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IT’S A GRAND LIFE Our specially commissioned, sea
sonal, short story sees Seamus O’Reilly reflect on a time when he worked with An Post and was privy to a special haul of letters. words Seamus O’Reilly illustrations Ruan van Vliet When I talk about how I spent that Christmas twelve years ago, people usually ask what I learned from opening every letter in Ireland that was addressed to Santa. My answer is, simply, that whatever else separates them, children possess an inordinate fondness for bicycles. Big, small; with training wheels and without; carrying the insignia of a favourite football team, superhero, or cartoon; pregarnished with flair in the spokes, or pretty baskets, or a rad mudguard, and in any number of shapes, brands and styles – some commercially available, others clearly improvised from some experimental bike lab deep inside that infant’s head. Sometimes none of those specifics were given at all, but colour was never left to chance. Bicycles were almost universal, whatever the social status or geographical location, but specifying the colour of those bicycles was more universal still. If held to it, I’d proffer it went red, green, blue, then pink and black – in that order. Yellow and white almost never, and multicoloured not once. So, before I explain how it came to be that I was in receipt of the dreams and desires of every Irish child, I can tell you that I learned about bicycles, and coloured bicycles most of all. I’d gotten a job with An Post because I was tired of paying the rent in crumpled, weed-stained fivers and a good deal more tired of not quite being able to do so. Phillo’s cousin Mick had gotten me in on the job while he was selling me acid. “There’s good work hehehe,” he said, “to be had hehehe with An Post hehehe over Christmas.” Phillo said Mick’d gotten a shock when he was a kid and had the laugh since then, which sounded unlikely. His mother said it was something to do with glands, but no further details on that conjecture were ever forthcoming. I was always a bit nervous around Mick because the laugh would have a way of sticking in your head. It was like when an elderly person had a disfigurement so bad your dad had to warn you about it before you got out of the car. Hehehe. All the time. Sometimes every sentence or two, or sometimes, when he hadn’t spoken in a while, every two or three words. Your responses became robotic, and the real worry – the worst, easiest thing you could do – was that you’d start laughing along with him, out of some sort of feckless, friendly instinct. Few people did it a second time, preferring instead to listen to him stonefaced and grave, ignoring the growing sense of drama which arose as each sentence went on for just long enough that you thought surely no laugh was coming, only for it to arrive and reset some infernal counter in your head until the next. His reedy, little laugh, like a metronome keeping him going. His brothers used to tell him if he ever did stop then his brain would explode, which couldn’t have helped. It didn’t even sound like his actual laugh, which was deep and bright and normal, it was a photocopy of a photocopy of a laugh, dull and clipped, dropped into otherwise expressive sentences like sticky little amendments to a chip shop’s menu, the type you find inserting the word PORK over the laminate in a less pleasing font, and making you oddly suspicious that pork had not always been on offer. One night Phillo got drunk and told me that Mick actually woke up laughing, and I told him he should stop telling people that because I could never look at him the same way after hearing it, which wasn’t fair to Mick on top of all his other troubles. Like how he laughed all the time for no reason. I, of course, just ended up telling everyone myself. I didn’t start off with the Santa job. I went in as a relief sorter. These jobs were plentiful on account of An Post being so overstretched with all the extra bits of business mail that would be going through the depots at Christmas, and postmen being too union-ed up to take the slack. Better, it was thought, to get in cheap holiday labour from idlers who were less discerning about sorting envelopes all day for the first three weeks of December. The beauty part was you’d get twelve hours’ pay for about five hours work, since you’d get in at 10am and were paid until 10pm, on the off chance there was some hiccup on the road or some van broke down and you had to stay late. What I hadn’t been told was Christmas sorting had a way of packing twelve hours’ work into five, and often very much more besides, because by some odd ingenuity of planning, it was where all of the day’s post from all over Dublin eventually wound up. I was offered gloves on the first day but only had the sense to accept them on the second, by which time my princely little palms had been rubbed to ribbons by overhandling. The other seasonal staff were an odd bunch, since no one doing the holiday sorting at Cardiff Lane had chosen this option over a visiting fellowship at the Sorbonne. We were not any of us in that best, most golden, phase of our busy lives. The job attracted people who needed quick cash and had nothing better to do in the run-up to Christmas, and we had little else in common beyond that. The oddball quotient was, therefore, through the roof. There was a guy called Matt who had a tattoo of the word TATTOO on his left hand and didn’t want to talk about it. There was a very tall man who stood separately from us during fag breaks, and we later discovered this was because he was in the remarkable habit of smoking two cigarettes at once, side-by-side, and this something about which he was, perhaps reasonably, bashful. We found this so funny, so enlivening within the vacuum of time and space in which we worked, that we all started doing it. A few of us kept it up the entire time, either out of a need to show some sense of good sport or as a final, depressing admission of just how empty and devoid of external stimuli our lives had become. All day, trucks wheeled into Cardiff Lane by the dozen, showering us in a deluge of letters packed in big scratchy nylon bags. Each day, soundtracked by Christmas hits on the crackly radio that rang out over two acres of trays, crates, parcels and forklifts, we lifted, unbundled, and sorted hundreds of thousands of letters via destination; 33