O'Brains was tired. It had been a long and arduous day, following the same pattern as all days. He was drunk. He was tired. All he could think about was the goddamn meerkats. Those meerkats haunted his dreams and nightmares. Their spindley little limbs were so creepy that he imagined them skulking around the streets terrifying tiny children with their evil eyes and their poking bony fingers and he shuddered. He hated meerkats.

  Everything had changed several weeks ago. He'd turned up at the usual place, armed with his trusty kit of preferred instruments, ready for an evening of ecstatic meerkat evisceration