The store still has its pneumatic tube, the brass pipes that carried cash from the counters to the cash office and change back, and the cash office end is kept working for the tourists. Every night at ten past six a capsule arrives. From a station number the system does not have, because the counter it served was bricked up in the seventies. Inside, a sale's worth of old money and a chit in pencil, and if the cash office sends the change back down the tube it goes, and does not arrive anywhere, and is gone.
I am the cash office supervisor at a department store that kept its pneumatic tubes, and the tubes are a curiosity, and one of them is a line.
The tubes.
Brass pipes in the walls from every counter to the cash office in the basement. A sale's cash and the chit went in a capsule, the capsule went in the tube, air took it to the office, the office made change and receipted the chit and sent the capsule back. It ran until the tills came in. The office end is kept working, with three stations on the shop floor, for the tourists, who love it.
At ten past six a capsule arrives from station twenty two.
Station twenty two.
There is no station twenty two. The system in the office has a board with the station numbers on it, brass, and the board stops at eighteen, because the stations above that were on the old mezzanine, and the mezzanine came out in the seventies and the tubes to it were cut and the ends bricked up in the wall on three.
The capsule comes down the tube from twenty two. The office end has a receiver for each tube and twenty two's receiver is a brass pipe that ends in a wall, and the capsule comes out of it, with the thump they make, into the tray.
Inside: money, old, notes and coins, a sale's worth, and a chit. Pencil. A counter number, a department, which is one that was on the mezzanine, a price, and initials. The chit is on the store's chit paper, which we have a box of, in the office, unused since the seventies, and the box is not fewer.
What has been checked.
The receiver on twenty two, taken off the wall, and behind it is a pipe into brick, and the capsule came out of the brick and fell on the floor.
The office, at ten past six, by me, at the tray. The thump. The capsule. I opened it and I did what the office did, because I have been shown: I counted the money against the chit, and it was right, and I made the change, from the old money in the drawer that I keep for the tourists, and I receipted the chit with the office stamp, and I put the change and the chit in the capsule and I put the capsule in the tube to twenty two, and pressed the lever, and the air took it, up, into the brick, and it did not come back.
The next night the capsule came down. With the chit from the night before, receipted, in it, with the sale's money, and a new chit, and the change from the night before was not there, because it had been received.
She is getting the change. Whoever she is. On the mezzanine. And sending the next sale.
Who.
The department on the chit was a counter on the mezzanine that sold one thing, and the store's staff records for that counter go back to the twenties, and the initials on the chit are on the records from 1951 to 1974, one woman, the whole of that time, on that counter, and 1974 is when the mezzanine came out and the counter went and she went, the record says, on the day the counter closed, without notice, which the record marks as, left.
She did not leave. The mezzanine is bricked up and she is behind it, at her counter, making sales, sending the money down, waiting for the change, and for forty years the change did not come.
What is done about it.
The capsule is on the office's reconciliation every night as a receipt from an unlisted station, in currency the bank will not take, and the finance office has a drawer of pre decimal money that grows by a sale a night, and has asked me where it is coming from, and I have said, station twenty two, and they have looked at the board.
What I do.
I run the cash office.
The office sent the change and receipted the chit and the counter was paid for the day. That was how the store knew a counter had traded. At the end of the day the office sent a last capsule to every station with the day's total on a slip and the word, agreed, and the counter kept the slip, and that was the counter being told it had done its work.
So I send it. After the change, every night, I send a second capsule up twenty two, with a slip, in the old form, the day's total, which is one sale, and the word, agreed, and my initials, and the air takes it into the brick.
The next night's capsule has the slip in it. Kept. Every one. She is keeping them, and sending them back down so I know she has, and on the last one, under agreed, in pencil, in the hand from the chits, she had written, thank you, and under that, and goodnight, and the capsule was warm, which brass is not, unless it has been held.