Psychological horror · 5 min read ·
The Colour of My Porch Light
She repainted her porch lamp one weekend, and by evening the street lamp outside had taken the same colour without anyone touching it.
- perspective: first
I bought the paint because the porch lamp had gone the colour of weak tea. That is all the reason I gave myself, and, at the time, it seemed like a full account. Ten years in that flat above the harbour chemist, and the bulb behind the frosted pane had aged from white to yellow to something the colour of an old envelope, and one evening in February, coming home with the shopping, I thought: I will paint the lamp bracket instead of replacing the bulb. Green. A green I had seen in a dream, if I am honest, though I did not put it that way to myself then. A cold sea green, the green of the metal railings along the front in the rain.
I did it on a Thursday, my half day. I took the bracket down, sanded it on newspaper in the kitchen, gave it two coats and blurred one of them by touching it too soon, and put a new bulb in anyway because I was up the ladder with everything out. By six I was finished and the porch light came on with the timer, and it shone green on my own green door, and I stood on the step in the cold and felt a small clean satisfaction, the kind you get from a job where the job is all of it.
The street lamp outside is on the corner, ten yards from my wall. It is a council light, sodium, and it had been, for as long as I have lived here, that washed orange that makes everyone on a night street look like they are being developed from a negative. On the Friday morning I left for work in the dark and the street was orange. On Friday evening I came home in the dark and the corner of my street was green. Not pale, not reflected — saturated, the same cold green I had mixed up on Thursday from a tin I had mixed myself from two tins, because the shop only had it in a colour called Marsh Verdict, which is the kind of name that gets paint reduced.
I told myself the council had changed the lamp. There had been a works notice tied to the railings in January. That held until I walked to the bus stop and saw that only my lamp was changed — the next one along, outside the bakery, was still orange, and the one past that, orange, the whole street in its old jaundice except the pool of green that lay across my own door like a hand. So I rang the council, and the man there was kind, and said if the lamp head had been changed it would be on his sheet, and it was not on his sheet, and he would send someone. They came, two men in a van, on the Tuesday. I watched from the window. They got the pole up to the lamp, and then one of them came and knocked on my door, and asked, politely, when I had noticed the change, and I said Friday, and he said, right, and did I mean to keep the porch light that colour, and I said yes, and he wrote something down, and they put the pole away and left without touching the lamp. They did not charge the hydro for the visit. I have looked. There is no visit on any account.
I want to write down exactly what I did next, because I have noticed that people in this situation — and I have decided, quietly, that it is a situation — tell it as though they were brave. I stopped repainting. That is the whole of it. I did not find out what it was. The lamp stayed green; the street lamp stayed green over my door every night after; and I went up and down my own step in that green for weeks and stopped seeing it, the way you stop seeing a stain. The only thing I could not stop was checking, first thing each evening, before anything else — stepping out onto the landing while the soup heated, looking through the frosted pane, and seeing what colour the corner was. Orange meant nothing. Green meant I was home, and being told so.
In April the bakery closed, and the lamp outside the bakery went out for good — the council wrote to say they were decommissioning it, part of the works, and I read that letter ten times. Two lamps for two doors. I had reassured myself for months that the green street light was a copy of me. Somewhere in the middle of that letter I understood that it might be the other way, and that I had checked the porch lamp every evening in April, and that April's green had been mine, and I could not tell, and I did not take the tin of Marsh Verdict down from the shelf for the railings, which is what I had bought it for. The railings are still their old black.
I stopped repainting after May. I stopped, I mean, doing the small thing, checking. It got so that I left the porch light off altogether and came into my own hall by the green on the step outside, without ever turning to look at the lamp that threw it, and last month I moved the timer to the hall light and have not been on the step since dusk since. The paint is in the cupboard under the stairs with the sanded newspaper still wrapped round it, and the lid has a thumbprint in the green where I tested it, and some evenings, when the hall timer clicks, the flat fills for a second with a colour I did not ask for, and I turn on a table lamp to push it back, and I tell myself the bulb is just aging. Nothing has ever been at my door. I switch off the table lamp before bed. It is warmer under the green; that is the thing I will say; whatever is out there has kept the corner lit every night since I painted, and it has never come in, and I no longer count that as nothing.