BLEAKFEED · all stories
Every BLEAKFEED story, in full, to read instead of listen. 81 of them, all original, each one also read aloud on the feed.
The meter is labelled Room 4. There are three rooms in my flat, and I have measured them.
One panel, one controller, one log. It records which flat answered and which flat released the door, and flat 9's handset was taken off the wall and the cable cut back five years ago.
Three machines on a card system where every card belongs to a flat and every pound is reconciled monthly. Machine three runs one cycle a week on a card the system has no record of issuing, and the money is really there.
Ninety six windows on the elevations, counted from the street and counted off the drawings and billed for every month. Ninety four if you go in and count them from the rooms.
Every lorry weighs every bin as it lifts it and the weight goes to an account. Ours runs one household heavy, every week, and the extra bag is always in the same corner.
A water bill, a pension statement and a dentist's reminder, all addressed to a name at flat 6 that nobody at flat 6 has ever heard of. Three organisations told me they have a live account at that address.
Twenty four leases, twenty four percentages, and the percentages in the leases add up to one hundred. The money only reconciles when it is divided by twenty five, and it has done for nine years.
One way in, one way out, a barrier on each with its own loop and its own counter. Over a season the out counter finishes ahead of the in counter by nine, and it has been nine every year since 2017.
Ninety pitches, one database, one availability rule. For the same eight nights every August pitch 31 comes back as occupied, by a booking with no name, no payment and no reference, that I cannot delete.
Every network card in the world carries a maker's number in the first half of its address, and the list of who owns which is public. Mine belongs to a firm that was wound up before wifi existed.
Bundles counted out, bundles counted back, cash counted against them. The stock is always right and the money is always right, and about nine times a season the money includes a coin that has not been legal tender in my lifetime.
Four taps on one spur, and the spur has its own meter because the water company made us fit one. The field has been shut for six years and the meter has turned every summer since.
A mooring is paid annually by standing order. His has never missed, never bounced, and never been indexed. The bank says the account is closed. The money still comes.
A tide gauge measures the sea. Ours agree with each other to within a couple of centimetres, all the way up the coast. One of them, twice a year, records a high water forty minutes early and two metres too big.
Every structure on that frontage has a number, an owner, a build date and a maintenance record. Groyne 9 has none of those, and it is the only one on the beach in perfect condition.
The keepers left in 1988 and the light runs itself. The lamp room log book on the shelf has an entry for every single day since, in ink, in the same hand.
Plot 31 is on the council's vacant list. The waiting list is four years long. Nobody has ever been allocated it, and every August the runner beans on it are the best on the site.
We packed and numbered fifty four. Fifty five came off the lorry, in my wife's handwriting, in a marker we do not own.
Footpath 71 is on the definitive map, which is a legal document. It runs three quarters of a mile across a field to a hedge, and stops. I reported it as obstructed. The council came out and told me it was clear.
Stone comes up. Bone comes up. Metal comes up. In Wickett's Piece the same object comes up every autumn, in a different corner, and I have taken it away five times.
There were forty one houses in Nether Combe when they flooded it in 1937. I have the tithe map. I have counted the footings out of the mud four times in my life, and this August there were forty two.
The water is off at the main and the electric is off at the box. Van 41 is warm. I have put my hand on the wall.
You count them out and you count them in. That is the sport. Six years running I have counted more in than out, and the extra one has no ring on its leg.
Four point one miles on the map, on every map, measured with a wheel. My watch says four point six, and the extra always appears between the same two trees, and it takes eleven minutes I do not remember.
Not quieter. Stops. You can stand with one foot each side of it in May at five in the morning and hear a dawn chorus in one ear and nothing in the other.
Twenty four cameras on a grid, all the same model, all set to stamp the date. Eleven takes pictures of the same path in a different month from the one it is in, and it is always ahead.
Eighty one hectares of catchment, a rain gauge in the middle of it, and a stream that carries about fourteen per cent more water out of the bottom than the sky puts in the top.
A planting invoice from 1961, a county master chronology that every other wood in the district agrees with, and thirty-eight trees that have all had more growing seasons than there have been years.
Fourteen searchers, overlapping sweeps, every GPS track saved and plotted afterwards. Over eleven years not one track has crossed a half hectare clearing, and nobody has ever reported turning aside.
The machine measures and records every stem it takes. The file says 212. Two men walked the block with tally counters and found 211. The mill weighed the load and the mill agrees with the machine.
The camera only records when something moves. It recorded him for six hours in one unbroken clip, which means he never stopped moving, and in the footage he does not move at all.
It started in the loft. In January it was on the landing. Last week it was outside our bedroom door, and my wife heard it too, and she has never heard it before.
He died in 2019. The diary runs to 2030. I have checked every day since against what he wrote, and he has not been wrong once.
The advert said three nights, four hundred pounds, and all you have to do is sleep. Two of those nights were a formality.
The patient presses a button when they hear a tone. In booth two, for four years, the button has been pressed a quarter of a second before the tone is sent, by people who cannot possibly have heard it.
Every carrier is addressed. You dial the station number and the system routes it. Eighteen stations exist. Something has been sending from nineteen since 2013.
You count everything in and everything out, twice, out loud, with a second person. The counts match. There is still a thing on my tray at the end that is not on the list.
The panel has eight zones. Seven of them are wards. Zone seven is a corridor of ground that has been a car park for twenty years, and twice a year it tells me the oxygen pressure there is falling.
Guests hand the key in when they go out. It comes back on the hook at about ten to two, from the far side of a locked front door, and room 12 has not been let since 1998.
