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had teased me into full consciousness with a Bourbon biscuit dipped in sal volatile. ‘It’s only the offcuts burning in the grate. They haven’t proved themselves to be a particularly good substitute for coal. I think I will discontinue their use as soon as I run out of them.’
    ‘Offcuts?’ I said. And then, ‘carpet offcuts.’ And then I felt faint all over again. But I didn’t pass out again. Once wasn’t cool. Twice would really be taking the Mickey Mouse hat. And I didn’t want to do that.
    I did a little squinting about and, true as true, we did have a carpet, too, right here in the sitting room. Same as the hall. Same green.
    ‘Billiard table green,’ I said.
    ‘Billiard table baize offcuts,’ said my mother. ‘The same as the stage clothes you are wearing. In fact, when you fainted in the hall we had a job finding you. You sort of blended into the carpet. As would a chameleon.’
    ‘Billiard table baize offcuts?’ I did a bit of gauging up and mental arithmetic. ‘I would say,’ I said, ‘that surely this front sitting room of ours would have a floor area roughly equivalent to at least three billiard tables. Surely these are very large offcuts.’
    ‘That is what the foreman said to your father,’ said my mother. ‘Before he sacked him, this afternoon.’
    ‘Sacked him?’ I said. ‘Oh dear, not again.’
    ‘No, he only sacked him the once.’ My mother was a stickler for detail.
    My father was not in the room. For had he been, I very much doubt whether this conversation would have taken place.
    ‘Since you have known my father,’ I said to my mother as she now kindly mopped my fevered brow with a rum-soaked copy of Pirate Today, [7] ‘how many different jobs do you think he has had?’
    ‘It depends on what you mean by “different”,’ said my mother. ‘Many have been in the same line of business.’
    I nodded and I gave the matter thought. ‘With different employers, then,’ I said.
    ‘Goodness me,’ said my mother. ‘I have long ago lost count. But forty or so years from now you will be able to “Google” him on the “Internet”. You can find out all about him then.’
    ‘Google?’ I said. ‘Internet?’ I said also.
    ‘Sorry,’ said my mother. ‘I was just having one of my visions. I have been granted the gift of prophecy, you see, from Northfields Pentecostal Church. Captain Lynch is schooling me in the technique.’
    ‘I’ll just bet he is,’ I said. ‘And have you had any visions, or prophetic insights, regarding him? Such as him discovering a lost city of gold, or suchlike?’
    My mother shook her head and said that no, she hadn’t.
    ‘I suppose Dad’ll be at home a lot now,’ I said, with a degree of dread, if not in my voice, then probably upon my face. ‘It always takes him a long time to find a new job.’
    ‘Research,’ said my mother. ‘So much research.’
    ‘Right,’ I said, recalling my father’s research. ‘He always researches the various strengths of alcohol in the local public house, but never takes a job there.’
    ‘Not in a single public house,’ said my mother, once more the stickler for detail. ‘He does his research in many different public houses. He’ll do so much research in one public house that the landlord will urge him to go elsewhere, lest he over-researches.’
    ‘Right,’ I said. With the same inflection I had put into the previous ‘right’.
    ‘But no,’ said my mother, now applying vinegar and brown paper to my forehead, for she had read in a nursery rhyme that this was a timeless remedy. ‘He won’t be researching in public houses because he already has a new job.’
    ‘Already?’ I said. ‘But he was only sacked this afternoon.’
    ‘I know,’ said my mother. ‘What a world we live in today and no mistake. It must be this Space Age that they are all talking about. But a man knocked upon the door earlier this evening and offered your father a new job. And he took it, right there and