Barcoders World

It was rare that my job was anything other than – excuse my French – fucking tedious. So when I prised open the lid of the almost unusable cardboard box – a job that was surprisingly difficult, or at least difficult not to get your fingers covered in grime - and discovered what was probably at least a hundred grand, my first thought was to wonder, is it real? My second thought was to think, bloody Thievy Stevey better not see this.

I sat with the box on its side, facing towards me. Sooner or later I’d have to get back to work, I guessed. Only what was I supposed to do with this? Stick another bloody label on it and forget about it? Seemed a bit of a waste, all that money, what were they thinking? I was half tempted to keep some of it. It was more than anyone I knew, and definitely I, had ever seen in my life.
“What’s up, Karina?” my opposite number and usual partner in crime Derek said. He was a nice bloke, if somewhat annoying at times. “Anything interesting?”
“Erm, you better come round here, mate.” He got up, with some difficulty as he was quite overweight. They should have done something about his chair by now, surely the amount of pressure on it would be a health and safety thingummy.

“How much do you reckon is in here?” I say. Thievy Stevey was at the other side of the room, luckily.
“Bloody hell. Erm … Must be thousands. At least.”
I drew out one of the bulging envelopes and began to count it out. It felt as though I was doing something wrong and slightly dirty, especially when someone shouted across the floor, “what you got there?”
“It’s money,” Derek said. “Loads of it. Come here.”

“Blimey, you’re right, aren’t you,” the guy who had shouted said in a far softer voice. He was an older guy called Albert, which we teased him about because we all thought his name was right posh, and because of his age and general attitude, he often gave off the impression that he knew and had seen it all.
“I were you, I’d just take half meself and share the rest out with us, nobody’s gonna know.” His desk mate said. I thought about doing that, but that would be too wrong wouldn’t it? Like when you were at school and one of the kids had left something in the cloakroom like a watch or a nice necklace or something, you look at it, you think you want it, but nah, it’s just wrong.

Now everyone was coming to have a look, except for that girl sat in the corner who for as long as I’d been working with her had had her ear glued to her mobile the whole time. As you may have picked upon, my workplace was a very male dominated environment. That meant that there was a lot of banter, much of which I was the target of. Phone Girl – nobody knew her name - however rarely was, mostly because she never interacted with anyone.
“Wonder what kinda label you got to put on it? Or do each one separately?”
“It’ll be the new label,” I laughed. “Look, because this is all new. It’s all brought out in the last five years. Look at it.” I was about to hand one of the crisp £20 notes to somebody to examine but then thought better of it.
“Nah, we’d better tell the supervisor I’d say.”

Part of me was relieved at the thought of telling the supervisor. I disliked the idea of getting into trouble – it had been hard enough for me to find this job let alone find another one. But part of me wanted an adventure and believe me adventures were so rare in the packing world. I’d been working here for nine months. It felt as though it had been nine years. I looked across at Phone Girl again. Hadn’t it said in the paper that talking on a phone for an hour might put you at risk of cancer, let alone talking on it for nine months. Probably more than that. Not the sort of thing you could really joke about though.

“So tell me. What is problem then, Karina.” The supervisor was an Albanian man with a name that nobody could say but everyone just called him Joe for some reason. Stalin’s nickname used to be Uncle Joe and he could behave like him at times, looked a bit like him as well. He was a big, muscly man.
He picked up one of the envelopes as everyone watched curiously. “It is money,” he said. He reached for another envelope, a bit roughly I thought. “More money. How much money you have in here. This is first box like this?”
As far as I knew … yeah, I told him.
“I take it to the office. You have any more, you come and find me. OK?”

So that hadn’t gone as badly as I’d hoped.

The rest of the day we sort of spent in a weird kind of silence. The money was the only thing on most people’s minds, well it was certainly the only thing on my mind. I began to regret not stashing some of it. I also started to wonder how it had got there, and about who had put it there. It was all I could really think about, although finding things other than work to occupy my mind through this tedious nonsense was something I “enjoyed” every day.

As I took my work overalls off and put on my normal clothes an idea suddenly took hold in my mind. An idea that I should have put to rest immediately, but just didn’t.
“You coming to the Black Lion, Karina?”
“No,” I said.
“You can buy us all drinks … come on, you kept some of it, didn’t you?”
“Another time,” I said, wanting to tell them to fuck off. Suddenly I needed to be alone. Or at least, not drunk. I wanted to think, although straight away I knew the sensible thing would be to go to the pub and get properly trollied, not to follow through the idea I had just had.

