No, I don’t really follow, not to begin with. I let my thoughts walk alongside them, that’s all. I concern myself. I wonder if, say, the man striding by on legs that seem shortened from lack of use has cause to feel as pinched and aggrieved as he looks, and why he may be dismayed in his heart. I worry that the slow, sentimental-looking pregnant girl carrying bags of sweets has nobody to listen to her cravings and go to the shop for her, and hurry back to run her a bath and feed her liquorice sticks or spearmint toffee, stroking her belly, as she lies in the deep warm water. I don’t follow them; I just need to know they are safe, the lost ones, the wanderers. I like to see them enter rooms that will shut out the night that’s lapping at the door. I’m anxious and hungry for their well-being, so I give in and let myself be pulled along behind them.
Not that I try to see into houses. I do not go searching for uncurtained rooms. But there are so many, and it is impossible not to look in through lit windows, for since I now truly know the dark, I want equal knowledge of its absence. I have to observe the places where darkness has been disallowed, where its opposite reigns apparent. Such brightness! I admit the brightness does enthral me, though I gaze in dread because I can’t separate it from what it illuminates: people in houses moored like toy lightships on the surface of the night, people tending futile little eternal domestic fires the way I used to and the way Ruth and Arthur did. I can hardly bear to see them so lit up, so impossibly vulnerable yet oblivious, as if they thought their puny flares of artificial daylight could prevail, as if any tiny guttering yellow flame could ever withstand the encroaching black.
For hours at a time I watch them dappled by the light of television screens, heavy and unmoving in their chairs. I watch them at tables and mirrors, filling plates and eating with their hands, flipping through papers, brushing their hair. They stand at sinks, lift telephones, open and close cupboards. Children are put to bed and babies bundled on shoulders are carried from room to room. I watch as they leave off talking and little by little grow dreamy and inattentive, and fond and slow. How I envy them. Lights go out.
I want more. Now when a house goes dark I draw closer, right up to the windows. I want to hear breathing. I like to picture people in their beds and unaware that the day has run out on them, that sleep is suspending every crisis, every flawed, unfinished striving, every word said and not yet said in their particular small lives. I want to hear their steady breathing because then I would know that until they wake their stories are collapsed and upturned, dragged along in the depthless currents of dreams. I’d know that for a while at least their stories are as lost to them as mine is to me.
So what harm would it do if at such a time, for such a short time, I came closer still? I wouldn’t invade anyone’s dreams just by coming within the walls. Nor would I try to steal anyone’s story and take it for my own, but may I not borrow it, during a few hours of darkness, in order to affect it for the better? I see enough in all these lit-up houses to know I could do some good; there are always dozens of practical ways of making a difference. I long to help, as I did before. And I wouldn’t take more than I give. I’d attach to another life to improve it, not to end it or suck it dry. I’m not parasitic. It’s symbiosis I seek, that poise and purity and balance. I’m starving for it. I whimper at people’s windows.
Yet I shy away. I haven’t yet tried an unlocked door or unlatched a low window and stepped in, though I think I’m bound to; it’s only a matter of time. I don’t know what inhibits me, but I turn away long before it’s light.
Tonight I wander back the way I came along the quiet roads but I’m not ready for sleep in the rented room that smells of bar dregs and disinfectant. I’ll stay out even though there’s a prickle of frost in the air and I should be in warmer clothes. Beyond the houses, the pavement widens and leads into a park with a few swings and a roundabout. I set the swings going as I stroll past and then walk on quickly so I won’t hear their empty creaking. I slip through a line of trees on the edge of a recreation ground and strike out across playing fields. Ahead and around me in the dark I can make out the leaning white ribs of goalposts. When I’ve crossed to the far side I stop and stare back at the park and the houses under their yellowy bloom of cloud, looking for a sign that I ever set foot there. There is none, not so much as a dent in the grass. In front of me now is a fence and a scrub of bramble bushes and beyond that, over a metal gate, a stretch of ploughed earth curving upward into faraway woods.
Once I’m through the woods I roam further, across a patch of thin pasture and more fields. Then it gets steeper; paths end at stiles or slide over the horizon through gaps in hedges, land drops away behind scraggy stands of bushes and falls into hoof-rutted gullies. The wind rises. Darkness lies trapped in the trees like black veils snagged on the branches, it ripples ahead of me and spreads over the swell of the hills. I follow it, climbing an old sheep path almost to the top of a hill high above the glow of the town, where moonlight strikes through the clouds and silvers the grass.
I shiver and settle myself down, hugging my knees. Suddenly I’m too weary to move any further. My eyes close for a moment, though it’s so cold I won’t fall asleep. I wish I could. I need a place to lie, somewhere to stay. Is it to be here, another hillside under the moon? I look back in the direction of the town.
Something feels near at hand. I force myself awake and try to make sense of the contours of the hill, but I’m drowsy and shapes loom and shift and nudge against me, benignly perhaps; the wind now has me wrapped in its cool rocking arms and I don’t wish to be let go. I can’t trust my eyes, but I strive to make out a gate half-open, half-closed, in the moonlight. I’m searching through the dark for signs of a throng of lost ones idling along the path, the wind ruffling dry leaves into a familiar tangle of hair, bearing the echoes of myriad remembered stories and the scents of old vines and honey. Will they wait for me?
Something is ending, or beginning. How long will they linger, my lost ones, my wanderers? They wonder, I think, why I stay away. Do they hear me when I murmur that I think it may be coming soon, the night when I venture close enough to see if the moving shadows on the hillside really are theirs, do they know how I yearn to catch a glimpse of patient, moon-white hands outstretched to take me with them? But again I make myself turn away and look down towards the town. Then it’s as if I also see, motionless under the roofs of all the houses, the slumbering keepers of stories, the tender, infinite stories, so clamorous and so many and all of them unfinished, surrendered, waiting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Morag Joss grew up on the west coast of Scotland. She began writing in 1996 when her first short story won an award in a national competition. She then wrote three Sara Selkirk novels, set in Bath, the first of which, Funeral Music, was nominated for a Dilys Award by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.
With her fourth novel, Half Broken Things, she won the 2003 Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger award. Half Broken Things has been adapted as a TV film and broadcast on national television, and Puccini’s Ghosts, published in 2005, has been optioned for film. The Night Following is Morag Joss’s sixth novel. She lives in Hampshire.
