Dead Letters Anthology

by Conrad Williams

  ‘Fuck off, mate,’ he said, more casually now, yet I felt his shoulder tense under my touch and my arm fell to my side.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

  His eyes flashed. ‘Look, mate,’ he said, leaning in close and lowering his voice in a way that made it more threatening. He smelled of smoke and something sweet. ‘You don’t exist and your boyfriend doesn’t exist.’ Then he placed both hands on my chest, pushed me backwards with surprising force and walked away.

  I got to my feet and watched him go, shock and adrenaline making me unsteady.

  Ian had finally replied to my email earlier that day, cryptically, his email containing no message but a link to an article about disagreements between Raymond Carver and his editor Gordon Lish. The lack of a message allowed me to make my own inference, which seemed pretty clear. Carver had thought Lish too interfering. Ian wanted me to lay off his prose, stop trying to tie up his loose ends.

  * * *

  They were all within a couple of minutes’ walk of each other, the four former Fleet Street addresses of Geographia Limited. First I found No.167, a large, anonymous-looking office block on the north side of the street, home to numerous businesses of various types. Addresses on Fleet Street are numbered sequentially, eschewing the convention of odds and evens occupying different sides of the street. Right across the street from No.167 were Nos.55 and 63, the former an upmarket pawnbroker with a downmarket email address printed on its fascia (when I checked this on the Internet it transferred to a somewhat smarter-looking jewellery business based in Colchester) and the latter an optician’s. Less than a minute’s walk east, and back on the north side, was No.111, or where No.111 should have been. A grand doorway topped with a frieze depicting a pair of cherubs either side of a garlanded globe and carved figures – 110/111 – was now filled with a picture window belonging to an espresso bar. To the right of this was a chain sandwich shop that the Internet told me occupied No.109, while on the left of 110/111 was a branch of a Japanese restaurant chain confusingly also resident at No.109, again according to my research. The espresso bar, meanwhile, located between the sandwich place and the Japanese chain, was, supposedly, No.110.

  All of which, unsatisfactory and contradictory as it was, assuming either EAT had eaten Wagamama or vice versa, giving them the right to share an address, left No.111 still unaccounted for.

  To the right of EAT, I’d already checked, was Vision Express at No.108. Clearly, on that side, then, the numbers were counting down in the right order.

  I rested my back against a narrow section of wall between two mobile phone shops on the south side of the street and checked my email. Still nothing useful from Ian.

  I tried a different approach and searched the Internet for 111 Fleet Street. The answer, when it came, was mundane: serviced offices. But the north side remained a puzzle. Between Wagamama and Boots, at No.120, there was an alleyway, Poppins Court, blocked off with three bollards. So where was No.111? Not to mention Nos.112 to 119.

  My phone buzzed faintly in my pocket. A red blob had appeared on the Mail icon. I tapped the icon. An email from Ian. I felt a tightening of my scalp, tiny hairs rising on the back of my neck. I opened the inbox and tapped his incoming email, which said, simply but totally mystifyingly:

  DL-CCC

  I stared at my phone, trying to make sense of Ian’s message. In a daze I raised my head and looked straight in front of me. People streamed past in both directions, a blur of colour and a murmur of countless conversations leaking smells of burgers and sandwich fillings and astringent perfumes and cigarettes and Lynx and exhaust fumes and drifting from somewhere nearby the sweet aroma of roasting chestnuts. It seemed impossible to me that I should be able to see through all of this and all the red buses and black cabs and white vans and all the cycle couriers and motorbikes and the corresponding streams of people on the far side of the street to make out that distinctive shape of the back of the head ducking into Poppins Court and walking north away from me.

  The human sea parted and I stepped into the road.

  * * *

  The medics told me I was lucky – no shit – and the police said that witnesses had reported hearing the cyclist blow a short blast on a whistle. Yes, my ears pricked up at that, too. Some cyclists use whistles, like a horn, but not that many. The cyclist hadn’t stopped. Well, he’d stopped – I’d stopped him – but he got back on again and rode off. The police said they hoped looking for a damaged bike would make it easier to catch him, but I decided they were either being kind or taking the piss.

