Short story · 3 min read · Set in Cormorant Street ·
My Through Road Steams
A road gang's night sheet marks one manhole breathing warmth at dawn on nights the rest of the town cannot call frost.
The night gang on Cormorant Street has one clear duty between ten and four: the through road stays passable, the salt goes down before the frost, and the foreman's sheet lists every drainage fitment on the carriageway so that no gully is skipped. It is not a hard job, and it is done the same way every night, which is the manner in which this borough prefers everything done, from the burial registers to the tide tables.
The sheet lists forty-one fitments on the through road. Thirty-nine of them are cold by two in the morning, and when the frost comes they gather a rim of white like every honest piece of iron in a northern town. One of them steams.
It is the manhole outside the pawn office, slightly off the crown of the road, listed as fitment 17, and from late September onward the gang begins to notice that by dawn it is breathing. Warm air stands over it in a column pale as a chimney's, tall enough to bend the streetlamp light above it, and the salt spread around it at midnight is dried by four into a neat tyre-wide circle while every yard either side still carries the crust. The frost that takes the rest of Cormorant Street never takes that square of road. The tarmac there in January is bare and soft-edged, as though a warm hand had been held flat against it all night.
The men have tried, in the way workmen try, to make the thing boring, and the records they kept are the reason this file exists. In the first winter the ganger, a careful man named Charles Petty, taped a steel rule to the iron at two one morning and read it again at four: over by 22 degrees, on a night when the harbour sluices had ice a knuckle thick. His sheet entry reads, in full, FITMENT 17 WARM, CHECKED, NO ACTION AVAILABLE. He did not write steaming.
They tested everything a sensible crew tests. The gas board came out twice; the second time the mains man walked the line both ways with a listening stick and reported the run under the road flat — no leak, no draw. Electricity was ruled out by standing near the cover, which did nothing to the hair on your arms. A sonde sent down the tie rods in February came back reading the same temperature all the way down, which no sonde under Cormorant Street has ever done.
What is strangest, recorded faithfully across three winters of sheets, is the pattern. Fitment 17 does not steam when it ought to. On the hardest nights, when the whole sheet shows a crust, it stands cool; the column drifts sideways and goes out, as though it had done its share elsewhere. It steams on the mild nights, the ones that come with rain instead of frost — chiefly on the nights building up to and following the second of November and its neighbours, when nothing in the borough is behaving and the whole through road smells faintly of a hairdryer left on in an empty room.
Division's position, after the second winter, was one typed line returned with the sheet and pasted into the binder: FITMENT 17 TO BE LOGGED NIGHTLY. NO WORKS RAISED. That is the whole of the instruction, obeyed for years by men who log it nightly and raise nothing, and none of the crew any longer crosses the road to walk behind the pawn office when they could walk the far side. The binder went up to the archive room in the spring with the sealed button of a closed works record on the spine.
The present night gang, asked under a hundred headings for this record, came back with one line in the foreman's neat hand, held open in the middle of the page:
If the warm is coming up out of the town's one unlogged seam on the nights nearest the Misprint, and the frost refuses it all winter, what is Division standing on the lid of — and why will no hand in this borough, not even that neat one, write the word steam?