Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Hapenny I Hide
Every wage pouch a cash carrier is given runs one halfpenny light, and the halfpenny makes itself up with no line in any book to account for it.
- dated: "the wage weeks"
- narrator: "Keith Lamble, cash carrier"
First Friday of the wage weeks. Nineteen pouches out of the works office, counted before me and the foreman both, seal to seal, and right every one. At the doors they are short. Every pouch, opened under the receiver's eye, a halfpenny out. Mrs Pargeter tipped hers on the doormat at number 19 and did the count herself in front of me, twice, and looked at me, and I looked at the flap of the pouch, and there it was, flat in the seam where the stitching turns, exactly the halfpenny that was missing. She signed. Nobody said anything. By the fourth door I had stopped worrying the shortfall and started looking instead, and it is always somewhere roundabout: under the lip of the flap, in the lining, once on the mat itself shining where the lamplight was not. Then the pouch is whole, and the receiver signs, and at the office the book stands exact and wants no halfpenny of anybody. Twice I asked, once of the pay clerk and once straight out, and both times the same answer: you counted it, didn't you.
Second Friday. The halfpennies keep their own round. Number 19's was under the seal wax today, flat to it, as if it had been posted through. Garden Walk's turned up in my left turn-up, and these are not the trousers I deliver in. Twelve found on that round, twelve rejoined, and the book exact as scripture and about as interested. I said pouches are short to the foreman. He said the office total says otherwise. I said I know it does. Nothing else was said and nothing will be entered, because I have read the books and there is no line for what these coins do, only the lines they leave behind when they come home.
Paying-out Thursday. I kept one back. The Garden Walk halfpenny, came home the usual way, and this time I did not put it where it was going. I put it in a matchbox in my boot. I had a reason at the time and it has faded. All the wage weeks, every halfpenny that turns has made itself whole without a hand owning the doing of it, and I wanted one that had somebody's hand, if only mine, on the keeping of it.
Last Friday of the wage weeks. Eighteen pouches, eighteen short, and every one made up: sixteen on the rounds as ever, one in the seal wax of the last pouch at the office gate, and the eighteenth — I carried it home in my glove without knowing, and there it was on my own mat when I came in, which I did not care for, my door being no part of any round I ran. The books stand exact from the first Monday to this Friday and have never once wanted a halfpenny explained to them. I have the matchbox still, with the halfpenny in it, and I do not spend it, and I do not put it back, and the wage weeks are over. If they are all made up and made up to nobody's hand, and now there is one short that nobody is making up, whose pouch is waiting for the one in my boot?