Metrocount

Metrocount

I count. Not one two three four five... More like one one one one one. I have a little machine that deals with that accumulation of symbols for me, otherwise I would lose count and there’d be gaps on my data sheet. My hand-held counter cannot lose count. It is a precision instrument. I understand they use the same counters at nightclubs, the bouncer clicks once for each person entering and they stop letting people in when its hits a certain number to abide by fire-safety regulations.

But I am counting cars – any motorised vehicle with four or more wheels.

I am stationed at a different roadside location each day with my hand-held counter and a clipboarded data sheet. Each hour on the hour I write down the number on the sheet and reset the counter to start again.

∞

I am merely the mechanism that causes the count, the eyes that see what is to be counted. The numbers themselves are in the mechanical mind my hand, so my thoughts have a little freedom to roam.

In the morning I feel fresh and clear for the first hour, my thoughts held taut in a low background hum,
like the muffled noises of someone waking in an adjoining room. Then around an hour in I start to hear my thoughts a little more clearly. My hand works almost on its own, clicking along to the quells and surges of traffic. My thoughts shifting, sifting, not quite vocal but somehow increasingly solid as the afternoon sets in. I pore over all manner of things.

Like what other kind of work I could do. Gardening maybe. Or street sweeping. I see both of these professions often as I am posted in different places around London. I like the look of street sweeping. Hundreds of times I've been on the point of asking a street sweeper what the work is really like when they're right next to me, but I've never dared. Counting cars doesn't boost confidence.

∞

I get asked for a light so much I've started carrying a lighter. One man shouted at me for not having a lighter. He said he'd asked everyone. He took it personally. He screamed in my face. I stood stock still save my thumb jolting to the traffic passing behind him – still counting. Everything seemed to go quiet after his scream. I could smell tobacco and his bacon based breakfast on my face. I stared into nothing, unfocussing my eyes and willing his disappearance. He suddenly turned and marched away. I let go a deep breath and released myself back into the job. Solace, even in the fumes that licked my face clean of his foul spittle.

∞

Today my tiredness was worse than ever. I am not sleeping enough. I dropped off standing bolt upright in the middle of my three o'clock hour. Nothing to lean on. I shut my eyes for a moment and it was longer than a moment. I woke up with the pavement sloping towards me. I caught myself just in time, stumbling to a crouch. I'd probably only been asleep a few seconds. Maybe a minute. I didn't know you could sleep standing up. I must've looked strange, a sleeping statue. I slapped myself hard in the face and clicked the counter furiously to make up for lost numbers. I clicked each car double for the next minute or so. I care about the rectitude of the numbers. Ifajobsworthdoingitsworthdoingproperly.

∞

People with time to kill or rage to spill approach me because I don't appear to be doing very much. It is often the mad, the lonely, or those mad with loneliness. But you never know. An old man stopped at my side this morning. Age had set in heavy so he could only walk very slowly – it had taken him at least five minutes to cover less than a hundred meters. He stopped beside me and smiled. His eyes were folorn. I gave him a perfunctory smile, not wanting to encourage a conversation.

“They say it'll rain later so I went for me run in the morning” he said, puffing out a chuckle, his eyes sadder still. I nodded and tried to click louder so he'd see that I was busy. He looked around him as one does having reached the summit of a mountain. I watched him watching a tree sway in the wind, still counting cars peripherally.

He turned back to me with a face that spoke of having tried all the other options. The tree wouldn't engage him so I was his last hope. His face was pleasant in spite of his melancholy – beautiful in wrinkles.

“Whats that you're doing lad?” he said, “Counting the seconds? A clock will do that for you,” he wheezed a laugh. I couldn't hold back a smile and his face bloomed with the reciprocated joy of my smile. He drank the merest drip of my mirth as though it would save him. I was happy with his wit, it was uncommon. I let my guard down a little and was about to speak when he spoke again. “I know what you're up to, really, counting cars for the government. Its a tough job I bet. Tires the eyes eh.” I nodded. “So I won't get in your way any more” he said, “Wouldn't want to get you fired or something.”

He shuffled around, feet barely lifting off the ground, and I realised with a pang that he had walked all this way just to speak to me. He wasn't walking past me. He had spent the past five minuted dragging himself along the pavement just to see if I could be roused to conversation. I hadn't said a word and now he was going. My guts churned with regret. He was still only a couple of meters away but he had his back to me and was resolutely departing. I made an internal vow to be kinder. To give people a bit more credit. They aren't all crackpots out to ruin my day.

