The Watcher In The Window

Cally let out a tiny girlish squeak. 'Lookit. There's this creepy
old guy watching us.'

She ducked behind the curtains like a kid playing hide and seek, and
beckoned me over.

'Where?' I said.

'On the top floor.'

'I don't see anyone.'

'With the light off.'

Sure enough there was an old man sitting in a chair facing the full
length window and looking down directly at us. Cally pulled me back to
look herself.

'Wave at him.' I suggested.

'No. He's creeping me out.'

'Close the curtains then.'

'I will.' She said, and did.

Afterwards we remembered it all, every word, we even worked out the
exact time. A boy went missing from the courtyard that night, at almost
that precise moment. If we had only looked down instead of up we might
have seen him.

The boy had been taking the bin out, you have to take them all the way
across the courtyard to the road, the bin had been left halfway across
but the boy had disappeared. Nearly a hundred flats look out over the
courtyard but nobody had seen what happened, we all had our curtains
closed and were all watching our televisions. The boy was thirteen and
his name was Johnny. He used to play skateboard in the courtyard and
scowl at grown ups walking past. We suggested that the policemen who
talked to us talk to the old man, he said that they were talking to
everybody.

Cally lives in a third floor flat facing the road and I live on the
first floor facing the courtyard. We met when I moved in and she
introduced herself. These days she comes down most weeknights after
dinner and we watch the television together. She has a boyfriend who
works in Luxemburg and only visits every other weekend.

*****

The old woman who lives in the flat next to mine meets me in the
hallway. Her name is Mrs Fulber, she baked me a cake when I first moved
in as a welcoming gift and once gave me a cold chicken pie for no
reason whatsoever. I gave her a bottle of very good wine for Christmas
and she still makes a point of saying how she is looking forward to it
now, in July. She occasionally says clich?d old-person things like
'Don't mind me, I've got bats in my belfry' but today she just wants to
talk about the boy who went missing. I do not tell her I came so close
to seeing what happened, instead I tell her I am sure the boy is fine
and will be found soon. I say I have no idea what could have happened
to him, I say he has most likely run away from home. I imagine an
argument because he had not taken the bin out and spent the day playing
video games and skateboard instead, I imagine his mother yelling at him
and him running away in a fit of pique, abandoning the bin halfway to
the road, but my imagination fails there because I cannot imagine why
he has not come back.

In the flat I make a point of looking out the window, the courtyard is
empty and the old man is not watching. Cally is away, she has gone for
a break in the country with her boyfriend, 'a dirty weekend' she called
it, smiling wickedly, disappointed when I pointed out it was not a
weekend. I microwave my dinner and watch television on my own. Later I
turn it off, pour myself a glass of wine and do some work. I can hear
Mrs Fulber singing along to the radio next door. I check the window
again before going to bed and fancy for a moment that I see Johnny in
the courtyard but it is just some other kid.

*****

Johnny does not return the following day. Cally comes running down to
intercept me when I get home from work. She has been watching for my
car from her window and is upset because she has remembered shouting at
the boy when he clipped her on his skateboard. I give her a drink and
she describes the incident. It turns out that she is not even sure it
was the same boy, and it all happened over two years ago. I try to act
sympathetic but I honestly have no idea why she has worked herself up
into a state about it.

Later we go next door to see Mrs Fulber, she makes us coffee and
carefully arranges a whole packet of gingersnaps on a plate while we
wait in the living room. The two women talk too fast for me to keep up
and instead I play with Mrs Fulber's Yorkshire Terrier puppy Jack and
sneak him biscuits.

When Mrs Fulber goes to the kitchen to make even more coffee Cally
whispers to me that she saw him again.

'Who?' I ask.

'That creepy old guy, he was watching me this morning when I walked
across the courtyard.'

It occurs to me that she is scared of this old man but Mrs Fulber comes
back in to the room and Cally ends the conversation with a finger to
her lips. Cally believes in things like tarot cards and weeji boards
and gets frightened easily, once I had to check her bedroom for ghosts
before she would go to sleep but we were both quite drunk that
night.

Automatically I check the curtains and fancy, for a moment, that I see
a light immediately wink off where the old man was, but I cannot be
sure. We talk about the boy Johnny, Mrs Fulber says she has
grandchildren that age although they never visit, I get the impression
she does not see eye to eye with their mother. Cally and I have
volunteered to go into town at the weekend and paste up posters asking
for information about Johnny. I have the posters in a box by my door,
Johnny is wearing a school uniform in the picture and his hair is
combed, I doubt I would recognise him.

*****

The following morning I see the old man watching me as I walk across
the courtyard, I wave but he does not wave back. He is sitting on a
chair and is absolutely motionless. It is disconcerting to be examined
so intently and I understand why he scares Cally. For a moment I
consider going up and asking him myself if he saw Johnny, but I am
already late for work.

As soon as I get home Mrs Fulber knocks on my door looking flustered
and desperate. She has lost Jack, her Yorkshire terrier puppy, she was
walking him in the courtyard when he got away and now she cannot find
him anywhere. She has, she says, been running up and down the courtyard
all evening calling for him and is at her wits end. I sit her down and
make her a cup of tea and let her calm down. Out of the corner of my
eye I see the old man at his window again, he is sitting exactly where
he was that morning and looking directly at my flat. I usher Mrs Fulber
back to her own flat before she notices him and tell her to wait there
in case Jack returns while I go out and look. She makes a big fuss
about the tea cup she is still holding, telling me she will wash it and
return it tomorrow. For all I care she could keep it.

