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‘I thought I could see you twitching. Must be old age.’

‘I smashed me ribs on them bars that time.’ He tugged at his vest. ‘Just as well I’m wearing me Fisher Price pads, innit?’

Colin appeared from behind the curtain, his waist-mounted man-bag leading the charge. As the genius who choreographed our timings, he was the one independent critic we aimed to please.

‘Superb, boys. Ben, even your little missiles went off this time, the sedan fell apart on cue and Jason showed the punters his arse. Are you all right, Jason? You look out of breath.’

‘Yeaaah. Think I caught me nads, but I’ll be awright.’

‘Thanks, Colin, you did an awesome job,’ I said.

He knew our routines backwards. We meticulously choreographed every move to chime with the music and pyrotechnics. With so many near misses in a tight space, timing was everything.

Doing it live meant we had to be prepared to improvise within a split second, and with up to five shows a day it created some tension backstage. I slept as much as I could between performances to maintain my focus. We spent most of our time at the arena, but did manage to slip into Jo’burg once or twice.

Outside the dome I passed out under the African sun with a tumorous hangover from a dinner party the night before. Just two bottles of Wind-hoek beer had reduced my brain to a pulsating bag of snot after a third day of breathing exhaust fumes inside the closed arena.

Hammond had swallowed his own vomit on stage during the show and Jeremy was moving around like someone was operating his limbs remotely with strings. James’s whereabouts were still unknown.

The dry heat roasted my limp carcass and I shaded my eye sockets with some light reading, The End of Oil. The impending fuel crisis had been of great concern to me, until I read the bit about the dawn of hydrogen fuel cells and the very fast, very powerful electric vehicles of the future. Then I slept like a baby.

‘Has anyone seen Ben? BEN, you’re ON for f …!’

I peeled my sweaty bones off my cardboard floor mat and tried to remember where I was. I pulled focus on cargo containers full of gear-boxes, a gazebo covering an Apache gunship with wheels and a Ninja dressed top to toe in white silk. Ninja was doing a standing splits and whirling a double-ended sword through the air with phenomenal co-ordination. My watch alarm went off and it all came back to me: drive time, third show of the day.

I ran past Ninja, a freakishly talented young girl called Chloe. Her slender arms and legs fired through a sequence of graceful kicks and swipes, with a final thrust of two fingers towards her eyes and a single point at me. I returned her salute and slipped on a black balaclava.

Backstage was blacked out but it didn’t silence the thrum of my V8. I inspected the climbing handles on the rear deck of the jet-black Vauxhall Monaro ‘Ute’, then double-checked each individual tyre by hand for signs of blistering or bare canvas. I pumped the flyaway handbrake, disarmed the TCS and armed the smoke box. The familiar green LED dials all read true, and I pulled forward with my heart running a million beats a minute. I always dreaded this sequence, in a good way.

We lined up silently on the stage, hidden from the audience in a sea of darkness. A crashing drum roll introduced Chloe under a strobing white light, then the spotlight hit me. I unleashed 450bhp, nipped some left-foot brake to exaggerate the wheelspin and slewed off my mark. Chloe stepped aside at the last moment, allowing the fender to brush her sword as I yanked the wand and rotated the bonnet around her legs.

The Monaro began its circle fully sideways as I powered the rear wheels and took my hands off the steering. The wheel spun itself through 720 degrees in the blink of an eye until it found the appropriate degree of opposite lock, a peculiar technique I had picked up in the course of the tour. I caught the wheel one-handed and began the perilous triple lap around Chloe as her right leg darted skywards and she balanced precariously on the left. With the bumper inches from her