Alun was the brother of Mog, who was the brother of Tim the Big Footer. I told them it was a bad idea to kidnap the dentist, but I was someone whom they derived pleasure from never taking seriously. I don’t know why they didn’t respect me. It should have been the other way around, for they were idiots and I got solid Bs. Even more notably, I was on a war path to a stable career in Ethical Hacking. Now I’d been roped into kidnapping a dentist and I was risking it all. They call this ‘going along with the crowd’. My mum always told me not to, but she wasn’t the crowd; they were.

As we airlifted the stolen dentist out of the swimming pool that he was known to frequent, it occurred to me that this wasn’t remotely ethical. But when you’re in it, you’re in it. When they say, “tie that rope around his left ankle”, you tend to do it.

I looked at Alun. He grinned back at me and said, “I told them I’d amount to something.” I smiled back, weakly. Tim the Big Footer was flying the helicopter. I didn’t really trust him, but I was trapped. The sharp turns, lurching, and sudden dives made me nauseous, and I felt a wave of suffocation. It was like being locked in Tim the Big Footer’s car boot all over again. How was this my life? How had it come to be that I was forty-seven and kidnapping an innocent dentist with a bunch of excitable morons? And how come I still couldn’t grow sideburns?

The dentist, although dripping, rebelled. He swung a punch at Mog. He was fighting for his dignity, and the future of his patients. Despite the Speedos, I truly believed that he was a serious man who loved to fill in teeth. Mog dodged the punch. It caught me square in the gob instead. Knocked out my two front teeth. I bellowed in pain. I scrambled around on the floor, desperate to find them. There they were, two incisors, under the parachutes. I cupped them in my hands. My little darlings. Fortunately, there was a dentist on board, and a bloody good one at that.