The Lost Post (Chapter Three) Docket and lies

Docket

Definitions:

1. Work carried out over and above one’s duty
2. That with which to supplement a derisory income
3. That to be stolen from someone else
4. That to be the germ of warfare
5. That from which empires are built

When Roy joined Royal Mail he was a man in a hurry. He’d experienced five tortuous years as a Rep in insurance sales having being head hunted from a “nice safe bank job.” The dream life promised him had turned into a nightmare. He was sold the job on half-truths and downright perjury and found quickly that he was wedged into a catch-22 situation. He could sell okay but commission payments were slow in coming and without that income he couldn’t afford to do the necessary legwork of 100 or so calls to hit the ten appointments mark from which, statistics reliably informed him, would produce the one good sale. That’s what he told himself anyway.
It truth Roy was never disciplined enough for the work. The office itself was like a drop-in centre. But the phones were rarely used to trawl through the directory and make appointments. Roy made more phone calls to fend off his creditors and arrange stage payments for unpaid utility bills than he ever did for business. He boosted his monthly figures by selling himself a pension and life assurances which, once his savings had been raped, he couldn’t afford to pay for and the policies lapsed.
The social scene was great though and if you hit certain targets you were invited to the monthly lunch, all-in. Sandra, who had been unimpressed by the self-centred characters she met at the social functions, found herself ostracised, at first by Roy who was totally enamoured by the attractive wives of some reps and flirted outrageously, believing his wife an obstacle that needed to be sat at a table with half a lager. Later Sandra just stopped going. It wasn’t a case of refusal or denial. Roy got ready to go out one night and she didn’t; and that was that.
As the forces of debt gathered their armies and breached the thin black line of solvency, Roy became isolated from the societal side of things. His monthly figures, never brilliant, began to slide dramatically. To the other reps this was the kiss of death. You didn’t associate yourself with the virus of failure lest you too became infected. So his colleagues would either be engaged on the phone or just leaving the office when Roy arrived. After a week Roy was reduced to climbing into the car each morning and driving to the car park at the local train station where he’d sit for hours. He would read or sleep or both and then eventually drive home telling Sandra what a hard day he’d had. And of course in a way he was being entirely truthful.
“Are we leaving the house this year?” she asked Roy one early spring morning during his first year as a rep.
“I can’t afford to I need to build up a client base” Roy lied.
She feigned comprehension but knew that all the big hitters had exotic holidays and long weekends. Roy was never here while she always was.
The following spring she put it to him again.
His response lacked a little in credibility.
“We’re hitting the south of the city with a massive campaign. It’ll be a huge earner and I can’t afford to miss out”
“More clients?” Sandra said acerbically.
“Of course”
“Where’s the money then?”
There had been money, at least in the first year; but he’d borrowed that from his mother giving her the impression that he was investing it for her. He had also tried to get back into banking but no-one wanted him. So he continued to lie as he’d done since making the catastrophic move into direct sales.
His mother’s cash was gone by the second year and he hadn’t paid the mortgage for six months. The utility companies were threatening disconnection so he did the obvious thing. He lied again. He persuaded his mother that it would be wonderful for them all to go abroad together, the three generations and that her investment was doing so well it would pay for it.
In truth he’d organised a loan from a company that promised up to £5000 if you can say yes to three questions. Roy said yes to 10 days in Spain. He’d escaped for a while and like all threatened species his brain had simply ignored the dangers he’d left behind even though eventually he’d have to return to confront them.
And that was the key- the kernel to it all. Roy could not confront anything. When he’d argue with Sandra he’d walk out. Without completed anything so many things in his life became unresolved.
When the plane brought them back Roy entered the house and saw the huge pile of correspondence. He knew what most of it was but simply dropped his bags and went for a walk. He was only a mile away on foot but several light years away in thought when Sandra’s brother Fred drove up besides him. He had his Royal Mail uniform on as he’d just finished work. He looked incensed and jumped out at Roy dragging him toward the car and pinioned him to the passenger side like a policeman making an arrest despite him being wiry and relatively small in size and weight compared to Roy.
“What the fuck’s been going on?” he barked
“Morning Fred and how are you?” Roy replied in his usual jovial style.
“I’ve just paid your latest electricity bill otherwise my sister wouldn’t be able to cook a meal for my nephew”
“Those people; I called them and said I’d clear it as soon as I returned. I’ve got a big commission coming”
“Who from? Sandra’s just opened a letter from your employer. You haven’t sold anything in weeks. They’ve sacked you”
Roy’s mind began surfing for a response but, as psychiatry informs us that a thief continues to steal because he wants to be caught, so Roy had lied and lied because he wanted the truth to out, and now that there was no need to cover up anymore the untruths that had reliably leapt onto his tongue to divert his inquisitors away from the veracity of his situation had dissolved.
