In which we meet the Staff- Glom of Nit - Dissertation on Rhyming

Slang - ‘You should have been there!’ - The Dead Letters - A Golem’s

Life - Book of Regulations

 

There was always an angle. There was always a price. There was always a way. And look at it like this, Moist thought: certain death had been replaced with uncertain death, and that was an improvement, wasn’t it? He was free to walk around . . . well, hobble, at the moment. And it was just possible that somewhere in all this was a profit. Well, it could happen. He was good at seeing opportunities where other people saw barren ground. So there was no harm in playing it straight for a few days, yes? It’d give his foot a chance to get better, he could spy out the situation, he could make plans. He might even find out how indestructible golems were. After all, they were made of pottery, weren’t they? Things could get broken, maybe.

Moist von Lipwig raised his eyes and examined his future.

The Ankh-Morpork Central Post Office had a gaunt frontage. It was a building designed for a purpose. It was, therefore, more or less, a big box to employ people in, with two wings at the rear which enclosed the big stable yard. Some cheap pillars had been sliced in half and stuck on the outside, some niches had been carved for some miscellaneous stone nymphs, some stone urns had been ranged along the parapet and thus Architecture had been created.

In appreciation of the thought that had gone into this, the good citizens, or more probably their kids, had covered the walls to a height of six feet with graffiti in many exciting colours.

In a band all along the top of the frontage, staining the stone in greens and browns, some words had been set in letters of bronze.

‘ “NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLO M OF NI T CAN STAY THESE MES ENGERS ABO T THEIR DUTY,” ‘ Moist read aloud. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘The Post Office Was Once A Proud Institution,’ said Mr Pump.

‘And that stuff?’ Moist pointed. On a board much further down the building, in peeling paint, were the less heroic words:

 

DONT ARSK US ABOUT:

rocks

troll’s with sticks

All sorts of dragons

Mrs Cake

Huje green things with teeth

Any kinds of black dogs with orange eyebrows

Rains of spaniel’s

fog

Mrs Cake

 

‘I Said It Was A Proud Institution,’ the golem rumbled.

‘Who’s Mrs Cake?’

‘I Regret I Cannot Assist You There, Mr Lipvig.’

‘They seem pretty frightened of her.’

‘So It Appears, Mr Lipvig.’

Moist looked around at this busy junction in this busy city. People weren’t paying him any attention, although the golem was getting casual glances that didn’t appear very friendly.

This was all too strange. He’d been - what, fourteen? - when he’d last used his real name. And heavens knew how long it had been since he’d gone out without some easily removable distinguishing marks. He felt naked. Naked and unnoticed.

To the interest of no one whatsoever, he walked up the stained steps and turned the key in the lock. To his surprise it moved easily, and the paint-spattered doors swung open without a creak.

There was a rhythmic, hollow noise behind Moist. Mr Pump was clapping his hands.

‘Vell Done, Mr Lipvig. Your First Step In A Career Of Benefit Both To Yourself And The Veil-being Of The City!’

‘Yeah, right,’ muttered Lipwig.

He stepped into the huge, dark lobby, which was lit only dimly by a big but grimy dome in the ceiling; it could never be more than twilight in here, even at noon. The graffiti artists had been at work in here, too.

In the gloom he could see a long, broken counter, with doors and pigeon-holes behind it.

Real pigeon-holes. Pigeons were nesting in the pigeon-holes. The sour, salty smell of old guano filled the air, and, as marble tiles rang under Moist’s feet, several hundred pigeons took off frantically and spiralled up towards a broken pane in the roof.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said.

‘Bad Language Is Discouraged, Mr Lipvig,’ said Mr Pump, behind him.

‘Why? It’s written on the walls! Anyway, it was a description, Mr Pump! Guano! There must be tons of the stuff!’ Moist heard his own voice echo back from the distant walls. ‘When was this place last open?’

‘Twenty years ago, Postmaster!’

Moist looked around. ‘Who said that?’ he said. The voice seemed to have come from everywhere.

There was the sound of shuffling and the click-click of a walking stick and a bent, elderly figure appeared in the grey, dead, dusty air.

‘Groat, sir,’ it wheezed. ‘Junior Postman Groat, sir. At your service, sir. One word from you, sir, and I will leap, sir, leap into action, sir.’ The figure stopped to cough long and hard, making a noise like a wall being hit repeatedly with a bag of rocks. Moist saw that it had a beard of the short bristled type that suggested that its owner had been interrupted halfway through eating a hedgehog.

‘Junior Postman Groat?’ he said.

‘Indeedy, sir. The reason being, no one’s ever bin here long enough to promote me, sir. Should be Senior Postman Groat, sir,’ the old man added meaningfully, and once again coughed volcanically.

Ex-Postman Groat sounds more like it, Moist thought. Aloud he said, ‘And you work here, do you?’

‘Aye, sir, that we do, sir. It’s just me and the boy now, sir. He’s keen, sir. We keeps the place clean, sir. All according to Regulations.’

Moist could not stop staring. Mr Groat wore a toupee. There may actually be a man somewhere on whom a toupee works, but whoever that man might be, Mr Groat was not he. It was chestnut brown, the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong style and, all in all, wrong.

