The bend between levels two and three is too tight and the pillar on the inside of it gets hit about once a month, which is a known thing with a known repair. It is hit every night now. Same height, same place, same white paint left on the concrete, and the camera on the bend records the sound of it and shows an empty ramp.
I am the maintenance man for a multi storey car park and the pillar on the bend is the thing I have repaired most in my life.
The bend.
Between two and three the ramp turns tight, tighter than it should, because the building was drawn for smaller cars. The pillar on the inside takes a wing mirror a week and a proper hit about once a month, and there is a yellow rubber guard on it, and I replace the guard when it splits and make good the concrete when it cracks.
It is hit every night now. At twenty to twelve.
The damage.
The same place, a metre up, on the corner that faces the ramp. A fresh dent in the guard, the rubber torn, and on the concrete behind it where the rubber has gone, a smear of white paint. Van white. I have had it looked at by a body shop and it is a white that was used on a range of vans in the late nineties and is not used now.
I make it good in the morning. It is hit at twenty to twelve.
What has been checked.
The camera on the bend. It has a microphone. At twenty to twelve, on the recording, there is an engine coming up the ramp from two, a diesel, a van, labouring in a low gear the way they do on the ramps. Then the impact. A bang and the sound of rubber and then a scrape, the long scrape of a panel being dragged along concrete by a driver who has not stopped. Then the engine going on up to three and away.
The picture shows the ramp. Empty. The lights. The pillar. At the moment of the bang the guard on the pillar moves, pushed in, and springs back torn, and a white smear is on the concrete that was not there the frame before, and there is nothing on the ramp.
The loop on the ramp counts one car, up, at twenty to twelve, and the count on three goes to one, and a minute later the count on three goes back to zero with nothing coming down, and the loop on the ramp to four reads nothing, and the exit reads nothing.
It comes up from two and it hits the pillar and it gets to three and it stops being anywhere.
The van.
I asked the retired attendant, the one everybody asks. He said a courier van had come up that ramp fast one night in 1998, with a lad in it who was behind on his drops, and had hit the pillar and kept going, and had got to three and parked, and the lad had got out and sat down next to the van, and the attendant had found him at six, sitting, and the van running, and it had been running all night in a closed level with the lad next to it, and the attendant said, he just wanted to sit down for a minute, he had told them that, on the phone, when he rang in to say he would be late, he just needed to sit down for a minute.
What is done about it.
The pillar repair is on a standing order and the guard comes in by the box now, and the council's asset register has the bend as a known hazard, and the dent every morning is logged as a hit and run with no footage of a vehicle, and the police stopped taking the reports in the spring.
What I do.
I fix things.
Level three, by the ramp, in the bay where the attendant said the van had parked, there is a place on the floor that is always warm. Concrete, in a covered level, on a November morning, warm, in a rectangle the size of a van's engine bay, and next to it, on the floor against the pillar, a place the size of somebody sitting.
I have put a bench there. A proper one, bolted down, a bench with a back, where the sitting place is. The council asked what a bench was for on level three of a car park and I said it was for people who needed to sit down for a minute, and they let it go.
It is hit at twenty to twelve, every night, and the scrape goes on up to three, and the engine stops, and on the camera on three, which sees the bench, the bench at that moment has the shape on it that a bench has when somebody sits down heavily, and the warm patch on the floor is warmer, and I have got used to it, and I think he has too.