‘Probably someone advertising pizzas or something,’ suggested Tommi, already pouring his second.
‘OK, you’re officially useless,’ she said. ‘Let’s see what Dr Google has to say.’ She typed and sent. Her screen filled with text and video links, and she hit the first one. ‘There you go,’ she said, spinning the screen to include Sam and Tommi. She hit play. A black and white video started to play. A young waistcoated Bob Dylan stood in a ramshackle street, white A3 cards held in his hands.
‘What is it?’ said Tommi.
Famie’s jaw dropped theatrically. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Really?’
Tommi shrugged.
‘“It”,’ said Famie, ‘is one of the most iconic videos of all time.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Remind me not to put you on any entertainment stories,’ she said.
They watched as the singer held, then threw away the cards, each with key words and phrases from the song written on it in black marker.
‘And that’s Allen Ginsberg on the other side of the street,’ she said. Tommi opened his mouth to speak but Famie ploughed on. ‘And if you ask who Allen Ginsberg is, you’re fired.’ Tommi closed his mouth.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Sam.
‘Wait,’ said Famie, ‘I remember this now. My dad used to play this stuff all the time.’
Dylan was into the second verse, the words ‘District Attorney’ etched in black capitals on his card. There followed ‘Look Out!’, ‘It Don’t Matter’, ‘Tip Toes’, ‘No Dose’, ‘Those’, ‘Fire Hose’, ‘Clean Nose’ and ‘Plain Clothes’.
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘Shut the fuck up, Tommi,’ shouted Famie, pausing, rewinding slightly. ‘Listen, for Chrissakes.’
She hit play. As Dylan dropped the ‘Plain Clothes’ card, he sang the words they’d been looking for – ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’ – while holding a card with ‘Wind Blows’ written on it.
There was silence in the room.
‘OK, well, so what?’ said Sam. ‘It’s a line from a Bob Dylan song.’
‘“Subterranean Homesick Blues”,’ said Famie.
‘OK, it’s a line from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. And?’
Famie spread her arms wide. ‘And … I have no idea. It means something. Rings a bell I think, but right now, I’ve not a clue. Neat video though. I’d forgotten how much I love his stuff.’ She selected some tracks from a playlist on her laptop and the opening chords of ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ played from the speakers.
‘Your brain has been addled by all that Mozart,’ said Sam over the intro. ‘Now this is music.’ He raised his glass, clinked the ice.
They sat in silence, a companionable if mournful silence. Famie glanced at her friends; Sam with his eyes closed, Tommi leaning forward, eyes to the floor. She knew they were about to embark on an alcohol-driven, post-funeral reflection so she thought she would go first.
‘Well today has been fucking awful,’ she said. ‘Much like yesterday and the day before that. But’ – she waved her glass for emphasis – ‘that burger and this gin taste wonderful. So I’ve decided to resign. Cheers.’ She took her turn to raise her glass.
Tommi looked up. Sam furrowed his brow.
‘Sorry, what?’
She smiled at her bemused colleagues. It wasn’t what she had been planning to say, in fact she was surprised to hear herself say the words at all. But they sounded sweet so she said them again. ‘The burger and the gin taste wonderful and I’m quitting.’
Tommi shook his head. ‘You need second eyes on that sentence, Fames. That’s a non sequitur right there. The second half of the sentence doesn’t fit with the first. Didn’t you learn anything at journalism school?’
Famie dumped her laptop and spun herself to face them. ‘This may sound stupid and I might message you in the morning taking it all back, but I’m serious. And no, Tommi, it all makes sense. To me anyway. I’ve had enough. Enough of the restructurings, the reorganizations and the improvements that always make things worse. Enough of the bullshit. I’d had enough before … before all of this.’ She pointed at Sam and Tommi’s funeral suits and her black dress. ‘These are our work clothes now. This is what we wear. Every fucking day. Look at us! I never want to wear this again. In fact …’ She stood up from the sofa, exiting the room as swiftly as the gin would let her. In her bedroom she pulled off the dress and grabbed some jeans and a T-shirt from the laundry bag. She reappeared in the lounge still zipping herself in. ‘There. I’ve resigned. What do you think?’ She paraded in front of them like a catwalk model.
‘I think you’re pissed,’ said Tommi.
‘Pissed but serious,’ suggested Sam.
Famie pointed at him. ‘In one, Sam, got it in one. There’s voluntary redundancy on the table and I’m buggered if I want to spend one more second of my life feeling terrified. I have no idea what I’ll do. But where I was just depressed about work before, now I’m depressed and scared, and that’s just stupid. For any of us.’ She felt surprisingly, delightfully exhilarated by her own words and wondered if she should call Charlie.
How swiftly our roles reverse, she thought, that I now need approval from my child.
‘I know this isn’t exactly the point here, Fames,’ said Tommi, ‘but where precisely does the burger and gin come into all of this?’
Famie sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him, glass in her lap. ‘But it is the point, Tommi, it is precisely the point,’ she said. ‘After the funeral we were so hungry, so desperate for a drink that when we got both, they tasted amazing. That’s what life should be like! That’s what life is like for everyone else!’
Tommi looked sceptical. ‘Burger and gin every day?’
Famie’s shoulders slumped. ‘It’s a metaphor, Tommi, cut me some slack here. It’s normal life I’m talking about and I’d like some. That’s all.’
‘You’d hate it,’ said Sam. ‘We’d all hate it.’
‘Maybe,’ said Famie, ‘maybe. But right now I’d hate it a whole lot less than wondering if some psycho with a knife is waiting for me around every street corner.’
Many hours later, when Famie got up to close her windows and take some painkillers, she picked up the discarded windscreen note from the sofa. While she waited in the near dark of her lounge for the tablets to kick in, she played with it in her hands, wondering again why it had been left for her in the first place. No other cars had one. It wasn’t a flyer. It wasn’t mass-produced. It was just for her. In the silence of the night, it seemed a stranger, deeper puzzle than before. She fumbled for the light.
‘Ouch,’ she said, shielding her eyes with a hand. She took a few seconds.
When she could bear the brightness, she peered at the note. She held it up to the light. Looked on the reverse, then flipped it again. She felt the indent of the letters on the paper. Who used a typewriter these days?