‘Fair hair?’
‘Yes. That’s right. He’s your man.’
A beat. I stare at him. If this is true then a picture is emerging.
‘The same guy that confronted the kids. The… scar on his hand?’
‘Wouldn’t know about that. Didn’t get that close. Wouldn’t dare. But he has a way about him. He hangs about. You know what I mean?’
I don’t. Not really. But this is exactly what I wanted to hear. Is it too good to be true? Is he feeding me exactly what I want? What could he possibly want in return if not money? I’m not sure whether him turning it down made me trust him more or less. He holds my hand over the table and continues. His weathered green eyes and quivering mouth look right at me. He’s one of those men who produce too much saliva, so every so often he sucks some of it back in from the corners of his mouth.
‘Over six foot. Fair hair. Always heads back to that building. The, errr… the, err…’
‘Waterway Apartments?’
‘No. No, not that one.’
‘Not that one?’ Shit. It will be back to the drawing board if that’s true. If he can be trusted.
‘What’s the one opposite the Riverview Apartments?’
‘Waterway Apartments. I promise you. That’s what it’s called.’
‘No. No it’s not. Oh, hang on. Maybe…’ He draws in the air and his fingers rise like he’s conducting an unseen orchestra, trying to get a sense of something. He shifts in his seat, holding his head, closing his eyes and then finally he snaps his fingers. Then he shouts, excitedly, like he’s had some scientific Eureka moment to do with dark matter. ‘Yes! That’s it. Waterway. I’m sorry, love. That’s it!’
I breathe again, I am on the right path. I knew it, I felt it. I want to hug him. But I’m not sure I should get quite that close.
He continues: ‘Yes. I heard a noise, reckon he broke in through her back window. Then not long after, he was brazen enough to come out of her front door. If I trusted the police as far as I could throw them, or they trusted me, that’s what I’d tell them, Scouts’ honour. Then I saw him walk away back to his building, all casual like. I tell you what, he was in and out of there in less than five minutes I’d say. He didn’t hang about. You wouldn’t credit it, would you, that it could all happen that quick? He knew what he needed to do. So he did it. No big drama about it. The things some people do these days. And why? I dunno. You’d scarcely believe it.’
But I did believe it. I like him now too. He was straight up.
‘OK, lovely. I do hate to ask but thinking about it… if you did have a tenner that would in fact go an awful long way for me.’ Hang dog look.
With some reservations I handed it over. Hoping for all I was worth that this wasn’t all about the money. That what he said was true.
Boom boom boom de boom. The gang’s music rose again as I stood to leave. Without thinking, I took a detour to where they were standing.
I’m not sure what I’m doing. They look up at me and I look back.
‘Yeah, what the fuck do you want? Who rattled your cage?’
Maybe I was emboldened by the news I’d just heard. Maybe I simply snapped, but next I did something that seems strange to me. Somewhere in the Venn diagram of brave and stupid. I pull my foot back and kick the chair out from underneath the lad with the ‘Hoverboard’. His arse hits the floor. It feels very satisfying.
My fists are clenched and I’m shouting, pointing at each of them. I stamp my feet, reading them the Riot Act. They’re too stunned to move as I bring my fist down on a table next to one of them and then take a step towards another. I lean down to eyeball him, take a deep breath and keep shouting. Snarling. In his face.
I watch myself. Not quite believing it’s me that’s doing this. Hardly hearing the words that are coming out of me. It’s as if I’m standing next to myself, looking up at me in amazement. Whose is this voice and where does it come from? A couple of them grab their bags and leave. But that doesn’t sate me. I keep on at them. It’s not quite heroic. I must look like a wild animal. I shout and snarl. Turning the air blue. Giving all I’ve got.
People change. What a strange thing I’m becoming.
12 days till it comes. 4 p.m.
RW – Turdus iliacus – Inner city – Good vis, wind light, 16 deg – 2 flock – Healthy colouring, strong dark chequers against a rich white breast, male – 14 cm approx. – Shy, twitchy.
