Weird Mail

So we moved to the suburbs a while ago, bought this house from a portly, Marks & Spencers pod-family of five who had been living there for over a decade. After we settled in, we found we were still getting their mail. Not all of it, but just the odd little piece here and there - junk mail, circulars, christmas cards from folks they didn't like enough to tell them they'd moved, you know the kinda thing.

They didn't leave us a forwarding address, but in some vaguely good-willed way we kept it all for about six months, just in case they turned up on the doorstep one day to demand their copies of the Freemans catalogue and Butlins holiday brochures. Eventually it all went into the recycle crate, but here we are months and months later and we're still getting it. The thing is, from the stuff that turns up we've gradually built up a picture of what kind of people they were - where they shopped, what they did for leisure. They liked motor racing, ten pin bowling and holiday camps, they were patrons of local theatres, they did a lot of mail order shopping.

But as time went on, we discovered something interesting. The mail didn't have the same names on it. There were variations in the addressee details that seemed to go beyond mere spelling errors, different names and identities that left me wondering... What had they been up to here, perhaps some kind of heinous fraudcrime? How many names did they have? Did they sell up and go because they'd run out of fake IDs? What did they bury under that dull patch in the garden where plants won't grow?

And every now and then, we get the weird mail. The names on them are in no way connected to the names of the people who sold us this house, and yet they keep arriving. Invitiations to peculiar, cultish-sounding events. A anonymous packet of badly-shot photographs taken at the Natural History Museum. We got one recently from what looked like a plumbing supplies company, and we decided to return-to-sender the damn thing; but it wasn't plumbing supplies, oh no. It was a catalogue for sex toys. And not just any old kind. Gold-plated, jewel-encrusted ones.

Just another day in The Burbs...