Forever After

4

The Records Department was the red tape of the afterlife. In an organised and structured world, where everyone and everything had a place, they were the ones who maintained order and made sure that everyone and everything was where it should be.

The headquarters of the department rested on a plane between this world and the next, accessed by any of its tens of thousands of worldwide employees through personal portals around the globe. A world on its own, a busy, functioning heart through which the lifeblood of the afterlife pumped. Without the department there would be no death and there would certainly be no afterlife; the dead would be stuck in a constant state of limbo.

It was rumoured that the heads of the department were the top angels and demons themselves, but nobody really knew. The leaders, if any -- as the department breathed and beat to the pulse of its many lower level workers and didn’t need a head to function -- were a secretive, unseen group.

Naff had worked at the department for longer than he cared to remember. He could no longer recall his birth, his death or any of his life outside of the one he had grown so accustomed to. None of it mattered anyway -- whether he had a worthwhile mortal existence, whether he was a scoundrel or whether he had never lived at all -- the only thing that mattered was his current existence, a life devoted to the department and an endless track of data.

He was paid well for his services. His salary earned him more money than Michael and Chip combined, and allowed him to buy a comfortably sized detached house in a quietish suburb on the edge of town. It was still Brittleside so it was still rife with squalor and, a mere stone’s throw from Naff’s front door, over the neatly trimmed hedges of his pedantic neighbour and beyond the potholed road boarded by rows of overgrown weeds and broken glass, was one of the worst estates in the town. But Naff liked Brittleside, he had been there a long time and, although he couldn’t recall it being anything other than a dumping ground for the worst portraits of human existence, something about the town endeared him.

Michael always felt like he was dirtying Naff’s house whenever he entered. He always took his shoes off at the front door despite being told not to, yet he still trod on the fluffy cream carpets with great care, worried that the cheapness of his unwashed socks would somehow transfer a film of dirt onto the floor.

He always refused to sit on the soft, upholstered three-piece sofa lest he transfer the dirt from his clothes. He chose instead to sit, precariously, on the edge of a wooden chair brought in from the kitchen.

Chip, on the other hand, bounded into the house like he owned it. He never took his shoes off, barely acknowledged the trail of mud he so often left behind, and threw himself onto the sofa like an athlete attacking the high jump.

Naff did tell Chip to remove his shoes, but he rarely listened. This time, as Michael carefully placed his coat over the edge of the hardback chair and sat -- with a careful and awkward consideration -- Naff didn’t mind the trail of mud left behind by the impish tooth fairy soiling his expensive sofa. The homeowner stood in the middle of the living room, next to a marble-style fireplace.

“We need to lure him here,” he suggested with a thoughtful finger on the tip of his chin. “We write a letter, give him my address, ask for something we know he’ll feel obliged to deliver,” he tapped his chin as he spoke, his eyes wondering ponderously away from the faces in front of him, “we wait for him and then--” he lifted his hands and widened his eyes. “Bam! Gotcha.”

“We jump him and kick the shit out of him,” Chip said with an agreeable nod. “What? No,” Naff said, disapprovingly. “We talk to him, see if we can--”

“Talk to him and then kick the shit out of him?”

Naff shook his head solemnly. He turned to Michael who returned his bemused expression with a simple shrug.

“No fighting,” Naff insisted. “We let him come to us and we keep things civil.”

Chip looked disheartened, but he quickly perked up.

“So we hide in the dark, wait for him too approach and then jump out?” Chip exclaimed excitedly.

“I guess…”

Chip buzzed with childish glee, his little body practically trembling under the veil of his own pent-up excitement. His mind seemed elsewhere as he spoke: “And then we say something cool, something like, ‘the only presents you’re getting are--’, no wait. Oh, oh, I got it, ‘They’ll be no chimneys where you’re going’.”

“What? No, I don’t think--”

Chip held up an apologetic hand. “You’re right,” he said softly. “It’s terrible. Don’t worry, I’ll think of something better.”

