The Lost Post (Chapter One) Roy

Roy wasn’t fat; jolly, even chubby; he’d accept that. Fat wasn’t genial and, after all, he was jolly, very jolly. He knew how to tell a story. He was never short of company, either at work with the Royal Mail or socially. Sandra (his match in girth if not in height) and he got along okay. He worked days, she worked nights and absence makes…well that’s what they say. Their joint income allowed them at least one holiday a year (but usually two) with their son Bobby and the ability to meet the invoices of life comfortably. But Roy, just lately, didn’t feel jolly. He wasn’t thinking of holidays or parties or even amusing stories. His seat belt was cutting into him and it had just occurred to him that Sandra was fat.
He began to reminisce about the first time he ever went out in a mailvan. He recalled that moment of turning the ignition keys and suddenly sensing that glib superiority that all drivers felt. This was the top job, on this level at least. No walking, no sorting, no bag tipping or tying or anything that was remotely brain-dead. No-one wanted to lose their driving job. It was unfathomable. The van itself wasn’t new and like most of the fleet the cab was festooned with assorted rubbish – crisp packets (with crisps), sweet papers and coke cans; the latter being a particular hazard to Roy shortly after being taken onto the driving section.
An empty coke can had, unseen, worked its way under his brake pedal as he was nearing the end of his collection. The woman who lived in the bungalow opposite the T-junction that Roy had failed to come to a halt at, had been sitting in her kitchen drinking tea and wondering where the post had got to that day. Three seconds later her inquiry had been answered when Roy’s van came crashing through her living room wall. It came to rest a few inches from the TV set, much to the lady’s relief but unfortunately had demolished her husband’s favourite chair, unoccupied albeit, a fact that seemed to offer her little consolation.
That was Roy’s first ‘blameworthy’, and the best of the bunch. Three of those and you were off the driving. He protested his innocence but to no avail. Every driver was given 10 minutes to service and clean their vehicle. Nobody did so, at least none of the new lads. A couple of the old-timers did so religiously and complained about a new lazy generation that was ruining the job. It was one of the latter that carped gleefully about Roy having to “carry the can”. That was another bugbear you had to live with on the driving. The drivers were a funny bunch, but absolute bastards when you fucked up. Nevertheless the van was used on three shifts. Why should he clean out what another idle bastard had left. That was a cleaner’s job surely and cleaners were the lowest of the low. But he couldn’t afford to accumulate any further ‘blameworthies’ on his record so he constructed a rationale that rendered this menial task acceptable to one so lofty. He would check for empty cans and bottles and eject them because doing so would make him a better driver and therefore then they could not be construed as litter or he as a cleaner. As for the crisp packets and sweet papers, he wouldn’t touch them.

