Cambridge Post Office
In the morning dawn crept in the windows and clasped the curtains tight. Even so, they were leaking light, like the dark before it. The sash window was always open to let the town in. Outside silence, early traffic, street lights snuffed, no more human life.
I lit a Player’s Weight, swallowed, coughed and gobbed on the roof of a dark blue Vauxhall Astra on the other side of the road. I boiled the kettle in the kitchen, then in the bathroom to run cold water over my face and hair. There was no soap or hot water. I cleaned my teeth and checked my face. I was looking fairly sharp, so I toyed with my knob to get it hard, but I soon gave up tugging, tucked it back in my y-fronts and went back into the kitchen.
I put the mug of tea on a stable bit of the mattress and swung the needle onto ‘You make me die’ by Thee Mighty Caesars, off their Punk Rock Showcase LP, which made things all right. Morning out the window didn’t seem any better than when I’d last looked. It was 4:14 and I was already late.
Three shifts a day. The sorting office was manned every day except Sunday. Every day as much overtime as you could take. Time and a third for the first 10 hours, time and a half for 10 to 15, and after that you were on double bubble all the way, as they used to say back then. We were told about the top men who took home £250 a week on a basic of £120, they were pointed as sages, hermit coptics. Bog-brush haircut, impertigo, village schools, just like me.
From the start it was clear that the only way to double your pay was to more than double the work. Unless you managed to get on nights. But there was no chance of nights unless you knew a supervisor, menaced them, or were working up to retirement and needed a bit extra on your pensionable pay. There was no way round it. Within a week I found that all the overtime came from sickness.
I thought back to the interview and test and some of the candidates who struggled to make selection. One man looked over my shoulder during the picture recognition session in the late morning. He must have failed, because he didn’t show up in the afternoon, and I never saw him again.
In at 4:12, throwing off letters and packets into the frames ordered by street names, then by house number — odds and evens. After you’d learnt all the closes, avenues, streets and districts, the sorting was simple and only took about 40 minutes. Letters, packets and parcels in the bag, then up to the canteen for a mug of tea with a bacon and egg roll and 20 minutes of fags and chat. I liked to look out at dawn and watch the mist burn off Parker’s Piece and scatter. The room was purple from smoke and I still had bits of last night in my back pocket. I was into back pockets in those days. Being English, not American, That’ll Be the Day, Woodbines, and that.
Ray always had scrambled eggs with lots of pepper and salt. His mum named him after the Hollywood special effects technician, Harryhausen. He guzzled his coffee, hands shaking, face red or violet. His hands red, shaking. His mouth chewing, lips trembling.
He was alright. We’d been out till after midnight. He giggled, brushing some long hair from his eyes and mouth before each mouthful. I’d only got a couple of hours sleep. I imagined those long hours being deducted at the end.
There was a whiff of burnt hair from across the room which made me think about my throat prolapsing. A fellow at the back of the canteen had fallen asleep with his head resting on his right hand and his superking had done the rest. The uneaten food binned, we wandered downstairs to sign for registered mail from the duty PHG. Then outdoors.
I struggled up the ramp from the bike-garage and pushed the machine with a running start because of the weight of the bag on the front. With 60-70lbs on top of the front wheel you could hardly steer straight. And the dew was still in the air when I left the sorting office at about 6 am.
I was singing at the top of my voice as the bike swung past the swimming pool. There was no traffic and no one there as I took the junction on the wrong side of the road, singing “Baby You’re Phrasing is Bad” by Caleb to speed me up as I mounted the pavement in front of the Catholic church.
Past the big houses down the right hand side of Trumpington Road, and on to Trumpington High Street. As far as I could see from the envelopes the occupants were mostly doctors or Arabs. Probably all university educated, inherited money, languages. How could I know what they all did, or how they afforded their addresses?
Each house had a stack of letters. Contacts. I knew that much. I was the one who’d got up at 3:30 and spent two hours sorting them. I carried their personal business in a sack on the front of my bike. It was their business that made my legs ache after work and late at night in bed. I never got any letters. Their importance made my back ache.
