Column | The Greenkeeper Writes
Published on June 6, 2020The Day After Part 8: Nina
Nina arrived at the office earlier than usual. Much earlier. It is unlike her to arrive late but she was rarely this early.
She had heard noises in the apartment next door and that had kept her awake. She thought she had heard noises, she corrected herself. It was a faint rustle, a sound so faint she almost wouldn’t have heard it if she wasn’t paying attention. She hadn’t heard anything else until almost 10 minutes later.
She woke up alert and silently walked to her window, the one overlooking the main street and the parking lot. She lived in an apartment on the second floor; high enough to see the surrounding area, too high for most people to climb up unnoticed but not impossible for her to climb down.
She had rented two apartments side by side using a non-existent company’s name, agreeing to pay cash for three months’ rent upfront and telling the house-owners as little as possible except that she and her roommates work in the same factory. But there were no roommates, she lived alone in both apartments making sure her neighbours saw her coming and going only in the rear apartment which faced the field behind the apartment building. When she was certain that no one was watching, then she entered the apartment she was living in now.
All her bills, correspondences were sent to the rear apartment while she lived in the one in front. All rents and bills were paid at a bank’s deposit machine by cash one week before the due date. Cash, she has plenty. Even if she ran out of cash, all she needed to do was simply punch a series of numbers she had memorised into an ATM machine and it spewed out the amount she needed. Assuming ‘they’ hadn’t blocked her access but she didn’t think so since it was the one way they could track her location.
She usually came home after dark, stayed in her car until she was sure no one was following or watching before she climbed the staircase with a hand in her handbag, gripping a telescopic baton her trainer had said she was the best he had ever seen wielding. Not until she locked her apartment door behind her and checked all rooms, would she let go of her baton.
She left for work early that day in her car, a common locally made car with the most common colour one could imagine and a false number plate. As usual, she drove in circles around town before making her way to the club.
Today, she decided to drive straight to work. On some other days, she parked at random places and took public transport to the office and if she happened to feel brave, she even took lifts from strangers. Her smile made men assume her to be soft and vulnerable.
Once, one of them in a fancy car went too far with his hands and she punched his ear with an open palm. The over-pressure of air in the ear canal disrupted his eardrum and he gave a loud scream. She took off his glasses, told him it was below the passenger’s seat, slammed the door and walked 500 metres to the office knowing his disorientation, ringing ear and fear would prevent him from seeing where she was going. Shame would prevent him from reporting the incident. She would have had to steal another car of the same model and colour just in case he was waiting for her at the same place the next day.
Her double life was tiring but there was no escaping it. No escaping them either. She knew she would have to make her move soon. But today was a workday and she was early to work. She decided she might as well do something useful.
Nina switched on the storekeeper’s computer and accessed the inventory database. Other than being Roslan’s secretary, she was also the storekeeper, a position once held by another person, but Nina being efficient and effective found it easy to do the job as long as she could ask the male staff to do the heavy lifting and for that, she had her smile to thank for. With her training, she could easily climb the 3-metre high racks but all she had to do was ask and three of her colleagues would do the climbing.
The database software told her what items in stock were below par and needed to be ordered but she didn’t trust the software because many of the operators tended to walk in and take the items without filling up the form or giving her the bin card for her to minus the quantity taken out.
“Everything has a pattern”- something her trainer once told her and she looked for a pattern in purchasing. The fungicides were used usually during rainy seasons, the insecticides were rarely used but once used, it was used three times over a 30-day period. Something about avoiding insect immunity so spraying to break the life-cycle of the insect was Roslan’s explanation. The insecticide only killed adult and larva but not eggs and cocoons, so Balan and Chong would use multiple applications to kill the larvae as they were hatched from eggs and adults as they broke out from their cocoons.
So she made sure the pesticides were in enough quantity for a three-application spray. Each application uses four 1-litre bottles so she kept 12 bottles and times it by two for both courses. As soon as they took out the first four bottles for their first round, she began the ordering process for the 12 bottles of the next three-round application.
Fertiliser was a bit harder to estimate but long gone were the practice of ordering one tonne of greens’ fertiliser and four tonnes of fairway fertiliser. Now she knew that the greens on the South Course totalled 0.7 hectares in size and 1.2 in North Course. Usually, Roslan would put out 3kg per 100sq.m of greens fertiliser per month, so by simple calculations, she knew that Roslan used about 570kg of fertiliser a month and each bag was 22.68kg, so she needed to keep 25 bags of fertiliser for greens a month.
The club had 32.7 ha of fairways and if Roslan put out 3kg per 100sq.m every two months, she needed about 436 bags of 22.68kg per bag fertiliser, though she usually ordered an extra 5% to account for spillage or miscalibration of the fertiliser spreaders for the fairways. If she already had a certain amount of buffer in stock, she ordered just enough but made sure the buffer stock went out first.
The suppliers were impressed with her and one of them even said that no other storekeeper in the country was as in touch of the operation as she was. They said most clubs didn’t have storekeepers, they relied on the superintendent to do the ordering and it was mostly by an urgent ‘send it next week’ basis.
She didn’t take it as a compliment as she felt it was one of the easiest jobs she had. All she needed to do was find out what was the pattern of usage or the par level for each item. As soon as the item went below par level, she ordered it. What was so hard about that, she wondered?
Post-lockdown, the storekeepers had a role to play too. The previous superintendent or storekeeper or purchaser had a habit of buying fertilisers and pesticide in bulk, rounded up to an easy to remember figure; one tonne of this, four tonnes of that, 10 bottles of this, 20 bags of that and whenever there was a change in fertiliser or chemicals, there would be leftovers of a few bags or bottles of various fertilisers and chemicals. It was her job as storekeeper to take note of what was left, their active ingredients for pesticides and their formulation for fertilisers and present it to the superintendent so that he could make use of them to reduce purchasing costs. Oh… she almost forgot; she needed to check the expiry dates too.
She stopped whatever she was doing and strained her ears. She could hear someone moving in the store. She reached for her handbag and felt around for her Glock 43 until she remembered she didn’t carry it around anymore. All she had was her telescopic baton. Never mind, she was good with it. All she had to do was make sure they were within reach.
Her heart pumping, her senses alert, she reached for the door of the store and slowly turned the knob.
