Going Postal Read online

  ‘Ah, yes, I think I once saw a magazine, or something,’ said Moist desperately. ‘It was called, er… Pins Monthly ?’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Groat, behind him. Stanley’s face contorted into something that looked like a cat’s bottom with a nose.

  ‘That’s for hobbyists,’ he hissed. ‘They’re not true “pinheads”! They don’t care about pins! Oh, they say so, but they have a whole page of needles every month now. Needles? Anyone could collect needles! They’re only pins with holes in! Anyway, what about Popular Needles ? But they just don’t want to know!’

  ‘Stanley is editor of Total Pins.’ Groat whispered, behind Moist.

  ‘I don’t think I saw that one—’ Moist began.

  ‘Stanley, go and help Mr Lipwig’s assistant find a shovel, will you?’ said Groat, raising his voice. ‘Then go and sort your pins again until you feel better. Mr Lipwig doesn’t want to see one of your Little Moments.’ He gave Moist a blank look.

  ‘. . . they had an article last month about pincushions .’ muttered Stanley, stamping out of the room. The golem followed him.

  ‘He’s a good lad,’ said Groat, when they’d gone. ‘Just a bit cup-and-plate in the head. Leave him alone with his pins and he’s no trouble at all. Gets a bit… intense at times, that’s all. Oh, and on that subject there’s the third member of our jolly little team, sir—’

  A large black and white cat had walked into the room. It paid no attention to Moist, or Groat, but progressed slowly across the floor towards a battered and unravelling basket. Moist was in the way. The cat continued until its head butted gently against Moist’s leg, and stopped.

  ‘That’s Mr Tiddles, sir,’ said Groat.

  ‘Tiddles ? said Moist. ‘You mean that really is a cat’s name? I thought it was just a joke.’

  ‘Not so much a name, sir, more of a description,’ said Groat. ‘You’d better move, sir, otherwise he’ll just stand there all day. Twenty years old, he is, and a bit set in his ways.’

  Moist stepped aside. Unperturbed, the cat continued to the basket, where it curled up.

  ‘Is he blind?’ said Moist.

  ‘No, sir. He has his routine and he sticks to it, sir, sticks to it to the very second. Very patient, for a cat. Doesn’t like the furniture being moved. You’ll get used to him.’

  Not knowing what to say, but feeling that he should say something, Moist nodded towards the array of bottles on Groat’s bench.

  ‘You dabble in alchemy, Mr Groat?’ he said.

  ‘Nosir! I practise nat’ral medicine!’ said Groat proudly. ‘Don’t believe in doctors, sir! Never a day’s illness in my life, sir!’ He thumped his chest, making a thlap noise not normally associated with living tissue. ‘Flannelette, goose grease and hot bread puddin’, sir! Nothing like it for protecting your tubes against the noxious effluviences! I puts a fresh layer on every week, sir, and you won’t find a sneeze passing my nose, sir. Very healthful, very natural!’

  ‘Er… good,’ said Moist.

  ‘Worst of ‘em all is soap, sir,’ said Groat, lowering his voice. ‘Terrible stuff, sir, washes away the beneficent humours. Leave things be, I say! Keep the tubes running, put sulphur in your socks and pay attention to your chest protector and you can laugh at anything! Now, sir, I’m sure a young man like yourself will be worrying about the state of his—’

  ‘What’s this do?’ said Moist hurriedly, picking up a pot of greenish goo.

  ‘That, sir? Wart cure. Wonderful stuff. Very natural, not like the stuff a doctor’d give you.’

  Moist sniffed at the pot. ‘What’s it made of?’

  ‘Arsenic, sir,’ said Groat calmly.

  ‘Arsenic ?’

  ‘Very natural, sir,’ said Groat. ‘And green.’

  So, Moist thought, as he put the pot back with extreme care, inside the Post Office normality clearly does not have a one-to-one relationship with the outside world. I might miss the cues. He decided that the role of keen but bewildered manager was the one to play here. Besides, apart from the ‘keen’ aspect it didn’t need any effort.

  ‘Can you help me, Mr Groat?’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about the post!’

  ‘Well, sir… what did you use to do?’

