Tag Archives: Robert Garnham

Twenty years ago, I wrote a novel. And some of that novel had material in it from fifteen years before that. It’s lived at the bottom of a drawer for most of that time. Thanks to technology, I can now bring this to you. I will be sharing a chapter a week.

Here is a brief synopsis:

A comedy novel set at His Nibs, a fictional shop at a seaside town which sells only pencils. Assistant manager Robert once had a steamy and passionate romance with his colleague Matt. Matt is now with Clarissa, and it must be serious because they have got a cat. Meanwhile someone has burned down the pier, which means there are no tourists, and the shop is not making its targets. It rains a lot. Manager Carol has gone off the rails and harks back to the glory days of pencil retail. Robert is determined to win Matt back, or at least recreate the romance with someone else, while area manager Mona is determined to turn things round at the shop. Standing in their way are mystery shoppers, angry refunders, the company auditor, weird customers, light-fingered gang members, the local protection racket, increasingly bizarre memos from head office and the joys of the twice-annual stock take.

Chapter One

The Stock Take

We haven’t sold a pencil in hours yet we’re not supposed to start counting them until six o‘clock. It’s quite worrying that we haven’t sold a pencil in hours because the whole shop exists just to sell pencils. It’s a pencil shop. Pencils and the very minimum of pencil accessories. Pencil sharpeners. Pencil erasers. Pencil cases. And pencils. If we sold some pencils then there would be less to count, obviously. If we sold two pencils in the last hour then that would be two less pencils. The shop has probably got thirty thousand pencils in it. We will find out in the next six or seven hours. How long does it take to count one pencil?

          But that’s life. The tills are all computerised now and if we were to sell a pencil after the stock take had started, then it would bugger everything up. The count would be wrong and we’d have gaps in the stock list where more pencils should be. And the area manager, Mona, she would get awfully sarcastic and make us do it all over again. And a part of me would understand the world a little better while simultaneously bemoaning its perpetual unpleasantness. A part of me would wish that the world would have less pencils in it. A part of me would want to be at home luxuriating in the freedom associated with a man who does not have to do a stock take. For some reason the company likes to know how many pencils it has.

          ‘Right, I’m off home’, Carol says. ‘Let me know how it goes’.

         Carol’s the boss, the Manager. Carol is a canny operator. Carol has come up with a theory that when it comes to a stock take, it’s more accurate to have two people doing it instead of three. Two people can easily get on and do it. Three people would just complicate things. That’s what Carol says. And she lives furthest from the shop, so it only makes sense that she be the one to forego such nocturnal delights.

          The door closes behind her. She locks it on the way out.

          I’m not looking forward to it, obviously. One pencil starts to look like another after a while. There’s really been no innovation in the pencil industry for quite some time. Some have got rubbers on the end and some haven’t and that’s really the only source of variety, otherwise they’re all straight and made of wood and they’ve all got a pointy end which draws or writes. I’ve been working in pencils for over ten years and I still don’t know what the pointy end which draws or writes is called. I mean, the technical term. It’s easy to lose enthusiasm for pencils when you’re around them for as much as I am.

          I’ve got Matt helping me with the stock take, though. That’s something, at least. I like Matt for a number of reasons. The first reason that I like Matt is that he’s accurate and occasionally conscientious. The second reason that I like Matt is that we’d sometimes stop counting for a bit and lose ourselves to the simmering sexual tensions that have existed between us since the very first day he walked into the shop with his CV and his boyish grin and his impetuosity and his fashionable hair and his love of life and the rumbling sense of innate masculine ecstatic oblivion I feel whenever I’m in his company which makes each nerve tingle and the air itself crack with hormonal longing. The third reason I like Matt is that he lifts some of the heavier boxes.

          Alas, the chemistry between us has been somewhat depleted these last few months.

          ‘How’s Clarissa?’ I ask.

          Because it’s only polite to ask.

          ‘She’s great’, he replies. ‘She’s perfect. We‘re thinking of buying a cat.’

          Which is disappointing, because as well as being conscientious, masculine and impetuous, Matt is also alarmingly moral. Our stock-room trysts, foibles and peccadilloes are now a thing of the past. Clarissa is his life. A cat only compounds that.

          ‘Let’s start this thing’, he says, picking up a pen and a clipboard. (Carol doesn’t like us using pencils during a stock take for fear of accidentally using shop stock). ‘Let’s put this baby to sleep!’

