LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL

by Ronan Hession

  ‘I’m just filling in; the regular fella will be back tomorrow.’

  Further on, a young woman, still in her pyjamas, shouted after him from her door, something about bending her birthday cards.

  ‘I’m just filling in; the regular fella will be back tomorrow.’

  He had to get an elderly lady to sign for a package in the next street on behalf of her neighbour. ‘They’re never home. Poor kids in crèches all day. I’ll drop it in later. You’re a bit late today aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m just filling in; the regular fella will be back tomorrow.’

  He didn’t stop for lunch, as he always felt self-conscious sitting down and eating his sandwich while wearing the uniform. People didn’t like seeing that sort of thing.

  Hungry Paul continued on his rounds, his bag getting lighter and lighter, doing a job that has existed, largely unchanged, for hundreds of years. To any busy person, burdened with all of life’s responsibilities and preoccupations, Hungry Paul’s lot would seem a bearable one. He didn’t have to decide which of a patient’s limbs to amputate first, or where to invest the life savings of a company’s pensioners. There was no pressure to report fourth quarter losses to the ‘higher-ups’ in HQ or force-feed cold carrots to a fevered toddler. His job, on the few days he did it, involved no agonising decisions or regrets that might spoil the conversation over dinner.

  And yet, in modern vernacular, postal work is a profession that has become synonymous with violent meltdowns. Why would this happen in such an apparently placid line of work, which involves chatting happily to the householders and performing a task that has, throughout history, been shown to be helpful in all ways? Most overworked middle managers would gladly swap their late evening conference calls with the West Coast for the simplicity of the postal worker, walking in the mixed March sunshine, alone with his thoughts. However, such white-collar fantasies fail to consider what it is that bends even the most pacific minds towards self-destruction. Though we may be a species that prizes great minds, we are also terrified of and by our thoughts.

  In prisons, the most extreme and austere punishment that is meted out to errant prisoners—those whose behaviour exceeds even the diabolical standards of incarcerated society—is solitary confinement: the awful fate of being imprisoned with only one’s thoughts for company. With no distractions, one thought billiards another, and an endless internal monologue drowns out the rest of life, bringing dissonance to silence, restlessness to stillness, and anxiety to forethought. A certain type of person, isolated and unsuited to long daily periods of reflection, will eventually think themselves to madness.

  But Hungry Paul seemed to be able to maintain his peace where another man might have declared war on themselves and those around him. What did he think about? The answer is, quite simply, nothing. Hungry Paul had been blessed with a mental stillness which had become his natural state over the years. His mind worked perfectly fine and he had all the faculties of a healthy, if slightly unorthodox, man of his age. He just had no interest in, or capacity for, mental chatter. He had no internal narrator. When he saw a dog he just saw a dog, without his mind adding that it should be on a lead or that its tongue was hanging out like a rasher. When he heard an ambulance siren he just heard an ambulance siren, without noting its Doppler effect or wondering if it was a real emergency or just the driver running late for dinner. And it is in this way that Hungry Paul maintained a natural clarity throughout his day, and stayed apart from the trouble that the world will undoubtedly make for those who look for it.

  At around midday he finished his deliveries and dropped his bag back to the depot. But there was one last letter to deal with before his day was finished. He took his competition entry out of his breast pocket and posted it in the box outside the sorting office, affixing a patchwork of smaller stamps that he had saved up in the back of his wallet. This was all done without any sense of excitement or concern about the competition; his entry was merely an offering. He didn’t so much want to win as help. If some other phrase was selected, then that was fine too.

  The house was empty when he got home. Peter and Helen had left a note on the fridge saying that they had gone off to buy a Buddha at the garden centre. Hungry Paul made himself a peanut butter sandwich and, having failed to find any treats in the cupboard, ate it alone in the kitchen on the seat where he had watched the birds only a few hours before, the feeders already empty again.

  He decided to lie down on the couch and took off his shoes the lazy way, with the toe of one foot prising off the heel of the other, the laces still done up. His feet tingled now that the weight had been lifted from them after a long morning of walking. He dozed off, not minding that he would later wake with that drugged feeling that comes with a second sleep. All around him, the house stood in a state of empty, quiet equilibrium.

  Chapter 8: Don’t use the lifts

  Leonard had been cleaning the fluff out of his keyboard with a paperclip when he received the next set of comments from the author. He had sent her a stock piece of work about Roman noses and chariots as a sort of holding response to keep her off his case while he tried to rustle up some ideas. She loved it. Her covering email was gushing: ‘Now we’re finally getting somewhere,’ like a teacher with a slow child who has just mastered a basic task that the rest of the class learned ages ago. Her comments and corrections were predictably about making it as much like every other Roman book as possible. It would be easy to keep her happy and to fill out the rest of the book on auto-pilot. Leonard didn’t like churning out bland material but when the author took a different view he usually felt that there was no point campaigning. These were commercially produced books and he already had more artistic licence than he ever expected, purely because he backed down on anything important to the author and reserved his creativity for the bits the author didn’t care about or notice. Whenever he lost some argument about content, he would try and make up for it by being more stylish or by sneaking in a phrase that he thought a kid might enjoy learning or asking their parents about, like ‘eyeballing’ or ‘frogmarch.’

