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?
‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,’ she said aloud.
The nagging bell was still ringing and she reached for her laptop. Repeating her earlier search, she ignored the videos and scrolled further. It didn’t take long. Three more clicks and she was there. Famie read fast, her finger following, underlining each word.
Terrorwatch International archive 1969. The WEATHERMEN. WEATHERMAN. WEATHER UNDERGROUND. Named after the line from Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ (1965) ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’, this radical American left-wing terror group conducted a campaign of bombings through the mid-70s.
Famie’s head cleared fast, her headache lost in the adrenalin rush. She sat on the edge of the sofa, all thoughts of returning to bed fading like the night. The lyric was also the name of this group’s 1969 document which called for the destruction of US imperialism and the establishment of world communism. There were speeches to read, links to banned organizations to follow and whole histories to buy.
She stared out of the window to the already lightening sky; lines of grey cloud were flecked with egg-yellow sunlight, but Famie saw none of it. She looked back at the note.
Suddenly she was Slot again; assessing, judging, evaluating. She shook her head.
‘Nah,’ she said to the room. ‘You have to say that seems unlikely.’
14
Thursday, 7 June
FAMIE FIXED A pot of coffee and set herself up at the kitchen table. She flexed her fingers, took a deep breath. Three cups later she had composed her letter of resignation. She knew it was too angry and forced herself to walk round the flat a number of times. ‘Leave with grace,’ she heard Charlie say. ‘Why cause more trouble?’ she heard her mother say. She drained