          It’s an unusual metaphor. This baby wont be asleep for another six or seven hours just yet.

Dextrously, Matt’s fingers pour over boxes of stock. His large brown eyes – the eyes of a particularly obedient puppy, eyes which have always seemed far, far too big for the rest of him – concentrate on the task at hand. One pencil, two pencils, et cetera. There’s no guess work, no cutting corners with Matt. He always goes for the maximum. If he wants it, he gets it. He does things properly.

          I think back to a couple of years before, when Matt brought a sudden burst of romance into my life. Perhaps he was drunk on the wooden smell of all the pencils. He couldn’t control himself. What started out as a gentle re-organisation of the pencil case shelf in the stock room blossomed into full-blown rumpy pumpy. He became a floppy love machine, curling himself around me and oozing warmth and sensuous impossibility, it was all I could do to put down the pricing gun.

         This happened again the next night, after Carol had seen the reorganised pencil case shelf in the stock room and told us to put it all back again. And then it happened once more the night afterwards, though we didn’t touch the pencil case shelf or reorganise anything, and Matt had brought some whipped cream along with him, you know, for some added pizzazz. It was only on the eighth night that we began to ask ourselves why we were using the stock room of a pencil shop when we could easily just go back to my flat and use the bedroom.

          It kind of slowed down a bit after that. 

          But every now and then, perhaps excited by the sight of so many pencils in a kind of as yet undiagnosed drawing implement fetish, Matt and I would give vent to all kinds of ingenious desires, until Carol got suspicious at all the time we were spending together and thought that we were only doing it for the overtime. Then Clarissa sauntered in one day looking for a pen, (seriously!), and Matt didn’t seem to get quite so excitable around me any more.

         ‘1147367’.

          ‘HB hexagonal shaft blue with a white stripe?’

          ‘Six’.

          ‘1147374’.

          ‘HB hexagonal shaft red with a white stripe’.

          ‘Nine’.

          It took us two hours to work out that all of the numbers started with ‘1147’. The stock count started to go a little bit quicker after this.

          ‘479’.

          ‘HB hexagonal shaft yellow with rubber’.

          ‘Seven’.

          Matt is seemingly unflustered by the fact that we shared so many intimate moments in this very room. Yet I cannot get over the lack of passion he now shows. I pretend to count, gazing up from the boxes of pencils, and I cannot envisage anything beyond the madness to which we would willingly succumb. There are seven pencils in the box but I manage to lose count, and he makes me do it again. Two years before, we would have been all over one another. There’s nothing more sensual than a box of pencil sharpeners when you’re both naked and gagging for it. His new-found professionalism is an affront to the memory of our passion. If only a switch might be activated ensuring his sudden interest in matters other than the rigours of a damn good stock take.

          ‘532’.

          ‘HB round shaft novelty Spongebob Squarepants squeaky tip’.

          ‘Eighteen’.

          But there’s no let up in his demeanour. Never before have I seen anyone so intent on the counting of pencils. It’s not that he wants to finish the job any quicker, though. It’s almost as if he relishes the opportunity to lose himself in stationery. This cheers me up for a little while, repays some of the faith that I have previously lost in the human spirit. But then I realise that he’s probably concentrating so intently so as to ward off some of the emotion he might otherwise feel on returning to the scene of our many romantic escapades.

          ‘45, er . .  .’.

          ‘Yes?’

          The thought has jarred me a little.

          ‘458. No. 459’.

          ‘So what is it?’

          ‘459’.

          ‘There is no 459’.

          ‘Ah. It’s 458. There was a bit of dandruff or something on the code number. It made the eight look like a nine’.

          ‘How many?’

          ‘I don’t suppose it matters’, I tell him. ‘There’s only one. And it’s snapped in half’.

          ‘It’s still got to be counted’.

          ‘But it’s snapped. It’s either one, or two halves. It wont make any difference in our overall figure whatever we decide to do with it’.

          ‘We will have to write it off. But first we need to count it. The Damaged Stock Form will arrive at head office after the stock take, so it’s officially still a part of the stock’.

          ‘I can fill out the Damaged Stock Form now and send it this moment. Then we wont have to count it at all’.

          ‘But it would be wrong’.

          ‘It’s one pencil’.

          ‘You know the procedure’.

