‘Gonna be like that, then, is it?’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Oh, you didn’t need to, ya little sh*t, I know exactly what you did, and once again, you forgot the other side of the effing country.’

‘I did not see the other side of the effing country.’

‘Well, it was based on the other side of the effing country. Which way are the eyes facing, eh? We are lookin’ at you.’

The green eyed one was looking at the other, other side of the country. ‘Apparently, we still don’t exist. Isn’t it amazing that we still don’t exist. I’m not getting political at all. It is not in my nature. By the way, I have been there. I had to go allllll the way over there just to see a band. It was okay, I guess. Different.’

They start to mutter to themselves. ‘Did he just? I didn’t know he was here.’

‘Yes, he was,’ says his mother, and she raises an eyebrow. She doesn’t say anything else, but all the other westies know what she’s thinking. ‘We aren’t particularly stupid, and we haven’t forgotten how to speak properly, but we also haven’t forgotten how to dance to a stick with bottle-tops on it.’

‘Yes.’ Someone does a weird underhand punching motion that looks like he’s pulled back on it a bit so no one would get hurt if they’re standing in the way unintentionally.

‘That’s why I moved there,’ said an unnamed person. ‘They can be a lot more real. Most of them anyway. It is rather hot though.’

‘You get used to it,’ said a very tanned and, in his opinion, absolutely beautiful male of indistinct heritage. ‘My mum said I can come back whenever I want, ‘cos I’m a spunk and you’re not.’

The Independent publisher man was horrified. ‘You did NOT just say that. I am too, a spunk that is. My mum said I’m really cool.’

‘I think that might depend on the situation,’ said the mum of three young men. ‘I am not trying to sell them off, but really I think I raised some good looking blokes, so there.’

‘I know,’ said the mother of two girls and a boy. ‘I raised some pretty good lookin’ kids myself. So there.’

The mother of three girls shook her head. ‘Other people might not agree. You lot are trouble with a capital T. My lot are also trouble with a capital T, and I think if I married two of mine to two of yours, then we’d all be in trouble with a capital T.’

She was probably right.

The brother of the one who thought she was totally awesome shook his head and laughed to himself. ‘My sisters and I can dance really cool if we wanna. We just choose to be nice people.’ The dances they had done back in the day tended to take up most of the dance floor, and it was not the highland fling although it resembled it in a number of ways. ‘So, I guess there’s that.’ (His sister had been his wingman on one occasion.)

She had smiled at one of them once and nearly tripped over her own elbow. They had thought that was one of the funniest things they’d ever seen. ‘If he does that kind of thing, a lot of young women would have been in trouble back in the day,’ someone observes. ‘But, we are not allowed to talk about that, which doesn’t seem fair.’

D does not agree with any of this. ‘They are all quite magical, I said that to my dad, and he agreed. I think we should make a movie on this lot, and my dad just gave me the filthiest look. He said you guys are insane, but in a really funny way. He said,’ and here he points at someone else entirely. ‘He could not get your head in a vice because he trained you to get out of one, and he remembers that too. He’s kinda cool for an old guy with no hair.’

Some other people were mortified. ‘I do not think you can say that, D,’ said someone who knew how the system worked. ‘I think you might have to pull your head in, just a bit.’

‘I do not care about these people in my head,’ said D. ‘I am quite sure they can’t be real, because there is simply no chance they can be that cool. Who made them up?’

There was silicone in his world, and he didn’t quite understand that really cool people were not the people he thought they were.

‘Definitely not real,’ he muttered. ‘This is not my time at all. These guys are seriously not my people, but I can’t help but be impressed behind the scenes. That did not make sense, but I can’t seem to tell her I think they’re freshly minted coins and this is still not my time. Not today.’

No one understood that at all, and he didn’t mind, because apparently they weren’t meant to. ‘Not my time to die,’ he said, very clearly. ‘That’s all.’