Closing Time at the Wax Museum
The night watch at Thornbury Waxworks runs from 18:00 to 06:00 and consists of four circuits and a great deal of sitting down.
Bartek has done it for six years and would like to state, at the outset and for the record, that nothing supernatural has ever occurred.
He says this because it is the first thing everyone asks, and because the honest answer — nothing supernatural has ever occurred and it is still the strangest job in the county — is harder to get across.
On the figures
There are forty-one. Eleven are historical, nine are royal, fourteen are entertainers of varying and in some cases extremely dated fame, and seven are described in the inventory as "general public," which means they were made for a tableau that no longer exists and now stand around the mezzanine looking like people waiting for a delayed train.
The general public are the worst. Everyone assumes it is the historical ones. It is not. It is the seven ordinary-looking adults with no name plates who are simply there, on a landing, at two in the morning, being nobody.
On the eyes
The eyes do not follow you. This is a well-understood optical effect produced by the way a painted or glass eye is set into a static face, and it applies to portraits, and it is not mysterious.
Bartek understands this thoroughly. He has explained it to school groups.
He still does not use the east stairs after midnight, and he is not going to justify this to anybody.
On the Napoleon situation
Institutional policy is that there is no Napoleon situation.
What there is, is a figure of Napoleon that was acquired in 1974 from a closing attraction in Blackpool, and which does not match the house style, and which has been moved eleven times, and which — this is the entire content of the situation — is very slightly too small.
Not comically. Not obviously. About four inches under where he should be, which nobody notices consciously and which every single visitor reacts to.
The comment book has, over five decades, accumulated one hundred and sixty-odd remarks about Napoleon. They almost never say too small. They say odd, or creepy, or, on one celebrated occasion in 1988, I did not care for the Frenchman.
Management has considered replacement four times. The replacement quotes are extraordinary. Napoleon stays.
On the actual difficulty of the job
It is not fear. Bartek would like to be clear that after about the fourth month, fear is not a feature.
It is that you become extremely aware of being the only one.
Forty-one figures and one person. You do a circuit and everything is where it was and everything will be where it was, and it is not that they might move, it is that they very definitely will not, ever, and you will, and you are the only thing in the building that is going anywhere at all.
That is a peculiar thing to know at three in the morning and it does not get less peculiar.
On the cleaner
Halina comes at 05:15 and they have twenty minutes of overlap and it is, Bartek has come to understand, the load-bearing element of the entire arrangement.
They talk about nothing. Her son's coursework. A dispute about a parking space. The price of things.
Six years of twenty minutes.
Last month she said she was leaving — better hours, a school — and Bartek said congratulations and meant it, and then went home and lay awake, which he attributed to coffee.
The new cleaner starts on Monday. His name is Tomas and he is nineteen.
On what Bartek will tell him
Nothing about the eyes; he'll work that out.
Nothing about Napoleon; that is management's problem and he can enjoy discovering it.
What Bartek will tell him is that the shift is twelve hours and that the last twenty minutes are the ones that matter, and that he should not spend them on his phone.
He suspects this will sound like nothing.
He intends to say it anyway.