9 a.m. ‘M’ comes out of his flat. I see his head first, coming up the basement steps. He needs a haircut. And he’s wearing the same shirt he had on yesterday. He’s let things slide. The way he’s standing, tapping the pavement with his cane and moving his weight back and forwards, either he’s in pain or he can’t make his mind up whether to go left or right. Sometimes when he just stands there, I know it’s because he senses someone watching him. Once, I was concentrating on a patch of leg below his left knee and he suddenly bent down and scratched the leg in that exact place. I let out a whoop. Another six months and I shall be tipping tables.
He turns left. The feet pass out of sight, though I can hear the echo of the cane. A pair of high heels clacks along the pavement, then a woman passes with a toddler on a rein. The child bends down and stares into my window. We stay like that eyeballing each other, then I put two fingers out and go ‘Bang!’ He puts out his own fat little finger. I shout ‘Bang, bang, bang.’ His mother can’t hear but he can.
To fill in time ’til ‘M’ comes back, I feed the cats and water the geraniums. I’d walk down to the underground to buy a paper but I can’t risk bumping into him. Once, I was coming down the road and saw a man approaching with a woman on his arm. I saw her first and I remember thinking ‘That’s the sort of woman ‘M’ would go for.’ Then I realized it was him. They were too wrapped up in each other to take note of anybody else, but after that I was more careful.
I’ve filled seven notebooks since I set up my surveillance here. I may not know what ‘M’ gets up into in his flat, but I know everything that happens when he leaves it. I’m like CCTV to a man who breaks into a house and thinks he’s got away with it.
Miranda would have been impressed. She is the only person who’d be interested in the notebooks. Other than the police, of course. It took three years of hassling the old aged pensioner who lived here, to persuade her that she would be happier if she was in a ground floor flat out in the suburbs. I had been surprised to find that ‘M’ had moved to Fulham. Once he would have found it too staid, but the accident—perhaps I ought to put that in apostrophes—seems to have slowed him down. He’s normally in bed by half-past ten.
Ah, here he comes. Those hairy feet pad down the path on my side of the road. He’s picked up something on his sandal. Looks like chewing gum and there’s a bit of paper stuck to it, the sort that only comes off on the carpet.
He stops right outside my window and I hear him speaking to a neighbor from the flat above. I notice whilst he’s talking that his little toe is quivering. I make a note of it. When all you see of someone is their legs, you soon acquire an eye for detail.
I don’t know the other man, except by sight. He deals in vintage cars. He is the sort of man that other men—those into vintage cars—find fascinating and that women can’t stand. They think, rightly, that he thinks of women in the same way that he thinks of cars; how many careful owners have they had and how much mileage is he likely to get out of them. I’ve seen ‘M’ flirting with the man’s wife. She is what you would expect: ten years his junior, expensive, vacuous. That’s just me speaking. She could have a PhD for all I know.
Her husband doesn’t know yet that ‘M’ visits his apartment when he’s out. I’m wondering how to let him know. A telephone call, maybe. I can find out what his name is easily enough.
‘M’ swings his body in an arc around the basement railings and goes down the steps. I feel that sharp rush of adrenaline as I wait for his head and shoulders to come into view and then I hear the basement door slam shut behind him and he’s gone.
He won’t come out again until midday, so I get up and make myself some toast and coffee. I like having breakfast late; it makes the day seem shorter. Every day at half past twelve, he walks down to the precinct. Now he’s living on his own he’s more predictable. If he was being targeted by terrorists, they’d have him sussed out in a week. He likes the restaurants he eats at to be within walking distance of the basement. He’s been given his own table in a couple of them. They’re the sort of restaurants I could afford, too, at a pinch, but since I need to be here at my post to clock him in and out, my eating habits are erratic.
Still, it’s a Bank Holiday and suddenly I feel an urge to treat myself. The afternoons drag. ‘M’ will often have a nap when he gets back from lunch and since there’s nothing much to do, I often doze off in the armchair.
There’s one restaurant that I particularly like. It’s Austrian and serves delicious, pan-fried cutlets. It’s a hundred yards on from the others but the exercise will do me good and I’m not likely to run into ‘M’ there. As a fail-safe, I am careful not to sit where he would see me if he did come in, but when I glance up from my Wiener Schnitzel half an hour later, Jesus, there’s ‘M’ standing in the doorway, remonstrating with a waiter. Given that today’s a holiday and almost every seat is taken, I was fortunate to get a table to myself. The waiter scans the room. Is he about to ask if I’d mind sharing? That would be a laugh, us forced to introduce ourselves and then sit through the meal politely making conversation. But a couple at another table get up and the waiter takes ‘M’ over to it. He sits down directly in my line of sight.
I wait for him to look up. If we’d passed each other in the street, he might have thought no more about it, but the longer we sit staring at each other the more likely he is to remember. It was getting dark, of course; he wouldn’t have been able to see clearly. At the time he only said the driver could have been a man or woman and he thought the car was blue. Like many so-called intellectuals he never took much notice of the world around him. It pays sometimes to look where you’re going, especially when you cross the road.
I suddenly decide I’ve had enough of sitting in the window of the basement all day, week in, week out, carefully recording any indiscretions. It could be ten years before I hit on something that will really bring him to his knees. I want the satisfaction now of telling him ‘I picked you out deliberately, just as you picked out Miranda. She was no one special. Not to you, at any rate. I don’t suppose you even knew that she was dead. The police thought it was me who drove her to it but we both know that she never cared for me the way she cared for you.’
Of all the women ‘M’ had dalliances with, she was the one least likely to appeal to him. She wasn’t glamorous or well-connected and she didn’t have a husband, not in the accepted sense. His preference was for women who belonged to someone else. It took the pressure off. If he had bothered asking, he’d have found out that she did belong to someone else, but even if he’d known, he’d probably have thought another woman didn’t count. He wouldn’t be the first to have made that mistake. It isn’t likely he’ll be making it again.
Perhaps it’s time to tell him that the ‘accident’ was not an accident at all. There’s no point in him thinking he was just unlucky. ‘Actually,’ I want to tell him, ‘you were lucky that it was your leg the wheels went over, not your head. I’m not that careless normally.’ What spooked me was him turning suddenly like that and staring straight into my eyes the way he’s doing now with that same question on his face.
I want to tell him, but I see that I don’t need to. As he’s staring at me, suddenly the penny drops. I take a £20 note from my wallet. I don’t want to have to sit here whilst my credit card goes through. I wonder if he’ll follow me onto the street. He’ll see me go into my flat and know that I live opposite him. Will he think it’s a coincidence? I doubt it.
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