Mr. Coffey passed some several months on what he called “that black, bedevilled, sweltered isle,” the tiny, tropic mass that floats still visible, just, off the coast of Kerry. He analysed its rocks and its heavy vegetation and moved, unharmed, amongst its pasty-skinned and sad-eyed people. The tropic forestry out there is so wild that its inhabitants live permanently under shadow and barely see what little sun there is. But this thick jungle canopy, Coffey had deduced, was soaked up from the sun-embellished Gulf Stream that comes this way, at twists and turns, from Amerika.

The natives called it Tír Go Maith, in their own unruly language, or meant this word to signify themselves, or both. The term, Coffey opined, sounding, “rightly, as if they despised the wretched place.” Their patois was a garble of vowels and mismatched consonants, which the few indwellers with writing skills seemed to confuse all too easily, apparently ignorant of the civilised world’s consensus on V. Mr. Coffey, now Professor in a chair at Lifford University, picked apart the dialect over almost a year, condensing and defining its strange, off-putting attributes, until he could speak it almost as badly as the folk themselves. This great philological inquiry comprises much of Another Tongue: A Grounding in the Speak of South-Western Heathens, the professor’s first success. This was followed by a topographical primer of the area, an inventory of recognisable religious rituals (totalling nil) and a series of monographs. Of these, A Foundation in Island Humour amused me most.

All these books were available to me in the See House in Strabane, where I readied myself for my journey under the tutelage of Bishop Boyle, the Archbishop of Half Tyrone. I was just a young man, then, and spent my roguish energies on learning the lingo, such as it was, of that benighted place that sat in quiet protest so near to civilisation.

“Bishop,” I once spoke, “I hear their women walk bare-chested, without a sense of shame, and the men, not to be outdone, wear not a thing at all.”

“Now, son,” the Primate asked me, “where does it say this in your study book?” His theological rigour was astounding.

It said this nowhere in the literature. I had been mislaid by rumour and talk amongst the lads, so resolved to study all the harder. I worked solidly beneath the library’s reading lamp, kept at work by the severe ticking of my father’s pocket watch, its workings unusually large and awkward so that the blind Belgian watchmaker could set them in place. It was all I had left of him, my father; left, in fact, of my life before my admittance to the orphanage, as so much of the country was then.

“Bernard,” the Bishop told me, “Remember, when you reach the island, that you represent our nation, our beliefs and our ways. Conversion of the heathen is a tricky task, for, were he as reasonable as us, he would already think as we do. Your arguments must be strong as hammer blows to knock some sense into his head. Here, take these.” And the Archbishop of Half Tyrone weighed me down with tomes of theological discourse, of skilled religious reasoning, and most eloquent analogy.

These I read in quick measure and understood them to my fullest. Professor Coffey, now holding tenure across several departments in Thurles, was only an academic and, as such, held no greater ambition than to sneer. But I, invigorated by learning and encouraged by his Grace, sought to bring civilisation to that island of Tír Go Maith, the island that could be reached only by rowboat.

*

Civilisation was stuffed conveniently into my haversack: the lighter of the Bishop’s books, a parcel of fine home cuisine to last a few days, my pocket watch, a high-precision compass, and a change of shirt. On hitting the sandy island target, I slipped this over my shoulders and abandoned the rowboat to the beach. The great weight of the pack and the physical strain of rowing meant that I crossed the sand in faltering steps, falling sometimes onto all fours and dragging myself across the cold, white surface.

However, the coast was but a narrow areola around the hard, green centre of foliage and overgrowth. It was only moments before I was lost amongst it all, though the sense of loss seemed to last for hours. Huge fronds sagged down from the canopy and palms the size of collection plates pushed into me at elbow height. The sun, as it was, percolated weakly through the thick, wide leaves and the slight, green light that resulted was scarcely enough by which to stumble blindly. Numerous half-sunken roots uprooted me and creeping vines snagged my toecaps or brushed my head. When I return, some day, I thought, I will erect signs in the Bishop’s English, that no man may lose his way as I have mine.

