Quiet Words

Graham started at Royal Mail sometime in the nineties. New recruits came and went but if they lasted the first three weeks, they usually stayed for at least another couple of years. Graham immediately made an impression, if not necessarily a great one.

He was about my age, late twenties to early thirties, and cut a peculiarly slight figure. He was small without being either short or seeming necessarily weak. It wasn't that he was feminine, but neither was he particularly masculine. He seemed like a small, slightly fierce Charles Hawtrey without any of the camp. There was a suggestion of upper class heritage, or at least equivalent delicacy. He had short dark hair and pretty eyes, like a male Sinéad O'Connor, and naturally we all assumed he was probably gay. I imagine that being homosexual in a blue collar profession as was ours must be a pretty tough gig, but probably not so tough as people might imagine.

We were postmen, and of course postwomen, predominantly working class. We liked a pint. Many of us were into football, and not actually that many of us were into performance art or tone poetry. Of those of us who were into football, a few were in it mainly for the joy of kicking someone's head in after the game. Some of us read the Sun - but not everyone - and many of those who read the Sun did so in the knowledge of it being mostly complete bollocks. With one or two exceptions, the shit thick, xenophobic generic Sun-reading working class you may have heard about never really existed except in the imagination of a terrified middle class. Everyone at Royal Mail knew somebody who was gay, and mostly we were past caring because we all had our own shit to worry about; and those few suffering from raging homophobia presented a much bigger, weirder target than the actually homosexual. Gay people were easier to get along with and would even joke about uncomfortable particles of sweetcorn trapped beneath the foreskin, just for the sake of getting a reaction.

No-one knew whether or not Graham was gay, but in any case, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that he was quiet, and quiet to the point of being rude. He didn't speak to anyone. He didn't engage in small talk. If you asked him a question, he'd answer with three or four clipped words or he wouldn't answer at all, wouldn't even look at you. Most of us took offence at one point or another, but no-one acted on it because he seemed kind of intense and he did his job, which was all anyone could ask. Maybe he was just pathologically shy.

Years passed, and those clipped three word responses gradually blossomed into sentences, even exchanges which, if not exactly friendly, at least suggested there was a human being in there somewhere, just one who tended to keep his mouth shut unless he had something to say. He did his job, and no-one had any reason to complain, excepting one summer morning so hot that he went out on delivery wearing just shoes and a pair of shorts so brief that locals phoned the office to complain that their postman was walking around in just hotpants, and it was weird. Whatever Graham's thing might be, we guessed that being shy wasn't really part of it.

Another year passed and Graham volunteered to be our union rep on the grounds of no-one else wanting the job. To everyone's surprise - now that he had something to say - he revealed himself as erudite, fiercely intelligent, and riotously outspoken. He went to all of the union meetings and made many enemies, not least being Jim Cunningham, our area manager, the individual charged with shuffling in all of the changes to which the union and particularly Graham as our representative, were opposed.

I am hopeful that I never again receive correspondence from you written in the manner of this letter, Cunningham wrote in response to one of Graham's missives. Graham was amused, apparently enjoying sparring with upper management types, most of whom were unfortunately nothing like so sharp or canny as they believed themselves to be. Graham made copies of his exchanges so that we could all enjoy the spectacle of him going full Paxman on the mealy-mouthed tosspot who was doing his level best to make our working conditions that much less bearable in the name of savings.

If a man gets in the habit of dealing out blows, Graham told our common enemy, sooner or later he ought not be too surprised to receive a blow in return!

We were impressed, and I found in Graham someone with whom I was able to have an actual conversation. He remained a private person, disinclined to give away too much about either himself or his upbringing, but he was clearly educated and had read books. We talked a little bit about Mexico as it turned out that he had spent six months in South America, apparently in an effort to find himself although he didn't seem to regard the expedition as a success. He hadn't found whatever it was that he'd been looking for.

We sort of became friends, in so much as that one can become friends with anyone so private. We became close enough to laugh at each other's jokes. I asked about the apparent change in his personality from when he had first arrived at our sorting office.

'I think it would be fair to say that I was having a nervous breakdown at the time,' he told me with a confessional smile.

His parents hadn't wanted him, he told me, and so he had been raised by nuns. This seemed to explain almost everything.

He took an interest in my first attempts to write, notably an article on indigenous Mexican music proposed for Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector magazine.

For a start, a mythological figure who disputes the necessity of human sacrifice has as much place in pre-Colombian Mexico as a sped-up Benny Hill comedy chase sequence in the Bible. The very notion is completely inconsistent with indigenous thought of the time. The rest of the tale provides a good example of the Nahua propensity to explain and justify the present as the conclusion of a predestined past, even if that predestination only occurred in retrospect. The fact of the story of Quetzalcoatl disappearing on a raft appearing in no native record until a long time after the events it explained is clear indication that the tale is of interest more as an example of the Nahua attitude to history than as something worthy of consideration as a literal historical occurrence.

I was not accustomed to writing long articles with academic aspirations, but felt I was doing fairly well with this one. My writing style was significantly influenced by the strident and often sarcastic tone of Andy Martin's writing in SMILE magazine and on the covers of various records by the Apostles.

Somewhere on a Pima reservation two families are enjoying a civilised evening meal to the delicate accompaniment of Traditional Songs and Chants of the Millwall Wrecking Crew. Glasses are refilled and a second course approaches as the earthy and mysterious refrain of you're gonna get your fucking heads kicked in rattles the speakers.

Having effected what I considered to be a reasonable impersonation of Andy Martin's tone, I asked Graham to take a look at my most recent draft of the unpublished article. I asked for his feedback but didn't really want it. What I wanted was for him to confirm that my borrowed wit was indeed as sharp as I imagined it to be, perhaps even to join me in laughter as we considered all those unenlightened people quaking in fear as I set them right on a few of their silly assumptions regarding indigenous Mexican music.

He took what I'd written, and then came back with a response, mainly taking issue with the tone I'd adopted, and my tendency to switch between sarcastic funnies and po-faced self-importance. He quoted Cervantes in illustration of his point, and at the time I had no idea who Cervantes was, or even what Graham was trying to say beyond that he had apparently failed to recognise my genius.

You may have made the mistake of thinking that, as an 'expert', you can cry sanctuary, and be exempted from the ordinary rules of successful communication. Or, you may be thinking that, unless your subject is made to look suitably complicated, even gloomy, you won't win the respect of fellow experts.

I was stung, but above all I was embarrassed because I knew on some level that he was absolutely right. I recognised his criticism as both valid and helpful, but couldn't get past the idea that I'd written something which was essentially ridiculous, even if that hadn't been what Graham was suggesting.

Things became uncomfortable between us, and our tenuous friendship seemed to dissolve, vanishing like mist on a warm summer morning. At some point he left the job, and then I left the job, and that was that. He has no internet presence that I am able to trace, because more than anything I want to be able to tell him that he was right, and to apologise for having taken his criticism so personally, and I would at least like to know that he's still alive and is approximately happy, but some stories simply don't have any tidy ending. Clearly this has been one of them.