SMOKO Chapter 1

Smoko is available on Amazon. A second paperback edition will be published by Piwaiwaka Press soon.

I sat on an uncomfortable chair with a thick manual in front of me. As I read about the history of the postal service, two more trainees, a woman and a man, arrived.  

‘Cutting it fine, guys,’ Norm told the newcomers, tapping his watch. ‘All right, eight-thirty, let’s get started. Don’t worry, I’m gonna keep things light but make sure you listen, eh! I learnt to spot daydreamers in the army. You don’t want to head into combat with somebody thinking about how to cook a Thai green curry.’

Norm didn’t bore us with endless details from the manual. However, he spent an inordinate amount of time on security stuff. He opened his eyes crazy wide when addressing us, making everything he said seem important.

‘You should hide your uniform behind your towels on the washing line, so it doesn’t get stolen. We don’t want someone impersonating a postie terrorising the neighbourhood.’

Was he serious? I couldn’t tell. What did my fellow inductees think? The woman chewed her pen and rubbed a red spot on her cheek. The man repeatedly passed his hand over his head, as though looking for hair he’d lost years ago. Their expressions gave nothing away.

Norm warned us to be honest about recording the number of letters we sorted. ‘If the team leader doesn’t get you for writing up too many letters, the algorithms will.’

We got paid for the number of letters sorted rather than hours worked. What if I was slow?

After a couple of hours in the training room, Norm gave the okay for us, his three newbies, to stand up and stretch. He then took us for a look around the aeroplane-hangarlike depot.

‘Look at these sorting machines.’ Norm pointed at a gaggle of contraptions that looked like giant printers from the 1980s topped with black induction pipes. ‘Nine years ago they cost eighty million. Now they’re done, obsolete. Can only read envelopes with barcodes, not actual addresses. No good.’

Eighty million for the machines in Wellington or the entire country? How could a barcode give an address?

Before I could ask, a guy with a ginger beard and hands black with grease jumped out from behind a partly disassembled mammoth. ‘They wanted these bloody things scrapped, but now they’ve changed their minds. Can’t afford new ones, so I’m putting them back together again.’

‘Typical, eh,’ Norm said.

The man with greasy hands looked satisfied with this comment and got back to work. He started tapping the side of a machine with a spanner, which caused an arrhythmic beat to echo around the depot.

For me, this inefficiency of taking things apart and putting them together again was good news. I’d feared the post office would be a super-organised place to work. I conquered the urge to ask about the eighty million dollars and the barcodes. Experience has taught me not to show too much curiosity too soon.

The other two trainees lived less than ten kilometres from the central depot and so didn’t get lunch money. Norm and I did. We had an allowance of thirty dollars each on his company credit card. Norm chose a flash gastropub for lunch. He was flirty with the waitress. It surprised me she didn’t seem to mind. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty.

Norm had asked how old we thought he was in the training room. Before anybody could answer, he said, ‘Forty-six. Don’t look it though, eh?’

We all nodded. He did look good for his age.

After the waitress had smilingly taken our orders, Norm’s mouth turned my way. To stop him from talking shop, I asked about his military days.

‘You’ll never get to that level physically, never experience those extremes,’ he said referring to his training to get into the Special Forces. ‘After fourteen days, I was ripped as, mate. But on the last exercise, jumping off the top of a four-metre wall, I broke my ankle. I got invited to do the training again when I healed, but decided I’d wanted to join the Special Forces for the wrong reasons.’

After the army, he worked as security for weapons inspectors in Saddam’s Iraq. ‘I reported to Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, who in turn reported to Kofi Annan. I was only a couple of steps from George Bush. If I said, “Let’s get out of here” when inspecting a facility, we got the fuck out!’

Eyeballs popping out of his skull, Norm used what was available on the table to reinforce my understanding of the chain of command. The Secretary-General of the United Nations Annan was the saltshaker, Blix the pepper, and Norm himself the large tomato sauce bottle. As he arranged these objects, I noticed the vascularity of his forearms. The bastard was in great shape.

The waitress, still smiling, brought Norm his Thai green mussels with ciabatta bread. His comment regarding daydreaming about cooking Thai green curry during the morning session indicated a delicious lunch had been on his mind. He looked disapprovingly at my choice of Caesar salad.

The training session proved to be an easy half-day of theory. Driving home, my stomach and mood felt light. I congratulated myself for having a salad for lunch, and for making progress towards my first postie payday.

To celebrate, I took a walk in the park over the road from my flat. I admired the skeletal oak trees standing out against the green bush, bent down to smell the wet grass, and smiled at a family walking their dog. Things I would never normally do. This euphoric outing was cut short as wind-driven horizontal rain arrived.

In my room, I quickly dozed off with Brian Eno’s Music for Airports in my ears. I occupied the flat’s only bedroom. For her own makeshift sleeping space, my flatmate Rachel had curtained off half the lounge. My room was big and the rent cheap: maybe forty dollars less than what you’d expect to pay a week. It had been the second place I visited on my flat hunt. The guy moving out told me Rachel, the leaseholder, camped in her van half the time. I texted this Rachel. She said the other guy approved of me, so I could move in. I knew it wouldn’t be the perfect place to live but I was too lazy to look for anywhere else. In terms of setting my room up, I had bought a bed but no other furniture.

