Jam by Jo Cannon

Gail wasn’t surprised. She had tried different routes, left home earlier, but her journey to work had grown steadily longer. Accidents or weather fluctuations made some days worse than others. She began to take food and books to pass time in jams. Bad days became bad weeks.

And then the traffic stopped.

The first few hours were difficult. Gail fizzed with irritation, worrying about work and whether she had locked her flat. Her manager, on the mobile, was resigned. Hardly anyone had made it to the office that morning.

At first the traffic inched forwards, but soon even this ceased and she turned off the engine. A helicopter circled overhead as she tuned the radio to the traffic news. Across the country all vehicles were stationary and no one was going anywhere. As the day wore on people got out of their cars, proffered chewing gum and exchanged information. Children who had walked past the jam on their way to school found it still there when they came home. By evening entrepreneurs were weaving between vehicles to sell over-priced snacks and hot drinks to stranded commuters. As the sun melted behind the squat grey buildings that lined the ring road, vehicles huddled like animals, their occupants invisible behind misted glass. Gail’s car filled with darkness as though with water and she was overwhelmed with loneliness.

            The nights that followed were more tolerable. She was prepared. She listened to the radio; traffic news had become local, then national, news. After midnight the World Service talked endlessly about the jam, which had spread from country to country. Nothing else was happening because no one could get to work. Journalists, politicians, criminals and celebrities were stranded, impotent. Wars stopped. International finance stopped. For long stretches of time the radio played only uplifting music or old dramas.

People wandered from car to car to pass time. Friendships and enmities formed and reformed. In the heightened emotional climate people fell in love, fought and betrayed each other. Rumours of events elsewhere in the jam circulated: rapes and robberies at gunpoint, starvation and anarchy – each more frightening than the last.  But Gail’s stretch of road was quiet, her main hardship boredom, which lay on her shoulders like a wet coat.

In the car adjacent to Gail’s a man sat reading. He rarely looked up and never left his car. She studied his profile furtively and wondered about the other half of his face, hidden like the dark side of the moon. At last he slammed the book shut and wound down his window.

‘Have you got an A-Z?’

 Gail invited him to sit in the passenger seat of her car. Now she could see his right profile, which she liked as much as the left. When he turned to her and smiled the symmetry of the two halves pleased her even more. Tim ransacked her glove compartment for maps and then collected handfuls from his own. Together they unpacked and studied every map they possessed. First, brooding over the city A-Z, they devised intricate escape routes. When this palled they examined ordnance survey maps, pointing out childhood holiday spots and homes of friends. As they talked the contours moved, pulsed and formed pictures. They pored over charts of countries they had never seen, planning emigrations and new lives. And then, with maps plastered over the windows for privacy, they explored the cartography of each other’s bodies.

Nights were different now. Sometimes the sky was black, depthless and impassive; other nights, stars wheeled across like reflections from a mirror ball. Neon light flickered on their faces as they talked. When the streetlights clicked off they were still making love. The World Service burbled in the background as they slipped through the cracks between night and morning.  

The windscreen wipers whispered: life, life, life.

It isn’t easy to give birth beneath a blanket on the back seat of a car. Assisted by another motorist, a nurse in former life, Gail stoically delivered three sturdy children, each a year apart. For a few months they fluttered at her breast like milk-crazed moths, until hardened enough to join the melee. Nor is it easy to raise a family in such cramped conditions. The car seethed like an over-stocked carp pool. Gail and Tim learned to dodge flailing limbs and small hard heads. The children seemed to secrete a sticky glue that coated the car interior and everything they touched, while crushed crisps formed a carpet ankle deep. Other parents were raising families in cars nearby. There were sleepovers and parties: you squashed ten children in a vehicle, pushed in five more small ones, then stood back and watched it rock. Kids squabbled over sausages and hit one another, while dismembered Barbie dolls flew from windows and piled up outside. Chronically sleep deprived, Gail and Tim began to look like raddled and jaded thrill-seekers.