The redwings are early. Very early. It’s getting a little darker in the mornings. A bit colder at night. But I wouldn’t have expected to see one until early November.
But there he is. The noble redwing. A true thrush. Staring back at me. He can’t stay still. He probably feels a bit out of place. In plain sight. Perched on a tree. He seems somehow nervous. Is he lost? He can feel my eyes on him, I think. That’s what I think. He knows. He knows how close I am.
I haven’t done any work for about fifteen minutes. I’m sure they’ve noticed. Maybe I’m on strike, I haven’t decided yet. But my arms are folded and I’m leaning back in my seat. Brazenly watching the world go by. Not a single fuck given.
Watching the light play against the leaves. Examining the redwings. Making rare use of my office window.
I wonder whether I’ve had my hand up for the last ten minutes. I’ve been miles away; I wonder what my body’s doing. Do you ever have these thoughts or is it just me? You pan back for a second. Become hyper-aware of your body. Get out of your head and think some left-field thoughts.
Like, if I just got up now and threw my table over and then blew a raspberry, would anyone do anything? Would they just carry on? If I got some scissors and threw them at Deborah, my boss, right now, would she tear off her shirt and fight me? What if I just went ‘mahhhhhhhh’, quietly, in a dull monotone until I ran out of breath, and then started again, and kept doing that for an hour, what would everyone do?
Do you ever have these kind of thoughts? Maybe it’s just me. It’s just me, isn’t it? Oh, I am so bored. I want to get back to my flat. Back to my watching. To try to find this guy. Instead I’m just sitting. Here.
I turn my eyes to Phil. He said he’d been watching me. At the Tube. That time. So now I’m going to get my own back. Have a good look at him. Try to work him out. I’m good at that. Working people out. I think I am anyway.
His bottom lip sticks out. He’s not got an underbite or anything. He just does that when he’s concentrating. He sniffs. Scratches his nose. His mouth turns into a frown and the space between his eyebrows crinkles as he taps away at his computer, concentrating. He’s ordering stationery today.
He asked, ‘Anyone want anything, stationery-wise?’
A voice said, ‘Big bag of Mars bars?’
A single laugh came from somewhere.
Followed only by the tap-tap of nearby laptop percussion.
‘No, stationery wise,’ he said.
And the clock ticked on.
Yes, he’s ordering stationery today. But he’s making it look like he’s putting up a firewall to protect government secrets. He’s trying to radiate demonstrative intelligence and import. It’s not working.
He sweeps back his hair and pushes up his glasses. Plain black frames. Then he looks up. Catching my eye. And stays there. Me looking at him while he looks at me while I look at him. He is expressionless. Impressive. I’m good at watching and being impassive. I practised most of my young life. But he’s doing very well. I can sense he’s thinking about smiling. It’s telegraphed in the space between his cheekbones and eyes. But he doesn’t. It’s like he’s trying to intimidate me. In the workplace.
People don’t generally look at each other. Not in the eye. Certainly not like this. Not holding this kind of gaze. It makes people uncomfortable. Not just the people involved either. Do a sociological experiment. Get two people to stare at each other and see what happens to the air in the room. See how it changes. Get a thermometer out, see the temperature rise. And watch everyone tense up. Everyone in the room. They’ll kind of
half cringe. Watch them. Their fists will gently clench. Readying themselves for trouble. It’s challenging. Threatening. It’s primitive human instinct. We are all animals, after all.
But Phil doesn’t get nervous. Not today anyway. He keeps looking at me. As I look at him. He can’t help himself. How extraordinary.
‘How you getting on with the strategy for the HR Directors training objectives?’ Deborah says, floating the words malignantly in my direction. Somehow smug.
It makes me drop my gaze. I lose. I lose to Phil. I hate that. I look back at my screen. She waits for an answer.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ I say. It just comes out. Very quickly. As if in a single word.
‘Sorry?’ she says. Smiling, because she doesn’t know what else to do.
‘Yeah. Good,’ I say.
