The store has one old lift kept for the look of it, with a brass gate, a recorded voice that says the floor, and a stool where the attendant sat when there was one. It logs every stop. Every night at quarter past nine it logs a stop at a floor between three and four. The voice says a name for it that the store has not used since the sixties. The gate opens onto the shaft wall, and stays open for twenty minutes, and the stool is warm, and there is the smell of a department that closed.
I am the store's building manager and the old lift is the thing customers photograph, and the thing I ride at night.
The lift.
The original, from when the store was built, kept because people like it: a wooden car, a brass gate, a recorded voice that says the floor and what is on it, a stool in the corner where the attendant sat. It is inspected and it is safe and it logs every stop, like the modern ones.
At quarter past nine it stops between three and four.
The stop.
The log has it as a floor the lift's controller calls three and a half, which is not a floor. The car stops. The voice, the recorded one, a woman's from when the recording was made, says a floor name. Not third floor, not fourth. It says, haberdashery, which is not on the recording, which is a department this store has not had since 1968, when the mezzanine it was on was taken out and the floors renumbered.
The gate opens. Onto the shaft wall. Brick. It stays open for twenty minutes, which is longer than the gate can stay open, because the controller closes it after thirty seconds, and it stays. Then the gate closes and the car goes to the ground floor and the voice says, ground floor, perfumery, and the doors open on the dark store.
The stool is warm. And the car, when I get into it in the morning, smells of a department: cloth, and the oil they put on scissors, and something sweet, which the oldest staff say was the sweet counter that was next to haberdashery on the mezzanine.
What has been checked.
The controller, replaced. The stop is logged.
The car, at quarter past nine, by me, in it. It went up from the ground on its own. Past three. Stopped. The voice said, haberdashery, in the woman's recorded tone, and the gate opened onto brick, and I could see the mortar, and beside me somebody got off. The car rose an inch, the way a car does when a weight leaves it. And through the gate, from the brick, came the sound of a department. Not loud. A till, the old kind, ringing. A voice saying, and what can I get you, madam. Scissors on cloth, the long shear of a length being cut off a bolt. Twenty minutes. And then the car sank an inch as the weight got back on, and the gate closed, and we went down.
I sat on the stool for the last part. It was warm.
Who.
Two, I think. The attendant, because the stool is warm and the car goes where she takes it, and the attendant's job on the old lifts was to know every floor and say it, and the recording that replaced her was made from her, the oldest staff say, and the voice that says haberdashery is hers, saying a floor she said ten thousand times and the recording never captured, because the mezzanine had gone by the time they recorded her.
And the customer. Somebody who gets off at haberdashery and browses for twenty minutes and gets back on, every night, which was what a certain kind of customer did on a certain kind of afternoon in a store like this, when there was nowhere else to go and the sweet counter was next door.
What is done about it.
The stop at three and a half is on the lift log every night and the lift company's engineer has seen it and has said that there is no three and a half and I have said, there was, and he has written, phantom floor, in the log, which is the term, apparently.
What I do.
I manage the building.
The attendant said the floor and the customer got off. The one thing that did not happen, on any afternoon in the sixties or since, was anybody saying what happened to haberdashery when it went.
So I have put the sign back. A brass plate, engraved, the kind the store used, on the shaft wall at the level of three and a half, where the gate opens, screwed to the brick, and it says, haberdashery, and under it, in the smaller letters the store used for a department that had moved, now on the third floor, which is true, because the sewing counter is on three, in a corner, and has been all along.
The gate opens onto the plate now. The twenty minutes are ten. And the car, when the weight gets back on, goes to three, not to the ground, and stops, and the voice says, third floor, and the gate opens onto the dark store, and the weight gets off, and I have started to think that a customer who has been browsing a department that was taken out for sixty years has finally read the sign, and gone to find where it went, and that the sewing counter on three, which the staff say is always tidier in the mornings than they left it, has a regular.