Robert Garnham
1.
I used to call him ‘The Lurker’. He would linger in the back lane outside the steps up to my flat. It felt like he was there all the time because I’d see him when I got home and I’d see him when I was going out. My flat was over the top of an amusement arcade and it could only be reached by going in the back lane and then up a flight of concrete steps, but The Lurker would always be at the bottom of these steps, leaning on the corrugated iron fence of the bowling green. It was uncanny. He always wore the same grey ski jacket, the same brown corduroy trousers, the same dirty trainers. His hair was going grey at the sides so he must have been in his late forties or early fifties. He had the most pronounced eyebrows, and I know it sounds a little bit silly, but he looked a lot like the singer Neil Diamond. Though obviously, he wasn’t Neil Diamond. He always had a black and white collie dog with him, on a lead, sat ever so patiently at his side. He would be the first person I’d see every time I emerged from the communal entranceway to my flat, and the last person I saw whenever I arrived home from work. He was always there. It was unsettling.
2.
One day I went for a drink with my friend Anne and I told her about The Lurker, and she laughed and she said that it sounded like I had a stalker, and I laughed too, even though I didn’t think that it was very funny. Why would anyone want to stalk you, of all people?, she asked, still laughing. Which sounds cold and somewhat dismissive, but there was a fair amount of truth in her comment. I still drank at the time and we had both worked our way through two bottles of wine. The pub was in the same main road down to the seafront where I lived over the amusement arcades, and I said to my friend Anne that going to the pub after work with her had been a good idea because it meant that The Lurker would not see me come home at the usual time, and perhaps he might give up and go home without seeing me at all that night. And she said that I really shouldn’t worry, that one day he would just lose all interest and that he wouldn’t be there any more. We talked about other things too, so that the conversation wasn’t all just about The Lurker, it was merely a piece of colour I’d introduced into our evening to show her how interesting and weird life could be. But after I’d walked her back to the bus station and made sure she had got on the bus, I walked home, and sure enough, The Lurker was there in the alleyway at the bottom of the steps. He raised one of his pronounced eyebrows as if in friendly greeting, like we were old acquaintances and on nodding terms. I went inside to my flat, feeling mightily vexed by his presence.
3.
I realised one day that his grey ski jacket was grey now but it had obviously once been blue. You could see the original colour around the seams and under his armpits, and around the stitching of his pockets. I suppose it had faded in the sun, because he was standing outside all the time in that same ski jacket. He wore it all through the winter, which was fair enough, but then he also wore it right into the following summer. He wore it all the time. One day I said to a work colleague, will you be able to walk home with me, because The Lurker will be there, and this work colleague said, sure, and wouldn’t you know it, but we got to the back lane behind the amusement arcade and The Lurker wasn’t there. It’s almost as if he knew that I was coming with a work colleague, a friend. My work colleague laughed and said that perhaps The Lurker was a figment of my imagination, and I laughed too, because it was bloody typical of this to happen. But it didn’t feel funny. And when I sat in my flat I thought, The Lurker’s hair probably wasn’t grey at the sides when he bought that ski jacket all those years ago, when the ski jacket was still a rich, vibrant blue.
4.
I came up with a plan to deliberately obfuscate The Lurker. I reasoned that the most likely explanation for why he was there was just that he got a kick out of seeing me, and another kick out of me seeing him. I don’t know why I should have been the focus of this but my whole plan depended on the elimination of the second of the two things that gave him a kick, namely, my seeing him. I thought that my solution was quite clever. One day I came around the corner of the back lane and I counted how many paces it was to the bottom of the steps leading up to the communal entranceway. It was exactly thirty. So from that day onwards I knew that if I came around the corner into the back lane, with my head down without looking up, and counted thirty paces, then I would be able to turn and start climbing the steps up to the entrance. It would be good for my mental health not knowing if he was there or not, and it would be bad for his little mind games because I wouldn’t have any chance of seeing him. He would get no joy from that. He would get no joy in seeing the mix of disgust and terror that his manifestation always provoked in me. The plan, I knew, was foolproof.
5.
