The following morning, Harry sat on the garden seat in front of the shop. He had stopped noticing the moss beneath the seat or the cracks in the pavement or any of the sights that had become familiar to him, but on this particular morning he wouldn�t have noticed them anyway. His smile said more than he could ever express in words, which was just as well, because the only words he could say were �ha?� and �who?� Barbara and Roy were easily able to trace to source of the smile to his meeting with Jennifer last night. Over the course of the day, the ability to speak comprehensibly returned to Harry, but the smile remained.

The play ran for a week. It was one of the longest running plays ever in Mizzenwood and it made a reasonable profit, but Harry made much more money from the new customers in the shop. He mentioned the shop at every possible opportunity in the play, such as when someone comes into the pub and asks for a packet of peanuts, and the barman says, �You know you could get them for half the price at Edwards� shop on East Street.�

Harry kept the earnings from the play in a bag beneath the counter, just to look at it and take pride in his achievement. One day he took out a 5-euro note and lit it with a cigarette lighter. He then lit a cigar with the note. He dropped the note on the ground and took a long drag from the cigar.

�You shouldn�t do that,� Roy said.

�Why not? There�s plenty more where that came from,� Harry said as he pointed to the bag.

�No, I mean you�ve set your shoes on fire.�

Harry looked down. Smoke was rising from his shoes. �There�s plenty more shoes in the sea,� he said.

�Yeah, but what about your feet?�

�Do you remember the time Uncle Sean lost a foot when he stood on a tack as he was getting up from the breakfast table?�

�Yeah. He found it on the end of his leg as he was sitting down to supper.�

�He spent the whole day looking for it.�

�It�s always the last place you look.�

�Do you remember the time Granddad lost his glasses on holiday in Ballinspittle...�

��It was so funny. He was asking everyone if they�d seen his glasses and the whole time they were on the monkey on his head,� Harry said as he lay in a hospital bed. Roy was standing next to him. Barbara came to see Harry, and she had good news, bad news, and a book. The good news was that the fine weather was set to continue for another few days. The bad news was that Rita had written her autobiography and the book was Rita�s autobiography. It was getting a lot of attention, and a lot of customers for the supermarket. There was even talk of a film adaptation. The following is an extract from the first chapter of the autobiography:

When Harry got out of hospital, the shop seemed quieter than ever. The only customer they had in the morning was Jennifer, and that took Harry�s mind off things for a while, but when she left the silence returned. Barbara went back to the re-pricing and stocktaking, and she was finally able to get beyond the bottom shelf and onto the hat-shelf. John R always told himself that it was a hat shop, not a grocery shop, and he always kept some hats in stock. Paddy continued the tradition, even though he never sold any. The hats on the shelf had been there since the shop had first opened. Harry decided to keep the tradition going too, and the hat-shelf was left untouched.

The second customer of the day was a young girl who asked Harry if they had any paper.

�I�m sorry, we don�t,� Harry said.

�Do you have any paper at all, a notebook or anything?�

�No, we don�t have any paper. Look, here�s some lighter fuel.� Harry took a can of lighter fuel from the shelf behind him and gave it to the girl.

�But I just want paper,� she said.

�You�d only burn it,� Harry said.

�I wouldn�t.�

�If I saw a little girl with a can of lighter fuel, I�d say she wants to burn something, and then you come in here asking for paper, so I�d say my suspicions are confirmed. Now run along with your lighter fuel.�

The girl left the shop with her lighter fuel.

�We�re going to have to do something about this,� Harry said. �She�s the first customer all day, apart from Jennifer. And we�re out of lighter fuel too.�

Harry had been very impressed by his grandfather�s autobiography, and he had thought about writing his own memoirs. The writing part of the process appealed to him, but it was all the thinking that went with the writing that put him off. Too much remembering, recalling, explaining, expanding, extending. It was a huge project. He wasn�t sure if he was prepared to put the effort into remembering things that never happened to him, so he put the autobiography idea to one side, but he knew he had to do something. The shop couldn�t survive on so few customers.

He knew he couldn�t copy Rita�s autobiography idea, so he decided to copy another one of Rita�s publicity stunts instead: her charity work. A few days later, a story appeared in The Mizzenwood Times about how Harry was letting some homeless people stay in the spare bedrooms of his house. There were photos of three homeless men in the bedrooms. One was Alexander and the other two were Tracey�s dogs. Harry had dressed the dogs in old suits, just like they had done when they took them to Prague. There was also a photo of the shed where Alexander used to live � this is supposedly where the homeless men used to sleep before Harry took them in, and there�s an element of truth in that. Harry tried to make the shed look as cold as possible, and to do this he copied some ads from a few years earlier. A company that made heating systems once ran a very effective ad campaign, but their biggest rivals responded with ads for cold. It didn�t really affect the sales of the rival company because they made bicycles, but it had a negative impact on the company that made heating systems. Cold became very fashionable, but heat is back in fashion now again. Harry tried to make the shed look like the rooms in the ads for cold.