‘Ah, I see you’re admirin’ my hair, sir,’ said Groat proudly, as the toupee spun gently. ‘It’s all mine, you know, not a prunes.’

‘Er . . . prunes?’ said Moist.

‘Sorry, sir, shouldn’t have used slang. Prunes as in “syrup of prunes”, sir. Dimwell slang.* Syrup of prunes: wig. Not many men o’ my age got all their own hair, I expect that’s what you’re thinking. It’s clean living that does it, inside and out.’

 

* Dimwell Arrhythmic Rhyming Slang: Various rhyming slangs are known, and have given the universe such terms as ‘apples and pears’ (stairs), ‘rubbity-dub’ (pub) and ‘busy bee’ (General Theory of Relativity). The Dimwell Street rhyming slang is probably unique in that it does not, in fact, rhyme. No one knows why, but theories so far advanced are 1) that it is quite complex and in fact follows hidden rules or 2) Dimwell is well named or 3) it’s made up to annoy strangers, which is the case with most such slangs.

 

Moist looked around at the fetid air and the receding mounds of guano. ‘Well done,’ he muttered. ‘Well, Mr Groat, do I have an office? Or something?’

For a moment, the visible face above the ragged beard was that of a rabbit in a headlight.

‘Oh, yes, sir, techn’c’ly,’ said the old man quickly. ‘But we don’t go in there any more sir, oh no, ‘cos of the floor. Very unsafe, sir. ‘cos of the floor. Could give way any minute, sir. We uses the staff locker room, sir. If you’d care to follow me, sir?’

Moist nearly burst out laughing. ‘Fine,’ he said. He turned to the golem. ‘Er . . . Mr Pump?’

‘Yes, Mr Lipvig?’ said the golem.

‘Are you allowed to assist me in any way, or do you just wait around until it’s time to hit me on the head?’

‘There Is No Need For Hurtful Remarks, Sir. I Am Allowed To Render Appropriate Assistance.’

‘So could you clean out the pigeon shit and let a bit of light in?’

‘Certainly, Mr Lipvig.’

‘You can?’

‘A Golem Does Not Shy Away From Vork, Mr Lipvig. I Vill Locate A Shovel.’ Mr Pump set off towards the distant counter, and the bearded Junior Postman panicked.

‘No!’ he squeaked, lurching after the golem. ‘It’s really not a good idea to touch them heaps!’

‘Floors liable to collapse, Mr Groat?’ said Moist cheerfully.

Groat looked from Moist to the golem, and back again. His mouth opened and shut as his brain sought for words. Then he sighed.

‘You’d better come down to the locker room, then. Step this way, gentlemen.’

 

Moist became aware of the smell of Mr Groat as he followed the old man. It wasn’t a bad smell, as such, just . . . odd. It was vaguely chemical, coupled with the eye-stinging aroma of every type of throat medicine you’ve ever swallowed, and with just a hint of old potatoes.

The locker room turned out to be down some steps into the basement where, presumably, the floors couldn’t collapse because there was nothing to collapse into. It was long and narrow. At one end was a monstrous oven which, Moist learned later, had once been part of some kind of heating system, the Post Office having been a very advanced building for its time. Now a small round stove, glowing almost cherry-red at the base, had been installed alongside it. There was a huge black kettle on it.

The air indicated the presence of socks, cheap coal and no ventilation; some battered wooden lockers were ranged along one wall, the painted names flaking off. Light got in, eventually, via grimy windows up near the ceiling.

Whatever the original purpose of the room, though, it was now the place where two people lived; two people who got along but, nevertheless, had a clear sense of mine and thine. The space was divided into two, with a narrow bed against one wall on each side. The dividing line was painted on the floor, up the walls and across the ceiling. My half, your half. So long as we remember that, the line indicated, there won’t be any more . . . trouble.

In the middle, so that it bestrode the boundary line, was a table. A couple of mugs and two tin plates were carefully arranged at either end. There was a salt pot in the middle of the table. The line, at the salt pot, turned into a little circle to encompass it in its own demilitarized zone.

One half of the narrow room contained an over-large and untidy bench, piled with jars, bottles and old papers; it looked like the work space of a chemist who made it up as he went along or until it exploded. The other had an old card table on which small boxes and rolls of black felt had been stacked with slightly worrying precision. There was also the largest magnifying glass Moist had ever seen, on a stand.

That side of the room had been swept clean. The other was a mess that threatened to encroach over the Line. Unless one of the scraps of paper from the grubbier side was a funny shape, it seemed that somebody, with care and precision and presumably a razor blade, had cut off that corner of it which had gone too far.

A young man stood in the middle of the clean half of the floor. He’d obviously been waiting for Moist, just like Groat, but he hadn’t mastered the art of standing to attention or, rather, had only partly understood it. His right side stood considerably more to attention than his left side and, as a result, he was standing like a banana. Nevertheless, with his huge nervous grin and big gleaming eyes he radiated keenness, quite possibly beyond the boundaries of sanity. There was a definite sense that at any moment he would bite. And he wore a blue cotton shirt on which someone had printed ‘Ask Me About Pins!’

‘Er . . .’ said Moist.

‘Apprentice Postman Stanley,’ mumbled Groat. ‘Orphan, sir. Very sad. Came to us from the Siblings of Offler charity home, sir. Both parents passed away of the Gnats on their farm out in the wilds, sir, and he was raised by peas.’

