The lift in our home goes between two floors and it logs every call, because a resident stuck in a lift is an emergency. Every night at half past twelve it logs a call from the second floor. It goes up past the first, to a height the shaft does not have, stops, opens its doors for the time it opens them for a person to get in, closes, and comes down to the ground floor, and nobody is in it.
I am the deputy manager at a care home and I hold the lift keys, which is a bigger job than it sounds.
The lift.
Two floors. Ground and first. A lift big enough for a bed, slow, with a voice that says the floor. It logs every call, every stop, every door cycle, and the engineer reads the log at his quarterly visit.
Every night at half past twelve it logs a call from floor two.
Floor two.
There is no floor two. The building is two storeys and a loft with a water tank. The shaft ends at the first floor slab and above that is the motor room, which I have been in, and which is a motor room.
The lift answers the call. It goes up from wherever it is, past the first floor, which the log shows as passed, and it stops, at a position the log gives as floor two, and the doors open, and the voice says second floor, and the doors stay open for the twelve seconds they stay open, and close, and the lift goes down to the ground and opens, and the voice says ground floor, and it is empty.
What has been checked.
The controller, replaced. The engineer, who read the log and then went into the shaft with a torch at half past twelve and came out and sat in his van for a while and told me the lift had gone up past him.
The first floor corridor, by me, at half past twelve, at the lift doors. The lift goes past. You can hear it go past, behind the doors, the sound of it, going up, and then the sound of it stopping above, and the doors opening, which you can hear through the floor of the motor room, and the voice, muffled, second floor.
And then people getting in.
People.
I have stood there enough nights to be sure. After the doors open, above me, there are feet. Slow feet, on the lift floor, the particular sound of a care home at night, slippers and a stick, the small shuffle of somebody turning round in a lift to face the doors. More than one. Three, four. And then the doors close and the lift comes down past me, full, by the sound of it, the weight of it on the cables, and opens on the ground floor empty.
The load cell in the lift floor logs the weight on every trip. Down from floor two it logs about two hundred and forty kilos. Up it logs nothing. Whatever gets in on two gets out on the ground floor, and the ground floor is the lounge and the dining room and the front door.
Who.
There is no second floor now. There was. The home was a hospital before it was a home, a cottage hospital, and the hospital had three storeys, and the top one was the long stay ward, and the top one was taken off in the sixties when the building was condemned and rebuilt to two, and the lift shaft, the engineer says, is the original shaft, cut down.
The long stay ward is where the people who were not going home were. I have seen a photograph of it. Beds along both walls and a lift at the end.
What is done about it.
The half past twelve call is on the lift log as a phantom and the engineer has stopped writing anything next to it.
What I do.
I hold the keys.
I stopped standing at the first floor doors. I stand at the ground floor doors now, at half past twelve, and I wait for the lift to come down, and when the doors open on the empty lift, I hold them. With the key. I hold them open, and I say, this way, and I stand back, the way you do, the way I do every afternoon when the families come, and I look at the lounge, and the front door, and the dining room with the tables laid for breakfast, and I say, this way, to nobody, for about a minute.
The load cell logs the weight leaving. It did not, before I started. It logged two hundred and forty down and two hundred and forty sitting in the lift at the ground floor until the doors closed and it went back up with the weight still in it, and the next night the same weight came down again. It is less now. Two hundred and ten, last week. A hundred and eighty. They are getting out, a few at a time, and going through the lounge, and I do not know where they go from there, but it is not back up, and the lift, when it goes up to floor two the next night, takes nobody with it, and comes down lighter.
I think it is a ward being emptied. I think it has taken sixty years for the lift to be answered and I think when the load cell reads nothing it will stop going up, and I will be sorry, a little, and I will also ask the engineer to look at the shaft, because I want to know where it goes, and I am not going to go and see.