And indeed it worked well for a couple of days and I had no idea if he was there or not, so that meant that I could enjoy my evenings and kind of laugh inwardly that I’d thwarted his only ambition which, apparently, was to be noticed. However, on the third day there was a development. I turned the corner of the back lane as usual, and started counting the thirty paces, and I’d probably gone as far as twenty paces when I heard a dog bark. Only it wasn’t an actual dog barking, it was someone pretending to be a dog. Without realising what I was doing, I looked up, kind of instinctively, only to see The Lurker in his normal position leaning against the corrugated iron fence of the bowling green, the dog at his side. And as if to further announce himself to the world, he said, shut up, Peter!, to the dog, like it had been the actual dog all along that had barked. Then he smiled at me and nodded when our eyes met, because he knew that he had won on this occasion.
6.
When I was a kid we used to go and visit my Aunt and Uncle, who lived in Slough. My Uncle worked in an office for a tool supply company who had a building on an industrial estate, and one evening while we were visiting we had a phone call to say that the burglar alarm had gone off. My mother and my sister stayed with my Aunt at the house, while I went with my Dad and my Uncle to the office on the industrial estate to see if there had been a break-in or not. It was a misty winter’s night and the industrial estate seemed sparse and eerie in the fog. My Dad said that I should stay in the car while he and my Uncle went around the building to investigate. The factory next to the office where my Uncle worked made the casters that go on the bottom of sofas and even though there was nobody around or any sign that the building was occupied, I could hear automated machinery inside. I wound down my window a little bit and listened, and sure enough, there was a rhythmical clonk-ching clonk-ching clonk-ching. The windows of this strange factory were all darkened and there weren’t any cars in the car park but all I could hear was clonk-ching clonk-ching clonk-ching. And it was spooky, what with the possibility of there being a break-in and my Dad and my Uncle investigating, and the mist and the fog and this lonely industrial estate, and the idea that someone might be moving around with an evil intent, and I was sitting there in the back of this Ford Cortina with the clonk-ching clonk-ching clonk-ching. I’ve always had a pronounced sense of the uncanny.
7.
I started wearing earplugs when I came out of work, just so that he couldn’t distract me with fake barking. And just to be sure, as soon as I got to the corner into the back lane, and before I started counting my thirty paces, I’d put on a pair of headphones and play very loud music on my personal stereo. It didn’t matter if it was rock or classical, so long as it was loud. This is what I did for the next few days. Earplugs, very loud music, and thirty paces. Which worked well enough and soon became a part of my daily coming-home or going-out ritual. Now I couldn’t see him and I couldn’t hear him and I was deleting him, one sense at a time.
8.
I always wondered what it was that had happened that had made The Lurker think it was a good idea to stand there. Had there been some definitive occurrence in which fortune had once smiled along with circumstance, held his hand at just the right moment to make him think that this might happen once again? Was I supposed to be impressed by his tenacity? It didn’t matter what the weather was, he’d be there. I imagine how bereft his life must have been, how empty it was, in the days and the years before he decided to fill it with his continual loitering. Was it born out of jealousy, and if it was, who could possibly be jealous of me? Perhaps he lived at home with his elderly mother. This is how I liked to imagine it. He loved at home, perhaps in one of the bungalows a short distance from the town centre, and he told her that he was taking Peter out for a walk, and that he had a friend who he met up with, who lived in a flat over an amusement arcade. The very idea of it made me shiver. Grab the anorak faded grey, the dog’s lead, pat Peter a couple of times and head out down to the town, the road leading up from the seafront, the back alley, the corrugated iron fence of the bowling green, the steps leading up to the flats. And wait. And wait. And wait. Perhaps his mother was just happy that he was out of the house, perhaps she thought that it was good for him, whatever this friendship might be. Perhaps she thought that we were dating. Perhaps he wanted her to think that we were dating. Perhaps she thought it was all perfectly normal.
9.
If he was my stalker, then was this really the best that I could manage?
10.
