by Gary Locke
Clive slipped out of bed quietly and headed for the bathroom, contenting himself that at least next Saturday would be his day off for next week. The beauty of a rolling day off meant that every six weeks you had the reward of a three day “long weekend”. Unfortunately this also meant that you looked forward to, focussed on, and almost obsessed about these long weekends so much that you spent the vast majority of your life just wishing time away. As usual, Clive cleaned his teeth and had a quick wash whilst staring at himself in the mirror cursing the fact that, instead of the manly Sean Connery-esque hairy chest that he always wished for as he grew up, the chest hair he’d been blessed with made him look like a skinny, badly-shaved chimp. After the morale sapping few minutes in the bathroom he returned to the bedroom to get dressed in the dark, as he always did; so not to disturb Gayle. It was something that required great care and a certain level of skill because making mistakes getting dressed could have pretty severe consequences at work. The time he arrived wearing odd shoes (one trainer and one steal toe-capped boot) was something that was “hilariously” brought up every day for about two and a half years. Luckily for Clive, this unfortunate event seemed to be forgotten instantly the day that Burkey turned up one morning wearing his shorts inside out. (Even the fact that the cleaning instructions label was at the front and sticking out like a small, white, rectangular penis hadn’t alerted Burkey to his wardrobe malfunction.)
Once satisfied that he was dressed appropriately, Clive quietly walked towards the door, glancing at Gayle as he tip-toed across the room. She was sleeping peacefully so he continued his hushed footsteps and moved out onto the landing. It seemed like a lifetime ago that he would wake her with a kiss because she had insisted on being woken before he left; and she would hug him and send him off on his way with the warmth that came from being told “I Love You!”
Clive paused before going down stairs as he realised that he could do with popping into the toilet for a “number two”. He quickly changed his mind and began to descend downstairs reasoning that he would go to the toilet when he got to work. Just how much more satisfying is it to have a shit when you know you’re also getting paid for it?
Clive left the house, got in the car and told himself that he had between ten and fifteen minutes (depending on the mood of the traffic lights) to enjoy sitting down and listening to the radio before having to start another, pretty much groundhog, day working as a postman.
He had been a postman ever since leaving school. Gayle was heavily pregnant with Jack and Clive felt like he needed to get a job straight away to begin supporting them and so needed to take something that was realistically reachable. His true employment desire always involved doing something that linked into his talent for art but his thinking, back then, was to begin earning some money as soon as possible. He could always look into his dreams sometime later on down the line. (Which, for Clive, would turn out to mean the same as it did for most other people who approached things in a similar way: Sometime later on down the line = never actually getting around to it; while the very memory of it eats away at you constantly.)
Clive had actually been drawn to look into being a postman by the fact that he’d had a foster parent, Billy, for a couple of years around the age of ten who was, at the time, a postman and used to speak about the position in such glowing terms.
“Out in the fresh air. The sun on your face. Able to work at your own pace with no management breathing down your neck. Being paid for exercising. Finish work around mid-day, with the afternoon free to do whatever you wanted.”
These were just a few of the things that Billy would regularly say about the “utopia” that was being a postman. Of course Billy had never elaborated, and Clive had never picked up, on the small print.
“Out in the fresh air”? Yep, for most of the time with the emphasis firmly on the word “fresh” when it’s used in its function as meaning “bloody cold”.
“Sun on your face”. In England? Maybe for a hand full of days a year, if you were lucky. For the rest of the time you needed to be able to handle the freezing cold (you know, “fresh”) snow, frost, wind and rain; lots and lots of rain. And with lots of rain comes the need to explain/apologise to people why the letter they were expecting is now the ball of paper-mache that you are trying to force through their letter box with numb fingers. (Whilst trying desperately not to let those numb fingers themselves be pushed through even a millimetre – in case they have a dog that decides to try and bite one or more of them off.)
“Being paid for exercise” was technically true and a real positive if your exercise of choice is to walk as fast as you can for around ten miles, often up and down stairs, carrying bags that were so heavy they should really only be lifted by a crane.
And yes, you did indeed “finish work around mid-day”, with the “afternoon free” to do whatever you wanted, but this was only because you started work at a time that the rest of the civilised world refers to as the middle of the night. So that “doing whatever you wanted in the afternoon” invariably meant going back to bed because you were knackered from starting in the middle of the night and then walking for around ten miles, often up and down stairs, carrying bags that were so heavy they should only really be lifted by a crane.
But Billy had neglected to tell this side of things, instead focussing on the other aspects of the job. Was he ahead of his time and showing a remarkably positive “glass half full” attitude long before people decided that glasses always have to hold liquid at 50% of their capacity so you have to decide if it’s half full or half empty? Why can’t glasses be completely full or completely empty, or somewhere else that’s not exactly half? Sorry got a little side tracked there.
