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After a while, George realised he was going to have to start charging people to touch the rock.

At first it wasn’t a problem; it had just been local people. Friends and neighbours. Relatives. Weird Andy from the Hop & Grape. They came, they saw, they touched: they went away empowered.

Charlie from next door was the first. He’d offered to give George a hand moving the rock from where it landed – on his rockery. Funny that, George thought, if it had just been a little bit smaller, he might simply have left it there, made a feature out of it. But it wasn’t a little bit smaller, it was a whole lot bigger - and it threw out the symmetry of his whole garden. So it had to go.

George would have tried to move it himself, but Betty gave him so much earache after he did his back in carrying those bags of cement for the patio, he thought it wise to accept Charlie’s help. Besides, whether he liked it or not, George was seventy-six now, and that rock would have been heavy for a man half his age. Charlie was a good few years younger than that, plus he went down the gym three nights a week and played five-aside for the local league, so he was in pretty good shape - for an accountant.

It wasn’t immediately apparent that anything happened when Charlie tried to lift the rock; he just went purple and made a face like Bill Bixby on that old TV show. It wasn’t until the following weekend that he revealed his new ability to George. Charlie knew exactly what time the postman was going to arrive, every single day of the week. At first he’d thought it was just a fluke. A lucky guess. But after six days of heralding the delivery down to exactly where the second hand would be on the kitchen clock, Charlie knew this was something more.

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