‘Surely you mean on peas, Mr Groat?’

‘By peas, sir. Very unusual case. A good lad if he doesn’t get upset but he tends to twist towards the sun, sir, if you get my meaning.’

‘Er . . . perhaps,’ said Moist. He turned hurriedly to Stanley. ‘So you know something about pins, do you?’ he said, in what he hoped was a jovial voice.

‘Nosir!’ said Stanley. He all but saluted.

‘But your shirt says—’

‘I know everything about pins, sir,’ said Stanley. ‘Everything there is to know!’

‘Well, that’s, er—’ Moist began.

‘Every single fact about pins, sir,’ Stanley went on. ‘There’s not a thing I don’t know about pins. Ask me anything about pins, sir. Anything you like at all. Go on, sir!’

‘Well . . .’ Moist floundered, but years of practice came to his aid. ‘I wonder how many pins were made in this city last ye—’

He stopped. A change had come across Stanley’s face: it smoothed out, lost the vague hint that its owner was about to attempt to gnaw your ear off.

‘Last year the combined workshops (or “pinneries”) of Ankh-Morpork turned out twenty-seven million, eight hundred and eighty thousand, nine hundred and seventy-eight pins,’ said Stanley, staring into a pin-filled private universe. ‘That includes wax-headed, steels, brassers, silver-headed (and full silver), extra large, machine- and hand-made, reflexed and novelty, but not lapel pins which should not be grouped with the true pins at all since they are technically known as “sports” or “blazons”, sir—’

‘Ah, yes, I think I once saw a magazine, or something,’ said Moist desperately. ‘It was called, er . . . Pins Monthly?’

‘Oh dear,’ said Groat, behind him. Stanley’s face contorted into something that looked like a cat’s bottom with a nose.

‘That’s for hobbyists,’ he hissed. ‘They’re not true “pinheads”! They don’t care about pins! Oh, they say so, but they have a whole page of needles every month now. Needles? Anyone could collect needles! They’re only pins with holes in! Anyway, what about Popular Needles? But they just don’t want to know!’

‘Stanley is editor of Total Pins.’ Groat whispered, behind Moist.

‘I don’t think I saw that one—’ Moist began.

‘Stanley, go and help Mr Lipwig’s assistant find a shovel, will you?’ said Groat, raising his voice. ‘Then go and sort your pins again until you feel better. Mr Lipwig doesn’t want to see one of your Little Moments.’ He gave Moist a blank look.

‘. . . they had an article last month about pincushions.’ muttered Stanley, stamping out of the room. The golem followed him.

‘He’s a good lad,’ said Groat, when they’d gone. ‘Just a bit cup-and-plate in the head. Leave him alone with his pins and he’s no trouble at all. Gets a bit . . . intense at times, that’s all. Oh, and on that subject there’s the third member of our jolly little team, sir—’

A large black and white cat had walked into the room. It paid no attention to Moist, or Groat, but progressed slowly across the floor towards a battered and unravelling basket. Moist was in the way. The cat continued until its head butted gently against Moist’s leg, and stopped.

‘That’s Mr Tiddles, sir,’ said Groat.

‘Tiddles? said Moist. ‘You mean that really is a cat’s name? I thought it was just a joke.’

‘Not so much a name, sir, more of a description,’ said Groat. ‘You’d better move, sir, otherwise he’ll just stand there all day. Twenty years old, he is, and a bit set in his ways.’

Moist stepped aside. Unperturbed, the cat continued to the basket, where it curled up.

‘Is he blind?’ said Moist.

‘No, sir. He has his routine and he sticks to it, sir, sticks to it to the very second. Very patient, for a cat. Doesn’t like the furniture being moved. You’ll get used to him.’

Not knowing what to say, but feeling that he should say something, Moist nodded towards the array of bottles on Groat’s bench.

‘You dabble in alchemy, Mr Groat?’ he said.

‘Nosir! I practise nat’ral medicine!’ said Groat proudly. ‘Don’t believe in doctors, sir! Never a day’s illness in my life, sir!’ He thumped his chest, making a thlap noise not normally associated with living tissue. ‘Flannelette, goose grease and hot bread puddin’, sir! Nothing like it for protecting your tubes against the noxious effluviences! I puts a fresh layer on every week, sir, and you won’t find a sneeze passing my nose, sir. Very healthful, very natural!’

‘Er . . . good,’ said Moist.

‘Worst of ‘em all is soap, sir,’ said Groat, lowering his voice. ‘Terrible stuff, sir, washes away the beneficent humours. Leave things be, I say! Keep the tubes running, put sulphur in your socks and pay attention to your chest protector and you can laugh at anything! Now, sir, I’m sure a young man like yourself will be worrying about the state of his—’

‘What’s this do?’ said Moist hurriedly, picking up a pot of greenish goo.

‘That, sir? Wart cure. Wonderful stuff. Very natural, not like the stuff a doctor’d give you.’

Moist sniffed at the pot. ‘What’s it made of?’

‘Arsenic, sir,’ said Groat calmly.

‘Arsenic?’

‘Very natural, sir,’ said Groat. ‘And green.’