Anyway, rather than being a pioneer of positive thinking, there was another explanation for the way that Billy looked at things, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Remaining with the postman job thing, another reason that Clive was really interested in becoming one was because of Billy’s portrayal of: The Academy. Which apparently was a boot-camp style training facility that had to be successfully completed before you were ready to be accepted as a postman. (And this was described as a proper army style boot camp and not a chance for Simon Cowell and co. to show off their fancy houses during an X-Factor style one.) Clive had been assured by Billy that getting into Royal Mail was more difficult than getting into Fort Knox; and that the academy was an SAS style selection process where only the best of the best, and the toughest of the tough, made it through.
For example, there were daily “marches” during which you would have to carry mail bags, often containing three or four bundles of letters and up to five parcels, over rough terrain for miles and miles. Those who couldn’t keep up could pack their suitcases. There were regular sessions with professional whistling coaches to hone your skills because, when assessment time came, if you couldn’t perform a perfect whistled rendition of the intro to the The Scorpions’ Wind of Change or Otis Readings’ (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay then you would be sent home instantly. Every day there would be ever-more complicated walking gauntlets, designed with the toughest of council estate delivery in mind, in which you must avoid on-the-ground obstacles whilst being able to, at the same time, sort through your mail while a dozen people chased you demanding their giro. These were colloquially known at the academy as the Dog Shit Slaloms – you stand in one sloppy canine turd, a hypodermic needle or an empty can of special brew, and you’re out of there. Billy also reminisced to Clive about the hours and hours spent in the classroom with language experts who drilled you endlessly making sure that you could clearly articulate the complicated key phrases as if they were second nature.
“Morning love!”
“Nice day for it!”
“Got a parcel for you!”
“Sign here please!”
“Would you be kind enough to ask your dog to remove its’ jaws from my around my ankle, please?”
All these phrases needed to be at your beckon call,
whilst all the while you needed to be calm and cool enough to smile through gritted teeth during the numerous times each day that people would say to you “If you’ve got any bills you can take them back with you!”
And then, if you made it through all of that, there was, what Billy described as, “the most important part of the training”, which was apparently “the part that more cadets fail at than any other”: The Sprinting Test.
Day after day after day after day of running as fast as you possibly could and, even then, only the fastest few were selected to face – the dogs. At first you were given padded, protective clothing as you try to outrun these crazy dogs that, just like those in the “mean outside world”, have evolved to, mystifyingly, despise the postman even more than they despise cats. At first the dogs always catch you and frenziedly gnaw away at your foam arms and legs; but you get a little faster as the days pass, and a little closer to the safety zone. (A waist-height fence that you must also learn to hurdle as if you were Colin Jackson.) If, after these initial tests you are deemed worthy, and you had “the balls” to do so, you could attempt the final test – to try to outrun the dogs without any protective clothing.
If you did try, one of two things would happen.
1. You will run faster than you have in your entire life, outrun the dogs, make it to the safety zone, successfully hurdle the fence and achieve the ultimate status – a pass from the postal academy.
2. You will get caught by one, or more, of the dogs and be sent home with nothing more than “the three T’s” (Train Ticket and Tetanus shot.)
But there are always an elite two or three out of every group of cadets who do make it. And those special few, who entered the academy as boys, leave it as men..... postmen.
Of course, the reality of all this “academy” stuff was slightly different to how Billy had described it to Clive. The actual selection process didn’t involve an academy at all and was just a rather simple test in which you had to complete “complex” number sequences, such as –
1, 3, 5, 7, 9, _, _, _, _ and
2, 4, 6, 8, 10, _, _, _, _.
If you could do this, you were in!
If, on top of this, you could also actually spell your name correctly, then you were put on the fast track to management.
So, going back to the reasoning behind why Billy looked at things the way he did, it turned out that he probably wasn’t just an optimistic, positive thinker who was ahead of his time but, actually, there was a pretty good explanation as to why most people seemed to refer to him as “Billy Bullshit”. It was also more than likely that he wasn’t able to balance a small elephant on his head.
Chapter Seventeen: The Love Doctor.
Gayle poured the boiling water into her coffee cup and inhaled the release of the coffee aroma in through her nose. There was nothing more satisfying, to her, than a nice cup of coffee (or two) in the morning. (Or three – this was actually her third cup.) She smiled as thoughts of her morning, so far, gently swayed around in her mind. She had been looking through some of the boxes that Jack had left behind the previous day and her memories had, once again, been nicely shaken into life. The old Nintendo games systems and countless games that he used to love to play took up three large boxes. She smiled as she remembered numerous, memorable nights having Mario Kart grand prix events, just Jack, her and Clive. She was always pretty useless at it, and baffled by how Jack and Clive would zoom around the crazy circuits pressing, seemingly, random buttons at random times; but those nights were still great fun. Yep, they were fantastic times, with the three of them functioning nicely like a healthy family, despite what was going on with her and Clive.
