Imagined Slights Read online

  Though she was not the youngest, they called her Jane/267, because they could think of no other name for her, and everyone did what they could to make her feel welcome, part of the tribe, not least Jane/208, who took Jane/267 with her whenever she went beachcombing. Jane/267 proved not to be the sharpest-eyed of scavengers, but she made for good company despite (or perhaps because of) her lack of conversation, and as the two of them roved together along the grey, island-girding strip of pebbles between the black cliff and the creamy waves, Jane/208 would sometimes catch Jane/267 gazing out to sea, her phosphorescent green eyes wistful, as though scanning the horizon for something she had lost.

  Jane/208 shared that sense of loss, but for different reasons. Already there was talk, fomented by Jane/197, of building some kind of seagoing craft out of dismantled shelters, something like the First Jane's ark, and venturing out in it to discover other islands. Knowledge of how to put such a craft together existed in Mother Cave, and though she would be unwilling to impart it, she would do so if enough Parthenai demanded. Jane/208 herself had no urge to take part in the expedition, but many did, and whether they came home empty-handed or never returned, making the journey at all would destroy the beach-bound simplicity of the Parthenai's lives for ever.

  Changes, Mother Cave had said, could not be amended; they could only be endured.

  Was that true?

  Only Jane/267, who could not speak, knew the answer to that question.

  Dead Letters

  Bert was a big man who looked like he could have been a rugby forward or a professional wrestler or a nightclub bouncer but was too gentle of nature to have been successful in any of those violent occupations. In fact, Bert worked for the Post Office. He possessed a slow, methodical brain, which made him ideal for sorting, and for thirty-seven years Bert did just that, sorted, until machines came along that read and classified and separated and distributed mail in a fraction of the time it took Bert - conscientious, reliable old Bert - to perform the same task.

  When the machines came along, it seemed to Bert that that was that. He was near retirement, and the Post Office was taking on a lot of younger men and women now, people who actually understood how the sorting machines worked and could operate them. It was time for Bert to bow out nobly, the last of the old guard; take his pension and his fishing-rod and move to a bungalow by the coast to watch telly and read novels and the newspapers.

  His bosses had other plans for him. In the extending, expanding, full-speed-ahead-rocketing industry of mail delivery there was still a need for slow, methodical workers to do the jobs that required efficiency without urgency. Bert's bosses sent him a letter. They enjoyed sending letters. It made them feel that they were getting their hands dirty, actually touching the greasy cogs of the engine.

  The letter, when it finally arrived, described Bert in glowing terms (he was "a valuable, if not indispensable, asset") and went on to enquire if he would be willing to accept a transfer to a different department where he would be "in charge of and/or solely responsible for the distribution and/or disposal of undelivered and/or undeliverable correspondence".

  Bert's brain churned this one over for a while and came up with the translation: dead letter office.

  Dead letter office? He'd rather retire!

  But then he thought about friends who had retired. He thought of how they measured their hours with pint glasses and hip flasks; how they faded day by day; how boredom sucked the essence out of them, leaving them wrinkled husks of men. He thought about their rheumy, dreamy eyes that begged a question: where did it all go? Theirs was the shock and surprise of a punter who sees all the horses gallop past the finishing post and his isn't among them, hasn't even left the starting gate. Eh? What happened?

  Bert thought about this the way he usually thought about things, long and hard, and gradually his mind changed, turning over like one of those snowstorm-globe novelties that tourists like to buy, slow-swirling confusion settling again to clarity. He composed a reply to his bosses and started at the dead letter office the following Monday.

  The job banished him to the lower basement of the depot, where every morning he was greeted with canvas sacks full of undelivered correspondence. For the most part this consisted of circulars, shrink-wrapped catalogues and all the other junk mail that accumulated inside the front doors of abandoned shops and the homes of the recently deceased. Bert thought it was a shame, what with trees being whisked off the face of the planet at a rate of knots, that so much paper should be wasted selling products that people could go out and find for themselves if they really wanted them. Wearily he marked it all to be consigned to the incinerators.

  Business letters he opened and read and gauged as to their importance. Usually these were junk mail thinly disguised, further pieces of sales pitch dressed up in formal brown envelopes with the name and address of the target customer framed in a little cellophane window. Bit of a nasty trick that, Bert thought.

  Private correspondence, on the other hand, was sacred. It deserved respect for the effort that had been put into it, the care taken, the time spared. Bert regarded opening and reading private correspondence as very much a last resort, when every attempt to decipher the handwriting on the envelope or make sense of an insane address had failed. Even then, Bert looked only at the name and address of the sender (if there was one) at the top of the letter inside, then copied this on to the envelope, folded the letter back into the envelope and taped the flap shut. He would never have pried into another person's words. In fact, Bert wished he could write on every envelope, I haven't read this - honest. But who would believe that? Besides, it amounted to a confession that the temptation had been there.