So, Moist thought, as he put the pot back with extreme care, inside the Post Office normality clearly does not have a one-to-one relationship with the outside world. I might miss the cues. He decided that the role of keen but bewildered manager was the one to play here. Besides, apart from the ‘keen’ aspect it didn’t need any effort.

‘Can you help me, Mr Groat?’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about the post!’

‘Well, sir . . . what did you use to do?’

Rob. Trick. Forge. Embezzle. But never - and this was important -using any kind of violence. Never. Moist had always been very careful about that. He tried not to sneak, either, if he could avoid it. Being caught at 1 a.m. in a bank’s deposit vault while wearing a black suit with lots of little pockets in it could be considered suspicious, so why do it? With careful planning, the right suit, the right papers and, above all, the right manner, you could walk into the place at midday and the manager would hold the door open for you when you left. Palming rings and exploiting the cupidity of the rural stupid was just a way of keeping his hand in.

It was the face, that was what it was. He had an honest face. And he loved those people who looked him firmly in the eye to see his inner self, because he had a whole set of inner selves, one for every occasion. As for firm handshakes, practice had given him one to which you could moor boats. It was people skills, that’s what it was. Special people skills. Before you could sell glass as diamonds you had to make people really want to see diamonds. That was the trick, the trick of all tricks. You changed the way people saw the world. You let them see it the way they wanted it to be . . .

How the hell had Vetinari known his name? The man had cracked von Lipwig like an egg! And the Watch here were . . . demonic! As for setting a golem on a man . . .

‘I was a clerk,’ said Moist.

‘What, paperwork, that sort of thing?’ said Groat, looking at him intently.

‘Yes, pretty much all paperwork.’ That was honest, if you included playing cards, cheques, letters of accreditation, bank drafts and deeds.

‘Oh, another one,’ said Groat. ‘Well, there’s not a lot to do. We can shove up and make room for you in here, no problem.’

‘But I am supposed to make it work again as it used to, Mr Groat.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said the old man. ‘You just come along with me, then, Postmaster. I reckon there’s one or two things you ain’t bin tole!’

He led the way out, back into the dingy main hall, a little trail of yellow powder leaking from his boots.

‘My dad used to bring me here when I were a lad,’ he said. ‘A lot of families were Post Office families in those days. They had them big glass drippy tinkling things up in the ceiling, right? For lights?’

‘Chandeliers?’ Moist suggested.

‘Yep, prob’ly,’ said Groat. ‘Two of ‘em. And there was brass an’ copper everywhere, polished up like gold. There was balconies, sir, all round the big hall on every floor, made of iron, like lace! And all the counters was made of rare wood, my dad said. And people? This place was packed! The doors never stopped swinging! Even at night . . . oh, at night, sir, out in the big back yard, you should’ve been there! The lights! The coaches, coming and going, the horses steamin ‘. . . oh, sir, you should’ve seen it, sir! The men running the teams out . . . they had this thing, sir, this device, you could get a coach in and out of the yard in one minute, sir, one minute! The bustle, sir, the bustle and fuss! They said you could come here from Dolly Sisters or even down in the Shambles, and post a letter to yourself, and you’d have to run like the blazes, sir, the very blazes, sir, to beat the postman to your door! And the uniforms, sir, royal blue with brass buttons! You should’ve seen them! And—’

Moist looked over the babbling man’s shoulder to the nearest mountain of pigeon guano, where Mr Pump had paused in his digging. The golem had been prodding at the fetid horrible mess and, as Moist watched him, he straightened up and headed towards them with something in his hand.

‘—and when the big coaches came in, sir, all the way from the mountains, you could hear the horns miles away! You should’ve heard them, sir! And if any bandits tried anything, there was men we had, who went out and—’

‘Yes, Mr Pump?’ said Moist, halting Groat in mid-history.

‘A Surprising Discovery, Postmaster. The Mounds Are Not, As I Surmised, Made Of Pigeon Dung. No Pigeons Could Achieve That Amount In Thousands Of Years, Sir.’

‘Well, what are they made of, then?’

‘Letters, Sir,’ said the golem.

Moist looked down at Groat, who shifted uneasily.

‘Ah, yes,’ said the old man. ‘1 was coming to that.’

 

Letters . . .

 . . . there was no end to them. They filled every room of the building and spilled out into the corridors. It was, technically, true that the postmaster’s office was unusable because of the state of the floor: it was twelve feet deep in letters. Whole corridors were blocked off with them. Cupboards had been stuffed full of them; to open a door in-cautiously was to be buried in an avalanche of yellowing envelopes. Floorboards bulged suspiciously upwards. Through cracks in the sagging ceiling plaster, paper protruded.

The sorting room, almost as big as the main hall, had drifts reaching to twenty feet in places. Here and there, filing cabinets rose out of the paper sea like icebergs.

After half an hour of exploration Moist wanted a bath. It was like walking through desert tombs. He felt he was choking on the smell of old paper, as though his throat was filled with yellow dust.

‘I was told I had an apartment here,’ he croaked.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Groat. ‘Me and the lad had a look for it the other day. I heard that it was the other side of your office. So the lad went in on the end of a rope, sir. He said he felt a door, sir, but he’d sunk six feet under the mail by then and he was suffering, sir, suffering . . . so I pulled him out.’