  Rob. Trick. Forge. Embezzle. But never - and this was important -using any kind of violence. Never. Moist had always been very careful about that. He tried not to sneak, either, if he could avoid it. Being caught at 1 a.m. in a bank’s deposit vault while wearing a black suit with lots of little pockets in it could be considered suspicious, so why do it? With careful planning, the right suit, the right papers and, above all, the right manner, you could walk into the place at midday and the manager would hold the door open for you when you left. Palming rings and exploiting the cupidity of the rural stupid was just a way of keeping his hand in.

  It was the face, that was what it was. He had an honest face. And he loved those people who looked him firmly in the eye to see his inner self, because he had a whole set of inner selves, one for every occasion. As for firm handshakes, practice had given him one to which you could moor boats. It was people skills, that’s what it was. Special people skills. Before you could sell glass as diamonds you had to make people really want to see diamonds. That was the trick, the trick of all tricks. You changed the way people saw the world. You let them see it the way they wanted it to be…

  How the hell had Vetinari known his name? The man had cracked von Lipwig like an egg! And the Watch here were… demonic! As for setting a golem on a man…

  ‘I was a clerk,’ said Moist.

  ‘What, paperwork, that sort of thing?’ said Groat, looking at him intently.

  ‘Yes, pretty much all paperwork.’ That was honest, if you included playing cards, cheques, letters of accreditation, bank drafts and deeds.

  ‘Oh, another one,’ said Groat. ‘Well, there’s not a lot to do. We can shove up and make room for you in here, no problem.’

  ‘But I am supposed to make it work again as it used to, Mr Groat.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said the old man. ‘You just come along with me, then, Postmaster. I reckon there’s one or two things you ain’t bin tole!’

  He led the way out, back into the dingy main hall, a little trail of yellow powder leaking from his boots.

  ‘My dad used to bring me here when I were a lad,’ he said. ‘A lot of families were Post Office families in those days. They had them big glass drippy tinkling things up in the ceiling, right? For lights?’

  ‘Chandeliers?’ Moist suggested.

  ‘Yep, prob’ly,’ said Groat. ‘Two of ‘em. And there was brass an’ copper everywhere, polished up like gold. There was balconies, sir, all round the big hall on every floor, made of iron, like lace! And all the counters was made of rare wood, my dad said. And people? This place was packed! The doors never stopped swinging! Even at night… oh, at night , sir, out in the big back yard, you should’ve been there! The lights! The coaches, coming and going, the horses steamin ‘. . . oh, sir, you should’ve seen it, sir! The men running the teams out… they had this thing, sir, this device, you could get a coach in and out of the yard in one minute, sir, one minute ! The bustle, sir, the bustle and fuss! They said you could come here from Dolly Sisters or even down in the Shambles, and post a letter to yourself, and you’d have to run like the blazes, sir, the very blazes , sir, to beat the postman to your door! And the uniforms, sir, royal blue with brass buttons! You should’ve seen them! And—’

  Moist looked over the babbling man’s shoulder to the nearest mountain of pigeon guano, where Mr Pump had paused in his digging. The golem had been prodding at the fetid horrible mess and, as Moist watched him, he straightened up and headed towards them with something in his hand.

  ‘—and when the big coaches came in, sir, all the way from the mountains, you could hear the horns miles away! You should’ve heard them, sir! And if any bandits tried anything, there was men we had, who went out and—’

  ‘Yes, Mr Pump?’ said Moist, halting
Groat in mid-history.

  ‘A Surprising Discovery, Postmaster. The Mounds Are Not, As I Surmised, Made Of Pigeon Dung. No Pigeons Could Achieve That Amount In Thousands Of Years, Sir.’

  ‘Well, what are they made of, then?’

  ‘Letters, Sir,’ said the golem.

  Moist looked down at Groat, who shifted uneasily.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the old man. ‘1 was coming to that.’

  Letters…

  … there was no end to them. They filled every room of the building and spilled out into the corridors. It was, technically, true that the postmaster’s office was unusable because of the state of the floor: it was twelve feet deep in letters. Whole corridors were blocked off with them. Cupboards had been stuffed full of them; to open a door in-cautiously was to be buried in an avalanche of yellowing envelopes. Floorboards bulged suspiciously upwards. Through cracks in the sagging ceiling plaster, paper protruded.

  The sorting room, almost as big as the main hall, had drifts reaching to twenty feet in places. Here and there, filing cabinets rose out of the paper sea like icebergs.

