Keys of Babylon (17 page)

What are we looking for? I kept asking. But all he would say, till he told me in the pub last night, was it will be an honour. An honour for any British birder to see what we were going to see. Just the two of us, he said. On an expedition. It's time you came on an expedition. And this is best there is. Stuff the Gambia.

Well I'm not stupid. I can get a motor, can't I. So I'm on the team. We slept in the Punto last night, by this lake just north of Glasgow. Had to knock ourselves out with a bottle of scotch. We've both stiffened up. Before then we'd been in the Bay Horse in West Nile Street from about 8 p.m., and I was bushed. But proud of myself. That's a haul.

The pub was serving these great pies. Traditional fayre, as they say. We had two each. Pity about the Bay Horse. They're going to demolish it, and that really outraged John.

Look around, he said. It's perfect. All these mirrors with the optics reflected and names like Ballantyne's and Dewar's in gold in the glass. Even a whisky-drinking competition going on. Group of blokes, and a woman too, not throwing it back but tasting the different blends. Holding their glasses almost daintily, glasses that looked like little pots of honey. Which is not something you'd think would happen in a Glasgow drinking den. Sipping, then writing things down. And this long bar with a footrail and stained glass diamonds winking in the windows. It was almost a church in there. But the Bay Horse is going to the knacker's yard

Well it must have been a good pub because John is a hard man to impress. As I've said, he's meticulous. I might have said scrupulous but there are too many ways to interpret that. He is also a bit of a veteran. It's his fiftieth, his mum told me. My John is fifty. That was five years ago. A lean man. Yes, wiry. That's the word for John. His hair has thinned but there's not a spare pound on him. In my experience, blokes who live with mum tend to turn podgy. Soft and cuddly like golden labs. But John's sinewy. As if he's a deliverer, a real postie, not a sorter, not an investigator. Because that's how John sees himself.

I patrol a unique territory, he informed me once. (Yes, John informs you of things.) That border country between the missive's existence as a live entity, and its possible fate as dead letter. Or worse.

God, I used to sneer, silently of course, at that word.
Missive
. John used it a lot. Missive in action was one of his quips. And John's a good quipper, fair play. Come to think of it,
quipper
could be a bird's name. Because there's babblers aren't there? Yes indeed. So, northern quipper? Or just quip. Smew, twite, scaup, quip. One of those species named after its cry. Plausible.

But missive I don't like. Yet when John talks about the dead- letter office, I listen. And what's worse than a dead letter? I've thought about that a lot. Like there's a mysterious category of mail that only John knows about. A secret state of being. A state within a state maybe. Yes, I find it almost thrilling. A dead letter? How is a letter dead? And why? It has something of John le Carré about it, don't you think? Rainy Berlin streets and espionage in black and white. A chess match against the Stasi. I picture John writing codes into a book, a lamp with a green shade on his desk.

Code
is the crucial word here. Codes are codswallop to me but there's something of the code cracker about John. Or, if he's not an actual code breaker he's a believer in numerological systems. Hidden secrets and ancient wisdoms. Reading the runes in the dead-letter office. Which he tells me is a subterranean hall with a chained library of atlases and dictionaries. No windows. A pinging strip light and entry vetted by an ancient crone. John has a pass, he tells me. Unfortunately he can't bring it out on civvy street. Sacking offence. Like he's in the military.

But it's all going to the dogs, he tells me. And after forty years he must know. Sorting's an art, says John, when we meet at the Junction Café of a Saturday morning. That's become a routine. Suits me. Excellent fry-up. And cheap? You bet. It's John's one extravagance, the Junction. Proves to me he's still human. So he gets extra black pudding while I have two side orders of toast. White, always. Can't abide brown toast. Big brown pot of tea between us. Gets refilled twice.

Yes, an art, he says. You learn an art. You study that art. Then you practise that art. But the people I'm working with now, they're clueless. They think sorting's a step on the way to somewhere else.

Now our Christmas sorters, he'll continue, I've no problem there. University students. You can talk to them. Some even know a bit about birds. And travel? Oh boy, they're the RyanAir generation. Nowhere they haven't been. Lucky sods. But these others spend all night asking me where's this go? Albanians, Nigerians, coming up and sticking an envelope in my face. Mr John, they say, where, where? So it slows me up, doesn't it? If I'm not interrupted I can reach one hundred and twenty items of mail per minute. But not now. Oh no. So I look at the envelope.
Clackmannanshire
it'll say.
Bourton-on-the Water
, it'll say. Goes there, I say. Put it there, I say. Two minutes later it'll be Mr John, please Mr John. Where this go? That's Brixham I have to tell them. Not Brixton. And Henley's not Hackney. Strewth.

Look, John will tell me, constructing a bacon sarnie with tomato sauce. (It's always the red by the way. Counts as one of your five fruit or veg, he tells me.) Some of them, he'll say, more quietly, can't read English. Illiterate, see. Or as good as. Your first, your most basic requisite in the Post Office is competency in the English language. It's the Royal Mail, remember. Have a look at the stamp. So don't tell me if you've just come on the bus from Heathrow with your worldly goods tied up in a blanket and you're sharing a room down the Southall Broadway, that you know where a Clackmannanshire letter goes.

There's sixty-four boxes in front of you where that letter might end up, says John. But there's only one where it belongs. Where it has always belonged as far as I can remember, and no one in that office has done a bigger stint than me. So it's no guessing game. It's all based on history. Our history.

At least it's not raining. And John's in a good mood. Kind of euphoric. Because we're here at last. Ancient Caledonia, he calls this place. It's pristine, he says. The way it's always been. John likes the Scots, see. He says they're different from the Irish. John's told me that the sorting office was a dangerous place when the IRA were on the boil. The front line, is how he describes it. And yes, when you think about it, he's right. John was on the front line. You never knew, he says, you never knew if the next letter was going to be your last. John's been around.

