ZAC’S DAILY ROUND

Zac spends his life as a postman...

Zac was a simple enough soul. Even he knew that, and rather liked the self-assessment when he thought of it. To his own mind he’d been born to serve, so serve is what he was going to do. Nothing else really mattered.

But to the beginning, because he didn’t plop perfectly formed onto our streets: he was born, a human child to human parents who doted on him. Of modest means themselves, he had a modest up-bringing and never even bordered on the edge of being what they call spoilt because it was beyond the gift of his parents to spoil him. As a boy growing towards adulthood he was as average as a boy can be. And I’d be prepared to bet that if someone worked out the average age at which a boy first became enamoured of a girl he would fit that age exactly.

Because at precisely the right moment he noticed her. It was Jenny, incidentally, and for the few weeks she entered his life he adored her. Who wouldn’t? Physically, she was far from being anything but pretty. Not beautiful, there were no pretences there, she didn’t go as far as beautiful, but she was pretty and wore the sort of clothes that emphasised that prettiness. And believe it or not the things he really liked when he looked at her were the pristine white socks that were always smartly pulled up to her knees. They spoke of order, to him, smartness, not even a near relative of love, but then he was still young.

But the Jenny’s of this world fade enough soon enough as the boy’s proto-hormones grow more confident and become full grown and he looks for something a little extra, and Judy came along. No white socks here, but the suggestion of breasts tucked into a bra gave her a shape that sent his heart into a spiral of desire, at least they did for a week or two, and he was lost in pleasurable fantasies about her. Until Derek thumped him for liking her because Derek was the school bully and Derek, for a smidgeon of time, said he fancied Judy.

He didn’t stand up to Derek because that’s how the Dereks of this world win. Instead, he formed a serious attachment to a train set he’d been given when he was much younger, and started a train set fanciers club at school because Andrew liked train sets and he liked Andrew. At least, he thought he liked Andrew.

But Andrew rapidly became a disappointment for two main reasons: firstly, he was into heavy sports like rugby as well as little trains, and secondly he wasn’t a girl.

By the time he left school Zac had sorted his desires out and he had a regular girlfriend. She was Lorna, had all the right bits and pieces according to his immature expectation, wasn’t fancied by Derek or any of his bullish clones, and was nice. Plain and simply nice, and nobody could be better than nice, could they?

So he left school and Lorna stuck with him because she liked him with the sort of like that threatened to grow into love if she foolishly let it. Her problem was her niceness. She had ambitions for it. She wanted to be a sort of force in the world with a man at her side who would stand by her if things went pear-shaped, which they often did because Lorna’s niceness just wasn’t strong enough to stand up to the vagaries of the world where niceness was often no more than an unwelcome visitor.

She wanted to be a nurse, and that involved study, going to college, working in the local hospital for long hours during training, and Zac became a postman. Now, there’s no reason why the two shouldn’t co-exist in a home of their own (they were actually living together by the time she started her third year of training, co-habiting, which they tough was very avant-garde), but Zac had come from an old fashioned family (his words) with old fashioned values, and despite the risqué nature of their lives together, expected things to fit in with his own dreams of life.

Which included an inflexible time-table when it came to feeding him as well as the certainty that it would be Lorna and not some pizza delivery boy who provided his sustenance after work.

Lorna’s liking of him soon morphed into a kind of understandable detestation, and she went back her to her mother, in whose loving care she completed her training and won prizes over coming years for her nursing. Apparently she made a first class phlebotomist who hardly ever left a bruise when she extracted blood from her patients.

This left Zac on his own until he met Stella. Stella the star! Stella the lass who would do all those things he believed a woman ought to do, and not have a life of her own. At last, he was potentially happy. But only potentially because Stella had tendency to get pregnant, and Zac wasn’t always sure why. Had he paid more attention to biology lessons when he’d been at school it might have provided him with a clue, but a weird mixture of playground theories and his train set got in the way during the vital fortnight when the subject of human fertility was covered.

And so it was that the years passed, and a growing handful of little people had every right o call him daddy and expect him to tickle them in reply. And when Zac the postman went out on his rounds every day (the same rounds week after month after year, his world ceased to be home but became the streets where he walked his life away.

He got to know where wheezy old Mr Traverne lived and the things he liked to chat about until that asthmatic man died one cold November, and broke Zac’s heart. As far as he was concerned Mr Traverne shouldn’t be allowed to die! He was part of the infrastructure of hs world, and if someone else moved into the old man’s house everything would be confusing and all wrong: he’d be lost.

Then a new house appeared in what had been a space like a broken tooth on the street, almost overnight though overnight had been a couple of months, and he coudn’t come to terms with it. Letters addressed to the Padstows at 44a should have gone to that new house, but Zac didn’t like it, so they didn’t. He posted them next door and let nature or kindly neighbours do the rest, which they mostly did.

But number 44a, besides being an unwelcome interference in the normality of his world, had a surprise for him.

There he was, on a March day with a keening wind telling him to get done quickly, and get home to the warmth and a possibly pregnant Stella, when a voice broke through the spring ice and made him pause.

“Do I know you?” it asked.

He looked at the woman who’d spoken, then looked at the envelope he should have been posting to number 44a but was taking next door. Mrs J. Padstow. No, he didn’t know any Padstows, which was just as well because as far as he was concerned Padstow was a place rather than a person. He went there every summer for his solitary holiday because he knew one of the postmen there and they had a jolly chat about their different rounds. Zac was nothing if he wasn’t adventurous!

“No, I don’t think so,” he replied, annoyed that number 44a had given itself a face.

“I do. I know that I do,” it said, and he felt thoroughly annoyed.

“Mrs Padstow?” he asked, “Mrs J Padstow? No, I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure…”

“When we were kids,” she said, “at Junior school I think it was…”

He looked her up and down. She was his age, probably, so it was possible that by chance he had passed her on a corridor at school and somehow, he didn’t know why, she had remembered him. But it had been a long time ago and his own memory wasn’t that great. Why, he still forgot there was a number 44a!

Then something made him jolt as his eyes still roamed over her. She was pretty, but not beautiful, he told himself, but yes, certainly pretty with a lovely mouth. He’d long loved lovely mouths.

But why was she wearing knee-length white socks? Wasn’t that a bit old fashioned? He wasn’t at all old fashioned, was he, dressed as he was in the shorts uniform of a busy postman.

Then the word came out unbidden, chased from somewhere in his head, and he chirruped “Jenny?”

“So I do know you!” she beamed, “of course I know you! It’s Zac, isn’t it? You wore grey shorts back then, and I loved them! Do you remember way back, when we were friends? Oh, Zac, it’s so good to see you again!”

And there, on the street, with him holding a letter for Miss J Padstow, the years peeled away and blew like dust from his mind. He remembered the girl, sweet she’d been, white socks like now, nice face, the girl called Jenny.

He’d liked her, hadn’t he?

“I’ll put the kettle on, and we can catch up,” she said.

He followed her into the dreaded number 44a. Those socks, they were so white and neat. And he knew what: something had gone right, something in the world, he didn’t know what, but it really had gone right.

How was he going to tell Stella?

© Peter Rogerson 29.08.22

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