Treachery at Tefco a day in the life of Catherine a fictional checkout girl

Silhouettes in the dark dancing a flame of light and a woman of shadow together forming the perfect whole, one balancing the other and each completing there partner.


As the dawn came and the hated buzzing of the alarm clock woke Catherine she did not know why for as was the way of dream's she had forgotten even as she tried to hold onto that other reality, a feeling of loss came over her as she opened her eyes and threw her pillow at the alarm clock which merely knocked it on the floor where it continued to buzz until she got out of bed to turn it off.

Despite the feeling of loss she actually felt much more clear headed and that deep ache in her heart had eased, she never even gave Derek or Debbie a passing thought as she made her way to the bathroom to freshen up for work until she saw his shaving foam and razor still there as well as his toothbrush and shampoo all of which she put in a garbage bag and disposed of.

As she locked her door and turned to start walking to her car for the drive to work she had a sudden very strong flash as she recalled part of the dream, it was though it was something that wanted to be remembered and she heard a voice, it was Karl she knew but even as she tried to put it out of her mind fearing the pain it would cause she suddenly felt a peace settle over her and a warm feeling then she remembered him saying "You must live your life Catherine, find the one You now must meet and bring the children you are destined to into this world, I will always love you and will always be with you and one day we will all be together again but now my love You must not die inside for me but live for me, for both of us for I live now in your heart and your pain is my pain so if you still love me then live true to what you must become, stop running my love let me no longer hurt you but make you stronger for your happiness is my happiness".

The memory was clear, she had been somewhere dancing with Karl her fiance who had died just after they had gotten engaged more than ten years ago, she had never gotten over it but from time to time a mystery smell would remind her of him, a sound or even a color and after mourning she had nearly killed herself to run away but had been persuaded of the wrongness of her action and instead went wild running away from the world, from everything inside herself drinking and worse as she became a party going wild woman before easing out of it about four years later.

She nearly feinted as she remembered the word's and had to hold the door post before telling herself it was just a stupid dream and so now angry with herself she slammed her set off to the small supermarket in the small town in northern England were she now worked.

As she had already been promoted and was in reality far too highly qualified to waste her life working as a checkout girl or a checkout supervisor she decided at last to go back on the company promotion and training scheme so spoke to her friend Carol the personnel manager about it.

Later the Stores assistant manager an obnoxious little man who claimed he served as a Parra in the army but bragged about it when those who had served there country never even spoke about it came by, he was small but muscular and bald but she had seen his hair when he grew it and had suddenly looked like one of the three stooges so that was why he shaved it, his head glistened reflected the lighting like a large over ripe red tomato and he had told every one to call him Jeff which for some reason made her think of yellow squeezy plastic lemons they stocked and his surname was patey with went unfortunately well with his shaved head.

As he came over, his usual overbearing attitude in which he thought he could have any woman he wanted based on his paycheck he actually made her skin crawl but she smiled along with the horrible loud mouthed little man, since he had been promoted everybody said he was was power mad and he spoke to most of the shop staff like they were dirt so inwardly she hated him but had to listen as he talked feeling like her brain's were dribbling from her ears.

There had been Store Guard there until just a year ago called Paul, he had been liked but because he had never arrested anyone they all thought him useless and some of the managers led by Jeff had ganged up to get him out of the shop even stooping to lying about him even though he had worked for them for over eight years.

Now many of them rued his loss as the store was just not the same place and felt even more grey and miserable now without his friendly but awkward presence like a lumbering but inoffensive bookend standing guard at the door, the replacement guards were strict but not at all liked by the customers or indeed most of the staff and now the store was loosing even more stock meaning that he had in fact been a good guard and doing a good job, he had also helped the disabled and was missed by the elderly customer's who came into the shop.

She thought back to a time she had heard her friend Carol a manager who had been over the stock then and Jeff who was then the assistant manger talking, they had missing warehouse stock and everyone knew Jeff and his boss Peter took what they wanted, Jeff would send Paul into the shop ordering him to go on patrol to the far end of the store to get him out of the way waiting for him to be up the aisles then Jeff's friend took trolleys out of the store without paying for them and it had been when Paul had become suspicious that this was happening that Jeff and Peter had hatched the plot to get rid of him with two younger managers who gathered a clique of staff members around them, she thought also about when Jeff and Carol had been talking about the missing warehouse stock how Jeff was almost panicking.

