Tea is my typewriter

Every morning at five to ten, Miss Boyd would open her desk drawer and take a Yale key on a penguin-shaped key ring from a blue pen pot. Tony would watch her out of the corner of his eye from across the office. That key, Tony thought, is the key to joy and miracles.

Tony would watch Miss Boyd as, in a pencil skirt, high heels and a blouse with a bow and shoulder pads, she walked past the photocopier and the daisy wheel printer and left the editorial floor through the swing doors. He knew she would walk down three flights of stairs to the first floor corridor, to the sound of static twitches and high heels on the floor. She would unlock a grey, windowless, unmarked door and step inside. Tony found this quite thrilling, and he grinned.

For the rest of her working day, Miss Boyd was the secretary to the Features Desk, answering phones and making appointments for journalists. She was witty, had easy banter with colleagues and callers, and was the queen of the put-down, able to turn sexist old hacks into humiliated laughing stocks with a choice insult. But for half an hour every morning, she was the guardian of treasures, the custodian of wonders, the keeper of the stationery store.  

By ten thirty-five, Miss Boyd would be back at her desk, having been visited by a handful of the more junior staff of the Evening Mail.  They would be dispatched by their seniors to collect stationery requirements from the store during it’s 30-minute opening, and Miss Boyd would send them back to their departments with their orders promptly fulfilled. 

Tony was by far the most senior staff member to visit her. If the other reporters or the news editor knew that he made two trips a week to the stationery store, they’d be perplexed. “Why don’t you get the boy to do it?” They’d say. This was the common question whenever a reporter chose to get their own coffee, or collect their own cuttings from the cuttings library, or buy their own fags from the shop – despatch a copy boy, a general dogsbody, an enthusiastic minion. But for Tony, things were different when it came to stationery.

He delayed following Miss Boyd to avoid appearing over-eager, although over-eager was most definitely what Tony was. He waited until five past ten. He pulled his messenger bag over his head so the long strap ran from his shoulder to his hip. He stopped at the canteen on the way and bought a polystyrene cup of tea for Miss Boyd – milk and one sugar – and carefully carried it the rest of the way, his bag bumping on his thigh with each loping stride. 

Tony had long legs and thick heavy curls of dark hair falling over his face. He wore his suit with the air of someone wearing pyjamas, always looking crumpled and unprepared. His two years as a reporter at the Evening Mail had increased his confidence – he was well-liked, and his contribution to the paper was very well received – but he continued to give the sense of being not entirely comfortable in his own skin. But today this was offset by the obvious spring in his step and the smile on his face.

A smartly dressed office junior from the advertising stepped out of the stationery store with an armful of yellow manilla wallet folders, a packet of highlighter pens and 100 foolscap envelopes. A fairly dull haul, thought Tony, and that junior probably thought she was above doing the stationery run, judging by the look on her face. Tony knew that not everyone felt what he felt about stationery.

Tony tried to soften his grin as he stuck his head round the frame of the open door. Miss Boyd sat on the table facing the doorway, legs crossed, top leg slowly bouncing as she smoked a cigarette. She smiled as Tony held out the polystyrene cup.

“Tony! Is it Thursday already? Thank you for the tea.” She took the cup from him with one hand, and with the other, she ushered him into the store. 

The desk all but blocked access to the stationery shelves, and usually the juniors would give a note to Miss Boyd, who would then collect their orders from the three sets of grey steel shelves running away from the door behind the desk. But Tony had once asked if he might be able to browse, and Miss Boyd had agreed, and so it had been, twice a week for the last year and half. 

Tony squeezed past the desk into the cavern of delights that lay beyond. The dingy room was lit by a single fluorescent tube which hummed quietly, and together with the sound of Tony’s feet peeling off the slightly sticky floor, they were the music of the stationery store. There was the smell of cut paper, adhesive and shrink wrapped plastic coverings, dry and uncomfortable on the nostrils. Tony felt his shoulders drop, and a tightness in his stomach that he hadn’t known he’d had, disappeared. He felt safe and he felt happy.

He looked around at the familiar displays. There were specialist shelves for the photo library (china clay pencils for marking up photographs, envelope files, magic markers in five colours), advertising (mock tabloid sized notepads of squared paper, triplicate order books, telephonist’s headsets in boxes) and the cuttings library (plastic labels, half sized suspension files in ten colours, and seven varieties of scissors). 

An entire eye-level shelf was dedicated to pens – ball points in three colours and two thicknesses, felt tips only in black but three thicknesses, highlighters. One shelf was home to the expenses forms and the advance-on-expenses forms, and the security implications of these forms was one of the reasons why Miss Boyd kept the key in her desk at all times. There were three sizes of record cards and accompanying record cards storage boxes, where most staff kept the details of their contacts.

Tony was by now flooded with calm and wellbeing. He felt at home here. He was safe in the knowledge that from here, all ideas could be turned into reality. 

Stationery, Tony knew, is the facilitator of productivity. Stationery is responsible for turning inspiration into creation, for converting knowledge into reality, for taking something from the brain of one person and turning it into a million things in the brains of thousands of other people. Stationery was the way that Tony could take his own, amazing, wonderful thoughts and share them with the world. For Tony, stationery was the conduit which allowed him to make the strongest of connections to other people. The spoken word was troublesome, flighty, as hard to grasp as running water. But the written word, reflected upon and refined, had power. The written word allowed you to be the person you really were. The written word was real.