          ‘It will cost more in postage and work hours filling out the form than the worth of the pencil’.

          ‘Procedures must be adhered to’.

          ‘Why don’t I just buy the pencil?’

          ‘The shop isn’t open. So therefore the pencil is officially part of the shop’s stock at the time of the stock take’.

          Matt does not appear very happy for someone with a girlfriend and the chance of getting a cat.

          As the evening wears on I feel the insanity of our chore become ever more evident until I cannot see the world except through the subtle variations and design of the pencils that we are counting. Chair legs, skirting boards, anything straight or wooden or both present themselves to my mind which then, automatically, starts looking for a serial code. Another hour and life itself – nay, existence – seems secondary to the task of counting all the pencils in the shop. 1147001, big bang, celestial detonation : one. 1147002, universe, (expanding), infinite : one. I start to wonder if counting the universe in our stock take might automatically nullify the need to carry on with the stock take, but Matt says no. It has to be done. It is the reason why we are here. It is our aim and our purpose. Without the stock take, we are as nothing.

          And then a secondary madness takes over in which it becomes obvious, or at least, it feels obvious, that those at His Nibs head office damn well knows how many sodding pencils we have and that this is all some kind of cruel test or punishment inflicted on us just because we had the temerity to work for their company. And the company, oh, how it becomes in our minds so powerful and so all-consuming, directing us with its bulletins and conducting the whole shape of our lives with the list of items that we, us mere mortals, have to count, through the fabled, legendary stock take sheets. There’s no room for error, no room for improvisation. How deliriously do our managers sit in their offices compiling this list, laughing at themselves as they envisage the mayhem that it will bring to our lives! Oh, great and mighty stock-take co-ordinator, oh, you saintly powerful all-knowing New Goods department, how we aim to please you with our pitiful late-night counting!

          Matt tells me to snap out of it.

          ‘1147859’.

          ‘HB round shaft, silver coloured embellished edge’.

          ‘Yes’.

          ‘Well?’

          ‘Sorry. Eight’.

          I wish I was dead.

A couple of years before Matt had been a completely different person. There had been something sly about him. It was as if he were throwing subtle hints all the time. I would catch them in the way that he would look at me at certain moments, or the way he’d brush a stray hair away from my shoulder while we were making a display of pencils, or perhaps it was the fact that whenever we were alone he’d run his hands under my shirt and beg for ten minutes of ecstatic human physical companionship as if enraptured by the pounding, constant sensuality conferred on all like-minded sexed-up individuals. Such subtlety. But things are much different now. There’s nothing. 

          I find myself looking at him as we embark into our fourth hour of counting. The clock on the wall nudges inexorable towards midnight. He opens boxes of pencils and spends a couple of seconds running his fingers lovingly through the stock within, and it is the first sign I’ve seen of him wavering from his professionalism. He’s almost mesmerised by the pencils. He used to be mesmerised by me. But this was all before Clarissa and the promise of a kitty.

          ‘Are you OK?’, I ask.

          ‘Often’, he says, ‘I get a feeling of . . .’.

          An achingly long gap. He doesn’t say anything. Oh, the emotion, it must weigh heavily on his soul. My heart pounds with excitement.

          ‘Yes?’

          He puts down the clipboard. This alone is significant. And all of a sudden I can feel the last two years peeling away. This is how we used to be, so eager to share our private feelings and comfortable in each other’s emotional presence. He was so unsure of himself back then, so driven by the needs of the moment. He needed guidance in the ways of the world and I was always there for him. The night starts to feel slightly different. It’s as if Clarissa and the cat don’t exist at all. I can feel that he wants to say something significant, yet the new version of himself that he has created over the past couple of years would never be so forthcoming.

          He lets out a big sigh.

          ‘There are things in this life’, he says, ‘That I’m really not sure of’.

          ‘Such as?’

          Silence again.

          ‘You can tell me’.

          Much silence.

          Emotional silence is all very well, but this is bordering on plain rude. At last, he says:

          ‘Have you ever looked at the world and thought that it’s been put together just ever so slightly askew? And that certain components of it were – how do I put this? – meant for some other plain of existence, and used in a kind of half-hearted attempt to cobble the world together – and by ‘the world’ I mean the way that we live our lives, the philosophies and strictures which we adopt to govern our behaviour?’

