He stubbed it out viciously and lit the other. He had to do something. He couldn't tune this out. He knew he hadn't made a mistake. He knew that he was a normal, efficient human being, and that like anyone else, he'd have put the letters in the right envelope. But he couldn't remember doing so. He couldn't recall the moment clearly enough, and the harder he thought about it, the fuzzier it became.
He got up. He sat down again. He looked at the screen for a while but didn't even bother to retrieve the mouse from where it had fetched up. He stared out of the window at the street, taking manic interest in a passing child. He considered cleaning the bath.
It was no good. He had to do something about it.
Suddenly, something occurred to him. He looked at his watch. It was 3.20. He carried the ashtray to the sink, filled it with water and flicked the ash from the current one into the grey sludge. He closed the window and twisted the lock hard, and then, struggling into his coat, headed for the street.
As he walked quickly down Leighton Road, Richard rehearsed reasonable-sounding excuses in his head. By the time he got to the Kentish Town Sorting Office he knew that, if necessary, he'd tell the truth.
He rang the bell at the enquiry desk and stood fretfully reading very dull and badly designed posters until a man appeared. He didn't ask if he could help or even raise an eyebrow in signification of readiness for enquiry, but simply stood behind the desk in a resigned fashion, waiting for Richard to speak.
In the end, Richard didn't even get to use his first excuse for wanting to retrieve two pieces of mail. Once provoked into speech, the man proved surprisingly well-informed and helpful. Yes, he confirmed, it was possible to take back a piece of mail once it had been put into a mailbox. All that was required was a detailed description of the article in question, and comprehensive proof of identity.
Feeling relief wash over him, Richard reached for his wallet to produce credit cards, video library memberships, whatever it took. He was about to explain that there were actually two envelopes he wanted to take back when the man suddenly held up his hand.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘When did you post it?’
‘Twelve-thirty,’ Richard replied quickly, trying to be helpful. ‘Just before the lunchtime pick-up.’
The man shook his head regretfully.
‘No use you showing me anything, then,’ he said. ‘We're only part-time here, see. Only the first collection gets sorted here.’
‘What happens to the rest?’ Richard moaned.
‘Goes straight to King's Cross Sorting Office.’
‘And then?’
The man looked at him carefully.
‘It gets sorted,’ he said.
‘Yes, but what then?’
‘It gets put on a train,’ the man said slowly, obviously hoping that he wasn't going to have to explain the postal system from first principles.
‘Yes. When? At what time?’ Richard asked frantically, struggling to remain polite. The man looked at his watch.
‘Lunchtime, you said. Well, quite soon then. Ten, fifteen minutes.’
Armed with the address and phone number of the King's Cross Sorting Office, Richard ran back out to the street and looked quickly up and down it. The man's regret at professing himself unable to let Richard use his phone had been genuine, but final. The main sorting office was at least 25 minutes away by tube and foot. He didn't have time to find the nearest working phone booth, which was probably in Germany. So he trotted back towards his flat.
The light was flashing on his answering machine, but he ignored it and grabbed the handset.
The number was engaged.
Swearing wildly, Richard stomped over to the kettle and switched it on. He tried the number but it was still engaged, or engaged again. He fished the waterlogged buts out of the ashtray in the sink and slopped them into the bin. When he'd washed and dried the ashtray he set it on his desk, lit a cigarette and tried again.
This time he got a ringing tone. He continued to have a ringing tone for quite some time. Eventually it was answered by a female voice that seemed to conjure up endless, monumental vistas of boredom, a tumbleweed-strewn desert of futility.
It took Richard a few moments to get the person on the other end to understand that he was enquiring about the current status of the lunchtime pick-up of mail from a particular mailbox in Kentish Town. Once that was finally clear, the precise information that Richard didn't want to hear was immediately forthcoming. The mail had been sorted, and was beyond reaching.
Richard put the phone down, and watched the light on the answering machine flash for a while. He made a cup of coffee, and sat back down at the desk.
In a way it was a relief, of a terrible kind. There was nothing else he could do. The letters were on their way.
For a brief moment he had a sudden flash of rationality. There really was, he realized, no reason for him to suspect they'd gone in the wrong envelopes. There was a very strong chance that everything was going to be all right.
The moment faded, but left him feeling calmer than he had since discovering the blank checklist. He took a sip of coffee, feeling his heartbeat return to something like normal, and pressed the play button on the answering machine.
The message was from Isobel. She wasn't going to be in that evening, so she was calling now instead. She sounded disappointed not to have reached him, but chipper enough to have filled three minutes of tape with cheerful banter. At the end, her tone changed abruptly. I love you, she said, I love you very much.
When the message ended Richard sat motionless for a long time, listening to the sound of the words in his head, and wondering if this was the last time he would ever hear her say them. Say them like that, anyway. Say them like Isobel, instead of like Susan, with unthinking vehemence rather than considered resignation.
He managed to get a little work done in the remainder of the afternoon, but not much. At six he stood up for the tenth time in two hours, and this time elected not to sit down again. He took a shower and fixed a minimal meal, chewing it blankly in front of the evening news. Interest rates were up. England had won the cricket.
