They Said She Only Sorts the Post — Then the Sorting Frame Read Out His Suspended Round
Gerald's flat hand came down on the sorting frame door and Bridie's fingers were still under it — then he told the whole back room she was only temp cover.
Bridie Nolan has walked the village round for twenty years and run it alone for fourteen months. One mistake now and she loses the round, the pay, and the early visits that four housebound pensioners wait for every morning.
At 6.15 a.m. the strip light was already on and the round book lay propped open in the nearest pigeonhole, her signature fresh at the foot of the page. Gerald Pike let himself in with the brass fob he still wears on his belt, though the key stopped being his fourteen months ago.
"You only sort the post, love," he said, and lifted his hand off the wood.
She finished the pigeonhole she was on before she answered him, which is how she does everything, one sentence at a time.
Then the counter bell rang twice. Sanjay came through from the front in his burgundy polo, saw the scattered elastic bands and the letters fanned under the radiator, and asked Bridie — quietly, with his eyes on the hatch — to let Mr Pike have his way until the area office said otherwise.
By four o'clock a pensioner's letter sat in the wrong pigeonhole, and the Belgian parcel Bridie had logged and scanned at 5.52 a.m. was not in the sack again. The sack had been tied the same way she ties it.
That evening she lifted the round book out of the frame, turned the open page to the counter window, and read the registrar's printed line aloud beside her own signature: ROUNDS SUSPENDED — PARCEL SHORTAGE, UNRESOLVED. Beside number 14. Beside his initials, sharpened in pencil.
Gerald laughed once. Then he stopped.
Where those parcels went, and who signed the record that day, and what the early visits were actually logged as — none of it was on the counter notice.
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