The bird food aisle has a bin of loose seed and a scale that logs every weighing to the till. Every night after close the scale logs a pound. One paper bag is gone from the roll. And the feeder that hangs on the old oak at the edge of the car park, which the centre does not fill because it is not the centre's feeder, is full every morning, and the birds are on it at first light, and the scale has logged a pound a night for eleven years.
I am the pet and wildlife manager at a garden centre and the bird food aisle is the busiest in the winter, and one customer comes in the summer too.
The scale.
A bin of loose seed and a scale beside it that prints a label, and the label goes on the bag and the bag goes to the till, and the scale logs the weight to the system, because loose seed is stock too.
Every night after close the scale logs a pound.
The pound.
Sixteen ounces, which is what the scale shows when somebody weighs out a pound by eye, which is a thing older people can do and I cannot. The label prints. One paper bag is gone from the roll, torn off at the perforation, straight, by somebody who has done it a thousand times. The till does not ring. The seed is gone from the bin, a pound of it, and the label is not in the bin, and the bag is not in the shop.
The feeder on the oak is full in the morning.
The oak.
At the edge of the car park, an old tree the centre built round, and on it, on a low branch, a feeder. A good one, metal, the squirrel proof kind. It does not belong to the centre. It was there when I came. And there is a bench under the tree, one of the wooden ones we sell, with a brass plate on it, and a name on the plate, and the plate says he loved this tree.
The feeder is full every morning. Nobody fills it. The birds are on it at first light, the finches and the tits and the sparrows, the way they are on a feeder that is never empty, and it is never empty.
What has been checked.
The scale, replaced. It logs a pound.
The aisle, after close, by me, in the dark, at the bin. The scoop moved. I heard it go into the seed, the sound the seed makes, and the scale's pan took a weight, and the display, which I could see, came up to a pound, and stopped there, dead on, the way it does for somebody who knows, and the label printed, and the bag tore off the roll, and the seed went into the bag, and the bag went past me, and out, and I followed it to the door, and the door was locked, and through the glass I could see the oak, and the feeder, and something at it, at the height of a man reaching up, and the feeder's lid lifting, and the seed going in, and the lid going down, and then the bench.
Somebody sat on the bench. I could see the bench move. And stayed there for a while, in the dark, looking up at the feeder.
Who.
The plate on the bench has his name. He was a customer. Every day, the old staff say, for years, for a pound of seed for the feeder he had put on the oak himself, with the centre's permission, because he lived in the flats across the road and had no garden and the oak was his garden, and he had sat on the bench and watched the birds every morning, and had died, and his family had asked for the bench, and the centre had said yes.
His family filled the feeder for a while. Then they moved. The feeder stayed full.
He is buying his pound. Every night. And filling the feeder. And sitting on his bench. And the birds do not know the difference, because the seed is seed, and the man is the man.
What is done about it.
The pound of seed is on the stock report every night as weighed and not sold, which is shrinkage, and the area manager has asked me to find out who is stealing bird seed, and I have said, nobody is stealing it, and he has said, then where is it going, and I have said, on the oak.
What I do.
I manage the wildlife side.
He paid. Every day, for years. A pound of seed at the till. The one thing that has been wrong for eleven years is that the till has not rung, because there is nobody to ring it, and the seed goes out as shrinkage, and that is not what he would have wanted, because he was, the staff say, particular about paying.
So I ring it. In the morning, when I come in, I ring a pound of loose seed through the till, and I pay for it, from my own pocket, which is not much, and I put the receipt in a jar on the bench under the oak, which I have screwed to the arm, and the jar has eleven years of receipts to catch up on and I am not going to manage that, but it has a year of them now.
The feeder is full. The birds are on it. And the bench, when I put the receipt in the jar, is warm, on the side nearest the tree, where a man sits who has been looking up at the same feeder for eleven years and is, by every sign a bench can give, content.