“It’s been a helluva ride, hasn’t it?” Harry said. “What will you do now, now that you’ve been fired?”

“I’d like to think of it as a contract that’s expired on a mandate successfully completed,” I said pompously and spoke a line from Shakespeare in Love.

“The show must… you know…” I prompted him with my hand and he quoted Shakespeare’s famous line: “Go on!”

He laughed loudly. “That’s the movie, not Shakespeare. There is a difference.

He stopped laughing. “Seriously, what will you do now?”

“I don’t know,” I said, once more seeing a vision of myself in my room with a view with the typewriter and the bent-stem briar pipe. “I’ve been thinking, seeing as I know this campaign as if I was… you know… there! I might write a book about it.”

“Over my dead body!” he said. “Who do you think you are? Max du Preez?”

I knew he was joking. At least I thought he was joking and tonight wasn’t a night for writer’s angst.

“I’ll do it, even if it is over your dead body,” I said. “I might even have to organise a hit man just to give the story a bit of a sting in the tail.”

“In that case, I want a signed copy.”

“I’ll mail it to you.”

“How will it find me if I’m dead?”

“I’ll put on DropBox,” I said. “You can find it in the cloud.”

He laughed loudly again. He may have been a little drunk. Me too.

“What will you call it?”

“I don’t know. Something zippy, something absurd like, The Windmills of Harry Press’ Mind, Beautiful Dreamer, who knows?

“Something original, then?”

“Absolutely.

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