The Wrong Light

Gloria was forty-four years old and she had spent most of those years playing it safe. She knew it, too. She wasn't one of those people who told themselves comfortable lies about it. She'd been a working musician since she was twenty-two, which sounded risky at parties, but the actual life was a long line of sensible choices. Reliable van. Reliable set list. Hotels booked ahead with two confirmations each, in case one fell through.

Even the sex had been sensible. Men who asked nicely and did what she expected. She'd tried the dating apps for a while and every conversation felt like filling out a form. What are you looking for. A laugh, she'd type. Someone normal. And she got exactly that, over and over, and went home exactly as unsatisfied as she'd left.

There was one thing she'd never said out loud to anyone. Sometimes, when a man held her wrists a little too firmly, or when a boyfriend got impatient and pushed her against a wall, her whole brain lit up with flashing lights and ringing bells. And then she would get scared of how much she liked it, and she'd laugh it off, and that would be the end of that. Twenty years of laughing it off.

Her friend Tami had told her once, a couple of gin and tonics deep, "You know what your problem is, Glo? You've never once let go of the steering wheel."

Gloria had said something clever back and changed the subject. But she'd thought about it for weeks afterward, lying in her flat in Steiner, staring at the ceiling.

***

The tour was small this time. Six dates down the east coast, pubs and small halls, and the last one was this scruffy seaside town she couldn't even remember the name of until she checked the paperwork. The gig went fine. Decent crowd, about forty people, and two of them sang along on the chorus of the second song, which always did something good to her chest.

She packed up slow, had one drink with the landlord, and then walked to the station with her guitar on her back and her case wheel rattling over the cracked pavement.

The board said the train left at 22:41. Her phone said 22:39. She speed-walked, then jogged, and she got to the platform just in time to watch the taillights pull away. Seconds. Not even minutes. Seconds.

The man at the little ticket window was already sliding the shutter down.

"Last one, love," he said, not unkindly. "Nothing till half six tomorrow."

"Brilliant," Gloria said, and stood there a moment with her mouth open.

She went back outside, where the wind was coming off the sea and doing its best to take her hair with it. A woman locking up a chippy saw her looking lost and took pity.

"Need a cab? Bernie's still out, probably. He's slow but he turns up."

"How much to the nearest hotel that isn't a fortune?"

The woman winced. "There's nothing in town tonight, not with the darts on. Tell you what, the bingo hall stays open past midnight. It's warm, there's a machine for coffee. Better than standing on the seafront till Bernie remembers his van."

"That's... a genuine option, you think?"

"Better than my option, which was sitting on my freezer." She gave directions with a jerk of her chin. "Can't miss it. Sign's got a letter out. Been like that two years."

She was right. Gloria found the place by the glow at the end of a dead street. The neon read BINGE, the N flickering like it had a nervous condition. Under the glow sat a banner that said OPEN LATE THURSDAYS, which she supposed tonight was.

She pushed the door and warm air hit her, along with the smell of old carpets and something artificial trying to be vanilla. A hall full of vinyl chairs in rows, most of them empty. A worn counter with a man behind it, mid-thirties, filling in a crossword.

"Evening," he said. "You're either very keen or very lost."

"Missed my train by about four seconds."

"Ouch. That's a new one. We mostly get regulars and people hiding from the weather." He waved her in. "Coffee machine works if you thump it. I'm Kenneth, by the way."

"Gloria." She fed the machine a coin, thumped it, and got a cup of something hot and brown. Then she noticed she wasn't the only customer.

Near the front row sat a man, mid-forties maybe, in a jacket that looked like it belonged to a better job. He had a plastic cup of something and he was watching the big empty board like it might show numbers anyway.

"He won't bite," Kenneth said, following her look. "That's Eddie. Comes in most nights."

Gloria drifted over and sat a few chairs along from him, close enough to be sociable, far enough to be polite. "Is this seat taken?"

"It's a bingo hall at eleven at night," Eddie said. "Every seat is taken by nobody."

