Season tickets renew in June and the system prints a card for every seat that is paid for. One card prints every June for a seat that does not exist, because the seat was removed and a memorial plaque bolted to the concrete where it was. The card is not collected. On every home match day it is scanned in at the turnstile nearest the plaque, and the seat sensor at the plaque reads taken, and the plaque, at the end, is warm.
I am the ticket office manager at a football club and the season ticket renewals are the busiest week of my year, and one of them is not mine.
The renewal.
June. Every season ticket holder is invoiced and the ones who pay get a card, printed, with the seat on it, and the card is scanned at the turnstile and the seat is theirs. A seat that does not exist cannot be on a card, because the system only knows seats that exist.
One card prints for seat 121 in block D.
Seat 121.
It was a seat. It was taken out in 2003 and a plaque was put on the step where it was, for a supporter who had sat there for fifty years and had died in it, at a match, at the end, after a goal, which is how people say they would like to go and never do. The club had taken the seat out and put the plaque in, and his family had come, and it was a good thing to do, and the seat was removed from the system.
Every June the system prints a card for it. Season ticket, block D, seat 121, and a name, and the name is his, and the invoice shows paid, by a card that expired in 2003, and the money is in the club's account, which the finance office cannot explain and has stopped trying to.
The scan.
The card is never collected. It sits in the tray. On every home match day it is scanned in at turnstile twelve, which is the one below block D, at about twenty to three, which the old stewards say was when he came in, and the seat sensor at the plaque, which is a sensor on a step with no seat on it, reads taken from twenty to three till the whistle.
And people who sit near the plaque, the ones in 120 and 122, say the step is warm. They say they hear a man breathing beside them at corners. They say that when we score, something beside them stands up.
What has been checked.
The card. I have held it. It is a normal card. The chip on it is coded with a seat that does not exist and the turnstile accepts it and it is in the tray at the same time it is being scanned.
The plaque, at twenty to three on a match day, by me, standing beside it. The turnstile below clicked. The sensor on the step read taken. And I put my hand on the plaque and it was warm, and I stood there through the first half, and at the goal, which came at thirty one minutes, something beside me stood up, and the noise of the crowd covered whatever else there was, and at half time I went down.
What is done about it.
The card prints and the money arrives and the finance office has it as an unexplained receipt and the club's auditors have asked about it, and the chairman, who knew him, has told the auditors that the club is happy to receive it, and the auditors have written that down.
What I do.
I run the ticket office.
The card sits in the tray. That is the only wrong thing. A season ticket holder collects his card, in June, from my window, and I hand it over, and I say, see you in August. Nobody has said that to him since 2003.
So I take it to him. On the first home match of the season, at twenty to three, I go to block D with the card and I stand at the plaque and I say, your card, and I put it on the step, on the plaque, where the seat was, and I say, see you in August, which is wrong, because it is August, so I say, welcome back, and I go down.
The card is not on the step at full time. It is in my tray, in the office, the next morning. Every year. And on the scan log for that match, the first scan of the card at turnstile twelve is not at twenty to three, on the years I have taken it up. It is a minute after I have put it down, from the turnstile, below, as if a man had gone down to the turnstile with his card and come in properly, through the gate, as everybody does on the first day, and I have decided that is what he is doing, and I have decided to keep being the man at the window who hands him it.