You see Denny was the nicest of the men I met during this period, and he had the nicest face of any of them. It was a pleasant mix of babyish and manly at the same time, noble, if youthful, a hint of stubble, trouble-free, earnest. And oh my goodness, those eyes, those brown eyes like smooth coffee, how I liked his eyes. He’d arrived on a skateboard, which I hadn’t expected at all, yet he worked for a cable television installation service and he told me that he drove a van. Aren’t they hard to reverse?, I’d asked. A little, he’d replied. Denny was one of those people who looked far younger than they actually were, and he wore boxer briefs. We got chatting and drank red wine and rain fell lazily from the dark sky on to the old bay window, and he told me about the various countries he had visited when he was a teenager, including the USA where he’d spent a few years living in Kansas, and that’s why he travelled everywhere by skateboard. That night the two of us crept to the bedroom and we spent the first part of the night getting to know each other, just lying there, avoiding the obvious pretext of his visit. And then in the second part of the night we started the usual fooling around, me and Denny, and it didn’t even put him off when I asked what Denny was short for, and he said Dennis, and I laughed. We lost ourselves to the furious pent-up passion which lurks within most souls and I could see his skateboard through the bedroom door in the hallway leaning against my radiator and it felt amazing to have such variety in my life, Denny, earnest Denny, and you know what it’s like, at some point I felt the need to lick his eyebrows, his earnest eyebrows, feeling every bristle, each follicle beneath the tip of my tongue, feeling the shiver with delight in his body as I did so, the manipulation of each tiny hair of his eyebrows as if savouring every small, immaculate, perfect part of him, and that’s when it struck me that he had the exact same type of eyebrows as both Neil Diamond, and the Lurker. Are you tired?, he asked, as I gave up attending to his eyebrows and leaned back in my bed and closed my eyes and let out a gentle hum. Oh . . It’s nothing, I replied, but how could I possibly tell him that I’d been put off by thinking about The Lurker? He rubbed the end of his nose on the end of my nose, and all I could see, in the sodium-lit half light of my room were those eyebrows. And in my sensual, slightly damp and a little bit tipsy state, amid the delirium and a sudden mix of weird emotions, I equated his skateboard with The Lurker’s black and white collie dog. You know what?, I said. You’re right. I am sleepy. And this was all I ever saw of Denny.
11.
I felt angry towards The Lurker after this because I wondered if it would be the same with every relationship from now on. Yet the safeguards I adopted every time I came out of my flat, or returned home to my flat, meant that I didn’t even know if The Lurker was there. He had become a concept, an idea rather than an actual person. Far too much of my time was taken up with imaginary conversations with him. Some of these conversations were confrontational, but I soon figured that confrontation equals emotion, and he may have been pleased at exciting such emotions within me, even if they were negative emotions. Some of these imaginary conversations were entirely different, and took on a more reflective manner. It’s amazing to be adored from afar, to be desired, and in a funny sort of way, to be loved. Thanks for that. And as I get older it might be something that happens less often. I should hold on to this as a very special time in my life. Perhaps I might write about it, twenty years later, when I am really not quite so desirable. So yes, I’m very grateful and I want you to know how grateful I am. Because the world is a mystery. We are all individuals, and we cannot dive into the skin of another, and take command of their emotions and motivations. We are but atoms and molecules, electronic impulses, sparks of life on a distant rock, the pull of gravity and the earthly orbit dictating us as one at the mercy of science, and yet, forever diverse and independent, our consciousnesses impregnable. How do I know that you even exist? None of my friends have even seen you. So let us dance, Lurker-man, you and me, in celebration of this variety of being, let us dance and sway to the rhythms of life and all human aspiration, at one with the our divergent destinies, and yet brothers, inhabitants of the same time and place, oh, Lurker-man, let us dance, let us dance!
12.
I’ve been quite fortunate in my life and travelled to all sorts of places, but I’ve usually been alone on these journeys, which has often suited me just fine. Around the period that The Lurker was always outside my flat, I flew to Australia to spend a couple of weeks in the jungles around Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. One day I decided to join a minibus full of backpackers for a drive out into the jungle, and we had an amazing time in the tropical heat surrounded by verdant vegetation and the noise of the rainforest. At one point, while driving through the rainforest along a paved road, we saw a cassowary, and we stopped and took photos of it as it mooched into the jungle. The thing about this was that the jungle was so very humid that my glasses would steam up whenever I got out of the minibus. I made a couple of friends on this one-day expedition, a tour guide who was on holiday from Alice Springs, his nickname was Doc because he looked a little like the character Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films. As we drove back to Cairns, we had to stop in the rainforest at a river crossing, where a flat open ferry powered by tug boats took vehicles to the other side of the croc-infested water. The minibus had to wait in a queue of cars for the ferry to come back. Both Doc and I needed to pee, so we set out into the humid rainforest where no one from the road could see us. Our biggest worry was crocodiles, what with being so close to the riverbank, but instead we walked straight into a swamp. We stood side by side and urinated, and as we did so, we both realised that we were being bitten by flies. We’d both sprayed ourselves with insect repellent but even so we were being bitten all over, and bitten, and bitten. At last we finished what we were doing and went back to the minibus, entered the air conditioned vehicle and swatted at the flies that we had inadvertently brought back with us. And we were laughing because it had been so funny and so out of character for both of us and because the situation had been so silly, and everyone else in the minibus, the young backpackers and the travellers and the driver , were all laughing too, because the situation had been so silly, because the situation had been so absurd.
