The tills are on the store system and every sale is logged with the product code, the price and the tender. The perfume counter till rings a sale every night at the second the front doors lock. The code is for a scent the house stopped making in 1974. Gift wrap, which is a line on the receipt. Cash. The drawer has the notes in it in the morning, old ones, and the ground floor, from the counter to the doors, smells of a perfume nobody has been able to buy in fifty years.
I am the ground floor manager at a department store and the perfume counter is the first thing anybody smells when they come in, and the last thing I smell every night.
The till.
The perfume counter's till is on the store system and every sale is a line: time, product code, price, tender, and whether it was gift wrapped, because gift wrap is charged. The counter closes at half past five and the doors lock at six.
At six, at the second the doors lock, the till rings a sale.
The sale.
The product code is not in the system. The system rejects codes it does not know, and this one it accepts, and I looked it up in the old stock books, which are in the basement, and it is a scent by one of the houses, a real one, that was discontinued in 1974, and the price on the receipt is the 1974 price.
Gift wrapped. Cash. The drawer in the morning has the notes, the old kind, the right ones for the price, and the coins, and I have them in an envelope in the safe, a year of them.
And the smell. From the counter to the doors, a line of it, the way scent trails behind a woman walking to the exit with a wrapped box, and the older staff know it by name, and one of them cried.
What has been checked.
The till, replaced. The sale rings.
The counter, at six, by me, behind it, in the dark. The doors locked, I heard the bolts. The till in front of me lit. A key went down, I saw it, the old product code being typed, one digit at a time, by somebody who knew it. Gift wrap, yes. Cash. The drawer opened. Notes went in, I watched them go, and the drawer closed, and on the counter in front of me, on the glass, a box was wrapped. The paper, the store's, going round a box that was not there, the fold, the tape, the ribbon, tied by hands I could not see with the small tug at the end, and the box was lifted, and the smell went past me, and down the floor, to the doors, and the doors were locked, and the smell stopped at them, and stayed there, and was there at eight when I opened up.
She does not get out. That is the thing I saw. She buys the scent and she wraps it and she walks to the doors and the doors are locked.
Who.
The perfume counter in 1974 had a manager who had been there twenty years, and the oldest staff knew her, and she had been, they said, the kind who would serve a customer after the doors had locked, because a customer was a customer, and she had done so, on a night in 1974, for a woman who had come in at six for a bottle of that scent, gift wrapped, for her daughter, and the manager had served her, and wrapped it, and walked her to the doors, and the doors had been locked by a new security man who had not been told, and had gone, and the two women had been in the store for twenty minutes before anybody came, and the customer had been late for whatever she was late for, and had been, the staff said, very upset, and had never come back.
The manager had blamed herself. She had retired the year after. The scent had been discontinued that same year, which the staff said she had taken personally.
She is serving her. Every night at six. The last sale, the one that went wrong. And the customer is buying the scent and it is being wrapped and she is walking to the doors and the doors are locked.
What is done about it.
The sale is on the ground floor's till report every night at a price that does not match anything and the finance office has it as a till error and has asked me to void it, and I have said I cannot void a sale that has been paid for, and they have said that it has not, and I have shown them the envelope.
What I do.
I manage the floor.
The doors are on a timer. Six. I have changed the timer. Two minutes past.
At six the till rings and the box is wrapped and the smell goes down the floor to the doors, and the doors are open, because it is not yet two minutes past, and the smell goes through them, out, onto the street, and is gone, and at two minutes past the bolts go, and the ground floor in the morning does not smell of anything but the morning.
The till still rings. The manager is still serving. But the customer is getting out. And on the receipt, which prints, and which I have kept every one of, there is a line at the bottom that the system prints on every receipt, which is, thank you for shopping with us, and under that, since the timer changed, another line, which the system does not print and which is there, in the till's own type, and it says, sorry for the wait, and I have not been able to decide which of them wrote it, and I have decided it does not matter.