Overtime

23:40

The cloakroom at the Aviary takes four hundred and eleven coats on a Saturday and Bea has worked it for three years.

The system is a numbered ticket. It is the same system every cloakroom on earth has used since about 1910 and it is not improvable.

23:41

A man has lost his ticket.

23:41 (continued)

This is fine. There is a procedure. At the end of the night, the coats that remain are matched against the tickets that remain, and if there is one coat and one person, the person gets the coat.

The procedure requires waiting until the end of the night.

The man does not want to wait until the end of the night.

23:43

"It's the black one."

Bea turns and looks at four hundred and eleven coats.

"Right," she says.

23:44

He does not go away.

This is the thing about the cloakroom that Bea did not anticipate when she took the job, which she took because it is warm and indoors and pays the same as the bar without anyone being sick near her.

The thing is that a cloakroom is the only place in the building where somebody wants something from you that you can definitely give them and are definitely not going to.

00:15

Second lost ticket. A woman, extremely apologetic, who describes her coat in such detail — the tear in the lining, the pen in the left pocket, the specific pen — that Bea breaks procedure and finds it, because she can, because a coat with a Muji pen in the left pocket and a tear in the lining is identifiable and the risk is essentially nil.

The woman is grateful in a way that is out of all proportion and Bea thinks about it for the rest of the night.

00:52

Third lost ticket. Man. Black coat.

01:30

Fourth. Black coat.

01:31

Bea has developed, over three years, a taxonomy.

Type one accepts the procedure immediately and comes back at the end. About sixty per cent. Bea would not change a single thing about type one.

Type two argues for four minutes and then accepts. About thirty per cent.

Type three attempts to describe the coat, at length, becoming steadily less specific as they realise that they cannot in fact describe their own coat. This is nine per cent and is Bea's favourite category, because there is a moment — it happens every time, at about the ninety-second mark — where a grown adult hears themselves say "it's sort of, like, coat-coloured," and something in their face collapses.

Type four is one per cent and is the reason there is a panic button.

02:10

Closing. The room empties in about eleven minutes, which it always does and which nobody who has not worked a club believes.

02:22

Twenty-nine coats remain. Nineteen people remain.

This is normal. Ten coats will go unclaimed and will sit in the office for a month and then go to a charity shop, and every single time about four of them will be genuinely nice coats, and every single time Bea will wonder about it.

02:24

The matching begins.

It goes fast. Fourteen of the nineteen are matched inside six minutes because they have tickets and were simply waiting.

That leaves five people and fifteen coats, and this is where the procedure earns its keep: you ask each person to describe, and then you check, and it takes about four minutes each and it is unglamorous and it works.

02:41

Four of the five are matched.

The fifth is the man from 23:41.

02:42

There are eleven coats left and none of them is his.

He is not aggressive about it. That is what makes it bad. He is nineteen or twenty and he has been waiting three hours and he has been polite the entire time, and now there are eleven coats on the rail and none of them is his black one and he is standing there in a t-shirt at twenty to three in the morning.

Bea checks the rail twice. Then she checks the office. Then she checks the rail again.

02:51

She takes his details on the incident pad and explains the process, which involves a form and a manager and probably eleven days.

He says thanks. He genuinely says thanks.

Then he goes out into the street in a t-shirt in November.

02:52

Bea takes her own coat off the hook in the office and goes out after him.

02:53

He says no about four times.

She says she gets a lift and he is walking, which is true, and that she will get it back on Tuesday, which is a guess.

Tuesday

He brought it back at four in the afternoon, washed, which she had not asked for and which she has decided not to be annoyed about.

He also brought a bag with a black coat in it that was not his.

He had got home on Saturday and found it over his arm.

He has no memory of picking it up. Bea has no memory of giving it to him. It does not match any ticket and it is not on any list, and neither of them can construct a sequence of events that ends with a nineteen-year-old walking out of a cloakroom holding a stranger's coat that nobody handed him.

It is on the rail now with a note on it.

Nobody has claimed it.