Every level has a help point, a yellow box with a button and a speaker that rings the attendant's booth. Level six is the top covered floor and nobody parks there at night. At ten past three the level six help point rings, and the camera beside it shows nobody at the box, and a voice asks me to check whether the car is still there, and describes one.
I am the night attendant in a multi storey car park and the booth has a panel that lights up when a help point is pressed.
The help points.
One a floor, by the pay machine. A yellow box, a big button, a speaker and a microphone. Press it and my panel lights the floor number and I pick up and we talk. They get used for lost tickets and for a machine that has eaten a card, and once a week for somebody who cannot find their car.
Level six rings at ten past three every night.
The call.
I pick up. The line is open. There is the sound a concrete floor has, the hum, and a person breathing near the microphone. Then they ask, and it is the same question, and the same words, as near as I can tell, every night.
"Is my car still there?"
I ask which car. They describe it. A red estate, the make and the year, which I looked up and which stopped being made before I was born, a sticker in the back window for a radio station that is not on the air. Parked on level six by the stairs.
There is no car on level six. There has been no car on level six at night for the two years I have done this.
What I have said.
I have said no. The line goes quiet, and then there is a sound I would rather not describe, and the call ends. The next night they ring and ask again.
I have said yes. There was a silence and then the voice said, very quietly, thank you, and the call ended, and the next night they rang and asked again.
I have said I will go and look. I went up. The help point on six is by the pay machine and the camera is above it, and on the camera, from my phone as I came up the ramp, the button was being held in. The call was open. I stood beside the box. The panel in the booth, on my phone, showed six lit. The button was out. Nobody was there.
I pressed it myself, to see what the booth would hear. The booth recorded me. On the recording, under my voice, very close to the microphone, somebody was breathing.
What has been checked.
The box, replaced. The line, rewired. The camera, which shows nobody at the box while the call is open, every night.
The car. I asked. A red estate of that make had been left on level six for some weeks, in the nineties, by a woman who had parked and gone into town and not come back, and the car had been there when she was found, and her family had collected it, and it had been, the retired attendant told me, the thing they asked about first, on the phone, before anything, because it was the last thing she had done that was ordinary.
What is done about it.
The calls are logged as nuisance activations on level six and the contractor has been out to the box twice.
What I do.
I work nights.
I have started saying something different. When they ask whether the car is still there, I say: it has gone home. Your family came for it. It is at home.
The first night I said it the line was open for a long time. Breathing. Then the voice said, "Oh." Not upset. Said as a person says it on being given a piece of news that settles something. And then, "Then I can go," and the line closed, and I sat in the booth and shook for a while.
They rang the next night. Ten past three. Six lit on the panel. I picked up, and the breathing was there, and the voice asked, "Is my car still there?"
And I said it has gone home, your family came for it, and the voice said "Oh," and "Then I can go," and closed, and I realised that the news does not stay given, that whatever is on level six at ten past three has to be told every night, fresh, that the ordinary thing is finished and they are allowed to leave, and that the telling is a job now, and it is mine, and I am the only one on at that hour to do it.