legends · 4 min read ·
Temporary Lights
A traffic-light operator at roadworks sees a car wait since 1961 for a green that has just come on.
You are told the lights are temporary. That's the word on the paperwork, on the permit, on the clipboard in the cab of the van. Temporary traffic signals, two-way, red-amber-green, one set at each end of the works. Hired by the week. A man in a hi-vis jacket sits in the van with a flask and a radio and moves them by hand when the phases need changing.
I was that man. Contract work, six months, on a stretch of the B-road above Selby Dale where a retaining wall had slumped. I had a mate who did it and said it was easy money. You sit and you watch. When the queue builds you change the lights.
It was easy. A narrow road, hedged, with a field on one side and a long drop on the other. Few cars. A tractor, a hearse once, a lot of Amazon vans. The lights at the top end, the lights at the bottom. You could see the one from the other, round a bend, a red eye winking in the damp.
I noticed on the fourth day. The top set went from red to green exactly when I pressed the button. The bottom set did too. Always together, with the same lag. But on that day, a Thursday, in a thin grey rain, the top set went green a half-second before I touched the button.
I tried again. I held my thumb over the button and watched the lights, and the top set went green, and then my thumb came down, and then the bottom set followed.
I called the hire company. The man said it was a timing glitch. "They're on the same controller, mate. They're synchronised. Might be a phase delay." He said it would be sorted.
That evening I packed up as usual at six. The lights were still on. They're meant to be left on, powered by batteries, so that any traveller at night knows the road is narrowed. I locked the van. I went home. In the night I woke, at four, and lay there in the dark. The lights were on my mind. I could see them in my head, the red eye and the green, the thin wet road.
At work in the morning I found the lights set to green at both ends.
Both. Together. I have never seen that. Both green, and nothing in the road, and a long straight stretch of tarmac with two lanes' worth of light pouring down it. I stood in the road, waving my arms, thinking there'd be an accident. But there was only the silence, and the field, and the light.
Then I saw, a hundred yards down the road, coming slowly up through the fog, a pair of headlamps.
They were square. The sort of lamps a car had in the nineteen-fifties. The vehicle behind them was a long grey saloon, a gleaming thing, with a running board. It crept up the hill towards the lights and at the lights it stopped, quietly, and the engine idled.
A man in a trilby looked out of the driver's window. I walked down to him, as you do, to explain. I said, "I'm very sorry, sir. Works. They'll be done by Friday."
"Thank you," said the man. "I've been waiting for the green."
"It's green now."
"It's green for you," he said. "It's been red for me since 1961."
I stood there. The car idled. In the passenger seat there was a woman in a headscarf, looking straight ahead, with her gloved hands in her lap. She was not breathing. In the back, two shapes in the dark.
"I'm afraid it's temporary," I said, which is the stupidest thing I have ever said.
"Yes," said the man. He smiled and put it in gear. "That's what I thought."
He drove up through the lights, slowly, with the dignity of a hearse. As the car passed the signal head, the light on the pole above him changed, and for the first time I saw it, the thing the lights had been holding. A small bright flicker went through the road, and through the rain, and through me. And the car went into it as a hand goes into a glove, and was not there.
I handed the van back at the end of the week. They didn't ask any questions. I'd been told it was easy money, and it was.
I drive through roadworks now with a different feeling. When I stop at a red, I try to think who else might be waiting on the same one. And when it turns, I always, very gently, hold a moment longer before I go.