Her head shakes and she goes back to whatever the hell she’s doing. Unsure if what she thinks has just happened has actually happened.
‘Good,’ she says. Now fully resolved that she must have been imagining it.
I’m going to have to watch myself. My impulse control is getting very weak. The gap between think and do is almost nothing with me at the moment. I’m going to have to watch that.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Phil is still watching. He doesn’t even crack a smile. He hasn’t moved a muscle. He’s so still. I can sense him looking. But I don’t want to let him know I’m aware of him. I don’t want to let him know that I know that he’s watching. But I know. Oh yes. Because I’m watching him.
I think about the girl on the Missing poster again.
His index finger rises to his lips. And he breathes.
9 days till it comes.
The Situationalists say there is no such thing as personality. I’ll tell you what I mean by that. In the late sixties, after much work had been done on analysing personality, by the pre-eminent psychologists of the day, Walter Mischel posited the theory that our personality was completely defined by situation. He wasn’t alone, many joined him in this belief.
Yes, our levels of intelligence remain constant. We look the same no matter who we are talking to, but fundamentally, they believed, we are more a product of the situation we are being put in, right at that moment, than anything else.
One could be seen as an entirely different person with one’s mother, for instance, than with a work colleague. Our choices would be different, the way we sit, maybe even the way we breathe. So, the Situationalists argued, can we then really be said to have anything approaching a consistent personality? They believed not.
Five days ago, as the man child with the ‘Hoverboard’ lay on his arse and the lad with the phone stood up to me, fists clenched by his sides, his face scrunched to its full level of meanness, I felt like a different person.
Maybe the situation took over and dictated what was to happen next. His brow pushing down over his eyes almost, his jaw fully tightened, he wanted to go for me, tear into me. But he didn’t. This little bruiser let the situation get the better of him. He knew that with enough witnesses and people knowing he was a local lad he wouldn’t be hard to find. So he just sat back down, and turned his music off.
The other patrons looked on. Their morning busted open by my outburst. They smiled as I left, but I don’t know whether they were just as scared of me as they were of the gang. It wasn’t like anyone was breaking into spontaneous applause.
I grabbed my bag, paid and left. Thompson was gone by that point, he shuffled off as soon as he got his money. I strode back. Adrenaline up, head held high. And felt their eyes on me as I walked to the entrance to my flat.
After that kind of thing you really wish you could storm away out into the world and walk off the tension of the moment for a while. I’d certainly have looked more heroic if I had walked off into the sunset, rather than a matter of twenty paces to where my electronic key fob let me into the hallway. Through which I could still see the onlookers in the Z Café watching me go. Thinking, who is she? What on earth does she want? Where the hell did she come from?
Well, now they knew, just upstairs actually. What was it people say about shitting on your own doorstep? That low profile I’d been planning to keep hasn’t come to fruition yet.
The last few days have helped. I haven’t come perilously close to any dust-ups. I haven’t wandered into any abandoned buildings. Nor have I met any new friends from the neighbourhood. No, I haven’t spoken to anyone in fact. Not even at work. I’ve kept my eyes locked on my screen. Giving nothing away.
I’ve kept myself to myself and waited till I could get back to my spot and keep my eyes peeled. I’ve barely even spoken to Aiden. We communicate in sighs and grunts, and if you’re thinking that’s some sign that we know each other so well that we’ve got beyond language, that we’re somehow post all that, in a good way, well it’s not that. We’re strangers. Ghosts to each other. Hardly aware of one another’s presence in rooms.
That feeling you have, the way the air changes when you know someone has entered the room behind you, we don’t have that. I’m deaf to his heartbeat and he’s deep under. His mind is in another place. He’s fallen further into his book and hasn’t got any time for me or any of the living world for that matter.
I wonder sometimes whether our indifference will turn into hostility. I think perhaps one night it did. But it was in the dark. In the sleeping hours, the magic ones between three and five. I can’t be sure if I imagined it. In my slumber.
