Changing Lights -- A Story

Rain splattered the windscreen as his van sluiced along the urban two-lane road, tyres hissing through the standing water. It was almost ten a.m., yet his sidelights still cut twin cones through the dreary half-light. Sodden, late October sycamore leaves plastered the pavements flanking the road. Any time now the weather would turn, and those wet, decaying leaves would freeze and become a death-trap to the unwary pedestrian.

Jed Barnes guided his Highways Department van safely down the inside lane, paying little regard to the traffic racing past to his right. Twenty-seven years spent in this job had given him a wealth of experience of the sheer idiocy to be seen on an almost hourly basis on the city’s streets. He had been involved in five road accidents in his time, none of which had been in any way his own fault. On two of those occasions he had ended up in hospital, once with concussion, once with a broken wrist, both times with whiplash. Jed wasn’t a man to bear grudges, but these and a hundred other near-misses had been more than enough to show him that it simply wasn’t enough to be a safe driver; every moment you were on the road, you had to be watching every other vehicle you could see. Even then, if it was your turn, you just had to hope for a bit of luck when it happened.

Half a mile further along the road, he spotted the pedestrian crossing. Just beyond the crossing, he pulled off the road and parked the van on the wide verge. Looking grimly at the persistent drizzle outside, he took his mobile phone from its dashboard cradle and pocketed it, opened the door and stepped out into the wind and rain.

Several complaints about the crossing had reached the office over the last couple of weeks. Evidently the lights were changing to red at random times, when there didn’t seem to be anyone actually crossing. Jed suspected he would find the cause to be the usual: a matchstick jammed between the button and its surround, which kept the button pressed in and triggered the change of lights at regular intervals.

However, after checking the buttons on both sides of the road, this appeared not to be the case. Next favourite was a short within one of the post-mounted boxes. Checking for this took rather longer, but forty minutes later he had ruled that one out. There was little else he could check out in the field, so he put in a call to the office to request that two new control boxes be fitted.

~*~

A week later, Jed was back, two new control boxes on the passenger seat of his van. As expected, the weather had taken a turn for the nippy, so much so that he’d had to de-ice the windscreen this morning.
Fitting the new control boxes took the best part of a morning, and as he was packing away his tools, plus the two old control boxes in his van, he heard a voice from behind him.

“ ’Ow do?”

Jed turned and straightened up, seeing an elderly gent with walking stick. “How do,” he replied.

“What you doin’, then?” asked the old chap. He wore a houndstooth-checked trilby and overcoat, and Age had performed its usual facial exaggerations on the man, stretching ears, expanding the nose and sprouting long, grey hairs from both. He looked to Jed to be not far short of his eightieth year

“Had some trouble with the lights,” said Jed. “Been turning themselves on all the time. Probably faulty wiring. I just fitted new boxes, that should fix the problem.”

The elderly gentleman’s faced creased into a smile, and twinkles came into his watery eyes. “Ah, I see. And you say you think that’ll fix ‘er, do you?”

Jed nodded patiently, smiling. The old guy probably didn’t have anyone at home to talk to; this might be the only conversation he got today, and Jed was in no hurry. “Yep, with any luck.”

“Ah well, ‘spose we’ll see about that, won’t we?”, said the man, with a chuckle. And with that he walked away.

Maybe he wasn’t in need of the conversation after all. Jed finished off stowing everything in his van, and climbed behind the wheel. As he pulled out into the traffic, he couldn’t seem to clear his mind of the strange smile the old chap had given him. Something about that smile, and the look in his eyes. Something...knowing.

~*~

October faded into November, the days contracted and the weather turned wintery. The number of call-outs grew as Jed dealt with the usual flurry of accident-related damage on the roads: bent road-signs, broken bollards, smashed lights. Just at the time of year when such things were more important than ever, they seemed to become a target for all the stupid and incompetent drivers taking to the streets.

