Dearest Milton James by N.R. Walker

Chapter Two

“So all theseparcels and packages are just full of stuff people tried to send to someone?” I asked.

Mr Beige—I mean, Mr Pollard. I really had to stop calling him beigeful names in my head because they would undoubtedly start coming out my mouth. Mr Pollard was showing me through the warehouse.

He nodded. “Yes. Most we can reunite with its intended recipient, some with its sender. Takes some sleuthing, but that’s what we do. We have about a seventy per cent success rate.” He seemed very proud of this.

“Why does it go so awry?” I asked. “I mean, how do people get it so wrong?”

He paused at one shelf and plucked a random parcel. It was a brown box about the size of a shoebox, and there’d been some obvious water damage. He turned it over in his hands. “Label was ruined, the writing disappeared when it got wet. No return address.”

“So it just sits here unopened forever?”

“No.” He put the box back. “We open it to see if there is any ownership evidence.”

“You open it? Isn’t that some federal offence? You can’t just open someone else’s mail.”

“Us and customs are the only agencies who don’t require permission to open any mail.”

I was a little surprised by this. “What kind of ownership evidence are you looking for?”

Mr Pollard shrugged. “Anything from letters, photographs, names on cards, telephone numbers, invoices, email addresses. Something that will give us an ID. That kind of thing.”

I thought about that for a second. “Photographs? Like in the olden days?”

He chuckled. “You’d be surprised. Not all photos are digital. I know it’s not easy for someone of your age to believe.”

“I’m twenty-seven,” I offered for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Probably because I looked sixteen.

“I know. Your father told me.”

I made a face. “Did he? I tuned him out when he was talking, sorry.”

“I could tell. And so could he.”

I shrugged. “So how do you use photographs to identify and locate someone? Do you have face recognition software or something?” I looked around . . .  There was no way this place had that kind of technology.

He chuckled. “Ah, no. But there might be photographs with names written on the back or a group staff photo with a company logo on it, who we can then call. Once, there was a school class photo from the 80s, amongst other things in the package. There was a handwritten note that said, ‘Dear Joe, found the photo you wanted. Love Mum.’ Looked at the photo with all the student names; there was only one Joseph. And just like that, we had surname and a school and town.”

“Uh, that’s actually like police detective work.”

That earned me a smile. “We call it detective work, unofficially, of course.”

“That’s pretty cool.” I hated to admit that I was a little impressed. “What’s the best thing you’ve ever found?”

“Jewellery, expensive artwork, war medals. A surprising amount of antiques.”

“Anything gross? Like severed fingers?”

He eyed me oddly. “Uh, no.” Then he shrugged. “We do see some live animals from time to time.”

Now it was my turn to be horrified. “In the post?”

He nodded, then sighed. “Usually small critters like lizards and turtles on their way to overseas somewhere. Though most of our work is very mundane, it’s still very rewarding when we can deliver something once thought lost.”

“What happens to the stuff that can’t be returned?”

“Depends what it is. If it’s valuable, like jewellery or cash, it stays here for a year. If it’s just letters or cards or clothes, maybe three months. Then it all goes to government auction.”

“You sell it?”

He nodded. “The government does, yes. Everything from gift cards to Gucci shoes, PlayStation consoles to power tools. You name it.”

Wow.

He showed me the loading dock, the huge metal trolley cages that were filled with parcels and letters that we were supposed to process. Then he showed me how to use the digital scanner thing and how the computer software worked. Then he had me take a few mail items and enter them into the system.

Everyone else just did their own thing. Theo wheeled his cage trolley down the aisles of alphabetised packages, then came back with something, scanned it, typed on his computer for a bit, then hurried back down the aisle.

Cherry sat at her desk, opened some letters, and searched up some address on Google Maps. She squinted at the screen a lot, kept her head down mostly, went wandering off down the aisles, and came back with her nose in a different set of papers.

Denise was the one on the beeping machine, which turned out to be a cherry picker for reaching the top shelves. “Aerial work platform,” Mr Pollard corrected me. “Denise is also a licensed forklift driver, so if you need anything moved or retrieved from the top shelves, give her a holler.”

I didn’t see much of Paul . . .  I heard whistling coming from the dark depths of aisle J-K-L and I assumed it was him.

But everyone kept very busy. Piles of letters, parcels, packages, even luggage. Who the hell sent luggage in the post?

I even did some parcels from overseas with barcodes that were surprisingly easy to track down. Well, easy as putting a submission form to the UK postal service portal with the barcode details, and through the magic of the internet, sender and recipient information was retrieved.

Theo took a phone call from someone who was looking for a birthday gift from China that never arrived. They had a serial number, so Mr Pollard had me look it up and, lo and behold, it was being held in aisle S. I took my little scanner thingy down to that section and matched the barcode.

“Is that it?” I asked excitedly.

Mr Pollard pulled the box out, double-checked the scanner, and smiled. “We have a match.”

Oh my god. We had a match.

“We have a match!” I echoed, far too excited for this stupid job I was forced to do.

Theo confirmed the recipient’s proper address. We labelled it correctly and put it back into the system.

How on earth was it that exciting and rewarding to send someone their mail? I had no clue, but it was. And I even tried to tamp down my enthusiasm. “Can I do another one?” I asked.

Mr Pollard smiled. “You can do hundreds.”

“Oh.”

