44 :

Eight hundred yards from either railway station, sandwiched at the top of an undistinguished hill, at an intersection made of traffic lights and traffic jams, it sits.

A large, grey, undistinguished building. Two, three stories of brick and concrete, pale, dusty glass and cold, wooden slats. Of close corridors, tall and thin, of tight corners, of the smell and taste of hospital wards. Of footsteps and heeled shoes clicking on cold, sterile, inorganic floors. Of a maze of walls, corridors that lead to corridors and other corridors that lead to locked rooms and closed offices.

Through these three floors, cutting through them like a blade through the entrails of the building, a sharp gash of two massive parallel escalators. Leading down to the depths of the earth, or up to the glory of the heavens. Up, into a world of panel and glass, of sunlight and reflective surfaces, of offices and the shine of new enterprise.

Built on a mountain of rubble and shit, the elegantly named Mount Pleasant sorting office sits. Built on a waste dump, a landfill, a hole in the ground made of dirt and detritus, they took dirt and they made something out of it.

Every day, every hour, this building sits, a hive of activity. Between midnight and eight AM, every day a stream of cars, postmen cycling to work, red and yellow vans stream in and out. Like a torrent, like a flood. Without a minute’s respite, a minute to sit and wait, an endless row of worker ants. Receiving mail, sorting mail, delivering mail. Machines spitting out endless rows of identical letters, envelopes, mail written by computers that never gets read. The roar of machines that is silenced only by daylight.

Mail should be delivered somewhere between 7am and 11am. Unlike the United States, where mail arrives any time it feels like, the postmen deliver within the early hours, sleeping whilst we work, working whilst we sleep.

Down on the basement floor, set below the earth, the floor of the Sorting Office. Rows and rows of sorting machines. Millions of letters. Dozens of trucks carrying bags and bags of mail, parked in rows, letters lined up and dispatched, thousands per minute, to a fine tuned set of postcodes. A few minutes later, a different programme, another borough sorted.

A machine for delivering mail. This building is just a machine.

I wandered through the Mount. I was searching. I was trying to find her. She was somewhere here. But where? They don’t exactly put up road signs directing you to the Redirections Unit. Oh, the irony.

It was difficult to find her. Difficult to avoid the bodies, frantically moving through the corridors, through the rows of pale blue uniforms and fast moving trolleys. This was not where I thought I would find her.

Admittedly, I didn’t know where I would find her, but I didn’t think it would be here.

I walked around the side of the building, through a side door, ducking under a barrier. I tried, as always, to avoid travelling through walls or anything solid. I can’t say it got any easier or any more pleasant with time. Sometimes it couldn’t be helped, but it never got any better.

I tried my best. But as we all know, best intentions don’t always work. It wasn’t as if I could relax, and after all I’d been through, my nerves felt a little fractious to say the least. I suppose I could’ve picked a quieter time, but it wasn’t as if there was time to waste. My nerves were jumping ants.

I’d wasted enough time already. I’d wasted enough chances.

The bodies moved with a mission. Dozens of people, a babble of voices, a hive of activity and straining muscles. Of packages being tossed in boxes, and of the sudden feeling as a large brown paper bag stuffed with CD’s, or clothes, or medical specimens passed through me without warning.

If I could retched, I think I would’ve. But obviously without a stomach, there was nothing to give. I just felt as if I’d been stretched. Yanked. Pulled out of shape, as if somehow, my body were elastic and it almost snapped back into place, though not exactly the same. I don’t understand this either, I’m hardly an expert on biology let alone supernatural biological physics.

It sure is weird to experience things happening to your body that you don’t understand. And you know that your five limited senses won’t ever be able to comprehend or explain, let alone accept.

And so, in this corridors I ducked, I dived, I skittered and tried to hide. I hugged walls to avoid the urgent yet imprecise rush and haste, yet always felt, at the least moment, the wrenching of paper, or steel, or flesh through me. And each of these people, these anonymous, fleeting men and women, who flew through me with the intimacy of a one night stand, I felt their DNA, I felt their bones, their flesh, their blood, move through me, and they too, felt something odd. Something that told them that they shouldn’t be there. And they never paused to find out why they felt that way. They just moved onto somewhere else, as quick as they could.

This world is wrong and I am trapped in it.

Past the trucks that held the mail. The useless old bills, the unread junk mail, the valuables, the divorce papers, the probates and repossession orders, all. Past the trucks loaded with millions, billions of pounds worth of diamonds. The jewellers queuing up to pick up their stock every morning, having mailed it to themselves the previous night, so that no stock was to be held on the premises.
So that no budding Michael Caine’s bulldoze their shopfronts in the dead of night to win their own, illicit lottery. The Kensington Job didn’t quite have the same ring to it.

And so, each day, the queue stretched out to the collections office, as postmen and women passed small packets worth more than they would ever earn in their sixty years to men who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

And I passed these.

And I passed the bomb bins. These half sized, bomb-proof bins, designed solely to contain explosions. Suspect packages of all shapes and sizes would be deposited here with urgency. Analysed, picked apart by specialists for possible threats. These rotund tubes, cocooned within inches of absorbent, scientific materials. Their yellow and black necks bulging with menance.

Everything in here, every package, everything anyone touched could be a bomb. With the gift of fear and paranoia, thinking like that could rule countries.

And I passed the religiously segregated toilets. The urinals that face away from Mecca. The Muslim Prayer Room. The Gym room. The abandoned, closed rooms in a dying building. I wandered lost through all these. Not even aware that I was moving, not even aware that I was anywhere different, so universal was the old paint regime, the green stripe that turned to a contaminated, flecked grey at shoulder height.

I wandered lost. Unable to ask questions, unable to find her. And she was here. Somewhere. On a board. On a queue. Somewhere.

First I had to find Postal redirections. And then her postcode.

There wasn’t even a Postal Redirection Unit here.

I was lost again. I wasn’t here. I didn’t know where I was, but I wasn’t here. I was trapped again in an alien world.

She wasn’t there. I stood in that office and I tried to find her, but she wasn’t there. I looked with keening eyes, trying to find a name, a number, anything, any trace of if she was alive, around, anything.

But nothing. Zilch. Denada. Zero. Nothing.

And it wasn’t there. No matter how hard I looked, no matter in which place I looked, no matter where it was, I could find nothing. There was nothing to find.

I needed to be somewhere else.

But where?