Tuesday’s Delivery Run

Erik called back just as Vera was searching for her keys at the front door. He had heard her message, he said. A delivery to the station café. For someone who did not work there.

‘Anouk Meijer,’ Vera said.

‘An address will tell me more than a name.’

She gave him the café address, then the date. To open the door she had to hold the phone between her ear and shoulder, and asked him to wait a moment. Someone with a pushchair stood behind her on the narrow pavement.

Inside, she put down her bag and took the phone properly in her hand. Yasmin looked up and signalled that the kitchen was empty.

‘It’s about a folder,’ Vera said. ‘I signed for it. Now someone’s saying it was five boxes.’

Erik did not answer straight away. She heard the low sound of an engine, an indicator, then silence. He had apparently parked first.

‘Those are two very different things.’

‘That’s why I’m calling.’

‘Have you got the paper?’

‘Part of it. Not all.’

He asked whether she could come to the collection point on the edge of the town centre that morning. He had a small load to pick up at ten, and a quarter of an hour afterwards. Not somewhere halfway along his route, because he knew what he was like: he would set something down to look for a copy, then drive off without it.

Vera wrote down the street. She could be back for the break. She told Yasmin where she was going and did not ask her to stay longer. It was an agreed time, not a request which only turned into a shift afterwards.

The collection point was a warehouse behind an office-supplies shop. Vera had to go through the shop itself, between shelves of paper and empty ring binders. Beyond a waist-high gate Erik stood beside his van. Rondrit was written on the doors. He wore a grey work jacket with a patch on the sleeve lighter than the rest.

He only recognised her when she mentioned the café. ‘You’re the one with the coffee machine always a bit further back.’

‘It’s been there for years.’

‘Must be remembering it right, then.’

He closed one rear door and left the other open. Crates of printed material stood in the van. A man from the warehouse brought another box and asked which trolley had to go back. Erik pointed, then looked at the sheet Vera was taking from her bag.

She had brought the cropped copy Dorus had given her. The number he had written beneath it was still there. Erik saw his own business name, turned the sheet straight and took reading glasses from his breast pocket.

‘This isn’t the whole thing.’

‘No. Dorus said this was what he had.’

‘The top’s missing.’

Vera waited. He might be able to say what had been there. He checked the date again, then went to the front of the van. A thick notebook with curled corners lay on the passenger seat. He set it on the edge of an empty part of the load space without moving a crate.

‘This is mine. The short notes. The forms go separately.’

He leafed back a few weeks. Vera did not look past his hand while other names were on the pages. When he found the right page, he covered the line above with one finger.

‘Here. That address.’

There was a short note, hurried but legible. A reference to a delivery run and the word presentation. No mention of five boxes. Nor a complete list of contents.

‘What was it?’ Vera asked.

Erik thought for a moment. He looked at the van as though something from that run might still be inside.

‘A folder, probably. That printer often has presentation material. But what I remember and what’s on the form are two different things.’

He broke off to answer the man from the warehouse, who wanted the van behind the gate as soon as Erik was finished because a bigger load was coming. Erik said they would be gone in a moment. He did not close the notebook.

‘Did you collect those boxes, then?’ Vera asked.

‘From who?’

‘Dorus. For that run.’

‘I’ve got one note here about his delivery. The actual form’s clearer.’

Vera laid the cropped copy beside it. Her V looked like a small mark beneath something from which the rest of the language had vanished. She had written it on a little board, with someone standing opposite her and the freezer being repaired behind her.

‘I remember a flat brown wrapper. A folder inside, with small copies.’

‘That could fit this.’

‘So it wasn’t five boxes.’

Erik lowered his glasses a little. ‘I’m saying I want the complete delivery record in front of me. Otherwise I’ll be doing the same as the other fellow.’

Vera wanted to explain that she knew the difference between a folder and five boxes. That was not what he was doubting. She put her hands in her coat pockets and looked at the word presentation.

‘Where’s that sheet?’

‘With the bookkeeper. The signed receipts and the full route book for that period are there. I took a stack over. I’m collecting the folder next Monday anyway.’

‘Couldn’t it be sooner?’

Erik looked at her. He did not sound irritated yet as he explained that the woman who looked after it was off this week. It was not an office with a counter where Vera could ask for one sheet out of a drawer. His handover appointment was already arranged. The papers in his van were enough for today’s deliveries, but not for going back through a delivery from that period in full.

