The grotto runs from November to Christmas Eve and every visit is booked, a child's name and a time slot, and on Boxing Day it is boxed up and the booking system is closed. Every night from Boxing Day onwards it takes a booking. Same name. Six o'clock slot. The grotto is flat pack in a cage in the basement. The camera on the empty fourth floor shows the place the chair stood, and something the weight of a child in it, and in the morning the sack of gifts in the cage is one short.
I am the events manager at a department store and the grotto is my Christmas, and it has become my whole year.
The grotto.
Fourth floor, a wooden cabin, a chair, a sack, a man in the suit, and a booking system on a tablet at the entrance, because a queue of children is a thing you manage. It runs from the first week of November to Christmas Eve, and on Boxing Day it comes down and goes in a cage in the basement, and the tablet is wiped and the system is closed until October.
Every night from Boxing Day it takes a booking.
The booking.
Six o'clock. A child's first name, no surname, which the system requires and does not have. An age, seven. And a note in the box for special requirements, which is a field parents use for allergies and wheelchairs, and the note says, has been very good.
The fourth floor is empty. The grotto is in the cage. The camera on the fourth floor, which is there for the stock, sees the place where the cabin stood, which is carpet, and at six, in the dark, on the carpet, where the chair was, the pile of the carpet goes down. The way carpet goes down under a chair, and inside that, the way it goes down under a small person sitting on the chair, and the carpet stays down for about four minutes, which is a grotto visit, and comes back up.
In the morning the sack in the cage in the basement, which is counted, is one gift short. Every morning. The gifts are wrapped and I do not know which is missing until I unwrap them all, and it is always the same one, a small one, a thing for a seven year old.
What has been checked.
The tablet, wiped again and locked in the safe. The booking arrives in the system, which is on a server, at about five every evening, for six.
The fourth floor, at six, by me, in the dark, on the carpet, where the chair was. The pile went down beside me, in the shape of the chair, and in the chair a small weight, and there was breathing, a child's, the fast excited breathing of a child who has waited in a queue and is at the front of it and is trying to be good, and then, from the place in front of the chair, from nothing, a voice, a man's, deep, kind, put on, the grotto voice, said, and what would you like, and the child said something I could not hear, and the man's voice said, well, let's see, and the sack, in the basement, in the cage, four floors down, went one short.
Who.
The name in the booking is a common one and there are fifty years of grotto in this store, and I could not have found the child, and I did not have to, because the man in the suit found me.
The store's grotto had one man in the suit for thirty years. Every year. He retired and then he did it as a volunteer and then he died, and the older staff talk about him the way people talk about somebody who was the best at a thing that nobody thinks is a thing. And one of them, when I described the note, has been very good, said, oh, that was his: he wrote that on every child's slip, before there was a tablet, because he said every child who came in had been good, whatever their parents said.
I do not know who the child is. I think the child is every child that missed him. A child who was booked and did not come, or came and he was not there, or was seven in a year when the store had no grotto because of money, and there is one in every year, I have checked. He is doing the visit for that child, at six, every night, on a chair that is in the basement, and the child is coming.
What is done about it.
The booking is on the system every night and the system reports it to head office as a visit and head office has asked why our grotto is running in March, and I have said it is a system fault, and they have asked me to fix it, and I have said I am trying, and I have not tried.
What I do.
I run events.
The grotto has an elf. That is my other job, at Christmas: somebody in a green hat who takes the child from the queue to the chair, and says the child's name to the man in the suit so he can use it, and takes the child back to the parent after. Nobody has been doing that for the six o'clock.
So I do. At six I am on the fourth floor, on the carpet, in the hat, which I keep in my desk, and when the pile goes down and the breathing starts I say the child's name, from the booking, the way an elf does, so the man in the suit knows it, and I say, this is, and the name, and he has been very good, and the deep voice says, has he, well, well, and I stand back for the four minutes, and at the end I say, say thank you, and a small voice says thank you, and I say, come on then, and I walk to the escalator with nobody beside me, and the carpet comes up.
The gift is still one short in the mornings. But the booking has changed. The special requirements note has an addition, since I started, in the field, after has been very good, in the same hand, which is, and so has the elf, and I have not wiped it, and I am not going to.