Eric takes things literally. Which is why – about two seconds after I said, ‘Eric, let’s catch the bus’ – there was a squeal of brakes.

At first, I couldn’t even look. The sound of those brakes set other sounds rushing out of my memory: the sound of a scooter clattering over; a terrible splodge that might have been my old hand slapping to the ground.

The sounds of The Accident.

Then someone shouted, and I opened my eyes.

The bus was in the middle of the road. Eric had grabbed hold of its bumper. He’d stopped it with his bare hands. Now he was crouching down with his head back as if he was trying to lift the bus up.

‘Eric, what are you doing?’

YOU ASKED ME TO CATCH THE BUS. IT TRIED TO ESCAPE BUT I CAUGHT IT. I AM YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT.

He yanked on the bus. I swear it jerked forward.

The next one to speak was the bus. The words came from deep inside its cab. ‘I am a scheduled, driverless service,’ it said. ‘In the interests of passenger safety and schedules, please remove the obstruction.’

The bus spoke again, but this time its words came out quite hiccoughy because Eric was shaking the whole bus up and down and yanking it from side to side.

‘For safety safety reasons reasons,’ it stuttered, ‘all passengers please please please leave leave the bus. Please leave the bus until the bus is returned to the ground.’

Luckily there were no passengers inside it, but people were coming out of the Co-op to see what the noise was about. The woman from the meat counter strode over, her meat cleaver sticking out of the pocket of her white overalls.

‘It’s that robot off the news!’ she growled.

‘No! No!’ It was a girl’s voice that said this. Maria-Jaoa had come trotting after her, clutching a fistful of chocolate bars. ‘It’s a suit of armour – isn’t it, Alfie?’

‘Yeah, a suit of armour,’ I said. ‘School project. We’ve got to go.’

‘It’s only got one leg,’ said the woman with the meat cleaver.

‘SO what!’ snarled Maria-Jaoa. ‘Don’t you think there were one-legged knights in days of old? They were in wars, you know. There’s nothing wrong with only having one leg. Or one hand. Or whatever. Is there, Alfie?’

‘Errrm. That’s right. Let’s go, Eric.’

The meat-cleaver woman was still giving us the hard stare.

‘Eric is my friend’s name,’ I said. ‘He’s inside the armour. Like a knight.’

The word ‘knight’ seemed to trip some kind of switch in Eric’s memory. He stood very tall. His head swivelled round to look down on the cleaver woman. His eyes flashed – literally, of course. He said:

VARLET!

Varlet is an insult used in days of yore by knights of old. I did not take it as a good sign that Eric was being rude, even in an antique way.

‘Got to go,’ I said.

WE RIDE AT DAWN!

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘So we’re already late. Hurry up.’

I walked off, trusting that he’d follow me, which he did. As far as the corner of Typhoon Street.

A Pizzabot was coming the other way.

Eric stopped right in front of it.

The Pizzabot said, ‘Scusi, per piacere.’

STAND ASIDE, VARLET!

‘Pizza for thirty-two Typhoon Street, scusi. He’s a-gonna go cold.’

ASIDE, VARLET!

‘Scusi. Pizza for thirty-two Typhoon . . .’

ASIDE . . .

‘He’s a-gonna go cold.’

It seemed like Eric would be happy to spend the entire day arguing with an oven. I told him to let the Pizzabot get on with his job.

I STAND ASIDE FOR NO MAN.

‘It’s not a man, though, is it? It’s an oven. On wheels.’

NOR YET FOR ANY UNNATURAL FIEND.

There really did seem to be a lot of knight-related words hidden in his memory.

‘Seriously, it’s an oven. Walk away. If you’re a knight, then surely you’ve got a quest to be getting on with.’

A KNIGHT DOES NOT RUN FROM HIS FOE.

Different people have different ideas about how to make the world a better place. You might want to clean up the oceans or stop global warming. Knights of old wanted to kill dragons or find the Holy Grail. It seemed Eric had decided to make the world a better place by fighting a pizza oven.

‘I’ve tried asking nicely,’ said the Pizzabot. ‘Now get outta the way.’

AN INSULT! WITHDRAW OR FIGHT LIKE A GENTLEMAN.

‘It’s not a gentleman, Eric,’ I said. ‘It’s a Pizzabot. According to Descartes – who is the main person when it comes to robots – it’s got no free will. How can you insult someone if they’ve got no free will?’

