Not Before the 25th

The last drop on Alan's round was a farm called Scarth Top, and the man who lived there had never once had a birthday of his own.

I could do this job without the van, at a push. I couldn't do it without the biro.

It sits on the windowsill of a rented room in Northallerton that I have been in since October and not hung one picture in, and every morning it goes into my left breast pocket in the dark, before I've even found the light switch. Not a pen. A biro, the cheap kind with a chewed lid, because the job it does is a cheap job and it does it perfectly.

It crosses things out.

That's the whole of my system, and I'm not ashamed of it. Every round I have ever been sent on comes with a walk-sheet, and every walk-sheet is a list of streets in the order somebody else decided they ought to be done. I do a street. I draw a line through it. I forget it. By the end of a shift the sheet is a ladder of black lines and I hand it back and I could not tell you, under oath, the colour of a single front door. Five years of relief, twelve rounds from Hartlepool to Thirsk, and not one first name. People think that sounds lonely. It isn't. It's tidy.

The alarm said ten past four. I was in the yard by twenty to five, ponytail pulled through the back of my beanie, the red-trimmed fleece zipped to the chin. It's the one bit of uniform I'll defend. Everyone else gets theirs a size up so it'll go over a jumper, and they spend the winter looking like a postbox that has given up. I got mine to fit and wore a thermal underneath. The yard lights made everybody yellow. The vans ticked over in a row with their exhausts going up white, and the sorting frame inside was already half empty, because December doesn't wait for anybody to have a cup of tea.

Denise was at the end of the frame with her glasses on her head and another pair on her nose. She is the delivery office manager and she has run that office through four Christmases, a flood and a change of uniform supplier, and she looks at a relief postie the way you'd look at a spare tyre. Glad it's there. Not planning to get attached.

"Thornwick," she said, and held out a clipboard. "Alan's. He's had his knee done. You've got it till Christmas."

"Fine."

"The van's loaded. Village first, then up Sourmire Lane to the top farms. There's a cattle grid. Don't stop on it."

"Fine," I said again, and took the clipboard, and looked down at Alan's walk-sheet, and stopped.

It was not a walk-sheet. It was a parish register.

There were no postcodes on it. Not one. There were names, in blue ink, in a careful, upright hand that had gone over some of them twice, and after every name there was an instruction, as if the person who wrote it expected the reader to be an idiot, or a stranger, or both.

Mrs Heywood, Rose Cottage. Back door, NOT the front, she's deaf to it.

Gordon & Sylvia Calvert. He'll be up. He'll want to talk about the weather. Let him.

The Billet — side door, hand to Nell. Never the letterbox.

Bunny Ogden, Chapel Row. Wipe your feet if you go in. You'll go in.

Nattrass. Parcels in the coal house, not the step. The step has a history.

It went on for two sides. At the very bottom, under the top farms, the last line said only: Scarth Top. Last drop. He'll be at the gate. Mind Fly.

I didn't know who Fly was. I didn't intend to find out.

"Is there a version of this with numbers on?" I asked.

Denise looked at me over both pairs of glasses. "That is the version," she said. "Thornwick doesn't really do numbers. Alan says it's quicker his way."

"Alan's been doing it thirty years."

"Then he'd know." She was already turning to the next van. "Half five, Jodie. They notice if it's late."

They notice if it's late. I wrote that on the inside of my head and drove out.

Northallerton falls away behind you very quickly in the dark. One minute there are roundabouts and a lit Tesco, and the next there is nothing but the van's headlights pushing at a road that climbs and narrows and goes up over the tops, with the walls coming in close on either side like they are trying to read over your shoulder. There was frost on the verges, and once a sheep's eyes in the lights, green as glass, and then nothing. The heater in the van smelled of burnt dust. The radio lost the station and found a different one and lost that too, and I let it go, because I like the quiet on a new round. It's the only time a place hasn't decided anything about you yet.

Thornwick came up out of the dark at twenty-five past five as a handful of lights and a church tower.

I parked on the green, by a bus shelter with a slate roof, and got out into a cold that went straight through the fleece and the thermal and took hold of my ribs. The village was the colour of a slate in the dark. Stone cottages, stone walls, a pub with its sign creaking, a pond with no ducks on it, three benches facing three different ways as though they'd fallen out with each other. Up the hill, behind the houses, the fell was a darker black against the black, and the wind came off it smelling of snow that hadn't arrived yet.

I did what I always do. I picked up the first bundle, pulled the biro out, and went.

It didn't work.

It didn't work because Thornwick does not lie still and let you post through it. At the third house, at quarter to six, a light was on and the door opened before I reached it, and a man in a quilted jacket and slippers stood on the step with a mug, looking at the sky.

"You'll be the relief," he said. He had the most beautiful low voice I have ever heard come out of a man in slippers. "Alan said. It'll come in tomorrow, that."

"What will?"

"Snow." He nodded at the fell as if it had been rude to him personally. "Wind's backed round. You'll have it by morning. Gordon."

"Sorry?"

"Gordon. Calvert. That's me." He took his post off me and waited. It took me an embarrassing second to understand what he was waiting for.

"Relief," I said.

"That's not a name, love. That's a job." He was quite kind about it, which was worse. "Sylvia will want to know."

I told him Jodie, because it was quarter to six and he was holding a mug and I couldn't see a way out of it. He said it back to himself, as if filing it, and went in. I crossed his name off with the biro. It didn't feel the way it usually feels.

