Graham wouldn’t have believed what had happened either, nor would he have believed what hadn’t happened. In fact, he wouldn’t even know what had happened, because it had turned out the Bob Marley was a coffeeshop.

He remembered a trip to the zoo he had made when was in school. It hadn’t been a huge zoo, but they had had quite a few monkeys. Ranging from chimpanzees, to some ring-tailed lemurs, to itty bitty things called pygmy marmosets. He started giggling at the thought. Tiny monkeys! Monkey monkey monkey! He started giggling a bit more. Monkeys were funny! Why didn’t he have a monkey? They were funny, and everyone would enjoy the sight of a tiny monkey sitting on his head. Even Miranda! If he had a tiny monkey, and trained it to sit on his head…
“Excuse me, sir?”
The train of thought about monkeys stopped, and utterly vanished. Someone was talking to him! This was important! Something important was going on! What was happening?”
“Sir?”
“Erm… yes?”
“Your cheese toasty is ready.”
A cheese toasty! He was hungry! A cheese toasty was a delicious idea! At that point, there was nothing he wanted more in the world than a cheese toasty in front of him, and him eating it!
“Do… do I eat it here?”
“If you want to, sir. How is your skunk?”
A skunk! He didn’t have a skunk! What the hell did he… ooh yeah, the weed, silly me!
“Its splendid, my friend.”
“You got enough for now?”
“Plenty.”
And he did have plenty. He’d only smoked pot a handful of times at university, and it hadn’t been as much fun as this stuff. It made his brain happy. His brain was sitting on a beanbag made of a Jamaican flag, feeling so happy it was unreal. He couldn’t quite remember why he’d ended up in here in the first place. Something to do with directions. But now he was here, it was all about smoking up a fat…
“Sir, your cheese toasty?”
Cheese toasty! Cheese toasty delicious!
And so it was. If he had been back in England, it wouldn’t have done much to excite him, but in Holland, stoned royally off of his face, he couldn’t have been happier if he’d been served the finest filleted steak, served off of a virgin’s backside. The cheese toasty didn’t stand a chance. It simply vanished, and was quickly forgotten.

* * *

Graham had not been quickly forgotten by the man in the head shop, however. This was not to his advantage, as the two senior policemen sitting across the table from him were very interested in what he had to say.
“I’ve told you all time and time again, I don’t sell drugs, I don’t advocate drug taking, I just sell these things, and what people choose to do with them is up to them. Not my business.”
“This is not the issue, Mr Winterton,” exclaimed one of the policemen, “although perhaps another time we might want to discuss why selling smoking paraphernalia inherently condones smoking. What we’re interested in hearing about is a certain package you received two days ago.
“A package? You want to know about packages, talk to the Royal Mail. I understand they have an international business based around delivering them.”
“But it wasn’t the Royal Mail who delivered this package to you, was it sir?”
“I’ve told you, I don’t know anything about any package! What’re you doing interrogatin’ me about something I don’t know, when there’s smackheads and rapists wandering round Hull as we speak?”
The two police officers shared a quick look, and the second policeman took up the interrogation.
“Mr Winterton, we have photographic evidence of a known felon visiting your place of work this Friday, and delivering a package matching a description of the one we are searching for. He claimed he only knew it as a bag of fish, and he had no idea what was in it. Much the same as you claim.”
“This individual,” continued the first policeman, “was tried last thing last night, and I understand has been sent down to HM Prison Hull for, how long is it?”
“About seven years, if I’m not mistaken.”
“That sounds about right. And he genuinely had no idea about this package. If we find out you are withholding information about it…”
The policemen let this thought trail off into thin air, allowing Winterton to stew for a minute.
“Anything you’d like to tell us, sir?”
“Well, I did have a package that fits the description you gave me.”
“Did, sir? Did have a package?”
“However, a man came yesterday to take it…”

* * *

That same man had taken a lot of something else as well. He no longer knew how he had gotten wherever he was, where he was going, but he did know how to rip a fat bowl of bud, and he had decided to go through his wallet. So far, the results were not particularly interesting. A debit card and credit card, each with colours on them. Apparently, there was money on them, although he couldn’t see it. A green driving license with the letter L on it. He couldn’t drive a car, therefore he didn’t know what he was doing with a drivers license. A red and blue card with a National Insurance number on it. Did that mean he was paying to insure the nation? And which nation was he insuring? Would he have to pay if it got lost or stolen?

A Tesco Clubcard emerged next, but was not very interesting. A very old student card, from the University of Manchester, and an ID card from work. He studied each of these in turn, as if he’d never seen them before. And they were all very interesting, except for the fact that they weren’t.

What we all need, he thought, is a piece of card, saying “I AM STONED”. This would tell everyone in the world how stoned we were, and how awesome being stoned is. It could also make rolling paper appear out of thin air, and could be torn up to make roaches out of! And what about having a car made of chocolate?

Chocolate. He was hungrier than he’d ever thought he could be, and somehow, he’d started thinking of chocolate. It was the Dutch that made chocolate, wasn’t it? Or was it cars they made? No, it was the Ukrainians who made cars… Ukrainians sounded like aliens. Was there an entire race of people who were aliens, living in… wherever Ukrainians lived. Ukrainia?