  This time though, he felt less comfortable about capitulating and moving on. He wasn’t satisfied with settling for some neatly-handled fact boxes, or digging out some obscure twist on a reworked apocryphal nugget. Whether it was his long-standing beef with the Romans or whether it was a response to the changes that had undoubtedly started to take place within him, he felt a new sense of impetus and creativity about his work. Some children might only ever read one book about the Romans and this one might be it. What if they were turned off history? Or worse: what if they were inspired by the example of the Romans to become their own little Caesars of the playground, making life difficult for the gentle, curious kids Leonard wanted the book to be read by? No, no, no, that wouldn’t do. He couldn’t dispute the Romans’ undoubted success at dominating the continent, and he could not deny their unmatched contribution to ancient civilisation. But were they not achievements for historians and sociologists to write about? Leonard wanted to ignite children’s imaginations about the world around them, and to inspire their curiosity. There would be plenty of time for them to learn the rough lessons of life, but shouldn’t they first be allowed to develop very special ideas about the world? Wasn’t it his role to catalyse the magic that happens when children read encyclopaedias, and especially so when they read them to their parents?

  Leonard remembered getting a set of Our World encyclopaedias from his mother, one by one, every Christmas, birthday, special occasion and, sometimes, just because she wanted to cheer him up. With all his heart he had longed for the complete set: Our Artists, Our Insects, Our Mammals, and two dozen others. He loved getting a new encyclopaedia in the set without any idea what was in it. The notion that you could have favourites or could read some but not others was completely alien to him. Encyclopaedias were supposed to involve a sense of discovery, of openness to whatever came next. He read them in the back of his
mother’s car, at the supermarket, at the dinner table, and in his bed with a torch. Encyclopaedias were books you were meant to immerse yourself in. They created their own worlds with magical pairings of writers and illustrators, using short exciting prose with memorable tableaux, drawn in a way that was meant to look lifelike but not so detailed that a young seven-year-old couldn’t attempt to copy the pictures themselves. Yes, they were factual books, but they weren’t just books of facts. They were storytelling books that used the world around us merely as a starting point, as kindling for a child’s imagination.

  He had always pictured the author and illustrator as intrepid, inseparable friends who wrote the books about facts they had discovered themselves. The books were written and illustrated with such a personal touch that it was hard to imagine that the people involved had not actually seen all the animals and shared campfires with all the tribes in the pictures. As a child, they showed him what life could be like: an adventure undertaken in the name of curiosity alone. He had resolved to do everything in those books: climb Mount Everest, swim in a shark cage, walk on a tightrope over Niagara Falls, and pull himself out of quicksand.

  But when he started working on encyclopaedias years ago as a proof-reader, he got his first exposure to the battery farm methods now used in the professionalised industry, the avuncular enthusiasts long since departed. Stock photos, dry facts, information with exclamation marks. It was still about getting kids excited, but now it was just sugar rush facts. Biggest this or that, gross-out facts, all written with an adult’s sense of what a child would like. Books abounded on vehicles, space, dinosaurs, the human body, but sets of encyclopaedias were on an irreversible decline. You now bought books on things you were already interested in.

  Leonard thought about his mother, who had always managed to find an encyclopaedia he hadn’t read yet, and who must have had to scour bookshops to find them in the days before the internet. He thought about how, whenever he read something he wanted to share as a child, if only because he would burst with amazement if he didn’t, she used the same phrase, a phrase that Leonard hoped every parent used with their children every day: ‘Tell me.’ With her attention undivided, he would gush with every last detail, urging her to share his awe, and pointing at the illustrations as if they were the only proof you could ever need that the world was indeed made of magic. In the past few weeks, as she started to retreat from his life, decades of conversation fragments like these had been stirred up within him. Random, unsorted mental echoes, not yet sweetened into nostalgia.

  Leonard boldly tapped Ctrl-N, the keyboard shortcut that he hoped would launch the life-changing expedition he had always promised himself. He started filling the blank white rectangle with lines and lines of nascent ideas for his own encyclopaedia about the Romans, into which he would put all he understood about the world and the people who lived in it. If he wanted to do something special, and without front-facing angry people, he knew that he would have to illustrate the book himself. Though he was a little rusty, he had always been able to envisage epic drawings for the books he worked on, and often felt let down to see the stale, lifeless scenarios they used in the published works: battle scenes that looked like department store windows, warriors who looked like bored supermodels, and intrepid explorers killing lions while sporting a neat side parting and a Hollywood smile. Why not draw pictures that kids would want to pull out and hang on their walls, full of believable figures from other times and places, captured at their most heroic?