On to the restored 2 up, 2 down artisan’s dwellings, and still further on to the mock-Georgian detacheds shoe-horned in on themselves. And though they were just an arm’s length from each other, the distances from door to door were maximised by lengths of brick walls stupidly castellating every plot. If they’d built then as semis, people would have had bigger houses. The market leads us to suggest that our neighbours enjoy separation.
No let up and only half way out. Biking on to Alpha Road at the end of the walk. Cypriot newspapers, Muslim Times. A bulky package for a semi on the estate. A shrub in plastic for a keen mail order gardener. Something sinister about the white polystyrene box for the Red Cross hospital. A quick can of Fanta.
And once again, for your money, in the late morning when the sun’s up behind.
Three cigarettes in hand and the day had about three quarters of an hour to go. The alarm clock was wound, with the switch was clicked off, so it wouldn’t wake me at 3:30.
I woke unintentionally. Late night builders were working. Hammer drills chunking out bits of the road, getting down to a sewer or a drain. Public Health Act 1848, possibly 1875. Victorian bricks, some medieval, too, silted pass use. Representing nothing other than the movement by which knowledge is presumed to accumulate. Woodlice and pale mites lick their chops in the sunken past.
I liked to leave the television on and sleep while the late and early fought a low-intensity conflict. Dreams in the relegated wee hours, while the wind flicked and drummed the unnamed red berries against the window and taxis waited for cash outside nextdoor. Or, half sleeping, the telly whispering a recipe, theme tune, sleep.
I was trying to fend off bad guts and head, so I got on my bike and went for a ride. I took it easy, a little faster than walking pace. I pedalled into town and freewheeled down lanes and back alleys. Down by the river. Up to the Newmarket Road roundabout and into Chesterton. After that I just followed the road. I didn’t think about where I was going. Leaning over the handlebars, resting my chin on my forearms, going forwards.
Fairly soon I was on a road in the country. Crickets were rasping and the fields on either side of the road were hissing, the long corn stalks rubbing up against one another. The sun was declining. I must have biked around for hours, but I was used to it and I wasn’t tired. Every now and then a car passed and I’d wake in the slipstream. Apart from that, I was absolutely calm.
Looking through the window, tapping on it, trying to get their attention. A nightie swished across, just too late to cover up bush and appendix scar; a hollow arse cheek sways away from the plastic cereal bowl to answer the door; a tit wings as the bra comes adrift at the back; a scratch of relief. There was always the free porn. The postman was clocking beautiful morning movements.
The crawl back to the sorting office was the beginning of a caper film. Everyone else on the road seemed to be using the other side, going the other way. I was a working class sphinx, sitting astride a hot plastic saddle, with just the two legs. When the pillar boxes ran out I’d take myself back to my rented room for a sandwich and a cup of tea and watch the news for half an hour before signing back in with an apology for the supervisor and a sack full of letters I’d collected and stuff people wouldn’t sign for.
There was time for a 10-minute break upstairs in the canteen before the second lot had to be sorted, bagged and taken out. I walked down the stairs from the canteen into the sorting office, whistling a non-tune backwards through my teeth. I’d already handed the second bag to a driver to drop off at a sub-post office on my allotted walk and shuffled downstairs to the bike garage. In the distance, behind the two big machines that read the blue dots encoded by PHGs tapping away at keyboards, I kept looking at her fine red hair. But all I got was her side view as I moved toward the door, hurried along by the posties behind me, shoving me out to work faster.
Second time out, the cars owned the road. Cutting you up, boxing you in, drowning you in blue fumes. Plus, the same bulk, and you had to take all the second class stuff left behind from the first walk. The thought of overtime and a way to pay the bills. I biked up and I biked back down again, getting out of my knowledge. I delivered the same stuff as before to the same houses. I sat pedalling and whistling, wishing for the mist on the river to reappear and, with it’s rising, transmute mid-day.
I got back late again and caught sight of Ray just after he’d dumped his bag on top of the sorting frame, a beige metal box with pigeonholes. He was apologising to the supervisor for being late and fast explaining how he got confused by all the numbers on the flats he had to deliver to, and how the heavy sack of letters slowed him down. Ray was telling the hard facts and Ron was looking straight past him at the arse of a woman 20 yards away, bent over, tying up a mail bag, in shorts through which every fold of her fundament burned. Ron told him not to get back late again, because he’d be docked.The matter had gone beyond his control.
