Entity story · 3 min read · Set in Tern Street ·
The Meter Reader of Tern Street
A gentle man in a municipal jacket reads the electricity meters on Tern Street and writes down a figure for each house, and the figure is the number of words the household has left before someone inside falls silent for good.
Nobody on Tern Street could say when the meter reader first came. The meters were old, the cream-enamelled sort fixed high on the hall wall in each terraced house, with a brass dial behind a glass cover and a numbered counter that clicked over slowly. The electricity board had stopped sending men to read them in the nineties. Residents gave the figures on the phone, or on a card posted through the door. The meter reader came anyway.
He wore a grey municipal jacket with a worn collar and carried a clipboard and a fountain pen. He was courteous, unhurried, a little stooped. He knocked, and waited, and when the door opened he would step into the hall without being asked, look up at the meter for a moment, and write something down. Then he would thank the householder for their time, say the figure was very satisfactory, and leave.
Maureen Tolley at number 22 asked him what the figure meant. He smiled and said it was the number of words the house had left. She said she did not understand. He said everyone has a number of words in them, a finite supply, and that the meter counted how many were still unspoken in a home. When the count reached zero, he said, the house went quiet, and the people inside stopped speaking to one another, and then to anyone at all.
Maureen laughed at first. Then she looked at the figure on his clipboard, which was 31, and she thought of her husband, who had not said a word to her since their daughter moved abroad, and of her grandson, who had stopped answering the phone. She asked whether the number could go up. The meter reader said it could, if the household spoke more. He said it was a matter of choosing the right words, and that most people had more than they knew.
Over the following weeks Tern Street began to talk. It was not a conscious decision. But the neighbours found themselves at the gates in the mornings, asking after one another's health, and the children playing in the road shouted across to each other without being told to stop. Maureen's husband, Frank, came out onto the step one evening and said good night to her in a voice she had not heard in four years.
The meter reader came back to number 22 in the spring. Maureen let him in and showed him the hall meter. He looked up at the dial and his face was pleased. The figure on the clipboard was 214.
He asked Maureen whether she had noticed that the street was louder now. She said yes. He said that was good, because the figures on Tern Street had been dropping for decades, and that the last one he had recorded had been a single digit, at number 9, where the old couple had not spoken in twelve years and had both gone quietly to their beds one night and never woken up.
Then he thanked her for her time, wrote a note at the foot of the sheet, and went down the street to the next house. At number 9 someone was already waiting at the door, a young woman with a baby on her hip, talking loudly to the neighbour across the road about the price of bread.
The meter reader stopped on the pavement and listened. He smiled, and touched the brim of his cap, and wrote a single figure on his clipboard, very neatly: *Tern Street. Increasing.*