Sean Parker

 It is too warm. I cannot sleep. Every time I close my eyes what appear to be almost formless avalanches fall downwards to greet me. All different, each seen for only a couple of seconds before switching to another, like a badly cut film. They fall towards me in all the colours of the rainbow from dark grey to black. Mud, slime, soil, rock. I think I cry.

It is no use, I decide as I give up on sleep and make myself a cup of coffee. I’ll have to go and find them again. I need them.

###

Morning eventually arrives. I dress as Mr. Nobody and leave my hole. The streets have been baked by the inescapable heat. Litter lies entombed in dried mud as hard as concrete. The city is dusty and thirsting for rain. The early morning people are wilting before the day even starts on them. I trudge amongst them, blending in perfectly.

The library where he works resembles a greenhouse, more glass than brick. White sunlight reflects off it in huge bright sheets but it still manages to look dingy, as if his personality has infested the entire building. I find an empty bench and merge with the surroundings. He arrives within a few minutes, looking tired and rumpled. Then something unexpected happens. He notices me.

Just as the automatic doors are swinging open to admit him, he looks back. I am too late to control a full-bodied nervous twitch, but, that done with, I sit impassive. He stares at me, for perhaps a second or maybe two, but that is enough. I can almost see the cogs turning in his brain as he attempts to recall why I look familiar to him. An expression of worry settles on his face, as well it should. Then he turns and enters the building, shaking his head.

Now that I have made contact again, I feel better. I leave him to his dreary job and kill the hours as best I can.

###

 Late afternoon. He leaves the library at five-thirty on the dot. He walks quickly, sparing a quick glance at the bench where he sighted me earlier. Of course, I’m not there. I am again just one of the crowd, on my way from somewhere insignificant to somewhere unimportant. It takes him, and me, around twenty minutes to reach his small terraced house. I wait out of sight as he unlocks the door, goes in and slams out the rest of the world. As afternoon fades into evening and the brightness dulls, I watch as he sends out messages using the lights in various rooms. I have never been able to de-code them. I suspect that a watcher would be needed at the back of the house also, to compile the sequence into something that could be understood. The message ends with just one downstairs light, visible from the sides of carelessly drawn curtains, augmented by the flickering of a television screen.

Soon the dark arrives and, in conjunction with the orange glare thrown out by the street-lights, my features are sufficiently shadowed and discoloured for me to feel safe. When he eventually leaves his house, dressed as anonymously as myself, he walks briskly in the direction of her flat. Almost silently, I follow.

Once there, he realises, as do I, that there is nobody home. The lights on the ground floor, which her flat takes up most of, are dead. Even from the distance I have left between us, I hear him sigh. I feel a brief flash of sympathy for him, but it passes almost as soon as it arrives. I wait whilst he urinates on the steps leading up to the flats and accompany him on a brief tour of some of the places where she might be.

After a while of watching him peering surreptitiously through the windows of wine bars and Italian restaurants, he appears to give up. He makes a turn down a back alley which is unfamiliar to me. Shortly after he rounds the corner, I do likewise.

He is there, waiting for me.

He pushes me up against a graffiti-covered wall, shouting questions at me and then shouting some more without pause for any answer I may give. He wants to know who I am, why I follow him, how long has this gone on for. He wants to know what I’ve seen, who I’ve seen and where I saw it. He is of the opinion that I am a very sick man. He is also afraid of me.

In some ways, we are quite similar.

Abruptly, he lets go of me and walks back out of the alley as if nothing has happened. During the entire incident, I had said not a single word. If I had, I may have tried to explain to him that he knew why I followed him, he knew the feelings that dragged me in his wake just as he was compelled to follow her. I may have told him that the two of them, stalking and stalked, were the closest thing to a human relationship that I could sustain. I might have mentioned the loneliness, the feeling of near-invisibility, the vertiginous sensation of almost slipping unnoticed off the edge of the world. I might have mentioned the anger, but I guess he knew all about that.

I give him a generous head start, and then set off back to my hole.