‘The whole place is full of undelivered mail?’

They were back in the locker room. Groat had topped up the black kettle from a pan of water, and it was steaming. At the far end of the room, sitting at his neat little table, Stanley was counting his pins.

‘Pretty much, sir, except in the basement and the stables,’ said the old man, washing a couple of tin mugs in a bowl of not very clean water.

‘You mean even the postm— my office is full of old mail but they never filled the basement? Where’s the sense in that?’

‘Oh, you couldn’t use the basement, sir, oh, not the basement,’ said Groat, looking shocked. ‘It’s far too damp down here. The letters’d be destroyed in no time.’

‘Destroyed,’ said Moist flatly.

‘Nothing like damp for destroying things, sir,’ said Groat, nodding sagely.

‘Destroying mail from dead people to dead people,’ said Moist, in the same flat voice.

‘We don’t know that, sir,’ said the old man. ‘I mean, we’ve got no actual proof.’

‘Well, no. After all, some of those envelopes are only a hundred years old!’ said Moist. He had a headache from the dust and a sore throat from the dryness, and there was something about the old man that was grating on his raw nerves. He was keeping something back. ‘That’s no time at all to some people. I bet the zombie and vampire population are still waiting by the letter box every day, right?’

‘No need to be like that, sir,’ said Groat levelly, ‘no need to be like that. You can’t destroy the letters. You just can’t do it, sir. That’s Tampering with the Mail, sir. That’s not just a crime, sir. That’s, a, a—’

‘Sin?’ said Moist.

‘Oh, worse’n a sin,’ said Groat, almost sneering. ‘For sins you’re only in trouble with a god, but in my day if you interfered with the mail you’d be up against Chief Postal Inspector Rumbelow. Hah! And there’s a big difference. Gods forgive’.

Moist sought for sanity in the wrinkled face opposite him. The unkempt beard was streaked with different colours, either of dirt, tea or random celestial pigment. Like some hermit, he thought. Only a hermit could wear a wig like that.

‘Sorry?’ he said. ‘And you mean that shoving someone’s letter under the floorboards for a hundred years isn’t tampering with it?’

Groat suddenly looked wretched. The beard quivered. Then he started to cough, great hacking, wooden, crackling lumps of cough, that made the jars shake and caused a yellow mist to rise from his trouser bottoms, “scuse me a moment, sir,’ he wheezed, between hacks, and he fumbled in his pocket for a scratched and battered tin. ‘You suck at all, sir?’ he said, tears rolling down his cheeks. He proffered the tin to Moist. ‘They’re Number Threes, sir. Very mild. I make ‘em meself, sir. Nat’ral remedies from nat’ral ingredients, that’s my style, sir. Got to keep the tubes clear, sir, otherwise they turn against you.’

Moist took a large, violet lozenge from the box and sniffed it. It smelled faintly of aniseed.

‘Thank you, Mr Groat,’ he said, but in case this counted as an attempt at bribery, he added sternly: ‘The mail, Mr Groat? Sticking undelivered mail wherever there’s a space isn’t tampering with it?’

‘That’s more . . . delaying the mail, sir. Just, er . . . slowing it down. A bit. It’s not like there’s any intention of never delivering it, sir.’

Moist stared at Groat’s worried expression. He felt that sense of shifting ground you experience when you realize that you’re dealing with someone whose world is connected with your own only by their fingertips. Not a hermit, he thought, more like a shipwrecked mariner, living in this dry desert island of a building while the world outside moves on and all sanity evaporates.

‘Mr Groat, I don’t want to, you know, upset you or anything, but there’s thousands of letters out there under a thick layer of pigeon guano . . .’ he said slowly.

‘Actually, on that score, sir, things aren’t as bad as they seem,’ Groat said, and paused to suck noisily on his natural cough lozenge. ‘It’s very dry stuff, pigeon doings, and forms quite a hard protective crust on the envelopes . . .’

‘Why are they all here, Mr Groat?’ said Moist. People skills, he remembered. You’re not allowed to shake him.

The Junior Postman avoided his gaze. ‘Well, you know how it is . . .’ he tried.

‘No, Mr Groat. I don’t think I do.’

‘Well . . . maybe a man’s busy, got a full round, maybe it’s Hogswatch, lots of cards, see, and the inspector is after him about his timekeeping, and so maybe he just shoves half a bag of letters somewhere safe . . . but he will deliver ‘em, right? I mean, it’s not his fault if they keeps pushing, sir, pushing him all the time. Then it’s tomorrow and he’s got an even bigger bag, ‘cos they’re pushing all the time, so he reckons, I’ll just drop a few off today, too, ‘cos it’s my day off on Thursday and I can catch up then, but you see by Thursday he’s behind by more’n a day’s work because they keeps on pushing, and he’s tired anyway, tired as a dog, so he says to himself, got some leave coming up soon, but he gets his leave and by then - well, it all got very nasty towards the end. There was . . . unpleasantness. We’d gone too far, sir, that’s what it was, we’d tried too hard. Sometimes things smash so bad it’s better to leave it alone than try to pick up the pieces. I mean, where would you start?’

