Always Open

Click and collect. 4am. The streets are quiet because everyone’s asleep. I’m not scared of the dark. I’m scared of people. Unruly school children. Men on motorbikes. Drunks leaving the pub at chucking out time. Even the swans are probably sleeping now. Birds won’t announce the new day for at least another hour. It’s best to make it home before dawn.

I can see the pick up point from a distance away. The road curves back on itself and dips down into a valley. There are lights that flicker. A beacon to guide you towards your destination.

Always Open.

That’s what the sign by the parcel locker says. There’s a keypad to enter your code. You just wait for it to register and then one of the slots will open and you can retrieve your parcel. At any time of the day or night.

Always open.

*

Jen’s dad was a hoarder. Couldn’t throw anything away. Shopping receipts from forty years ago. Tinned goods long past their sell by date. Random in-flight airline magazines. Cracked glasses – of the kind you drink out of and the kind you use to read with. A wind up watch stuck forever at seven minutes to midnight.

A collection of Neil Young albums on 8 track cartridge. Assorted medication, unknown because the boxes had gone missing or the typed on prescriptions had faded in the light. Circulars offering discounts that expired decades ago. An almost complete set of Radio Times magazines from 1977 to 1992. A half empty box of plasters.

I’m not like that. I only order the things I need.

With clothes you can try them on and then return them if they’re the wrong size or shape. In fact most items are returnable within a limited timeframe. No questions asked.

They want you to shop. See how simple it is. And if you have them delivered to a designated drop off point you can collect them whenever you want. At a time convenient to you.

Twenty-four seven.

Always open.

*

‘You could get packages delivered to the flat,’ Jen said. ‘You’re always here during the day.’

But the waiting makes me anxious. Always on edge. Then there’s the intercom to release the latch on the door to the building that I’ve somehow never learnt to operate. So I have to walk down three flights of stairs to let them in.

And it’s always men. And men intimidate me. Apart from once, a sweet Iranian who was lost trying to navigate to streets of a town he’d only moved to a month ago. Oh, and a young woman with dark hair who I fell in love with at first sight when I saw her face peering up at me from the intercom camera.

I didn’t say this last bit to Jen, but it doesn’t matter because I never saw her again.

*

Walking the streets at 4am feels transgressive. Like I shouldn’t be here. A police patrol will spot me and question what I’m doing. But there are no police patrols. Probably because nothing happens at this hour. There are easier crimes like phone snatching, online fraud or shoplifting that can be carried out at a more sociable hour.

Once I saw a man delivering milk, but he must cover miles every morning because so few people get milk delivered in bottles these days. Not like in my parents’ time.

Or Jen’s.

Her dad had somehow acquired a whole crate of empty bottles. Clear glass with an accumulation of dust that smeared when you tried to wipe it off. Other bottles where the glass is coloured green or brown.

He also had photo albums. So many different shapes and sizes. Photos in frames. Cubes with photographs mounted into each side. Loose photographs, some in colour, some in black and white. Polaroids. Negatives spilling out from little brown envelopes. So much history jumbled together.

You could lose yourself for days writing histories for all the random people, half of whom even Jen couldn’t put a name to. Of course some had annotations on the back – dates, names of places or parks or seaside resorts. Neat but cramped handwriting. And even then there were often further mysteries.

Swansea harbour? April? Bill and Hailey Turner? And one, poignantly, that declared, ‘A day ruined by rain.’

I never read the postcards. Too personal, too intimate. Although it’s all on display. Any postal worker could read those words.

But I do read this one. A glowing image of a windmill against a dark sky. Moulin Rouge. Jen in Paris, where she moved to stay ten months after her father’s death. It’s been two years now. I visited her there once, but I don’t like to travel. Only to places within walking distance.

*

There’s a video I remember watching of a blackbird sifting through a pile of fallen leaves. Moving heaps from one side to another. Dislodging earth and the occasional stone. I never fully understood its purpose. At ground level it couldn’t have been building a nest and it didn’t seem to be searching for food. But it was looking for something, oblivious to the fact that someone was filming its every movement.

At some point Jen suggested gathering up a roomful of her dad’s boxes, taking them out to the garden and setting fire to the lot. But I persuaded her not to do that. Not all junk is equal. Brute force is rarely a solution.

* 

Time passes and I still think about Jen and wonder what her life in France must be like.  I still picture the way she used to walk. The sound of her breathing when she woke up in the morning. The colour of her eyes.

But there’s still no one here at 4am. I love the silence. Even a breeze rustling through the trees sounds different at night. If it’s cold I put on two jumpers, an extra layer to keep out the chill. Although once you’re walking your body soon warms up. Sometimes I look up at random houses and wonder about the people that live there and what they might be dreaming about.

At night you can see stars. More now that the council have started turning off streetlights overnight to save money. There’s the hum of a generator as I walk past an electricity substation. The road rises again as it winds back out from the valley. The parcel locker stands there waiting for me, always open for business.

*

There’s a brand of dark chocolate you can only buy online. And I need a new pair of sunglasses because the lenses of my current pair are scratched. A comb to replace the one I lost last month. And perhaps some new gloves.

I only buy the things I need. Click and collect. It’s a simple transaction.

Twenty-four seven.

Always open.