Squash courts are booked online and paid for at the time of booking, and a booking with no payment does not go through. Court three has a booking at eleven on Tuesday nights under a membership that lapsed in 2017. The building is closed at eleven. On Wednesday mornings the court has been played on.
I am the duty manager at a leisure centre three nights a week, and one of those nights is Tuesday.
How the courts are booked.
Online, in forty minute slots, paid at the time. A membership that has lapsed cannot book. A slot outside opening hours does not appear on the booking page to be booked. Those are two separate things that should make this impossible, and there are others.
Court three has a booking every Tuesday at eleven at night.
The name on it is a man's name. I looked him up. His membership lapsed in 2017, at which point he was seventy nine. The booking has his membership number on it and it is made, according to the system, at about ten past eleven on the Tuesday it is for, which is an hour after the building is locked.
On Wednesday mornings court three has been played on.
The marks on the floor, from shoes, in the pattern a squash game leaves, which is a T in the middle and lines to the corners. The walls above the tin with ball marks. The ball, left in the corner, warm, when the first person in at seven picks it up.
It is warm at seven. A squash ball is cold within twenty minutes of the last hit.
What has been checked.
The booking system, with the company that runs it. They can see the booking. They cannot see how it was made because it was not made through the website and it was not made through the desk, and their logs have a gap round it that they describe as a sync issue.
The court. The courts are glass backed and the corridor camera sees court three through the glass. On Tuesday nights at eleven, on the camera, the lights on court three come on. The courts have their lights on a key switch in my office, and the key is on my belt, and I am not there.
Through the glass, on the camera, a ball moves. It is hit from the back of the court, where a player would be standing, to the front wall, and comes back, and is hit again, and it is one ball, moving the way a ball moves in a game, with the small delays of a person getting to it, for forty minutes, and there is nobody on the court.
At twenty to twelve the ball stops, in the corner, and the lights go off.
Forty minutes.
That is one slot, and the booking is for one slot, and he plays his slot and he leaves the ball.
I do not know if it is his ball. I take the ball away every Wednesday and every Wednesday there is a ball.
Who he was.
I asked the members who have been here longest. He played on Tuesday nights for thirty years, court three, the same partner until the partner died, and then on his own, hitting the ball against the wall for forty minutes, because the booking was in his week and you keep a booking. He stopped coming in 2017 because he died.
What is done about it.
The booking is in the system as paid, which it is not, and finance have written it off each week as a system error, and the sum of seven pounds fifty a week since 2017 is in a column on a spreadsheet that nobody has added up.
What I do.
I am on duty three nights and one of them is Tuesday.
His partner's name is on the booking now. Underneath his. It appeared about a month ago as a second player, which is a field on the form that a player can fill in, and I looked the name up, and the partner's membership lapsed in 2009, which is the year the members said he died.
On the camera, since it appeared, there is the rhythm of a game instead of a man hitting a wall. A rally, a pause, a rally. The ball goes to the corners now instead of straight at the wall, and somebody is getting to it.
I left a second ball on the court last Tuesday, in case they needed one. They did not. I think they are glad of the company, and I would not say that to finance.