The front door closed in his face. He slowly turned from the doorstep and started up the road towards the next house down, shaking his head ruefully. It was the latest missed sale in what had become a long list of missed sales in this new-build neighbourhood of shuttered façades. In his day the straight strip of land running under the road bridge was the local train station, before Beeching had his way and marked the end of the line. Now it was lined with clustered red-bricks. But he could still hear the whistling and puttering, envision the coal dust gently settling along the street, over the glass of the show-home that sparkled at the entrance to the estate. He remembered waving his soon-to-be wife off on a day-trip to London, meeting her return to the platform in the early evening with a bouquet of roses in the days when they were still courting. His heart tightened.
What was ‘Googling it’ anyway? The phrase echoed in his hearing aid, those times when he was invited inside to explain his business. He was harmless enough to be allowed indoors, a curiosity in an immaculately pressed suit tugging a trolley stacked with books behind him. The mothers perched on settees and bounced restless babies on their knees as he set out his stall, leafing through hardbacks as the fathers watched impassively from the sidelines with crossed arms, rolling their eyes in response to the occasional furtive glances of their better halves. Some rare times there would be a sale, the tome left squatting on the arm of a sofa in lieu of a bookshelf. But oftentimes in the end they would just shake their heads, “Sorry,” and he would painstakingly repack and bid them farewell. The children, for the most part, were unmoved by his presence, sprawled in front of televisions or hunched with fingers curled around the video game controllers to which they seemed permanently tethered. What had happened to these young folk?
Fellow pensioners kept him going. Cups of sweet tea and genuine interest, once they’d fetched their reading glasses. Many of them had old out-of-date encyclopaedias; they’d grown up with them. Given pride of place as the household’s store of knowledge, their dog-eared volumes sat, well-thumbed and within easy reach of the armchair, overlooking lace doilies and china figurines, dusty crystal decanters and dead flies. These were the easiest sales: people with the time and respect for new knowledge, people who had stored up questions about the world bustling around them that remained unanswered. After he’d left, they would look up ‘Google’, but their new book offered no clues: its yellowed pages were last published in 1989.
Matilda wound round his legs, mewing. He shook her food from the box, placed the bowl on the dining room table amongst his papers. It was easier than bending down. He had moved out of the office long ago after his colleagues had left one by one; it was just him now running the business from home. He settled down to prepare this month’s postal update. He still loved this part of the job because it was so personal; he didn’t need to open the box file to lookup each customer’s interests – the sheaf of questionnaires filled with childishly over-large handwriting – he knew them all by heart. The snap binder punctuated the quiet of the house as he moved through subject, taking out information sheets and sliding each one into an A4 envelope. Science: the first patent for a genetically engineered animal had been issued to researchers at Harvard University. Technology: the advent of digital cellular phones promised a coming communications revolution. Politics: the Liberal Democrats, a new British political party, had formed. He hefted the envelope, lips pursed to moisten the seal, but was interrupted by the unexpected ring of the telephone. He couldn’t remember when it had last rung. Could it be a new customer? The bulging envelope slipped to the floor, forgotten.
“Yes,” he confirmed, “that’s us. How can I help?”
The woman’s voice lilted on the other end of the line. She sounded affable, if a little scatty. “I’ve mean meaning to give you a call for such a long time,” she emphasised, “but you see we live out of the country now, in Spain. We’re back at our old place at the moment – our neighbours keep an eye on it for us – and I’m just going through the most enormous pile of post! You really wouldn’t believe how much can pile up over a few years; we could barely get the front door open!”
“Oh dear,” he said, as a familiar feeling – one he associated more with a closing front door – set in, “that sounds like a terrible inconvenience.”
“Yes,” she trilled, “it was a bit of a challenge! But we’re getting on top of it now, I think, which is why I called.”
He was conscious of the enthusiastic crunching of cat food, loud in the pauses between his answers. Matilda had her back to him; he wrinkled his nose in distaste and turned slightly away. “Go on…” he offered.
“Well, we bought a subscription from you, many years ago, for our son, David. Of course, he’s all grown up now with his own children, and, you see, we moved away ourselves. So, we’ve never got round to cancelling it, I’m afraid! Our surname is-”
“Clarke.” He knew already. “It’s no problem at all, madam.” They went through the formalities, and he wished her all the best with the remainder of her postal backlog. Shooing Matilda away, he lifted the ledger and, using a ruler, neatly marked a double-line through the surname. It was the last one in the book.
Related article here. Photo from here.
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