Every day there was talk of another man who wouldn’t be coming back due to illness, or so-and-so had been given the boot because of some instance of petty filching. Some of the younger ones couldn’t stand the constant pressure. Weeks after the last full day’s work they’d find the kid’s wardrobe at home, or a clump of trees better known for their wrinkled porn, stuffed with Royal Mail.
The old men with lined cheeks kept their mouths shut, heads down, and covert fags in their fists. Although they could’ve been younger. Men my age were looking forward to a spot of fishing at the weekend, but meanwhile they’d nudge me in the ribs and let me know that they had to plate and fuck their old girl until dawn. Then lit another one up. You were allowed to smoke from 10 pm to 6 am inside the sorting office.
Saturday morning, I visited the central library in Lion Yard. I’d used the Cambridgeshire Collection there when I was at school. It was the only bit of school I liked. I immediately became distracted by some of the less greasy cards in the index: an edition of M R James’ “Tractate Middoth”, “Plough Monday Traditions: Various”, “Skipping Rituals of the Fens”, “Summer Feasts”, etc. Among the categories I searched were: Village Life, Traditions, Myths & Folklore, College Histories. Local history is not a crime.
The study of magicke had been openly practised at Cambridge in the late Middle Ages and Rennaissance. S J Coleman, in Legendary Lore of Cambridgeshire, declared that one Thomas Nandik engaged in “nigromansiery” and employed his secret knowledge to aid the Duke of Buckingham in his attempt to overthrow Richard III in 1483. It’s live, political black-handed art, not dead, post-political.
That same book details the existence of the Black Hound legend predominant throughout East Anglia, and an almost universal localised belief, peculiar to the Cambridgeshire Fens in England, in the actuality of werewolves, or shape-changing beings. This is probably due to the Scandanavian influence in the post-Roman period.
In a binder of back editions of Cambridgeshire Life magazine I found an article containing a reference to a sprite known as Tiddy Mun, which, it is said, could control waters and mists and call up pestilence out of the bogs. That ghastly visitation reputedly had long, white hair and wore a long grey gown. You could hardly see him in the dusk.
I sat with Ray and Tony in the Merton Arms on Saturday night. ‘Silver Machine’ was on the jukebox. They were getting drunk and so was I. What they’d done was, they’d bought a lot of speed off Mark Fate and now they were having it. Ray’s last housing benefit cheque was already gone and what I had left was going the same way every time he nudged me.
Ray: “You’d not last 10 seconds in the Toon. I’m a working man!”
Tony smiled indulgently, gulped a mouthful of lager and pursed his lips to the music.
Me and Tony joined the Post Office together. He was Militant, a fantasy proletarian. He used his socialist credentials to fascinate women, then he let them screw him. Tony’s mate Ray got into the idea as well and joined for a laugh. Ray and Tony came from Newcastle. There was economic uncertainty in the north-east.
Tony had a first class History degree from a Victorian University. I didn’t think it strange he was doing the same job as me. He was a Trotskyite, a vanguardist. It was 1987. I read newspapers, and I’d worked out which way the wind was blowing. I liked his eccentric failure, which he hadn’t spotted yet.
Ray came from Benwell, the house he lived in as a child was demolished soon after he moved to Cambridge. Tony never left a conversation without letting people know how humble his friend’s background was.
We’d all read Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, except Ray, who only read stuff by the authentic Beats. He was Neal and Tony was Jack.
“Ray! I have a yen to buy a hounce a weed. Let’s go for some afters.”
Lock-ins were frequent at The Geldart, an Irish pub where buckets were passed round. Everyone thought it was cash for Republicans. But even a postman like me could smell a publican on the make. From there we went to a Blues. I had hoped to get home before closing and lie on the bed watching A Fistful Of Dynamite, imagining the world in my head just out of my reach.
