The potting bench in the middle of the shop is for demonstrations on a Saturday, a bench with a bin of compost and a stack of pots and a trowel on a hook. Every night after close it is used. Fifty pots, filled, firmed, lined up in rows of ten, the way a nurseryman lines them up, and the compost that spilled swept into a pile with the brush that hangs beside it. And the old radio on the shelf above, which is for show and has no plug, plays, from about nine, the gardening programme that finished in the nineties, with the presenter who died.
I am the shop floor manager at a garden centre and the potting bench in the middle of the floor is a prop, and every night it is a job.
The bench.
A wooden potting bench, the real kind, on the shop floor, for the Saturday demonstrations: a bin of compost, a stack of pots, a trowel, a brush, and on the shelf above, an old radio, a valve one, for the look of it, with no plug on the flex.
Every morning the bench has been used.
The pots.
Fifty. Filled with compost, firmed with the thumbs, the way it is done, with the small dent in the middle where the plant goes, and lined up on the bench in rows of ten, five rows, square, the way a man who potted for a living lines them up so he can count them at a glance. The compost that spilled, which it does, is swept into a neat pile at the end of the bench, with the brush, and the brush is back on its hook, and the trowel is back on its hook, and the bin is fifty pots emptier.
I put the pots back on the stack and the compost back in the bin. The next morning, fifty.
The radio.
From about nine, the old staff say, and I have heard it, the radio on the shelf plays. No plug. The valve glow, which is a bulb the display people put in, is on, and it is not a bulb glow, it is a valve glow, warm, and the programme is a gardening one, questions from listeners, the kind that ran for decades, and the presenter is a man whose voice every gardener over sixty knows, and who died in the nineties, and the questions are the questions from those years, about varieties nobody grows, and the potting goes on under it, the sound of compost going into pots and thumbs firming it, in the dark, at the pace the programme sets.
What has been checked.
The bench, cleared, the compost bin taken away, the pots locked in the stockroom. In the morning the bench had fifty pots on it, from the locked stockroom, filled with compost from the bin that was in the yard.
The floor, at nine, by me, at the till, in the dark. The radio came on. The presenter's voice. A question about a pear. And at the bench, the sound of a man working, the sound I know from my grandfather's shed, the compost, the thumbs, the pot set down, the next, and he hummed, under the radio, the way you do, and at the end of the programme, at ten, the radio went off and the brush came off the hook and the sweeping, and the brush went back, and I heard him say, to nobody, that's fifty, and the floor was quiet.
Who.
The centre was a nursery and the nursery had a potting shed and the potting shed was where the shop floor is, and the man who potted in it, for the whole of the nursery's life, had the radio on the shelf above his bench, the old staff say, for the programme, every week, and had potted fifty an hour, which was his number, and had said the presenter knew what he was talking about, which from him was a great deal.
He had died in the shed. Not dramatically. At the bench, one evening, with the radio on, fifty pots in rows, and the foreman had found him in the morning and the pots were still there.
He is potting. Every night. To the programme. Fifty, in rows, and he sweeps up, and the radio goes off, and he says that's fifty, and nobody has come to take the pots away and put plants in them.
What is done about it.
The pots are on the bench every morning and the compost is on the stock sheet as used and the Saturday demonstrator has asked me who is using her bench in the week, and I have said, the man who built it, and she has looked at the bench, which is old, and said, oh, and has started leaving it tidy.
What I do.
I manage the shop floor.
Fifty pots filled and firmed and dented is fifty pots waiting for a plant. That was the job: the potter filled them and the nurseryman came behind and put the plugs in, and the two of them, between them, were the nursery. He is doing his half. Nobody has done the other half since he died.
So I do it. In the morning, at seven, before the doors, I take fifty plugs from the plant area, whatever is ready, and I put one in each pot on the bench, in the dent, and I firm it, and I water them, and I put them on the trolley, and they go out on the benches to sell, and they sell, because a plant potted by a man who did fifty an hour for forty years is a plant that has been potted properly.
The radio has changed. The programme is the same. But at the end of it now, at ten, when he says that's fifty, there is a pause, and then the voice on the radio, the presenter's, which is a recording from thirty years ago and cannot do this, says, and that's all from us, goodnight, and then, not in the presenter's voice, in a voice that is not on any recording, quietly, from the bench, goodnight, and the brush goes on its hook.