Our seats have sensors under them, so front of house can see on a screen which seats are taken and hold the curtain for latecomers. Seat H14 is sold every night, at the second the box office opens the house, to a name that has no card and no email, and from the moment the doors open the sensor reads it occupied until the curtain call. The ushers have seen it from the aisle. It is empty. They have stopped selling H13 and H15.
I am the box office manager at a receiving house and H14 is the seat I know best in the building.
The system.
Every seat is on the plan and every sale is logged with the buyer's details. Under every seat is a sensor, put in for the fire regulations and used by front of house to see, on a screen, which seats are sitting in, so a latecomer can be walked to an empty one in the dark and the curtain can be held if half of row F is still in the bar.
H14 is sold at the second the house goes on sale for the night. Not booked ahead. The night's tickets are released to the box office at ten in the morning and the sale for H14 is logged at ten and no seconds, every day, to a name.
The name has no card. No email, no phone, no address. The system requires all of them and the system has none, and the sale is marked paid, and the money is not in the till.
The sensor.
Doors open at seven. At seven, H14 reads occupied. It reads occupied through the show and it reads empty at the curtain call, at the moment the applause starts, as if somebody stood up to clap and left.
The ushers can see the row from the aisle. It is an empty seat. They have said so a hundred times. They have also said that the seat is down, folded down, the way a seat is when somebody is in it, when the seats either side are up, and that it is down at seven and it is up at the call.
What has been checked.
The sensor, replaced. The plan, rebuilt. The name, searched in every system we have, and in the archive, and in the theatre's own history, which is on the wall in the foyer.
The seat, sat in, by me. I sat in H14 at seven with the house lights up and the screen on my phone, and the screen read occupied, which it should, and I got up, and the screen read occupied, which it should not, and I stood in the aisle and looked at the seat and it was down, and I put my hand on the cushion and it was warm, with a warmth that had nothing to do with me, the warmth of somebody who has been sitting a long time.
Who.
The wall in the foyer. It has a plaque at the end, past the photographs, for the fire. The old theatre on this site burned in the 1920s, during a show, and most people got out, and the plaque has the names of the ones who did not, and one of them is the name on the sale.
The old plan is in the archive. The old row H was where our row H is, more or less, and H14 on the old plan is a seat in the middle of the row on the aisle side, which is where our H14 is, and the archive says, in a note on the plan in pencil, that the seat was hers, that she had a subscription, that she had sat there every week for years, and that on the night she had been found in it.
She had not tried to leave. The people either side of her had. She had stayed in her seat.
What is done about it.
H14 is on the sales report every day as a comp with no allocation and the finance office has it on a list of seats that are given away and nobody is quite sure by whom.
The ushers do not sell H13 or H15 unless the house is full. When the house is full they sell them, and the people in them, at the interval, ask to be moved, and cannot say why, and say the seat next to them is cold, and that they kept feeling somebody was about to say excuse me and get past them, and nobody did.
What I do.
I run the box office.
I have stopped fighting the sale. I have done the opposite. The seat is sold at ten every morning to her, and I print the ticket, and I put it in an envelope with her name on it, and at half past six I put the envelope on the seat, on the cushion, the way we leave tickets for a guest who is coming in late, and when the doors open at seven the envelope is gone, and the seat is down, and the sensor reads occupied.
I do not know where the envelopes go. I have looked. But the sensor at the curtain call reads empty a second later than it did, now, and the ushers say the seat is warm when they check the row, and the woman in H13, on a full night last month, did not ask to be moved, and said, at the interval, that the lady next to her had been very nice and had said the show was better than the one she remembered, and that she was sorry about the smoke, and the woman in H13 asked me what smoke, and I said there had been a small problem in the old days, and that it was sorted now.