  Somehow I had managed not to break anything. Even my phone just had a little crack across the lens of the camera. But there were lacerations, a dislocated shoulder and the possibility of concussion. I was kept in for observation. A psych report was mentioned. I asked if that was because I’d insisted I’d seen angels, because all I’d meant was the cherubs, which were the last thing I remembered seeing, upside down, as I recall, before everything went dark. They said it was because I had walked straight out in front of a bus. The bus had been a couple of cars’ length away, but still.

  I asked them to contact Jane, but they couldn’t get hold of her. They said the number was dead. I said I needed my work, and could someone go to my girlfriend’s place and pick up my laptop. They said they might be able to rustle up an iPhone charger.

  I emailed Ian and suggested we meet. I told him where to find me. I didn’t expect a reply and I didn’t get one.

  I used my newly charged phone to look into Geographia a bit more and came across a forum for collectors and map enthusiasts on which a user had posted a question about an undated map and one of the replies had explained that, if Geographia dated their maps at all, they did so in code. The code required you to number the letters in CUMBERLAND from one to ten. So, if you saw, for instance, M.RM in the bottom left corner it meant March 1963.

  This got me thinking – I had a lot of time for thinking – and I looked again at the email from Ian that I’d been puzzling over just before I’d stepped into the road.

  DL-CCC

  I checked that out and decided Ian probably hadn’t been alerting me to the existence of the Detroit Lakes Community & Cultural Center.

  Instead, applying the CUMBERLAND code in reverse produced 107–111 and when I looked up 107–111 Fleet Street, I discovered that the serviced offices at No.111 were actually serviced offices at Nos.107–111, and I knew without looking that there would be a perfectly ordinary-looking entrance to these at No.107.

  The other thing I found out using my phone was that Joe had died from a subarachnoid haemorrhage. The kind of random event you can’t anticipate.

  * * *

  There was a lot of post in the hall at Jane’s. Some of it became squashed against the wall when I opened the front door. The flat was cold and the milk in the fridge had gone off. I whacked the boiler on and made some green tea.

  I retrieved my laptop from the bedroom, pausing a moment to check Jane out. She was still wearing the grey dress from Phase Eight. The wig was slightly askew – again. I straightened it and smiled at her.

  I opened Jane’s wardrobe. Everything looked normal. The upper drawers in the chest of drawers on the landing were still full of tops and tights and underwear.

  I’d lost a lot of time. I worked on the edit. When I felt a headache coming on I took a handful of pills and kept going. I left all Ian’s mysteries unresolved and, in the spirit of cartographers who introduce deliberate errors into their maps to catch out plagiarists, I allowed three different spellings for one particular term – ghost writer, ghost-writer and, finally, the correct term, ghostwriter.

  I emailed the edited manuscript to the publisher and they got back to me within five minutes, asking if I would be long with the cover copy. I sent them the blurb I’d written some weeks earlier and had been waiting for Ian to approve. Fuck him.

  They got back to me again. Just waiting for a cover quote now, they said.

  I sent them the following: ‘This
ghostly tale of death, desire and delusion will keep you guessing right to the end – and beyond’ – Joe Cross.

  I closed the laptop and got up and stretched, which was a bad idea. My shoulder was still painful. The pipes and radiators were making encouraging noises, but the flat didn’t seem to be getting any warmer. I tried Jane’s number, but couldn’t even get it to ring. I went down to the hall and scooped up all the post and carried it back upstairs. I took it into Jane’s bedroom and dropped it on one side of the bed. I lay down on the other.

  I turned on to my side and propped myself up on an elbow.

  ‘I think it’s just you and me now, Jane,’ I said.

  Her glass eyes glinted in the light from the window.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  I shuffled through the post. Letters for dead men.

  ‘Maybe there’ll be something here for me,’ I said.

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  Nicholas Royle is the author of First Novel, as well as six earlier novels including The Director’s Cut and Antwerp, and a short story collection, Mortality. In addition he has published more than a hundred short stories. He has edited nineteen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories (Salt). A senior lecturer in creative writing at MMU, he also runs Nightjar Press, which publishes new short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks, and is an editor at Salt Publishing.

