Seventeen Postcards

The first one came in September 2020 and Callum assumed it was a mistake.

It was a postcard of Whitby Abbey, postmarked Scarborough, and it said:

C — the tea room by the harbour has closed. I'm furious. Everything else the same. Love, Nan.

His grandmother died in November 2019.

He sat down on the stairs with it for a while. Then he did the sensible thing, which was to assume it had been sitting in a sorting office for ten months, which happens, which there are news stories about.

The second came in October. A different card — Robin Hood's Bay — and it said:

C — did you get the last one? The tea room. I know I've told you. Love, Nan.

That was harder to explain.

What Callum tried

He rang the Royal Mail, who were kind and baffled.

He checked the handwriting against a birthday card from 2017. It matched.

He checked the postmarks. All Scarborough, all recent, none more than three weeks before arrival.

He asked his mother, who cried, and then got angry, and then said something Callum has thought about for four years: "Someone is doing this to us."

He asked his uncle, who said, with total confidence, that it was his cousin Marie, and that Marie had always been odd. Callum rang Marie. Marie had received four of her own.

The pattern

By card seven Callum had a spreadsheet, because he is his grandmother's grandson and that is what that family does with a feeling.

Arrival: monthly, first week, no exceptions.

Content: two to four sentences. Weather, food, complaints about a specific dog that lived next door to her in about 2004, questions about Callum's job that were three jobs out of date.

And references. That was the thing. Card nine referred to "the business with the car," which happened in 2011. Card three referred to Callum's degree, which he started in 2015. Card twelve mentioned his sister's baby, born 2018.

They were not in order.

He arranged them by internal chronology and got a sequence that ran 2004, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2007, 2016 — no pattern he could find, and he looked for one for two years.

Card seventeen

It came in January.

C — this is the last one. Seventeen was all I could manage before my hands went. I hope they came out roughly right. If they didn't, I'm sorry, it seemed better than nothing.

Ask your mother about the box in the wardrobe. She'll be cross. She's had it since the funeral and she'll have been in two minds the whole time, and she'll be relieved to be found out.

You were four months old when I decided I liked you, which is later than people admit about babies. Love, Nan.

The box

His mother was cross. She was cross for about ninety seconds and then she was something else entirely.

There were seventeen postcards, written between March and August 2019, in an envelope with a note giving dates.

And a second envelope, unopened, containing a further eleven, with instructions to send one a month for as long as she thought Callum needed them, and to stop when she thought he didn't.

She had sent seventeen. She had judged that seventeen was enough.

She had not sent the remaining eleven, and had never mentioned any of it, and had let her son believe for four years that something inexplicable was happening to him — because his grandmother's note also said, in the last line, that Callum should not be told until the seventeenth had arrived, and that this was important, and that she was not going to explain why.

Callum has read card seventeen perhaps two hundred times.

He thinks he knows why.

For four years he woke up on the first of the month and thought about his grandmother.

Not sadly. That is the part he cannot get anyone to understand. He thought about her the way you think about someone who is about to send you a postcard.