∞

Black coffee from a flask. Thats the stuff. Soup sometimes. Bananas always. I get a lunchbreak in the middle of the day but I get hungry before it so I eat with my freehand. One of my front teeth is still loose from when I brought the counter to my mouth and bit it. The sandwich was in the other hand. Or was I trying to bite it out of existence. Swallow the statistics and digest them, bound for the sewers...

∞

I count. If I don't count, I don't count. There's some sort of pun there. It occurs to me often, to work out some sort of gallows joke about the tenuous monomania of my profession, how hard you must work to make yourself feel meaningful, and even then... But instead, when I hap upon that plan of thought, I end up just repeating variations of the phrase in my head, or under my breath... I count. I don't count. If I can't count I won't count. I won't count if I don't count. I'll do counting. I'll die counting...

∞

I live in fumes. They clog me up. I am being slowly murdered by invisibles. My skin turns grey. I check my reflection in puddles and begin to worry. I might as well smoke. Start using my own lighter, inhale a bit more death than I have to – quicken the full saturation, the fumigated cell-count... yes, counting. I can't get away from it. And somehow I count all the wrong things and let the seconds, hours, years pass by uncounted. The years have piled up like a crash. Is it already 1983?

∞

I have started bringing a little pocket radio to work. With headphones I can listen with almost full engrossment and still do my job. This'll keep my brain alive. The news is strange to me though. I haven't heard of some of these countries. I'm losing touch. Time to reform that. Come on BBC, fill me in.

∞

I sit on the sharpest edges. Rest my backside on the most inhospitable perches, sloped walls, spikey hedges. I've sheltered under the thinnest awnings, even crouched in the shade of bins. The craft of self-care is subtle and can make small things generous. But sometimes I have to stand all day on flat asphalt with not so much as a bottle cap to sit on. So my calves are strong. Sitting is bad for you anyway. The world of office-sitters are having their backs damaged by slouching in chairs. I heard on the radio that for most of human history only people of high status had any sort of chair at all. And even they sat cross legged on a simple raised platform, the backrest was only supposed to be ornamental. Now that chairs are mass produced we are encouraged to lean back. But that's bad for our backs. I'm better off in that respect. If I do sit, I make a stool of a bollard. No backrest.

∞

And then the weather. The sun pummels me. Or the wind whisks me in the windiest corners. Whirlwinds of leaves and plastic bags take me for a statue and weave about me. I have known rain to fall for three solid weeks. No waterproofs exist that can answer to such wildness. So I dissolve sometimes, slip down into myself and an autopilot takes over. He is not summonable though, this pilot; otherwise I'd have him do my job all the time, I'd sleep standing up beneath his hard-work. But no, he isn't at hand when I want him. He falls to work unpredictably when I fall into this strange coma.

Then I fade to a grey brick mottled street wall paper and people turn to cough in my face, not seeing me. Dogs piss on me. Birds land on me. I am a wall that dust scuttles along, that the wind buffets, brushes, nudges. An empty crisp packet scrapes along to feed at my feet. What does it want? To be replenished? I am not a crisp packet refill station, I tell it, in silence.

∞

There was wild garlic by the side of the road where I was posted today, Totteridge: A bit more rural than usual. I picked it and put it in my soup. There was also an abandoned sofa right where I was assigned to stand. I was surprised to find that the sun-warm sofa did not smell of urine and was comfortable. I lounged through my work. Some days are better than others.

∞

I am lost and found in a still standing instant. The cars blur but still I count on them. Am I merely an appendage? I the sentient crud that clings accidentally to the purposeful counting hand, like the turd of a goldfish, slow motion flag-like flapping from its anus. A statistician's cipher, statistical statistic, I statisticise, collapsing in on that singular point in space and time, the singular point of it all. But what is the point, all this? The cars can't all have places to get to. There aren't so many places as that.

∞

At least I am accountable. It is vindicating. There's a man who drives around London checking all of the enumeration agents are at their posts. If he didn't check we could just fake our data sheets and lie in bed all day. So this enumeration overseer visits on random days. Not often, but the method has a panopticonic stealth. You never know when he might be a little way up the road watching. But I never misbehave on purpose. I know how important my job is, the figures I produce are vital. I have a degree in town planning so I do know about it.

