Bridges

A Story by Jostein Kasse

Monday was my first day on the new job. In the morning we'd delivered a tall and heavy fridge-freezer to a house in South London and after we'd struggled to carry the unit through the first hallway it became wedged between the internal door frame. After tipping and tilting, we managed the tight squeeze, but somewhat problematically for us there was a wall that immediately jutted out to the left-hand-side to make the task even more arduous. As I pulled the dead weight of the structure, standing from the lower tier, before three hallway stairs, the higher fridge-freezer door uncoupled loose, and I stood holding the bulky white plastic in my hand.

The house was being renovated into separate rental flats and there were two construction workers inside the building who had previously allowed us in. They attempted, but couldn't attach the door back onto its moorings, "this is not my job", said one dissatisfied man, and the door was promptly handed back to me. The two crew members I had arrived with disappeared out the front and left me with the puzzle that was in need of a solution. Two minutes later we were up and running again and J came back into the house and we maneuvered the delivery into the kitchen.

After lunch time we had been given the assignment of delivering a sofa to an apartment that seemed more-than-likely from the given number that it would be in a high-rise block of flats. We drove to Battersea and we were scanning every block of flats we could see on the sides of the roads for place names as the Sat-Nav, it seemed, had become crazy and in need of psychotherapeutic aide. We turned onto a side street and the driver S pointed to the two chimneys of the famous power station jutting upwards toward sky that had become an unlikely tourist attraction after the Pink Floyd jacket sleeve for the album Animals, and he said, "that's the power station, and that...", he said, pointing to the right, "is Battersea dog's home".

We parked up the van by a block of flats along Sopwith Way, and walked over to the embankment of the river Thames, and I saw for the first time what appeared to be a jazzy railway bridge composed of bold and bright colours on its frontage with the striking word POWER horizontally stretching along the bridge from one-side-to-the-other.

We weren't certain which block of flats we needed to be in, it seemed there were several blocks, and the Irishman J, and the driver S looked for clues on maps printed on plastic plates that were affixed to short stocky stands in the gardens. Underneath the bridge was a man in uniform and the two delivery men ambled over to him and asked for directions. After a short discussion I saw the expressions etched across their countenances which appeared to me to have proven unfruitful and they disappeared shaking their heads from side-to-side under the bridge toward where I could see there was another block of flats.

I'd bought a new I-phone on the Sunday afternoon as my LG had become overburdened with photographs and seemed to be in constant need of having to have storage space freed up, the glass screen had also cracked. I'd wanted to test out the new gadget's camera and assess its capabilities. The bridge appeared to me to look as though it had been designed by Wassily Kandinsky and Zio Ziegler after having sipped South American cactus juice at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. I took three photographs, also taking several snaps of Chelsea Bridge. After searching the I-phone's WI-FI settings I was able to establish an online connection and after having filled in a form I uploaded the images to a new Instagram account I'd recently opened the day before in the vain hope that I could escape Paparazzi intrusion. The buzzing flies had infested my other accounts.

S and J came back around and they were still uncertain as to which block we were looking for and we got back into the van and S saw a man working in the underground car-park near to where we'd parked up. S rolled the van forward, and with a push of a button, lowered the lateral window. The man spoke with a European accent and he said that the very parking lot we were looking for was the one we had parked the van right up next to, we had found it! we were here!, but it turned out we would need to drive around to the front of the building again and speak to the concierge for a permit.

S drove the van around to the front of the building and the three of us got out and S and J spoke to the concierge. They were told that we didn't need a permit, we could just park up without one for a short durated delivery it seemed. We drove back around the corner from whence we had just come.

The previous day I had offered a minor insult to British intelligence on my new Twitter account where I'd exclaimed "that was quick for British intelligence" as I'd recognised from having scanned over Daily Mail images that they were already onto my new accounts. After we had unloaded the sofa from the van, J and I carried the heavy item of furniture through the underground parking area with a man on either side, and I could hear a whir and rumble of a helicopter flying low over the area. The helicopter was circling around it seemed. That was quick for British Intelligence, I thought.

After passing two lift shafts, having walked past a bright blue Lotus and toward a red Ferrari, we reached the third lift shaft, it was numbered three, and we maneuvered the sofa through the doors, and when I saw the size of the minuscule lift I said to J, "there's no way this will fit in there". Rewind; we carried the sofa back to the van, careful to lift over the bollards so as not to cause damage to the material. This job was a heavy sweat.

We were supposed to wait for the lady who had asked for the sofa to be delivered, she was away from the property and had spoken to S on the phone. I needed refreshment and so I walked a short way over to a store and bought a carton of chocolate milk that was made from oats and not cows and I bought a Galaxy bar to munch. I took more photographs on the way there, and then on the way back. The lady didn't show and we had other jobs to do so we left. We were still out working after 5pm which was our clocking off time, our last job was delivering bookshelves to a pleasant young woman who was holding a newborn baby in her arms.

The following morning, which was Tuesday 14th of August, I arrived downstairs to make coffee and toast for breakfast and the TV set was on in the lounge area and as I stirred the coffee in the mug from the kitchen, I saw a news like item on the screen from the BBC which presented to us that a man had driven a vehicle into 15 cyclists and multiple pedestrians on Westminster Bridge.

I quietly mouthed, more to myself than the room, "this is fake", and then one of the residents who was sitting in an armchair in the corner eating wheat Shreddies drenched with milk from a bowl, said between mouthfuls, "the chances of this not being a terrorist attack are very slim".

It seemed fake to me.