom right-hand corner of your mind’s screen - comes down beautifully poised on the balls of his feet, swiftly glances both ways to make sure he’s clear, and runs. Fourteen seconds later he’s in the Lamp-Maker’s quarter, disguised as a wandering fakir and negotiating keenly for a second-hand camel, long MOT, new saddle, good runner.
    By the time Yasmin and Ali have saved up enough courage to peek out, see nobody there, and wheel the trolley back out again, he’s galloping through the western gate of the city. By the time the fortieth jar proves to be empty, giving Ali Baba a nasty turn of the same order of magnitude as a cat might experience on arriving at the Pearly Gates to find them guarded by fifteen-foot-high mice, he’s a very long way away indeed. So far away, in fact, that henceforth he will be extremely hard to find in this dimension… But that, as they say, is Another Story.
    ‘You sure?’ Ali Baba asks.
    Yasmin nods. ‘We did counting at houri school,’ she adds, rather unnecessarily. ‘I got a B. We got thirty-nine bedraggled footpads and one empty jar.’ She shrugs. ‘So what?’ she said. ‘Thirty-nine out of forty’s not so bad.’
    Ali Baba frowns. ‘Quite,’ he replies. ‘It’s almost as consoling as knowing you’re only going to have to face the Death of the One Cut. And who let that dratted monkey out?’
    ‘Nobody,’ retorts the dratted monkey, remembering too late that it isn’t supposed to be able to. ‘I mean nya-ha-ha-ha eek eek.’
    ‘Yusuf. Come here!’
    Ah, the hell with it, mutters the monkey to itself; for the last time, because Ali Baba relieves it of the ring, muttering, ‘What the devil is this, I wonder?’ and henceforth when the monkey soliloquises, it’s back on familiar ground