Charity Angou
Care of: Central Post Office
1st of the 10th
Dear Adelaide
I am starting to get the hang of the language here. When the stallholders at the market try to offer me over-ripe fish and stringy beans I can tell them no. I can call them a filththief and a damnpervert (I won’t translate those words). They always try it when it rains. The covers on their stalls only shelter them and their goods, so people are in a hurry, won’t check, or if they do won’t argue, or if they do will take them anyway if they outlast them. You can always see, there’s no hiding imperfections.
There’s a saying in the city. If you ask how things are they reply with “Can’t always rain.” Well maybe it can’t but it always seems to when I look through the window or go out.
They move us again and again. The city is always being built and rebuilt. There’s not that much land between the hills and the sea, no great spread. Instead old houses are torn down and new blocks built. My remittance is not so generous as to cover both a new, efficient apartment and my books and studies, so I live in rooms high up in an old house. Another old house, after the last two were closed to be replaced. Rumour is there’s six months until the owners come to clear us out of this one. My neighbours are nonchalant about this. I am already looking for somewhere new.
You will laugh but I have had to learn to sew. There is always furniture, if not left in the rooms, stored in the house, tucked away in a box room or basement and friends and neighbours will bring them out. What there aren’t, what there never is, are curtains. Without them it is impossible to sleep. All these old houses, these garrets and attic rooms I live in, they all have different sizes of windows. So I must bring my old ones, cut and sew to fit.
My current rooms have one high window, like a door, that looks out over the city, the gleaming, rain slick roofs reflecting like mirrors. Beyond them the harbour, where ships lurk like half seen monsters. I sewed together two thick curtains to cover this one. On the other side are many small windows, from hand sized to suitcase sized, each looking out to the blank off-white faces of newly built blocks. These I had to cut the old curtains to fit.
Adelaide, you ask how I spend my time here, how I live. As I said I study, in the archives on top of the hill, and the library by the harbour. I learn the language. I have friends here, the neighbours from previous houses. Simon and Gilda like to take me to cafes where poets must shout their verses, trying to be heard above the rain beating on the window and the scream of the steam-powered drink machines. Tomas and I have haunted basement bars, blacked out except when someone opens the door, where musicians play quiet laments by flickering lamplight, drinking sour peach wine and bitter seaman’s beer.
Perhaps you meant how I earn my keep. My uncle sends me a remittance. At first this was difficult. I would go to the post office every day and they would not find it, looking in the parcel room, in the poste restante pigeonholes, in the outgoing mail boxes or the dead letter room. They could not pronounce or spell my name. They would look in all the wrong places. Now I am starting to speak they still cannot find it, but I can insist on them looking until they do, if not on my first visit, then on my second. The locals write their letters in thick black lines, claiming them easier to read against bright white or pale brown in the full light than the curves that make the elegant handwriting we were taught. I am not sure this is true. It is not that they can not understand the outside world, it is rather that they have no interest in it. A curious attitude for the postwomen of the city.
It will be best if you keep sending letters to the post office rather than my rooms, which may change, or the letters go astray if they misread the address. If you do send letters. Adelaide, you know that I will not return. That I cannot return. And that you must never come here. My uncle sends a remittance and in return I look after his affairs here. When a ship comes in there are delicate parcels, items that must not see the light of day. I collect them from the harbour then take them up to the offices of the haulage companies by the old city gate. From there they are taken into the interior. I do not know the contents of these packages and I do not ask nor speculate. No doubt I am assisting in something unseemly, a very small transgression compared to those I committed at home.
“Can’t rain all the time.” Well perhaps not, and it may be that one day something will change. But they have another saying. “There’s no escaping the light.” Trivially false, my ill-sewn curtains and the cellar bars disagree. Yet a greater truth to it as well. No matter how we hide from it, we always have to step back out. To find food, or companionship. To send a letter.
If I am to catch the post, and the post to catch the mail packet, then I must finish here and run down the stairs, through the bright, wet streets to the post office. It was good to hear from you. I hope this sketch of time here in the city reassures you. I have a small life here compared to home, and not a good one, yet still, perhaps this is better.
I remain your friend,
Charity
Notes:
Song: West End Blues by Louis Armstrong And His Hot Five
How big is your city? Kind of cramped
How old is your city? It feels old but like all cities it’s been built and rebuilt in my lifetime
What is the climate in your city? It’s raining, but not cold. Does it rain all the time? Can’t rain all the time.
Who runs your city? Well no one of course. But the mayor, apparently.
Who lives in your city? The thing about the city is that we all live there. It’s by the sea so we make our living there.
What does it look like? It’s dark, black, slick, hard. Always being built.
What is the source of tension? Difficult to tell. I don’t speak the language.
How does the city feel? It welcomes visitors but it doesn’t care.
Some Thoughts
Writing with one day to go before the deadline, even with a plan, can have some unexpected results. I have all my influences in the front of my mind, and I ignore my own notes at the start. I don’t have the time to fold it all in. This story has West End Blues as it’s assigned theme song, but I was listening to the whole playlist as I wrote. So the city is not dark (of course not, it’s full of White Light). My notes say we all live in the city yet there’s at least one stranger. And we don’t make our living from the sea, or not entirely. If I’d had another fold at it, would the music be more subliminal, or more obvious, the surface influences blending deeper? Did it need editing or would that cheat us of the original?
Influences? “Can’t rain all the time,” is a line (and lyric) from the film The Crow. Going to a strange city and learning the language is a major part of Roppotucha Greenberg’s recent novella Getting By In Tlingolian. Perhaps even more explicitly it’s the drabble I wrote during the intermission of the online book launch, an activity/challenge on the theme of language they gave us that I took up. The market and the post office are taken from that. Anyway, influences, very obvious, to me.
Here’s the drabble:
And so. I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.
In the market when the man tries to palm me off with stringy beans and over-ripe tomatoes I can call him a thief and a pervert. When the neighbour comes by for a bowl of soup I can ask them about the weather.
When the post office doesn’t have my remittance I can spell out the letters and insist they look and look again until they find it.
I’m starting to get the hang of it. So perhaps I can find the words to take me back home.
Neil Willcox lives in a small town in South East England; when you say the word city inevitably he thinks of London. He has been previously published several time in the voidspace, as well as recent appearances in the Hellarkey Halloween zine, Crow And Cross Keys and Swords And Sorcery magazine. He can be found online at nightofthehats.blogspot.com, as well as on the bluesky @neilwillcox.bsky.social