‘I can send her a message asking her to include that particular form,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going to say I’ll have it tomorrow.’

Vera thought of the following Monday. Tomorrow they were going to the foundation. Afterwards she still would not be able to show Dorus what was written above the V. It felt like time she had let slip away herself by not calling the driver on Friday.

She could have called on Saturday or Sunday, too. Perhaps he would have told her the same thing on his day off. There was no point now in calculating what might have been possible earlier.

‘Shall we meet the Tuesday after, then?’ she asked. ‘Once you’ve collected it on Monday.’

‘Yes. Let me confirm on Monday that I’ve got it. Then you won’t come on Tuesday for nothing.’

He made a note on the right page of his notebook. He did not write the café address again, just Vera’s number and name. She checked the spelling. He had added an h after Vera, crossed it out and said he knew someone who did spell it that way.

‘May I photograph this line?’ she asked.

‘Just that line.’

He held the notebook so she would not have to crop out his other customers. She took the picture and showed him straight away. The word presentation, the run reference, the address. Nothing else. The large gap on the receipt was still a gap.

Erik turned back one more page and rested his finger on an entry.

‘I see station here as well. That’s why I want the route sheet too.’

Vera looked up. ‘A second delivery?’

‘Another stop. But I’m not making a story out of one word. The address and recipient are on the full sheet.’

‘The same day?’

‘Yes.’

That was not an answer she could add to the five boxes in her head. She wanted to know where the other stop had been all the same. Erik was already drawing the notebook back. She asked him to bring that too: the full route sheet, not just the receipt. He nodded and added another word to his note.

The man from the warehouse came outside again. He ran his hands down his trousers and looked at the open van door. Erik put the notebook back in the front and secured the last crate. Vera took the cropped copy off the edge before he closed the door.

‘What exactly is this Dorus saying?’ he asked.

She showed him the message Anouk had forwarded. Erik read the lines, then looked at the paper in her hand. He did not laugh.

‘All five, in this one delivery,’ he said. ‘He’s very definite about that.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll put that in my request too. Otherwise they’ll think I only want to know whether it was delivered. With that signature, that isn’t much of a question.’

Vera had wanted to begin with the signature too. Erik wanted the line describing the load. He got behind the wheel and wound down the window.

‘You’ll hear from me. Don’t ring five times in between, mind. It won’t bring the paper back any faster.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Don’t promise if you don’t mean it.’

She laughed. So did he, briefly. Then he checked his mirror and reversed out through the gate, slowly enough to let the man with the trolley cross. Vera waited until the van had gone before walking back into the shop.

At the till an assistant asked whether she had found anything. She said she had come for the delivery driver. He pointed to the exit as though to spare her having to buy something for the privilege of walking through the shop.

Outside, she sat on a bench to write to Anouk. It was dry beneath a narrow awning. She put her bag between her feet and found the new photograph.

She did not send the picture on its own. She added that Erik had a short note, that he would collect the complete signed form and route sheet on Monday at his already arranged appointment with the bookkeeper, and that they would look at them on Tuesday. The word presentation was legible. Erik was thinking of a folder, but wanted to see the whole document before giving that as his account. There was another stop with station in the note; the route sheet would have to show which one.

Anouk read the message quickly. Her answer was shorter.

That still isn’t five boxes.

No, Vera wrote. But I haven’t got the complete form yet.

She did not need to send another sentence to prove she was carrying on. Tomorrow they would see the two boxes at Sanne’s. She sent the time once more to check. Anouk confirmed. She would bring the commission and contents list, as agreed.

Vera looked at Dorus’s skewed scan. The top had not been copied; it might have been done in a hurry. But he had added the whole account of five returned boxes himself. She did not need to know why he had copied it like that to want to know whether his account was true.

On her way back she saw a stack of flat cardboard boxes outside a shop. She did not go over. Packaging for the new stock of lamps, it said in large letters on top. She no longer felt the need to measure every piece of brown card against Anouk’s things in her mind.

At the station she took the tunnel and went straight to the café. Yasmin was slicing bread and nodded towards the clock. Vera was on time.

She put the two pictures in her own folder: the cropped copy and the new photograph of the note. There was an appointment between them now, not a solution. She closed the folder, slid it onto the shelf above the stock and went to wash her hands.