He had been in and out of the warehouse, up and down from the offices that were over the shop then his face became grimmer as though he had come to some serious decision and had gone into the back for about ten minutes when suddenly the fire alarm sounded and the sprinkler system came on causing tens of thousands of pounds of damage to the stock in the warehouse.

Jeff who had supposedly been in the army or so he claimed had come out of the warehouse door screaming at the top of his lungs "Get them out, Get them out its a real fire" in a panick, now being the daughter of an officer and an air cadet herself she had seen the incongruity of his actions immediately for as a manger he was trained in crisis management and as a soldier it should have been drummed in as second nature so it looked like he was literally putting it on acting in order to set the stage for a cover up of some kind.

Later while they waited outside for the fire fighters to finish there work of checking the building she heard Jeff and Carol talking and knew that the Stock documentation had mysteriously been burned were the fire had started in a document tray, in a code locked office no where near any electrical cabling and so she and the rest of the shop knew that Jeff had set the fire to cover for his own and Peter's corruption, the staff also suspected them of stealing several hundred pounds from a kitty that was collected for a staff party and that had gone missing despite there large pay packets but when you work in a place like that under people like them what could you do.

She and another Debbie that she worked with and who was an older but very good friend had tried to warn Paul not to be too friendly but could say nothing more to him about it, perhaps they had been a little short but in fact they had cared about him, he was a fixture and had been there as long as any of them so they really did not want him to go.

In spite of what the clique were putting him through, including accusing him of following woman which he would never have done Paul had hung on to his job until at last Jeff had asked a favor of a drinking buddy who was a local villain called Malcolm Arnolds a money lender and small time gangster, whose brother had once murdered someone by plunging a knife into there head and who himself had ordered a girl blinded by one of his female lackey's for not paying him fifty pounds he claimed she owed him, the female thug had attacked the young mother with large ring's on her fingers, she had waited for the young mother then attacked her gauging her eyes open and tearing her cornea blinding her.

As Paul had been patrolling the store Malcolm had waited for him to come back to the entrance then he had come in looking for a fight with the dumb seeming gentle guard by walking into his back and punching him in the kidney while the guard was looking the other way but not only had the guard merly turned and pushed the thug away but the guard had in the event been more than able for him and not at all afraid of the thug at all so since there plan was not working the store manager Peter Cunninghaming who was about to retire and for some reason, maybe because he usually took stock such a bottle of champaigne and some fresh flower's for his wife that he had had reduced from the warehouse and so was helping himself despite a hundred thousand pound salery, hated all security guard's claiming that they were unnecessary, had accused the guard of hitting Malcolm twisting the whole incident and turning the injured party into the villain of the story.

The realization of what they had done had not sunk in for some time but after a while she felt sick and so too did many of the other long term staff who now secretly hated Peter, Jeff and his cronies even if they had not before but Jeff did a good job of keeping them divided with the ass licker's just as he had been with Peter, he had once been described by one discerning customer as looking like a pair of little leg's sticking out of Peter's posterior, those in the staff who seemed to be genetically descended from professional house slaves and who seek to rise above there station by pleasing there higher up's that you find everywhere in life clinging to his butt like unwiped feces.

Jeff, Sean and Mike had created these lies and engineered the whole thing and she thought to herself even though she got on with them having to be two faced to keep her job that if they could do that to a nice guy who harmed no one like that and concoct such absolutly filthy lies then what could and would they do to anyone else who worked at the shop.

But as she walked into the warehouse like supermarket and to the lockers to put her coat away she remembered Karl in her dream, "I will always love you and always be with you though we will always be apart I will always live in your heart so now my love live your life for both of us".

As she sat down at the checkout as one of the girls had rang in sick so she would have to juggle managing the other girls with working the checkout herself at the busiest times, she eased her mind into her job and forgot all about it as the therapeutically mind numbing beep, beep,beep of the scanner reading bar code after bar code almost hypnotically made her forget and she fell back into the hamster like regime of running on the tread wheel of life but tonight she was going to a party at a friends so she was more optimistic today, she was now in her thirty's but had it on good advice that she was still a beautiful woman so decided to get on with it all and live it up, "Ah Hell" she thought "maybe mister right guy was just around the corner", something inside told her he was, but you see she had this thing for younger guy's in there twenty's and as was the way of thing's he was probably nothing like that.