Uncollected goes to the charity shop after six months. That is the rule and I have kept it for nineteen years. Ticket 0417 has been on the rail since before I owned the place.
I have run the same dry cleaners for nineteen years and I bought it off a man who had run it for twenty six.
It is one shop on a parade, between a barbers and a place that has been four different takeaways. Two of us on a weekday, three on a Saturday. We do not clean anything on site any more, it goes on the van to the plant on a Tuesday and a Thursday and comes back the next day on hangers, which is how nearly all of them work now and which disappoints people when they find out.
The rule about uncollected is not mine and it is not unusual.
Six months. It is printed on the bottom of every ticket, it is on a laminated sign behind the till, and it is what the trade body suggests. After six months we are entitled to dispose of it, and what disposing of it means in practice is that twice a year I fill four bin bags and carry them up to the hospice shop.
I have done that thirty-odd times.
There is a coat at the end of the rail.
Not on the customer rail, which is out front and alphabetical. On the back rail in the store room, where the long-standing ones go, and it is the last thing before the wall.
Wool overcoat, dark grey, nice one. A proper one, half-lined, with the horn buttons and a hook vent. The label is a Manchester outfitter that stopped trading in 2003 and it is a made-to-measure label, which means somebody stood in a shop and got measured for it.
It is clean. It has been cleaned and it is in the bag.
The ticket is the paper sort we have not used since 2009, stapled through the loop, and it says **0417** and under that, in pencil, **14/3/94**.
Nineteen years is thirty-eight clear-outs and it has been through all of them.
I want to explain what a clear-out actually is, because I think people imagine me strolling along with a bin bag being sentimental.
It is a Sunday. The shop is shut. I go along the back rail with the book, and anything whose ticket is older than six months comes off, gets checked for pockets, and goes in the bag. It takes about two hours and it is one of the jobs I dislike most, because half of it is somebody's dead mother's good coat and you can tell.
I do not skip anything. I have taken wedding dresses.
Every single time, that coat has still been there when I finished.
I did not notice for the first few years, which sounds impossible and is not. A shop like that has a hundred and forty things hanging in the back at any time and they all look like each other. It was a coat at the end of the rail. It had always been at the end of the rail. That is not a thought you have.
What made me notice was the ticket book.
We keep them, the old paper ones, in a box under the stairs, because you are supposed to for seven years and because nobody has ever thrown them out. In 2014 the accountant wanted something from 2011 and I ended up going through the whole box for an afternoon.
The 1994 books are in there. Two of them, March to August and September to February.
There is no 0417.
The numbers run 0411, 0412, 0413, 0414, 0415, 0416, 0418. I have looked at that page more times than a person should look at a page. It is not a torn-out stub, the book is intact and the spacing is even. It goes straight from 0416 to 0418 in the same hand on the same line of the ledger, and the two either side are a suit and three shirts and both were collected in the same week.
I asked the man I bought it from. He was alive then, in a bungalow, sharp as anything.
I said do you remember a grey overcoat on the back rail, made to measure, Manchester label.
He said: is it still there.
I said yes.
He said: leave it where it is, and he changed the subject, and he was not a superstitious man, he was a man who had run a shop.
I went back a second time about a year later, because it had been sitting in me. I asked him straight out what happened with 0417.
He said he had taken it to the hospice shop twice.
Twice.
He said the first time was in about 1996 and he did not think anything of it, it went in a bag with the rest. He said it was on the back rail again by the end of that year, cleaned and bagged and ticketed, and that he assumed one of the girls had brought it back or the shop had returned it, and he did not chase it.
He said the second time was 2001 and he watched the woman in the hospice shop put it on a hanger and price it at eight pounds, and he stood there and looked at it on their rail with a price on it.
It was back on his rail in the February.
He said after that he stopped taking it and he stopped thinking about it, which I did not believe when he said it and I believe completely now.
I have not tried it a third time.
The reason is not the one people want it to be. I am not frightened of it. I have carried that coat, I have moved it to hoover behind the rail, I have had it in my hands a hundred times and it is a coat.
It is that the man who had the shop for twenty six years told me to leave it where it is, and he was the only other person alive who knew, and now he is not.
So it hangs at the end of the back rail and it goes on the insurance schedule as one item, and when the new girl asked about it in the spring I said it is a long-standing uncollected and she said fair enough and that was that.
There is one thing I have done, and I have never told anybody, and it is the reason I am saying any of this now.
Two years ago I checked the pockets.
You always check the pockets on a clear-out, so it is not that it had never been done, it is that I had never done it on purpose, slowly, with the shop shut and the lights on.
Inside breast pocket: nothing. Left outer: nothing. Right outer: a bus ticket, printed, from an operator that was absorbed in 1998, for a route that still runs.
And in the ticket pocket, the little one above the right hand pocket that nobody uses, folded twice, a slip of paper the size of a receipt.
It is one of ours. The customer's half of a paper ticket, the bit you keep and bring back with you.
It says 0417.
I have thought about that for two years and here is the whole of what I have got.
The customer's half is the half that leaves the shop. It goes in a wallet or a coat pocket and it comes back when the person comes back, and you match it to the stub and you hand the coat over and that is the end of it.
There is only one way that slip is in that pocket.
Somebody came back for it.