Every lock holds its own audit trail in a chip, read out with a handheld on the door itself. Eleven locks have a denied entry from a card encoded for room 019, on a floor plan that stops at 012.
Seven levels, seven sets of landing doors, seven positions the controller knows by a magnet on the guide rail. The event log has a position between six and seven, and the car has stopped there nineteen times.
Covers are counted three ways, by the till, by the host on the door and by the kitchen's own stock, because breakfast is where a hotel loses money. All three say one more than the room list allows.
A reservation taken by phone, a card that authorises, a guest who never checks in. The room is held, goes down as a no show, is never charged, and housekeeping strips a bed somebody has been in.
One book, one pen on a string, a line for every hour of the night shift, signed at handover. About once a month there is an entry between two of mine, in a copperplate hand, reporting the same thing.
Two cameras, eleven hundred metres apart on the same carriageway, one clock between them. Something goes past the far one first, by between four and nineteen seconds, and only between two and four in the morning.
Same truck, same trailer, same driver, same load, same road, north then south. The pump and the engine's own fuel meter agree on every leg except the northbound night run, where eleven litres go missing in the same forty miles.
The meter, the dispatch system and the card machine are three separate things that have to agree before anybody gets paid. Once every few weeks they all agree on a job I was not on.
Two pressure loops in the road, a light beam across the lane, and a barrier that cannot open without a payment. Between three and half past, lane four counts axles in pairs while the beam says the lane is empty.
A digital tachograph is a legal instrument on a sealed card and it cannot be edited by a driver. Mine records forty one minutes of driving in the middle of a forty five minute break, in the same lay-by, and only there.
Everything on the shelves has a docket saying which train it came off. The things on shelf nine have dockets too. The train numbers on them have not run since 1988.
The 43 terminates at Weld Street. After midnight it goes one stop further, and the sign on the front changes to a place I cannot find on any map.
We count them in at the turnstile and we count them out. For two years the pool has run one over, every single weekday, and the count comes right the moment anybody looks.
You page a bleep and the person carrying it rings you back. 419 belonged to a doctor who left before I was born. I have paged it four hundred and six times and it has rung me back four hundred and six times.
Every train is offered to you before it comes. The box up the line rings a code, you accept it, and then it arrives. For eleven years my box was offered one that nobody had sent yet.
A lorry drives on empty, gets loaded, and drives off heavier. That is the entire job. For six years one wagon came in and went out at exactly the same weight, and the load was gone.
A sensor over every bay, a red light for occupied and a green for free, and a count on the sign at the entrance that has to be right or people drive in and find nothing. One bay has been red for eight years with nothing under it.
Every cabinet is metered at the busbar, billed to a customer, and on a plan that has to match the fire certificate. J14 draws between 1.9 and 2.2 kilowatts, belongs to nobody, and the aisle it is in goes J13 to J15.
Eleven checkpoints, a wand that reads them, and a log nobody can edit, which exists so a guard cannot claim a patrol he did not walk. Mine says I scanned point 11 at a time I was four hundred metres away at point 4.
The page is a file, the file becomes a plate, the plate prints. About four hundred copies of one edition a month carry three words in the deaths column that are in no file and on no plate we can find.
Eight desks, eight headsets, eight licences. The wallboard has shown nine logged in on the night shift since 2019, and the ninth takes calls.
Orders come off the system, the flour is weighed against them, and the despatch notes are signed by the driver who takes the tray. One line on one order is for a product code that was retired before I started.
She batch cooked and she labelled everything, in biro, on masking tape. She died in March. The meals at the bottom are dated for next winter and there are more of them than there were.
A pot is the top of a flue and a flue goes to a fireplace. You can count them from the street. We have counted ours for nine years and the sums have never come out.
Two hundred years of feet wear a hollow into stone. Ten of our eleven steps have one. The fourth is flat and sharp, as if nobody has ever stood on it, and I have stood on it ten thousand times.
Three brass pushes on the jamb, three labels behind glass, three sets of wires. The middle one is not connected to anything in this house and it rings something.
I bought it because I wanted the frame. It has taken nine months and four attempts to get rid of the photograph.
Four owners in six years, four part exchanges, back to my forecourt every time. Every one of them told me it was a lovely car. Not one of them would look at it while they said so.
Three strokes for a man, two for a woman, then one for every year they lived. I have counted it my whole life. On the ninth of April it rang three, and then it rang forty one, and I am forty one.
Uncollected goes to the charity shop after six months. That is the rule and I have kept it for nineteen years. Ticket 0417 has been on the rail since before I owned the place.
An empty house uses a little. A pilot light, a boiler ticking over, a fridge on the electric. Number 6 has used exactly zero for fourteen years, and somebody answers the door.
Cards expire. People move, people die, and the system tidies them away. Card 00311 has been renewed every three years for fifty years and it takes out the same book every February.
Every one of them had the deeds. Every one of them had a solicitor, a completion date and a key that did not fit. The Land Registry shows one sale on that house since 1968.
A pothole is a hole. When you fill it and it fails, it fails outward, bigger and rougher. This one comes back at exactly the same size, with the same edges, and I have the photographs.
One hour, one garden, the highest number of each species you see at once. Mine has a bird on it that is not on the list, and it has been in that garden every January since 1994.
You ring the family below you on the list and they ring the family below them. Number eleven is a landline for a cottage that came down in 1998, and it answers, and it passes the message on.
Six foot by two foot four, at the same compass bearing every year. We have dug it, scanned it, and had the soil tested. It is ordinary garden soil and it is four degrees warmer than everything around it.