The Tunnel Took Nine Minutes

The Hartfield tunnel is 900 metres long. At motorway speed you are through it in about forty seconds. I commute through it twice a day and its rhythm is stitched into me: lights-flicker-lights, out.

On a Tuesday evening the rhythm broke. Nothing dramatic inside — same sodium lights ticking past, same lane discipline. If anything it was too calm: I remember noticing the radio had gone to static and that the tunnel felt long, the way a held breath feels long, and my ears popped twice.

I came out into rain that had not been falling when I went in — soaked roads, wipers-on-full rain, established rain. The dashboard clock had jumped from 18:22 to 18:31. My phone, in its cradle, agreed with the dashboard and had helpfully rerouted around 'unexpected delays'. My wristwatch — mechanical, my grandfather's — said 18:23, and for the rest of the evening it stayed stubbornly eight minutes slow against every screen in my house, having been dead accurate for years.

Forty seconds inside, nine minutes outside. I did the sums at the next services with a coffee shaking slightly in its cup.

One more thing, and it is the part I would delete if I could, because it turns an oddity into something else. A blue hatchback entered the tunnel behind me — close, annoying-close, lights in my mirror the whole approach. No lights followed me out. I sat at the services watching the tunnel mouth through the rain for twenty minutes. Traffic dribbled through. No blue hatchback.

There was no incident report that night. The tunnel has cameras at both ends and I have thought many times about making a nuisance of myself until someone checks whether entries matched exits between 18:22 and 18:31. I have not done it. I am not sure which answer I am more afraid of.