by Gary Locke
Clive first looked at the next work frame along and at Mark Tipton, or Tippo, who was one of the strangest individuals you could ever wish to meet. He was a confusing mix of wannabe alpha male, and yet the only man Clive knew who was always sensitively talking about his feelings. In fact, he acted so rough and tough one minute, and then was so in touch with his feminine side the next, that you had to wonder if he had a detachable cock. And yet he was a constant source of good company and amusement; always playing pranks, waving at strangers on delivery or getting on his hands and knees and barking wildly back at dogs who’d had the audacity to bark at him. Completely bonkers!
Just past Tippo was Jason who, rather sadly, used to be known as smiley Jason. Unfortunately his perpetual smiling had been slowly worn away over the last couple of years of Royal Mail’s ever toughening grindstone and the smiley part of his name had been dropped. I suppose it’s much the same as, for most people, the good old days now seemed to be referred to as the old days.
As Clive looked around further he heard the first shouts of “Owww – for fucks sake!” and “Snapper! Another fucking snapper!” of the day. This meant that some in the office had started “bagging up” (preparing their mail for delivery) and had experienced their first snapped elastic band of the morning that, after breaking, had rapped them somewhere across their fingers or knuckles, like some kind of sadistic daily torture ritual.
Hopefully some Royal Mail purchaser somewhere got a nice little bonus by making a healthy saving on the huge number of elastic bands that the company uses – by doing a deal to buy bands that do not stretch! Every postman goes out on delivery each morning looking like they’d had a particularly bad day at the hands of some overly-aggressive, corporal-punishment obsessed Victorian school teacher and his trusty splintered ruler.
This is just one of the new challenges that faced the modern postman these days – how to stretch elastic bands that won’t stretch. The traditional problems of abysmal weather, aggressive dogs, giro-demanding smack heads and lonely, horny, under-sexed housewives were issues that had been addressed, and mastered, over the years, but these new work puzzles were something else. For example: mobile phones. Not only does being in possession of a mobile phone mean that the boss can get hold of you at any time, there is also the potential catastrophe that is posting your phone. As such, you should never be tempted to deliver and text / browse the web at the same time. Because, whereas for the customer, receiving a mobile phone (that may or may not be viewing a “questionable” web page) is probably favourable to the latest Screwfix DIY catalogue, it’s not ideal for the postman – especially when excessive knocking on the door you’ve just posted your phone through leads to a neighbour coming out and informing you that the occupants have gone to Torremolinos for a fortnight.
Clive shuddered, remembering not having his mobile phone for two weeks the previous summer and hoped that his own elastic bands ordeal today didn’t lead to a snapped band striking him dangerously near his eye again. Eye patches look cool on some people and are often the result of extreme and dangerous shenanigans that provide an interesting story worth repeated telling. Losing an eye to a cheap, non-stretchable elastic band whilst doing a job that was painfully like some Groundhog Day hell would certainly not offer an account worth multiple renditions.
Clive’s shudder turned into a sigh as the mundane nature of his “career” struck him again. As he began doodling on his pad again, to finish the sketch of the grim reaper he had started earlier, he couldn’t help but think about the news article he’d just heard on the radio about the state retirement age being under review again. How many more times would the retirement age be increased before he would be eligible to take his well earned old age rest? Could he really live this humdrum life for another 25 / 30 / 35 years?
Chapter Twenty: The First Time.
Gayle had now spent nearly a full hour with Jeremy and was completely and utterly baffled about what she thought of him. She had certainly never watched someone take five minutes to slowly rummage through, what she could now see was a vintage, LA Law style brown briefcase, unpack some papers, a budget writing pad and carefully line up seven pens on the table in front of him with the slow precision you’d only usually expect during a complicated set up from a domino rally professional. And why seven pens? Well, apparently, “you can be sure if one pen runs out of ink then two or three will quickly follow”! Why this should mean that you need to carry seven pens with you at all times was completely unfathomable.
Gayle had always prided herself on her ability to judge people almost instantaneously. She was able to suss out what a person was all about, very often, the first time she ever heard them speak. Of course, she was regularly very wrong and had to change her knee-jerk opinions of people at a later date, but that didn’t really matter. What was so unnerving right now was that Jeremy had stirred up, pretty much, every emotion within her in under an hour. She felt that she liked him, and yet couldn’t stand him. She was angry and yet she was calm. She thought he was quite intelligent and yet a raving lunatic. And the whole experience was exhausting. It was like watching an episode of Big Brother.
“Ok” said Jeremy, after writing down Gayle’s response to his previous question. “Without wanting to sound like a pervert, I need you to tell me about the first time you and Clive had sex.”
Gayle’s confusion about Jeremy instantly cleared up: she couldn’t stand him, she was angry and he was a raving lunatic.
“I beg your pardon?” she said defensively.
“I know it seems a little intrusive of me to ask that, but the fact is that the act of sexual intimacy is a major part of the connection between humans; none more so than the very first time it happens. I don’t need a detailed account of the actual act; but the time, the place, the build up, how you felt etc. All these things are important parts of you and Clive falling in love.”
Gayle calmed down.