The machete is hardly civilised, but it was a necessity. It never rested in the haversack, but always in my hand or by my side. Its narrow edge met many a branch and severed groping limbs, protecting me here and freeing me there. One swipe loosed me from the tropic bough that snagged my lading luggage and pulled me back with a snap. I tumbled forward with such force that a bush before me was parted in two. But I kept on, heaving myself through the grim shade, forward to my destiny.

It must surely have been days, although I could not tell dusk from dawn under that umbra… days that I had traipsed, swinging one arm and then the other against the undergrowth, searching for lack of civilisation. In my initial fervour, I acquired great strength, taking my baggage forward with ease, but now, days later, for it must have been days, I started to tire. I found a flat-topped rock and parked myself and hoisted up my haversack, where a parcel of the finest home cuisine lay wrapped for me. Or so it had done, at some point, but all the sack bore now was the clean cut of a machete blow. The items from my home were scattered now, somewhere across the jungle floor, back along my way.

It was then that I let out my first defeated cry.

But, the heathens, I thought, must feed themselves, if only on gruel or unholy fleshes, so I ploughed ahead with my task, truly hungry for success. It must have been night by then, for it could hardly have been day any longer, and I hoped to find them while they themselves were exhausted.

Dirt crumbled beneath my feet and limp limbs bended to my will, but I found no clumped heathens, bare-chested or otherwise. Some hours after my discovery, a square of waxed paper passed before me. It had once protected a slab of Cashel Blue, but it had been neatly unsheathed by jungle fauna. The package still wore the strong scent of the Bishop’s own blue, so I pressed it deep inside my nostrils, as one might a hankie to a nosebleed, and felt myself revived just enough to sleep.

An unshoed foot passed over me, when I awoke, and connected to it the ashen leg of an ashen man, as filthy as Adam & Eve after the expulsion and as shameless as they were before. He did not look down at me, nor did the procession of similar men that followed.

“Thank G-d!” I cried, leaping to my feet and taking down a heathen in good fun.

The front one stopped. “Thank G-d?” he repeated with a stumble. His lips turned up, then, in smirking recognition. “Thank G-d,” he laughed. “Yes, thank G-d… Coffey?”

“No, thank you,” I replied, “But I’m dying for something to eat.”

The heathen seemed to grasp the language, as if he had learned as much from the Professor as the Professor had from him. I imagined the grotesque, paganistic chair he must occupy in his village. Then, in my first halting attempt at speaking it out loud, I tried the heathen tongue. “Yes, thank G-d.” This word I was uncertain of. Coffey, with a book due soon from the Carrick-On-Shannon press, seemed to think these people didn’t understand it, but this man’s first reaction was word enough for me. “Thank G-d, I say. For it is G-d has crossed our paths like this, that you might come and save me.”

“No. This is where we hunt,” he said in deadpan. “We would have been here anyway.” He smiled. “Your G-d has brought only you here. And it seems he has done a rotten job. But come…”

This pale, diminished man directed me on into the forest and his colleagues followed close behind. They were each one naked, as had been rumoured, but not a one of them were brutes. Each was short and thin, though broad across the shoulders, and on each one an overgrowth of ginger hair and riotous red beard. Maybe this results, I thought, from a carotene-heavy diet.

Shortly, they had led me to a clearing and for the first time in, goodness, it must have been weeks, I saw the wan, old sun that watches over us. There were no huts, no fanciful heathen totems, only women, bare-chested, kneeling on the earth, sitting on felled logs or returning, themselves, from hunting. In my relief, I promised myself one hundred Penitent Fathers as penance for the gruel or unholy flesh I felt compelled to eat.

“You must take something,” the tribesman told me, guiding me to a prostrate log. And he revealed a bloated, little fruit in his outstretched palm.

“Was the party not out hunting?” I asked him.

“O, yes, we were. These ones hang especially low. They are very easily trapped.”

“You caught no animals? No flesh to cook?”

“But the animals are so fast,” he answered, a tad confused. “And they’re so sweet… not sweet-tasting, as in your language… but good, nice… go maith.”

