“You aren’t going to tell the truth, are you?”
“N-no.”
“You were! You were, weren’t you? You were going to tell the truth!”
“I wasn’t.”
“The truth. Of all things.”
“I was just going to say…”
“I don’t want to hear it. If you can’t think of a decent lie, don’t say anything at all.”
“I…”
“Even a cheap one. A cleesh. A fucking, aliens abducted my fat arse and took me on a circuit round the earth and I saw it, I saw it all, darling, it was blue, the blue bits, they were blue, and the other bits, they were other colours, and the aliens they spoke like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, they spoke like, “you’ll never believe who I had in my spaceship the other day.” “Who did you have, Pete?” “I’m glad you asked me that, Dud. I was in my spaceship.” “Right.” “I was in my spaceship, and who came and knocked on my door but Tony Bloody Blair.” “All bloody, was he, Pete?” “No, Dud, it’s just a turn of…” and they go on chatting and chatting like that, funny it was, at first at least, but bloody hell after you’ve had those two Pete and Dud aliens bantering for fourteen hours straight, you just want to get off the spaceship, that’s all you want to do is get off the spaceship and come back, in the morning, in the morning after you have spent the night abducted by aliens, all you want to do is come back, back to your wife.”
“That is – exactly – how it was.”
“That’s right. That’s how it wasn’t. And things that aren’t like that, aren’t going to happen again, are they?”
“They won’t.”
“Liar.”