  The letters which he did read, and was delighted to read, and read because no one else would read them, were those addressed to Santa Claus, The North Pole. He loved the lists, painstakingly detailed in case Santa should go to the wrong shop or buy the wrong brand or type of toy. He chuckled over the requests for trips to the moon and wishes no parent could fulfil ("Please could you send my little brother to Timbuktu and make sure he never comes back?"). He smiled at the protestations of goodness that bordered on saintliness and the apologies for crimes committed during the past year, wishing that his greatest worry in life was that he had knocked over a vase and blamed it on the cat. He delighted in the spiky cacography, the way the lines of writing veered more and more from the horizontal the further down the page they went. Although December was Bert's busiest month, it was also his favourite. He took all the Santa Claus letters home with him and placed them in box-files. Each year he bought new box-files to fill.

  Cynics might scoff, but Bert - the big, timid man, hidden away from daylight in a chamber in a lower basement in a depot in a city - was perhaps the closest the world would come to a real Father Christmas.

  Three years almost to the day that Bert was shunted off to the dead letter office, it arrived.

  It was compact, lighter than an aerogramme wafer, with no stamp, and was addressed simply:

  Dearest

  There

  That was all, two words on two lines. Bert tutted as he slid his finger under the flap. Honestly, there weren't half some odd sorts around.

  The sender's name and address at the top of the page turned out to be even less illuminating than the recipient's. It said:

  From Your Darling

  Here

  Bert scratched his head and was preparing to crumple the letter up when he found himself reading the first line. Well, it was only one line... But once his eye had begun to wander, he found he could not call it back.

  My Dearest,

  My heart grows sick while we are apart. It aches as it beats and with each shuddering throb seems ready to burst. When will you reply? When will this winter absence turn to spring? While you are there and I am here, snow surrounds me, the landscape is stripped of its beauty and I am cut off from everything that makes living bearable. A word from you, a single syllable, would be more welcome to me than the
first bud on a branch, the first song of a returning bird, the first blade of grass. When will I see you again? When?

  All my love,

  Darling

  Smiling, Bert read the letter again. Someone, he decided, had been buried too long in books of poetry. Perhaps a lovelorn student had hunted through pages of verse for these pearls of love-wisdom; perhaps an ageing spouse, hoping to rekindle love's first fading flame. Bert couldn't tell. The sentiments were immature, but their expression was adult. Or was it the other way round?

  He held the letter up to the unshaded lightbulb that hung from the ceiling on a length of plaited flex. You know, he hadn't seen paper of this quality in ... oh, ages. It captured the light. The light suffused it from corner to corner, from edge to edge, so that the lines of writing stood out like black bars against the sun. It fluttered dryly yet felt as smooth as cream, and it was thin - so thin it all but disappeared when turned sideways. The nib that wrote on this delicate stuff would have to be flawlessly smooth.

  The letter should not have been sent. It was a mistake. Nothing this precious and delicate should have been surrendered up to the mangling jaws of the Post Office. Nor, by any rights, should it have survived intact the lugging and manhandling that every letter had to endure.

  Bert took the frail miracle home with him, keeping it for the same reason he kept the letters to Santa, as a thing of simple faith that flew in the face of common sense.

  About a month later, the second letter arrived. Again it was for "Dearest, There" and again it was written on the same translucent paper. Bert opened the envelope with what he hoped was reverence tainted by forgivable eagerness.

  My Dearest,

  Time passes, and slowly your face decays in my memory. I can see its outline and know it to be handsome, and I remember the colour of your eyes and know them to sparkle, but I cannot mould the parts together to create a picture of you. I am left with a shape without form, an idea of beauty, and a hint of sadness.

  Without you and without your words to inspire it, my memory is a clumsy, blunt instrument, and my heart the poor craftsman who blames the inefficiency of his tools when he ought to blame the failing of his art.

  Send me words, send me art, send me love,

  As I send you mine,

  Your Darling

  Several things about the letter puzzled Bert, most of all whether Darling was a man or a woman. The handwriting, normally a dead giveaway, was rounded italics, a product of learning rather than nature, and therefore not obviously belonging to one sex or the other. And the words "handsome" and "beauty" could be applied equally to a man as to a woman, so that didn't help - assuming in the first place that the letter was being sent by a member of one sex to a member of the opposite sex...

  Bert showed this letter and its predecessor to his friend Harry (retired, widower, dismal) over a pint of bitter. Harry squinted at both letters for a while, slipping one behind the other, one behind the other again, while Bert searched his face for a glimmer of enlightenment. Eventually Harry set the letters down in the empty ashtray to keep them from getting soaked by the wet eclipses left behind by their pint glasses. Then he took a swig of bitter and said, "Pretty."

  "Pretty?"

  "The paper. Must've cost a bob or two."

  "But what about the words? What do you think? Do you think someone's playing a joke?"

  "On you?"

  "On me, on the Post Office, I don't know."

  "Don't make much sense as a joke, does it? Looks more like a headcase to me. I mean, the words are pretty, too, but a bit..." Harry tapped his temple. "If you catch my drift."

  "They make sense to me," said Bert. "He, she, whoever it is, is in love. Really, truly in love."