So I'm listening hard. But there's nothing. It's completely silent amongst these pines. We've been here five hours now, trekking up, down. Woke at six because I couldn't stand it any longer. Had to wait while John did his callisthenics, but there were these clouds of midges, getting into everything. So we drove off.

Since meeting John I've looked at people on the underground and the buses in a different way. Those Senegalese men selling sunglasses? They're dressed like kings. And what about the Slavic girls, Lithuanians maybe? Skinny as gymnasts. And their eyes staring right through you, blue as lupins. They're haughty bitches. Are they working down the sorting office driving John spare? Can they even read this country's language? They certainly know how to suck its tit.

You know, I'm pretty tolerant. I've never bothered with politics. But I've started to think. What's going on? In your own country you write a letter. To someone else in your own country. You post that letter. It's collected. Tipped up onto the conveyor. Then it's sorted by hand. And that's where the trouble starts. The sorter can't read. Thinks Luton is Leyton. That Lee is Lea. It's as if the England around you is dissolving. Getting murky like an old film.

So I make up tests for those people on the trains. Passes the time. It's like liquorice all-sorts down there these days. Chipping Sodbury? That would fool a few. Rhosllanerchrugog? Cop a load of that. Went on holiday there once. Oh Mr John, Mr John! they'd cry. Help me! What this terrible place?

Because I think John's correct. The sorting office is a proving ground. He says if you're incapable of working there you can't qualify for citizenship. That this citizen exam they give them now is bollocks. And I'm sure that's right. Spot on.

Yes, it was five years ago I met John. Seems longer. Sometimes it feels like I've known him all my life. That was a bad time for me. I'd been married two years and thought everything was fine. Didn't have any money but the flat we rented seemed good enough.

It was a Saturday morning. As per usual I was in bed with Alice and I was just waking up. We'd met online and everything clicked. Same age, same everything. Hunky dory I thought. So I was all dreamy because I knew it was Saturday. No work. Nothing to do. Luxury I thought. Nice lie in. Get
The Times
for the sport. Takes all morning to read it but brilliant footie coverage. Real analysis. But Alice was sitting up and she was looking at me. After a while I thought it a bit odd.

What's wrong? I asked.

Oh well, Lloyd, I was considering, she said.

Considering? I said. She didn't say thinking. She said considering. Kind of ominous, that word. And she was using my name. For some reason she never used my name.

Considering what?

Last night, Lloyd, she said. Friday night. What did we do?

Watched telly, I said.
Big Brother
.

And last Friday night? What did we do?

Can't remember, I said.

We watched
Big Brother
, Lloyd, she said. What happened in it?

Christ knows, I said. Search me.

That's right, said Alice. I can't remember either. You know why?

She was looking down at me. I felt I was trapped in bed.

Why? I asked.

Because nothing happened.

Yeah, I said, sort of relieved. It's crap.

No, she said. It's not that
Big Brother
is crap.

Well, it's okay, I said. I was still coming round.

No, she said again. I don't mean that.

What is it then?

You want to know? she asked.

Yes, I want to know, I said.

Well, it's you, Lloyd, she said.

Me? I said.

There was a fire drill in my head now.

What about me? I said.

You're boring, she said.

I'm what? I said.

I've been looking at you sleeping, she said. And now I know for certain.

Know what for certain? I asked.

That you're boring, Lloyd.

You what? I said, struggling up. I'm not boring.

Yes you are, she said. You're boring. And that's why I'm leaving you.

What? I said. You what?

But she never answered. That day, that luxurious Saturday with nothing to do, she had it all planned. In the evening, after packing, she would go to a friend's. I lay in bed late. Like the
Big Brother
people did.

Eventually I called down the stairs.

We could go to my mother's, I said. Take her a cake.

Five minutes later she brought me a cuppa.

You don't get it, do you? she said, pulling the suitcase off the wardrobe.

Boring? I said.

Yes, boring.

I felt weird. Boring? I asked myself. Boring? That was below the belt.

Which is why it was a bad time for me. But after a while I started to understand what Alice had meant. Because what does it mean, being boring? Not a crime, is it? Not a sin? But I thought and thought. I thought for two weeks. Then I rang her.

Okay, I understand now, I said. You mean we should do things together.

That's part of it, she said.

Interesting things, I said.

That's right, she said.

Well, I said. What about bird watching?

She put the phone down.

Look, it's not as if I was in the football chatrooms all night, or bloody Youtubing it. I didn't go drinking. Much. And taking your wife to a pub always feels a bit strange. Like you're being sized up by other blokes. Has he pulled a looker, is what they're thinking. Well Alice is no looker, okay? Bit plump. Homely. Nice eyes though. So why was I boring?

Yes, birding was an out of the blue idea to Alice. It was even new to me. It happened like this. I'd caught the Brighton train, but got off after Haywards Heath. Suburbia with bits of grass. I used to live there for a while when I was little and I hoped it would be a good place to consider stuff. I was on this rise, mooching about.

Alice had always noticed that about me. You're a moocher, she used to laugh. I'm sure she found it endearing. With your shoulders hunched, your hands in your pockets, she said. Mooching about. All moochy, aren't you, Mr Moochy? And she'd pinch my bum.

So there I was, minding my own business. No one about, gorse bushes on the hill, and these big rocks with yellow lichen like egg yolk spilled everywhere. Then I see three people coming up the path. Cameras, pagers, the lot. Two passed me with dirty looks. The third man was wearing a woolly hat.