          It’s not the most coherent question I’ve ever been asked.

          ‘What I mean is, do you often think there’s more to living than just this?’

          Not going so well with Clarissa, then, I feel like saying.

          ‘Well . . .’.

          ‘Because for a while I’ve thought that even though I’ve got all the things I’ve always wanted, I’ve still been missing out on . . .’.

          ‘Yes?’

          ‘Life’.

          It’s not the sort of thing that I’d been expecting him to say. I’d seen him become a machine over the last couple of years, a unit designed for living normally. And yes, I want to agree wholeheartedly with his sentiments. He’d gone chasing after the life that culture has told him to live, quite forgetting that he would still be the same person underneath.

          ‘Do you remember how it used to be?’ I ask. ‘The fun we used to have? Do you remember?’

          ‘To be honest’, he replies, ‘Not entirely’.

          ‘All those nights reorganising the pencil case shelf?’

          ‘Doesn’t ring any bells’.

          ‘And you’d say, gosh, it’s so hot, do you mind if I take my shirt off?’

          ‘Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I’d say.’

          He’s right, of course. It doesn’t. Not any more.

          ‘And anyway, what’s that got to do with . . With what I’ve just said?’

          ‘I’m just trying to remind you of the times that we used to have together, the fun and the physical nature of our relationship, and how you used to live for the nights and you’d come in to work and you’d whisper to me, hey, let’s reorganise the pencil case shelf tonight, and all day long I’d be longing for the moment when Carol went home and we could lose ourselves to the absolute bliss of each other’s company, and some times we got so into it that we’d finish reorganising  the pencil case shelf and then start all over again, and the world seemed right and the night stretched before us with all its promise, and we’d be both so incredibly happy that we’d had the fortune to find each other,  that the world should be a place where constant adventure could happen right here, right here, in this crappy little town’.

          ‘To be honest, I don’t remember any of that’.

          ‘You don’t remember?’

          ‘Not in the slightest’.

          ‘It was the highlight of my year!’

          His eyes narrow.

          ‘If you must know’, he says, ‘It sounds a bit far-fetched’.

          Far-fetched. I can remember every second of our many encounters. Emblazoned as they are on my memory in all of their vivid detail, there can be nothing more real than the exquisite mix of heart-felt longing and rampant masculinity, blending as they did into a fine madness into which we both so willingly succumbed. And yet, yes, he’s right. It does all sound magnificently far-fetched.

          ‘Often’, he says, ‘When something is very horrific, the mind shuts it out completely’.

          ‘But you must remember some of it’.

          ‘Well . . .’.

          More silence. 

          ‘What has all this got to do with what I was saying? I trust you enough to delve right down to the deepest part of my soul and you highjack the moment just to concoct some bizarre story about us having a relationship which I can’t even remember. It can’t have been that special, really. That’s what I’m thinking. It probably wasn’t even with me, was it? I don’t go around shagging work colleagues in the store room of a pencil shop. And just at the moment when I need some help in trying to understand the world, you go and make it even more complicated. Well, thanks. Thanks for that.’

          ‘So you don’t remember any of it, then?’

          ‘The only thing I remember is . . .’ He stops for a second. ‘Did you hear something?’

          ‘We need to talk about this. I don’t think you understand how important this is to me’.

          ‘Can you hear it? Movement, out the back. And it sounds very much like . . .’.

          Please, no. Of all the times.

          ‘Bin robbers!’

          ‘You said yourself, Matt. You said that you weren’t sure about life. You said it just now, that there was something else. Well, there was. And you don’t remember any of it. I showed you what it was that you were missing. I showed you, two years ago, but . . .’

          ‘Bin robber!’

They come every night, the bin robbers. They rummage, standing on upturned milk crates in order to delve deeper into the mysterious delights of the pencil shop skip. They’re looking for pencils, obviously, or anything else that may have been thrown away during the day. It’s a wonder they find anything amid the boxes and the packaging and the assorted detritus of a pencil shop skip, but every now and then they find what they’re looking for. Pencils. Only the pencils have been broken in half, as per company guidelines. Go to any car boot sale and you’ll find a stall of short stubby pencils, sharpened, perhaps, at both ends. Discontinued lines from pencil shop skips, pencils with health and safety issues now illegal to trade, dug out from the bottom of pencil shop skips and sold by shady looking gentlemen with stubble and inappropriate piercings. Some of these gentlemen might even have tattoos. There’s money in pencils, obviously. The internet hasn’t killed everything.

