Verbal Magazine

Traffic Lights

I was engaged once: to Julia. We were both thirty and it should have been all ahead of us. But it didn’t work out. I was full of anxiety and crankiness at the time and she wanted better things. 

I remember the December evening when we were driving home from her Christmas work party. I had felt uncomfortable there with her office workmates and I drank too much. In the car I kept imitating her boss, an over-educated American who was continually quoting this corny line:
“Management of many is the same as management of few. It is a matter of organisation.”
I repeated the phrase over and over in the man’s American twang. When we stopped at a set of traffic lights with the road empty in all directions I could see that tears were running down her face. It was only then that I realised how bad things were between us. I could have apologised. I said instead,
“They have sensors that make these lights change. But I don’t see any difference.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t see any difference.”
Her voice wavered as she swallowed back tears.
We parted soon after that and basically the most important relationship in my life ended around a discussion about traffic lights. That was a very bad move, not least because every day when I drive and come to a stop at a set of lights I think of that moment and my inane behaviour.
Sometimes I drive over to where she lives now. I wait in the shadows under the tall poplars. The house is a large detached yellow-brick. I sit there in the darkness and look at the heavy curtains glowing with leaked light and warmth from inside. She married a work colleague called Matt who’s a few years older than her. He’s been promoted so now he is high up in the company. I met him a couple of times. I didn’t like him.
I’m living in a flat near the Western Road flats. It’s small, built at the side of Brenda’s house. The area isn’t great but at least I’m by myself. I didn’t want to live with people again after the incident with the Latvian. That court business did something to me and I wanted a quiet life for a while.
Brenda is my landlady. She’s a well-meaning woman though too nervy to ever deliver on her good intentions. She keeps her hair too long and she’s put weight on her hips and shoulders that makes her look out of proportion. Some days I see this medicated look in her eyes which I don’t like. But overall she’s okay.
She has an eight year old called Kyle. He’s a pale little lad with thin arms and legs who moves like Pinocchio and speaks in a garbled way like a crackly speaker. He has Cystic Fibrosis but it’s a mild form. He can digest food so at least he doesn’t have weight problems. But he picks up infections easily and Brenda finds it hard to cope.
It wasn’t long until Kyle started tormenting me, dropping in unannounced at all times. Brenda isn’t big into discipline and the boy can be all over the place, full of jerky, unfocussed energy. I have this old banjo that I’ve brought around with me. I can rattle out a few chords and ballads on it but Kyle was drawn to it like a bad magnet. It upset me to see the old instrument abused and so I took to locking my door, sitting inside watching the handle turn and then trying to ignore his pathetic cawing as he struggled to pronounce my name.
One Saturday after a long six day week on the site I forgot to lock the damn door and he was in on top of me. His mouth was rimmed with chocolate. I took one look at him and before I could stop myself, I grabbed a cloth from the sink and cleaned his face. That did the trick because he took off out of the room like a burnt animal. Ten minutes later the door flew open. It was Brenda. She pointed at me.
“I don’t need your help raising my son,” she said. “Or washing his face…I’m his mother.”
I could hear the trigger of hysteria in her voice. I didn’t blink though.
“Good,” I said. “Because believe me I wasn’t offering.”
My reply surprised her. She took a breath and burst into a flood of tears. I felt sorry for her. She was under a lot of pressure with Kyle and I wasn’t helping. After a while she calmed down and for the first time I could see that the wall look was gone. I was looking at her real face for the first time.
“It’s just so hard to keep going,” she said without bitterness or anger. 
“Well,” I said. “Do you need a hand doing anything?”
I meant around the house, shelves, gardening that kind of thing. But Brenda had other ideas. She needed help with an appointment. A speech therapy appointment that she had missed. Maybe if I went down with her, I could convince them to give Kyle another time.
What could I say? How could I not help her? So the next day I made an excuse to the foreman and collected Brenda and headed down to the clinic. The receptionist was a manicured woman that wore makeup like knights of old wore armour. I explained the problem.
He’s got cystic fibrosis,” I said. “He was sick.”
“The appointment was missed. There’s a six month waiting list. Its only fair if he goes to the back of the queue again,” she said smiling sweetly and I felt whatever customer relations course she’d done coming into play.
“The boy was sick,” I repeated.
“His mother could have just rung beforehand, told us and got another appointment….”