That didn’t sound too bad. As long as he didn’t expect the intimate details, then she wouldn’t have to recall ripped knickers, mistaken orifices and a nasty, naked roll onto stinging nettles.
“It was a summer’s night.” Gayle began. “Me and Clive were 15. We had started seeing each other, pretty much, every day. All day, every day. Clive’s step mum wasn’t too well and so wasn’t around to check where he was, and my mum; well my mum had begun to forget I even existed. And so we had each other. And we didn’t need anyone else. We used to go down by the stream walking, sometimes even swimming in there. When we first started dating we used to go to the cinema or to McDonalds like the other kids but over time we found that we just wanted to be somewhere on our own; somewhere away from everyone else. Then one time we climbed over the fence to the school grounds and found a place we’d never seen before, right away in the corner of the field behind the big oak tree. It felt like it was private from the rest of the world, that it was our place, almost our own private little desert island. We started taking an old tartan blanket and having late picnics there. They were made up of whatever bits of food we could find in each other’s houses. Usually some cheap wafer-thin ham on milk roll, Trio chocolate bars and packets of those Disco crisps, that often had so much flavouring on them that you couldn’t feel your tongue for a couple of days after eating a packet. We also thought it was cool, and maybe grown up, to take some mixed spirits in an old hip flask that Clive had. Little bits of any old bottles of hard booze – enough to get us a bit tipsy, but not so much that anyone would notice straight away. We would have one of our walkmans and listen to one ear phone each, sitting in each other’s arms pretending that we were in our very own house, that we were grown up and in love. Clive sometimes used to attach pictures to the tree; hidden behind a small black towel he’d once received in a Lynx Christmas set. The one time he smelt good for a few weeks into the new year!” Gayle stopped and smiled at her own joke.
“It became a ritual. I would remove the towel to see what he’d put up there - post cards or pictures from magazines
of scenic views, mansions, mountain tops or beautiful golden beaches. I’m not sure where he got them from but he found these pictures that we would stare at and pretend that we would go there one day; that they would be the perfect places for us to be together. Because we knew, back then, that we were going to be together, forever.”
Gayle paused for a moment, her eyes moistening as she recalled her yesterdays.
“But what did we know!” she added with a little snigger. “We were just kids!”
She composed herself for a few seconds before carrying on. Before she did, Jeremy furiously wrote something done onto his pad.
“Anyway, the night in question was the same. We were sitting on our blanket; I was lying on Clive’s chest. We were sipping away at the hip flask, hideous really – probably a mixture of gin, whisky and sherry or something. But I remember clearly that a warm night breeze was slowly blowing through. My walkman started playing one of my favourite songs: When I See You Smile by Bad English. We started kissing, and it started just like usual; but somehow it grew into something more. We stopped and looked into each other’s eyes and, for the first time, it’s like our eyes were so big that we felt like we could climb inside each other. Because we could see what each other was thinking. And then, when we started kissing again, it was almost like the best kissing in the world just wasn’t enough anymore. We hadn’t planned anything but we just started taking each other’s clothes off; we needed to be together, as one, and so.....”
Gayle stopped herself as she had glanced over at Jeremy who was sitting at the edge of his seat smiling. Was he getting off on this? Was he just some, weird, raving pervert?
“And so.....?” asked Jeremy.
“And so..... you said you didn’t need details of the act!”
“No, no, I don’t.” said Jeremy, suddenly realising that he was at the edge of his seat and somewhat thankful that his tongue wasn’t hanging out. “But how did you feel? What happened next? These are all important parts of it.”
Gayle stared at Jeremy for a little while wondering whether this was all just a waste of time. This didn’t feel anything like how some counselling would be, like she had wanted all those years ago. This just felt like she was telling some fairly intimate details of her past to a very strange man. Her instincts told her that she had told him all she wanted to. The weird thing was, though, that she was actually enjoying recalling, out loud, stories of her and Clive; this one especially. She almost ignored the fact that Jeremy was listening and carried on.
“It felt really good” she started, letting her mind return to that fateful night. “It felt like we were together. We weren’t two teenagers having sex; we were two young adults making love. And it was like the whole world wasn’t there anymore; like the whole world was ours. There we were, under the night sky making love. Lots of stuff back then seemed to be us almost living some of the songs we loved. One of them was by Cher, called Love on a Rooftop, which has a line in that says “we never stop to see the moon at night”. But that wasn’t us. We said we were always going to stop and see the moon at night. We were always going to live “young and foolish lives”. And, right then, during our first time, it felt like everything we had spoken about was real. And then, of course, I realised that certain parts of me were very itchy and really quite sore.”
“What was that?” asked Jeremy, looking up from his latest note making.
“Oh nothing!” said Gayle, realising that the nettle-roll was not something that she had planned to recall out loud to anyone; ever. All she could think of was: thank God for dock leaves.