‘I think I get the picture,’ said Moist. You’re lying, Mr Groat. You’re lying by omission. You’re not telling me everything. And what you’re not telling me is very important, isn’t it? I’ve turned lying into an art, Mr Groat, and you’re just a talented amateur.

Groat’s face, unaware of the internal monologue, managed a smile.

‘But the trouble is - what’s your first name, Mr Groat?’ Moist asked.

‘Tolliver, sir.’

‘Nice name . . . the thing is, Tolliver, that the picture I see in your description is what I might refer to for the purposes of the analogy as a cameo, whereas all this’ - Moist waved his hand to include the building and everything it contained - ‘is a full-sized triptych showing scenes from history, the creation of the world and the disposition of the gods, with a matching chapel ceiling portraying the glorious firmament and a sketch of a lady with a weird smile thrown in for good measure! Tolliver, I think you are not being frank with me.’

‘Sorry about that, sir,’ said Groat, eyeing him with a sort of nervous defiance.

‘I could have you sacked, you know,’ said Moist, knowing that this was a stupid thing to say.

‘You could, sir, you could try doin’ that,’ said Groat, quietly and slowly. ‘But I’m all you got, apart from the lad. And you don’t know nuffin’ about the Post Office, sir. You don’t know nuffin’ about the Regulations, neither. I’m the only one that knows what needs doing round here. You wouldn’t last five minutes without me, sir. You wouldn’t even see that the inkwells get filled every day!’

‘Inkwells? Filling inkwells?’ said Moist. ‘This is just an old building full of . . . of . . . of dead paper! We have no customers!’

‘Got to keep the inkwells filled, sir. Post Office Regulations,’ said Groat in a steely voice. ‘Got to follow Regulations, sir.’

‘For what? It appears we don’t accept any mail or deliver any mail! We just sit here!’

‘No, sir, we don’t just sit here,’ said Groat patiently. ‘We follow the Post Office Regulations. Fill the inkwells, polish the brass—’

‘You don’t sweep up the pigeon shit!’

‘Oddly enough, that’s not in the Regulations, sir,’ said the old man. ‘Truth is, sir, no one wants us any more. It’s all the clacks now, the damn clacks, clack clack clack. Everyone’s got a clacks tower now, sir. That’s the fashion. Fast as the speed of light, they say. Ha! It’s got no soul, sir, no heart. I hates ‘em. But we’re ready, sir. If there was any mail, we’d deal with it, sir. We’d spring into action, sir, spring into action. But there ain’t.’

‘Of course there isn’t! It’s clearly sunk into this town long ago that you might as well throw your letters away as give them to the Post Office!’

‘No, sir, wrong again. They’re all kept, sir. That’s what we do, sir. We keep things as they are. We try not to disturb things, sir,’ said Groat quietly. ‘We try not to disturb anything!

The way he said it made Moist hesitate.

‘What kind of anything?’ he said.

‘Oh, nothing, sir. We just . . . go carefully.’

Moist looked around the room. Did it appear smaller? Did the shadows deepen and lengthen? Was there a sudden cold sensation in the air?

No, there wasn’t. But an opportunity had definitely been missed, Moist felt. The hairs on the back of his neck were rising. Moist had heard that this was because men had been made out of monkeys, and it meant that there was a tiger behind you.

In fact Mr Pump was behind him, just standing there, eyes burning more brightly than any tiger had ever managed. That was worse. Tigers couldn’t follow you across the sea, and they had to sleep.

He gave up. Mr Groat was in some strange, musty little world of his own. ‘Do you call this a life?’ he said.

For the first time in this conversation, Mr Groat looked him squarely in the eye. ‘Much better than a death, sir,’ he said.

 

Mr Pump followed Moist across the main hall and out of the main doors, at which point Moist turned on him.

‘All right, what are the rules here?’ he demanded. ‘Are you going to follow me everywhere7. You know I can’t run!’

‘You Are Allowed Autonomous Movement Within The City And Environs,’ the golem rumbled. ‘But Until You Are Settled In I Am Also Instructed To Accompany You For Your Own Protection.’

‘Against who? Someone annoyed that their great-granddaddy’s mail didn’t turn up?’

‘I Couldn’t Say, Sir.’

‘I need some fresh air. What happened in there? Why is it so . . . creepy? What happened to the Post Office?’

‘I Couldn’t Say, Sir,’ said Mr Pump placidly.

‘You don’t know? But it’s your city,’ said Moist sarcastically. ‘Have you been stuck at the bottom of a hole in the ground for the last hundred years?’

‘No, Mr Lipvig,’ said the golem.

‘Well, why can’t—’ Moist began.

‘It Was Two Hundred And Forty Years, Mr Lipvig,’ said the golem.

‘What was?’

‘The Time I Spent At The Bottom Of The Hole In The Ground, Mr Lipvig.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Moist.

‘Why, The Time I Spent At The Bottom Of The Hole In The Ground, Mr Lipvig. Pump Is Not My Name, Mr Lipvig. It Is My Description. Pump. Pump 19, To Be Precise. I Stood At The Bottom Of A Hole A Hundred Feet Deep And Pumped Water. For Two Hundred And Forty Years, Mr Lipvig. But Now I Am Ambulating In The Sunlight. This Is Better, Mr Lipvig. This Is Better!’

