We are on a forested hillside and the way leads north and up. Or so John says, John the map reader and expedition leader. But, as he keeps reminding me, we might be there already. The Mecca, he says. The ultimate. So keep your eyes peeled.
As if I need telling. That’s John’s trouble. Stating the obvious. Am I stupid or something? I might be boring but I’m not stupid. You bet my eyes are open. Because I’m looking. I’m listening. There had been a treecreeper on one of the pines back there and I’d watched it for a while. But John paid no attention. We’re after something else, aren’t we? Something more important. At least for John.
I watch him peel his apple. Bloody John and his fruit. His five, his eight a day. We’d bought the apples with the other food. The last three in the box, bruised and yellow grannies, going soft. But why peel them? Surely if there was any goodness left, it was in the skin. John has a bigger knife than mine and it’s much sharper. Good blade. How quickly the peel lies in one piece, its curls in the pine dust. But who the hell peels apples now?
And, wait for it, I think to myself. Now comes the other blade for the next operation. The coring. One twist, and there it is. Little pale embryo, black seeds intact.
Meticulously neat, that’s John. But not as mad as you might think. Some of the others are extremists. Utter obsessives. There’s this chap, Tim. Dotty about dotterels. That’s all he looks for. Maybe a kentish plover. But, fair play, John has another life. In fact, I’ve always thought he has his hands full.
There’s his mother, to begin with. And John’s job. John’s a mail sorter at the Mount Pleasant depot. Working nights, he has plenty of time for his other profession. That’s what he calls it. Now some of those types, the bachelors still at home, you never get to see where they live. The kind of time warp they inhabit. The sad squalor. But John is relaxed about me coming to his flat. It’s upstairs in a street over in Archway. Near the Drum and Monkey, a pub he’s never been in. It’s a bit Irish round there and for historical and employment reasons John doesn’t like the Irish. He’s lived in that flat all his life.
John’s mum’s a queer old stick, I suppose. But not bedridden or anything like that. Her legs are thick and inflamed, but she hasn’t suffocated him, as I might have expected. The flat’s her palace.
Ooh, he’ll be out in a jiff, she’ll say to me. He’s just doing his books. Have a cup of tea, love.
Whenever I come round, John is doing his books. But then he’ll emerge from his bedroom and she’ll waddle off into the kitchen, which isn’t a kitchen, just part of the front room. Tight fit that nest. Two big eggs. After she serves the tea, in china cups, lump sugar with a tongs, she’ll retreat to her bedroom and the telly will start. A quiz or something. She does crosswords too. And read? John is proud of his mum’s reading. Biographies of the stars. You know, the newsreader type stars. Glamorous weathergirls. Breakfast show bints.
I remember once recently, I called round and John was working on his Gambia sightings. Ledger XLV1, to give it the full title. Some people use photographic records but not John. It’s not the look of birds that pleases him. It’s not the colours. Some people even record songs, but you have to draw the line somewhere. No, it’s the very act of seeing that’s important. Important to John, that is. The observation itself. Not the appearance of whatever’s observed. And then the logging, the listing in the ledger. The listing’s as important as the sighting.
It’s a special kind of imagination that works like that. But John is his own man. He doesn’t need photographs to prove to anyone else what he’s seen. He hates those types who put everything on a website. Because if the Gambia ledger states that John has seen some sunbird or a sulphur-breasted bushshrike, then that’s enough. He trusts his own eyes and what those eyes see is added to the ledger’s columns. The ledgers are his chronicles. His Domesday Book.
He’s commandeered those ledgers during his turns at the dead-letter office in Mount Pleasant. Apparently that is a trusted role. The Post Office doesn’t let just any common or garden sorter loose in there. You see, John by now is a senior sorter. They give him the difficult stuff to decipher. No, not Santa Claus letters, but the mysterious parcels and envelopes. The indecipherables. The inexplicables. Sometimes they have to be opened and that again is a responsibility. Everything’s tiered in the Post Office, see. And John’s up there. Well, that’s what he implies.
