Floodlights are on a contactor with a key in the control room and a meter that logs every hour they burn, because they cost a fortune. Every night at twelve minutes past eight they come on, all four towers, with the key in my pocket, and burn for eleven minutes, and go off. On the pitch camera, for those eleven minutes, the stands are dark and the pitch is lit and the shadows on the pitch are the shadows of a full house, and there is nobody in the ground.
I am the head groundsman at a football club and the floodlights are not mine, but I am the one who is here when they come on.
The lights.
Four towers. A contactor in the control room with a key. A meter that logs burn hours, because each hour is a number the finance office reads. They come on for matches and for the pitch lights in winter and otherwise they are off, and the key is with whoever is on.
At twelve minutes past eight they come on. All four. Full. With the key in my pocket.
Eleven minutes. Then off.
Eleven minutes.
I knew the number before I looked it up. Everybody at this club knows it. A match, a night match, a long time ago, the lights had gone, a fault in the supply, and the ground had been dark for eleven minutes, a full house, and in the dark there had been a crush at one end, on the old terrace, and people had been hurt, and one had died, a young man, and the eleven minutes were the eleven minutes the club had been dark and the crowd had been frightened and nobody could see.
The lights had come back at twenty three minutes past eight. The match had been finished. The young man had not been.
They come on at twelve past, now, every night, and go off at twenty three past, which is the eleven minutes, backwards. On when it was dark, off when it was light. As if the ground were trying to put the light where it was not.
The shadows.
The pitch camera, which is for the grass, shows the pitch under the lights. The stands round it are dark, as they would be: floodlights light the pitch, not the seats. And on the pitch, from the stands, come the shadows.
Not of people. Of a crowd. Forty thousand people in four stands cast a shadow on a pitch that is a texture, a thickness at the edges where the lights come across them, and the texture moves, the way a crowd's shadow moves when the crowd moves, and for eleven minutes the shadow on my pitch is the shadow of a full house, and at the end that was the terrace, the shadow is denser, and it moves in one direction, and I have watched it enough nights to know what I am watching.
What has been checked.
The contactor, replaced. The towers, inspected. They come on at twelve past eight.
The pitch, at twelve past eight, by me, standing on the centre spot. The lights came on above me, the hum and then the flood, and the ground was lit, and I looked at the stands and they were empty and dark, and I looked down and I was standing in the shadow of a crowd. The shadow of forty thousand people fell across the pitch around me, and I could hear them. Not loud. The sound a crowd makes when it is quiet, which is not silence, which is breathing, and at the terrace end the sound was not quiet, and I did not go to that end, and I am not going to.
What is done about it.
The eleven minutes a night are on the meter and the finance office has the cost of them and has asked the club to stop, and the club has asked me, and I have said that the key is in my pocket, and the finance office has asked for the key, and I have given it to them, and the lights came on at twelve past eight that night and the finance office has not asked again.
What I do.
I look after the pitch.
The young man who died has a plaque. It is at the end where the terrace was, which is seats now, on the wall by the concourse, and it has his name and the date and a line from the club, and people put scarves on it on the anniversary and otherwise it is a plaque.
I have moved the pitch lights. Not the floodlights, the small lights on rigs that we put on the grass in winter to grow it. I have put one at that end. On the pitch, facing the wall, facing the plaque, and it is on from dusk to dawn, which it would be anyway, for the grass, and it lights the plaque, which no light has ever done, and which means that at twelve minutes past eight, when the floodlights come on and the shadow of the crowd comes onto the pitch, the end where the terrace was is already lit, and the shadow there is thinner than it was, and the sound from that end, since the rig went in, is the quiet kind.
The finance office asked why a grow rig is facing a wall. I said the grass there needed it. It does not. I do not think anybody is going to come and check.