Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [12]
ONLY ONE post office employee was absent from the post office as Ambras Cetts and his colleagues began their investigation, and that was Mother, whose waters had broken early that morning. Soon our faint beats would be joining with all the other hearts’ soft drumming throughout the world, soon the world would be bursting into technicolour.
Father was seated that morning on his stool by Mother’s empty plastic chair, as tense as an overwound spring. Unable to bear the pain coming out of Mother’s great mouth, he had rushed from the hospital into the comfort of the post office the moment she had started screaming.
As Mother wailed for God and for Father, and expressed an eagerness for her life to be ended, Ambras Cetts discovered on our postmaster grandfather’s desk a list of letters reported missing, which all happened to have originated from foreign countries. As the list was further examined—as we lessened Mother’s struggles for a kind (and brief) moment—the streets of the complainants were considered, and a map of the city was sought … and found on the wall behind Grandfather’s desk.6
THIS MAP, a generous size, probably the most comprehensive map of Entralla at that time, was not, however, in the pristine state it had been purchased in. Years of post office dust and labour; years of the exhalations of the post office workers’ nicotine-tainted breaths had bent its corners upwards and made brittle its surface. Generations of employees had been called into the postmaster’s office to offer their many thousands of excuses, both the believable and the fantastic, to list over time all the illnesses that are available to the human body in this part of the world and to elaborate on the processes of these illnesses; or to tell tales of innocent and guilty colleagues; or to express predictable Christmas sentiments; or to be dismissed without a smile; or to shake hands on retirement day and then to look finally at that large map behind Grandfather’s desk for the ultimate time, briefly to view the network of streets, the honeycomb of our lives, before retreating in old age to a life that concerned only a handful of passageways.
This map had been disfigured by something other than time and the deposits of so many human fingers. It had lines drawn over it in standard black biro, dividing the city into even more sections than already existed. These boundaries were not real walls of bricks, they were not present in our everyday sleeping and waking city; they were the barriers demarcating the streets and districts assigned to the postmen. Each division belonged to one man. And each division had been impaled with a pin on which a piece of fixed paper stuck out at right angles, like a diminutive flag. Each of these toy flags, as if they were to indicate principalities of a country, had a surname written in capitals across it: the name not of the local potentate but of the postman who delivered the letters for that portion of the city. Oh what a useful map this is, thought Ambras Cetts and his colleagues. Three minutes was all it took these achievers to discover the patch on the city’s surface in which all the letters had failed to arrive. A single postman’s division.
L. Dapps said the flag. Where is this Dapps?, wondered Ambras Cetts and his companions. We’ll speak to this Dapps before the minute is out. To ask him what? To ask him: how is it possible that all these letters should disappear from one district only? One district for which only one postman delivers the letters? One postman who handled not one but all of the absent articles? Is that coincidental or is that criminal? Which one of those, answer us that.
Now I imagine that I can hear a noise. A sharp noise to provoke ear covering. The sound of the postal horn perhaps? No, no, it is the scream of a woman in labour as she pushes, pants and sweats. This is agony. Mother’s between-the-legs door, our door into the world, is beginning to open, it’s ripping open. But wait a minute—as Mother