The Ledger in the Notebook

“Twenty-seven fifty.”

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to pay that much for a six pack of beer but I needed something to take to my friends’ house later that day and I was trying to strike that bourgeois balance between looking cheap and showing off. It had to be from a craft brewery (definitely not from a multi-national) and it had to be more than four dollars a can. My friends could be passively judgemental… or maybe I just assumed that they were.

My phone didn’t seem to be cooperating. Ever since I had upgraded to using it as a proxy credit card, I had started forgetting to carry my wallet whenever I left home. How was I going to pay for my beer if the damn phone wouldn’t come to life and register the transaction?

“Perhaps you’ve run out of battery.”

I looked at the shop assistant for the first time. Was he really old enough to serve me alcohol? The liqueur chain branded polo shirt suggested he was and by the look on his face, he had managed to become world-weary before he’d turned twenty. Annoyingly though, he was right.

Engineered obsolescence was sucking the battery life out of my phone alarmingly quickly in recent weeks. I knew that it was time for a new phone but I wanted to squeeze every last day out of this one before throwing more money at a new one (not too low-cost to be useful and not too ostentatious so as to avoid friendly judgement, of course).

“I think I’ve got some cash in my bag here, if that’s OK?”

It was hard to understand why I felt that I needed to ask this spotty teen whether it was alright to look through my own bag given that I appeared to be the only customer requiring attention. Here I was losing my social standing at the counter of a bottle shop searching for loose change and lost bank notes in the creases of my backpack.

I unpacked my vacuum insulated drink bottle (mostly empty), the paperback I was reading (dog-eared), a folded muesli bar (blueberry yoghurt and of indeterminate age) and finally my little black Moleskine notebook. With the backpack now empty, I would be better placed to find any remnant money hidden deep inside pockets and under nylon flaps.

“Would you like a receipt?”

The shop assistant had stopped scrolling on his own fully charged phone and had begun wrapping a paper bag around the six pack.

I reflexively replied, “no,” as I always did when asked that question but then paused in confusion to look at the blank cash register screen.

Another customer had appeared from behind a promotional display for a new tasteless spirit mixed with cordial and was moving into my space. I hurriedly repacked my backpack, reached for the paper bag of beer cans and walked out of the bottle shop.

As I sat down on the garden wall a couple of doors down, I felt the nervous excitement of a miscreant shoplifter. I hadn’t paid for my beer, had I? I checked my phone; still dead. I checked my pockets; no wallet. I looked back at the bottle shop to see the other customer leaving with a carton of multi-national brand beer and opening the door of his early model Ford with a long unresolved dent in the rear passenger side bumper. He didn’t pay for me and there was no way the disenchanted kid behind the counter would have waved me through. Maybe I should get up and walk away in case someone was monitoring the closed circuit security cameras from the back of the store and had worked out that I had defrauded the company of twenty-seven fifty.

I unpacked my backpack again so that I could wedge the beers into the bottom of the bag for my walk home. Out came the drink bottle and the novel. I ate the muesli bar and pushed the wrapper into my back pocket (where it would probably stay for another week before I remembered to put it in a bin). I fumbled the notebook and it fell onto the asphalt footpath. It was new and although I had removed the elastic band around the cover, the spine hadn’t been properly broken in so it opened briefly with the force of the fall but closed quickly before coming to rest next to my shoe.

I’ve long carried notebooks with me to collect thoughts or scribble reminders. It was a habit I developed at school because I was an habitual forgetter of deadlines and appointments. A year ten home room teacher had suggested that I use a notebook to write anything down that I wanted to remember. She produced one of those spiral bound A5 lined notebooks you see in office supply stores from a drawer in her desk and gave it to me. I haven’t been more than a few hours without the company of a notebook ever since. In recent years, I’d taken to using matt black Moleskine notebooks for this purpose because I thought they epitomised my preferred balance between something that was widely available and something that was stylish and enviable. No friend was going to be passively judgemental about my notebook.

As the notebook flashed open, I thought I saw some writing inside. That upset me because the notebook was newly purchased and I expected it to be pristine. Some brat (probably one of the shop assistant’s bored mates) must have doodled on the pages in the newsagent and put the notebook back on the shelf. I let out a low volume groan as I bent down to recover the notebook from the ground. I brushed off a little dirt from the cover and opened it to the first page. It was blank but the next facing page (the third page) was not blank. A ledger had been hand drawn the full length of the page with three entries written in black ink. The handwriting was unmistakably mine but I had no recollection of drawing up such a ledger. I didn’t even know if I could have done so without searching for accounting practices on the internet. If that wasn’t confounding enough, the entries themselves were strange. No, not strange. The entries were disturbing. Profoundly disturbing. The opening balance was twenty thousand dollars. The current balance was nineteen thousand nine hundred and seventy-two dollars fifty. The only expenditure was for grocery items to the value of twenty-seven fifty.

The beer. It was the six pack of beer. My notebook had paid for the beer.

I stood up with the backpack positioned between my feet because this revelation didn’t seem to the kind of thing you investigated slouching on a garden wall. I felt around the cover carefully and with what I thought was the right amount of pressure to reveal an embedded credit card or a chip that might have pinged the cash register. There didn’t appear to be anything secreted in the cover or the spine. Even when I held each page up to the sunlight, I saw nothing but the grain of the paper and the faint lines of the ruled pages.

“Forget something?”

I had returned to the bottle shop. The only way to test if I was right about my notebook credit card was to attempt to purchase something else.

“Yes. Ah, just this, please.”

I reached for one of the bottles of sweet alcopop being promoted at the front of the bottle shop and placed it on the counter. The shop assistant paused, perhaps wondering who I was planning to slip this drink to and for what immoral reason. Then he swiped the single bottle past the barcode scanner (I thought then that I probably should have grabbed a full six pack) and asked for three dollars fifty. I passed the notebook over the chip reader.

“Do you want a receipt?”

“I found my credit card. It was in the notebook.”

It wasn’t. There was nothing in the notebook but paper and ink. I felt I needed to explain what I’d just done and putting my credit card inside a notebook seemed less eccentric than returning to a bottle shop to buy a single bottle of spirit and mixer after buying some good quality craft beer a few minutes earlier.

“For my sister.”

That attempted justification just made the exchange more awkward so I walked away without even audibly refusing the receipt and left the bottle shop as quickly and as casually as I could.

As soon as I was outside, I opened the notebook to page three.

Current balance nineteen thousand, nine hundred and sixty-nine.

My thirty dollar notebook now appeared to be worth twenty thousand dollars (minus six craft beer cans and a bottle of fruity spirit). If there had been a PIN written on one of the pages, I would have walked straight across to the automatic teller machine on the other side of the street and reduced the balance of my notebook to zero. As it stood, it was likely that I would be forced to limit my transactions to two hundred dollars or less. And how long did I have until the funds expired? I didn’t know but I set myself to undertaking the hundred or so purchases needed to maximise my windfall gain in the shortest time possible. I needed shops and lots of them in close proximity to one another.

I placed the little ribbon bookmark in front of the ledger, closed the book and replaced the elastic band tightly around the cover. The book didn’t go back into my backpack. I held it squarely in front of my body, slightly awkwardly above my belt with both hands. To a passer-by, I might have looked like a preacher with the holy book (albeit a slimline version) ready to proselytise as I strode down the street. I was, in fact, something much more avaricious. I was a supernaturally funded shopper in search of a mall.