At the Edge of the Game (6 page)

The receptionist
ignores me as I take my leave, begin the bicycle-less trudge back to Ranelagh.

Mobile starts
ringing in rainy Harcourt Street. It’s her. I’ll just let it ring out. It’ll
spoil the effect if I try to tell her about this on the phone. I can picture
myself getting annoyed at the need to repeat things, poking questions
diminishing the event in that way that they always do.

‘Didn’t you get
my call?’ she says at the front door twenty minutes later.

‘I didn’t hear
it. Listen, I have some good news. I’m starting a job in the morning.’

The joy that
shows on her face, it almost makes me take a step back. I did not expect it.
She grabs my hands.

‘Oh, George.
That’s great. Is that where you were?’

‘Yeah, the
agency called me down. Got there just ahead of another fella. The games they
play with other people’s lives, making people race each other for work.’

‘How much does
it pay?’

‘It’s minimum
wage, a mailroom job in some pharma place.’

‘Minimum wage.’

This takes the
wind out of her sails a bit.

‘We knew any of
these jobs would be minimum wage, Helen.’

‘I know, but –’

‘What?’

‘I just… hate to
think of you slaving for so little.’

‘Maybe if I get
enough work, we won’t have to have Mr Lodger here any more.’

‘Hmm,’ she
sounds into my shoulder, unwilling to humour this notion even for a moment.

The dawn greys
itself into existence, light spreading thinly from the cold shallows of the
Irish Sea to the murk of the city. It is wrong, so wrong, to step outside at
this, the cruellest hour, when the driven air slaps you before you’ve made your
first step. Evasive faces scan the rough pavement, creased with the rage of
birthright denied. It should not be like this, goes the human mind. Beings such
as we, the species that dominates the physical world with blundering ease,
should transcend this sort of nonsense, should not be subjected to the
indignity and squalor of the dawn commute. Of course, this is only day one, so
I might get used to it.

Endure another
tedious hike through town. Slouched crowd at the bus stop on the quay, no
chance of getting a seat. Get thrown about as the bus thuds its way up and
around past Heuston, through Inchicore, along the ugly, harsh Naas Road, all
the derelict car dealerships, retail warehouses, half-arsed fast fooderies. Get
stuck in some sort of stupid snarl-up at the Long Mile, police in tactical
armour and their silly obstructions. Same again at the Red Cow, more police,
keeping the interchange secure for Dublin’s remaining workers. All this eats up
my fifteen-minute margin of error. Watch out now, turning through these
industrial back roads, watch out for the right place to alight.

Rain has started
to pelt. Raise my jacket hood as I stride across the empty car park, towards
the warm light of the Avatan reception.

‘I’m starting
here this morning,’ I tell the young receptionist and her complicated
deployment of make-up and hair. She turns away from me to make a call to Candy
McThomas. Wonder how I must seem to this young one. Suppose I must look old,
declining, weak. Maybe I am all of those. Depends on your point of view, at the
end of the day. Don’t really see it that way myself. How have I managed to come
through so much life, such a vast span of time, still with all targets ahead of
me? So much life already lived. Statistically speaking, nearly halfway through
my lot of time, and I feel as though I’m only starting out.

Candy McThomas
is a good-looking, tall, slim girl in a fairly garish pink body-hugging
mini-dress and dark tights. Her face registers womanly satisfaction at the
widening of my pupils. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I say in a businesslike tone.

She leads me to
the lift with minimal conversation. A routine part of her job, bringing new
try-outs into the mailroom. To her I am a number, not someone to be thought of
as attractive, or even unattractive. She’s maybe five years younger than me,
curiously demure in her movements, considering what she’s wearing. Hard to
figure out, she is.

‘Here it is,’
she says, pushing open one of a pair of double swing-doors, gesturing me
through ahead of her. Step forward, see the mailroom for the first time. Two
men stand at a bank of pigeon holes, shoving envelopes into this one and that.
They show no interest until Candy calls them over to meet me. ‘Lads, this is –
um…’ She looks at me.

‘George.’

‘Sorry. George,
these are Len and Al.’

Len is a small,
weedy-looking man, whereas Al is medium-sized, burly.

‘Alright,’ says
Al in his city accent. ‘We’re just about to do our runs, Candy.’ To him I’m an
annoying disruption.

‘You go on your
run then, Al. Len, will you stay here for a minute and get George started?’

Al pushes a cart
of sorted envelopes out the door and off towards the lift.

Len is
diffident. He leads me to the bank of pigeon-holes. His voice is raspy, his
breathing short. Just listening to him makes me feel short of breath myself. I
wonder is he missing part of a lung.

‘Get some post
like this’, he says, picking up a pile out of a large plastic container beside
him. ‘Just check the name and throw it into the right hole’

He dispatches
the pile to their respective holes in just a few seconds. It’s like his hands
are performing the task autonomously.

I look at the
names taped to the pigeon holes. Lanigan, Norris, Kearney, Adams, Thomas,
Sugrue, and so on. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of these holes. ‘How are
they organised?’

He shrugs.

‘So how do you
know where to put what?’

‘You learn.’

‘Just memory?’

He shrugs again.
‘You want to get started? Just pick up a pile of post and get going. You can
hang your coat over there.’

He leaves on his
mail run, pushing a laden cart out the door.

I look at my
first envelope, feeling utterly stupid. A big inter-office envelope, A4 size.
Name on it is Sean Killeen. Killeen. I start on the left of the bank of holes,
scan them semi-methodically, side-step slowly along, eyes searching up and
down, zig-zagging. I notice suddenly that Candy’s desk is in a partition at the
far end of the room, which offers a clear-glass view of the mail-sorting area.
She’s sitting there, looking at me. I find a pigeon hole labelled Killeen right
back where I was originally standing. Next envelope is for a Mr Black. Begin
the scan again, thinking of the way Len went through that stack like a machine.
Is it possible that I can end up doing that?