John also tells me he gives advice on anything suspicious. That’s all he says. But suspicious is a serious word. You might think that he means nutters. Blokes with a grievance against any one of our glorious bureaucracies. Which probably means all of us. You know, the oddball who might send a letter bomb to the taxman or the speed camera people. But, really, it could also be terrorists. Anything suspicious, John says. So follow the logic. I asked him once. He just tapped his nose. Experience, see. He’s out on his own is John.
Anyway, John has transferred all his earlier birding records to the ledgers. Even his schoolboy stuff, because he started this lark when he was ten. Names in Latin and English, locations, dates, times. All done with fountain pen and Indian ink. The sunbird and the bushshrike, by the way, were recorded in John’s hotel grounds in The Gambia. Sixty big ones, he told me.
If John was impressed, then it was, shall we say, significant. A big one is his term for a completely new species. A first. They were in the bloody gardens, he hissed. Sixty! He even said the bloke with him never left the hotel. Didn’t need to. A week in The Gambia and the chap was in his element. UK Gold on telly, English grub, and sulphur-breasted bushshrikes on the pitch-and-putt. For a lot of the men I’ve met in this game, that’s a version of paradise. Couple of bottles of Julbrew beer – the Export comes in at 5.7 alcohol according to John – and you’ve got yourself sorted. Then three hours of The Sweeney while you’re writing it up. Birder’s heaven. Though not John’s cup of tea of course. He did the jungle trip, the river trip. Got another bundle of big ones. Including, nice one this, the western banded snake eagle, which is always hard to spot. Or so everyone says.
It’s not bad under this tree. John says it’s a Scots pine. The food’s finished and I’m looking round. There’s a shaft of light on the pine needles and the pine cones and the orange flakes of bark around us. Everything is sparkling. But the forest gets darker in all directions.
No, it’s not bad. But not great. I’ve never been in a forest before. A real forest, that is. Where you can’t see the edges. Must be three in the afternoon now. But don’t they say it stays lighter in Scotland? Closer to the North Pole? You know, the northern lights. Maybe that’s only in summer, but I’m not going to bring it up and show my ignorance. Not worth it with John. After all, he’s the traveller, I’m not. Though after this trip, that may change. Alice wanted to go on the Eurostar to Paris but I didn’t fancy it. Too pricey.
But travelling’s hard work. It’s Sunday and we’re supposed to be driving back tonight, which is crazy. It’s six hundred miles and the van has to be on the forecourt tomorrow at nine. I work at a car hire place see, New Jersey Road Wheels. We do all the Fiat models and it can be busy. People like Fiats. Nippy and cheap. Spare on the juice too, which means everything these days. The boss said I could borrow a Punto. Seeing I’ve been there twenty years, that’s the kind of perk I expect.
But it was tough driving. The M40 was a giant car park. I don’t know how much longer we can go on like this, forty tonners going past from Romania, Slovakia. That’s where they make the cars now, John said. Slovakia. They say it’s booming.
That’s interesting, I said. But, fair play to yours truly, this has been my longest drive. Ever. A New Jersey customer had left Abba Gold in the CD player, so I kept putting it on. Got it all by heart now, from track one, ‘Dancing Queen’, to track nineteen, Waterloo. Can you hear the drums Fernando? became our catch phrase. Going north was hard work. John decided we had to be driving north west of London. But past Brum then Manc, it was ‘Fernando’ all the way.
After the umpteenth play, John put it off
. It’s rubbish, he said. Those horrible rhythms are rotting my brain. That’s the trouble with Abba, he said. No soul. No personality. Not real is it? Typical Swedish flatpack crap. It’s Ikea music.
We kept going and soon I was further up than I’d ever been. The smell was different. There were all these old mills that had become apartment blocks. Cottages with stone roofs. Fields full of black sheep. By the way, I’ve always liked that song, ‘Life in a Northern Town’. Pity we didn’t bring it. After a while we stopped for food at the Rheged Centre near Penrith. John said there’s a Penrith Road in N15 and a Penrith Street, with your associated closes and suchlike, in SW16. The guy’s a genius.
We had extra coffee to keep us going, then a quick tour of the exhibitions. Rheged was all wars. Warriors with dirty great swords. God, isn’t England great? I said. Why do people fly abroad when they could be exploring their own country? But John had his mouth full of Cumberland sausage and soon we were bombing on.
