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The following excerpt is drawn from a new work – Chinese Postman – by illustrious literary lion of the University, Brian Castro.

Appropriately for this time-related issue of Lumen, the novel examines the experiences of older age, exploring the life of Abraham Quin, in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced former postman and professor, now a writer living alone in the ���˲�Ʊ Hills. 

He offers up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. 

There is nothing much you can do to ameliorate or euphemise the word “gunshot”. You could do a lot with a word like “shotgun”, used figuratively in phrases like “shotgun wedding”, “shotgun shack”, “he rode shotgun” etc. But “gunshot” only emits peril and portent. Its report is totally enveloped in time and that is what you told the police. Back to front now, it wears a jacket of time, cloaked by the night, its crack no longer immediate in recall and as I do not have a watch, I had no idea of what aspect of the night had ushered me into that menace of a gunshot; whether it was the freezing cold, the incipient flurry of light snow, the anticipation of joy. 

But apart from all this drama which has only accrued of late, Quin was normally obsessed by tidiness, by spelling, by rubbing off stains on the carpet. How quickly it arrived, middle-age, then old-age. He remembered his father’s shuffling gait; not quite balanced; the earth also shuffled; not quite balanced, and wild with contingency. 

It was as though, now that he was released into the countryside doing nightshift without a watch, it was as though he was licensed to use verb tenses interchangeably. But like his mother’s conjugations, there was no future tense. He was free to deliver mail in any order or on any specified route, as long as all was done within twenty-four hours. On daylight schedules he didn’t hurry or try to get home early. There would be long days when the sun had already gone down and he would be trudging up the hills with his bicycle, completing his duties as cooking wafted out the windows of the cottages, and sometimes a woman would wave to him but not too often because she was often too busy with cooking or children to notice him fiddling with her letter-box in the half light. He preferred not being noticed since he received a private satisfaction from depositing a missive into a private box like a sneakthief taking his pleasure from a sleeping girl by leaving her a ring or a necklace stolen from someone else. 

I only ever waved back to one of them. It was by coincidence that I had not only seen her up in the hills but had met her in the city and then there she was now, looking very pretty, a month before what I will call the Lookout Incident. I remember that day well. In the art gallery in town, I had seen myself in the glass doors like an installation, my father looking back at me, his eyes squinting against the glare just before he died into the light. I remember him saying that death was the only deadline for a journalist. As a journalist he trained himself to notice things with the instincts of a policeman, mainly about people. But he did not seem to care about what was on the periphery... a particular tree, the light in the late afternoon, peculiarities of feeling. He did not know that the key to understanding anxiety was to realise one was missing something loved and longed-for like home, because as a journalist he sub-edited emotions and was often disappointed that the homeless realities he pursued did not fit. He moved on, like I did that day, wandering into the labyrinthine alleys of cafés and cannabis. I noticed the librarian’s wife working in one of them, and when I waved, she beckoned me to enter, asking if I had a day off, to which I replied that it was a postman’s holiday. I should have said it in French if she had been French (though I found out later that she was Ukrainian), that I was un facteur en balade and with that waltzing ballad upon my lips ordered a Pernod. I read somewhere that when someone is attracted to another, their pupils dilate. I put on my dark glasses. Indeed, the light was blinding in the café, where skylights had recently been installed.