The Wheelbarrow on the Night Shift

At two in the morning, the supermarket belongs to the people who stack its shelves. The music is turned down to a whisper and the freezers hum. The long white aisles stretch away like corridors in a ship that has lost its passengers.

Kaya loves it. It is her third week on the night shift. She is seventeen, which makes her the youngest person in the building by about twelve years. She works in the aisles with Yvo, who is eighteen and has already decided that he knows everything about stacking tins. He is right about most of it.

Tonight, however, he is not stacking anything. He is standing in the garden aisle with his arms folded, staring at a wheelbarrow.

It is a good wheelbarrow. It is deep and green, with a solid steel frame and a fat black tyre. It sits on a wooden pallet with a sign that says DISPLAY MODEL, ONLY ONE LEFT, 39 EURO. Someone has filled it with flowerpots to make it look cheerful.

"You have been staring at it for ten minutes," Kaya says.

"My dad has wanted one for years. He has a tiny garden and an enormous number of plans." Yvo unfolds his arms and folds them again. "It is his birthday today. I get paid at six, when the system updates. I can use my staff discount at the till, and it will cost me half."

"So buy it at six."

"The garden department opens its sale at six thirty. But the manager moves the display to the front doors at half past five, and the early shoppers come in at six." He sighs. "A man in a cap will take it before I can reach the till."

Kaya thinks about this seriously. She is a person who makes promises easily and keeps them with a mixture of stubbornness and luck. She looks at the wheelbarrow, and she looks at Yvo, who has the face of someone who has run out of ideas.

"I will make sure nobody buys it before you do," she says. "I promise."

"You do not have to do that."

"I know," she says. "That is why it is a promise."

It sounds easy for about forty minutes.

At a quarter to three, the night supervisor arrives with a clipboard and a heavy sense of duty. He is a thin man with enormous eyebrows, and he walks up to the wheelbarrow and prods it with a pen.

"This should be at the entrance," he says. "I am moving it now."

"Now?" says Kaya.

"Better early than late."

"But it is full of flowerpots, and the pots will fall off the pallet." She says the first thing that comes into her head. "I need to clear it first, and that takes a long time."

The supervisor looks at the flowerpots and at his watch. "Then do it before the morning staff arrive," he says, and he walks away, writing something down.

She has bought herself two hours. It is not a good plan, but it is a plan.

At three thirty, the delivery driver comes through the back door, pushing a trolley of frozen peas, and sees the wheelbarrow. His whole face lights up.

"Do you mind?" he says. "My trolley has a wobbly wheel. I could take it for the peas."

"It is on display," Kaya says, "and the pallet is very fragile."

"It is a wheelbarrow, not a vase."

She cannot argue with that. The driver wheels away his frozen peas, and the display model rolls out of the garden aisle with a deep, satisfied rumble.

"Yvo," Kaya whispers, running to find him. "A man has stolen our wheelbarrow."

"He has borrowed it."

"He is going to put it in the freezer room."

Together they chase the wheelbarrow through the back corridor and past the cold store. In the loading bay, they take it back by pretending that the pallet has a safety problem. By four, Kaya has fought off two more enquiries. A stock clerk with a hundred boxes wants it, and so does a cleaner with a bucket.

She is exhausted. She is also beginning to understand a basic truth about the world. In an empty supermarket at night, a wheelbarrow looks like the most useful object ever invented.

"I have an idea," she says, at ten past four.

"Is it a good idea?"

"It is a very strange idea. Come and help me."

They go to the stockroom. They find twenty boxes of tinned tomatoes, fifteen of soup, and a tower of cereal, and they load all of it into the wheelbarrow. It takes them twenty minutes. When they finish, the thing is a mountain on one wheel. It is so heavy that Kaya needs both hands and a lot of breath to move it.

"You are going to use it as a cart," Yvo says, with growing admiration.

"If someone wants to take it, they will see that it is in use. Nobody takes a wheelbarrow that is full of work. And if the supervisor asks, I tell him I am carrying stock, which is true."

"That is almost clever."

"It is completely clever. Push."

For the next hour and a half, the wheelbarrow becomes the most hard-working object in the supermarket. Kaya and Yvo push it up and down the aisles and unload a box here and a box there. Then they fill it again at the next stockroom door. It carries soup to the soup shelf and pasta to the pasta shelf. It delivers a pile of washing powder to the far end of the shop. Each time the supervisor appears at the end of an aisle, he sees two teenagers and a loaded wheelbarrow. He nods slowly and changes direction.

"I have never seen anyone stack so many tins in one night," he says at five o'clock.

"We are very committed," Kaya says.

At half past five, they are standing by the entrance doors with the wheelbarrow between them. It is empty now. The aisles behind them are tidy and brightly lit, the shelves full to the edge, and the tins stand in perfectly straight lines. Kaya is so tired that the edges of everything look soft.

At the other side of the glass, a few shoppers are already waiting in the dark.

"Half an hour to the system update," Yvo says. He looks at the wheelbarrow, and he starts to laugh. "You kept your promise."

"Not yet. I still have to keep it for twenty-nine minutes."

"I can wait twenty-nine minutes."

Kaya finds a roll of silver ribbon from the gift aisle and ties a big, untidy bow around the left handle. Then they stand there in the hum of the freezers, the two of them and the wheelbarrow. They watch the clock above the till change one number at a time.

When it reaches six, Yvo walks to the till. The screen blinks, the system wakes up, and his discount takes the price down to half. He pays with a few crumpled notes, in a quiet, almost holy way, as though he is buying something far bigger than a garden tool.

Outside, the first shoppers push through the sliding doors, and they stop to look at the wheelbarrow, standing by the exit with its silver bow. Then Yvo takes the handles, and Kaya holds the door open for him. The wheelbarrow rolls out into the empty car park with a single, steady squeak. The first thin line of light follows it across the ground.