The Programme

The children knew something was wrong with the show before the adults did. Not wrong in the way that parents mean - too loud, too fast, the colours too bright. Wrong in the way that a room is wrong when someone has been in it and left and you can't find what they moved.

The show was called *The Programme*. It had aired since 1968. Nobody could remember who created it. The host changed every few years but the new one always looked like the old one - not the same face, but a face designed to be forgotten. The set was a single room: a kitchen, a hallway, a door that was never opened. The same kitchen. The same hallway. The same door.

My mother watched it as a child. I watched it as a child. The episodes from 1972 used the same script as the episodes from 1994. Word for word. The host said the same things, moved to the same marks, opened the same cupboard and took out the same cup. The only difference was the film grain - you could tell the decades apart by the colour of the light.

There was a character who lived behind the door. He was called the Resident. Nobody ever saw him. The host would walk to the hallway, knock three times on the door, and say: "Resident? Are you there?" And from behind the door would come a sound - not a voice, not quite a knock back, but something that the show treated as a response. The children in the studio audience would laugh. At home, I did not laugh.

My sister Niamh loved the show. She was four years younger than me and she watched it every afternoon after school. She would sit on the floor - our floor, the linoleum floor with the pattern worn away in the path between the kitchen and the hallway - and she would watch *The Programme* with the devotion of someone attending Mass. She was not enjoying it. She was performing a ritual.

When Niamh was seven she started knocking on our hallway door. Three times. "Resident? Are you there?" She did it every evening for a month. My mother told her to stop. My father thought it was funny. Then Niamh stopped watching the show, and then Niamh stopped being there.

They said she wandered out. They said the front door was open. They said these things as though they were facts but the floor told a different story - the linoleum in the hallway was worn in a path that did not lead to the front door. It led to the door that was never opened.

I am thirty-two now. I work in the building where they filmed *The Programme*. It is a storage facility now. The set is gone but the floor is still there - the same floor the host stood on, the same hallway, the same door frame without a door. I found it by accident, walking through the back rooms on my lunch break.

The linoleum in the studio is worn in a path between the kitchen mark and the hallway. The same path. The same feet. Forty years of a host walking to the door and knocking three times.

I knelt down. I put my hand on the floor. It was warm.

Behind the door frame - behind where the door would have been - I heard something. Not a voice. Not a knock. But something that I recognised, the way you recognise a sound from childhood that you didn't know you'd been carrying.

"Resident?" I said. "Are you there?"

The sound came again. And the floor under my hand was warm, and the pattern was worn, and the path did not lead out.