Free The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Thériault Page A

his blood turning to ice in his veins. In the toneless voice of a robot about to break the First Law, he ordered Robert to give the sheets back to him, but Robert seemed in no hurry to comply.
    ‘Wait,’ he said, flipping through the poems. ‘The other ones are even lousier.’
    And the clerk did it again, read another haiku in a ridiculous falsetto voice. Bilodo moved towards him. Robert had expected that. He jumped out of the chair and ran to the other end of the room. Bilodo pursued him, determined to get the precious poems back no matter what. He finally outwitted the miserable clown’s manoeuvrings and managed to catch hold of them, but that idiot wouldn’t let go, so the inevitable happened… Bilodo stared, bewildered, at the fragments of the torn sheets Robert still clutched, and then at the ones in his own hand.
    ‘Oops!’ said Robert, roaring with laughter.
    ‘Get out,’ Bilodo ordered in a monotone.
    ‘Relax,’ the clerk shot back defiantly. ‘Let’s not get all worked up about three or four shitty poems!’
    Did he really say ‘shitty’? As swiftly as it had solidified, Bilodo’s blood liquefied, instantly reaching the boiling point. His fist clenched, lashed out, punched Robert on the nose. The clerk was hurled through the cherry trees on the folding screen and crashed down on the low table behind it. Bilodo snatched the shreds of paper from between his fingers. Dazed, holding his bloody nose, the clerk picked himself up as best he could and had the nerve to take it badly. He swore, flailed his arms, tried to strike back, but his blow only grazed his co-worker’s ear. Bilodo retaliated by planting a hefty right in his belly. Robert deflated, all the aggressiveness draining out of him along with the air in his lungs. Bilodo took advantage of it to pick him up by his vest, and dragged him to the hallway, just barely taking time to open the door before heaving him out. Robert, flung out onto the staircase, bounced down three steps on his backside. Bilodo threw his clothes at him and bolted the door.
    He couldn’t believe it. He who had never hurt a fly without regretting that he couldn’t give it an anaesthetic first had just hit his best friend. His ex-friend, that is. But he had a more pressing concern right now. It was a serious moment: some of Ségolène’s loveliest haiku were in shreds. Indifferent to the insults and direwarnings Robert was uttering outside, as well as his violent banging on the door, Bilodo got out a roll of sellotape and applied himself to piecing the treasured sheets together again. Behind the door Robert had begun to make threats, swearing he wasn’t going to get away with it, he’d get his own back sooner or later, but Bilodo didn’t hear a thing, engrossed as he was in the delicate surgical operation of mending the mutilated verse.
    It wasn’t until later – long after Robert’s shouts had died away, once Ségolène’s poetry had been fully restored – that Bilodo realised, as he searched in his jacket pocket for the unsent letter he’d slipped into it the previous day, that it wasn’t there any more. It had vanished along with the tanka it contained.
    He had no recollection of what he might have done with it. Had he foolishly mislaid it during last night’s cavorting, or had that scumbag Robert swiped it?

16
    When Bilodo walked into the Madelinot at lunchtime, he noticed Robert sitting with the inevitable band of colleagues in the postal workers’ spot. The swelling and abnormal hues of his nose were hard to miss. Bilodo felt a volley of hostile looks focusing on him; Robert had obviously circulated a highly biased version of the nasal attack. Bilodo tried to ignore the prevailing animosity. He took a seat at the counter. Tania came over to put a bowl of soup down before him and, as he began spooning it up, he pondered how to tackle the tricky business of the filched tanka. Did Robert actually have it in his possession? Putting the question to him