  ‘Like most of my stories, it’s eighty percent true, and the difficulty for me – hopefully the fun for the reader – is working out which is the twenty percent that’s made up. It’s not always, or even often, the strangest part.’

  CHANGE MANAGEMENT

  ANGELA SLATTER

  ‘Mail Redistribution Centre’ was what Eva was supposed to call it now. She hated the way it looked on the labels she printed out in the back office. ‘Change is the only constant,’ her father liked to intone on those rare occasions when he decided wisdom was necessary. On those rare occasions when he was home.

  Eva preferred the old name.

  ‘Dead Letter Office’ seemed more exciting, poetic, essential. As if she was dealing with artefacts, fossils, things that had once pulsed with the energy of their allotted task: to carry messages from one person to another. And she was a link in the chain that took care of them, even if only a little link. A caretaker, a pathologist, trying to work out why they’d failed to do their job, if any got a second chance (perhaps a number transposed, a missed connection with an address redirection, unpaid postage), silly little things that might be easily remedied if she did a little investigation. Mr Burstock kept pointing out it wasn’t her job: ‘Just send ’em to the specialists.’

  Anything she had to send to the Belfast MRC made her feel defeated; that she was an undertaker because she couldn’t be anything else. It always felt like failure, but she’d learned to live with it. Sometimes there was simply nothing to be done.

  Change was the only constant, yes, but it didn’t mean she had to like it. Since the restructure, though, she still spent a chunk of her day in the same building, swiping in with the same keycard in the same slot as she had for ten years, so much was different. The biggest, and worst, of those adjustments was Mr Burstock, brought in two months ago to replace Mrs Arrowsmith, the old supervisor, hired to rationalise things.

  Eva was fairly sure rationalising things didn’t include his coming to her desk twice a day, sometimes more, to lean over so close his chest touched the back of her head and shifted the soft brown curls about. It didn’t include touching her hand or shoulder or knee every chance he got (when they were alone, always alone). It certainly didn’t include asking her to come for a drink at the end of each day. She told him, every time, that she didn’t drink, which was true. When he persisted she said she had to be home on time to relieve the carer who looked after her infirm mother.

  It didn’t stop him asking.

  It wasn’t quite a lie. It wouldn’t have been three years ago when Beth was still alive, but no one who worked with her knew that her mother had died. The crotchety old woman remained Eva’s go-to excuse when she wanted to get out of anything social with her work colleagues.

  She was, as far as they were concerned, a solitary little mouse; lived with her mother, did her job well, troubled no one, although she could be a little obdurate on the matter of dead letters. They were uninterested in her, thought they had her pegged. No one knew how stubborn she’d had to be in order to remain at work when Beth became bedridden, bitching and moaning about the carer, demanding to know why Eva wasn’t looking after her.

  Beth had had every expectation, based on long history, that Eva would give in to her. Eva hadn’t gone to university but found a job instead. She’d not accepted Teddy’s invitation to the final year prom, but stayed safely home. She’d cut her hair short as instructed so it wouldn’t get caught in the vacuum cleaner filter. Eva had crumbled in every battle of wills – except this one. She’d firmly refused to give up work, defiantly hiring a home nurse who took Beth’s insults and complaints with a smile and an extra five pounds an hour.

  It had been a matter of intense pride to Eva that she’d held her ground. She kept her job, got out of the house just enough to stay sane, to not put a pillow over her mother’s face while the bitter old woman slept – at least not until the very end. It meant she got to stay with the poor dead letters, the failures, the missives and parcels that were never quite good enough. The things she understood, the things with which she felt a kinship.

  It gave her the chance to be among people without being one of them. Pretty Alice on the front desk who flirted with Scott, the delivery driver, while her fiancé, Huw, was out back unloading the trucks, hefting the heavier things into piles and stacks that Megan and Toby and Lou would sort through later. They’d bring the smaller items to Eva’s hidey hole, give her a smile, ask ‘All right, Evie?’ and she’d nod and never say, I hate being called Evie, that’s what my father called me when he did terrible things. She thought it, she felt it, but she didn’t say it. And that had been enough for a long time, until change came.

