Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Unfinished Porch Count
A retired surveyor counts porches down his street nightly, and the count always stops mid-number, though the tally pages keep filling.
- dated: "November, the week the lights failed on the rise"
- narrator: "Selby Croft, retired surveyor"
First entry, Monday. Forty years on the benches and I kept one habit out of the trade, the evening walk of the streets behind my house, and on the walk I count the porches. It began as checking a string of working drawings against the built street when the estate was new, and the habit survived the job. There are sixty-two porches on my circuit if you count the corner gate as a porch, which did throughout my working life and see no reason to stop. I count them aloud, low, the way you count chain lengths. Tonight I lost it. Stopped dead mid-number, between a figure and its neighbour, and I will not write here which figure I stopped between, because writing it makes the number finished, and the point of this diary is that it is not.
Wednesday. Kept the tally on paper this time, in the yard book I still keep for no reason the family would respect. The walk went the usual way, past the corner where the wind stands, and I got as far as the low forties, and again the count stopped. Not at the same porch. That is what the book was for. The tally marks go along the wall-side kerb and they stop mid-cluster, four strokes and part of a fifth, the stroke begun and not driven home, the nib lifted while the hand was still in it. I stood doing the arithmetic any man does, was I tired, was the wind in my ear, and the answer is that I count porches the way other men say prayers and nobody's prayers stop mid-word twice running.
Friday. Rain. I took the inside route instead, which is cheating, and I own it, remembering that I drew half these porches. I tried counting from the plans at the kitchen table, tea going cold on the slope of it. The plans are safe. Every porch is there, sixty-two, all present, all measured, and daylight is intact, I put that on record for whoever inherits this book. Under the gas lamps the porches are there too, and I can touch any of them, and one of them, the blue door with the bucket hook, had a wet handprint on the pillar at the height of a man standing still a long time, and I did not count that porch. I did not count from it either. My count stopped three short of it, mid-number again, and the tally in the book did the same dying fall as Monday, four strokes and a start.
Sunday. Here is what I want kept, no theories. The tallies are unfinished. All of them. Every page of the yard book from the week has a count that ends in the middle of a number, and a number ended is a thing you can name, and mine cannot be named because the stroke does not land. My old chief used to say a survey is only ever finished at the level of the funds, which was his joke, and I have laughed at it for fifty years in the right places. Tonight I walked as far as the corner and stood there doing nothing at all, no pencil, no count, only standing, and the street was quiet down its whole length, patient, all sixty-two porches, every one of them holding its number for me the way you hold a breath, and I came in and did not finish it, because whatever is counting back wants me arriving at the door with the number still open, and the number is still open, and tomorrow I will walk out to fetch the milk at first light, where things can be read all the way to the end.