"—and I told them, twelve. I counted twelve aisles every night for six weeks, and the store only has eleven."
That was how Priya started, halfway through her second pint, like we'd been talking about it for an hour already. We hadn't. We'd been talking about her sister's wedding, the one in Formby that got rained off. I asked her what she meant and she looked at me the way people do when they've told a story so many times in their own head that the outside version comes out wrong.
She used to do stocktake at the Tesco Extra on the ring road, the overnight one, three till seven, scanning shelf by shelf with a handheld gun while the delivery guys stacked pallets in the warehouse behind her. Eleven aisles. Tinned goods to frozen, household to health and beauty. Two years in the job, she could have walked it blind, and mostly did, she said, especially on the four a.m. stretch.
One Tuesday in March she finished aisle eleven, frozen, and turned to head for the office to log out. There was another aisle in front of her.
She said it wasn't dramatic. No lights flickering, no cold spot, nothing you'd notice in a film. Just a gap between the freezer wall and the fire exit where the corridor to the staff room should have been, and instead a strip of shelving running off further than the store's footprint should allow, lit the same flat white as the rest of the place. Own-brand biscuits on the left. Cat food on the right. The barcodes scanned fine. The gun beeped, logged the SKU, added it to the tally, same as any other shelf.
I asked her what she did.
"I counted it," she said. "What else was I going to do, leave a job half done?"
She walked the whole aisle, top to bottom, both sides. Forty-one minutes by her handheld's clock, longer than any of the real aisles ever took her. At the far end there was no wall, no exit, just the aisle folding back into itself. That was when she stopped and went the way she'd come. Not running. Not exactly walking either.
Her manager didn't believe her, obviously. The stock report went through fine, no anomalies flagged. Whatever she'd scanned matched real inventory somehow, biscuits and cat food that existed on the actual shelves in aisle six and aisle two. Like the twelfth aisle had borrowed stock from the other eleven to make itself convincing. She kept saying that bit, the borrowing, like it bothered her more than the aisle itself.
It happened four more times over six weeks. Never the same place twice, always after she finished the last real aisle, always gone by the time she looked for it again in the same shift. The worst part, she said, wasn't the aisle. It was that her tally always came out exact. Never over, never under. As if whatever it was understood that a stocktaker's whole job is the number at the end, and it wanted hers to be right.
She quit in April. Works in an office now, payroll, hates it. Says at least payroll numbers stay the same amount every time you count them. Her sister, by the way, still hasn't had the rescheduled wedding. Venue keeps falling through. Nothing to do with any of this, Priya just always brings it up first and then can't get back to the actual story for a while.
I walked her to her car after. On the way we passed the big Tesco on the ring road, the one she used to work in, closed for the night, all the windows dark except the strip above the tills. Still lit. Running one pane further along the wall than the building outside it looked wide enough to hold.
"Homogenized Music" by Joe Shlabotnik is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.