Naff stared with open mouthed disbelief at his friend, lost for words and detoured from his own train of thought. Chip turned his own thoughtful eyes to the carpet, his mouth speaking silent thoughts as he tried to come up with a better punch line.

“What do we do when we have him?” Michael wondered as he shifted uncomfortably on the seat. “We can’t just ask him to nicely follow us back to hell can we?”

Naff tapped his forefinger against his lip thoughtfully. “I can take his powers away first, that would help.”

“No shit.”

“But I can only do that if he willingly gives them to me.”

“Ah,” Michael said with a sarcastic nod. “No problem there then.”

“Without his powers he’s harmless, we can overpower him.”

Michael nodded again, “Good luck with that.”

“But first,” Naff drifted into the kitchen. His friends listened as he opened and shut drawers that rolled on hinges and thudded against frames. He rummaged around inside a few, spilling and shifting cutlery and papers. Eventually he returned to the living room with a pen and a notepad which he offered to Chip.

The tooth fairy looked at the pad with caution, as if seeing one for the first time.

“You need to write the letter,” Naff explained after a few seconds of awkward staring. “It’ll be better coming from you.”

Chip raised a thick eyebrow suspiciously. “And why do you say that?” he quizzed.

Naff hesitated, Michael explained for him, “Because you write like a retarded child.”

“Ah,” Chip acknowledged with a nod of his head. “Gotcha,” he took the pad and pen and awaited their instructions.

A spitting spool of undelivered letters -- a myriad of bills and season’s greetings awaiting undesignated recipients -- raced along a succession of conveyor belts that overlapped one another like a high-speed spaghetti junction and dropped with a fling and a flutter into large bins.

Amongst the clattering calamity of ferocious machinations a handful of dole faced workers worked like automatons, picking out armfuls of the dropped letters and transferring them, with skilful rapidity, to their chosen slots which beckoned like a wall of bird-less pigeon holes behind them.

A heavyset worker moved quicker than the others, his hands barely visible as he tore through the mountain of letters before they had a chance to accumulate. His large white beard flicked and waved under his chin, gracefully shifting with the movements of his overfed body.

He blocked out the chaos; blocked out the mayhem. He was in his own world, a highly efficient machine.

The bearded fat man with the blank expression and the motorised hands halted his speedy work. The flicker of a smile twitched at the wrinkled corner of his eye, pulled his skin momentarily taut, and then departed just as quickly as it had appeared.

The address on the letter in his right hand had been scribbled by the hand of a very special, very young, child. The handwriting was a mess, scribbled erratically by an incapable hand. The words weren’t uniform, some were heavily pressed in; some barely visible. They bounced around the page as if they had a mind of their own. The spelling was atrocious; every word had been spelled incorrectly.

The smile threatened to return, he quickly banished it.

He looked around at his fellow workers, an army of boys in blue who worked like systematic machines, flipping and sorting the letters without a flicker of emotion. He looked back at the letter, happy in the knowledge that he wasn’t being watched.

These letters were his favourite. He felt like he was doing an honourable job by responding to them, these were the children who needed him the most. He was excited about the prospect of opening it, of finding the required present and then taking it to the child in need, but that had to wait.

He eagerly ripped open the letter and stuffed the torn envelope into his pocket. He read it with an unrestrained smile on his face, a face that had now come to life and shone with an empathetic and wise glow.

He was almost giddy at reading the callous writing. This child was clearly troubled, clearly in desperate need of his services. They wanted a toy, a popular military action figure currently doing the rounds on the playgrounds and in numerous advertisements targeted at children.

Every misspelled word was clearly a pained struggle for the child. He was either very young or had severe learning difficulties, yet he had gone to effort to write the letter himself, instead of turning to an adult or a computer for help. He read the name at the bottom with a warmth in his large heart, like a parent seeing their child’s first scribble.

“Naff,” he read softly to himself. Odd name for an odd kid, but he would do his best to give him exactly what he wanted. He placed the letter back in his pocket and continued with his robotic job. The smile, and the warm expression, banished from his face.