After about ten
minutes, Candy comes over to me. ‘How are you finding it?’

‘I’m a bit slow.’

‘You look like
you’re making a good start.’

Really?

‘The lads will
tell you about the rest of it when they come back. The mail runs are the major
other thing. Just keep up what you’re at for now.’

She goes back to
her desk, and starts working on something involving a computer. Doesn’t seem to
be watching me any more. A few names recur over the next while, and I retain a
few locations, slot away a few envelopes almost like a pro.

The next thing,
the two boys come clattering back with their carts almost empty.

‘Alright, Candy,’
shouts Al in his nasal drawl. ‘You still here, buddy?’ He jostles past me.

They immediately
get to sorting the post that they’ve brought back from their runs.

‘You’ll see in a
while where this comes from, buddy. This is a big place. I have 23 mail
stations on my run. Len has 16 on his. You’ll be doing the D-3 run. That has 13
mail stations. I’ll show yiz around it myself. Used to be my run.’

I follow their
lead and just press ahead with the mail sorting. When we’re done with the
envelopes and packages in the carts, Len produces a big plastic crate full of
more.

‘When there’s
nothing else to sort, do the ones in this bucket.’

‘These are the
tricky ones,’ Al says. He shows me one. ‘See here? Magazine subscription.
Addressed to a fella called Tom Polvell. Come over.’ He leads me to an ancient
computer terminal. ‘Type in the name here. See, no such fella in the company.
Never has been. But using my expertise I detect that it’s actually for Tom
Powell. He’s in building D-12.’ He sticks the magazine in the T. Powell pigeon
hole. ‘If it comes back to us, we’ll try again. Now, try one yourself.’

I pick up a
letter with a hand-written name on it, almost unreadable. I type in my best
guess. Darragh Mitta. Nothing. There are a few Darraghs, but none with a
surname that looks anything like Mitta. I check through the M surnames. I spot
one that might fit the bill. Darren Mills. Al is not entirely pleased to be
surprised at this.

‘It might work.
At nine I’ll take yiz on your first run.’

At 8:55 we start
loading the D-3 cart with its mail, emptying each pigeon hole and
elastic-banding each little stack of sorted mail. We put a plastic cover over
the cart, don our coats before beginning the long car-park crossing through the
rain to cubic building D-3. Inside, Al greets the security guard with a ribald
word, and hands over the first stack. Through to the main ground-floor office
we make three drops and three pick-ups. Same thing on the three floors above.
Then back through the rain to the mailroom to resume sorting. By now I am
tired, hungry and thirsty. Still no sign of an upcoming break, and I know
better than to ask when there’ll be one.

Candy comes
over. ‘How did he do on the run?’

‘Seemed all
right, Candy. Can he manage the next one on his own - that’ll be the teller.
Got it all stored away in the memory banks, buddy?’

‘Think so, yeah.’
I hope this contains the trace of superiority I had in mind. Unless I’ve missed
something fundamental, only a moron could manage to forget the D-3 run. The
only difficult bit of this job so far is memorising their bizarre pigeon-holing
system.

Al takes down a
battered old CD player from on top of one of the presses. On goes some horrible
old Wolfe Tonesey crap, and so we spend the next stretch in the mailroom
sorting letters to the sound of ‘ra songs pounded out to a baying live crowd in
some god-forsaken Dub-a-lin venue. So loud it’s not even possible to ask
questions. I wing it as best I can until the time comes to load the cart again
and cross the car park solo to D-3.

Helen listens
with disconcerting eagerness to my tale. I recount the entire day, omitting the
bit about Candy’s mini-dress but including all other pertinent details, from
the depressing bus ride to the haphazardness of the pigeon-holing system to the
fact that from tomorrow I’ll have to wear a uniform. Candy asked me my size
just after lunch, and before I went home presented me with five of each
garment, one for each day of the week. Emblazoned on the shirt is the name
Richard, an ex-employee whom Al took obvious pleasure in telling me is dead.

‘Enjoy your
lunch, George?’ he asked me during the afternoon.

‘Yeah, it wasn’t
bad.’

‘Like the
canteen?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘That’s a pity,
cos from tomorrow on you’ll be aytin with us on the loading dock.’

Al is proving to
be a bit of a fucker, all things considered.

‘Mailboys are
not allowed in the canteen,’ he said. ‘You got away with it today without the
uniform.’

‘Not allowed?’
The canteen is divided into two, with a glass partition separating the
sections. The private smaller section is for senior management only. The glass
partition is to prevent the ordinary minions from eavesdropping on their
mission-critical lunch meetings. But there’s a tier even lower than the
minions, and I belong to it. I’m one of the underclass expected to bring in
their own lunch and eat it in whatever filthy corner is most endurable.

‘Jaysus, no. You
might be used to all that white collar stuff, with the college degrees and the
fine big office and all that, but forget all that if you want to work here.
Len’ll tell you that, won’t you Len?’

Len was perched
glumly at the far end of the D-5 wall. ‘Yeah.’ Dead-voiced and uninterested.

I got chatting
later in the afternoon to Len, while Al was sent away on some errand. He hates
Al as much as I anticipate that I’m going to.

‘Never mind him,’
he said, looking around in case the man himself should come bursting through
the door. ‘Don’t even listen to his shite. That’s how I deal with him.’

Len has a slight
stutter. He looks about 50, but something about him makes me suspect that he’s
more like 38. The slope of the spine, the inclination of the jaw, these speak
of existential defeat. Wrong to make such assumptions about people. Ill-founded
ideas about someone can imprint on your brain, colour the way you see them,
deal with them. But something about Len invites disrespect.