I sipped the froth and topped up the glass with the remaining light ale. I had to phone in sick, I couldn’t face it. It was still the dinnertime session, though it was nearly closing time and the work crowd was leaving in couples and threes and the glasses were being taken in. Beside me, electronic warfare and other people’s glasses clinked and flashed all around me. The light from the door dazzled brightly and the interior muted brownly. It was 1:30.
Strolling away from the pub, I was thinking out loud about the past as I walked, unsure where I was going. Inside the memory theatre. The streets were quiet except for the sound of voices raised in girlish racket, and whitish-grey except for the bright colours of language school rucksacks on the backs of neat, unconsciously wealthy European children. The echoes of shouts reverberated around the high stone walls that embanked the slow river. Further splashes and laughter echoed too.
“Good afternoon sir, what service do you require?” Late-30s to early-40s.
In the background I could hear low voices and a faint tune, ‘My Friend Jack’, the Boney M version. The woman repeated herself.
“I’d like to hire one of your ladies.”
“Okay. Are you over 18?”
“I am.”
“Okay.”
“And your name is . . . ?”
“Terry Thomas.”
“Okay, Mr Thomas, do you have any preferences whatsoever?”
“No, not really, just whoever.”
“Linda is 22, she has auburn hair.”
“She sounds terrific.”
Linda was terrific. She took off her t-shirt and her nipples were hard. I could feel her clit pulsating in my mind.
“Okay, is there anything you’d like me to do?”
“Just whatever you feel like doing’ll be fine with me.”
“Is it hard yet? I’m going to suck your big cock and lick the bell end with my tongue and squeeze your balls and then I’ll fuck you.”
I’d got up, put my clothes on and walked out the door up the road to work. Burped a nugget of sweet and sour pork. Scratched my nuggets. Smelled myself wafting out of the Post Office waterproof jacket a couple of sizes too big. Warm air was trapped and it expelled reassuringly with sudden movement. A Fiat Panda whined past, but I could hear it coming way before it happened. I felt like shit and belched a fetid breath into the wind, and back it came.
Then I farted a long warm one that slipped out shit hot and spread around my arse cheeks, like war across the face of the earth. Still clenching, though it was too late, I turned in a march-step and doubled back up the road, indoors.
There wasn’t much paper left, so I used the lot, wetting a wodge from the sink tap to clean up after I’d scraped the worst with dry handsful. When the paper finished coming up stained, I folded four sheets and jammed the contraption right up.
I phoned the sorting office and told them I’d tried to get in, but I’d shat myself on the way. I’d probably be in tomorrow. The duty personnel officer didn’t sound like she believed me.
As I reached for the TV on, the bookseller’s girlfriend, herself a bookseller, entered my room to thank me for the birthday card I’d left tucked under her bedroom door. I was thoughtful, lying in bed, feeling sick. Her right tit was hanging out of her tatty dressing gown. She tried to flirt with me in whispers, possibly enjoying my hangover reticence and semi-erection, until she suddenly lost interest and left without saying anything.
I propped myself up on my pillow and began writing a thing titled ‘Frigadoon’, a short story about a short story that appears once every hundred years. Hopefully, it would contain images and ideas that would transcend my inability to express myself.
In the roof space the admin section clerks hovered above the sorting office. A wooden shack with little square windows. Partitions separating the higher and lower grades, stinking of fags and sweaty arses. Piles of overtime sheets in trays. Rotas, stuck and stuck over with coloured stickers and corrections, and crossings out that had themselves been recorrected and crossed through.
A graph, just about level, made slow progress across a sheet of graph paper. Admin life signs. Adding machines flashing green LED. Keeping a weather eye open for inevitable losses.
None of the men in the office were known to me. The one who pushed a series of forms towards me had a tight shirt stretched over his big tits. He glanced at his colleague and raised his eyeballs up to the ceiling, showing superiority in the face of the daily flux from service.
“Where you off to then?”
“Brighton.”
“Ooh! Nice!”
Two right hands flapped at right angles to the floor. I took the pen and followed the instructions, signing where I needed to and declaring my intention to return all items of clothing supplied by the Post Office.
There’s nothing there today. Its all gone, there’s no point looking for any of this, it was all taken apart brick by brick years ago. The space it left for a while after demolition was sold for offices. Prestigious location opposite Fenner’s cricket field.