  She looked at the flexi-box on the bench and began to flick through the top layer of its contents: a padded bag with no postage; a mid-sized parcel with the address label half gone; a plain C6 envelope marred by disapproving red lettering. NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS on the front. RETURN TO SENDER on the back. In black (but equally disapproving) POSTAGE UNPAID, with lines drawn through the address: Jonathan Oaks, 12 Lodge Lane, Seaton, Branscombe, Devon EX12 ???!!

  Not helpful, thought Eva, pursing her lips, but not too hard to fix. She turned it over and a small wad of tightly folded pages fell out through the slit in the top. Filofax inserts, held together with a black paper clip; a tiny blue Post-it read: Jon – found this in a junk shop Filofax. You’re into this kind of found shit, no? LOL. Kind of creepy, sad. Love, Steph oxox. Little red-brown dots spattered the back page.

  Honestly, how hard was it to finish a string of numbers? Eva was about to grab the postcodes reference list when she was distracted by a noise from out the front. Voices, two, yelling. The female louder and angrier than the male. It was irresistible, and she padded along to stand just back from the doorway so she could watch but remain inconspicuous in the dim corridor.

  Mr Burstock, monolithic in his grey suit and highly polished shoes, was turning a wonderful shade of red, even his scalp under the close-shaved black stubble. But the woman who was yelling at him: oh! Thin, thinner even than Alice, dressed in black jeans and a black tee-shirt under a battered red leather jacket, her skin so pale it had almost a blue translucence. Her hair, long and oil-slick ebony, drank in light and held on to it. Her mouth was a crimson slash, narrowed in anger, and her eyes dark as dark could be. She was beautiful and frightening all at once, and Eva could barely breathe for the sight of her.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ said the woman in jagged tones, ‘it was sent to my brother, Jonathan Oaks. It’s not arrived, so it should have come here.’

  ‘W
ell, where is he?’ asked Mr Burstock.

  ‘He’s sick. He sent me.’

  ‘Where’s your ID then? Show me proof of who you are. Where’s your brother’s authority letter, then?’

  The woman remained silent.

  ‘I thought not,’ rumbled Mr Burstock, his petty satisfaction at sanctioned unhelpfulness evident. ‘You’ll not be going through Royal Mail property like it’s a jumble sale table. Off with you.’

  The woman could have been anywhere between nineteen and forty for she had a way, as if she carried a shell around her, to hide as many truths as she could. She lifted one hand and pointed a long, thin crooked finger at the supervisor. That was all she did but the gesture said everything it needed to.

  Eva gasped and though Burstock didn’t seem to hear, the woman did. She flicked her gaze to where Eva hid, sought her, caught her in the shadows. Stared at her for long moments, then backed away, never once changing the direction of the accusing digit from Mr Burstock’s fat red face, not until she backed out the front door and walked off.

  Eva remained, hands clasped to chest, feeling the thud of her heart as if it was trying to follow the girl, the woman. As if… as if… as if…

  Then Mr Burstock began to turn and Eva skipped away from the threshold, down the corridor, and into the little room. She picked up the letter meant for Jonathan Oaks and stuffed the Filofax pages inside. Hearing the thud of Mr Burstock’s footsteps she slipped the envelope into the pocket of her cardigan. Eva took a deep breath and focused on the other items in the tub, waiting for her supervisor to arrive for his morning visit.

  * * *

  On her way home, Eva felt herself watched.

  Don’t be silly, she thought, that’s just guilt. Low-level guilt; it was easy to distinguish from the real thing. The letter still in her pocket seemed to be burning a hole against her hip. You nicked Royal Mail property.

  As she headed towards the train station the sensation grew too strong and she looked over her shoulder. In the late afternoon sunshine a silhouetted figure drifted behind her, not too close, but not too far. It made her heart pause, then the figure passed into the shadow thrown by the off-licence, the bright corona dissipating, and resolved itself into a woman wearing black and red, with a wave of hair floating behind her.