When I woke. In the dark. I felt his weight on me. He had his thighs either side of my body. Holding me down. He was muttering to himself. He must’ve been dreaming. Must’ve been. Though it was almost pitch black, some light spilt in under the blind and showed me his face. Crumpled with anger. And his knuckles.
He pulled his arm back, fist clenched into a tight ball. His wrist, tight. His bones all knotted up and holding me down. I yelled for him to stop. But his hand went back and back. I’d never seen him like that before. As an aggressor. My husband. His body stretched to its full size. He looked huge and he groaned in distress as he prepared to bring his fist crashing down on me. Bearing down on me. His muttering getting louder. I yelled for him to wake up. He must’ve been dreaming.
Then as I closed my eyes and waited for it. Moaning, in fear, in the night-time. His other hand at the base of my neck. Then it came down. Gently tapping the pillow next to me. Like he was only playing. Then he rolled over, sighed and muttered himself back to rest.
I didn’t even bring it up the next day. I didn’t know how to. And he didn’t. So I didn’t.
He must’ve been dreaming. He must’ve been dreaming.
Right?
But dream or not. He’s changing too. I don’t know what’s happening to him. Sometimes he scares me a little. Like Phil does.
But I’m OK. I can look after myself. I’m self-sufficient.
I’ve got my tip-offs and my project. My information and my grid to keep me company. Keep me out of trouble. I’ve had a lot of watching to do.
I’m not going to say it hasn’t been frustrating. The first day was easy. Some small sightings, nothing big, but I’m resilient. I’m always thinking about tomorrow, about what might come then. About possibilities and new evidence. You need patience in the hide. You need a different mindset, you need to be hopeful and prepared because the moment something rare sticks its head out you have to be ready to see it. Otherwise, what was all the waiting for. I repeat my new mantra.
Stay awake. Stay conscious. Stay sane.
Let me fill you in a little. I’ve been glued to the window. No chance to even write new entries in this journal. Too busy. But now I’ve got a bit of breathing space. So let me get you up to speed with my last five days in the hide…
Part Six:
The Big Stay
Waiting for Jonny and Joseph’s Hands
Day 1: In short, I got nothing.
No blinds came up in flats four, seven, eleven or eighteen.
I got home from work to catch Jonny, our angry
Skyper, and our other main suspect, Joseph, him of the meticulously clean bike, both rear their heads, but their hands were nowhere to be seen.
Jonny’s girlfriend, Lina, is away so he ordered a pizza. Joseph wandered around a little in there and read off his iPad. The whole day did not make good viewing.
My eye was drawn to Tippi and Janet for about twenty minutes when they attached a small net to their kitchen table and played a lively game of ping-pong. Janet won, 2–1 in games, in a hard-fought encounter. It was 21–17 in the decider, an excellent game, with Janet coming out the victor despite Tippi attempting to target Janet’s weak backhand. They hugged afterwards. But Tippi secretly stored up a bit of resentment for another time.
Day 2: Flat 11. Blind open. Vincent.
Day two started at 7 a.m. with great success.
With one pull on the cord of his blinds Vincent revealed himself to me. Quite literally. In nothing but a thin dressing gown, which constantly billowed up and did little to preserve his modesty, he ironed his shirts, and boxer shorts would you believe. He then swiftly changed into the last pair he ironed. Hmm toasty. Momentarily giving anyone outside, who happened to be watching, a full glimpse of arse.
Vincent has a belt holster, which he slips his phone into like its a deadly weapon he owns a license to wield. Vincent talks to himself constantly. I thought he had someone else in there for a good hour, a hostage tied up next to the toilet perhaps, out of view. But no. Vincent talks to himself.
I’ve always thought it extraordinary how people find others talking to themselves so odd. As if people should be too private to reveal they have an inner life. Terrified what people might think if they knew they had actual thoughts. So scared of the so-called ‘mad’. Of looking it themselves. Of the man muttering his shopping list to himself at the meat counter. As if every syllable could be the prelude to some indiscriminate machete based killing spree. Rather than just talking with no one else around.
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