The tannoy logs every page with the handset it came from. At half past three every night it pages a name to goods in, and the handset it logs is number nine, which was on the wall of the old canteen, which was knocked down in 2018, and whose cable was cut and capped. The voice on the page is a woman's, and it is the same every night, and the name she pages has started answering.
I am the night operations manager at a warehouse, and the tannoy is how I talk to four hundred thousand square feet at once.
The system.
Twelve handsets round the building. Pick one up, press the zone, talk, and the speakers in that zone say what you said. Every page is logged with the handset number and the time, and the audio is kept for a week, because a page is sometimes the only record of who said what when something went wrong.
Half past three, every night, handset nine pages goods in.
Handset nine.
It was on the wall of the canteen. The old one, on the mezzanine, with the vending machines and the fruit machine and the smell. The canteen was knocked down in 2018 when the mezzanine was extended and a new canteen was built on the ground floor, and handset nine's cable was cut at the junction box and capped, and the system was told there were eleven handsets.
It logs nine. The audio is there.
The page.
A woman's voice. Not a staff member, by the voice, or not one I know. Calm. The way you say a name on a tannoy when you have said it a hundred times. She says the name, and she says, "to goods in, please," and she says it twice, which is the rule, and she puts the handset down, and the log says the page was eleven seconds, and they are all eleven seconds.
The name is a man's. I have checked the staff list and the agency lists and the leavers back to the building opening, and there is nobody of that name who has ever worked here.
What has been checked.
The junction box. The cable for nine is cut and capped. I have had the cap off and looked at the copper and it is copper going nowhere.
The canteen. Is not there. Is racking. The place on the wall where the handset was is the air between two uprights in aisle sixty, at about the height of a person's head.
The speakers in goods in. They play the page. The night shift in goods in hear it. They have heard it for years. They thought it was a page. They thought the man was somebody on another shift and they had not met him. One of them, a lad of twenty, asked me last month who he was, because he had been paged every night for the six months the lad had worked here and he had never come.
The answering.
That is new. Two months, about.
The page goes out at half past three. Eleven seconds. And then, on the log, about a minute later, a second page. Handset four, which is in goods in, on the wall by the office, which exists, which I have used. The audio on the second page is a man's voice, and it says, "On my way," and it is three seconds, and nobody in goods in was at handset four, and the lad, who was nearest, said the handset had lifted off its hook on its own and he had watched it and then it had gone back.
He does not work nights now.
Who.
I have not been able to find out. There is nothing in the building's records with the name in it. The canteen had been there since the building was built, and before the building there was a different building, a factory, and the factory is in the council's records, and the council's records have a list of the people who were in it when it burned, in 1971, and the name is on the list, and it is a list of men who did not get out, and goods in is where the factory floor was, and the canteen was where the factory's canteen was, and I think she was calling him to his shift.
I think she still is. I think for fifty years she has been paging a man to a floor he is on and he has finally heard her.
What is done about it.
The half past three page is on the log as a system fault, handset nine, and the reply is on the log as a system fault, handset four, and the engineers have been out and found no fault, and I have stopped calling them.
What I do.
I run nights.
The pages have changed. She still says his name at half past three and he still says on my way. But last week she said something else first. The log had the page at fourteen seconds instead of eleven, and I played it, and before the name she said, very quietly, as if she had not pressed the zone button yet and did not know she was being heard, "There you are."
The replies have stopped. He does not say on my way any more. I think he got there.
She still pages. Every night. I do not know who for, now, and goods in is a night shift of nine people, and the lad was the tenth, and he is on days, and I have been wondering, since the replies stopped, which of the nine it is for, and whether I should be the one to answer it, so that it is not one of them.