          But they’re nasty, too. There’s many a report of bin robbers threatening shop staff, managers holed up in their offices on the phone to the police or, god forbid, violence against any hapless employee who should go out after dark to empty a waste-paper bin and come across a bin robber. Territorial, occasionally hyped up on various concoctions, there are even stories of rival bin robbers fighting each other in front of bemused His Nibs shop staff. They leave a mess behind them and throw the non-pencil-related skip contents across the back yard in order to get to their bounty. Sometimes they even turn the bin upside down and empty it, which is no small task what with it being made from solid steel and as large as a small car. They threaten anyone who tries to stop them. Many a time a lowly His Nibs shop employee has had to call the old bill because a particularly nasty bin robber has promised some admittedly quite inventive form of personal injury while filling up their pockets with faulty pencil sharpeners or pencil cases that have been withdrawn from sale due to copyright issues. Illegally mass-produced Scooby Doo pencil cases that head office have bought cheaply and sold at quite a mark up until threatened with court action by the intellectual property owners of the Scooby Doo franchise, now filling up the Lidl’s carrier bags of the common bin robber. It’s a vicious circle.

          It’s recycling, at least.

          And tonight’s is a fine specimen. In his woollen cap and bomber jacket, he looks every inch the scrote. We watch through the back door as he sets up a powerful torch, climbs on his milk crate, then dives into the bowels of the skip, his army boots sticking out as he has a good rummage. You might think that it would be safe just to let him get on with it, but there are moral forces at work, a sense of personal violation which comes from seeing such an atrocity, particularly in the private enclosure of the back yard. Indeed, as the police have pointed out, each pencil sold by a bin robber feeds violence and drug abuse, underhand dealings, and the powerful local organised crime syndicates, and that it is our duty to prevent all further bin incursions. The police have better things to do.

          Matt’s fingers reach for the door handle.

          ‘It’s not safe’, I tell him. ‘He might get violent’.

          ‘He’s upside down in a bin. We’ve got the tactical upper hand at the moment’.

          ‘He might have an accomplice’.

          ‘It’s a chance we have to take’.

          ‘We don’t have to. We’re not here to fight crime’.

          The bin robber throws a sack of waste paper over his shoulder. It lands on the ground and scatters everywhere.

          ‘If we don’t make an effort’, Matt says, ‘Then it will just carry on’.

          ‘He might be armed, and dangerous . . .’

          ‘What better way is there to go?’

          I can think of several other options rather than being knifed by a bin robber next to a rubbish skip out the back of a pencil shop at two ‘o’ clock in the morning in a deserted seaside town. It’s not an iconic death. But Matt is starting to open the door now.

          ‘Matt!’ 

          ‘Tell my parents that I love them’.

          ‘And what about Clarissa?’

          ‘Yeah, her to’.

          I can only assume that the worst will occur. The bin robber will lunge at him, perhaps shouting, perhaps incomprehensible, no doubt far too stoned for any rational response other than shooting at us with a concealed weapon, or perhaps a bow and arrow. (The mind does funny things during moments of stress). And already I can envisage having to phone Matt’s parents and telling them the bad news, the police helicopter hovering overhead with spotlights trying to track down the ruthless bin robber, the whole thing conveyed live to local television. 

          ‘Hey!’, Matt says, whipping the back door open.

          ‘All right?’, the bin robber asks.

          ‘What you doing?’

          ‘I’m robbing your pencils’.

          ‘From the bin?’

          ‘Yeah’.

          ‘But they’re broken’.

          ‘That’s the thing with pencils’, he replies. ‘They’re never really broken. You just sharpen the jagged ends and you’ve got yourself two new pencils. Hey. My name’s Dave’.

          Dave holds out his hand and, amazingly, Matt shakes it.

          ‘That’s all very well’, Matt says, ‘But then you’ll end up with stumpy pencils’.

          ‘I know’.

          ‘What good’s a stumpy pencil?’

          ‘There’s a lot of people out there with SFS. Horribly afflicted. They can’t handle full sized pencils. They’re crying out for shortened pencils. I’m only happy to help them’.

          ‘SFS?’

          ‘Stumpy Finger Syndrome’.

          ‘You know, you really can’t do that. It’s stealing’.