He bid me stand, to show me all the clearing. “We hunt the fruit that lowers its guard. And we forage for the seeds and pods, that we may grow them ourselves, if we can. But, strangely,” he said, “very little grows here at the centre of the isle.”

He showed me a row of dirt in mounds, each as sad and lifeless as the last. A woman, on her knees, had paddled clear a little hole and was placing, now, a pod inside. The pod glinted, weakly, as the sun fell on it and I realised, as it slipped out of her hands, that it was my father’s pocket watch.

“Good G-d. Stop!” I cried, diving to the ground and scooping the precious item from the earth. “This was my father’s watch.”

I pulled myself up, dusting first the watch, then cleaning off myself. “Can you not see that? It fell from my haversack… see.” I showed them both the frayed opening. “I lost it and all my items from civilisation. That’s where I am from.”

“It’s a large sack,” the woman said.

“And heavy too,” added the man.

“Well, it’s a most amazing place, a place of wondrous and ingenious things. Take this watch.” I held it in the sun, that all could view its majesty. “This was crafted by the finest artisan in all of Belgium. Could you not tell by its intricacies, by its ornate features, by its sheer beauty, that this was the result of some great intelligence? That it had been slaved over in its design? That it was not just some husk dropped from a tree or dispersed from a plant?”

The tribesman took the watch in hand, surveying it in ponderous detail. “Someone made this?” he asked. “But why?”

“To tell the time of day.”

“Ah. You see, we just look up, if we are here. And, if we are in the jungle, it makes no odds. But this? It seems such effort, when time is all about. And with the forest all about, why would we think that this, which we found there, was not part of it?”

“You do not make things?”

“What’s to make?” replied the Heathen. “Everything we’ve ever thought to need is in the forest. Sometimes things are just there and one needn’t worry about the cause.

I looked gravely at the tender fruit I’d been given. It was the size of a pocket watch and yellow in colour and, when I took a bite, it tasted of the finest things, like strawberry and mango and of Cashel Blue.

“Yes,” I said. “G-d has been good to you.”

“G-d has never visited the forest,” the tribesman told me. “Your Mr. Coffey mentioned him, but I did not recognise any such description. Was he the maker of your… watch, was it?”

“No, no. That was just a Belgian. G-d is all around us.”

“Like time? Or like the forest?”

“Like both, I guess.”

“And yet you test him so and value him much less than your things of civilisation. Is that really the way your kind treat a person?”

I shook my head at him. “But G-d is not a person.”

“Well, maybe that explains it,” he said. “Now, let us go and find these things you prize so much.”

We wandered through the jungle; he knew it much better than I did and found my tracks when I thought I’d left none. A certain rock seemed familiar and some shapely overhang of leaves I’d surely seen before and that specific severed branch had been cut to size by me, but, yet, we found no change of shirt, no hermeneutic books, no food nor waxen paper even. The compass too was lost.

In time, we came out near the water; the little rowing boat settled on the sand.

“You will not go now?” asked the sallow tribesman.

“No,” I said. “My job is still undone. For it was my duty to bring G-d to this island.”

The native looked confused. “Then, yes, your job is still undone.”

“He is here already,” I explained. “It’s just you do not see. Still, you rely on him, on his forest, on his time alone… how to put this?” I stared across the sand, at the rowboat that had carried me so soundly, and noticed, for the first, the prints I’d left when stumbling towards the trees.

“You see,” I started. “Imagine there’s a man who walks along a beach for many miles and, at the very end, he meets with Jesus…”

“Who?”

“Let’s say G-d.”

“If it helps.”

“So,” I said. “He meets with G-d and G-d tells the man that he was with him all the time. The man looks back to see, like these that I’ve left in the sand, prints, sometimes one pair, sometimes two. ‘But did you desert me sometimes?’ the man then asked of G-d. And G-d replied: ‘No, sometimes, I walked there by your side. And, sometimes, where you see only a pair of prints, this is when I carried you.’ This is how you should see G-d, as one whose work cannot always be seen.”