When he walked back into the house Sandra was in the front room on the sofa crying. Fred’s wife Jean was playing with Bobby in his bedroom and Roy’s mother stood in the lobby glowering at him.
“My investment?” she asked him flatly
Roy stared at the toes of his right foot as they were the only part of it that was visible beyond his stomach. He remembered being in a similar position of chastisement when he was 13 and could make out both feet quite comfortably. He’d balanced a firework in a milk bottle and positioned it so that it was pointing out of his open bedroom window. He’d lit it but as he retired to a safe distance he’d nudged the bottle which toppled back into the bedroom. For the next thirty seconds he’d practically booked himself a place in the Pentathlon for the next Olympics as he sprinted, hurdled, jumped and threw himself around his bedroom furniture to avoid the rocket which was careering around the room in an ever more sporadic trajectory bouncing off the newly decorated walls and spruce new shag pile carpet.
As it became spent the room resembled a saloon after a gunfight and Roy knew that once the sheriff returned there’d be more gunfire. But she never hit him. She was a single mum who had left her philandering and violent husband nine years previous, never to physically wish for another, and constructed her own debt-free universe from the meagre wages she earned through a strict regime of self-discipline and sacrifice which mirrored her religious advocacy although she never applied this to her son.
“This is my reward for all the love I’d showered on you” she cried but this was now and not then.
“I’ll pay you back. I’ll pay you all back” He wanted this to be the truth but couldn’t disguise the fact that his reply was more a reflex than a basis for reimbursement.
“You bet you will” Fred interrupted. “You’ve got an interview at the Post Office next week”
Sandra could’ve walked out on him and Roy would have deserved it, but she stayed and supported him by getting a part-time job. He passed the interview and was offered a start in a month’s time. She found that work a necessity and when her employers offered her a full-time job she took it. Sandra was friendly and polite but never engaged with her fellow employees outside of working hours. She felt that she should continue to bolster her husband at home too until he could return to work. She would arrive home from work in the evening and tidy and wash up the house before cooking her husband’s dinner and flopping into bed. She never felt Roy culpable for the state the household was in. He had all the time in the world, she agreed, but it was wholly engaged in having to deal with his enforced idleness, and she empathised totally, because Roy told her how hard it was for him to deal with the situation.
When Roy donned his Royal Mail uniform he felt safe for the first time in three years. Structured work and basic pay was an amnesty after the incarceration of sales representation, but it was never enough. The house was still only one step from repossession, what meagre furniture he and Sandra owned sat on bare floorboards and his bank account balance was redder than the halls of hell. What he needed was a knight in shining armour and he found one – and its name was docket.
Docket was the post office word for overtime. It was derived from the sheet on which the work was recorded and endorsed by a manager – the docket sheet. For some there wasn’t a finer sight since Moses cast his eyes on the Promised Land than a docket crammed head to foot, Monday to Sunday, with hour upon hour of paid overtime.
Postmen and women from the Moray Firth to Lizard Point needed docket like Laurel needed Hardy. They had built beach houses in the Caribbean; Mansions in the Punjab and secured second homes for holidays and rentals all over Europe and the coast of Florida. Others drove the latest BMWs or Mercedes. Young lads who spent every waking hour at Royal Mail purchased Golf GTIs and Audi Quattros in order to rip up the same strip of tarmac that ran the mile and a half between their house and the mail centre.
The wise ones paid their mortgages off early and got off the overtime carousel. Others invested in their children and sent them to public schools, even Oxford, in the hopes of gleaning the dividend in financial support from their grateful sons and daughters when Time’s sharp second hands chipped away savagely at their arthritic bones and gradually reduced their capabilities to not much more than a normal working week, the recompense for which was considered survival rations.
For Roy, destitute and in danger of losing control of his life, the sooner he climbed into the docket express the quicker he could clamber out of debt. It wasn’t easy though. Certain impediments prevented an immediate enhancement to his poor weekly basic. For one thing being a new boy he was restricted by his lack of experience and so he volunteered for as many overtime walks as he could and gradually enhanced what was a poor knowledge of the topography of the city. He also put his name forward for driving duties and hoped to be considered after he had completed an obligatory six months service.
The greatest hindrance to a new boy trying to get some overtime were the docket kings. Masters of all they surveyed and wise to every trick, the docket king could conjure up overtime from thin air. During the summer periods when annual leave was high, the docket would flow like manna from heaven and everyone that performed overtime had access to it. But the kings still did the most. If some one had 30 hours docket in the bag, they’d have 40. If an ordinary subject had an entry every day, they’d have two or three.