What are we looking for? I kept asking. But all he would say, till he told me in the pub last night, was it will be an honour. An honour for any British birder to see what we were going to see. Just the two of us, he said. On an expedition. It’s time you came on an expedition. And this is best there is. Stuff the Gambia.
Well I’m not stupid. I can get a motor, can’t I. So I’m on the team. We slept in the Punto last night, by this lake just north of Glasgow. Had to knock ourselves out with a bottle of scotch. We’ve both stiffened up. Before then we’d been in the Bay Horse in West Nile Street from about 8 p.m., and I was bushed. But proud of myself. That’s a haul.
The pub was serving these great pies. Traditional fayre, as they say. We had two each. Pity about the Bay Horse. They’re going to demolish it, and that really outraged John.
Look around, he said. It’s perfect. All these mirrors with the optics reflected and names like Ballantyne’s and Dewar’s in gold in the glass. Even a whisky-drinking competition going on. Group of blokes, and a woman too, not throwing it back but tasting the different blends. Holding their glasses almost daintily, glasses that looked like little pots of honey. Which is not something you’d think would happen in a Glasgow drinking den. Sipping, then writing things down. And this long bar with a footrail and stained glass diamonds winking in the windows. It was almost a church in there. But the Bay Horse is going to the knacker’s yard
Well it must have been a good pub because John is a hard man to impress. As I’ve said, he’s meticulous. I might have said scrupulous but there are too many ways to interpret that. He is also a bit of a veteran. It’s his fiftieth, his mum told me. My John is fifty. That was five years ago. A lean man. Yes, wiry. That’s the word for John. His hair has thinned but there’s not a spare pound on him. In my experience, blokes who live with mum tend to turn podgy. Soft and cuddly like golden labs. But John’s sinewy. As if he’s a deliverer, a real postie, not a sorter, not an investigator. Because that’s how John sees himself.
I patrol a unique territory, he informed me once. (Yes, John informs you of things.) That border country between the missive’s existence as a live entity, and its possible fate as dead letter. Or worse.
God, I used to sneer, silently of course, at that word. Missive. John used it a lot. Missive in action was one of his quips. And John’s a good quipper, fair play. Come to think of it, quipper could be a bird’s name. Because there’s babblers aren’t there? Yes indeed. So, northern quipper? Or just quip. Smew, twite, scaup, quip. One of those species named after its cry. Plausible.
But missive I don’t like. Yet when John talks about the dead- letter office, I listen. And what’s worse than a dead letter? I’ve thought about that a lot. Like there’s a mysterious category of mail that only John knows about. A secret state of being. A state within a state maybe. Yes, I find it almost thrilling. A dead letter? How is a letter dead? And why? It has something of John le Carré about it, don’t you think? Rainy Berlin streets and espionage in black and white. A chess match against the Stasi. I picture John writing codes into a book, a lamp with a green shade on his desk.
Code is the crucial word here. Codes are codswallop to me but there’s something of the code cracker about John. Or, if he’s not an actual code breaker he’s a believer in numerological systems. Hidden secrets and ancient wisdoms. Reading the runes in the dead-letter office. Which he tells me is a subterranean hall with a chained library of atlases and dictionaries. No windows. A pinging strip light and entry vetted by an ancient crone. John has a pass, he tells me. Unfortunately he can’t bring it out on civvy street. Sacking offence. Like he’s in the military.
But it’s all going to the dogs, he tells me. And after forty years he must know. Sorting’s an art, says John, when we meet at the Junction Café of a Saturday morning. That’s become a routine. Suits me. Excellent fry-up. And cheap? You bet. It’s John’s one extravagance, the Junction. Proves to me he’s still human. So he gets extra black pudding while I have two side orders of toast. White, always. Can’t abide brown toast. Big brown pot of tea between us. Gets refilled twice.
Yes, an art, he says. You learn an art. You study that art. Then you practise that art. But the people I’m working with now, they’re clueless. They think sorting’s a step on the way to somewhere else.