I watched them go, not really caring. My mind was only on one thing.
“All right?”
It was Thievy Stevey. He had about three or four different mobiles, at least one of which looked suspiciously like one someone had lost at work. People spoke to him, but nobody was really mates with him apart from a bloke called Callum who’d been sacked the previous week. It was because of his reputation.
“Not going to the pub, then?”
“No, don’t fancy it tonight,” I said, not wishing to be drawn into a conversation with Thievy Stevey. “I’m going home now,” I lied.
“Gonna save some of that dosh then.” He was not renowned for his social skills especially among women. But as I spoke to him an idea came to me. A horrible selfish idea. He had not earned his name for nothing, and he was unpopular enough that should this “idea” backfire he would get most of the blame for it at work, although I hated myself immediately for thinking on these lines. Besides, he’d been in prison hadn’t he, so he’d be the guy to ask really.
“Stevey,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“We’re gonna go on an adventure, you and I.”
He gave me an odd look and I wish I hadn’t said it. “Umm, yeah. What’s this about.”

“Come on.” We walked until Joe and anyone else still unlucky enough to be in the building were well out of earshot.
“We’re going to find out where all that cash came from and how it ended up in that pallet. And whether there’s any more of it lying around.”
“Umm, well, I doubt there’s any more of it,” he said.

Steelgate Holdings, where the cardboard boxes they used for the pallets were produced, was a dark, forbidding looking building. Although I guess that was what work looked like late at night, although I’d never liked to hang around there for long enough to find out. There was one light on in the building. And they weren’t kidding about the steel gates.
“You never know when your skills are gonna come in handy,” Thievy Stevey muttered, as the huge lock slid open. “Although never thought I’d need them with a nice girl like you.” The tone of his voice and actually everything he said made me slightly unnerved.
“Not a word to anyone, yeah? Don’t want to go down again for another five years.” It was obvious however that unlike at work he was in his element, as Posho Pete would say. He was loving it. I felt an odd tingle but I told myself it was just the cold. The people in the office of Steelgate Holdings, if they were still there, didn’t seem to have noticed.

We hung around there for about an hour, looking in vain for a way in that didn’t involve an alarm being set off, until the first droplets of rain began to appear on my face. “Better give it up,” I said. “This was a daft idea from the beginning.” What was I thinking? We had already committed several illegal acts – damaging private property, trespassing. Better just go home.
“No, wait,” he said. “What’s this?” Stevey gestured at something just behind the front door of Steelgate Holdings. It was a single, pale blue envelope that had obviously been delivered well after the usual mail-delivery times.
“Perhaps it’s someone’s birthday,” I said. “Look, we really shouldn’t…there’s people in there…”
“You’re the one said you wanted to find who the money belonged to,” Thievy Stevey said.
“Yeah, but I don’t…” I said. I tried to grab him. It was too late, though. A few moments later he was holding the envelope in his hand. I hadn’t even seen him open the door. Then we were walking back through the cast-iron gates. He had a determined look on his face.

It looked as though the envelope had been written on with a fountain pen. It was in that long cursive script, but I didn’t have any trouble reading it. It said, “To Pam from Steelgate Holdings.”
“Look, it’s obviously private, I don’t think there’s any point in…”
He opened the envelope carefully. It was hard to read in the dark. “Here, you have a look,” he shrugged. “Can’t make head or tail of it.”

The letter was handwritten in the same cursive script as what was written on the envelope. I felt intrusive reading it but yet could not stop, although I knew that its contents, like the money I had discovered that day, did not have anything to do with me.

Dear Pam,

I must offer my sincerest thanks and heart-felt wishes to you for agreeing to my request, at what I fear may have been substantial personal and legal risk. You have done all you can to ensure that my gift reaches its intended recipient. As you can imagine, tracing the young lady has been an unimaginably preposterous task, made more difficult by the fact that I did not know anything for many years besides the year in which she was born, which meant that she could have been any one of thousands of babies around the country or indeed the world. My only knowledge was that a child must have existed, because the woman she belonged to was a devout Catholic and would not have given the baby up willingly. However, by the time I managed to gather up the courage – long overdue, I know – to contact Lola again – she was sadly deceased, and so finding the child seemed a fruitless and impossible task. However, thanks to your help I was able to obtain information that a girl with my maid’s surname, matching her description and approximate age was working for one of your clients, and again I cannot thank you enough for this. My only regret is that I was not able to contact her directly. I have lived a life of luxury and selfishness and my only wish is that now in my old age I am able to give something back.

With my heartfelt thanks,

James Lefevre

“Well I be…” Thievy Stevey said. He looked uneasily at me. “It’s not you, is it?”
“Of course it’s not me,” I said. “How could it be? My mum’s not dead.”
We started discussing who it might be. Couldn’t be that woman who sat in front of me … sour-faced old bat, and Lefevre had talked about a “young lady,” unless he’d been sarcastic, and the tone of his letter didn’t seem that way at all.

“We won’t know, now,” I said, almost welling up. “And neither will he or the person the money was meant for. He might think she doesn’t want to know.” The thought made me want to cry. “And she might never know he tried to contact her.” I wished I’d never read the letter or seen the stupid money in the first place. Suddenly I felt angry with him, this unknown man, for making such a gesture that was probably not even going to work.
“It’s OK. I’ve got a feeling who it might be,” Stevey said, his face softening. Suddenly I felt a huge amount of warmth towards him. “I think it’s Phone Girl. But if not, we can still have another try at finding out.”