“I see,” said the tribesman, shaking his wild red hair at me. “But don’t you understand that one of those sets there is but a pair of handprints? You must have fallen over from that heavy haversack of sack of yours. That was when you were carrying the burden of civilisation. You must remember that you were alone, until you met us.” He stretched out his hand to me, with my father’s watch upon it. “But here, pay me no heed, I’m sure you will want to take this with you.”

But, reader, I can hardly tell you why, I did not want to.

Bernard O’Hagan,
Tír Go Maith,
1894.

Brittaine set the soft, pink azaleas in the shadow of the still-fresh stone, where the soil stayed upturned some few months on. Molloy was just behind her, with a low-hanging head, and she turned to him with a wide, affected gesture.

“The last time we saw Barker!” she declaimed. “What a hearty meal that was! And we talked, Molloy, do you recall? Gourmands philosophising, we talked richly, with many, o’er wooden, tawny ports and salmon tightly rolled, fois gras, thick and phlegmy, freshly choked that morning. What a generous home was Barker’s! Such a feast that those baked meats boldly furnished forth four more night’s eating.”

A drop of moisture slowly rolled along Molloy’s knave jowl. They had not eaten now for days and talk of such fine food had made him salivate. “What I remember best about old Barker,” he began, “was the little sausage rolls.”

“They were most succulent,” his friend agreed. “And most succinct. It would be hard to fault dear Barker on such a score as that.”

The gravestone praised the former host for fidelity and faithfulness, faithfully survived by Elsie, the lady of the house. The sorry pair could hardly disagree. “It seemed to me that Barker… He… would never let his dear friends go without,” Brittaine declared.

“No, nor strangers,” said Molloy.

“No, nor strangers neither,” agreed Brittaine. “He was very good to us, that time that we were here. If only people took him as example. What a paragon of animals he was! So, let us raise…” she then affirmed, fishing vaguely through her pockets. “For Barker, let us raise a… well, I’ve nothing much to raise. Molloy, you had better tip your hat. To Barker!”

“To Barker!” Molloy concurred, baring his pate to the swelling sun; the two smiling broadly over the narrow plot.

“Ya nyew tha boul Barker, then?” came a voice from behind. It belonged to a thickset gardener or, perhaps, he was a gravedigger, a spade set, work-end up, over an unveiled shoulder. He kept an easiness about him, as if it were his property, and the grave were not.

“We were at the funeral,” Brittaine explained.

“Up at tha house,” the gardener added, turning a thumb towards a homestead, just beyond the great, wide flowerbeds and a spatter of trees. At this distance, even, it seemed to tower over the grounds.

“The patio doors were open,” said Molloy. “So we thought we’d wander in.”

“Owt,” corrected the groundsman, as much for his own sake as theirs. “Ya wundered owt to pay yer respects.”

“Just while we were passing through,“ Brittaine replied. “We had such fun the last time we were here, you see. There was a chocolate fountain, I recall, into which one could dip all sorts of things; like lychees, jackfruits, rambutans and mangosteens and melanos and durians. And by a cut-glass punchbowl, some cubit in diameter, there was a Scottish terrier, a statue, made from sugar and we were all spurred on to break off strands of hair into our tea or our thin glasses of absinthe. It was quite something of an evening”

“Aye, that was after Baker’s funeral, so it was,” nodded the gardener, although, perhaps, he was a gravedigger professionally. “But her ladyship’s, int like that. It‘s right‘an misrible, ainit?”

“Up at the house?”

“That’s tha wun.”

Molloy glanced at the great Victorian building. “Well, of course, the funeral at the house. With all the free food at it.”

“It’s nat so fancy as tha las wun thoh. ‘Er ladyship threw away all her dough sendin’ off the poor, wee dog, on account a her bein’ so aggrieved, that there was hardly enough fer a few sassage rolls at ‘er own wake.”

“But there are sausage rolls?” Brittaine hoped to make clear.