Just before I leave she says 'He likes to be sung to.' I am not sure if
this is supposed to help me find him or what.

I fetch Cally to see if she will help and together we go out and wander
aimlessly around the surrounding streets. I imagine Jack, over excited
by his freedom, running out into the road and being hit by a car. I
check every mark on the tarmac to see if it is fresh blood but do not
confide my concerns to Cally. After we have been walking over an hour
and it has gotten dark we pass a pub, Cally suggests we stop for a
drink but I tell her we should really keep looking.

'He's probably found his way back by now.' She says.

I ask 'Do you want to go back and check?'

She looks at me as if I was an idiot. 'Just ring.'

'I don't have the number.'

She rolls her eyes at me and gets out her mobile phone and with a look
that says 'this is really your job' rings Mrs Fulber. They talk
cheerily for a couple of minutes whilst I stand outside the pub. It is
a small place tucked away on the corner between two residential
streets. I have never seen it before and had no idea it existed.

'He came back about twenty minutes ago.' Says Cally putting away her
phone.

I say 'Oh.' I feel stupid for not having thought of phoning
before.

Cally smiles and says. 'Drink?'

The pub keeps serving beyond closing time and is still open when we
leave near midnight. I drink beer whilst Cally drinks white wine. Cally
tells me all about the country hotel she and her boyfriend stayed in,
describing the matronly landlady's disapproval of unmarried couples
sharing a bed under her roof, and how they had to push their two
singles into a double every night, and how they were pulled apart again
every day.

As we are leaving Cally says 'I almost forgot, has there been any news
about the boy?'

I reply that there has not.

'I hope they find him soon.' She says.

'So do I.'

She puts her arm through my arm and we walk home.

Once, Mrs Fulber asked me why Cally was not my girlfriend. I said she
already had a boyfriend and Mrs Fulber said that should not matter.
Perhaps she is right but it does matter and there is nothing I can do
about it.

******

The police are everywhere. On Friday one comes back to ask me about the
old man we saw. Apparently nobody lives in the flat I indicated, they
know all about who lives where now, he assumes I must have been
mistaken but I am sure I pointed to the right window. Before he leaves
the policeman notices the stack of posters by my door and says he hopes
they will do some good. I ask him how the search is going and he looks
at me as if he doesn't understand the question.

"We will keep looking." He says.

After he has gone I give Cally a ring but only get the answering
machine, I have not seen her since the pub the other night. I go next
door to see Mrs Fulber but she is not there either. She never did give
me my teacup back. The conversation with the policeman has depressed me
and I do not want to spend the evening watching television, I want to
do something instead. I decide to go out and put up the posters
tonight. Before leaving I try Cally's mobile but just get her
voicemail, I do not leave a message.

As I put the phone down I look out the window and see the old man
watching me again from exactly the window I had indicated to the
policeman. Like Cally did when she first saw him I instinctively duck
behind the curtains.

I drive to pre-arranged places and paste up the posters on lamp posts
and bus shelters, it is a miserable job, people look at me suspiciously
as if I were illegally fly posting, and when they read the posters they
do not look at me at all. They all know about Johnny, they have all
read about him in the local papers or seen his picture on the local TV
news. Finally, when it is late and I am about to give up and go home,
an old man walking a dog stops to read the poster I am holding and says
he hopes they will find the boy soon. I nod, and smile, and say I hope
so too, and he pats me on the back and says 'Bare up old man, I'm sure
he's okay.'

Only when I am in my car does it occur to me that he thought I was the
boys father.

*****

I am woken early the next morning by the doorbell. It is Cally, keen to
get on with the posters, I do not tell her I went out last night till
we are inside I am filling up the kettle.

'Oh' she says, sitting at the kitchen table, 'I just, I just wanted to
do something myself you know.'

'I know,' I say. 'So did I. There's still some streets to do.'

She brightens up and asks how many.

'Oh about four or five.' I say, knowing full well it is only
three.

Cally insists that we will get the job done faster if we each take a
side and work down the street, so we work within sight of each other
but too far apart to hold a conversation. When we come to the last of
the three streets it is just a lane, barely fifty yards long. Cally
pastes up one poster and says 'Let's go home.' I suggest a pub lunch
but she declines, saying it is too early.

Back home Mrs Fulber rushes out to greet us. 'Isn't it wonderful news.'
She says.

'What?' I ask. Cally squats down to pet Jack.

'About the boy.'

'What about the boy?'

'He came home.'

I pick up the local paper from my letterbox and there, on the front
page, is the news that Johnny had come home, apparently he had been
hiding in a friends attic.

'Oh.' Says Cally, reading it over my shoulder. 'Well that was a waste
of time.'

She goes back to her own flat, and me to mine. Beneath the article,
sharing the front page only because it occurred in the same block of
flats, is the news of an old man found dead sitting at his window. He
had been sitting there for days and nobody had noticed. I look up at
the window across the courtyard and it is empty, down below children
are playing again, making a racket.