The lockers lock with the wristbands we hand out at reception, and every wristband has a number, and every number is in the system against a name and a time. Locker 112 is locked every morning by a wristband whose number the system has never issued. We open it with the master key. There is something in it every time, and it is not the same something.
I run reception at a leisure centre, which means I am the one who hands out the wristbands.
How the lockers work.
You pay, you get a wristband with a chip in it, you touch it to a locker and that locker is yours until you touch it again. The chip has a number. The number is in the system against your name and your entry time, and when you leave it is against your exit time too, and the locker unlocks itself if you forget.
Every wristband that exists is in the system. They came in a box of five hundred, numbered, and the numbers go from one to five hundred.
Locker 112 is locked every morning.
The locker system logs which wristband locked which locker. 112 is locked at a time that is always after we close and before we open, by wristband number 000.
There is no wristband 000. The box started at 001. The system will not issue a 000 because it does not exist in the system to be issued.
Locker 112 is locked by it every night.
We open it with the master key.
The first time there was a towel in it. Not one of ours, which are blue. A white one, folded, damp.
The second time, a pair of goggles.
The third time, a swimming costume, a woman's, hung on the hook, wet, in a size that was not in our lost property and that nobody claimed.
What has been checked.
The locker's lock, replaced. The locker logs 000 and locks.
The wristbands. All five hundred counted, twice, in the box and out on wrists and in the returns tray. Five hundred. None of them is 000. None of them is missing.
The changing area camera, which does not see 112, because 112 is in the row the camera cannot see, which is why the row exists, and which I did not choose.
The building. Locked at close, alarmed, the alarm has never gone, the doors have never opened on the door log between close and open.
What is in it now.
I stopped opening it in the mornings after the eleventh time, because what was in it on the eleventh time was a wristband.
One of ours. Blue. Numbered 000, in the font ours are numbered in, on a chip that the reader reads as 000, in a locker that has never had a wristband left in it before.
I put it in the drawer at reception with the returns.
The next morning 112 was locked, by 000, and the wristband was not in the drawer.
We had a fire drill in March. Everybody out, the register counted on the car park. The register said one more than the people standing on the car park, and the fire officer asked who was missing, and I said nobody, and he said the register says one, and I said the register is wrong by one, and he asked how long it had been wrong by one, and I told him, and he wrote it down, and nobody has followed it up, because what would they follow.
What I do.
I run reception.
The reader at the front door logs everybody in by their wristband, and at half past six every morning, before we open, before I am in, the front door reader logs an entry by 000. Not an exit. There is never an exit.
Whoever it is has been coming in since before I started, one entry a night and never out, and the system, which counts who is in the building for the fire register, has a number on the fire register that I print every morning, and the number has been wrong by one for as long as I have printed it, and I sign it, because the alternative is to write down who the one is, and there is no name in the system for 000, and I have not got one either.