“So yous’ins say,” said the gardener. “But, yah cuddin have a wake wee-out sassage rolls. Wenn yer as deep as she was, even.”

“And she’s deep now, is she?” Molloy inquired.

“Aye, quare an’ deep, G-d rest ‘er,” the gravedigger replied, his faced bowed down and dipping his corduroy cap. “Sheda sold the whole place off, the oul doll, an’ ah think sh’was tryin te, but she weren’t up til it. Nat in that respect.”

“Speaking of which,” Brittaine cut in. “We should head back to the house and pay those same respects again.” The gardener nodded his consent, letting the pair make off towards the house; its broad French doors open wide and, from within, the clack of teeth, half open to speak, half closed to chew.

But, they had barely started on a canter, when the fossor, at the graveside, called them to immediate halt. “Houl on ,” he beckoned, pointing to the shady sepulchre. “Are they azaleas?” And it seemed that with the question came an important answer: the man was not a gardener.

Brittaine crouched to survey the simple posey she had dropped, earlier, by the graveside. The gravedigger seemed somewhat confused or, perhaps, annoyed; it would not do to admit acquaintance with the bold bouquet. “I would dare say,” she answered, with a pin-point vagueness, “That it’s the right time of year for them. And, yes, those leaves are dark enough and they’re grown inside the usual range… but…,” with a cough, “I’ve never before seen a bunch of azaleas exactly like that one there.” Coolly, behind her, Molloy offered no one a reassuring grin.

The shovel met the ground with a thud, not a slurp, as the gardener threw it down in discomposure. “See her, shez always doin’ that, that Ms. Crozier, so sh‘is.” There was a tritone of displeaure in his voice. “An’ ahm s’posed t’be head gardener,” grumbled the gravedigger. “It was her had m’plant thim in tha firs place, but she’s gone an’ pulled up halfa them anyway.”

“She must really miss the dog,” stated Molloy.

“She may an’ all,” the gardener pondered, momentarily. “But it happened before that. Y’see, shez this thing bout bringin’ in the tourists and she brung mee in t’make up all them flowerbeds. Loadsa different coloured ones an’ makin‘ up wee wurds an‘ all. But shez always changin’ ‘im. Ah wish sheed jus make up ‘er bloody mind.”

“Well,” Brittaine confessed. “It was the flowerbeds and their colours that drew our attention from the first.”

And Molly felt he must say: “I noticed quite a curious one, reading ‘AID ME HAROW’ beneath a two-leafed shamrock.”

The gardener shrugged his shoulders with a sigh: “Shez always correctin’ m’spellin’ an’ all.”

“Why, what did it say originally?”

“CAID MEELA FAWLCHA ROWUTT,” he said. “Tha’s part a her plan fer the tourists, so it is. Tha oul Irish stuff an’ all that. Cute. But ah dun m’knees in plantin’ that lot an’ there’s her takin’ up mosta thim. Ah dunno were sh’throws thim all, anyway. At ‘er arse, probably. G-d knows, ah haven’t found tha half a thim. That’ll hardly bring folk to tha house, dead azaleas lyin’ everywhere.”

“Well, we hate to prove you wrong,” Brittaine broke in, “but, with that thought of graceful flowers wilted sadly, we should return to the house, for the end of her ladyship’s wake, before she goes cold.”

“Ar tha food.”

“Yes, I almost forgot about the buffet,” she replied, her back to the gardener already and her legs building up to an impressive feat. Molloy, she could see, had taken brisk strides to the nearest of the flowerbeds, passing the one, in strict martial meter, and brushing loose petals up into the air. She stumbled to catch him without losing grace in front of the gardener. But, she was so hungry, now, that she hadn’t the strength to look eager and ravenous.

The great house bobbed into middle-distance, much sadder now on close inspection. The baronial style, so dour and so Scottish, seemed not so alive as at Barker’s memorial; the clear-paned doors in the old façade creaked open on their whining hinges and, from inside, no song nor story, but the jarring jabber of gentle chatter. A century of northern weather had worn a graveness on its walls, but for repair from fire or lightning or a rather recent weathervane, which kept it off the list of buildings that make the listed building list. Noble dust, ground by squall and mistral, met clay that stopped the gaping holes; from dust it came and would return.

