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THE EMOTION COUNTER
By Andrew Wade © 2006 and for all eternity or till someone pays me enough
A violator of the law of no feelings
-Gary Numan, "Only a downstat"
It is spring in the Forest. Like autumn in reverse; things are coming back to life rather than dying. Crows fly overhead, their wings like B-52s. Other birds chirp their indignation, and everywhere, insect and plant life slowly wakes up.
Other things are waking up, too- like the railway line to Portishead and Avonmouth, which has been closed for about twenty years. Every few hours, freight headed for Avonmouth or somewhere like that, some industrial suburb of Greater Bristol- roars past. And my machine is also waking up; a cheap Russian geiger counter that I recently bought off Ebay for next to nothing.
The last commercial trains to run that line were what the locals call The Nuclear Train- a slow, heavily armoured transporter heading for the region's nuclear power station at Hinkley Point. As a boy, I recall the local paper doing an expose on it- the way the nuke authorities would clandestinely park it for a while, load it up, then trundle it off at ten miles an hour. I vaguely recall seeing it- although it could have been something else, something innocuous hyped up by my overactive imagination.
Maybe my new toy can unravel this mystery. I have always loved machines. It is a very simple device - it clicks when a particle or ray hits the tubes. Also a light flashes - Green (marked FON in Cyrillic) for SAFE, and red (VNIMANYE) for danger, or "Attention" as the euphimism has it.
I am testing the side of the railway for abnormal levels of radiation - not really expecting to find anything - when it clicks more rapidly. It is still FON - safe- but still rather a sudden burst. I stop.
The burst is not repeated, but I look down and see two tree stumps. Trees are a good thing to test, because they live a long time- if this one is the right age, it might have absorbed a dose as a sapling, and traces of strontium or whatever might still be present. I bend down and place my counter's protective cover as close as possible without actually touching it to the wood.
Nothing happens- then there is a burst of clicks and it settles down to a steady rythm of clicking.
Interesting.
Radiation is random stuff. Radioactive material decays at random, and there is so little of it present in the environment normally that a Geiger counter usually sounds like an avant-garde musical score- none of the steady, menacing ticks you get in the films, it is more like Philip Glass- silent, then a click or two, then silent for a couple more seconds, then maybe a burst of clicks, then silence puncuated by more of the same. This reading is steadier- more like the movie experience.
It looks like there may be very small but statistically significant quantities of radioactive material in this tree stump. Nothing VNIMANYE- but interesting none the less. I make a mental note to come back here and take samples. Perhaps it is an alpha emitter, in which case it is time to upgrade to more sensitive and expensive equipment.
I move on.
And stop. There is another burst, then nothing. I move- another burst. There are safe-level bursts of radiation occuring all around me. It is like Fireworks night in Baghdad here.
I head towards the railway line proper. It is slightly - very slightly - more radioactive here. The reading is slow but steady, like spots of rain falling on a windowpane.
There is a tunnel here. I imagine the Nuclear Train, trundling along one night in 1986 or '87. Something is wrong - possibly a leak- so the driver parks it in a tunnel and calls for help. A discrete van full of discrete and very well-paid men and women arrive and fix the suspected leak. They check the seals, and the Nuclear Train drives on.
Meanwhile, people all over the city are sitting in their houses watching Max Headroom and listening to A-Ha. They watch Spitting Image and Nigel Havers playing a gentleman in a bow tie. Then they turn off the TV and go to bed. They are completely unsuspecting. I myself lie in bed in the children's home, dreaming my dreams, thinking my thoughts. Thinking of the Nuclear Train, perhaps.
Is this why that line was closed for twenty years? My mind goes into trips and double spins of paranoia. Why are they cutting down the trees here, anyway? This is supposed to be some kind of nature reserve, yet the council are chopping down many of the trees. All around the railway line, they are thinning out the woods.
I need to go into that tunnel, take more readings.. But what if some railway cop hassles me? Apart from the fine I'd have to explain what I was doing there. I can just picture the scene: "Sorry, Officer, I was just trying to determine the level of radiation present in the environment here. I'll be off now. Please don't fine me; I won't do it again."
