The seed rack is on the stock system, every packet with a barcode, every sale logged. Every night after close the system logs one packet sold. The barcode is for a variety of vegetable seed the seed house withdrew in 1986 and that has not been on our rack in the centre's life. The rack is one packet short in the morning, in a slot that does not exist. And on the allotments behind the centre, on a plot the council lists as vacant, that variety is coming up in rows.
I am the seed and bulb buyer at a garden centre and the seed rack is the most logged twelve feet of shelving in the building, and it sells one thing I do not stock.
The rack.
Every packet has a barcode and the rack is on the stock system, so I know what sells, and the seed house takes back what does not at the end of the season and credits me. It is a good system and it is the reason I can tell you that a packet of a variety withdrawn in 1986 sells every night.
The sale.
After close. One packet. The barcode is the seed house's old format and the variety is one they dropped in 1986, a vegetable, a kind that people grew and stopped growing when the supermarkets wanted something else. The system has never had it. It logs the sale, at the 1986 price, cash, and the rack in the morning has a gap in it, in a slot at the end that does not exist because the rack ends before it, and the gap is where the packet was.
I have asked the seed house. They have the variety in their archive. They have not made a packet of it in forty years. They asked me if I wanted them to look into it and I said no, because I had already looked.
The allotments.
Behind the centre, over the fence, the council's allotments, and one plot, the last one, is listed as vacant and has been for years, and it is not vacant. It is dug. It is in rows. And the rows, in the season, are that variety, coming up, at the spacing the old packet said, and I know because I have the packet, the seed house sent me a scan of it, and the spacing is on the back.
Somebody is buying a packet a night from a rack that does not have it, and sowing it on a plot nobody has, and it is coming up.
What has been checked.
The rack, at close, by me, in the dark, beside the end of it. At about half past six there were footsteps on the concrete. Slow. A boot with a sole that was worn. They stopped at the rack. There was the sound a seed packet makes coming out of a slot, the small rasp of the card, and the sound of a packet being turned over to read the back, which anybody who has bought seed knows, and a breath, the breath of somebody reading, and then the boots went to the till, and the till rang, and the boots went to the door, and out, and across the car park, to the fence, and over it.
I followed as far as the fence. The plot beyond was dark. There was the sound of a dibber going into soil, at intervals, the intervals of the spacing on the packet, in a row.
Who.
The allotments' committee has a book that goes back to the war, and the last plot has a name on it for forty years, the same name, until 1986, when it says, given up, and under that, in pencil, in a different hand, the words, passed on, which is what the committee wrote when a plot holder had died.
The seed house withdrew the variety in 1986. The plot was given up in 1986. The man who had the plot, the committee's oldest member said, had grown that variety and nothing else, every year, since he had come back from the war with the seed in his pocket, and had saved his own seed from it, and had said it was the only one worth growing, and when the seed house stopped it he had said that was that, and he had been, the old member said, not long after.
He is buying it. Every night. From a rack that does not stock it, at the price it was, with money I have in a bag, and sowing it, and it is coming up, and nobody harvests it, because it is a vacant plot.
What is done about it.
The sale is on the stock report every night for a barcode the system does not have and the seed house has stopped crediting me for a packet I did not buy, and the area manager has asked me why my seed sales include a variety that was withdrawn before he was born, and I have said, it's a good variety.
What I do.
I buy the seed.
I have got it back. The seed house's archive had a few grams of it, held, the way they hold old varieties, and I asked for it, and they said it was not for sale, and I said I did not want to sell it, and they asked what I wanted it for, and I told them, and there was a long pause on the phone and then the woman said she would see, and a packet came, one, in the old design, printed for me, and I put it in the slot at the end of the rack that does not exist.
The sale still rings. But the gap in the rack in the morning is not a gap now. The packet is there. It has been opened, and closed, and put back, and it is a little lighter each morning, and the rows on the vacant plot are coming up thicker, and in the season, when they are ready, I am going to go over the fence and pick some, because a variety that a man carried home in his pocket and grew for forty years and is still growing should be eaten by somebody, and the seed house has asked me to save them some seed, and I will.