  After half an hour of exploration Moist wanted a bath. It was like walking through desert tombs. He felt he was choking on the smell of old paper, as though his throat was filled with yellow dust.

  ‘I was told I had an apartment here,’ he croaked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Groat. ‘Me and the lad had a look for it the other day. I heard that it was the other side of your office. So the lad went in on the end of a rope, sir. He said he felt a door, sir, but he’d sunk six feet under the mail by then and he was suffering, sir, suffering … so I pulled him out.’

  ‘The whole place is full of undelivered mail?’

  They were back in the locker room. Groat had topped up the black kettle from a pan of water, and it was steaming. At the far end of the room, sitting at his neat little table, Stanley was counting his pins.

  ‘Pretty much, sir, except in the basement and the stables,’ said the old man, washing a couple of tin mugs in a bowl of not very clean water.

  ‘You mean even the postm— my office is full of old mail but they never filled the basement? Where’s the sense in that?’

  ‘Oh, you couldn’t use the basement, sir, oh, not the basement,’ said Groat, looking shocked. ‘It’s far too damp down here. The letters’d be destroyed in no time.’

  ‘Destroyed,’ said Moist flatly.

  ‘Nothing like damp for destroying things, sir,’ said Groat, nodding sagely.

  ‘Destroying mail from dead people to dead people,’ said Moist, in the same flat voice.

  ‘We don’t know that, sir,’ said the old man. ‘I mean, we’ve got no actual proof.’

  ‘Well, no. After all, some of those envelopes are only a hundred years old!’ said Moist. He had a headache from the dust and a sore throat from the dryness, and there was something about the old man that was grating on his raw nerves. He was keeping something back. ‘That’s no time at all to some people. I bet the zombie and vampire population are still waiting by the letter box every day, right?’

  ‘No need to be like that, sir,’ said Groat levelly, ‘no need to be like that. You can’t destroy the letters. You just can’t do it, sir. That’s Tampering with the Mail, sir. That’s not just a crime, sir. That’s, a, a—’

  ‘Sin?’ said Moist.

  ‘Oh, worse’n a sin ,’ said Groat, almost sneering. ‘For sins you’re only in trouble with a god, but in my day if you interfered with the mail you’d be up against Chief Postal Inspector Rumbelow. Hah! And there’s a big difference. Gods forgive’ .

  Moist sought for sanity in the wrinkled face opposite him. The unkempt beard was streaked with different colours, either of dirt, tea or random celestial pigment. Like some hermit, he thought. Only a hermit could wear a wig like that.

  ‘Sorry?’ he said. ‘And you mean that shoving someone’s letter under the floorboards for a hundred years isn’t tampering with it?’

  Groat suddenly looked wretched. The beard quivered. Then he started to cough, great hacking, wooden, crackling lumps of cough, that made the jars shake and caused a yellow mist to rise from his trouser bottoms, “scuse me a moment, sir,’ he wheezed, between hacks, and he fumbled in his pocket for a scratched and battered tin. ‘You suck at all, sir?’ he said, tears rolling down his cheeks. He proffered the tin to Moist. ‘They’re Number Threes, sir. Very mild. I make ‘em meself, sir. Nat’ral remedies from nat’ral ingredients, that’s my style, sir. Got to keep the tubes clear, sir, otherwise they turn against you.’

  Moist took a large, violet lozenge from the box and sniffed it. It smelled faintly of aniseed.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Groat,’ he said, but in case this counted as an attempt at bribery, he added sternly: ‘The mail, Mr Groat? Sticking undelivered mail wherever there’s a space isn’t tampering with it?’

  ‘That’s more… delaying the mail, sir. Just, er… slowing it down. A bit. It’s not like there’s any intention of never delivering it, sir.’

  Moist stared at Groat’s worried expression. He felt that sense of shifting ground you experience when you realize that you’re dealing with someone whose world is connected with your own only by their fingertips. Not a hermit, he thought, more like a shipwrecked mariner, living in this dry desert island of a building while the world outside moves on and all sanity evaporates.

  ‘Mr Groat, I don’t want to, you know, upset you or anything, but there’s thousands of letters out there under a thick layer of pigeon guano… ’ he said slowly.