But I sensed a slight shift of tone. She looked me up and down, noting my work clothes and I had a feeling that something unusual was coming.
“Do you know anything about decking?” she asked
“Sure,” I said lying.
“Hmmm,” she said and I felt a whisper of hope.
That weekend I ended up at the back of her house putting down this wide deck. I got paid and Kyle got an appointment and the receptionist had her barbecue. Brenda was thrilled and she cooked me dinner in thanks. Rubbery steak and oven chips. We drank cheap wine and she told me that once she wanted to be a hair dresser. I hadn’t thought of Brenda having ambitions and it touched me. I knew I had underestimated her. For the second day running the frozen expression was gone from her eyes and I could see she really had a lovely smile.
Later that night we ended up sleeping together. I hadn’t been with a woman for a long time and though my heart wasn’t in it, I found myself unable to resist her heavy warmth, her fleshy goodness, her smoky sweet smell. I found out that she was forty three. Five years older than me. I would have thought it was ten.
Despite my misgivings an easy routine started. I’d come in from work, get cleaned up and then I’d go into Brenda and Kyle. There was all this stuff that needed to be done for Kyle so I’d help him with that, coaxing him into sitting still long enough for the inhalers to work. Then we would all eat and watch television together. And I would spend the night with her. Brenda started taking a bit more care of herself. She talked about taking exercise and she definitely cut down on the medication. We never once talked about the future or what we wanted. It just never came up.
When Kyle’s birthday came along I said that we should go out for a meal in the local pub. It seemed like a good idea until the actual day came and I realised what lay in store. Me and Brenda had never gone out like this. Not once to a pub or a coffee shop even. Brenda was all over the place trying to find something to wear. In the end she appeared in jeans and a sweatshirt.
“I can’t find anything,” she said. Already she looked wrecked and I guessed she’d taken a valium.
“You look fine,” I said placating her.
It was Saturday and the pub was busy. We found a table near the toilets and I could smell sweet pine bleach. Brenda couldn’t wait to get her hands on a vodka and white and that seemed to help her. But I felt cold and empty. Even Kyle wasn’t a distraction with his manic energy. He sat there looking at me as if I’d done something horrible. The food came and we ate though I had lost my appetite. Afterwards I went up to the bar even though I didn’t want anything except to get away from them.
Then I ran into him. Matt the company man, Julia’s husband. He looked so clean like he showered in Milton’s fluid. It’s hard to feel comfortable with a man that clean.
“How are you getting on?” he asked.
“All right. Busy.”
Then from behind me Brenda called out.
“I don’t need another mmmmi..ixer.” she said in a slurred voice. “I have enough here.”
She held up the little bottle like it was the most thoughtful thing that she’d ever done. There was a stain down the centre of her sweatshirt and her face looked puffy. Her eyes had that double-glazing reflection. Kyle was playing with the slops on the plates and his mouth was encrusted with ice cream. Matt didn’t say anything, just looked at me.
“The boy has cystic fibrosis,” I said as if that explained everything.
Matt nodded in an overtly interested way.
“Oh sorry to hear that,”
There was another toe-curling pause.
“You’re a busy man. I’ll leave you to it,” he said and walked off.
I bought another round of drinks and sat down but as soon as I could I got them into the car and back to the house. Once we were there Brenda flopped onto the sofa and fell asleep, mouth open, like she had died in mid cough. Kyle sat watching cartoons on television. I left them and went back into my flat.
I felt cold, almost frightened. It was like I could see everything for the first time. This damp flat, the grey estate, Brenda’s childlike nerves. I thought about the look in Matt’s eyes, that mixture of scorn and sympathy. For a moment I wanted to throw some stuff together and get in the car and just leave. But I also felt tired: from a long week at work, from never knowing what was going to happen next. That restless energy wasn’t what it was and so I sat for a few minutes and tried to think straight.
And as I thought about it I realised that I had nowhere to go. Nowhere that wasn’t some version of somewhere that I had already left. There were traffic lights everywhere. Traffic lights enforcing those merciless seconds of thought and regret. Life could have turned out differently. Maybe I could have been in that nice house with Julia. But I wasn’t and if I left now those traffic lights would haunt me all the more. Just as I always remembered Julia, I would also now remember Brenda and Kyle. This place was a kind of life but at least I didn’t feel alone and there was a sort of honesty to it. Which had to count for something. And so I sat while the evening darkness ebbed in around me, just thinking, wondering how things happen the way they do, for better or for worse. And then later when I heard sounds of activity from inside I went in to see how things were going.

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