Lights Across the Street

For nineteen years, Greta Ahlberg had worked the night shift, and for most of those years there had been one other light on the street at four in the morning, and it had belonged to a man she had never met. The light was the bakery. Lindqvist's, on the corner of Vine and Carrow, a narrow brick shopfront with the ovens at the back, and from the third-floor window of the care home where Greta did her nights, she had watched that light come on at four o'clock with a regularity she had come to depend upon without ever quite admitting she depended upon it. The night shift was a particular kind of solitude. The world divided itself, Greta had learned, into the people who were awake at four a.m. and the people who were not, and the people who were not could never entirely understand the ones who were. There was a loneliness to the small hours that was not unpleasant — she had chosen the nights, after all, had chosen them again and again over thirty years of nursing — but it was real, and it was best survived by knowing you were not the only lit window in the dark. So she had her residents, and her rounds, and the slow careful business of keeping the frail safe through the part of the night when the frail most often slipped away. And she had the bakery light. At four it came on. By half four she could sometimes see him moving, a shape behind the glass, and a little after five the first warmth would start, and on still nights when she stepped out for air she had, more than once, caught the smell of it carried up the empty street — bread, the plainest and most reassuring smell in the world — and had stood on the care home step and breathed it and felt, obscurely, kept company. She did not know his name. She knew it was a *his* only from the shape behind the glass. She had built nothing elaborate around him; Greta was sixty-three and not given to elaboration. She simply knew that there was another person who lived in the four o'clock world, and that he was forty feet away across a dark street, and that this had quietly mattered to her for the better part of two decades. Then, in November, two things happened close together. The first was that Greta retired. It was time; her knees had been saying so for a while, and the home had a good young woman ready to step up, and there was a small flat with her name on it and a pension that would, carefully managed, do. She worked her last night shift on a Friday, and on the Saturday she woke at noon into the strange flat daylight of a life that no longer had a four o'clock in it, and she discovered, lying there, that she missed the bakery light with an intensity that genuinely surprised her. She had retired from the work. She had not understood, until it was gone, that she had also retired from the company. The second thing happened on the following Tuesday, and it happened because the whole street lost power. It went at twenty past four in the morning — Greta knew the time because she was awake, of course she was awake, nineteen years did not switch off because a pension had started — and the dark that came down was total, the streetlights gone, every window black. Except that Greta, standing at her own window now in the small retired flat, saw something she had never seen in nineteen years of watching that corner. She saw the bakery door open. She saw a man come out onto the pavement in the pitch dark, and stand there, and look up and down the lightless street with the particular helplessness of someone whose entire morning has just been unplugged — and then she saw him go back inside, and a moment later a softer light appeared in the bakery window. Not electric. Candlelight, or a lamp. The warm uneven gold of a flame. And Greta Ahlberg, who had watched that light from a distance for nineteen years and had never once crossed the street, found herself reaching for her coat. She could not have entirely said why. The sensible account would be that a power cut at four a.m. is a small emergency, that an old neighbour might want help, that this was simply what you did. But the truer account, the one she only half admitted as she did up her buttons in the dark, was this: for nineteen years she had been kept company by a light, and now the light was in trouble, and she had just spent four lonely days discovering exactly how much that distant company had been worth — and she was sixty-three, and newly aware of how much of the night was left, and tired, suddenly and completely, of watching the only other lit window in the world from forty feet away. She went down her stairs in the dark. She crossed the empty street. And she knocked, for the first time in nineteen years, on the door of Lindqvist's bakery, where a man she had never met was standing among his cooling bread by the light of a single flame, and looked up, startled, at the sound.