  ‘Actually, on that score, sir, things aren’t as bad as they seem,’ Groat said, and paused to suck noisily on his natural cough lozenge. ‘It’s very dry stuff, pigeon doings, and forms quite a hard protective crust on the envelopes… ’

  ‘Why are they all here , Mr Groat?’ said Moist. People skills, he remembered. You’re not allowed to shake him.

  The Junior Postman avoided his gaze. ‘Well, you know how it is… ’ he tried.

  ‘No, Mr Groat. I don’t think I do.’

  ‘Well… maybe a man’s busy, got a full round, maybe it’s Hogswatch, lots of cards, see, and the inspector is after him about his timekeeping, and so maybe he just shoves half a bag of letters somewhere safe… but he will deliver ‘em, right? I mean, it’s not his fault if they keeps pushing, sir, pushing him all the time. Then it’s tomorrow and he’s got an even bigger bag, ‘cos they’re pushing all the time, so he reckons, I’ll just drop a few off today, too, ‘cos it’s my day off on Thursday and I can catch up then, but you see by Thursday he’s behind by more’n a day’s work because they keeps on pushing , and he’s tired anyway, tired as a dog, so he says to himself, got some leave coming up soon, but he gets his leave and by then - well, it all got very nasty towards the end. There was… unpleasantness. We’d gone too far, sir, that’s what it was, we’d tried too hard. Sometimes things smash so bad it’s better to leave it alone than try to pick up the pieces. I mean, where would you start?’

  ‘I think I get the picture,’ said Moist. You’re lying, Mr Groat. You’re lying by omission. You’re not telling me everything. And what you’re not telling me is very important, isn’t it? I’ve turned lying into an art, Mr Groat, and you’re just a talented amateur.

  Groat’s face, unaware of the internal monologue, managed a smile.

  ‘But the trouble is - what’s your first name, Mr Groat?’ Moist asked.

  ‘Tolliver, sir.’

  ‘Nice name… the thing is , Tolliver, that the picture I see in your description is what I might refer to for the purposes of the analogy as a cameo , whereas all this’ - Moist waved his hand to include the building and everything it contained - ‘is a full-sized triptych showing scenes from history, the creation of the world and the disposition of the gods, with a matching chapel ceiling portraying the glorious firmament and a sketch of a lady with a weird smile thrown in for good measure! Tolliver, I think you are not being frank with me.’

  ‘Sorry about that, sir,’ said
Groat, eyeing him with a sort of nervous defiance.

  ‘I could have you sacked, you know,’ said Moist, knowing that this was a stupid thing to say.

  ‘You could, sir, you could try doin’ that,’ said Groat, quietly and slowly. ‘But I’m all you got, apart from the lad. And you don’t know nuffin’ about the Post Office, sir. You don’t know nuffin’ about the Regulations, neither. I’m the only one that knows what needs doing round here. You wouldn’t last five minutes without me, sir. You wouldn’t even see that the inkwells get filled every day!’

  ‘Inkwells? Filling inkwells?’ said Moist. ‘This is just an old building full of… of… of dead paper! We have no customers !’

  ‘Got to keep the inkwells filled, sir. Post Office Regulations,’ said Groat in a steely voice. ‘Got to follow Regulations, sir.’

  ‘For what? It appears we don’t accept any mail or deliver any mail! We just sit here!’

  ‘No, sir, we don’t just sit here,’ said Groat patiently. ‘We follow the Post Office Regulations. Fill the inkwells, polish the brass—’

  ‘You don’t sweep up the pigeon shit!’

  ‘Oddly enough, that’s not in the Regulations, sir,’ said the old man. ‘Truth is, sir, no one wants us any more. It’s all the clacks now, the damn clacks, clack clack clack. Everyone’s got a clacks tower now, sir. That’s the fashion. Fast as the speed of light, they say. Ha! It’s got no soul, sir, no heart. I hates ‘em. But we’re ready, sir. If there was any mail, we’d deal with it, sir. We’d spring into action, sir, spring into action. But there ain’t.’

  ‘Of course there isn’t! It’s clearly sunk into this town long ago that you might as well throw your letters away as give them to the Post Office!’

  ‘No, sir, wrong again. They’re all kept, sir. That’s what we do, sir. We keep things as they are. We try not to disturb things, sir,’ said Groat quietly. ‘We try not to disturb anything !

  The way he said it made Moist hesitate.

  ‘What kind of anything?’ he said.