###

 The following evening I am clever. I wear my reading glasses and a faded baseball cap and a different jacket. I’m a completely different nobody. Now that I have been noticed I devise a different strategy. As evening falls I proceed directly to her flat, find myself some comfortable shadows with a good view, and watch. Tonight, all the curtains in her flat are drawn, but there is light and life behind them. This is not my main concern. I wonder if he has made himself stay at home, but reject the idea. I know how hard that can be.

At last, he walks quickly to his usual vantage point across the road from her flat, not more than ten metres or so to my left. He looks more nervous than he usually does, darting glances to and fro. Pull yourself together, I think at him, you’ll get yourself noticed. Soon enough, he manages to calm down a little.

It occurs to me that the three of us have never been together in the same place except in the dark and the artificial light. I’ve seen him during the day several times, and for all I know he may have seen her, maybe in his lunch break, I don’t know. But night is traditionally when we all come together.

And here she is, half a face peering around a curtain. Pale features, dark hair tied back, worried eyes. Searching for someone she hopes will not be there. And eventually finding him.

Somehow, I’m not surprised. A kind of laziness, a lack of care, has entered the proceedings. I guess I’m as guilty of this as anyone. We all used to be so careful, dancing gracefully around each other, our finely choreographed movements ensuring that we never quite come into contact. Now I have the feeling it is all starting to fall apart, as all relationships do. I hope I’m wrong. I hope it’s just a rough patch.

He steps back further into his own personal gloom, but it is too late. She pushes the curtain aside and swings the window open. She shouts. Obscenities, threats. A flood of words which seem to shrink him. He diminishes with each new insult, each mention of calling police or friends. She starts to sob as she retreats back inside, slamming the window shut so violently that it bounces back open. There is silence, except for the occasional car passing a few streets away, and the sound of drunks yelling in the hot night.

I see him turn to leave, but before he takes more than a couple of steps he changes course and heads directly for her flat. The look on his face disturbs me. I feel everything spiralling out of control, as if any of us had any real control over the situation in the first place.

He strides up the three or four worn stone steps at the front of the building and, with a grace that I find surprising, grabs a cast-iron drainpipe to his left and flicks himself up and across to the open window. With his feet resting on the sill, he reaches to grasp the window frame, and drags himself through. Don’t, I whisper to myself.

I hear shouting, and then screaming in reply. There is a series of muffled bumps, as if heavy furniture is being thrown about. It goes on for what seems a very long time. Heads start to appear at open windows above the flat and the two adjoining buildings. I see no-one make any move to investigate in person, but I guess that somebody eventually phones for help.

I stay where I am until the ambulance arrives, accompanied by two police cars, then I join the small crowd which is gathering around the whirling blue lights and the efficient men and women in green who are half carrying, half pushing a trolley up to the front door.

A figure is led out, supported by two of the ambulance team, who lead her gently to the waiting vehicle. She appears to be shaken, shocked even, but otherwise unharmed. I feel a smile of relief try to sneak onto my face, but I wipe it away. The trolley, still empty, follows her. The doors are swung shut and the ambulance leaves, unhurried, followed by one of the police cars.

One of the remaining policemen starts to wave the muttering crowd backwards. The other sits in the car, talking into the radio, summoning the experts who arrive within minutes. Reels of yellow crime scene tape are unrolled, fencing in the front of the building.  

I can only presume that he is lying dead somewhere in there. With a kitchen knife in his stomach? With a hole in his skull? Maybe tomorrow I’ll go to the library where he used to work, read the local papers and find out. Already he is slipping into the past tense, as is she. Already a gap is making itself felt in my life.

 ###

Tired of the continuing show, I shuffle away. Something catches my eye in the shadows that I had recently inhabited. As my eyes adjust, the something resolves itself into a somebody. Nondescript in every way, clothes leeched of all colour, age indefinable, features bland to the point where there is just nothing to latch onto. He’s watching me carefully.

As I move on, I try not to feel his stare on my back. I try not to look around, it wouldn’t really be fair, but at last I do. There he is, trailing half a street behind.

Now I see a wondrous thing. Another figure, half hidden on the corner of a side street, is watching my new friend. And somewhere behind him, I can hardly believe it, is another figure gazing intently in his direction. Further than that I cannot see, but my imagination fills in the big picture.

Smiling happily, I move on with a new spring in my step, the centre of all things.