Watching

This is a short story I wrote for my first Tutor Marked Assignment for my Open University Creative Writing module (A215).  We had to do a prompted freewrite on a choice of titles then develop a story of 750 words from that.  I chose ‘Walking At Night’.

I have been walking the streets at night since I was a small child; introduced to it by my mother who used to love to walk past people’s houses where the lights were on but the curtains left open, bleeding lamplight into the street outside and providing a vista of bright colour, or cool, calm sophistication to anyone who cared to look.

            I was embarrassed by her of course, by the way she would slow down and make no effort to disguise her nosiness, ensuring that she saw as much of the room as possible.  I was too young to realise that the people inside couldn’t see us, blinded as they were to the darkness which enveloped us by the very brightness which attracted us, like moths, to their homes.

            Mother said that she liked to see how people arranged their rooms, to take inspiration from their choice of furniture and colour schemes.  I, however, started to look at the people inside.  I grew to enjoy seeing a snapshot of their lives, like a tableau or a window-display in a department store; grown-ups sitting companionably talking, children playing with each other, whole families sitting together around a table, sharing not only their meal but also the story of each other’s day.

            These scenes, which I watched with an increasing sense of longing, were so different from the reality of our own home where, because it was just Mother and me, there were no large family gatherings around the table and no siblings to play and fight with.  Whatever inspiration Mother had from looking through those windows, it never did transfer to our home which remained dark and dingy, the shabby pieces of uncomfortable furniture and our few clothes all smelled of the damp that inhabited the walls.

Many years later, though Mother is long dead, I still like to walk through the streets at night and to look through people’s windows.  I try to stay in the shadows as much as I can so as not to draw attention to myself.  There is an undercurrent of danger in the darkness these days, which wasn’t there when I was a child.  The smells that fill my nostrils are more mechanical, the acrid whiff of engine oil and wet concrete has replaced the floral scents from my childhood.  The rustling sound behind a hedge is unlikely to be the innocent scuttling of a hedgehog or field-mouse.

            I sense, rather than hear, movement ahead of me up the street, which causes me to startle and pause, my breath catching in my chest.  I feel the familiar surge of adrenaline course through my body as my heart begins to race and I hear my pulse and the swish of my own blood coursing through my veins.  My instincts are validated when I see a distant figure passing through the golden glow from a street-light, approaching me steadily.  I press myself against the hedge beside me, which, to my relief, yields accommodatingly to envelop my form within its thin branches.

            I can hear footsteps now as the walker comes closer, striding briskly and with purpose, the beat of footfall resonating slightly, echoed by the surrounding buildings and now joined by staccato breath sounds, audible because the exertion of walking quickly, but when combined with the noise of tread, amplified to a clamour by my hormone-induced heightened sense of awareness, and I know that they’re almost upon me.

            Taking a deep breath, I step out of the shadows and register the look of shock, quickly replaced by terror, as she sees me materialise in her path.  Putting my hands quickly across her mouth, before she can do more than gasp in shock, I feel the warmth of her body as I wrap my other arm around her and drag her backwards into the alley behind me.

            She won’t be going back to the house which I have been watching for the last few weeks, which will be bathed in the warm glow of lamp-light and where her family will await the return of the wife and mother who will never arrive.  Instead, she will be joining Mother, and the others, all of whom are to blame, just as she is, for their own destiny.  After all, as Mother always used to say to me: ‘Son, if they didn’t want people to watch what they were doing, they would have drawn the curtains’.