After a forty-five-minute nap, I woke up refreshed and ready for an evening of YouTube videos. I would need a coffee and a tuna sandwich with canned corn and peas on the side—one of my go-to meals when in saving mode. Rachel arrived home as I waited for the kettle to boil. In her fifties, she limped because of hip and ankle issues.

‘Hi, what time did you knock off? You were working today, right?’ She asked.

‘Yeah, I was. Pretty early today.’

Small talk and coffee made, I hurried to my bedroom, plate in one hand, mug in the other. I put the plate and mug on the floor by the bed and shut the door. To eat, I sat on the side of the bed with the plate in my lap.

Before touching my computer, I fastidiously wiped any residual tuna oil off my fingers with a paper towel. Satisfied my hands were clean, I opened my browser and navigated to YouTube. But what to watch? As I tried to think of something, the bedroom door opened. Rachel shuffled in weighed down by a bulky dehumidifier clutched to her stomach. She put the machine down and fumbled with the plug.

‘Rachel, what are you doing?’

She turned her head and regarded me with surprise. Her jaw dropped making her look like a gaping sideshow clown in a carnival game. If I’d had a ping pong ball to throw, I would have aimed for her mouth, even though there was no prize to win. Composing herself, Rachel gave me a sheepish grin.

‘Ed? I forgot you were here.’

What? Was she senile at such a tender age? We’d spoken in the kitchen fifteen minutes ago.

‘I’ve got to put the dehumidifier on—it’s part of the rental agreement. We’ve had black mould here before. Sorry I didn’t knock but you wouldn’t have heard me with those thingies in your ears. What are they called?’

‘Earbuds’

‘I see. Can you hear me or are you lip reading?’

‘I’m not listening to anything right now.’

‘And those work without wires? Are you sure they aren’t radioactive and give you cancer?’

A joke? Her weathered face, long even now that she’d regathered her jaw, gave nothing away. She waited, either for a laugh or an explanation. How could I explain a Bluetooth connection? I didn’t understand how it worked myself. I decided to ask my own irreverent question.

‘Didn’t your generation call the radio wireless?’

‘I’m not that old. I’m of the Walkman generation. Great gizmos. Their only issue was the headphone wires always got tangled and eventually stopped working because the copper inside broke.’

‘I had the same problem with my Discman as a kid.’ 

‘Right, we’ve got something in common then. I guess wireless is great as long as the microwaves they use to beam the music don’t make you sterile. I’ll let you get on with it. The hum of the dehumidifier won’t bother with your uh … earbuds. Why don’t you just call them earphones?’

A rhetorical question. She turned on the machine and closed the door behind her. Rachel’s having come into my room unannounced worried me. However, the interruption did have one positive result—it gave me an idea for what to watch on YouTube. Rachel and her marvelling at wireless earbuds reminded me of an old TV show I’d seen reruns of many years before. In the show, a British wizard time travels from 1066  to 1970. Initially, modern technology, in the form of a red tractor, terrifies the wizard. He thinks the tractor is a dragon. Then he discovers something he likes: the magic of electrickery, which allows one to summon up tiny suns. From then on, a flashing light anywhere in the village means the pesky wizard is flicking a light switch on and off, laughing to himself like a small child. I could sympathise with the wizard’s fear of new technology, specifically in the form of a vehicle. The suburban mail depot I’d be working at was trialling a new electric delivery vehicle. I felt nervous about driving anything except a car with automatic transmission. Once I’d hired a truck to move house and managed to crash it into a wall. The only time I’d tried to ride a motorbike I’d fallen off. Would these electric delivery vehicles require good balance? I’d never mastered the skateboard tricks my friends had due to my bad balance … heck, even riding a bicycle seemed like a challenge. Delivering the mail on foot would have been my choice. However, walking routes were confined to built-up or hilly areas in Wellington City. Out in my area of far-flung suburbia, until now it’d always been bikes.

I wasted several hours watching the lightweight series about the wizard. Then I felt sleepy again and barely had the energy to get up and turn off the humming dehumidifier. In the bathroom, I combatted my tuna breath by gargling Listerine. I would be assaulting my gullet with canned fish in another twelve hours, as apart from a few gingernuts, tuna was all I had to take for morning tea. It annoyed me to discover that Rachel had been using my toothpaste. I’d bought a new tube a week ago, and now had to squeeze hard to get anything out of it.  

That night I dreamt of Norm and Hans Blix visiting a suspected weapons-making facility in Baghdad.

‘Look what we have here, Hans, bloody black mould-making machines.’ 

‘Ja. Saddam is inventive with biological weapons,’ Hans said patting the side of one of the machines that looked suspiciously like mail sorters. ‘Black mould spores are like mustard gas for people’s lungs.’ Hans’s German accent was stronger in my dream than when I’d seen him on the telly.

‘I’ve got this. Nothing some plastic explosive can’t handle,’ Norm said, sticking what looked like a big piece of chewing gum on each machine.

Instead of an explosion, my alarm went off—ten to six, time to get up. I ventured into the kitchen to prepare my bowl of Weet-Bix and a cup of instant coffee. The kitchen and lounge were open-plan, so I could hear Rachel snoring gently behind her curtain. After wolfing down my breakfast, I washed my bowl and spoon and ignored her dirty plates that had been in the sink for several days.

 

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