Familiar Faces

 

She hadn’t lived there for very long, just over a year and it was all so different to what she’d known. It was a new beginning. A glistening shoreline, fresh air, the quietude of a small coastal town full of strangers, the freedom of being a stranger herself.

 

The town had recently grown from a small forgotten backwater to an increasingly fashionable location, attracting wealthy retirees and young families fleeing the cities for a healthy outdoor lifestyle. There had been considerable pushback on the recent housing developments and there were plans for more. Little could be done to halt the rising wave of trendy New England style homes on the edges of town and the installation of a sprawling supermarket with ugly signs and a petrol station attached. 

 

Those flimsy new houses were not for her. She had managed to purchase one of the period cottages just off the High Street. It was built from stone, narrow on three floors, chilly with windows that rattled and a tiny garden, surrounded by cold towering walls where shiny ferns peeped through the cracks and the sun only hit for a few hours in the late afternoon.

 

The discomfort was part of the experience. On windy days the house whispered her name, taunting her, on cold nights it licked her awake with an icy tongue and she often woke with a start when bits of it fell off; lumps of mortar (the wrong mortar according to her next door neighbour), a tile from the roof, a nugget of the old cast iron gutter pipe, something fluttering in the loft which she was putting off investigating.

 

The house was an animal which she hadn’t managed to tame, not yet. It hadn’t accepted her and she was mature enough to know that she didn’t own it, not really. She’d paid for it with the money from her divorce settlement but it wasn’t the sort of house you owned, you were simply one of many generations passing through. A custodian of the beast. She crossed her fingers and hoped that it wouldn't turn on her completely and cripple her finances with costly repairs.

 

The sense of freedom, at first, was overwhelming. ‘You can reinvent yourself,’ said a friend and it was a tempting prospect but not one she’d managed to pull off. She got some new clothes and signed up to a silversmithing course but most aspects of herself had refused to leave and make way for the aspirational roles she would never fulfill.

 

Walking was her sanctuary, with her little dog, a border terrier and there were so many walks, through the town, across the downs, along the coast to a hamlet where a Sheltie barked from an ugly bungalow and jumped at a picture window. At first it was like walking through a dream where nothing can touch you and everything is possible but as the months went by, repetitions etched a pattern on her consciousness and the grate of the familiar began to set in.

 

Faces were branded into her memory, she saw the same people every day, heard the same voices, the same dogs and cats and bricks and man-hole covers, the row of poplars holding hands by the cemetery. She knew the curve of the lampposts, the drop of the curb on the corner where she crossed the street. It was both comforting and abrasive, the edges of their stubborn existences rubbing on hers, snagging on the fabric of her perceived freedom. 

 

 

The people were much friendlier than they had been in the city but there was a point, around eight months where she developed a sense of being observed and went from anonymous stranger to a known face in town. There are expectations around a known face and potential to gossip about a person who can be recognised from their description. At this point her perceived freedom became vulnerable to corrosion. 

 

There was one face in particular she kept seeing, on her dog walks, in the post office, at the corner shop, in the alley ways, at the dentist, in a passing car. She called him that man and he was everywhere. Even when she changed her habits, walked and shopped at different times of the day, she still saw him, walking towards her, their mutual body language disclosing a slight wince as they observed each other, an awkward smile and greeting ensued.

 

They walked on in separate directions but her mind rang in despair. It’s him again, she thought, and then again and again. Sometimes she wanted to hide, change direction so that they didn’t have to pass each other. The first few occasions were warm, friendly but they reached a point when their politely confined greetings became stale. Their embarrassed smiles should have progressed to a few words, they could have got to know one another but they didn’t and then their encounters became awkward.

 

Sometimes, in an attempt to remain unaffected by their unison, they each pretended not to recognise the other, avoiding each other’s eyes and refrained from any exchanges. The approach didn’t work, there was something there, a knowingness, it weighted the air around them and pushed their feet deeper into the surface of the earth, making them feel unstable.

 

It took some time to recover again until she didn’t recover at all and between meetings she kept on seeing his face in her mind until it began to feel sinister. There was a point where the situation changed from dismay at the absurdity of these coincidences to something like an attraction. The man became so familiar, there was a reassuring fatherly quality to his appearance. 