The reason Roy was enjoying a lengthy pause was principally due to his escort, Spanner. An escort was posted to a driver whose collection was either particularly heavy or had points on the route which could be potentially hazardous, for example, a post office that was only accessible by walking some distance from the safety of the van. Not that Spanner would be much help Roy thought, watching as he attempted to open up a pillar box. All the drivers would configure their route to ensure the escort was always on the side of the pillar box giving themselves little to do but drive (outside clearing Post Offices) yet this was little consolation to Roy. Of all the escorts in all the world, he thought, Spanner comes stepping into my wagon.
He was slight, almost elfin-like. If they were attacked by robbers Roy may have looked like he required a good pistol-whipping to subdue him but a breath not much than that needed to extinguish a candle would have knocked Spanner over for six. Besides which Roy doubted whether such an incident would provoke any reaction from his escort and beam him back from beyond the parallel universe he seemed to inhabit the majority of the time.
Spanner was a TV child. Hid language was dominated by extracts from TV shows or blockbuster movies, specifically sci-fi movies. He actually believed in the force and knew he could acquire this power by practice and concentration. Roy had caught him at least twice already during their collection with his eyes squeezed shut and his forehead creased like the sidings at Crewe. The third time he went into the unknown was during a stop at a set of traffic lights.
“What are you trying to do Spanner?” Roy asked, prompted by a curiosity he didn’t realise he possessed until today.
“I am trying to turn the traffic light green with the force” Spanner declared.
“They’ll go green any…”
“There – I’ve done it” he smirked as the lights changed.
It was pointless to argue. Some months before Spanner had been dragged on a drinking binge with a few of the drivers one Saturday night. As a sober lad he was barely coherent with reality; drunk his preoccupation with mysterious (or what you and I would call nonexistent) cosmic influences exacerbated beyond the pale.
After several pubs someone suggested a curry and someone else a nightclub. A third offered the intriguing compromise of a nightclub first and then a curry and carried the day. Seasoned drinkers themselves they had little or no difficulty in appearing sufficiently temperate in order to gain entry to the club. Spanner on the other hand was to all extent in another galaxy.
His legs were hardly able to offset the gravitational pull on his torso and continually bent and straightened in quick succession throwing his upper body up and down like a marionette having an epileptic fit. His vocal chords had disintegrated so much so that he either giggled or dribbled as his mood swung from happy to depressed, as is the way for those whose secret truths drink excavates.
Nevertheless he contrived a conversation with a rather thick-set and impatient bouncer, dressed in a white dinner jacket, who sidled over and blocked the nightclub entrance as the last of Spanner’s mates entered the building.
“Where are you going son?” he asked Spanner
Spanner raised his leaden eyes from the pavement and tried to focus on what appeared to him to be a large Stormtrooper barring his way.
“In there” he slavered
“Oh I don’t think so” countered the bouncer.
Through the murky shallows of his battered conscious Spanner recalled the moment in Star Wars when his hero Obi-Wan Kenobi encountered a similar foe in the villainous town of Mos Eisley and decided to conjure up a Jedi mind trick that would befuddle his enemy allowing him to pass into the club.
“You don’t want to stop me do you?” he breathed, rather too close to the intolerant door-keeper
“Oh yes I do” the Bouncer answered with just a hint of appropriate malice.
Spanner lifted his right hand with the index finger pointed to imitate the placing of the force against the immovable object and jabbed it in the direction of the bouncer whilst giving the order “No you don’t”. At least that was the plan.
Actually Spanner only managed the first two words of that sentence. The next person he spoke to was the nurse at the local hospital when he awoke on a seat in the casualty department braced between two of his mates who were pissed off having to cart him there and missing out on any chance of cheating on their wives with a couple of girls they were chatting up at the bar inside the nightclub.
Spanner, still drunk and now very sore, could not distinguish the figure in white in front of him from that which had sent him half way to Mars with a haymaker and decided then and there that this stormtrooper was a disciple of Jabba the Hut and possessed the ability to block his mind-trick and for the rest of his duration at the A & E did exactly what she told him to do with a very demure and constant “Yes sir”.
Just drive, Roy told himself. If there was anything between his ears, rather than a gerbil on a treadmill, he’d make the effort. This was the guy, he told himself, whose mother packed his sandwiches in an empty margarine tub every day and put them into his shoulder bag. The one day she left them in the fridge; the one day he had to make the monumental effort of putting them into his bag alone, he brought the margarine in instead. And this is the escort they landed me with Roy mused.
Spanner was so sluggish that Roy was at leisure to retrieve whole tracts of memory leaning on his steering wheel and waiting for his aide to complete the most mundane of tasks. “It’s hardly metaphysics is it?” he mused, “all that’s required is to find the right key for the right box, clear the letters into a bag and close it up” Yet last week Spanner had managed to lock the keys in another pillar box and the week before he’d dropped them in a mailbag. They were recovered three hours later after they had mangled up one of the sorting machines.
“Okili-diddly-dokely”, Spanner brayed as he climbed back into the van. Roy groaned. This pathetic Flanders impression was irritating Roy as though a rasp was being applied to one of his ribs.
“Let’s go then” prompted Spanner. “What about that?” Roy sighed, nodding toward a letter lying on the pavement. “Doh” Spanner expounded, Homer-like, and slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. Roy almost swallowed his tongue to prevent him gnawing it two. “How difficult can it be to make sure you get every…” but Roy’s censure whithered into the ether as he watched Spanner pick up the letter and put it back in the box. “Sweet Jesus the man’s a moron” he muttered in awe, as Spanner revealed yet another facet of his mediocrity. “Get the fuck in fool we’re 15 minutes behind schedule as it is!” Roy barked. No sooner had Spanner managed to pull his left leg into the van than Roy had sped off, depressing the accelerator and crashing the gearbox in an effort to exorcise the demon sitting next to him.

Roy approached a T-junction to make a right turn. The oncoming traffic to his left was obscured as the road curved away toward his blind side. Forgetting the warning his memory had provided moments before concerning his history with this particular obstacle he entrusted Spanner to check for cars approaching from that direction. “All clear mate” Spanner declared and so Roy 38 years young and as naive as an infant accepted the word of a clown and pulled into the path of a heavy goods vehicle. The ensuing and unexpected horn blast Roy remembers to this day, as well as the unfortunate occurrence in his underpants, and often wakes him from one of those nightmares; you know the ones, when you knew you shouldn’t have done something but you did anyway and only just escaped the consequences; but in the dream you never do.
Roy didn’t see the driver’s middle finger gesturing toward him, stiff and erect, as his body had swiftly dissipated into the opposite state – jelly-like and quaking, but he envisioned it notwithstanding. It was only through instinct that he guided the van to the small welcoming lay by some fifty yards away and, after grappling at the seat belt buckle with tremulous fingers, fell out the van unable to stand on his bloodless legs and crumbling knees. “Spanner you fucking idiot, you said nothing was coming!” he croaked from a prone position. “You didn’t say anything about lorries” replied his insensible assistant as he climbed out of his seat clearly oblivious to the tragedy only just averted.
“At least the fucking prick is going to help me up” Roy thought, but wait as he did his escort refused to emerge from behind the vehicle. Picking himself up Roy staggered to the other side of the van hankering for a solution to Spanner’s disappearance. In doing so he bumped into his nemesis, mailbag and keys in hand and looking quizzically at his driver. “Where’s the box” Spanner asked.
“There’s no fucking box here, is there? Christ we’ve done this collection every day this week, can’t your brain retain anything?”
“Why have we stopped then?” Spanner inquired without the merest trace of mischievousness.
Roy inhaled, filling his diaphragm twice over, in a fitful attempt at self-control and said nothing. It was, after all, the final box of the final collection of the final day of the week. Perhaps someone would kill him over the weekend.