west london tales 2

He looked out of the window and saw a van driving too slowly down the road, which came to a dead end beneath the Westway. It was a nondescript white van. It got to the end of the road and turned around, still moving at a crawl. As he’d half-expected, the phone rang.

The driver said he was on the street. G answered that he knew. He could see him. There are only two residential addresses on the street, both blocks of flats. He told him to come to the first, and went down to collect him.

There was a kid sitting in the passenger seat of the van. The driver said:

Do you know how heavy it is?

G said he didn’t.

It’s 75 kilos, the kid said, holding a clipboard.

G said he didn’t know how heavy that was.

Put it this way, the driver said, I never carry anything more than twenty kilos on my own.

They went to the back of the van, the kid staying in his seat. There were about half a dozen boxed mattresses there. The driver started pulling one out. It was heavy.

That’s a good mattress you’ve got there, the driver said. You can tell by the weight.

The mattress was boxed. The driver said the best thing to do was take the box off, so they could fit it in the lift. They carried it round and squeezed it in, before dragging it down from the twelfth to the eleventh floor, the mezzanine floor.

Once they’d got it there, G told the driver he was OK, he’d get it in and onto the bed on his own. The driver had already come from Barking and had a whole load more drops to make.

G dragged the mattress in to the hallway, before stripping the bed and removing the old futon mattress, which had lain so heavily on the bed, nine years of ownership baring into his back. The new mattress was bigger and heavier than he’d imagined it would be. He’d been hoping for a low bed to go with the low ceiling. With this one you could see out of the window, all the way to Wembley stadium, lying down.

He made the bed up and tested it out, remembering what the man had said. It was a good mattress. He got used to it, felt the way it supported his weight. It was surprisingly good. He turned and looked out of the window. He could see right over West London. Just lying there on the bed.

G got up and collected the post together that needed sending and readied himself to go out.

The phone rang.

It was the driver.

I suppose you’ve already taken the mattress out of the plastic and everything, the driver said.

G told him he had.

It’s just – I’ve only gone and given you the wrong mattress, haven’t I?

Fifteen minutes later the driver buzzed on his door. He’d brought up the cardboard cover which had been lying where he’d left it. Together, he and G did a makeshift job of replacing the plastic sheeting and assembling the cardboard over the mattress.

They dragged it down a flight of stairs to the tenth floor and squeezed it into the lift. It hadn’t got any lighter. In the lift the driver told him this had set him back half an hour. He was having a hell of a day. His wife had unexpectedly had to go to work, which was why their son was sitting in the van.

They lugged the mattress back to the van. The driver’s son stayed in the van. The driver dragged G’s actual mattress out of the back and stripped the clean cardboard from it and took his time putting it over the heavy mattress, so it looked nearly as good as new.

They carried G’s new mattress over to the lift, and squeezed it in. G told the driver he’d be alright with it on the stairs. It wasn’t very big. And it wasn’t very heavy. It wasn’t very heavy at all.


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