In an interview for the paper, Harry talked about how he had found these men living in appalling conditions in the town (there was also a photo of the shed where Alexander lived) and he felt it was his duty to offer them the spare bedrooms in his house.

The article had an immediate impact. There were ten customers that morning, and normally they�d just have Jennifer. In the afternoon there was a constant stream of people through the door of the shop. Business continued at that pace for the whole week.

They never had to work as hard as that before, and Harry decided it was time for a little reward. A long weekend was coming up and he suggested to Roy that they go away somewhere for it.

�How about another trip to Prague?� Roy said. �We could meet up with Archie.�

�I�d like to meet Archie again,� Harry said, �but we�ve been to Prague before. It�d be nice to go somewhere different. What about another European city?�

�I�m sure I saw an ad here for Dunn-Air,� Roy said as he looked through the newspaper. �Here it is. �Fly to Berlin for only 50 cent�.�

�That sounds good,� Harry said. �Barbara, will you come along? We�ll pay for everything.�

�I don�t know. Will Peaches be there?�

�We�ll ask her anyway, but trust me, she�s great fun on holidays. Jennifer will probably go too. We might ask a few other people as well. There�s Alexander; it could be his stag party, and we�ll try to get Archie to go. Maybe Dave.�

�Yeah, why not,� Barbara said. �I�ll go.�

Alexander was nervous at the prospect of being in open spaces for so long, but the chance to get away from Nancy for the weekend appealed to him, and it would probably be his last weekend of freedom before the wedding so he agreed to go. He told Nancy that he was going out to get matches.

Harry said he�d pay for everything with the money he made from the play and the donations he had received for the blind child. It seemed only right that Archie would go as well. After all, he was the �blind child�. Harry called him up and told him if he could just get to Berlin, they�d pay for the rest of the weekend. Harry, Barbara, Roy, Alexander and Jennifer met up with Peaches and Dave at the airport.

Also at the airport, two jockeys were trying to check in for their flight, but they were told that the flight had been cancelled because there weren�t enough people on it.

�But we have to be in Doncaster for the 3.20,� one of the jockeys said. They were both wearing all the riding gear, and holding saddles and whips.

The woman at the check-in desk looked at the computer and said, �We do have a flight to Doncaster East. It�s only 50 cent.�

�That�s even better,� Tommy said. �I didn�t even know Doncaster had an airport at all.�

�It�s not actually in Doncaster; it�s a little to the East. In Berlin. You might have to get a bus to Doncaster.�

�That�ll be grand,� Tommy said, as he and Charlie searched their pockets for the loose change to pay for the flight.

Tommy and Charlie were sitting in front of Harry and Jennifer on the flight. The jockeys told them about how their flight had been cancelled, and their conversation lasted the whole flight to Berlin, although neither Harry nor Jennifer got much of a word in. Harry wanted to steer the conversation towards where the jockeys keep their gold, but he never got the chance.

When Tommy and Charlie arrived in Berlin, they realised that they didn�t have enough change left for the bus, but they weren�t bothered. They decided to walk to Doncaster. They went to the front entrance of the airport and tried to figure out which direction was east. Charlie thought it was to the right, so they started walking in that direction. About fifty yards down the road, a thought suddenly occurred to Tommy. He stopped and said, �If we�re east of Doncaster now, shouldn�t we be walking to the left?�

�God, you�re right,� said Charlie. They turned around and kept walking; down roads, through fields, across rivers, talking all the time.

Harry got a great price for the hotel with his fake student card. It was a nice hotel too, and near the city centre.

They had a great weekend in Berlin. Archie got drunk again. Well, they all got drunk, some more so than others, and Archie more so than any of them. He ended up in a fountain with a shoe in his mouth. He would have been arrested if he hadn�t been a pig.

Harry and Roy were right about Peaches � she was great fun on holidays. She was the life and soul of the party. It was she who stood on the table and sang �Hit me baby one more time.� It was she who dared Archie to steal the policeman�s shoe.

Barbara and Jennifer were keen to sample some of the city�s culture, and they managed to convince the others to go to a museum, but they regretted bringing them along later, after being constantly bombarded with questions like, �Why is that in a museum?�

�Because it�s very old,� they�d explain.

�Where are the new things?�

�There are no new things.�

�Well what�s that then?�

�A light switch.�

�What�s that doing in a museum?�

�It�s there to turn on the lights.�

�I could have seen lights at home without paying anything.�

�If they didn�t have lights you wouldn�t be able to see the exhibits.�

�I could have seen the exhibits at home too. We have plenty of light switches.�

The weekend had gone perfectly until they were about to return to the airport in Berlin to fly home. Harry had told the others that he�d take care of everything, including the tickets, but when he looked at the tickets he realised they were only one-way. The flight home was 200-euro.