WITHDRAW THE INSULT OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES.

Eric reached over and grabbed a garlic baguette from the oven’s side pocket. He held it like a sword, stretching one arm behind his back.

The oven tried to barge past him.

GENTLEMEN DO NOT BRAWL. THEY DUEL. FIRST, SALUTE.

He raised the baguette to his face in a kind of greeting, then pointed it menacingly at the oven’s middle.

I was feeling sorry for the oven by now. It tried to sidle past him again. Eric whacked it with the garlic bread, and when that broke into a thousand crumbs he crushed the hot little Pizzabot so hard between his mighty hands that the pizza popped out of the top and frisbee’d into my hands.

‘Now look what you’ve done!’ I bawled, struggling to balance the pizza. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

It was the first time I’d ever shouted at Eric.

Eric’s reaction to being shouted at? He tried to tell his fish joke again.

WHAT KIND OF FISH DOES A SEA MONSTER EAT? NO, THAT JOKE IS INCORRECT.

Robots can’t cry. I think getting a fish joke wrong is maybe the robot way of saying, ‘I’m sad.’ Eric’s arms hung down at his side, and the blue light of his eyes dimmed.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You can carry the pizza. Let’s go and deliver it. It’s the least we could do.’

I pressed the doorbell of number 32. Eric probably thought that if he copied what I did, he would be sure to be doing the right thing. So he pressed the doorbell too. When I touched the doorbell, it chimed. When Eric touched the doorbell, it clanged like a fire alarm. Every light in the house started flashing on and off. Radios and TVs blasted out at full volume. Smoke alarms howled. Eric’s finger seemed to be activating every electrical appliance in the building.

A teenage boy in a big T-shirt, big earphones and an even bigger state of panic pulled the door open, his eyes bulging with fear.

‘What? What’s going on?’ he said, looking up and down the street as if there might be an invasion.

‘Pizza!’ I said, as though that explained everything.

And Eric hurled the pizza through the open door. It flew along the hallway and landed perfectly on the kitchen table.

‘Enjoy,’ I said. ‘Good shot, by the way, Eric.’

THANK YOU.

‘Hey!’ yelled the boy as I steered Eric away. ‘I ordered pepperoni! This is tuna!’

Once we were back on the street, I said, ‘Eric, you’re supposed to be lying low . . .’

His knees began to bend. I knew what was coming. He was going to lie low – literally.

I yelled, ‘NO! Don’t lie down. Not here. You’re an outlaw. You’re not supposed to draw attention to yourself.’

GOOD SHOT.

‘Yes, it was a good shot,’ I reassured him. ‘Now let’s go home.’

There was a high whining sound coming from somewhere overhead.

A delivery drone was hovering over the rooftops, its spindly body wobbling in the air like a skeleton bird of prey. Delivery drones hover for a bit, make sure that no one is in the way, then they swoop down and leave a parcel on your doorstep. Normally.

That’s not what happened today. The drone swept over the roofs, but it didn’t deliver anything. It swung up and down the street, and each time it passed by, it came nearer.

‘Eric,’ I said, ‘I think we’re being watched.’

GOD SAVE OUR . . .

‘No. Don’t do that. Let’s get out of here as quick as we can.’

I’ve got to admit, he was obedient. When I said that about being quick, he plonked me on his shoulders and hurtled off along the avenue. When I say hurtled, I mean that every rivet in his body was shaking. But the drone came after us, its whine getting higher and higher. We dived into an underpass, scooter wheels thundering. The drone was waiting for us when we shot out of the other side.

Eric paused and looked up. The drone hovered closer. Eric’s eyes blazed blue. Then he swatted the drone out of the sky like a fly. It tumbled on to the tarmac. The lens of its camera twinkled in the dust.

‘Oh!’ I gasped. ‘You should not have done that. You definitely should not have done that.’

Eric just spread his giant arms wide and aeroplaned off around the traffic island. Sparks flew from his wheels where he clipped the paving stones.

‘Eric!’ I yelled. ‘Where are we going?’

I AM YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT, he said.

He curved across the car park of the Community Hub. He sailed past the DustHog enclosure. There’s a low wooden fence behind it. He smashed through that, and then we were thundering through Hangar Wood.