          ‘But you’re throwing them away’.

          ‘It’s still stealing. That’s the law. And I’m here to uphold the law.’

          ‘It’s recycling. That’s what I’m doing. Otherwise it would all go into landfill, and do you know how long it takes for a pencil to biodegrade? I‘m saving the planet, my good friend, that’s what I’m doing’.

          ‘Go on’.

          ‘What?’

          ‘How long does it take for a pencil to biodegrade?’

          ‘Hey, I’m too busy bringing hope and comfort to those with SFS to worry about minor details like that’.

          Dave takes out two more pencils from the bin and holds them up to the light.

          ‘Right, then. I’ll wish you two gentlemen a pleasant evening’.

          He closes the lid of the bin and saunters away. Matt watches him leave for a couple of seconds.

          ‘Well’, he says, ‘I don’t think he’s going to mess with us again’.

          This whole night has been profoundly confusing.

We count through the night. The Earth spins round one more time. The count is completed by five in the morning, the last pencil located in a plastic display case next to the till area at the front of the shop. What mystical powers that one pencil holds! I place it back in its case feeling a sense of ceremonial duty, for now we have completed our task. Yet the world seems just the same. I look out the plate glass window at the front of the shop floor at the dark, deserted street, the sodium lighting and the parked cars, the fascias of the other shops unlit, silent fashion shop dummies just standing there like memories of parties past, and it all looks like hardly anything has changed at all.

          ‘We are free’, I whisper.

Two hour’s sleep, and a new day starts.

          It’s just as well that my tiny flat is over the road from the shop itself. It’s a constant joy to open the curtains each morning and see the little shop sitting there, taunting me with its pencils and its sense of constant dread. I dream of bin robbers screaming through several surrealist situations, none of which I can particularly remember within seconds of waking.

          One of the eternal mysteries of retail is the stock count. The head office New Goods department has a figure which is supposed to match the number of pencils held in stock. In all likelihood, the shop will have this figure with a slight margin of error. Yet it all depends on how great this margin of error is. If it’s a lot more or a lot less, then there will have to be an investigation and it will be assumed that the stock has gone missing, somehow. If there are three thousand less pencils in stock than the paperwork says, then it means that someone has come in and robbed the shop of three thousand pencils. And this is rightly seen as an example of gross misconduct on behalf of the shop staff. But if the figure is, say, out by fifty or so, then that’s seen as officially All Right. It could easily be a mis-count. Fifty-one or more and there’s a problem. The area manager will demand that we do it all over again.

          Our total is out by two hundred and fifty six.

          This is when it’s wise to begin a subtle manipulation of the paperwork. The first thing to do is to look at the last Breakages list and assume that it hasn’t got to Head Office just yet. So if there’s eight pencils on the Breakages list, then these can be added to the stock count, therefore making it out only by two hundred and forty eight.

          Then one has to look at the other stock that has been written off. Out of date pencils, deleted pencils, pencils that have been recalled due to various health and safety investigations. If a child somewhere gets a splinter from a pencil, then the pencil is withdrawn from sale. If an artist on a remote island artist’s community puts a pencil in their mouth and has an allergic reaction to the paint, then the pencil is withdrawn from sale. This can usually add another twenty or thirty to the final figure. And then there’s the stock that has been transferred to another branch. If shop A phones up shop B and asks for a box of two hundred HB red and white striped pencils, they will often be so relieved to receive the stock that they might quite forget to process the paperwork that comes with it until a couple of months later when it’s found at the bottom of the in-tray next to a mouldy bacon sandwich, the one that’s been funking up the office for the last few weeks. So these transfers, also, and quite cunningly, are added to the grand total of the stock count.

          But Head Office gets its revenge. The stock count sheets themselves are incredibly long, a concertina of computer print-outs. A fully unfolded stock count sheet will stretch from here to halfway down the street. On each page are fifty serial codes of the different types of pencil held in stock, and there are three columns which must be filled in: stock in shop [A], stock in store room [B], and total stock [C]. Easy enough, you might think. But for a start, column [A] and [B] must add up to column [C], and each column must add up to the sub total at the bottom of each page, and then each page must add up to the grand total. 