 

A monster had grown from the frequency of their encounters. She wondered if he had some special powers or whether he was actually real at all, after all she’d never seen him with anyone else. But she was a loner too, with only her little dog at her side.

 

One day she saw him on the beach at high tide in the area where there was only a narrow pathway between the big rock that was shaped like a lizard’s head and the shallow foamy edges of the incoming waves. She controlled herself and loaded a confident greeting into her social pistol but it misfired and she only blurted out an unfathomable noise, somewhere between ‘morning’ and ‘hi’, sort of ‘mor..hi’. 

 

He looked up and swallowed her whole with the familiar warmth of his face. There was no need for words, he had an energy which fully charged her in the space they shared. The image of him remained in her mind’s eye. How scruffy and old he looked, stooped, gripping his hands behind his back. She wondered how old he was but she wasn’t good at guessing people’s age; he could have been ten years older than her or twenty or perhaps his age wasn’t even counted in years but something else.

 

This is a small town, she told herself as she tried different approaches to make light of her growing irrational feelings although she didn’t fully understand what they were. An obsession, a physical/emotional attraction? Perhaps it was time to make some real friends in town and gain some perspective again on the human race but she’d moved to get away from fake friends and pushy people, people who lied and disrespected her, people who claimed to always know best.

 

Despite feeling bent out of shape by the frequency of their encounters she found herself bereft on the days when she didn’t see that man. Her head spinning more than usual as she went about her daily walks, eyes in search of him, wondering what he was doing, where he was. She didn’t need to learn his name, that would have broken the spell and she was addicted to it now.

 

It was absurd how much time he spent inside her head as she invented various scenarios in which he needed her assistance and she was able to save him from some sort of peril. She imagined him having fallen at the stile or broken down in his car near to her home. Then they would be forced into a conversation and they would become close friends, galvanising the invisible and intense connection that she felt that they had.

 

Perhaps they would become lovers but her imagination remained in the fantasy gear of a film whereby there was no blundering or coarseness, no evidence of human deterioration. Words would spoil it, shoes and socks would spoil it, the very existence of other people would spoil it, fresh air would spoil it, the real world outside her fantasy would ruin it. 

 

Their coming together would happen just after some catastrophically destructive event whereby all the familiar faces in town and the dogs and cats and lampposts had been destroyed, the row of poplars fallen, the town gone. Only the energy of herself and that man, remaining, merging like celestial bodies. A new universe would form and everything that had gone before would be forgotten.

 

Then she remembered that he might have a wife at home, a lovely woman who looked after him, washed his clothes and gave him that warm, inner glow which he reflected back on strangers he happened to see on his walks. And it occurred to her that she’d never even spoken to him, knew nothing about him except for the look on his face, the way he walked, the energy around him like an aura which caught on her each time they passed, making her glow.

 

It was possible that he had some dangerous criminal past or that he was hiding something terrible which he’d done decades ago, a dark secret and that was part of what made the ballast of his energy so great. The man did have strong energy, there was no denying that but she was contributing to it with her own obsession which was something like a sickness.

 

Sometimes she told herself that he had similar feelings about her, that he saw her face when they were separated and searched for her. There was another part of herself that fully understood the ridiculousness of her assumption and that she may never have entered his head beyond the seconds that his eyes met hers. Somehow she found this hard to believe but it was all one sided, she would never really know if she was anything more than one of the faces in town to him.

 

This sickness could only go one of two ways. It could grow into full blown stalking whereby she would seek to learn more about him, follow him and force a relationship of some kind. But she knew this wasn’t really her style and that knowing more information about him, dull details of his life would likely kill the obsession and deep down, she didn’t really want this. The obsession was her addiction, it filled a void in her head. A void left behind by the, now diminishing stress of her divorce, the trauma of marital separation.

 

The other way was just to let it run its course, exhaust itself. It, in itself was exhausting, it couldn’t continue. Then she could find something else to be obsessed with. It didn’t have to be a man, it could be anything, a new pet, a hobby, a colour, some recently discovered music or book. Equilibrium would be restored and space would be created for a new, healthy chapter of her life in this new town, new house, new beginnings.