Short story · 3 min read · Set in Veyne ·
The Tannoy of the Ninth Announcement
At Veyne the night tannoy runs a full sequence of eight announcements, and a ninth keeps joining it for platforms that were closed years ago, in the voice of a man retired away from the district.
The night sequence at Veyne runs to eight announcements and the eight are accounted for. They come off the reel store in the annexe — eight tapes, eight runs, the voice of the recorded woman, who has said the word cancellation so many times that the word has gone flat and honest. The sequence is timed from the quarter, first call at 02:04 and the eighth at 03:26, and any clerk on nights can recite the order of it the way other clerks recite charges.
The ninth joins it between the fourth and the fifth, at 02:38 exactly, and the ninth is not on any shelf.
The ninth is a man. It names a service and a platform in the old style — the 02:51 boat train will depart from Platform Nine, the boat train will depart from Platform Nine — and it says Veyne the way the man it belongs to used to say it, swallowing the last letter, so that the district came off him like a stone skimmed. Every hand on nights knows the voice. It is the voice of Stanley Brandreth, who announced at Veyne for six-and-twenty years and taught half the relief staff their emphasis, and who retired inland to his sister's at the top of the county and is alive and sends nothing.
Platform Nine has not taken a train of any kind since the year the dock steps were fenced. Its concrete is a locked car park now, and the boat train itself stopped before that, when the steamers did. Nobody waits on the platform it names. Nobody would. The young ones on nights laughed at it, at first, the laugh you give a thing that cannot cost you anything, and the old ones let it pass, the way the old ones let the bell pass, and the announcement goes on making its minutes.
Properly it should be logged. There is the difficulty that is spoken of and the one that is not. The log has columns for eight. Odell, who keeps the tally, writes the ninth in the margin in pencil, each night, and lets the pencil stand, because to write the ninth into a column is to vouch for when it began, and nobody's notice said it began; it is one of a sequence one night and then it is all of them, the way weather arrives. Her marginal strokes now go back most of a winter, and she has never once added a word of explanation, margins being where the unvouched is kept.
The store was checked the Tuesday after the young ones laughed too loudly. The check was done by the book: eight reels run and wound and counted against the register, and the register answers eight, and eight is what the shelves hold. The ninth is not mislaid. The ninth was never bought, never logged in, and never withdrawn, and a tape that was never in the store cannot be played from the store, and the announcement still makes its 02:38.
Somebody at the district office was told, in the correct way, on a form. The district office keeps forms. The form came back wanting a first date of occurrence for the announcement, and Odell could not give one, the tally being a matter of winters and margins, and the form was returned wanting it still. As for the voice — it belongs to a man the district finished with, properly retired, pensioned off its books and gone over the county line. There is a procedure for ringing a retired officer about a matter in his old posting. Nobody has rung him. There is a form for that too, and the form wants a question you are able to put.
So the sequence runs, eight from the shelves and one from nowhere, and the margin fills, and the question the night book now carries in three different hands, evenly, the way the old ones keep things — where is the ninth being kept?