The sound of gunfire duplicated itself dozen-fold on the walls of the hemming towers until it reached Testoteroni’s ears a full-bodied fire fight.

He had another unsuccessful go at scratching his greasy head.

‘Yard,’ he whispered in inert awe.

There was no sign of a toilet anywhere. Weed wanted to ask directions but everyone seemed so busy he did not want to disturb them. Hassled clerks pushed by with wheelbarrows full of computer printout, which they dumped into big wire bins placed at the end of each nest of work stations, from where sweating folk in cheap suits used pitch forks to toss it onto the desks of data input clerks — haggard looking men and women perched on high stools whose fingers worked at the keyboard like flocks of starved geese. The reams of paper data were allowed to spill into yet more wire baskets from where yet more young workers with pitchforks and shovels would load it into wheelbarrows again before transporting it to other wire bins. Printers screamed and gnashed their cogs, kettles spewed steam, young graduates with scrubbed lobster skin gushed coffee-tainted sweat.

Trying to pick out a person to ask, Weed settled on a composed looking individual with a balding head and glasses who was writing slowly and carefully on a quaintly old-fashioned tablet of foolscap with a beautiful and classically knobby fountain pen. As Weed approached, the balding man was set upon by a horde of brown-overalled operatives who came out of nowhere. They dismantled the computer he was not using and made off with the telephone. They lifted up and carried away his desk to the east and lifted his chair with him and his fountain pen still aboard and carried it west. More of their band swiftly arranged the surrounding workstations and clerks so that no obvious space was left.

‘Downsized, innit.’ It was Warren, who had suddenly appeared at Weed’s side and who was muttering conspiratorially in Weed’s ear. ‘Outsourced, rationalised, streamlined. Efficiency boosted. That was Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogered, he is now.’