In the second week of November he received a call-out request to replace a 30mph speed limit sign which had been uprooted by a car mounting the pavement (while travelling at 43mph). As he approached the sign, he passed between the twin lights of the pedestrian crossing which, he recalled, he had fixed some weeks earlier.

As he was pulling the replacement sign out of the back of the van, a familiar voice came from behind him. “ ’Ow do?”

Jed put the sign down gently on the ground, leaning against the tailgate of the van, and turned. Sure enough the same old gentleman, who had spoken to him when he had been working on the pedestrian crossing, was standing a couple of yards away; dressed, as far as Jed could recall, exactly the same as he had been on the previous occasion. “How do,” he replied.

“Fixing the sign, are ye?” said the man.

“That’s right. Car hit it.”

“Aye, so I ‘ear. Bloody lunatics, some o’these kids, way they come racing down ‘ere. Still, funny but it’s never ‘appened ‘ere before.” Again that same, wry smile.

“That a fact?” asked Jed. “Just lucky I suppose, it’s happening everywhere.”

“Aye. Just lucky, like you say.” He chuckled and wandered off on his way, leaving Jed standing, watching. He almost spoke to ask what the joke was, but decided against it. He knew, from his own octogenarian father, that with age comes a way of seeing humour in almost anything, as though a lifetime’s experience renders everything mildly amusing.

~*~

He was thinking about Christmas presents when it happened. With an adult son and daughter and four grandchildren between them, there was much to think about in the last couple of weeks before Christmas. He and Pat generally shared Christmas duties between them, and while she organized food, decorations and dates, he had the task of buying the kids’ presents. He swore he was still concentrating on the road, but in the two seconds while he was trying to decide whether twelve-year-old Daniel would rather receive games for his X-Box or a new pair of trainers, the young lunatic in the lowered Renault Clio with an exhaust the size of a drain-pipe pulled straight out in front of him from a side-road. From the moment he saw the car, Jed knew he was going to hit it, but he did what he could to avoid a head-on collision, slewing the van round as it approached the Clio. The driver of the car had stopped, and the last thing Jed saw was the look of utter terror in the kid’s eyes as he saw Jed’s van bearing rapidly down on him, all the time turning so that at the moment of impact it was almost side-on to the car. This last, split-second act of Jed Barnes saved the kid’s life by avoiding a T-bone which would have crushed his slim body like a paper cup. As it was, he escaped with cuts, bruises and a broken ankle.

Jed wasn’t as fortunate. The unusual angle of impact meant that the normal safety devices—seatbelt, headrest, airbags—proved ineffective, and the impact of his head against the passenger window fractured his skull and knocked him into a coma. As his world faded to black, one last disconnected thought sparked dully in his mind...that’s the pedestrian crossing I repaired two months ago...Gone.

~*~

Regaining consciousness was a strange experience. It seemed to happen over a long period of time, though he had no idea just how long. Hours? Days? He had absolutely no idea.

Hearing was the first sense to return. He slowly became aware of voices, muddy and indistinct. Then he became aware that he had actually been aware of them for some time without realizing what he was hearing. Some time later, when the voices began to coalesce into understandable words, he tried opening his eyes. Piercing white light forced itself between his eyelids and he squinted them shut again. Slowly, he rationed the light to his eyes until his irises contracted and he was able to deal with it. The voices came from outside of the private room he found himself in, through the open door. For long minutes he lay, taking stock of his surroundings, reconstructing the fragments of memory currently floating around his battered head. To the left of his bed, an empty chair. To the right, some kind of monitor he assumed he was connected to. On a bracket high up on the far wall, a TV, switched off. Next to the TV a clock, showing four-fifteen. He couldn’t see any windows so had no idea whether that was a.m. or p.m. Gradually he put together and understanding of what had happened to him. He remembered driving down the road...thinking of Christmas...the car...young driver, looking at him through the window...