“Even if they are slim pickings,” said Molloy, in puffing flight. “I think it wise to free our pockets of anything that weighs them down. Or fills them up.” And so, with that, he tossed a notebook to the ground, then a tweezers and a magnifying glass; a glass he could have proudly raised in memory of Barker.

Hearing no admonishment, he turned to see his colleague stopped, briefly by a flowerbed, its soil turned and thinned of blossoms. It was just a momentary pause and soon she’d ambled, thoughtfully, back to her partner’s side.

“What did it say?” he questioned her, starting again for Norecastle House.

“It posed a most interesting question,” she said. “Why hire that invidious idea of a man, if you need him to spell or to know about flowers?”

“I thought he seemed nice,” objected Molloy.

“No, it’s not the man’s fault, he did not, after all, build the stereotype.” This was Brittaine’s most reasoned response. “Such a clichéd character is only employed if it serves somebody’s scheme. People with broad Belfast accents do not exist out here. They barely scrape an existence there. No, no, Molloy, if this man is here, he was brought with a very good cause.”

“But what?”

“I think it is really quite simple, Molloy, if one thinks of her ladyship. So simple, in fact, it should not take first prize over our more pressing hunger.”

They strode together, linking arms, up the marble steps, where great French windows opened on a coldly clinking party. Over the murmur of mumbled condolence and half-masticated chicken in bread, the faint strain of strained disapproval carried through the parlour, with the stony scrape of stiff shirt collars swivelling to view them. But Brittaine, in her great certainty, bent towards the voul-au-vents, only for a hand to come between the plate and mouth.

“You two,” cried a red-haired woman, whose blood struggled to show her anger through the dusty pallor of her face. She swatted them with her neat palms and pushed them with the leverage of legs pinioned tightly by a black, funereal skirt. “Get out!,” she yelled. “Get out!”

The male guests moved uncomfortably to help her, some unsure of why they might be helping. Amidst their bashful flapping, Brittaine kept her composure. She took Molloy’s arm, proudly, turning to the waiting window and, in perfect time, they stepped back down into the garden. “It’s quite alright, Ms. Crozier,” quipped Brittaine, as if casting a champagne flute over her shoulder. “We know when we’re not wanted.”

“Again!” shouted the red-haired lady, drawing the doors to a shuddering close.

“That was the same one as last time,” Molloy said, with a twitch, when they were safely amongst the flowerbed again. The nearest one read ‘RAT F ORT‘ in pink letters.

“No doubt, that Ms. Crozier,” answered Brittaine. “Who, as I was saying, before that disturbance, was the one that most certainly did it.”

“Did what?” asked Molloy.

“It is really quite simple, if one thinks of Ms Crozier,” she dryly explained to her colleague. “What do we know about her already? She is eager to turn this place into a show place, when Lady Norecastle was desperate to sell. See that iron weathervane, it went up in the eighties and those reconstructions have changed most of the face; no government order could spare this old building. It would be no sooner flats. Or apartments, at worst.”

“So, to save her position as head of the household, Crozier would have to prevent the whole sale.”

“And, thus, why she hired the gardener, Molloy.”

“To make the old house more attractive to tourists, securing an income that kept her in work.”

“There’s such stuffing in your thoughts, Molloy,” Brittaine, smugly, snapped. “That’s exactly what your finite faculties would think, if the man were qualified. But, purposefully, she picked the man because he could not spell and because he knew nothing of azaleas. It was some ignoble reason. He was mere device in her dire plot, for no professional gardener plants azaleas, in such number, when there’s a canine running round. It wouldn’t run much longer.”

“Because they’re toxic.”

“Azaleas are, in the right amount. And we know already half have been uprooted. And it requires just two percent of the dog’s own weight in blossom to send the poor thing into death or coma. If the giant sugar terrier, we saw at Barker’s wake, was in anyway to scale, the figures work themselves out for themselves.”