          There are so many serial numbers that most of them will not be carried by the shop in question. Therefore, the total for each column will be zero. Except Head Office doesn’t like the number zero. They say that it can easily be mistaken for a six, especially if written hurriedly. Every time a zero occurs in the paperwork, the word ‘zero’ has to be written in the space allocated, rather than the number. A typical row will therefore read ‘zero zero zero’, which means that most of a stock count is taken up not with counting, but by writing the word ‘zero’ a couple of thousand times.

          Oh, the unique joys of the stock take.

There’s always the dread of the familiar on arriving back at work, whatever the circumstances. The shop seems just to sit there over night, ostensibly inanimate yet filling itself with more reasons for you to hate it. There’s a crushing sense of obligation in every detail as if it’s playing with you, saying, ‘Forget any hopes and dreams you might once have had, forget anything else which might seem important in your life, because you exist for me now, and nothing else’. And while some might argue that in the modern economic climate it might be seen as advantageous and perhaps even privileged to have a job at all, there’s also something emasculating about putting so much energy and thought and worry and paranoia and everything else which makes us human and makes us function as individuals into the selling of pencils. As if to compound the delirium, there are emails from Mona. 

          She does a good line in sarcasm.

          Indeed, it seems a pre-requisite that an area manager should dabble in the black art of sarcasm. Perhaps they teach it at Area Manager School. And like any art movement, it’s not just dependent on content, but also the circumstance and the delivery. An Area Manager standing in the doorway of a shop and saying ‘it looks like a herd of bulls has rampaged through this place’, seems to have a greater effect than merely, ‘Looks like you might need to tidy up in here’. Or then there’s the old classic ‘am I speaking a foreign language? Do you want me to provide a translation?’ This one works especially well when the simplest command has been seemingly ignored, Mona once again standing there with her hands on her hips, demonstrating that as well as being an expert in retail management, sales patterns and category space analysis, and all those other minutiae which make such middle managers feel important in the grand scheme of things, she is also something of a comedian. This morning’s email is profound with such literary shenanigans.

          ‘Yet again it would seem that most simple of tasks – counting stock – is beyond your capabilities’, is the cheerful phrase she uses to begin her message. I imagine her sitting at home, a plate full of cream buns next to her laptop and Wagner playing on the stereo, firing off this latest communication. ‘It’s not hard to keep a tally. Maybe I should run a seminar on it. Or perhaps not. Go into any good book shop and they will have a volume on simple mathematics’. She then has the sense to end the email with the phrase, ‘kind regards’.

          Carol has called in sick. She always calls in sick the day after a stock count, you know, just in case. We open the shop. Matt goes on the till and fumes to himself for the whole of the morning. We have one customer in the first hour, getting a refund on a 25p pencil sharpener that she bought in another branch. Matt is somewhat abrupt with her. Then he’s somewhat abrupt with me when I quip that this is one more pencil sharpener that we will have to count. The fluorescent lights make my eyes hurt.

          By midday we have come up with a plan to do the count again that night.

          ‘We’ll have to be more methodical’, Matt says. ‘Every time we count a box, I will attach a yellow sticky notelet to the side of it so that we can gauge where we have been and what has been counted’.

          ‘Oh yes, so that’s going to be the answer to everything, is it?’

          ‘I can’t see you coming up with any better suggestions’.

          ‘To be honest, I’m beyond caring’.

          ‘A sticky yellow notelet. And then we will write on all of these notelets, ‘counted’, which will act as a double check’.

          I yawn.

          ‘You’re right’, I tell him. ‘That will be the answer to everything. Problem solved. Every problem the world has ever had, solved, just like that. Sticky yellow notelets’.

          ‘And they have to be yellow. No other colour will show up in the dark confines of the stock room’.

          ‘Another night together, then’.

          He smiles.

          The prospect of spending it in such a way fills me not with dread, but with a rising sense of excitement, especially as the afternoon rolls on. It’s all I can do to stop my heart from beating, seeing him there and knowing that we will be together again. Maybe it’s sleep deprivation, but the world seems suddenly filled with promise and excitement. Because last night, oh yes, last night, Matt came so close to admitting the truth. So incredibly close. And if he doesn’t do it again tonight, I might just sabotage the result myself just to make sure that it all goes in to a third night.

          ‘Yellow’, I repeat, ‘Notelets’.

          Early evening, I find a box of two hundred and fifty pencil erasers in the kitchen microwave. I decide to hide them. Often it’s best not to admit to such things.

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