Their surpassed themselves however, during the periods when holiday absence was relatively small and docket scarce. To the majority of people, in meagre times, the posting of ten hours overtime would be as much as they could hope for. But the regal ones had standards. To hand in a sheet like that was an anathema. A bare minimum of 25 hours was the least that could be considered and they’d be unhappy with that. So, as with all great inventors, they’d create overtime and hold the patent. One always wondered what they could possibly be doing one week that wasn’t required the previous. That was the magic.
But all plans have a structure and the first essential ingredient was to be close to the manager. This did not necessitate having to like the supervisor, they were all generally hated and mistrusted, but one had to affect a convincing display of amiability toward them.
Secondly one had to convince them that the work was required, not as difficult as it seems, particularly if the manager could claim their own portion of overtime in supervising you. Once established the overtime remained entrenched. It developed as an integral part of the shift and became inseparable from its creator. It didn’t appear on any lists so no-one else could tick to benefit by it and yet when its originator was on leave or sick, it’s importance diminished to a state of non- existence and both shift and office survived quite well without it.
Yet while raking in as much overtime as he could physically and mentally stand began to resolve one major problem - his indebtedness, it soon created another for him at work with Danny the Docket King.
Most people working at Royal Mail earned themselves nicknames. Roy was amazed at the variety and imagination in some of the creations, considering the dearth of these qualities in relation to the working environment. Early on he’d met Shot Away Sally whose legend had fastened on her as a result of a series of ‘Clouseauesc’ faux pas. She’d been his driver when Roy had been on the walks and was responsible for dropping out his second pouch.
A second pouch was a necessary requirement for walkers without a car or who refused to use their own when carrying out their delivery. The latter group was as numerous as the stars in the sky on the sunniest day in Death Valley but this was due an arRoy of conditions from the unreliability of the driver to have the bag in place when needed to having to catch a local bus out to their first delivery point. However the bottom line to a Walker was the need to get finished as early as possible and that the only delivery that ever counted was the one they were about to do.
The future was an alien concept to them; there were only a succession of presents which formulated a kind of Boulder Dam, inviolate and secure. The inevitable job losses and extra work lumped onto their deliveries through their daily demonstrations of getting the mail out long before their duty officially ended, were simply sluice gates emitting the necessary run off. Regardless of the extra work they would go even faster and still be home and having breakfast on the firm’s time. So the merry go round continued unabated and as long as the people leaving did so voluntarily or through retirement and they were protected by the ‘no compulsory redundancy’ clause, so they would continue to murder their jobs with an almost Stalinist disdain.
Roy hadn’t a car at this point in his Post Office career. He was still rebuilding his personal economy from the debacle of his sojourn into insurance and had larger mortgage payments after his building society agreed to re-mortgage his accumulated debts into one easy payment. But it wasn’t that easy and he was still scrambling for his share in the overtime trough.
That morning he’d asked his manager where to leave his bag for the driver.
“Over in that corner son. Shot-away’s just gone for a coffee – she’ll be back soon”
“Who?”
“Sally; shot-away Sally”
“My driver?”
“Just leave your bag, don’t worry about it”
Just as he was putting it down he caught a glimpse of someone who looked like Olive from On the Buses but paid scant attention to her as he was late getting away.
An hour and a half later Roy was midway through his walk waiting at the grocers shop which was the scheduled drop for his second pouch.
“She hasn’t turned up yet” said the unsympathetic Indian lad behind the counter.
Roy caught a half smile.
“Is she all right?”
“Wouldn’t know mate. Drops the bag and goes”
“But when?”
“I’ve seen them give up on her and go home”
“Fuck’s sake. I’ve got to pick my kid up from school. Got any cold drinks I may as well have one while I’m waiting?”
“Down the back in the big fridge”
As Roy sauntered off to the far dark end of the telescopically shaped shop Sally was turning the corner on two wheels and screeching to a shuddering standstill like a cardiac patient with a seizure in front of the store. She had straggly dark hair which clung to the sides of her head like guy ropes. She wore thick spectacles as her eyesight had deteriorated rapidly over the last two years but her ability to steer a Royal Mail vehicle had never been questioned as her accident rate, two a year, was no higher than the norm.
What assisted her in maintaining a low impact quotient was the fact that she’d performed the same job for seven years and meticulously stuck to the same route every day regardless of the variety of different addresses or bag drops that she had to visit over that period. In reality she got by through a combination of memory and structure. The landmarks of each road that comprised her route - the cars, trees, road signs and lampposts - these were mostly blurs to her, but it was their position, spacing or proliferation that became the basis of the navigational system she worked to.