  He wondered about Roman children and whether they were close to their parents. Were the Roman children born outside of marriage looked after in the spirit of Romulus and Remus, the storied founders of the city? He made a list of the toys Roman kids played with like kites and swords, all things that still filled toy boxes to this day. What did the shy Roman children make of it all—did they feel part of the Empire or did they have nightmares about Caesar? What about the public servants who actually designed and engineered the public works projects that the emperors took credit for; the unacknowledged geniuses who built great things and then came home to play with their kids, feeling exhausted and sore. He thought about the slaves who were smarter than their masters, who in a different era would have been as celebrated as Blackadder, Jeeves or Sir Humphrey. His mind became effervescent with pictures and stories of overlooked people who had simply lived their lives as best they could during the Roman Empire. Ordinary, kind, gentle people whose stories he had only ever considered telling in a generic way. Their details had only seemed relevant to him insofar as they typified Roman life. He had seen them as a topic, and in doing so he had made the mistake of dehumanising them, forgetting to make them into interesting people that kids would want to meet, or even be. All along he had been writing them as sort of historical mannequins, modelling generic facts about the period. Depicting them like that must be frustrating for kids, like bringing them to a toy shop where all the toys are in boxes. Kids needed to be able to put down the book, run off and grab their friends and bring the energy from the page into their play.

  Locked away in his headphones, he bashed away at his keyboard like Mozart, writing his own alternative version of the book: a book about all the people who were invisible to history. He felt utterly connected to his work and creativity, timeless and free. It was as if the ideas were flowing from an imaginary classroom of children in his head, all with their hands up, asking him to write about their favourite subject.

  It was like…

  A hand waved in front of him.

  It was like…

  It continued waving in front of him like a windscreen wiper.

  He looked up at a girl who was standing beside him and mouthing something.

  Leonard took his headphones off with snappy overacted impatience.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

  ‘Fire alarm. We have to go.’ The girl with a green jumper and cherry-coloured hair was leaning to one side and double-pointing her thumbs in a direction she indicated was ‘thataway.’

  ‘Fire alarm,’ she repeated. ‘You have to get out of here. Run for your life. Please. If you don’t mind.’

  ‘Is it a fire or a fire drill?’

  ‘Now, I’m not allowed to answer that question and even if I did answer it, it doesn’t matter: you still have to get out of here. Those are the rules.’

  ‘It’s probably just a drill. They do them every once in a while.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You have to go. Women and children could be dying while I’m here talking to you.’

  ‘I’m okay, I’ll take a chance,’ said Leonard, reaching for his headphones.

  ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,’ the girl sang the notes as a scale in the key of C. ‘Sorry to pull rank on you my friend, but you don’t have a choice.’ She pointed to the hi-vis sash she was wearing which said ‘Fire Warden.’

  Leonard gave in and walked huffily towards the door. ‘No need to thank me for saving your life,’ she called behind him.

  He pushed the button for what must be the slowest lift in the world and tried to trace back the thread of his thoughts about the book, getting the feeling that he’d lost a little momentum, like when a sneeze nearly happens but doesn’t.

  ‘Hey, hey, hey, you can’t use the lift in a fire situation! Everybody knows that.’ His fire warden friend had followed him out, pegging him for a trouble maker.

  ‘How do I get down then?’

  ‘Most people use the stairs, but you can also abseil or climb the outside of the building like Spiderman if you know how to do that. C’mon, stop being difficult. Disobeying a fire warden is seven years bad luck.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be wardening the other floors?’

  ‘Nope. I’m Floor 3 only. Other floors have lesser fire wardens so I imagine the body count on those will be pretty high. Look, can you not just go assemble yourself at the corner between the park and the museum with all the others
. Please?’

  Leonard did what he was told and as he walked off she blew a little whistle that was on a string around her neck, which startled him and gave her a giggle.

  At the assembly point, the girl with the cherry-coloured hair carried a clipboard and counted up everyone, as the people from Floor 3 chatted light-heartedly, some wishing they’d brought coats, others wondering if they had time to get a coffee before returning to the building.

  The girl cupped her hands into a megaphone and thanked everyone for their cooperation. As they all filed back to the building, some young guys joked flirtatiously with their colleagues about one last wish before they all perished in the fire. Leonard hurried back to his desk and started typing a few sentences, but the moment had gone and with it his inspiration. He decided to go onto the internet for a while, surfing aimlessly and brainlessly, before giving up and heading for a cup of tea.

  He stood in the kitchenette and waited for the kettle to boil, checking his reflection in the microwave door. There was some stubble he’d missed during his preoccupied shave that morning, and, dumbest of all, he was still wearing his single-pocket, paisley pyjama top, having forgotten to change it in his rush out of the door that morning. Just as he was bending down, looking in the back of the bottom cupboard for some sugar, a loud peeping noise sounded behind him, taking two years off his life expectancy.

  ‘Hi there. Glad you survived the fire.’ It was the girl with the cherry-coloured hair.

  ‘You almost gave me a heart attack. What are you doing?’

  ‘Oh, just thought I’d come and say hello. A fire warden needs to know who she’s protecting, you know, in case I need to notify next of kin.

  ‘Actually, I think I kinda, sorta know who you are,’ she continued. ‘Are you Mark Baxter, BEd, the guy who wrote all the Facts at My Fingertips series? I’ve seen you working on them at your desk. They’re great books. You’re really good.’