Somebody went along the plate with a thumbnail and took out what was left.
This is the same composition as the first panel and I want them hung together. Same plate, same bulb, same two columns of twelve. The difference is that in the first painting the slots were merely illegible, and here they have been emptied.
It is a small distinction and it took me a while to see that it was the subject of a whole picture.
An illegible name is still a name. The card is in the slot. Somebody put it there, once, on a day they moved in, probably in the first week, probably with more care than the task deserved, and the fact that the ink has gone does not undo the placing of it. The slot is occupied. The building is claimed, in twenty-four places, by twenty-four people who each did the same small ceremonial thing on arrival.
Pulled out, it is different. Now there are ragged quarter-inch remnants behind the glazing where the paper tore rather than sliding free, and a couple of slots with the card gone entirely and the back of the housing showing, and one where somebody got most of it but left a corner with two letters on it that I have painted at their actual size, which is very small.
I do not know who did it or when. I have a guess and the guess is dull: the building was sold in October, the demolition notice went up in November, and somebody in an office decided that a panel advertising twenty-four households at a condemned address was a liability.
There is no cruelty in it. There rarely is in this cycle. It is a maintenance action.
What it produced, though, is a device whose entire function was to distinguish between people, standing at a door, with the distinguishing removed and everything else intact. All twenty-four buttons still press. Every one of them still rings a real bell in a real apartment, some of which are still occupied. You simply cannot tell which is which any more, and neither can anybody else, and the only way through the door now is to know somebody well enough to have their telephone number.
The brick is coming through around the plate at the edges where the render has failed. I have given that more attention than I gave it in the first panel because in eight months it has genuinely got worse.