Chapel Row faced the wrong way, north into the fell, and the frost on the step at the Ogdens' had clearly been there since about the Tuesday before. The note had said you'll go in, and I had privately decided I would not, and then the door opened and a very large pink bald man in a cardigan stood there with a plate of something warm, and said, "Mind the mat. No, wipe them. Properly. There," and I found I was standing in a front room with the gas fire turned right up and a mince pie in my hand and no clear memory of how either thing had happened.

"Alan's knee," he said, sorrowfully. "Terrible thing, knees."

"I've got eleven more houses on this side."

"Then you'll want a second one for the road."

I went out with two. I'm not made of stone.

By seven there was a thin grey edge to the sky over the church and I had begun to understand that the sheet was not, in fact, written for an idiot. It was written for somebody who was going to be looked at. At the Nattrasses' I put the parcel in the coal house and a woman opened an upstairs window and said, "Good girl," and shut it again. At the Billet I went round to the side door and a landlady with her hair tied up in a scarf took the bundle off me, glanced at the name on my badge, and said, "Jodie. You'll be wanting a tea when you've done," as a fact, not an offer. A grey-muzzled collie lay across the doorway behind her and lifted one eyebrow at me and put it down again. I did not ask whose he was. I was getting the feeling that every question in this village came with a twenty-minute answer.

Rose Cottage was at the end of a ginnel past the postbox. The front door had a brass knocker polished to gold and a letterbox that looked as if it had never once been troubled. Every instinct I've got goes to the front door. Front doors are where post goes. But I had the sheet, and the sheet had underlined NOT twice, so I went round the side, past a water butt and a row of pots with something flowering in them in December out of pure bloody-mindedness, and knocked on the back.

It opened at once, as though she'd been standing behind it. She was small and silver-haired, in a forest-green cardigan, with a pair of reading glasses on a chain and very sharp blue eyes that went over me once from beanie to boots and came back up again with the inventory done.

"Alan's knee," she said, "will be a good while yet."

She didn't ask anything. She just stood there with her hand out for the post, and waited, and the silence after what she'd said was so exactly the right size that I heard myself filling it.

"I've got it till Christmas. Then I'm back at the office. I'm relief. I go wherever they send me."

"I expect you do," she said, and took her letters, and I had the strong and unpleasant feeling that I had just told a stranger something true about myself at a back door at ten past seven in the morning, and that she had written it down somewhere I would never find.

I went back to the van and sat in it with the engine off for a minute. Then I took the sheet out and looked at what I'd done. The lines were there. Every street was crossed through, neat as a ladder, the way it always is. Only this time, under every black line, I could still read the name.

I could still see the doors, too. That was new. I didn't like it.

The shop on the green opened at half eight, and Alan's sheet said, at the very end of the village section, Shop: pick up the counter bag off Kirsty. Don't let her give you anything else. I thought that was a joke. It was ten to nine by the time I'd got round to it, and there was a queue of two, which I would later learn there always is. The shop smelt of cardboard and bacon and, faintly, of paraffin, which I could not account for. A fridge hummed. A freezer at the back clicked over as I came in, like it was clearing its throat.

The woman behind the counter had her sleeves pushed up and her mid-brown hair tied back, and she was doing the till roll and a parcel and a conversation with the woman in front of me about somebody's boiler, all at once and without hurrying any of them. The woman in front of me wore a good green anorak and had the air of somebody who already knew everything I was about to say and was only waiting to hear how I'd put it.

"He'll have to have the man out," said the anorak.

"He'll not have the man out," said the counter, "he'll have it off the Calverts' lad," and the anorak said, "Well," in a way that settled the boiler entirely, and took her stamps and looked at me on her way past as though committing me to memory, and went.

"You'll be Jodie," said the woman behind the counter.

I didn't ask how she knew. Gordon Calvert, probably. Or the collie. "I've come for the counter bag."

"You have." She lifted it up onto the counter, a grey sack with a tag. Then she reached under the till and brought out something else and laid it on top of the sack, face down, with one finger on it.

It was an envelope. A stiff one, card-sized, cream, with something in it that didn't bend. It had no stamp on the back and no postmark. It was not, by any definition I had ever been trained in, post.

"Kirsty," she said, which I gathered was her name. "That goes round with you."

"I can't take that."

"You can. It's not heavy."

"It's not post," I said. "If it's not post, it doesn't go in the bag. If it doesn't go in the bag, I'm not covered for it. If it gets lost—"

"It won't get lost. You'll have it on you." She hadn't taken her finger off it. She hadn't raised her voice, either; I don't think she had ever raised her voice in her life, and I don't think she had ever once lost an argument. "Everybody signs," she said. "It goes house to house. You'll know where it goes when it's full."

"Where does it go?"

She folded the end of the till roll into a neat small square and put it by the till and looked at me.

"When it's full," she said again.

There was another queue of two behind me by then, a man with a loaf and a lad with a pint of milk, both of them taking a great interest in a card in the window about a fortnight's silage. Nobody was going to help me. Nobody was going to say the thing out loud. They were all just waiting, like the woman at the back door had waited, for me to do what the village had decided I would do.

So I did. I picked up the envelope without turning it over, because relief posties do not read other people's post, and I put it in the inside pouch of my fleece, face down, against my chest, where it sat stiff and slightly warm from under the till.

Kirsty took her finger back. "Up Sourmire Lane next," she said. "Mind the grid."

"I've been told."

"You have," she agreed, and turned to the man with the loaf. "Morning, Vernon."

I went out onto the green with the counter bag over one shoulder and the light coming up grey and thin over the fell, and I took the biro out of my pocket to cross off the shop. I held it over the line for a moment.

Then I put it back without drawing anything at all.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

Get the e-book