Molloy eyed the fallen petals that lingered at his feet with a more than just professional suspicion. “So, she didn’t kill the lady of the house,” he stated, to be sure.

“Not directly, no. But leave a vase in a low place… Or, to reach the dark quintessence of the bloom, grind a dust of it, sprinkle over food or rub it in an ear, a wound, a snout. Then here are we, some few months later and her ladyship has died of grief.” The aging slewfoot pulled, from her pocket, a sausage roll, she’d secreted in the brief furore. She tore it in two pieces.

“You know,” Molloy munched savagely. “She’ll have a tough time bringing tourists here. She doesn’t seem to know how to treat house guests.”

“Not at all,” said Brittaine, with a dainty slurp. “She’s not so generous as Barker.”

“Was there ever such-a-one.”

“Yes, Barker, we know, would make the ultimate sacrifice for a friend.”

“Or a stranger.”

Brittaine wiped a pastry fleck from off upon her jacket. “And she is a fool, you know,” the old sleuth slowly mused, “to think the sale would go ahead. No developer would take the risk to build on an animal graveyard.”

I

Stan sank his hari-kari blade into the envelope and, with a right, then upward motion, plied it apart. Inside, a number of small note pages were folded, one within others and upon each was an urgent handscrawl.

Handwritten contents always require scrutiny, for they are, invariably, of greater importance than off-printed duplicates. And, of course, between the mortgage forms, tenancy agreements, CVs and advertising pamphlets, any personal communication is short reprieve from the tedium of death-mail sorting.

This general type, like the one in hand, quite frequently carries the incorrect postage costs. People always seem to undervalue their mail, never overvalue. They probably have more pressing things on their minds or are rushing towards a more important engagement or activity.

When a letter of that variety arrives, the contents are first shaken to loosen any cheques, valuables or trinkets that may be concealed. In this particular, there was nothing. Nor was there a return address in the top corner. Nor an ‘If Undelivered’ direction on the envelope’s reverse. There is little that can be done, unless the letter’s origin is revealed somewhere within the body of the writing. Otherwise, it would head to the cull. Or, if suitably amusing, filthy or preposterous, it would slide under the supervisor’s nose and to be slipped into Stan’s breast pocket.

It read:

Dearmost reader,

My utmost apologies for the state in which you find me. Usually I take such care over my appearance, but, naturally, I have had no means to perfect myself in my current situation.

You find me thus for I am bored. It is tedium that kicked my chair and no pleasure that tugged my legs. And amidst all, experience suggests that it will get no better. No action or inaction is likely to please me in such a way as I would wish.

T’is no great misfortune, for it was always thus, from birth at least. I could live with inactivity all too well – I am experienced at that. The trouble resides, I know, in too many people – not in the sense of over-population, but on a more personal level; I know too many people and this appals me.

I have a mobile phone. Its address book is filled, not with addresses, but with the names and numbers of folk I have only briefly met and even more briefly cared for. Come New Year, they may send me a congratulations, but for the rest of the time, naught. All this from casual interruptions in bars and cafes, because other people are desperate to be known to have friends.

The same is true of my paper address books and computer contacts – my acquaintances are legion; they are a whole multitude of swine. And to give the necessary care and consideration due them all, I must spread myself too thin. To desert any of them, after they have feigned the kindness of showing interest in me, would be the height of rudeness, so, for me, that is no option.

By acquainting with so many souls – the modern malady – I find that I repeat the same charming anecdotes until they are meaningless, overuse witticisms until they clunk.

Unsure of what I have said to whom, I worry about boring everyone and, in the process, bore myself. There is no chance to refine, rarefy or re-enforce, for I am on mere verbal nodding terms with all.