  "My point exactly, Bert, my point exactly," Harry said with a half grin, and waved his froth-streaked glass at Bert with significance.

  Bert sighed. "Same again?" he said, reaching into his pocket.

  The letters from Darling started arriving regularly, one a month, usually towards the end of the second week, at the latest by the beginning of the third. They traced Darling's mounting desperation, the increasing urgency with which he or she longed for an answer from Dearest. Dearest's reticence was "like the Arctic wind that cuts to the bone with innocent malice". Dearest was "the kindest and cruellest creature that ever lived". Dearest was by turns "beautiful" and "beastly", "exquisite" and "evil", "ravishing" and "ruinous", "tender" and "tormenting", sometimes both in the space of a single sentence.

  When Harry cast his expert eye over each new instalment, he would look sly, tap his temple as before, and say, "Now, what did I tell you? Headcase. And getting nuttier by the month."

  And Bert would wonder (but never aloud) who was the biggest headcase here. Darling, for writing to an imaginary lover letters that would never reach anywhere? Harry, for dismissing love as a madness? Or himself, for being captivated, swept up, swallowed whole by the letters? Was there something wrong with him because he looked forward to Darling's next missive with the excitement of a schoolkid counting down the days until the end of term? No, he decided. Not when the letters made a dull job a little brighter, his confinement to the bowels of the depot that little bit more bearable.

  Then one morning Bert received a letter from his bosses similar to the one which had informed him of his transfer to the dead letter office. This one informed him that his services would no longer be required as of next Friday. (The letter gave him the statutory month's notice, or at least it would have, had it arrived when it was supposed to.) The bosses added that they very much appreciated the decades of hard work and unstinting loyalty Bert had given to the Post Office, but owing to circumstances and/or situations beyond their control the dead letter office was to be closed down. He would receive his full pension, of course, and would he accept their deepest sympathy and/or sincerest hopes for the future?

  Bert bent his head, gritted his teeth, and lodged a protest. What about the children's letters? What about the private correspondence? What about the arrows of love that never reached their intended targets? (He cribbed the metaphor from Darling's most recent outpouring.)

  The smooth running of the mail delivery industry, replied his bosses, was their greatest concern, and they were gratified to see that it was his too. The sorting machines, they told him, could now be programmed to spot such mistakes and/or anomalies and direct them straight to the incinerators, thereby making immense savings all round in effort and/or time and/or care. They appreciated his drawing their attention to the problem and/or were moved by his display of company spirit right to the very end. Might they again offer their deepest sympathy and/or sincerest hopes?

  Bert's final days at the dead letter office drifted by. The flow of letters began to dry up. The sorting machines were already hard at work tossing away the unwanted catalogues and the lists for Santa and the private correspondence without a second glance, with barely a blink of an electronic eye. It pained Bert to think that Darling's future letters would, once sealed, never be read; that the strange, delicate paper would be lumped in with the rest and burned to ashes. When it pained him too much to think about it, he went to the pub with Harry, drinking for the sake of drinking, even though drinking didn't do much except get him drunk.

  Bert's last day arrived, and there was going to be a party that afternoon when the whole depot would turn out to present him with a gift they had all chipped in for. Then they would wheel in a cake that said, in letters of piped icing, "To Bert, Best Wishes On Your Retirement". And when everyone had eaten a slice they would stand in a circle, shuffling with embarrassment, and sing "Auld Lang Syne". The prospect filled Bert with dread. These rituals, these last rites that Bert had himself helped administer to the old men and the old women before him, feeling vaguely sorry for them as everyone was no doubt feeling vaguely sorry for him today - this really was the end, wasn't it? Now he had nothing to look forward to except beer and oblivion. He nearly called in sick, but decided that he had to attend. It would have been rude
not to.

  There was a letter waiting for him in the dead letter office. A small envelope. That extraordinary paper.

  Bert snatched it from the table and attempted to drive his trembling finger under the flap. Then he felt a peculiar twinge at the back of his mind, as though his thoughts had snagged on a thorn. He looked around. Had a piece of furniture been moved or something? No. Then he looked down at the envelope in his hands. He turned it over.

  The handwriting on the front was not Darling's. The letter was addressed:

  Darling

  There

  Bert had to restrain himself from tearing the envelope apart. He fumbled out its contents and began to read, his eyes gaping wide to drain every last drop of prose from the page:

  From Your Dearest

  Here

  My Darling,

  What can I say? I must reply. Your sweet words have moved me and my love cannot stay silent for ever.

  I have abused you as no lover has abused a love before. I have ignored you when I should have cherished you. If my face has grown faint in your memory, it is because the real me is wan with shame and pale with remorse. Would that I had vanished from your memory altogether, for I deserve to be forgotten, never forgiven!

  But I beg you now, and will if necessary beg you to the day I die...

  Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

  All my love,

  Your Dearest

  A Taste of Heaven

  Think'st thou that I that saw the face of God

  And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

  Am not tormented with ten thousand hells

  In being deprived of everlasting bliss?