She laughed, more than the joke deserved. Something about his voice. Low and flat, like he was reading a report, but there was a weight under it.

"What brings you here every night, then?" she asked.

He turned the cup in his hands. "I inspect bridges. For the council. I've done it nineteen years." He said it the way other people say a diagnosis. "I come here to think about them. It's quiet. Nobody talks to me. The numbers board is like a puzzle I don't have to solve."

"That's either the saddest or the most sensible thing I've heard all year."

"Both, probably." He looked at her properly then. "You're the one from the gig. The singer."

"You came?"

"Kenneth said there was live music up the road. I went. You were good. The second song especially."

"Well, thank you. Most nights I'd have missed the train on purpose after a crowd like that, but..." She trailed off, gesturing at nothing.

They sat in the warm hum of the place. The sign outside buzzed through the window. Somewhere a fridge clicked on and off.

"Do you ever do anything reckless?" she asked him, before she could stop herself. "You seem like someone who checks things twice."

"I check things four times. Cracks, rust, the waterline, the bolts. Then I write it down." He took a sip. "Nineteen years of writing it down. I'd like to feel something again, honestly. Anything with an edge to it." Then he glanced at her. "Why do you ask?"

"Because I don't, either." She wrapped both hands around the coffee cup. "I've been safe my whole life. Especially, you know. In that part of things."

"In bed."

"In bed. Yes!" She felt her face go warm and kept going anyway, which was new for her. "There's something I've never said out loud. I've always wondered what it would be like to just... not be in charge. For once. To let someone else run it and trust them with it."

The word she wasn't saying was dominated, and she suspected he heard it anyway.

Eddie was quiet for a while. The N in the sign buzzed, went out, came back.

"You'd have to pick the right person for that," he said at last. "Someone careful. Someone who checks things four times." He said it without smiling, which somehow made it land harder.

"Have you ever done anything like that?" she asked.

"Never done anything at all, really. That's the point."

A door at the back of the hall opened and a woman in her thirties came out, coat half on, keys in her hand. She stopped when she saw them.

"Oh, you're still here, Eddie. And a stranger. I'm Molly, I do Thursdays." She looked between the two of them with open interest. "What are we all talking about, sitting in the dark like a support group?"

"Nothing," Gloria said, too fast.

"That was not nothing. That was a conversation with a temperature." Molly pulled a chair around and sat in it backwards, arms folded over the backrest. "Right. Someone catch me up."

Kenneth called over from the counter, "The singer missed her train."

"And that explains the sitting in the dark how?"

Gloria looked at Eddie. Eddie looked at his cup. The broken sign hummed.

"It doesn't," she said, and Molly grinned like someone who had just found a story.

Molly wasn't one to let a silence sit. She spun the chair a quarter turn, then back again, and looked at Gloria with the patience of someone who read people for a living, or at least for Thursdays.

"You're blushing," Molly said. "At a bingo hall. At eleven at night."

"It's warm in here."

"It's freezing in here. Kenneth won't put the heaters on because of the electric." She turned to Eddie. "What did you say to her?"

"Nothing," Eddie said.

"See, that's the same voice Gloria just used, so I know it's something." Molly stood and went to the counter, leaned on it, and looked at Kenneth. "Last game's done, love. Board's off at midnight. You can put the numbers away."

Kenneth finished his crossword square first, then capped his pen. "Already off. Been off since half ten. Nobody's played since the Hendersons left."

"So we're all just sitting here in the dark for the atmosphere."

"That's the general idea, yeah."

Gloria looked at her coffee. She'd said more to Eddie in an hour than she'd said to anyone in a month, and she still hadn't said the actual thing. She wondered if the actual thing was going to sit in her chest all the way back to Steiner tomorrow, unspent, like the six dates of the tour had been. Twenty-two years of playing to rooms and never once saying the plain sentence.

Eddie set his cup down on the floor, carefully, so it wouldn't tip.

"All right," he said. "Since we're being interrogated."