The Route

The bag is lighter than it used to be. That’s the first thing anyone asks — do people still get post? They do. Less of it. The ones who are left mean it more.

I start at the top of Beech Lane and work down. Always have. Thirty-one years, same direction. Terry Machin, number 2, asked me once why I didn’t start at the bottom and save the hill for the way back. I told him the hill wakes my knees up. I tried it the other way once, in 1997, and the whole day felt wrong — like reading a book backwards. I went back to the top the next morning.

Number 2. Machin. Gas bill, something from his daughter in Canada — I know the handwriting, the blue aerogramme she still uses even though nobody sends aerogrammes anymore. He could get emails. She could text. But every three weeks the blue envelope comes, and the handwriting is getting larger, and I have never met this woman and I know her hand better than I knew my wife’s.

Number 4. The Okafor-Stewarts. Parcel, small, padded envelope, something that rattles. They get a lot of these — craft supplies, I think, or parts for something. The letter box is at knee height, the old Victorian slot, and getting the padded envelopes through it is a negotiation I have with the brass flap every time. The trick is to bend the envelope lengthways. Nobody told me this. Thirty-one years of bending envelopes.

Number 6 is empty. Has been since March. The family moved to Birmingham and the house went on the market and the sign has faded from red to pink in the front garden. I still check the slot from habit. Sometimes estate agents send letters to houses that are for sale — writing to a building as though the building is going to buy itself.

Number 8. Mrs. Parikh. I ring the bell because she asked me to, years ago, because the sound of the letter box frightens her cat. The cat is seventeen. I ring the bell and hear the cat land on something — the hall table, probably — and then Mrs. Parikh’s slippers, and then the chain, and then the door opens the width of the chain and her hand comes through. I put the letters in her hand. Two today. She says thank you. I say you’re welcome. She closes the door. I have been doing this for nine years. I have seen her hand four thousand times. I have seen her face through the gap in the chain — the left side of it, always the left side, the eye and the cheek and the edge of the mouth. I have never seen the right side of her face.

Number 10. Nothing today.

Number 12. Henderson. Credit card statement and something official, brown envelope, window. Brown window envelopes are never good news. You carry enough of them and you learn the weight of trouble — the thin ones are reminders, the thick ones are proceedings. This one is thin. A reminder. He’ll open it tonight, or he won’t. I push it through the slot and hear it land on the mat, a small slap, and I know what’s in it the way a doctor knows what’s in an X-ray before he puts it on the lightbox. Henderson will know at six o’clock, or tomorrow, or next week when the thick one comes.

Number 14. The Chens. On summer mornings when the sash is up I can hear Mei Chen’s piano through the front window. Years ago she used to stop and start — the same passage, over and over. Now it flows. She plays something different each week, and some weeks she plays the same piece every morning until one day it opens up and she moves on. I don’t know what the pieces are called. I know what they sound like through a window at half past eight while I’m sorting her post on the front step.

Today she has a letter with no stamp. Hand-delivered, pushed through her slot before I got here. The handwriting is careful, each letter formed separately like printing. No return address.

I add my letters on top of it. The hand-delivered one goes underneath. That’s the order. Mine on top.

Number 16 gets a catalogue they didn’t ask for. Number 18 gets nothing. Number 20 gets a charity appeal and a flyer for a new pizza place that opened on the high street in a unit that has been four restaurants in six years. I have delivered menus for all of them. The pizza will last eight months. I won’t be here to see it but I’d put money on eight months.

Number 22. Flat A, flat B, flat C. The building used to be a single house — the Warrens lived there, before my time, and when old Mr. Warren died it was converted. Three letter boxes in a column by the front door, labelled with tape that has yellowed and curled. Flat A gets a bank statement. Flat B gets nothing. Flat C gets a parcel too large for the letter box, so I press the buzzer. Nobody answers. I press again. Nothing. I take the card from my bag — the red one, WHILE YOU WERE OUT — and write the depot address and tick the box that says We’ll try again tomorrow.

Except I won’t. Tomorrow is someone else’s route. Someone else’s knees, someone else’s order — bottom of the hill or top, left side or right, the negotiation with Mrs. Parikh’s chain. I write the card and push it through the slot and stand there on the step.

The bag is almost empty.

Number 24. Nothing. Number 26, a postcard. I turn it over — I always turn postcards over, everyone does, posties and the public, a postcard is an open letter and reading it isn’t a crime, it’s an invitation. This one is from Crete. Weather beautiful. Hotel average. Miss you already. D.

I push it through.

Number 28. The last house. The Bradshaws. Two envelopes, both white, both hand-addressed. Wedding invitations — I can tell by the weight of the paper, the way the envelope is slightly too thick for the gum, the formality of the address written in full: Mr. and Mrs. R. Bradshaw, 28 Beech Lane. Someone is getting married. The Bradshaws are invited. The invitation has been in my bag since the depot. I hold it at their door. The bag is empty.

I push them through. The slot closes. I stand on the front step.

The street is quiet. Midmorning, Tuesday. A car at the far end, parked. A dog in the front garden of number 14, lying in the last patch of sun where the wall meets the path. Mei Chen’s piano, faint, through the closed window now — something I haven’t heard before.

I walk back up the hill. The bag weighs nothing. My knees are fine.

At the top of Beech Lane I stop and look down the street. Every door closed. Every letter delivered. Thirty-one years of mornings in the same direction, top to bottom, and I have never once walked the street with nothing to carry.

I fold the bag. I walk to the van.