“Stick this in the ignition and turn it until you hear the Welshman talking about death” he walks inside to buy coffee, so she turns the key until the radio blahs back into life. The Welshman being interviewed is a social historian, he’s going on about cremation, about the splendour of a Roman funeral pyre. His voice has a lyrical musicality, it should have been given to an opera tenor not to an academic. She looks out of the passenger window.

Where they stopped there’s a parks and rec sign, commemorating a prohibition gun battle between police and gangsters. There’s a swimming pool now and it’s overlooked by over-dressed condos. She can’t really imagine how it looked in the twenties. She sees it like black and white movies, a time when men always wore hats and ties and almost everybody smoked, if only to be social. Did the gangsters stake a look out right here? Did he feel sleepy? Did he cup his hands to light a cigarette? Did someone bring him coffee?

The Welshman’s voice lilts on and she closes her eyes. The young city was wilder back then; not wild in a roaring twenties way. Wild with unmade roads and nature fighting to reclaim stolen territory. She wonders why history is all about gun battles and funeral pyres instead of the things that really matter everyday, like coffee. Why’s the coffee taking so long?