Drunk teddy bears make plans to start hamster farms. Somebody shook this fact out of a teacher. The last time I was shaken, hundreds of things fell out, things like buttons, paper clips, coins, newspaper clippings. A deck of cards sounded like a tennis ball when it hit the ground. The people who shook me knew that the tennis ball must be in me somewhere, so they shook me even harder. Eventually they got tired and they had to take a break. They sat down to have a smoke. They used the cigarette lighter that had fallen out of me. We were near Harold's house at the time, and they asked me who lived there.

One night, just as he was lighting his pipe, he was visited by a ghost. The ghost kept talking for hours. He went away at four o' clock in the morning, but before he left he said, "I'll see you again tomorrow night."

The ghost arrived back on the following night. When he appeared in Harold's room he said, "Have you ever tried using time? Someone once said to me I should try using time, so I said I'd give it a go. I found a fortune in my trousers. Someone said to me that this had nothing to do with time. I'm not so sure myself. I remember I was in Berlin once..."

He kept talking for hours again, and again he said he'd see Harold on the following night. Harold needed a good night's sleep. He thought of Luke, his brother. Luke used to spend a lot of time watching TV, but he got bored with that because the TV kept showing the same image.

After staring at the wallpaper for hours, a blue ghost emerged from it. The ghost brought havoc to the house for a few weeks, but he started to calm down eventually, and Luke was able to tame him.

On the day after Harold was visited by the ghost, he went to see his brother to get his advice, but Luke didn't know which 'know' was which and which 'which' he stole from from. He talked his tongue off, and then he used some worms instead. Harold listened carefully and tried to make sense of his advice, or the worms' advice. He thought he heard something about Shane.

Shane lives in the grass. He only comes out at night.

He'll grant you three wishes if you give him a can of beer. These wishes are never fulfilled, but it's fun waiting around for nothing to happen.

Harold went to see him that night. He gave Shane a can of beer, and he said he didn't need three wishes. He just wanted one: for the ghost to leave him in peace so he could get some sleep. Shane said his wish would come true, and they spent the next hour drinking beer. Harold asked Shane how he passed the time during the night. Shane said, "I listen to the conversations going on inside my mouth. Do you want to listen in?"

"No thanks," Harold said. "Maybe I should be going home now."

They both went back to Harold's house. Shane wanted to see if the ghost would appear. The ghost was waiting for them when they got to the house. Shane and the ghost realised that they'd met before. While they were talking downstairs, Harold went upstairs to bed. He could hear them reading their poetry and crying. Harold likes the sound of other people crying. He finds it relaxing. He finds poetry relaxing as well. He's always distracted by the sound of it and he can never comprehend the words. He was asleep after the first two lines of Shane's poem 'Fat astronauts fall out of the sky'. Shane and the ghost meet in Harold's house every night, and they always put him to sleep.

The tennis ball fell out of me eventually. The people who had been shaking me put out their cigarettes and picked up their tennis rackets. One of them hit the ball into a field and then they went to look for it. This is how they play tennis.