And so on. Having never smoked a large amount of weed before, Graham had taken the approach of a gigantically fat man learning to swim by jumping into a lake. Doing all this while exhausted and hung over was like the fat man wearing lead boots and carrying a piano. Eventually, the tiredness, THC and general despondence got to him, and he fell asleep. This was not something the people running the coffeeshop approved of, so he was, fairly politely, asked to leave.

“Where am I?”
“You are in a coffeeshop, and we need you to leave.”
“Why?”
“Because you are falling asleep.”
“I’m tired!”
“We know, but you cannot sleep here.”
“Well, where can I go to sleep?”
“Where are you staying in Rotterdam?”
He had to think about this one, and only responded when asked again.
“I don’t know!”
“Do you have anywhere to stay?”
“I don’t think so.”
“There is a hotel down the road, go left, and walk until you see a big duck. Go in, and they’ll have a room. Now please leave.”
He picked up his stuff, and somehow set off. This was even more difficult than he’d have imagined, even if he had the capacity of mind to imagine anything. His brain had a pulse. The entire road had a pulse. And wherever he looked, everything looked slightly like a duck. There were ducks in the windows, people looked like ducks, without looking any less like people, and the air even seemed to quack ever so slightly. Every duck seemed to be watching him, and he wanted nothing more than to hide from all the ducks. Except he couldn’t do that, until he’d found the biggest duck of all, and gone into a hotel next to it. He swayed, he felt like he was walking through treacle, and time seemed to stretch like a piece of chewing gum caught between two people on trampolines. Duck, duck, duck, duck, everywhere he looked, he could think of nothing but ducks. And yet, he could not stop looking, for eventually, he would find…

A large statue of a duck, in the middle of a crossroads. It was quite large anyway, but to Graham’s mind, it loomed as large as a mountain, only shaped like a duck. So somewhere about here, there was a hotel. He looked around, but being stoned made the language unreadable. He sat down, and looked around, slowly considering the problem that now he had sat down, it would be next to impossible to stand up again.

And at some distance away, he saw a sign that could have said “Hotel”, but might not have. It was enough for him, so with the sound of ducks echoing through his head, he staggered towards it. Closer inspection made it out to be the “Hotel Van De Eendmening”, which made no sense. But it said hotel, and hotels had rooms, so he staggered inside.

“Hallo, kan ik u helpen?”
“Whaaaaaaaaaa?”
“U sprekt Engels?”
“Uh?”
“Can I help you, sir?”
Which would make perfect sense, but the two lines of Dutch had done horrible things to Graham’s head. He hadn’t understood a word she had said, and therefore he simply couldn’t understand her, even when she switched over to English.
“Do you speak English?”
“Yes, can I help you?”
“I can’t understand you, but I need… a room!”
“Yes, how long for, sir?”
“No, a room! Where you sleep in!”
“I know, sir, but how long do you need a room for?”
“Can you find someone who speaks English?”
“I can speak English, sir.”
“Yes, English, can you find someone who’ll speak it.”
Giving up, the poor woman on the desk went to find the manager. He was a middle aged gentleman, used to the English, but inexplicably not understanding the mind of the stoned man.
“Can I help you sir?”
“Yes, I couldn’t understand your woman there just now.”
“She was speaking English, sir.”
“That’s no English I’ve ever heard. I need a room, my friend.”
“Certainly sir, how long for?”
“…I don’t know. How long can I have one for?”
“Hmm, we’re almost completely booked, sir, there’s only one single room left, and only for two nights.”
“I’ll take it, here’s some money, I’m going to bed.”
And with that, he slapped the remains of the hundred euros on the desk, and staggered off to where he thought the lifts were.

Very shortly afterwards, he staggered back.
“Sorry, I’ve no idea where I’m going.”
“Quite alright sir. (Adrianna, show this stoned idiot to his room).”
The girl who had tried to serve him winced.
“(Sir, do I have to?)”
“(Everyone else is at lunch.)”
She sighed. She always got stuck with the mad people.

* * *

This was an assumption shared by the two special agents in Hull’s main police station, after they had finished interviewing Mr Winterton.
“So some random guy turns up in his shop yesterday, takes the package, and buggers off? That doesn’t make much sense.”
“It does, in a twisted kind of way. This individual we’ve got a description of sounds like someone out of town, and not one of the usual suspects. This thing seems to be big enough that they’re taking risks to make sure it gets there.”
“So what is this elusive package we’ve spent three months tracking?”
“I don’t know much more than you. It apparently came across from America, and its something terrorist cells in mainland Europe have been trying to get hold of for months, maybe years. These Dutch people normally deal in more… unusual imports, but this one’s going to make them a fortune if it goes through. By the look of it, if we capture this package, it will damage this Dutch group, a number of European terrorist organisations, and… I don’t know.”
“You seem to know a lot more than me about this. Why didn’t I get a briefing like that?”
“Not sure.”
“If I didn’t know you actually didn’t know, I’d put this all down to politics and think someone was messing me around.”
“Could still all be politics. I had to do a lot of prodding to find out even that.”
“So you do know why I didn’t get that information?”
“Oh shut up, you know now.”
Before they could have a rather unhelpful argument, the phone rang. The agent who knew what was going on picked it up, listened for a second, then  put the phone down.
“They’ve got the photofit for this guy together, let start our investigation. We’re running out of time quite badly here.”