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.
I read meters for twenty years and I still do two days a week.
People think it went away with the smart meters and it mostly did. What is left is the awkward ones: the houses that refused, the ones with no signal, the ones where the meter is in a cellar behind a stack of paint tins, and the ones where the smart meter went in and then went dumb, which happens far more than anybody admits.
So I get a list. Fourteen years on the same patch, which means I have been in more houses in this town than the postman.
You learn to read a house before you read the meter.
Not the curtains and not the garden, those lie. The number lies less. A person uses gas the way a person breathes, in a pattern, and after a while you can look at four quarterly reads and tell me whether somebody in that house has been ill.
And nobody uses nothing.
That is the whole thing, so here it is plainly.
An empty house still uses a little. A boiler on frost protection fires now and again. A pilot light on an old back boiler burns twenty-odd units a week doing nothing at all. A house sealed up for probate with the water drained still creeps, because the supply is live and something in it is drawing.
Zero is not a low reading. Zero is a disconnected supply, and a disconnected supply has a cap on it and a sticker, and I would know because I would be looking at it.
Number 6 is not capped.
It is a live supply into a live meter and the five digits on the dials have not moved since the eleventh of October 2011.
I have read it thirty-one times.
I know that because I have the dates. When I started noticing I went back through what I could get at, which is my own record book plus what the office would print for me, and it is thirty-one visits from 2012 to this spring, and thirty-one identical numbers.
The office does not see a problem. A no-change read gets flagged, the system sends a letter, the letter says please contact us, and if a read comes back the same again it eventually stops asking. Somewhere in there it got moved to an estimated account and the estimate is zero, which is a beautiful piece of circular reasoning that nobody will ever look at.
I raised it twice.
The first time in 2016 I put it through as a suspected meter fault and an engineer went out. His notes say meter tested, operating correctly, no fault found, index confirmed. That is a man with a test kit standing in the same cupboard I stand in, agreeing with me about the number and not about what it means.
The second time in 2021 I wrote a note in the box saying **this supply has recorded no consumption in ten years, please investigate independently.** The note came back closed with the words: customer contacted, no further action required.
Customer contacted.
Somebody answers the door.
Every time. Not once has that house been empty when I have knocked, in thirty-one visits over fourteen years, which is a rate no ordinary house achieves.
It is a woman of about sixty. She has been about sixty the whole time, and I know what that sentence sounds like, and I am going to leave it there rather than dress it up.
She is perfectly pleasant. She says hello love, she says it is under the stairs, she stands in the hall while I do it, and she says mind the step on the way out because there is a step.
The hall is a hall. Coats on hooks. A phone table with a phone on it, the old sort, and a pad. Carpet, patterned, worn in the line people walk.
The house is warm.
I have checked the obvious things and here they are.
It is not a bypass. A bypass is somebody's brother-in-law's pipework and it looks like it. You can see it, and an engineer with a sniffer would find it in a minute, and one has been.
It is not bottled gas with the mains left idle. There are no bottles, there is no external store, and the boiler in that house is a mains combi with the flue out the back wall, and I have watched the flue on a January morning and it is running.
That is the sentence I would take out if I were making this up. I stood at the end of the garden path in the cold and watched the plume off that flue, and went inside and read a meter that had not moved in a decade.
It is not somebody else's supply. The pipe comes off the main, through the wall, into the meter, out of the meter, into the house. It is eight feet of visible pipe.
I asked her once.
Not accusing, just talking, standing in a hall. I said, do you not find it cold with the heating off.
She said the heating is not off.
I said the meter has not moved since 2011.
And she gave me the look a person gives you when you have said something a bit rude, and she said: no, love, I know.
Then she said mind the step.
I am retiring in the spring.
The lad who is taking the round did his first fortnight with me in July and we did number 6 on the second Tuesday, and I did not say anything at all, because I wanted to see it happen without me putting it there.
He knocked. She answered. He read it. We walked back to the van.
He got in and sat there with the book on his knee and he said: that cannot be right.
I said no.
He said, how long has it been like that.
And I told him fourteen years, and he laughed, and then about ten seconds later he stopped laughing, and we drove to the next one without either of us saying anything else about it.
There is one more thing and it is why I have gone from thinking about this to talking about it.
On that visit in July, she said the same things. Hello love. It is under the stairs. Mind the step.
But she said them to him.
She did not look at me. She did not say hello to me. I stood in that hall two feet behind a lad she has never met, after fourteen years of that woman saying hello love to me on that doorstep, and I was not there.
I have not been back since and I am not going back before the spring.
The round goes to him in March, and I have decided I am not going to tell him what I just told you, because I do not know what happens to the person who has been reading it once she has somebody new to say it to.