Some time later he awoke, not realizing he’d drifted off until he noticed that the clock on the opposite wall now said ten-thirty. He wondered if he’d been asleep for six hours or eighteen. It didn’t really seem to matter. He felt stronger now, more with-it. He glanced to the side of his bed and realized there was someone sitting there. Not Pat, who he had expected to see, but...no, this can’t be right, I’m obviously still dreaming...was that...? Yes, it was. Seated in the chair next to his bed, leaning with both hands on his walking stick, checked trilby on his head, was the old fellow Jed had seen a twice whilst carrying out repairs...on the same road where I had the accident, he suddenly realized.

“ ‘Ow do?” said the old man. He nodded at Jed, smiling faintly. “You back in the land of the living, then?”

Jed almost laughed out loud at his scrambled imagination. He had to give himself credit, it was a very realistic dream. In his totally relaxed state of mind, he decided he might as well go along with it.

“Aye, back in the land of the living I think, although I’m not quite sure why I’m seeing you here.”

The old man chuckled and gave his wry smile. “Just thought I’d pop in and see how you were, like. Gave yourself a bit of a knock there, didn’t you?”

This time it was Jed’s turn to laugh. “A bit of a knock? Yes, you could say that.”

“You’re not the first to come to grief on that road, you know.”

“Oh no?”

“Bit of a blackspot, actually. Mind, things had been getting better. But last couple of months, there’s been at least four smashes to my knowledge. Odd that, don’t you think?”

Jed couldn’t really see what was odd about it, given the way most people seemed to drive these days.

“Ah, but the way it ‘ad all but stopped, then just started again, sudden like.”

“Probably the bad weather, days drawing in. Just a seasonal thing, I expect.” Jed was starting to grow a little bored with this dream, and was anxious to see Pat and talk to her, talk to the doctors, find out how long he’d been unconscious, what the damage was.

“Last year, weren’t a single accident from June to December,” said the man, who apparently was unaware that he was part of Jed’s dream. “What do you think of that?”

Jed had heard enough. “I really don’t know. Look, it’s very nice of you to come and visit me. I think I’m okay, but I’m going to have to talk to the doctors now, and my wife should be...”

“Oh I know, I know,” he said, “I’ll be on my way now.” He stood slowly, leaning heavily on his walking stick. He headed for the door, then turned back to Jed, catching his stare with eyes that had suddenly become lucid, and rather fierce. “Just one thing,” he said, softly, “Don’t you think it’s a bit strange that all these accidents started up again just after you messed with that crossing?”

Jed forgot for a moment that he was dreaming. “What do you mean? I fixed the crossing because it was faulty. What’s that got to do with anything?”

The old man had reached the door of Jed’s room. As he stepped out, he replied, “Just something to think about, innit? Strange, that thing going off on its own like that, but soon as you fix it, people start driving into each other like lunatics. Makes you wonder, don’t it? Makes you wonder how many accidents might have happened if them lights had been working prop’ly all along; how many folks’re still alive because they had to stop at that red light when no-one was crossing. I’ll be on my way now.” He raised his hat in an old-fashioned gesture. “Get well soon, Jed.”

Jed was glad this was all a dream, because otherwise he would have been extremely unnerved that the old man had known his name. He was glad he was dreaming, because if this had been real he would have been questioning his own sanity, particularly in view of the thoughts going round in his head after the old man’s departure.

Four weeks later, under cover of darkness at ten p.m. on a snowy January night, he was very glad that the surreal conversation with the old man in the hospital had all been a dream, as he removed the two new control boxes from the pedestrian crossing, and replaced them with the two “faulty” ones he had removed back in October. That way, he could pretend that his actions tonight were simply in order to free himself of the guilt he felt on each of the three occasions since Christmas when he heard about another road accident on this stretch of road. He just hoped that he hadn’t left it too late, that the ghost was still in this particular machine.

The pedestrian crossing which inspired this little tale is on my way home from work. Three times last week it caught me, and on no occasion was anyone crossing...