She had also seen Jacks very first pair of shin pads in one of the boxes. He hadn’t worn them for years, as they were much too small, but had always refused to throw them away. He was a bit like Clive in that sense: overly sentimental about basic, material things. Even now it was difficult to talk Clive into getting rid of anything; even things like socks that were so old and worn that he may as well have been walking around with bare feet – it seemed that it would break his heart to throw them away. Ridiculous! (He would be an absolute cert to end up on one of those sad hoarder TV programs, where people have rooms full of old magazines and other useless shit they’ve collected over the years, if she didn’t keep up with throwing stuff away behind his back.)
Jacks shin pads were different though. For him it represented the first time he got to play real, eleven a side football with a real team and real football boots and, yep, those real shin pads. And, for Gayle, it brought back those Saturday morning feelings that always represented “her and Jacks time”, because Clive was always at work.
Very often she was the only Mum standing out in the cold and the rain watching football training or matches. And she loved it. Isn’t it weird how a “sport” (men running around aimlessly and collapsing every time they are faintly touched?!?) that you can detest most of the time, can become something so enthralling and engaging when your offspring is taking part?
Gayle smiled, and even laughed a little, as she recalled seeing the “X-Files: Complete Season One” DVD box set in one of Jacks boxes. She wondered if he’d “enjoyed” it as much as she and Clive had. She was pretty sure that if he knew the detailed history of that particular set, then he wouldn’t have been as keen to have kept it in his room as long as he had.
Gayle put a splash of milk into her coffee and stirred it gently, before cradling it in her hands and carrying it through to the front room. She sat down and closed her eyes and let her body relax into the sofa.
DING-DONG
Gayle opened her eyes and looked out of the window and saw an old, maroon Volvo sitting outside the house. Wow, that was weird. She always heard cars arriving on the street outside. It was like this one had appeared out of nowhere. She stood up, realising that this must be the arrival of the “love doctor” and began to feel a little nervous; she had no idea what to expect. She walked through to the front door, checking her hair in the hall mirror as she always did. She ran her hands through it a couple of times but, as usual, had to settle for more of an “it will have to do” feeling rather than the “just stepped out of the salon” feeling she always hoped for.
Gayle opened the door and was faced with a tall man holding a brown briefcase. He was wearing a dark jacket and a black chauffeur cap and was putting what looked like a camera back into his pocket. What was he doing with a camera?
Over the road, Gayle noticed the familiar twitching of Mr Dennis’ curtains. No doubt he was making a note about Gayle’s early Saturday morning visitor and, by lunchtime, everyone who had visited Patel’s mini-mart on the corner of Walker Street will know that she was having a “clandestine and hot-blooded affair with a man with a maroon Volvo”.
“Good morning Mrs Ford” said the tall man with the briefcase in a strange South African accent. “I’m Henry, Mr Corden’s driver. He has had to take an important phone call in the car, but will be with you presently.”
Gayle nodded her head and wondered whether to invite “Henry” into the house, whilst she waited for “Mr Corden” to finish off his important call. Instead, after glancing at the maroon Volvo and being pretty sure that there was no one sitting in there, decided on a different course of action that she thought may “cut the bullshit”.
“Please, call me Gayle. And are you actually Jeremy?” she began, feeling particularly straight-to-the-point. “Clive told me last night that you like to impersonate different characters.”
“Henrys” shoulders visibly slumped.
“Guilty!” he said through an embarrassed little laugh, his accent turning instantly to something typically local.
“Sorry, I try to make a real, professional business impression because I think it’ll impress people. If they realise it’s just me on my own then I worry they’ll just think I’m a bit of a loser.”
Gayle opened her eyes wide, acknowledging the irony of what Jeremy had just said. Did Clive really think tha
t this was someone who could help them in any way, shape or form? She stared at him as he now, rather bizarrely, turned his facial expression to one of mini-shock and walked past her into the hall. He quickly glanced at the pictures sitting on the radiator cover before bending down and reaching for something that appeared to be lodged behind the radiator itself.
“Sorry” he said, passing Gayle what looked like a poem in a small picture frame. “My eyes were drawn to this. I presume it shouldn’t be hiding down there, out of sight?”
Gayle took it from him, confused at first but then realising what it was. It was the framed lyrics of a “love song”, or poem, that she and Clive had written many, many years ago. She couldn’t actually remember the last time she had seen it and, judging by the amount of dust that was on it, it appeared that it may have been stuck behind the radiator for quite some time. How strange that the first thing Jeremy should notice when he walked into the house was a long lost poem by her and Clive. What a curious character.
“Wow, I haven’t seen that in ages” Gayle said, deciding that she should explain its origins to Jeremy. “That’s something that me and Clive wrote together, back when we thought we could write songs. That one even related to something that happened to us; something that made me feel like our love was deeper, somehow, than just normal love. Stupid really. In fact, it was mainly me that wrote it. I always thought Clive would be best designing my single and album covers – he was really good at art. But I used to think I was destined to be involved in the music business … if there’s a next time, I’ll be a rock star … next time I’ll do it all!”
She paused as her mind was taken back. It was unclear if she heard Jeremy say, rather quietly: