The crossing that will not go green

There is a pedestrian crossing at the end of my road that I have started to think of as a colleague. We keep the same hours. I come home late, it is the last obstacle between me and my own front door, and at two in the morning it is in no hurry at all.

You know the kind. A button, a small light that says WAIT in case you had other ideas, and a road that at this hour has not seen a car since the last bus gave up. I press the button. Nothing. I press it again, which never helps and which everyone does. The light stays red. Somewhere a machine that has counted a thousand crossings today decides that I, alone, on an empty street, must wait my turn.

And here is the strange part. I could walk. There is nothing coming. I can see a clear quarter mile in both directions, the tarmac shining a little from the earlier rain, the shop signs off, a cat conducting its own business along the wall. No car. No danger. Every sensible cell in my body says go. And I stand there like a good citizen, waiting for a green man who is taking his time deciding whether I deserve one.

I have thought about why, and it is not the law, and it is not the cat watching. It is the road itself. An empty road at two in the morning is not empty the way a field is empty. It is empty the way a held breath is empty. The whole point of a road is that something comes along it. Standing at the edge of one that has gone quiet, you are not waiting for permission. You are waiting for the thing the road is for.

The frightening part of any street is never the traffic. It is the moment the traffic stops.

This is more or less my entire trade in one bad habit. People think a thriller runs on the event: the headlights, the figure, the sound on the stair. It does not. It runs on the flat grey minute before any of that, when nothing at all is happening and you cannot for the life of you leave. Give a reader a monster and they will brace and cope. Give them an ordinary hallway and thirty seconds of silence and they will do the work themselves, far better than you ever could, filling that silence with whatever they personally keep locked away.

So I have made a small peace with my crossing. It is teaching me the lesson I keep trying to teach the page. Do not rush to the green man. Let them stand a little longer at the edge of the quiet road. Let them hear how loud their own coat sounds. The car will come, or it will not, and by the time it does or does not, the person has already frightened themselves half to death with an empty street and a working streetlight, which is exactly where I wanted them all along.

The light changed while I was writing that last part in my head. I almost missed it.