13.
All I wanted was to live and to do so with the most normal life imaginable. The flat was the first one that I had ever rented and I wanted everything to go well. I wanted to be happy there, but I was too wrapped up in wondering who this person was who I had become now that I lived on my own. It’s true that I had some lonely evenings, in which I felt so downcast and detached, and I would look out of the bay window at the drab street below with its gift shops and its fish bars, and the sad tourists who walked around dejected because the weather was so bad, and I didn’t really recognise who I was any more. The Lurker’s presence didn’t help matters. I needed consistency in my life, but not this sort of consistency. Life was consistently weird. I tried to act as normal as possible, but life was consistently weird.
14.
Why did he automatically assume that I would fall for his charms? That’s the most comical thing about this.
15.
You ready?, I asked, just about to serve. Neither of us took it too seriously, this weekly game of badminton. I’m ready, Mark said, and then he blew a raspberry and I asked him why he’d done that, and he said, to put you off your serve. We’d just bought new shuttlecocks and they seemed to fly much further than the ones we’d used previously. Go on then, Mark said, serve. I concentrated on what I was doing and just as I was about to serve, he lifted up his t-shirt and wobbled his belly, which made me laugh. All around us the people on the other courts were playing their own badminton games and some were involved in endless volleys back and forth and we could hear the energetic squeak of their shoes echoing back from the high breeze block walls of the leisure centre hall, but the most prevalent sound which came from our court was that of laughter. I served, but the shuttle went much further than I had anticipated, and I laughed as Mark watched it sail right over his head, and then he looked behind him. It had landed quite a distance away somewhere near the door to the changing rooms. He then started measuring the distance between the end of our court to where the shuttle had landed, by using his feet. Thirteen and a half feet, he said at last, as he bent down to pick up the shuttle. And I laughed, and he laughed.
16.
I don’t know when it was that I realised that The Lurker had gone. Counting my paces in the back alley, and masking my hearing with earplugs and my personal stereo, had not been totally foolproof, and every now and then I’d accidentally looked up and seen him there leaning against the fence, but a couple of times I’d looked up and he’d not been there at all. And those had been pretty good days, but invariably, he’d soon be back. I remember one day I forgot to take my personal stereo with me and I was angry at myself as I came out of the communal entranceway, but I felt that it would be silly to turn around and go all the way back upstairs to my flat and go in now that I was almost in the back lane. In all the fuss I forgot to look down and count my paces. And wouldn’t you know it, but The Lurker wasn’t there. He wasn’t there the next day, either. And a couple of weeks later I forgot my earplugs, but I didn’t hear him bark or hear any noise at all from the area where he normally stood. And the day after that I looked up, and he wasn’t there. All I could see was a slight dent in the corrugated iron fence around the bowling green where he’d been leaning all that time. It looked like he’d gone. It really did look like he’d gone.
17.
He’s just got bored of you, my friend Anne said. You obviously no longer have quite so much appeal for him. Story of my life, I replied, and we both laughed. I can’t help but feel a little bit abandoned, I added. Don’t you understand? I’m no longer as special as I once was. I’m no longer worthy of his attention. I can no longer tell people that I have a stalker. And we both laughed some more. But honestly, I did wonder where he had gone, and what could have put him off from his attention, and what I might have done that had resulted in this. Perhaps he did, indeed, get bored, because it must have been tedious just standing there all day waiting for one person to come along who often didn’t even look up. And looking back now at a version of myself who was much more exuberant and outgoing than the version of myself who now exists, I wonder also what had also become of me. The way I see it, we were two separate people caught up in the same moment in history, at two very different parts of our lives. I couldn’t believe at the time that he had finally gone away, and looking back now, I can’t believe that he had even been there in the first place. But that’s life. And even now I have this sense that I’m being watched, every time that I leave the place where I now live. After all these years The Lurker is still with me, albeit psychologically. Perhaps this was his intention all along. Perhaps that’s why he did it in the first place.