Stories of the Street - Thirty

Jane is becoming quite worried about her “little obsession”. She is sitting in her car as the traffic clogs the street and is becoming infuriated by the morning jam. She has seen all of these cars a hundred times. She knows every number plate in this street and she needs to get onto busier, faster moving traffic.

The obsession, if that is what it is, started on a long journey taking their middle daughter and her friend to a Museum stuck out in the middle of nowhere in what her husband insisted was the “damn countryside”. Any large plot of land that has not been built on should either be a garden or a car park according to him.

So they were trundling down one of the quieter country roads when her daughter and her friend began complaining that there were not enough cars.

“Tell me about it!” was her husband’s only response, so Jane butted in on the conversation hoping against hope that their daughter was not turning into a prototype country hater like her husband.

The two girls explained that they were up to eighteen, as if that explained everything.

Further enquiries revealed that it was a little game to pass the time on journeys and while walking along the street to school. A few weeks before they started looking at car number plates. First, they looked for a vehicle with the single number one on it. Then they had to find a plate with a single two and so on. It sounded simpler than it was and it had taken them a few weeks to reach eighteen.

“It is so frustrating!” they both squealed, “You always see numbers one or two ahead of the one you want. Then, when you reach that very same number you cannot find a single car – they seem to just disappear the minute you start looking for them!”

Jane agreed that it was a silly sort of game but that did not stop her from looking, anyway. It was a casual glance here and there at cars as they slipped by.

Two things on the journey hooked her.

The first was pointing out to the girls a green vintage Ford as it trundled by on the way to the museum. It was odd enough to see such an old Ford that was not black and even odder to notice the number plate. The second thing was arriving in the museum car park and driving right into a parking bay next to a brand new Lexus with a single one as part of its plate.

She was hooked from then on and was up to five by the time they got home that evening.

Six months later and she was on number twenty five. Stuck on number twenty five for three of those six months and it was driving her crazy. In fact, last night she went on the internet to find a site where someone could tell her where she might find a number twenty five and now she was wondering when she could spend the day travelling over a hundred miles to a small town in order to see the number plate and get past the infuriating twenty five barrier.

But in the mean time she needs to get onto busier roads. She left twenty minutes earlier today so that she could take a detour just in case the illusive number reveals itself in the alien traffic of another part of town.