Sitting in the gallery at the sheriff court, he would take notes in his reporter’s spiral bound pad in swift t-line shorthand with a standard thickness smooth flowing ball point. Typing an interview with the local head teacher took ribbons, snowpake and carbon paper. When an angry pensioner phoned to complain about the council’s hedge cutting policy, it was the post-it note and felt-tipped pen that allowed Tony to pass the message on to his colleague. Without stationery, Tony knew he would be isolated, and who he really was would be trapped in his own head.

Tony loved the stationery, but he also loved the order. Miss Boyd kept a wonderfully tidy store which was quite unlike any other part of the Evening Mail’s offices. Little blue boxes of paperclips sat neatly on top of each other, four boxes high, and neighboured similarly sized green boxes of treasury tags, which in turn neighboured red boxes of staples. An entire low shelf was dedicated to reams of coloured A4 copier paper, in the order of the rainbow from red to violet. Hard backed notebooks were stacked, corner to corner, edge to edge, and their size grew from left to right across the shelf – from tiny policeman-style flip-up pads, through to foolscap then A4 (because in a trade which was made of paper, there were many strong views on the standardisation of paper sizes). 

Tony carefully picked up two spiral notebooks, checking that the cardboard backing wasn’t too flimsy. He selected one of the tiny hardbacked notebooks with its vertically opening cover, and he broke into a smile when he found a tiny pencil attached inside by an elastic loop. From boxes of 100 he selected ball point pens – two black and two blue and one red. The fewer he took today, the sooner he could come back, so he suppressed his urge to take the whole box.

Tony’s hand was floating over the typewriter ribbon when Miss Boyd’s voice, alarmingly close behind him, made him jump.

“Are you finding everything you like, Tony?”, she said, slowly and carefully. This was new, thought Tony. Does she think I’m pinching the expense forms? Miss Boyd had never before spoken to Tony beyond the usual “thank you for the tea”. And now she was right behind him, even though the shelves were so close together.

As he turned round, startled, his bag knocked against her and he lost his balance, and his armful of stationery fell to the floor. He opened his mouth to speak, but the only sound that came out was the remains of a gasp. She was standing terribly close to him.

Even though Tony’s bag had bumped her, Miss Boyd had not moved, had not stepped away. She looked up at him, over the top of her large, red-rimmed glasses, and she gave him an open-mouthed smile.

“I… I..” Tony had no words. There was not a thought in his head. And even if there had been, his mouth was suddenly too dry to speak. But this seemed to be okay to Miss Boyd, because she had plenty to tell him.

“Listen, Tony, thanks for the tea.” She kept her eyes on his. “I really appreciate you thinking of me. Especially since you come down here so often. None of the other reporters come here themselves.” She placed her hands on the shelves on either side of her, blocking the aisle, and turned one padded shoulder towards him. She tilted her head to the side so that her hair fell over the front of her blouse.

“So I wondered, Tony, whether you’d like to spend a little bit more time down here with me? I could lock the door. We could get… stationary together. Well, I mean… one of us could keep moving, but… do you get the picture?”

As she spoke, she opened a box of paper clips with one hand, and let the contents fall onto the shelf and cascade to the floor, with 150 tiny clatters. Dropping her gaze she picked up one paperclip, and slowly, carefully unfolded it to use as a – Tony had no idea what. He had never seen a woman unfold a paper clip with such intensity before. “I like these, Tony,” she said, staring at him. “They’re the large lipped sort.”

All of his life, Tony had wondered what it would be like to be a person who was better with the spoken word than the written word. The person who would know exactly the right thing to say in just this sort of situation. The right thing to say would be kind and clever, firm and witty, and leave Miss Boyd in no doubt that while she was undeniably a wonderful person, he was only interested in what she had to offer by way of office supplies. He knew that in about an hour, the right words would definitely come to him, and he’d write them down, and they’d be perfect, the most dashing and debonair yet assertive words that anyone could have come up with. But for now, there was only a lump in his throat, a knot in his stomach, and the acute awareness that his stationery selection was scattered across the sticky vinyl floor.

Miss Boyd very gently pressed one end of the unfolded paper clip into Tony’s chest. ”I mean”, she said softly, “you’re not really here for the pens and notebooks are you?” As she moved closer to him, she lost her balance and he felt the paperclip puncture his skin. They both looked down to see her navy patent high heel sliding on the pages of a spiral bound notepad. She giggled. “Oops.”

That moment broke the spell. Tony knew it was time for him to leave. His discomfort in the face of Miss Boyd’s advance was nothing compared to the travesty of standing on a fresh notebook with no remorse or regret. He took a deep breath.

“I’m very sorry Miss Boyd but there’s been a misunderstanding and I’m going to leave now because I was only ever here for the stationery and I’m going to forget this ever happened and I hope you can too.” He turned and launched himself towards the back wall of the store, did a swift u-turn to head up the next aisle, vaulted the desk, flew out the door and ran back up the stairs two at a time, with his bag flying behind him.

Later that day, as he stood in the checkout queue, Tony reflected on what he’d lost. He knew that he would never, ever be able to go back to the stationery store. He would also have to avoid any contact with Miss Boyd. His heart was heavy and there was a speck of blood on his shirt. 

Oh well, he thought as he placed his spiral bound notepads, pens and notebook in front of the cashier. At least there’s always John Menzies.