 

That night, Moist lay staring at the ceiling. It was three feet from him. Hanging from it, a little distance away, was a candle in a safety lantern. Stanley had been insistent about that, and no wonder. This place would go up like a bomb. It was the boy who’d showed him up here; Groat was sulking somewhere. He’d been right, damn him. He needed Groat. Groat practically was the Post Office.

It had been a long day and Moist hadn’t slept well last night, what with being upside down over Mr Pump’s shoulder and occasionally kicked by the frantic horse.

He didn’t want to sleep here either, heavens knew, but he didn’t have lodgings he could use any more, and they were at a premium in this hive of a city in any case. The locker room did not appeal, no, not at all. So he’d simply scrambled on to the pile of dead letters in what was in theory his office. It was no great hardship. A man of affairs such as he had to learn to sleep in all kinds of situations, often while mobs were looking for him a wall’s thickness away. At least the heaps of letters were dry and warm and weren’t carrying edged weapons.

Paper crackled underneath him as he tried to get comfortable. Idly, he picked up a letter at random; it was addressed to someone called Antimony Parker at 1 Lobbin Clout, and on the back, in capitals, was S.W.A.L.K. He eased it open with a fingernail; the paper inside all but crumbled at his touch.

 

My Very Dearest Timony,

Yes! Why should a Woman, Sensible of the Great Honour that a Man is Doing Her, play the Coy Minx at such a time! I know you have spoken to Papa, and of course I consent to becoming the Wife of the Kindest, Most Wonderfu—

 

Moist glanced at the date on the letter. It had been written forty-one years ago.

He was not as a rule given to introspection, it being a major drawback in his line of work, but he couldn’t help wondering if - he glanced back at the letter - ‘Your loving Agnathea’ had ever married Antimony, or whether the romance had died right here in this graveyard of paper.

He shivered, and tucked the envelope into his jacket. He’d have to ask Groat what S.W.A.L.K. meant.

‘Mr Pump!’ he shouted.

There was a faint rumble from the corner of the room where the golem stood, waist-deep in mail.

‘Yes, Mr Lipvig?’

‘Is there no way you can shut your eyes? I can’t sleep with two red glowing eyes watching me. It’s a . . . well, it’s a childhood thing.’

‘Sorry, Mr Lipvig. I Could Turn My Back.’

‘That won’t work. I’d still know they’re there. Anyway, the glow reflects off the wall. Look, where would I run to?’

The golem gave this some thought. ‘I Will Go And Stand In The Corridor, Mr Lipvig,’ he decided, and began to wade towards the door.

‘You do that,’ said Moist. ‘And in the morning I want you to find my bedroom, okay? Some of the offices still have space near the ceiling; you can move the letters into there.’

‘Mr Groat Does Not Like The Mail To Be Moved, Mr Lipvig,’ the golem rumbled.

‘Mr Groat is not the postmaster, Mr Pump. I am.’

Good gods, the madness is catching, Moist thought, as the golem’s glow disappeared into the darkness outside. I am not the postmaster, I’m some poor bastard who’s the victim of some stupid . . . experiment. What a place! What a situation! What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

He tried to find the angle, the way out . . . but all the time a conversation kept bouncing off the insides of his brain.

Imagine a hole, a hundred feet deep and full of water.

Imagine the darkness. Imagine, at the bottom of the hole, a figure roughly of human shape, turning in that swirling darkness a massive handle once every eight seconds.

Pump . . . Pump . . . Pump . . .

For two hundred and forty years.

‘You didn’t mind?’ Moist had asked.

‘You Mean Did I Harbour Resentment, Mr Lipvig? But I Was Doing Useful And Necessary Work! Besides, There Was Much For Me To Think About.’

‘At the bottom of a hundred feet of dirty water? What the hell did you find to think about?’

‘Pumping, Mr Lipvig.’

And then, the golem said, had come cessation, and dim light, a lowering of levels, a locking of chains, movement upwards, emergence into a world of light and colour . . . and other golems.

Moist knew something about golems. They used to be baked out of clay, thousands of years ago, and brought to life by some kind of scroll put inside their heads, and they never wore out and they worked, all the time. You saw them pushing brooms, or doing heavy work in timber yards and foundries. Most of them you never saw at all. They made the hidden wheels go round, down in the dark. And that was more or less the limit of his interest in them. They were, almost by definition, honest.

But now the golems were freeing themselves. It was the quietest, most socially responsible revolution in history. They were property, and so they saved up and bought themselves.

Mr Pump was buying his freedom by seriously limiting the freedom of Moist. A man could get quite upset about that. Surely that wasn’t how freedom was supposed to work?

Ye gods, thought Moist, back in the here-and-now, no wonder Groat sucked cough sweets all the time, the dust in this place could choke you!

He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out the diamond-shaped cough lozenge the old man had given him. It looked harmless enough.

One minute later, after Mr Pump had lurched into the room and slapped him heavily on the back, the steaming lozenge was stuck to the wall on the far side of the room where, by morning, it had dissolved quite a lot of the plaster.

 

Mr Groat took a measured spoonful of tincture of rhubarb and cayenne pepper, to keep the tubes open, and checked that he still had the dead mole round his neck, to ward off any sudden attack of doctors. Everyone knew doctors made you ill, it stood to reason. Nature’s remedies were the trick every time, not some hellish potion made of gods knew what. He smacked his lips appreciatively. He’d put fresh sulphur in his socks tonight, too, and he could feel it doing him good.

