One day the office was visited by the bank manager and his assistant, for a closed meeting in Norman’s office. Murray had been running out of work, with Norman having few clients for whom to dictate instructions for Murray to type. He was spending more and more of his time going through the old files and deciding what could be shredded, and what had to be kept.

After the bank staff had departed, Norman called Murray into his office and said, “I regret to advise you that I have to put you off. As you can see, the phones aren’t ringing much, and the bank wants me to cut my costs in order to clear my debt with them. My wife has agreed to learn your job from you over the next two weeks. So she’ll be sitting with you tomorrow morning onwards, so that I can eliminate my clerical wages costs.”

“Will you be able to get enough business to keep going on that basis?” asked Murray.

“Well that will be the rub,” said Norman, “But you’ll have full severance pay. The bank won’t even run the usual check with the manager before you cash it. You’ve been here exactly six months, and I’ll give you a good reference.”

Weeks after he’d finished there, Murray wondered if he should have gone through all his observations of Norman’s unique P.R. approach with his clients, in order to throw some light on why the phones hadn’t been ringing with new business. It would have been too late to save Murray’s own job, and Norman might have told Murray that it was no business of his to comment on his former employer’s work practices. He decided to let sleeping dogs lie.

While looking for new jobs, he found himself with more time to spare and bought videos to watch during the longer periods of down time. There were two that particularly caught his eye in the shop. One was called “A Mountains Family Reunion”. The other was “A Mountains Family Easter Special.”

Murray remembered that, when he’d been aged five to fourteen, he’d seen the long running television series “Mountains Family” listed in the local television guide that came in the newspapers. It was filmed in the mountains which were located further on from his own village, in the opposite direction to the infamous village where he had recently been employed as a legal clerk. Murray had never watched “Mountains Family” as a child, because he’d been mainly interested in super hero cartoons. However, as an adult, he thought that a family drama series filmed and set not far from his own home would be very appealing. 

“A Mountains Family Easter Special” had aired when he’d been five years old, at some point in the first season of the regular show. “A Mountains Family Reunion”, according to the label on the back of the video case, had only been filmed the year before Murray had started working for Norman Tesoriero.  If Murray hadn’t seen the video release nearly two years later, he wouldn’t have known that a reunion movie had even been made.