Well, one was exciting . . . a hundred sounded a lot like work. But I did another letter. The front was marked Not at this address and there was no return address. Inside was a beauty company’s promotional discount voucher. It was a mass-produced marketing thing and it was a dead end. It went into the bin marked for shredding.

Not as exciting as the first one, but still.

Soon enough it was lunchtime, for which I had to raid the vending machine because I’d arrived here this morning with nothing but my father and a shitty attitude.

Everyone seemed nice, bar Paul. I mean, he did offer to share his lunch with me. Which was kind and generous, I’ll admit. But I’d seen those episodes on the crime channel where serial killers have bodies in their freezers, and Paul’s lunch looked decidedly suspicious.

“It’s vegan,” Paul said, still trying to convince me to eat half his food. “Plant-based pork.”

Plant-based pork . . .

“No thanks, but I’m interested to know which plant they use for that. Like what actual plant goes into plant-based food. Is it a general garden variety? And why don’t they specify?”

“I think it’s soy,” Paul replied. He read the label. “Textured soy protein.”

I tried not to grimace. “Sounds delicious. But I’m good, thanks.” I held up my vending machine packet of sodium and saturated fats disguised as potato crisps and realised his lunch actually sounded better than mine. “I’ll remember to bring something tomorrow.”

Tomorrow . . .

Would I even be here tomorrow?

“Anyway,” Paul said, his thin lips in a sly smile. “Hurry up and finish your plant-based lunch. We got a lot to get done this arvo.”

A trucker serial killer with a feisty sense of humour. I liked it. My lunch was indeed also plant-based. I chuckled. “Touché.”

And so, for the next few hours, Paul showed me how he did things. His tips were to wear just one earbud to listen to your favourite ‘jams’—his word, not mine, dear god—and still hear what’s going on in the warehouse. Wear a coat in winter or you’ll freeze to death. “Label everything that goes into the fridge, though the food stealing has stopped since Glenda died, so draw your own conclusions with that,” he said.

“How did Glenda die?” I asked as we packed new parcels away on aisle T-U. “She looked nice in the photo on the wall. Strong too, to hold an accordion that big. And all those cats . . .”

Paul almost smiled. “No one knows. She didn’t turn up for work one Monday. Julian tried calling but no answer, so he called the cops to do a welfare check. Turns out she’d died on the Friday before.”

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

“They found her in her chair. Rumour has it the cats ate her fingers. Can’t open the tins of cat food, ya see, so the critters gotta eat something.”

Aaaaaand just when I was starting to think he wasn’t a serial killer.

I tried to play it cool. “Guess there’s a lesson in that for everyone.”

He stopped pushing the cage. “Guess there is.”

He took down a box from the shelf and added a letter to it, scanned the letter and the box, and entered in the date and code so we could find it should anyone ever claim it.

“So what’s Mr Pollard’s story?” I asked, ever so smoothly.

“Mr Pollard?”

Mr Brown. Mr Sexy Beige. “Uh, Julian.”

“Oh, he’s okay. Keeps to himself mostly. Lets us do our thing. As long as the work’s done, he doesn’t care.”

“He wears a lot of brown.”

Paul snorted. “Never seen him wear any other colour. Not like you. With your peacock hair and matching boots.”

I looked down at my Doc Martens. “These are called Colour Pop blue. And my hair is ninety per cent black. The matching blue streak is called Bad Boy blue.”

“Do all the girls like it?”

“I wouldn’t know. The boys do though.” I just threw that out there. I’d never been shy about my gayness. “And when I get sick of the blue, I just bleach the strip of blue out and change colour. Last one was pink. I have the matching boots for that as well.”

Paul met my eyes and smiled. “Trendy. Back when I was your age, all the rage for guys was long mullets and moustaches.”

“Nice. Love a good porn ’stache.”

He laughed and kept pushing his cage, slowly filing away all the undelivered parcels. I had to jog a little to catch up. “So, what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever found in a parcel?”

“A box full of dildos.”

I snorted. “Nice.”

“Used.”

“Gross.” I shuddered. “Is there anything that lives in infamy? Something that still gets talked about? Or even better, something that no one talks about? Like you all just pretend never happened?”

“We get weird things all the time. Like false teeth, wooden legs, a whole range of sex toys, you name it.” He shrugged. “Nothing we don’t really talk about because it’s gross. But there is that pile of letters in Julian’s office that we don’t really talk about.”

“What letters?”

He sighed and pushed his cage to the next stop. “A pile of letters from the 1960s or 70s, I think. I dunno what’s in them. They were here long before me. Found ’em all bundled up in the back of a pigeonhole; must’ve got lost a long time ago. But he read ’em, Julian did. And he tried to find the owner.” He slid a box onto the shelf and did the scanner thing. The machine beeped and he looked at me. “Couldn’t tell ya what’s in them letters. Only that they’re all addressed to the same man, no address at all. Like he was writing to Santa Claus or Jesus or something.” He rolled his eyes. “We get a lot of those too.”

He had my undivided attention. This had intrigue written all over it. Not just the letters, but why Mr Sexy Taupe kept them after all this time. “What’s the name? On the letters, who are they all addressed to?”

He frowned as he tried to recollect. “Um . . . dunno. Oh.” He tapped his finger on the cart. “That’s it. They’re all labelled to a Dearest Milton James.”