The photo booth by the arcade takes four pictures for a coin and logs every print. Every night at ten to two it prints a strip with no coin in and nobody in the booth. Four frames. A family, a man and a woman and two children, in summer clothes from a summer a long time ago, smiling, pulling faces, the way you do in a booth. In the fourth frame one of the children is not there, and the other three are not smiling, and they are looking at the space.
I am the pier's amusements supervisor and the photo booth by the arcade is a money maker in the day and a thing I check the tray of every morning with my stomach tight.
The booth.
The old kind, with the curtain and the stool and the slot, four frames for a coin, black and white, printed on a strip that drops into the tray outside. It logs each print for the takings.
Every night at ten to two it prints a strip with no coin.
The strip.
Four frames. A family. A man in a shirt with the sleeves rolled, a woman in a summer dress, a boy of about ten, a girl of about six, squeezed onto the stool and round it, the way families do in a booth. Frame one, they are arranging themselves, laughing. Frame two, they are all looking at the lens, smiling, the proper one. Frame three, faces, the boy cross eyed, the girl with her tongue out, the parents laughing at them.
Frame four. The boy, the woman, the man. The stool where the girl was is empty. The three of them are not looking at the lens. They are looking at the space where she was. The woman's hand is out towards it. The man's face is a face I have seen on one other man, once, at the sea end, and I do not want to describe it.
The clothes are from the sixties, by the dress. The strip is the booth's current paper, which is wrong, because the booth's current paper is colour.
What has been checked.
The booth, emptied of paper. It printed the strip.
The booth, at ten to two, by me, in it, on the stool, with the curtain drawn. At ten to two the lights came on, the four flashes, one, two, three, four, with the pause between that the booth has, and in the pause after the third flash, in the dark, the curtain beside me moved, the way a curtain moves when a small person slips out under it, and in the fourth flash I was alone, which I had been the whole time, and the strip dropped into the tray outside, and in the fourth frame the stool was empty and I was not in the picture, which the booth cannot do either.
Who.
The pier's book has a girl. Nineteen sixty something. A family, a summer, a photo booth, and the girl had slipped out under the curtain while the pictures were being taken, the way a bored child does, and had gone to look at the sea, and the family had come out of the booth with their strip and she had not been at the rail, and the strip, the book says, because the pier master had it from the father, had four frames and she was in three of them, and the father had kept it, and had shown it to the pier master, and had said, that is the last picture of her, and she is not in it.
She is not in it. Every night. And they are looking at where she was.
What is done about it.
The strip is in the tray every morning and the booth's log has a print with no coin and the booth company has been told and has changed the mechanism and the strip is in the tray, and I have a drawer of them, a year, and I do not look at the fourth frame any more, and I cannot throw them away.
What I do.
I supervise the amusements.
A child who slips out of a photo booth to look at the sea is a child who is back before the strip has dried. That is how it goes. That is how it went for every other child on this pier for a hundred years. The one time it did not is the time the booth keeps printing.
So I am at the booth at ten to two. Outside it. By the curtain. And when the third flash goes and the curtain moves and the small person comes out under it, I am there, and I say, the thing you say to somebody's child on a pier, which is, where are you off to, and I say, your mum's in there, go on, back in, you'll miss the last one, and I hold the curtain.
The strip in the tray has changed. The fourth frame has four people in it. The girl is back on the stool, squashed in, with her tongue out still, late, caught halfway into the frame, blurred, the way a child is in the last picture when she has only just got back, and the three of them are looking at the lens, and they are smiling, and the man's face is a man's face, and I have put that strip, the first one with four in the fourth frame, in the pier office, in a frame, on the wall, with no label, and the strips in the tray since have all been four in the fourth, and I have stopped keeping them, because you do not need a drawer of a thing that is right.