            Then, between one breath and the next, the children collected rulers and pencils and leaping like porpoises, went to school. They didn’t come back. Although she knew before they were born this would happen, Gail was lost for a while. They were good children: they sent texts from all over the world and flew overhead in aeroplanes from time to time.

One night she woke Tim: ‘Listen!’

Cool and clear as a blackbird in a cathedral, their youngest child was singing on the radio.

Meanwhile the city, bereft of workers, decayed. Houses and shops near the ring road lost value; owners sold up, boarded windows and moved away. Rats multiplied in the rubbish. Larger animals moved around quietly in shadows. No-one sat on car roofs through warm summer nights anymore. Vigilante groups formed to protect whatever property or children remained.

 Usually Gail and Tim sat in her car together, but sometimes Tim preferred to stretch out alone in his. One day after he had been gone some time, Gail glanced across and noticed his face altered, as though with pain. He had moved his rear-view mirror and seemed to be watching the woman in the car behind. His lips moved silently as though he was daydreaming. Gail went over to the woman’s car and peered in. She wasn’t beautiful, but Gail could imagine that beauty might move in someone who looked at her. The woman smiled. Gail smiled back uncertainly, returned to her car and waited.

Waiting, she held her breath. She held it so hard her breathing stopped. The hiss and whisper of air through her lungs that she had heard without knowing every day of her life, hushed. Her heart, as though gripped in a fist, stopped contracting.  Blood jammed up the little roads of her veins. In the silence she could hear tiny creaks in muscles deprived of oxygen. The sound a heart makes when it is not beating, but waiting. You can live like that, but not long. Her mouth, dry because no saliva flowed, formed words that no one could hear.

            ‘Don’t tell me’

            Don’t tell me. Because then. Because.

At last Tim got out of his car and back into Gail’s, sighed and rested his face on her shoulder. Air warmed her nostrils, whistled and gurgled through her lungs. Stagnant blood began to flow and her heart to pump again. And the first breath hurt like a razor down her chest: a violent, scarlet grief she would never express all the days of her life.

Day and night.  Time binding and unbinding. All the ingredients of life.

Some hours expanded to fill a lifetime, others passed so quickly that meals and conversations flicked by like scenes from a train window. The space between days grew shorter all the time. Tim’s hair turned grey, then white. His eyes shone with new glamour, but his edges had blurred. Sometimes it seemed to Gail that her name had slipped into a temporarily irrecoverable space. He searched their maps, unfolding and refolding the complex creases, to find the right one, the first one, when their destination had been clear, the journey’s end assured. His fragmented conversations fell to the ground like one-winged birds. Gail smoothed the lines from his forehead. She whispered their children’s names, talked of things they had seen, and pointed out aeroplanes passing overhead.

Still there was enough: oil rainbows on the road, windows laced with frost. They watched the moon’s cool slide across the sky, the sun’s bloody birth. More than enough, there was abundance: the best of all their days.

Gail woke one morning to new sounds: the throaty rasp of old engines, small explosions from rusty exhausts, traffic noise. People shouted and sounded their horns. Tim’s line of traffic was moving, and he with it. At first, confused, she thought her car was going backwards. Tim turned to her, his face through the glass anguished, as his car picked up speed. She ran along beside, banged on the roof, tried to wrench open the door. But it all happened too fast. She was unfit, she couldn’t breathe.

She was old.

She glimpsed things she’d not noticed before: a birthmark beneath his thinning hair; dents on the bumper, as the car pulled away.

Now the days rolled on, faster and faster. Veins reared up on the backs of her hands, while her fingers twisted in stiff knots. Traffic to her right flowed freely. Inside a watchful stone of self waited, unchanged.

So the day she woke to an empty road ahead, she was ready. The key grated in the ignition but the engine fired at the third attempt. She wiggled the stiff gears and switched the lights on, then off, then on again. Her feet trembled a little on the pedals as the car began to move. The morning sky was a pale blue dome. Traffic lights changed up and down in an empty city. Gail was a careful driver, but for the first time in her life pushed the accelerator hard to the floor, feeling the wheels slip and the engine whine.

She knew she could catch him at the lights, or the next glorious, dazzling traffic jam.