Winter time was the most stressful for her. She would wait in the depot for as long as possible in order to garner as much light as the late morning would afford. She’d make little visits to the toilet or leave something upstairs or forget to pick up her registered items from the secure cages to disguise her real motive in procrastination. Somehow she’d muddle through but her Walkers, relying on her to drop the bags, would be driven insensate with impatience awaiting her arrival and in desperation began to cart out both bags with them on the bus in the morning rather than wait for Sally. Indirectly they reduced her burden and facilitated her through the dark periods and still no-one questioned the fact that she had little more vision that Kato’s master in Kung Fu.
One Christmas, long after Roy had picked off the walks himself, the game was up. New people had moved into 54 Crosby Road, but these were not ordinary people but the B & Q Santa brigade. Four weeks before the birth of our saviour they began cramming every inch of their front garden with decorations, lights, a sleigh with Santa and his reindeers and a crib containing life-size rubber characters from the Simpsons, which unfortunately they positioned close to the front door.
Sally had a parcel for the address which happened to be at the beginning of her delivery. People were getting tired of her delaying tactics and she was being pressured into leaving on time. To get around this obstacle she asked her husband to drive her around the route at night and took to counting the different lights on the road signs and lampposts and for a time this seemed to do the trick.
When she entered Crosby Road she was already counting.
“One, two white lights and then a yellow and another two whites and stop - number 54 is the one with the long front hedgerow” she whispered, her breath bleached white in the frosty air, and patted the decorative shrub as she made her way into the garden.
“Oh good he’s waiting for it”
In the adjacent garden the milkman was delivering a pint and two yogurts when he heard a strange one-sided conversation emanating from the neighbouring house.
“Could you just sign for this please?” It was Sally and her voice was strained.
“I need you to sign for this I’ve got to get on”
The Milkman peered across uneasily to witness the bizarre spectacle of Sally trying to get Homer Simpson to sign for a recorded delivery package.
“He’s not real love” said the Milkman apprehensively
Sally wheeled around but in the darkness could not make out from whom or from where the words had originated.
“Not real? He looks real” she answered to whomever and poked at the figure in front of her with the parcel she was holding to test the legitimacy of the observation. As most post office employees are aware some of the great British public do not package their sharper items with due diligence and attention and on many occasions those handling this mail receive cuts and nicks some of which have been deep and severe.
The parcel in Sally’s hands was a typical example. It contained a Stanley knife, bought from an internet site, which razor-sharp blade had been carelessly placed in a flimsy and inadequate covering which the knife had whittled away to nothing somewhere on its journey from Leeds to the mail centre. As it passed through the centre’s sortation process to Sally it had proceeded to gnaw away at the outer skin so that the point was projecting beyond the meagre binding. By luck it had got this far without assaulting the fragile dermis of at least one postman and crucially without the notice of any of the handlers who had sorted it from its arrival to delivery.
If Sally had presented the parcel to Homer in an opposite fashion she may have been in danger of severing the artery on her wrist as it was she consigned the figure to oblivion as it burst on impact with the exposed blade.
The police found the milkman writhing in agony at number 56 covered in strawberry yogurt which he had squeezed out of the two pots he was holding at the time. He had stuttered backwards in shock and tripped over an ornamental dog, which ironically he had considered real the first time he saw it in the garden and stopped lest it bit him.
“Bastard got me in the end” he cried falling backward in pink.
For Sally, at the epicentre of the explosion, she flew in reverse for what seemed an age, incomprehensible to what had occurred. The parcel was dropped in the melee and lay more or less in the spot where Homer stood and seemed only marginally more ridiculous as represented Jesus’ father as had Homer seconds earlier.
Recovering her senses Sally came to the logical conclusion that it had been a letter bomb and still in a prone posture began to pat her self down ascertaining if she was missing any integral limbs or joints. Confident she remained intact her lungs exhaled in relief whilst around her windows and doors were being thrown open as the neighbourhood woke up in a blind panic as if it were under attack.
Then she remembered the recipient of her package and raised her heavy head from the grassy carpet toward the crib. The yellow man was gone.
“Oh the poor devil” she cried and then she really did cry not only for the deceased but for the part she had played in his demise.
“I’ve been used by terrorists” she wept “He’s got a little baby too”
The people at number 54 evacuated their home along with half the street and soon gauged what had happened. However their version accused Sally of being a member of a militant Christian group intent on sabotaging non-secular imagery.
