A driver's ticket machine is logged on with a module at the start of a shift and logged off at the end, and it prints a waybill of everything sold, and the cash bag has to match it. The spare cab in the office has a machine in it for training. At midnight it prints a waybill. A full shift, four hundred fares, at fares that stopped in 1979, and the module number is one that was never issued, and in the morning the cash bag beside it is heavy.
I am the cash office supervisor at a bus depot and the waybills are how I know the drivers are honest.
The machine.
A ticket machine on every bus. The driver puts their module in at the start, it knows who they are, it sells the fares, and at the end it prints a waybill, which is the list, and the driver pays in the cash against it, and the difference is what I chase.
There is a spare machine in the office, in a mock up of a cab, for training new drivers. No module has ever been logged on to it except training ones.
At midnight it prints a waybill.
The waybill.
Four hundred and some fares. A full shift, morning to evening, on a route number we still have, at fares that are not ours. Six pence. Nine pence. A shilling, which the machine prints as a fare code that means nothing to our system and which the old hands, when I showed them, read at once. 1979 fares. The last year before decimal rounding changed them.
The module number on the waybill is not one we have issued. Modules are numbered and the numbers are in a book and the book starts in 1985 when the machines came in.
The cash bag on the hook beside the spare cab is heavy in the morning. It is full of coins. Old ones. The right ones, for the fares on the waybill, to the penny, and I have counted it against the waybill every morning for two months and it has never once been out.
What has been checked.
The machine, replaced with another spare. The other spare prints the waybill at midnight.
The cab, at midnight, by me. The machine came on. The screen showed a module logged on, with the number that is not ours. It sold. Fares, one after another, at the pace a busy morning route sells them, the small sound of each ticket, and the tickets came out of the slot, and I let them fall, and they are in a box in the office, four hundred a night, and every one is a real ticket, with the fare and the stage and the date, and the date is a day in 1979, and the day moves on by one every night.
The cash. I have watched the bag fill. It hangs on the hook and it fills, the coins going in one at a time, from nowhere, over the length of the shift, and by the end it is heavy, and the coins in it are dated 1979 and before, and they are worn the way coins are when they have been in pockets, and they are warm.
Who.
The old hands knew before I had finished asking. The waybill's route was one man's, in the seventies, and the man had been the depot's best on the cash, never out, never once, in twenty years, and had been proud of it in the way that men were then, and had been found one morning in 1979 in the cash office, at the counter, with his bag paid in and the waybill signed and the difference nought, and had gone quietly, they said, having done his sums.
He is still doing them. A day at a time, from where he left off. And the cash is right, because it always was.
What is done about it.
The waybill prints, the bag fills, and the cash office has a drawer of pre decimal coin that the bank will not take and the finance office has valued at scrap and I have not sent, and the auditors have a note from me that says, the training machine produces a nightly waybill from an unregistered module with a matching cash bag, and the auditors have asked whether the cash is real, and I have said, count it.
What I do.
I run the cash office.
The last step of a shift is the pay in. The driver brings the bag and the waybill to my counter, and I count, and I stamp the waybill paid in, and I say, that's you, and they go home. That is the step he was doing when he died, and it is the step nobody has done for him since, because there was nobody at the counter at midnight.
I am at the counter at midnight. When the machine prints the waybill and the bag is full, I take them both to my window, and I count, and it is right, and I stamp the waybill, and I say, that's you, difference nought, and I put the bag in the drawer, and I go home.
The date on the waybill is getting later. It was January 1979 when I started counting. It is October now. And the old hands say he died in the November, and I have started to think about what the machine will print on the night after, and whether it will print at all, and I have decided that if there is a waybill that night I will count it, and if there is not, I will stamp the last one twice.