The goods lift takes objects between the galleries and the basement store, and it logs every trip with the load. Every night at half past twelve it goes down with about two hundred kilos on it and comes up with nothing. In the morning there is an object on the receiving bench in the basement that is not on the database, wrapped the way we wrap things, with a label in a hand that is not ours, and it is always something that was lost.
I am the registrar at a museum, which means the list of what we have is mine, and so is the list of what we have lost.
The lift.
A goods lift from the galleries to the basement store, big enough for a trolley, with a load cell that logs the weight of every trip, because a heavy object that goes down without being written up is an object that will be found in ten years with nobody knowing what it is.
At half past twelve it goes down with two hundred kilos and comes up with none.
The bench.
The basement has a receiving bench where things are put when they come down, to be unwrapped and checked and shelved. In the morning there is one object on it. Wrapped, in the acid free tissue and the boxes we use, tied the way the conservators tie, with a label. The label has an accession number on it and a description in a hand that none of us has, an old hand, a clerk's hand, and the number is a real number, and the number is on the lost list.
The first one was a clock. Lost 1954, according to the list, in the sense that it was on the shelf one inventory and not the next, and nobody knew. It was on the bench. It was the clock. The description matched, the number matched, the maker's mark inside the case matched the card in the old index.
Then a fan. Lost 1971. A pair of shoes, 1948. A photograph album, 1990. A medal, 2003. One a night.
What has been checked.
The lift, by the engineer, who found nothing wrong and would not stay for the trip.
The lift, by me, in it, at half past twelve. The doors closed on me on the gallery floor and the lift went down and the load cell, on the display inside, said two hundred and eight kilos, and I weigh seventy, and there was nothing in the lift with me that I could see, but there was the smell of a store, of the old store, of dust and paper and the polish they used on the shelves in the fifties, and there was the sound of trolley wheels on the lift floor, and when the doors opened in the basement the wheels went out past me, and the load cell went to seventy, and in the morning there was a box on the bench.
Who.
The old index. Every card in it was typed, except the ones from before the typewriter, which are in a hand, a clerk's hand, and the hand on the labels is that hand, and the name on the bottom of the oldest cards is a name, and the name was the museum's first registrar, from 1890 to 1931, and she is buried in the town, and the lost list, which begins in 1931, begins the year she died.
Nothing was lost while she was alive. She has come back to see about it.
What is done about it.
Each object is logged as found in store and the lost list is one shorter every morning and the director has asked me how I am finding them and I have told him and he has asked me not to put it in the annual report, and I have put, in the annual report, that a review of the basement store has recovered a number of items previously recorded as unlocated, which is true.
What I do.
I keep the list.
The lost list had four hundred and six items on it when she started. It has three hundred and one. I have worked out that she will be finished in about ten months, and I have been thinking about what happens when the list is empty and there is nothing to bring down the lift.
I have started leaving her the list. The current one, printed, on the receiving bench, at close, with the items she has found ticked off in pen, and a note at the bottom that says, thank you, and the count. In the morning the list is there and the next item is ticked, in her hand, and the count is corrected, because I had it wrong by one, and beside my thank you she has written, in the clerk's hand, in the smallest letters, not at all, it was my job.