“Homer will not die in vain” they protested but found that when it came to replace him, due to popularity they were all sold out and had no choice but either let the crib stand one figure short or insert someone less applicable. After a week they decided to put a wooden Joseph figurine in, primarily because all the other options (Churchill, George Michael and Mr Blobby) weren’t apt and secondly they thought it might dissuade the fanatics from further attacks.
The Milkman’s testimony exonerated Sally from charges of criminal damage but got her taken off the driving. The Union insisted that she was innocent before being proved guilty and agreed that she should undertake an eye test to prove her ‘vanworthiness’. She was never going to pass. It wasn’t that she mistook an O for a Q or an M for an N. To her an I was as big as a W, and an S could easily be denoted an U.
The optician claimed that her vision must have been this ghastly for the last ten years and issued a censure to Royal Mail for allowing someone to drive a vehicle who, in his own words, “attempted to exit my office through the men’s lavatory”
And as shot-away Sally pulled out Roy’s second bag and headed for the grocers she spotted a large rotund figure who was standing, in a rather confrontational manner, just inside the doorway. As this was her last bag drop she knew she was late and assumed that the huge shape belonged to the young man who had given her his pouch nearly two hours ago.
To avoid confrontation she slung it into the shop from a short distance towards Roy with a cheery “Here you go mate, sorry I’m a little late…” and added for sympathy “…women’s problems” and was as quick back into her van and away.
It wasn’t Roy though but a large cardboard cut out of Cyril the Spiral, the marketing invention to promote Wheat and Bran spirals the new nutritious breakfast cereal “With more fibre than muslei” He too was decked out in light blue to match those of the cereal box.
As the bag hit the floor it slid toward Cyril and nudged the precarious looking base on which he rested. As Cyril wobbled his right arm, which was pointing at an artificial sky in which his index finger was manipulating the beginnings of a tornado with the catch-phrase “More twists than a twister”, brushed against the pyramid of canned tomatoes which had been positioned thus as they were the bargain of the week.
The collision dislodged the can at the apex of the stack which plunged to the ground and proceeded to roll down the left hand aisle toward Roy, who was still considering which soft drink would quench his thirst.
“A Doctor Pepper will do me” he decided and turned toward the check-out stepping on the can in the process.
In fact it was Dr Wahid Aswami that did him at the local A & E. Examining, X-raying and dressing the back of his head which cracked open as he hit the deck in the grocers shop.
Danny the Docket King was his usual compassionate self when he heard the news. Roy, as a new boy and a new boy who wanted docket, was dangerous. If his hand wanted to find its way into the pot, well:
“Less for everybody eh Danny” one of his sycophants crowed
“Fuck everybody. Less for me is all that I’m concerned about. Still the cunt’s fucked himself up for a while. Might make him think”
Danny had loads of friends. He’d accumulate docket for himself and then disperse what he couldn’t cope with to his close acquaintances. They worshipped him.
“That bloke can invent the stuff”
“It’s true. What you see posted is fuck all”
“What Danny gets is never on a wall. It’s invisible”
They relied on him, they adored him and when, in time when his underhand methods were regulated out of existence, they abhorred him.
Roy’s first abrasive encounter with him was in his first month. His manager was an affable guy and was eager to help Roy out.
“Roy, I’ve got a walk on docket all week – fancy covering it for me?”
“No sweat Gibb I’ll…”
“Hey Gibb” it was Danny “I need a favour off you”
“Where were you last week” Gibb seethed “I was in the shit with two walks I couldn’t cover”
“Sammy asked first – you know you gotta get in quick. I’m in demand – first come and all that”
“Well I’m covered this week”
“No you’re not”
“I’ve got Roy”
“Come here” and with that Danny pulled Gibb aside as if he were a hireling.
They had a brief conversation and then Danny walked away grinning like a Jack O’ Lantern.
“Roy” Gibb said mellifluously “Leave it this week son. I was wrong it’s not on overtime”
“You mean that fuck’s blackmailed you into giving it him”
“No, the postings were wrong. They made a mistake. Danny’s name should have been on it”
“You’re a gaffer aren’t you? Is that what happens in here? Fucking greedy arseholes run the joint?”
Hearing Roy’s tirade Danny returned
“Listen junior, I’ve got 17 years in this company. The wheels have been greased by better men than you. I make this work. Now fuck off on your own walk”
Gibb stood there like Abbanddo when he gave Viti Corleone his cards in Godfather 11
“Whatever he’s got on you it’s not worth selling your soul”
“Roy - understand the way things work here. A few months ago I had a postman die on me mid-week, heart-attack or a stroke I think. It was a bad walk, long and heavy but Danny was there for me and he’s right I owed him for that”
“Are you sure he didn’t kill the guy?”
But Roy would sell his own soul time and time again for the same reasons.

D