M. Durkheim concluded that suicide was most likely to occur amongst those with no support network to recline on, no friends or family or such. The current problem, then, is that there are too many people in one’s social network – a specious Foucaultian governmentality, I fear – in which the infinite webs of everyone you know delicately interconnect, but, where you to fall back on them, the whole would all give way, for not one of your relationships is strong enough to hold. It is a trust exercise in which I am too paranoid to partake…

There is a true love, of course. To her my kindest regards and the pick of my chattels. To the needy, the rest. Goodbye cruel world…

“Bloody stupid,” thought Stan, but he was young and still considered life worth living. He called over Mr Pungent, the dead letter office manager, to advise him. Mr Pungent was older and held a different opinion.

“No return address,” observed the old man plainly, as if the youth had no idea what the processes of his job were. “No value or trinket.” He checked the front of the envelope. “And not the standard for the Littlewood’s Catalogue complaints department, I imagine. Probably someone’s idea of a joke. I’d bin it. Would you?”

II

The milkman disturbed the bin, as it had been positioned awkwardly between the gate and footpath, with neither one, seemingly, determined as its final resting place. He did this each Monday morning, so had, by now, given up any preventative measures regarding noise control. That today was Tuesday hardly struck him as odd, as it is always Tuesday eventually. He strode gently down the path, a basket of bottles in his hand, making toward the front door.

From one of the empties on the doorstep there protruded a small tube of paper. It was there, he had small reason to doubt, to instruct him in some new combination of milk deliveries. Thus was certainly the convention.

Unrolling it, he read:

Dear Sir/Madam of the Littlewood’s Catalogue complaints department,

Fear not. I have no cause to grumble over your excellent service; in fact, the opposite is true. I write this letter solely to commend you on the top-drawerness of our correspondence, your customary professionalism and your quick-to-amends of aught-gone-wrong. For my various v-neck sweaters over the years, thank you. And many blessings for the swift reparations made after the Irish Thornproof confusion we all long to forget.

With this in mind, I will break all communication with you. Know that is it due, not to disgruntlement or animosity, but to simple facts – I will not be needing you anymore.

Good will. Yours…

Unable to determine whatever alternate directions this message hid, the milkman left the regular lode, along with the note, now replaced in the bottleneck.

III

Mrs Bench knocked three times, with intermittent pauses, indicating that each was a separate warning of her presence, rather than part of one prolonged furious rapping.

Upon no reply, she let herself into the hall of 29 Mount Pleasant Street. The cheque for this month’s rent sat squarely (well, more rectangularly) upon the telephone stand, as it usually does when the tenant is not there to give it to her by hand. She took it and signed the accompanying rent book.

She thought then of the tenant, so frequent in his graciousness and so giving in his candour. And more, she thought of what he’d done with her property. He had taken it truly in well-manicured hand, furnishing it with just the right bijou or doodad, straightening along the hidden length of the room or contrasting the exact colourways to make one welcome or at ease. He had the time to eke perfection out from banality.

This hallway was just right; not how she could have imagined it before her husband died. Nor even when she became a widow. The carpet was the same and the paint was unchanged, but his choice of umbrella stand, his selection of this old telephone and his curatorship of the prints, posters and wall-hangs. All he’d really done to the place was live in it.

O and what he’d done with the living room too.

She looked towards the living room door and noticed it was set a little ajar. There was a residue of plaster upon the treadboard in the doorway and powder along the jamb. Fascinated, she walked in. There, upon the floor, lay the ceiling. Or the great majority of it, ragged round the edges, where some weight had tugged it from the upper storey. In the centre, where the light fitting would be, the plaster seemed to crack upward into a small mound. A hand sat indifferently to the side, as if it had tried crawling out, but had grown quickly bored. A wrist disappeared back into the splintered wooden beams and plasterboard.

Mrs Bench didn’t much like manual work, so thought it best to leave all that to the police, once she called them. He’d dressed up for the occasion, she was sure, and it would be awful to see all that effort spoiled by some tonnage of building materials.

But, for completeness sake, she made her way across the ruin to pluck the small square of paper that was planted between two of the cold fingers.

It read:

Nothing for me today.

The old lady sighed. “Some people have such empty lives.”

And then awake with a shudder.

A Note From The Author

Don’t worry, reader, I don’t think it’s me.