Before it was ours the building was a control room for an emergency service, and the old console in the wing we do not use still has power because nobody has found the breaker. It logs a call every night at twenty past three. It logs a dispatch, to an address in the town that is a car park now. The call recording is there. It is a child. She gives the address. She says her mum will not wake up. And the console dispatches, and nothing goes.
I am the facilities manager at a call centre that took over a building that used to be an emergency control room, and the old wing is the part I do not send the cleaners into.
The old wing.
The service moved out in the nineties and the building was sold and the new owners built the call floors on the ground and first, and the old control room on the second was left, because it was cheaper to leave than to strip. The consoles are there, under sheets. One of them has power. I have looked for the breaker and I cannot find it and the electrician cannot find it and it has power.
At twenty past three it takes a call.
The call.
The console logs it the way it logged calls then, on a printer, on paper, which comes out of a slot and lies on the floor. Time, line, and the address the operator keyed. Then a dispatch code. Then, in the column for the unit sent, a callsign.
The recording is on a tape. A reel, on the console, that turns when the call comes, and I have played it back on the console's own machine, which works. A child. A girl, seven or eight. She gives the address, the way a child gives it when they have been taught it for exactly this. She says her mum will not wake up. She says she has tried. The operator, on the tape, a woman, says the right things, says help is coming, says stay on the line, and the girl says all right, and the tape runs for a while, the girl breathing, the operator saying you're doing really well, and then the tape stops.
The address is a car park. The street was cleared in 2001.
What has been checked.
The console, by an engineer from the company that made it, who is retired and came in for the interest. He said it should not have power, and it does, and it should not take calls, because the lines were cut, and it does, and he played the tape and sat with it and then he asked me not to call him again.
The wing, at twenty past three, by me. The console lit. The printer ran. The tape turned. And through the console's own speaker, which I had left on, the girl gave her address, and the operator answered her, and the operator was not on the tape, because the tape is a recording and the operator's voice was live, in the room, from the chair in front of the console, which was empty, and had a sheet on it.
Who.
The service's records went to the county and I found somebody who could look. The address, the year, the night. A call, logged, a child, a mother who had not woken up, a unit dispatched, and the unit had not gone, because the address had been keyed wrong, one digit, by the operator, and the unit had gone to the wrong street, and by the time it was sorted out it was too late for the mother, and the girl had been on the line for forty minutes.
The operator had left the service that year. The county's record did not say what happened to her and I did not ask.
She is taking the call again. Every night. And she keys the address, and I have checked the printout against the record, and she keys it right now. Every night she keys it right. And the dispatch goes out, to the right address, and there is nobody to go.
What is done about it.
The wing is locked and the power is a mystery and the printouts are in a box in my office, three hundred of them, every one with the right address on it, and I have not thrown any away.
What I do.
I look after the building.
The dispatch needs a unit. The callsign on the printout is a unit that does not exist. The operator sends it and it does not go, and the girl waits, and the tape stops, and the next night she rings again.
So I go. That is the only way I can put it. At twenty past three I am in the old wing, and when the printout comes and the dispatch is on it, I take the printout, and I say, into the room, to the chair with the sheet on it, received, on my way, which is what the units said, and I go down the stairs and out to my car and I drive to the car park where the house was, which is eight minutes, and I park, and I get out, and I stand where the address was, and I say, out loud, it's all right, we're here.
I do not know if it reaches her. The tape, the next night, is the same. But the operator, on the live side, in the empty chair, since I started going, says something at the end that she did not say before, after the girl has gone quiet, which is, they're there now, love, they've arrived, and I think she is saying it to the girl and I think she is saying it to herself, and I think it is the first time in thirty years that it has been true, and I am going to keep it true for as long as I have a car.