Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Victoria Street ·
The Drains That Learned Noon
Dry storm drains in a newly relaid street swirl together for four minutes at exactly noon, and the sound carries three streets away.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Dennis Cobb, road gang ganger"
The storm drains in Victoria Street learned noon, and they learned it on the 3rd of July. I am Dennis Cobb, ganger on the relaying, and I will set down what we did and what the street does now, and let the Division make of the pair what it likes.
We relaid the gullies from the church steps to the bookbinder's corner through June, six men, and the booking on the asphalt ran tight, so the busies went straight through dinnertime most days. The street had six of us sat over its grates at the lunch hour for four weeks running: plates on the kerb, kettle on the brazier, tar to be down by the last bus.
On the 3rd of July at twelve exactly every grate from the church to the corner began to swirl. Not a gurgle. A quick ring going round under each cover, all of them together, like a wet glass turning on a bar top. It ran four minutes by our tar stopwatches and stopped as one. We had had no rain a fortnight. The next noon we lifted three grates while it ran, and there was nothing under them but air going round and round, dry to the hand.
It keeps a timetable. Twelve to twelve-oh-four, working days, and it does not run the half-day. When the foreman moved our break to half past for the concrete pour, the swirl held to noon anyway. It keeps the old time, not ours. It is heard three streets wide: the chemist on the corner rings the yard about it, and the drivers on the rank say they hear it under the idling engines, and I would not have believed that from any man who had not stood there and heard it too.
Foreman Arthur Ledger signed the day log the first week and put it up on the sheet. The Division returned it inside a fortnight: meters nil, account not substantiated, log not countersigned. Nobody has told me whose meters, or where they were stood. The two of my labourers who still work other streets round about will not pass the corner at twelve any more, and the welder put in for the night yard and went.
What could be confirmed was. The grates we lifted are in the yard photographs, dry. The chemist will sign to hearing it through the party wall, and nobody at the Division has asked him. So the account stands disputed: Arthur's signature against their missing one, six of us against meters nobody will show me, and the swirl keeping the minutes regardless of what either side files.
What I cannot put away is the arithmetic of it. Four weeks of six men eating over the grates at the lunch hour, and then one month of the street keeping noon to the minute, three streets wide, over a dry main with the flow drawing nil. If it learned noon off us, sitting there day after day with the kettle going, what else did it hear?