And some moron in Kentish Town had completely fucked up his life.
After trying to watch the television for a couple of hours he walked down to the corner newsagents/grocery/video library and took out the most gripping-looking film he could find. On the way down the idea of calling Susan popped into his head. He spent the time in the newsagents and during the walk back telling himself that there was absolutely nothing he could achieve by doing so, and then picked the phone up as soon as he was back in the flat.
She was out, which was unusual. Thursday was generally her night for staying in and catching up on work. It was probably just as well: as soon as he'd put the phone back down Richard realized just how impossible it would have been to have done anything useful by phoning her. What could he have said? By the way, please don't open the letter which arrives tomorrow?
The film, despite the outlandish claims to the contrary plastered all over the cover, failed to grip him or even hold his attention. His mind kept going back to the phone call at lunch-time, trying to picture his hands putting paper into envelopes, trying to see what had happened. The film ended, and he rewound it.
Two hours later he was in bed, and still awake. The door was locked, the alarm definitely set. Lying flat on his back, eyes lightly shut, he listened to the sound of traffic on faraway roads, and in his mind heard it mingle with the sound of a train, a train which held a sack, a sack which held two letters. He knew that by now the letters would be on different trains, heading for different parts of the country, but in his mind they lay together, rustling against each other with the rhythm of the train as it rushed through dark fields under a clear black sky.
When the alarm went he slapped it off and sat bolt upright, filled with dread before he remembered why. It felt like the opposite of Christmas morning, a long-awaited bad thing that was finally here. He showered and shaved quickly, expecting
the phone to ring at any moment.
Because they would ring immediately. He would. Or would he? He thought he probably would. Some people, in some relationships, might save it up for the evening, let their anger ferment and refine the murderously cool way in which they'd reveal what had happened. Neither Susan nor Isobel were like that. In their different ways, they were very similar.
When by ten o'clock the phone still hadn't rung, Richard cautiously began to reassess the situation. They hadn't rung, which meant one of three things. The letters hadn't arrived. Possible, but unlikely given that they'd been out of the central sorting office at four. They'd arrived, but the girls had left before the post. Possible in Susan's case, unthinkably unlikely in Isobel's case. With her it was easier to believe she hadn't got up yet, but ten was pushing it even for her on a weekday.
Three. The right letters had landed on the right doorsteps. Richard sagged where he sat. After all that, he hadn't screwed up after all.
The phone rang.
Richard stared at it for a moment, utterly paralysed, and then picked the handset up carefully. Mr Baum told him he'd received the designs, and was actually pleased with them. After noting down a few points, Richard put the phone down again, panting.
By the time he was beginning to think about lunch Richard felt fine, if a little foolish. The real moral of the last 24 hours was that he was becoming dangerously reliant on artificial reassurances. When he finished a cigarette, he put it out properly. When he shut a door, it was shut. When he put letters into envelopes, he put them in the right ones. It wasn't a matter of trusting his memory. It was simply a case of trusting himself.
The printers now had two alternatives for their logo, and concocting another to make up the numbers would only take half an hour or so. As he waited for the file to finish saving Richard gazed contentedly out of the window at the street, where a black cat was sitting in the intermittent sunlight. It was lying down, technically, but something in its demeanour seemed to undermine this, as if it was taking a rest prescribed by protocol rather than need, part of some corporate relaxation regime that even senior managers were encouraged to follow. I'm lying down now, its manner said, but that doesn't alter the fact that what's really important is maintaining an up-to-date stock breakdown, and that's what I'll be going back to just as soon as this is over.
Then suddenly the cat leapt to its feet and scurried under a nearby car. Richard smiled at this, as there was absolutely no apparent cause for it. The computer pinged at him to signify completion of its task, and he hit the buttons which would quit the program before glancing back out to see if the cat had re-emerged.
A man was standing on the opposite side of the street, looking up at the house. He was in his late fifties and tail, with a lean face and tidy greying hair. His clothes were nondescript but light in colour, and he was wearing a dark coat. As Richard frowned on realizing that the man was not just looking at the house in general, but actually at his window, the man smiled gravely and started to walk away up the crescent. As he turned, he reached into his pocket and pulled something out. Still looking at Richard, he held it up for a moment, the minimal good humour vanishing from his face.
He was holding up two envelopes. One was blue, the other lilac. The man put the letters back in his pocket and held Richard's eyes for a long moment before walking away.
For a second Richard remained absolutely still, too shocked to move. Then he scrambled out of his chair to look through the next window along. He caught a brief glimpse of the back of the man's coat, and then he was out of vision again.
The man had his letters.
Richard turned wildly and stared at his desk for no reason, and then back out of the window. Abruptly, his mind caught up with events and he ran towards the door and slung it open. Feeling angry, bewildered and ashamed he hurtled down the steps and out of the building, leaving the door hanging wide.
There was no sign of him. Richard ran up to the nearest corner and looked down it, but the street was empty and so he sprinted up to the next road. The way to the right led down to the main junction with the Camden Road. It was wide and empty. There was no sign of the man in the other direction either, but that had to be the way he'd gone. Richard jogged up the road, trying to hang on to his anger. It seemed important.