Anyway, it never worked out for the office developer. No work will ever be done on that site again. The original builder went bust. The plot is tainted, any local historian could tell you that. They ended up stacking high-value apartments three stories high.
The rumour goes that the unbroken bricks from the sorting office demolition were cleaned up and sold on by the contractor. I have it on good authority that some of the secondhand bricks, and a sizeable amount of hardcore, were sold on to the firm in charge of the completion of Whitemoor Prison, near Peterborough. There have been four breakouts so far at that high-security gaol, and countless security breaches. The bricks and rubble are jinxed, saturated with spittle and curses. Drenched with excuses and malcontent. There’s no way building material like that should ever have been used. It’s not safe.
Like Addenbrooke’s VD clinic, Trumpington Street. It was left for a bit, then the site was sold and made into a Brown’s restaurant. I’ve not been down that way for years. They scrubbed with carbolic till the memory of ichor vanished. I ate there once for a treat. The propeller fans wafted the two portions of spaghetti marinara, the unwashed loose foreskins, distended vulvae, around the empty place. I’m likening the squid and mussels to sore cocks and cunts.
I made a big show of not asking anyone’s permission to leave, then left through the front entrance. I’d arranged to meet Ray at 4 pm in The Locomotive, his favourite pub, although I hated the place. I hadn’t seen him for a while. He’d been off, drinking heavily.
I bought a bottle of Prince Charlie, a bottle of Co-Op vodka and 200 Player’s Weights, because the bloke in the tobacconist said they were going to stop making them and they were the last I was likely to see. I also got a hard Italian loaf, artichoke hearts, Prosciutto and olives from the Italian deli on Mill Road Broadway.
Ray turned up late, nudging the cue arm of a short Rasta in his 40s and a tracksuit as he was about to take a shot. The player tilted his head and sucked his teeth. Ray laughed quickly and bought everyone drinks. Then he walked to the bar with me and ordered a bottle of Newcastle Brown.
“Do you want a tab? That bird over there’s got enormous nipples. No, not her! The one in the t-shirt behind that one!”
He directed me with an outstretched arm to the ones he was pointing at, knocked over his bottle and the barman refused his request for a replacement due to slippage.
We went to some more pubs, then Route 66 and the ADC Theatre bar, where, after I bought him a large vodka and asked what he was up to these days, Britain’s funniest piss-drunk genius, Peter Cook, told me to fuck off. We were finished at a blues off City Road. Eventually we were so poisoned we couldn’t speak.
All of a sudden there was no end to my suffering. Without sleep I opened my eyes, immediately woken for work. I got up and felt nothing. I swallowed four pints of water and dressed.
I sat on the edge of the bed and cried a little as the birds sung a frightening orison that I wished I couldn’t hear. I felt a bit better after I stretched my arms out as far as they would reach. I had a cigarette I couldn’t feel. There was no resistance.
There was no work. Just a wardrobe, a telly and two piles of clothes. Clean and dirty. From where I stood, having got up and wandered the room around in panic, I saw a bed with a patch in the middle of it, several shades darker than the blue sheet, and a plate on the bed next to the pillow with a pitta full of rind meat.
So I opened the sash window and stuck my head out. The morning was bright with potential, moments from fulfilment. A red post van came bombing along from the railway station with the rear shutter unsecured, a harpy, or troll, battering the fuck out of it with a human thigh bone.
I fixed my gaze on the green gable of the language school opposite. I was not Anne, she had a sadder life than mine. But I was so alone. I stuck my head out and cried out loud, meaning nothing, and then I wept. I pulled my head back in and dragged a stream of fresh air with me. I was still crying. The mirror on the wardrobe door. I cried until I’d finished and there was no more, except sobs without tears and soft morbidity, which I repeated until I was totally exhausted and slept in fits until 5:30.
I watched the light change all day through the bamboo blind and it stood still, used up, at 5:31. I lit a Dunhill International, flat box, very classy. I walked downstairs and out the front door to see if a man with no A-levels could get a drink before 6 in Cambridge in the dying winter of 1988.
Neil Palmer, 1999
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