"But why?" asked she asked, in a tone that might have been plaintive, if she were not Lynda Day, who simply didn't have "plaintive" in her vocal register.
She pulled a sheet of paper from the typewriter with an air of finality.
Kenny imagined it quailing with fear, and deflating a little with the relief of escaping its encounter with the irritable Lynda relatively unscathed. Kenny had myriad theories about typewriters, but he didn't need them to observe that Lynda only got on with one typewriter, and it primarily stayed locked firmly in her bottom drawer. He pushed the thoughts aside.
"Because you didn't sleep last night, and slipped out of the house at four o'clock this morning to get here in time to transcribe the early morning news report from Radio Sherrington," Kenny started, scrunching his face up in a way that he reserved for discussions with Lynda.
"Yes, but I ate breakfast," she interrupted dismissively, marching over to her desk and picking up a thick black pen with relish. "And how do you know?" she added, frowning suspiciously.
"You phoned me up to tell me you'd run out of Tippex!" Kenny exclaimed, now more capable of incredulity than he had been at the time.
He had stumbled down the stairs to hall phone, as hurriedly as he could, being half asleep, because some sixth sense, which he had named, in a way that could hardly be called affectionate, his Lynda Sense, one that woke up rather more quickly than the rest of him, told him that it would be her on the other end of the line.
"Well I needed some!" Lynda said defensively. "I pressed redial. If you hadn't been nagging me the night before, it would have called Frazz."
Kenny, at this point, became inwardly glad that it had been him who had received her summons. The streets of Norbridge in the small hours of the morning were a frightening enough prospect as it was, without Lynda wandering them with a pencil case and a temper.
"All I'm saying," he continued, "is that you should go home for half an hour or so before the meeting this evening. Watch television. Do something you enjoy…"
Lynda picked up on this last, and snapped up a folder from the desk. It was labelled "HITLIST" in her distinctive, angry, block capitals, and usually lay within a comfortable arm's length of her workspace.
"Well, I can do that here," she said, in a tone that approached cheerful. "There's all these dead-weights in Graphics that I can fire -"
Kenny exhaled, and walked around their desks to snap the folder shut.
"Go home," he said, drily. "Read a book. Practise your best cutting remarks in the mirror."
Lynda seemed to have an infinitesimal change of heart, and flipped her Hitlist open again.
"Let me fire three of them," she said, matter-of-factly, "and I'll go home."
"Lynda…" Kenny started, through clenched teeth.
"Three people, Kenny!" Lynda said indignantly. "Three tiny people for thirty whole wasted minutes! Honestly, you're so unreasonable sometimes!"
Kenny gave up and changed tack. "Tiny people? I thought you liked to fire the tall ones?"