∞

Sometimes I can hear my brain decaying, seeping out of my ears and dripping into the gutter. All that studying to end up doing this. So I remind myself. The design of the whole city hinges on my counting. And yet it doesn't... But if litter could vote. If fumes could... I'd be Duke – no – I'd be Count. Ha! Count von Zählen - roadside ghost-god presiding over the surging commuter veins, engine thunder, and lunglorn petrol; with eyes that skim the passage of time, the passages of tin, of boxed up human flesh zooming endlessly. I see faces in the fabled long grass of sunny weekends, darkening. I stay curtained in on the weekends.

∞

I am being replaced by a little metal box, I'm sure of it. They count vehicles. I'm convinced they'll install these everywhere and sack us all. Metal boxes don't need a pension, don't have sick days.

A pneumatic hose is stretched across a road. One end of the hose is plugged off to keep dirt and water from being sucked into the hose, and the other end is connected to what looks like a metal shoebox on the curb. Each time a vehicle drives over the hose, a pulse of air is generated which is detected by an air switch in the box. It counts the vehicle axles, and if two hoses are stretched across the same lane in parallel, it can determine vehicle speed and axle spacings, as well as the direction of travel.

Ned Ludd! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee. I'll have to sabotage these infernal shoeboxes on my own – accompliceless. It is apt that they should resemble shoe boxes, since a sabot is a shoe. A wooden shoe. They threw them into the automated looms to sabotage them, and the Luddite was born. So I am told. I'd better get me a sabot. A clog to clog up the mechanism, ha!

∞

So I went and broke one in the night. It was very difficult. I'd imagined just stamping on it a bit but the thing is probably designed to be impervious to the hardest kick a drunkard can bestow (even one wearing clogs, which I wasn't). I had to saw through the chain that locked it up and then throw it off a stairwell a few times. I managed to dent it quite a bit. Maybe it was still in working condition. But I threw it in the Thames. It can count the fish.

The pointlessness hit home almost immediately. I had only succeeded in costing some faceless company a few quid. I was a minor nuisance. I found myself counting cars in my head on the way home as if in recompense. To placate the statistical gods for the hole I made in their proceedings. I got a beer and sat on the curb, my clicking-thumb twitching empty-handed, Lady Macbething, as if a certain feverish count of clicks would make up for the drowned box.

∞

Well, I haven't lost my job after all. They seem to be keeping me on despite my non-metallic human body. I will try to be more of a metal shoebox from now on. I'll know no hardship. I'll be a hard ship. A shard hip. The fossil of a shard of hip. The lost dust of a fossil of hardship. I will reach the end bravely, gladly, goodly. I will go mad. Since the only glad here is mad glad.

∞

My judgement begins to bend. I was listening to a documentary about lichen on radio four. Fascinating. Lichen can endure severe dry periods, when there's no moisture to thrive on, by entering a metabolic suspension called crytobiosis. In this state they can endure extremes of temperature, radiation and drought. I was more than usually captivated by this and wanted to turn up the volume so I went pocket searching to turn the knob. I couldn't find it. Then I tried to follow the wires from my ears to find the radio. But there were no wires. There were no headphones in my ears. My head swam in a spinning garland of lights and the documentary fell silent.

Hearing voices? Yes. I remembered the pocket radio had been broken for two years. I sat down hard on the cold pavement. O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad.

∞

I made it to retirement age just in time. The metal shoeboxes have taken over. They say there are to be no new human recruits in the trade. They're hoping we all quit, retire, or die. I almost did all three at once. It was precarious. But I'll stick to the one. Retire dignified and step out as calm as I can.

∞

It's been years now but no escape at night: I dream I'm back on the roadsides again, clicking away. But something is always slightly wrong. Rain or a faulty counter. The data sheet blows away in the wind. Exasperating. I dream so much you'd think I miss it. Then there's a worse dream in which I'm shrunk down to a pea-size and made to work inside a Metrocount box. I am its live-in innards counting day and night. Eating only flies and ants (the size of dogs to me). Soon this is indistinguishable from the anguish of my not dreaming days. My figurings are weak. I don't know which this is any more. I don't count any more.