'I reckon them's your legs, Nobby. I've got mine.'
'Right. Right. Ooo ... I reckon I drunk a lot, Sarge.'
'Drunk as a lord, eh?'
Nobby reached gingerly up to his helmet. Someone had put a paper coronet around it. His questing hand found a dog-end behind his ear.
It was that unpleasant hour of the drinking day when, after a few hours' quality gutter-time, you're beginning to feel the retribution of sobriety while still being drunk enough to make it worse.
'How'd we get here, Sarge?'
Colon started to scratch his head and stopped because of the noise.
'I reckon...' he said, winnowing the frazzled shreds of his short-term memory, 'I... reckon... seems to me there was something about stormin' the palace and demandin' your birthright...'
Nobby choked and spat out the cigarette. 'We didn't do that, did we?'
'You was shouting we ought to do it...'
'Oh, gods...' moaned Nobby.
'But I reckon you threw up around that time.'
'That's a relief, anyway.'
'Well... it was all over Grabber Hoskins. But he tripped over someone before he could get us.'
Colon suddenly patted his pockets. 'And I've still got the tea money,' he said. Another cloud of memory scudded across the sunshine of oblivion. 'Well... three pennies of it...'
The urgency of this got through to Nobby. Thruppence?'
'Yeah, well... after you started orderin' all them expensive drinks for the whole bar... well, you din't have no money and it was either me payin' for them or...' Colon moved his finger across his throat and went: 'Kssssh!'
'You tellin' me we paid for Happy Hour in the Drum?'
'Not so much Happy Hour,' said Colon miserably. 'More sort of Ecstatic One-Hundred-and-Fifty Minutes. I didn't even know you could buy gin in pints.'
Nobby tried to focus on the fog. 'No one can drink gin by the pint, Sarge.'
'That's what I kept sayin', and would you listen?'
Nobby sniffed. 'We're close to the river,' he said. 'Let's try to get...'
Something roared, very close by. It was long and low, like a foghorn in serious distress. It was the sound you might hear from a cattleyard on a nervous night, and it went on and on, and then stopped so abruptly it caught the silence unawares.
'... far away from that as we can,' said Nobby. The sound had done the work of an ice-cold shower and about two pints of black coffee.
Colon spun around. He desperately needed something that would do the work of a laundry. 'Where did it come from?' he said.
'It was... over there, wasn't it?'
'I thought it was that way!'
In the fog, all directions were the same.
'I think...' said Colon, slowly, 'that we ort to go and make a report about this as soon as possible.'
'Right,' said Nobby. 'Which way?'