“Anyway, that feeling didn’t last that long. As we were lying there, in each other’s arms; ironically just after Clive had suggested that we actually sleep there for the night, we heard the caretaker shouting at us as he crossed the field. He must have seen, or heard, us there somehow while he was checking the grounds. We had to pack everything up really quickly, and then he chased us to the far end of the field where we had to climb over the back gate that led to the main road. It was really quite frightening and yet afterwards we laughed and laughed about it. It somehow made everything even more eventful. It had made our first time feel more monumental; somehow dangerous. We still went back to our place regularly and somehow hoped that he would spot us and chase us again, but it never happened …..”
Gayle stopped talking and looked again at Jeremy. He didn’t acknowledge her because he was too busy jotting things down on his pad once again. She wasn’t sure what he was writing, but he appeared very focussed and was wearing a large smile; so he must have liked what he had just heard. She smiled and left him writing away as she went back to the memory in her mind.
Chapter Twenty One: Get Me Out Of Here.
Clive rolled his sleeves up, took a deep breath and focussed on “getting on” with things again. He smiled a little to himself as he noticed his own action of rolling his sleeves up symbolising that he was preparing to get stuck into work. “Roll your sleeves up” was one of those phrases that he’d often wondered about; primarily where it had come from. You probably rolled your sleeves up to prevent them from getting dirty or wet if you were about to embark upon some kind of manual labour, and yet Clive couldn’t help but always picture someone who was clearing their forearms as someone who was preparing to assist in the birth of a calf. Nothing to clear your mind of your mundane, humdrum life than imagining that you are about to insert your arm into a cows arse. And why is it that there isn’t a similar, but opposite, phrase to coincide with you having finished the need to be getting on with things? No one ever tells you to roll your sleeves down do they?
Clive’s attention was (thankfully) grabbed by Colin Barber, who was walking past him wearing a very smug look on his face. Clive quickly turned away before any kind of meaningful eye contact could be made because he knew that Colin was looking for anyone to talk to. And that anyone that he spoke to would have to endure a conversation that went pretty much like this:
Colin: “Hey, how are you doing?”
Anyone: “Alright mate. How are you?”
Colin: “Yeah, good thanks. You’re off next week aren’t you?”
Anyone: “No.”
Colin: “Oh, it must be me then!”
This was not really exclusive to Colin and seemed to be a conversation that anyone who was approaching any time off liked to have – as a kind of celebratory announcement that they didn’t have to come into the mad house for a while. Clive particularly didn’t want to talk to Colin about his imminent time off because he had already had similar conversations, at least three times, in which Colin had boastfully given Clive the full itinerary about the “holiday of a lifetime” Caribbean cruise he was about to embark upon.
Clive didn’t want to listen to that again, thank you very much. Besides he had never really fancied a cruise himself anyway. For pretty much most bad situations that happen in life there’s someone who’ll always say: “never mind – worse things happen at sea”. Well, what the hell happens at sea? Clive had always thought it was probably best not to find out.
Whilst turning to avoid eye contact with Colin, Clive did see the Nick, the (current) boss, approaching fairly quickly holding a piece of paper. The odds were in favour of the paper containing the details of a customer complaint and the boss heading over to two frames down from Clive to see Chris “Woodsy” Woods – the undisputed record holder when it came to customer grievances. Like when you see a police car and feel like you need to drive more carefully, Clive at least tried to make it look like he was doing some work as the boss approached.
“Alright boss? You’re off next week aren’t you?” said Colin after Nick must have foolishly connected eye contact with him.
“Piss off Colin!” said Nick nonchalantly walking past him before arriving next to Woodsy, as Clive had predicted.
Clive leant over and tried to listen as they talked because Woodsy’s complaints were usually sources of great amusement.
“.....Number 45 Oak Lane.” Cliv
e heard Nick saying. “She says she’s got photographic evidence of you walking down the side of her house yesterday and urinating up against the wall. What do you have to say about that?”
“It was very cold!” Woodsy replied, quick as a flash.
Nick sighed deeply and shook his head.
“I don’t think she contacted us to comment about the size of your penis! I think she’s more concerned about you pissing on her geraniums!”
“Hey Fordy, look what I got!”
Clive was interrupted from listening any further by Dave Black who was approaching carrying a redirection instruction. It would have been nice to see how Woodsy got out of this one. He wasn’t known as the Teflon Garfield for no reason – nothing anyone ever threw at him seemed to stick and he had more lives than a cat. Only last week he’d somehow managed to talk his way out of a serious complaint about him breaking a vintage glass vase, by delivering it through an open window – on the top floor of a townhouse! Judging by the fact that Nick seemed to be showing Woodsy something on his phone, perhaps the photographic evidence of his toilet break, maybe it wasn’t something Clive wanted to see after all. Instead he turned his attention to the oncoming Dave Black.
Clive was referred to by the majority of his colleagues as Fordy, as most postmen only seemed to be comfortable using nicknames instead of real names. In contrast to Georges’ nickname(s) then Clive had to be reasonably happy with his, rather unimaginative, modified surname one. Dave Black, on the other hand, had been known as Blackie for years until an overly pc-correct manager had deemed that this could be offensive to individuals of certain ethnic backgrounds. (Although, ironically, the only black man who had ever worked there during Clive’s entire time was Nigel Whyte, who didn’t seem to have any problem responding to the nickname: Whytey. How is it that political correctness can get it wrong so, so often?)