They'd think I was some kind of nut; they'd put me away. And suppose I was onto something? Anti-nuclear activists don't exactly lead charmed lives - a lot of them seem to die in car crashes or get shot by burglars who dont steal anything- in other words, a paranoid person might be forgiven for assuming they are deniably assasinated by the authorities. Or so the urban legends have it. A shiver goes down my spine. This was just a bit of fun, a relaxing way to spend an otherwise dull day. What have I got myself into?
I make a compromise with myself. I will wait for a train to come and blow air out of the tunnel and at me and my two-bit, cheap shit Russkie radiation counter. If anything wierd happens - I phone Greenpeace. Otherwise, I'll go home and forget about it. Jiust forget the whole thing.
I sit down to wait for a train.
I brood, remembering all the things I'd done as a kid around here. A few years after they shut down the line - I must have neen 13 or 14- I used to come here with another teenager, a boy about a year older than me whom I will call K.
K. was interesting - he was stronger then me, and more developed, which for some reason I found fascinating. Actually the reason I found this fascinating was because K. and me started having sex at about that time.
It wasn't anything sick or abusive - we were just two bisexual teenagers who hadn't learned to seriously repress themselves yet. But that would come, in time. I sometimes wonder what happened to him.
I hear a distant rumble. Is it the train? No- just distant traffic. My counter clicks away. "FON".
We would come here and play our sex games, then mess around a bit and go home. It was sweet, because we'd already known each other a long time. There was friendship and trust in that little clinch. At least for a while.
Things started to go wrong in about 1990. He became macho and overbearing, testosterone flooding his system. I got tired of his shit and his increasingly over the top sexual demands - so I terminated the relationship. At least I think so.
No- that wasn't it. I remember what happened now. I had wanted to do something new for a while, for a long time in fact. Then he went and suggested it, apparently reciprocating something I had done for him, and I - panicked. I ran, pointlessly, not understanding. It was so fucking stupid. I should never have been afraid of him.
A year later I would be alone and need all the friends I could get. Slowly I closed myself off instead. I went into the closet at seventeen and didn't come out for five years. I spent decades running around in ever-decreasing circles, from squat to crappy housing project to scummy bedsit to shared house to sofa to squat, from unemployment to training scheme to dead-end job to failed university course to unemployment again, around and around, afraid of everything, afraid of my own shadow -
All because I had thrown this special thing away. What an arsehole I was. I remember fleeing in panic and terror, not just of him or of our homosexuality, but of the closeness itsself, of the danger of being loved, of everything, and cycling as fast as I could, and him coming after me trying to reassure me -
And there it was, a broken thing, finished, ended, no more. I'd self-exiled from something different and special to a world that had already done it's best to destroy me as a child and which would soon try to whack me again, this time as a man. A year after that I would spend a night sleeping in a freezing boiler room hiding from my father's beatings when I could have been in K's bed, two years after that I would be homeless, three years and four years and five years after that I'd be messed up, isolated, alone, unable to connect to anyone, and in a way that took years to fix-
And I'd never even allowed myself to feel regret. God damn it.
The train is coming now. The tracks are singing, a distant rumble fills the air, and over it I can just about here the insistent, tinny ticking of my radiation counter. I pick it up and hold it, sensor facing outwards.
Feelings are like radiation. Because we can't see them, we assume they aren't there. We deny them. We push them to the back of our minds and forget they ever existed. Then we do it again. Then we do it again. Then we do it again, until eventually, we have forgotten, and -
A WHOOSH of air is driven from the mouth of the tunnel and my counter is flashing green and red like a berserk traffic light, VNIMANYE, VNIMANYE, VNIMANYE- and I am thinking of what might have been, if I hadn't assumed everyone was such a threat, if I hadn't rejected K, if I hadn't gone and re-invented myself as a cold, unfeeling thing in return for a little "safety".
The neutrons and gamma rays and beta particles from the tunnel spiral out, washing over me and irradiating my tears.
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