Now our Christmas sorters, he’ll continue, I’ve no problem there. University students. You can talk to them. Some even know a bit about birds. And travel? Oh boy, they’re the RyanAir generation. Nowhere they haven’t been. Lucky sods. But these others spend all night asking me where’s this go? Albanians, Nigerians, coming up and sticking an envelope in my face. Mr John, they say, where, where? So it slows me up, doesn’t it? If I’m not interrupted I can reach one hundred and twenty items of mail per minute. But not now. Oh no. So I look at the envelope. Clackmannanshire it’ll say. Bourton-on-the Water, it’ll say. Goes there, I say. Put it there, I say. Two minutes later it’ll be Mr John, please Mr John. Where this go? That’s Brixham I have to tell them. Not Brixton. And Henley’s not Hackney. Strewth.
Look, John will tell me, constructing a bacon sarnie with tomato sauce. (It’s always the red by the way. Counts as one of your five fruit or veg, he tells me.) Some of them, he’ll say, more quietly, can’t read English. Illiterate, see. Or as good as. Your first, your most basic requisite in the Post Office is competency in the English language. It’s the Royal Mail, remember. Have a look at the stamp. So don’t tell me if you’ve just come on the bus from Heathrow with your worldly goods tied up in a blanket and you’re sharing a room down the Southall Broadway, that you know where a Clackmannanshire letter goes.
There’s sixty-four boxes in front of you where that letter might end up, says John. But there’s only one where it belongs. Where it has always belonged as far as I can remember, and no one in that office has done a bigger stint than me. So it’s no guessing game. It’s all based on history. Our history.
At least it’s not raining. And John’s in a good mood. Kind of euphoric. Because we’re here at last. Ancient Caledonia, he calls this place. It’s pristine, he says. The way it’s always been. John likes the Scots, see. He says they’re different from the Irish. John’s told me that the sorting office was a dangerous place when the IRA were on the boil. The front line, is how he describes it. And yes, when you think about it, he’s right. John was on the front line. You never knew, he says, you never knew if the next letter was going to be your last. John’s been around.
So I’m listening hard. But there’s nothing. It’s completely silent amongst these pines. We’ve been here five hours now, trekking up, down. Woke at six because I couldn’t stand it any longer. Had to wait while John did his callisthenics, but there were these clouds of midges, getting into everything. So we drove off.
Since meeting John I’ve looked at people on the underground and the buses in a different way. Those Senegalese men selling sunglasses? They’re dressed like kings. And what about the Slavic girls, Lithuanians maybe? Skinny as gymnasts. And their eyes staring right through you, blu
e as lupins. They’re haughty bitches. Are they working down the sorting office driving John spare? Can they even read this country’s language? They certainly know how to suck its tit.
You know, I’m pretty tolerant. I’ve never bothered with politics. But I’ve started to think. What’s going on? In your own country you write a letter. To someone else in your own country. You post that letter. It’s collected. Tipped up onto the conveyor. Then it’s sorted by hand. And that’s where the trouble starts. The sorter can’t read. Thinks Luton is Leyton. That Lee is Lea. It’s as if the England around you is dissolving. Getting murky like an old film.
So I make up tests for those people on the trains. Passes the time. It’s like liquorice all-sorts down there these days. Chipping Sodbury? That would fool a few. Rhosllanerchrugog? Cop a load of that. Went on holiday there once. Oh Mr John, Mr John! they’d cry. Help me! What this terrible place?
Because I think John’s correct. The sorting office is a proving ground. He says if you’re incapable of working there you can’t qualify for citizenship. That this citizen exam they give them now is bollocks. And I’m sure that’s right. Spot on.
Yes, it was five years ago I met John. Seems longer. Sometimes it feels like I’ve known him all my life. That was a bad time for me. I’d been married two years and thought everything was fine. Didn’t have any money but the flat we rented seemed good enough.
It was a Saturday morning. As per usual I was in bed with Alice and I was just waking up. We’d met online and everything clicked. Same age, same everything. Hunky dory I thought. So I was all dreamy because I knew it was Saturday. No work. Nothing to do. Luxury I thought. Nice lie in. Get The Times for the sport. Takes all morning to read it but brilliant footie coverage. Real analysis. But Alice was sitting up and she was looking at me. After a while I thought it a bit odd.
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