Two candle lanterns glowed in the velvet, papery darkness of the main sorting office. The light was shining through the outer glass, filled with water so that the candle would go out if it was dropped; it made the lanterns look like the lights of some abyssal fish from the squiddy, iron-hard depths.

There was a little glugging noise in the dark. Groat corked his bottle of elixir and got on with business.

‘Be the inkwells filled, Apprentice Postman Stanley?’ he intoned.

‘Aye, Junior Postman Groat, full to a depth of one-third of one inch from the top as per Post Office Counter Regulations, Daily Observances, Rule C18,’ said Stanley.

There was a rustle as Groat turned the pages of a huge book on the lectern in front of him.

‘Can I see the picture, Mr Groat?’ said Stanley eagerly.

Groat smiled. It had become part of the ceremony, and he gave the reply he gave every time.

‘Very well, but this is the last time. It’s not good to look too often on the face of a god,’ he said. ‘Or any other part.’

‘But you said there used to be a gold statue of him in the big hall, Mr Groat. People must’ve looked on it all the time.’

Groat hesitated. But Stanley was a growing lad. He’d have to know sooner or later.

‘Mind you, I don’t reckon people used to look on the face much,’ he said. ‘They looked more on the . . . wings.’

‘On his hat and his ankles,’ said Stanley. ‘So he could fly the messages at the speed of . . . messages.’

A little bead of sweat dripped off Groat’s forehead. ‘Mostly on his hat and ankles, yes,’ he said. ‘Er . . . but not only there.’

Stanley peered at the picture. ‘Oh, yes. I never noticed them before. He’s got wings on—’

‘The fig leaf,’ said Groat quickly. ‘That’s what we call it.’

‘Why’s he got a leaf there?’ said Stanley.

cOh, they all had ‘em in the olden days, ‘cos of being Classical,’ said Groat, relieved to be shifting away from the heart of the matter. ‘It’s a fig leaf. Off a fig tree.’

‘Haha, the joke’s on them, there’s no fig trees round here!’ said Stanley, in the manner of one exposing the flaw in a long-held dogma.

‘Yes, lad, very good, but it was a tin one anyway,’ said Groat, with patience.

‘And the wings?’ said the boy.

‘We-ell, I s’pose they thought that the more wings, the better,’ said Groat.

‘Yes, but s’posing his hat wings and his ankle wings stopped working, he’d be held up by—’

‘Stanley! It’s just a statue! Don’t get excited! Calm down! You don’t want to upset . . . them’.

Stanley hung his head. ‘They’ve been . . . whispering to me again, Mr Groat,’ he confided in a low voice.

‘Yes, Stanley. They whisper to me, too.’

‘I remember ‘em last time, talking in the night, Mr Groat,’ said Stanley, his voice trembling. ‘I shut my eyes and I keep seeing the writin’ . . .’

‘Yes, Stanley. Don’t worry about it. Try not to think about it. It’s Mr Lipstick’s fault, stirring them up. Leave well alone, I say. They never listen, and then what happens? They find out the hard way’

‘It seems like only yesterday, those watchmen drawing that chalk outline round Mr Mutable,’ said Stanley, beginning to tremble. ‘He found out the hard way!’

‘Calm down, now, calm down,’ said Groat, patting him gently on the shoulder. ‘You’ll set ‘em off. Think about pins.’

‘But it’s a cruel shame, Mr Groat, them never being alive long enough to make you Senior Postman!’

Groat sniffed. ‘Oh, that’s enough of that. That’s not important, Stanley,’ he said, his face like thunder.

‘Yes, Mr Groat, but you’re an old, old man and you’re still only a Junior Postm—’ Stanley persisted.

‘I said that’s enough, Stanley! Now, just raise that lamp again, will you? Good. That’s better. I’ll read a page of the Regulations, that always quietens them down.’ Groat cleared his throat. ‘I shall now read from the Book of Regulations, Delivery Times (Metropolitan) (Sundays and Octedays excepted),’ he announced to the air. ‘As follows: “The hours by which letters should be put into the receiving houses in town for each delivery within the city walls of Ankh-Morpork are as the following: overnight by eight o’clock in the evening, for the first delivery. Morning by eight o’clock, for the second delivery. Morning by ten o’clock, for the third delivery. Morning by twelve o’clock, for the fourth delivery. Afternoon by two o’clock, for the fifth delivery. Afternoon by four o’clock, for the sixth delivery. Afternoon by six o’clock, for the seventh delivery.” These are the hours, and I have read them.’ Groat hung his head for a moment, and then he closed the book with a snap.

‘Why are we doing this, Mr Groat?’ said Stanley meekly.

‘ ‘Cos of hub-riss,’ said Mr Groat. ‘That’s what it was. Hub-riss killed the Post Office. Hub-riss and greed and Bloody Stupid Johnson and the New Pie.’

‘A pie, Mr Groat? How could a pie—’

‘Don’t ask, Stanley. It gets complicated and there’s nothing in it about pins.’

They put out the candles, and left.

When they had gone, a faint whispering started.