�This is a complete rip-off,� Harry said.

�Well, 200-euro and 50-cent would be very reasonable for a return ticket,� Barbara said.

�They never told me it wasn�t a return.�

�It said so in the ad.�

�Who reads those little things in small writing at the end of ads? The main text said �Fly to Berlin for only 50 cent.� And what about those jockeys at the airport – their flight was cancelled because there wasn�t enough people on board. That�s outrageous.�

�In fairness, if you read the small print, it says they might do that � where it says, �Dunn-Air bears no responsibility for anything, ever.��

�No one reads the small print. That type of behaviour goes completely against their slogan, �The airline that cares for you.��

�Yeah, but the small print of the slogan says, �But we might occasionally f**k you over.� You have to expect these things when you pay 50-cent for a flight. I bet we still end up flying home with them. Even at 200-euro they�re still the cheapest.�

�I�ll rot in hell before we fly home with those bastards.�

Harry changed his mind shortly afterwards. Barbara explained the situation to him as clearly as possible and he realised that he didn�t believe in hell. On the flight home, when they were discussing airlines, it suddenly dawned on him. �Ah, I see,� he said. �So they only keep really old things in museums.�

As they were on the plane home, the two jockeys were walking through a forest. Still talking all the time, but they seemed a little more subdued.

�Ha?� Tommy said

�Ha?� Charlie said.

�Oh.�

�Who?�

�Ha?�

�Oh.�

�Ha?�

�Oh yeah, wasn�t he in the army?�

�That was his brother.�

They arrived home and Alexander returned to Nancy under the stairs. �I got the matches,� he said.

�That was quick.�

The next day, Harry and Roy sat in the living room watching TV. Barbara walked in and said, �Bad news, Harry. The press have found out that all this stuff about you helping homeless people is fake.� Barbara showed the newspaper to Harry. There was a picture on the front page of the two dogs at a dog show. It was next to the photos of them dressed up in suits.

�Damn!�

�People haven�t reacted too well to this. There�s an angry mob outside the shop. They seem very upset about you faking these things.�

�I suppose I better go out and see what they want,� Harry said as he stood up.

�I don�t think you should. They look very angry.�

�I�m sure they�ll understand if I just explain the situation to them.�

Harry went into the shop and Roy followed him. They could hear the noise of the crowd outside as they walked towards the front door. Roy tried to talk Harry out of facing the crowd. �Barbara�s right; you shouldn�t go out there. Maybe you�re better off leaving it for a while.�

�It�ll be fine. I�ll just tell the truth. People will be reasonable.�

�The truth? That you dressed two dogs up to look like old men just so you could pretend you�re letting homeless people use your spare bedrooms?�

�I�m sure they�ll understand if I explain everything in a calm, reasonable manner. Remember the time Uncle Al was in court after he got drunk at the funeral�� Harry and Roy went out the front door. Harry�s voice was drowned out by the noise of the crowd.

��And the judge said he�d never heard of anyone whose head was in a coma while his body could jump off a piano, but he gave him the benefit of the doubt.� Harry said as he lay in the hospital bed. He had a black eye, and a few small cuts on his face. Roy and Barbara were at the bedside.

�How�s your head now?� Barbara asked him.

�Not too bad. It was just mild concussion.�

�There�s one thing I don�t understand about this,� Barbara said to Harry. �How did the press get the photo of the dogs at the dog show?�

�I don�t know,� Harry said.

A few days earlier, the dogs sat at a table in a dimly lit room. Rita Smith sat down at the other side of the table and put a briefcase in front of the dogs. She opened the briefcase – it was full of cash. The dogs� eyes widened. One of them handed Rita a brown envelope. She opened it and looked at the photo of the dog show inside. She shook hands/ paws with the dogs and left.

Business in the shop ground to a halt after Harry�s failed publicity stunt. Jennifer left him because of the lies. Harry wasn�t going to give in to Rita just yet. He just needed an idea, but ideas were as thin on the ground as customers. He�d spend his mornings sitting in front of the shop, and the afternoons watching TV with Roy.

Roy watched TV for most of the day. There was a station called �Forget TV� that he watched most of the time. At nine o� clock in the evening there was a programme to make you forget about the rain, and then there was a programme to make you forget about your job. That one was just people falling over at weddings. And after that it was �Forget your upcoming trial�. That was just people getting wet or falling over things. There was a game show that claimed to make you forget who you are. It was basically just people remembering who they are � you could win a prize if you remembered who you are. It wasn�t as easy as it sounds, because most of the contestants were huge fans of the show. Harry didn�t watch much of Forget TV, apart from one show called �Forget the scam that�s made you an outcast�. He used to take notes during that.