After fifty yards he looked round the next corner, and saw that the man could not have gone that way either. He backtracked quickly and ran down the only side road he'd passed. Though the road curved he could see to the bottom, and there was nobody there. Then he noticed an alleyway on the left-hand side, and headed towards that.
The alley ran between high buildings, and was surprisingly dark. As he approached a recessed doorway he discovered what the anger had been masking. Fear. He moved carefully over to the opposite side of the alley, hugging the wall so as to see anything that might be in the doorway as soon as possible. Aware that his eyelid was twitching slightly, he peered into the doorway. It was empty, and he was very glad.
Casting occasional glances behind, he walked quickly down the remainder of the alley until he emerged on the side road that led into Torriano Crescent. He paused for a moment outside the door of the house, his heart beating quickly, and then stepped in.
Back inside the flat he walked to the window immediately and looked out, as if he hoped that would give him another chance. The road was still empty, which made him feel both desperate and relieved. He wanted his letters back, but he'd realized something in the alley. He didn't want to see the man again. Ever. There was something very wrong about him.
He grabbed a nearby packet of cigarettes, found it empty and crumpled it into the bin. Fumbling open another packet he paced round the room, barely aware that he was doing so.
He knew that he ought to feel furious. Someone had intercepted his letters, taken them out of the post and then come round to show him they'd done it. That was an outrageous invasion of privacy, and almost certainly illegal too. He ought to feel angry. He had every right to. So why did his anger feel so thin and abstract? Why was he allowing himself to feel as if he'd been caught?
Why did he feel afraid?
Cigarette finally lit, his pacing reached escape velocity and he strode off towards the phone. Someone in the employ of the postal service was going to receive the bollocking of their lives.
The handset was under his ear before he realized the problem with this, and it stayed there while he stared unseeingly out of the window, following the thought to the end.
Who was he going to accuse?
He hadn't described the envelopes to the man at Kentish Town, hadn't even told him there were two of them. Likewise, the voice at King's Cross had told him there was no hope before he'd had time to say what he was after. Neither of them could have known what to look for, and it couldn't have been them even if they had. He knew what the man at Kentish Town looked like, and the voice at King's Cross had been female.
Richard put the phone back down. Suddenly unable to remain in the flat, he grabbed his coat and wallet and left.
As he passed the postbox on the way to the high street he paused and stared at it. It occurred to him that either of the two people he'd spoken to could have got somebody else to come round with the letters. But it still didn't make sense. According to the man at Kentish Town, the letters would never have been there, and by the time he'd spoken to the woman at King's Cross the letters had been beyond reaching. He supposed it was possible that the man could have waited until he'd left and then called straight through. But why would he have done that, and how would they have known what to look for? Nothing he'd said to the man would have made two envelopes to different people an obvious target.
Still worrying the problem in his mind Richard absent-mindedly culled what he needed for the weekend from the shelves of the Pricefighter supermarket. He picked up the low-fat yoghurts and cottage cheeses that Susan would want, together with salad materials and a bottle of wine. At the counter he got an armful of packets of cigarettes too, partly to
allay the assistant's probable displeasure at him paying by cheque, and partly because he felt he needed them.
At the bottom of his road he stopped, and moved slowly round until he could see the street opposite his house. There was no one there, and he walked up the crescent. Outside his house he stood and looked up at the window. From street-level you could see the back of the computer, the edges of the curtains and a patch of ceiling. It wasn't at all clear what he'd demonstrated by establishing this, and he crossed the road and let himself in.
Taking the fact that he had the letters as a given, however inexplicable, the real question was what the man hoped to gain from them. Not blackmail, surely. Richard felt that he'd have to be famous and far richer before that became a serious possibility. So what?
All the man had done was stand outside, and show him he had them. That, and looking unforgiving and stern. So he must have known what was in the letters. What was he going to do about it? Withhold them for purposes of his own, or send them on? If the latter, why take them out in the first place?
Crouched in front of the fridge, tucking yoghurts away, Richard suddenly stood up. This was absolutely ridiculous. What fucking business was it of anyone else's? Richard knew well enough that the situation wasn't ideal, felt guilty enough about it as it was. Okay, he was running two girlfriends at once, but that was no one's business but his. Or his and theirs. Certainly not that of some old shag who went round fishing in mailboxes or sorting offices or wherever the hell he'd got the letters from.
Armed with a coffee he sat down at the desk to work out what to do, beginning at last to feel self-righteously angry. It had taken a while in coming, he thought; too long. Because he'd felt guilty and worried all night, his first reaction had been off-base.
So what now? There didn't seem a lot of point in calling the police. He could imagine both their polite suspicion and complete inability to help without going through the grief of observing it first hand. He thought briefly about trying to get hold of Susan or Isobel, and then realized again the pointlessness of doing so. There didn't seem to be anything he could do. Except wait. Wait and see if the man turned up again. And if he did?
What You Make It: A Book of Short Stories Page 15