The Watchful

When you live on a main road, you get accustomed to watching the world pass you by. The rush-hour traffic evacuating its exhaust pipes, ambulances and police cars scampering from one emergency to the next, opportunist thieves scouting for unlocked cars or homes without alarms and cameras. From my bedroom window, I’ve seen the wreckage of car crashes and the backwash of minor and major assaults. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been awoken by drunks serenading the stars.

          And so, that Friday afternoon when a man stood stock-still, his arms resting on the rough granite capping of my front wall, I didn’t pay too much attention at first. I was working in my home office and had he turned his head even a few degrees, he would certainly have noticed me behind my computer monitor. Instead, his eyes remained fixed entirely on the windows of my empty living room.

          I remember thinking he’d be gone in a minute. At 14:01, I glanced at the small digital clock in the bottom right corner of my screen. By 14:07, he was still there, eyes focused and resolute, as if secured on strands of invisible wire. In the Dublin 7 neighbourhood where I live, sometimes it’s better to take a breath. If a teenager tosses an empty can of Red Bull onto your lawn, or a dog with a choke collar takes a crap on your gravel driveway, cleaning it up yourself is the sensible choice.

          But I could stay still no longer and walked into my living room to see if there was anything there. Perhaps he was looking at ‘something’, a trapped bird or a stray cat that had slipped in through an open window. The living room was quiet though. The TV was off, there were no lights turned on, and the settee was empty. From where he stood at the end of my long front garden, I can’t imagine he could have seen anything but the paint on my walls.

          I approached the bay window, careful not to meet his eyes directly. For the first time, I began to suspect he was ill, that he had suffered a stroke or a catatonic episode. I wondered if I should call the police or an ambulance, but what could I have said? I stood a moment, hands on the window board, hoping my presence would scare him off like a foraging magpie. His motionless though was unnatural, like the hyperrealist waxwork sculpture I’d once seen in a London gallery that still appeared in an occasional nightmare.

          I started to think how I could approach him without being confrontational. I opened the front door and began to walk slowly down the drive, loose stones crunching underfoot like a man advancing towards a dog whose ears were pricked. It felt like I needed to say something before I got too close, that any sudden move might provoke him.

          “Is everything all right there?” I asked, though my voice was hesitant and drowned out by the traffic.

          Even if he couldn’t hear the words, he should surely have seen me. But his eyes remained fixed ahead, oblivious to his surroundings.

          “Are you all right there?” I said, more forcefully.

          He came to, his eyes darting, like he had awoken in an unfamiliar room. I felt like a hypnotist snapping his fingers.

          “D’you say something to me?” he said.

          “I was just wondering if everything was okay.”

          “How’s that your business?”

          “You’ve been standing there for twenty minutes.”

          He looked down at his wrist, tapped a button on his watch. As the time registered in his head, I could see his confusion. But he said no more and just turned and walked away. I stood at the wall, my arms now resting across the rough granite. He never looked back, just kept going, to where I do not know. As he walked though, I could see he was holding something in his hand, and as his arms swung, the afternoon sunlight caught the object, and it glinted like metal.

          It was a strange episode and if nothing else had happened, I think I would have forgotten. At best, it might have been a story to tell at the canteen table that Thursday, the only day of the week I had to show my face in the office.

          All that afternoon, I attended dutifully to my humdrum work, reading applications from hopeful community groups looking for a small government grant. It was an easy task to fall into, scoring each of them in ten different categories, rejecting those that did not fully meet the guidelines. There was a time I pitied the unsuccessful and all the time they wasted filling in their forms, but that time was gone. When the alarm on my iPhone chimed at 17:00, I stopped what I was doing and straight away hit the power switch on my PC.

          I lived in a fine red-brick house, approaching its one-hundred-year anniversary. It was only me there ever since my mother had passed away. I could have rented out one, or even two, of the spare bedrooms, but having company didn’t suit me. In work, there were some colleagues I could call acquaintances, but not friends. I had no interest in women, nor men for that matter. Maybe in a past life, I would have lived in some monastery or a beehive hut on an Atlantic crag.

          It is not uncommon for a solitary man to develop routines, for there is nobody there to break them. Once the screen of my computer faded to black, I would go upstairs and change into my cycling gear. I would fill two bottles of water, pack a fig bar in my back pocket, and put on my fingerless gloves. The Cannondale bike in the sitting room was the most valuable item in the house, and before every ride, I would carefully check the brakes and gears, the tyre pressure and chain lubrication.

          Pulling my helmet on, I would set off, almost always in the direction of the Phoenix Park. From there, I would glide down past the Angler’s Rest into the Strawberry Beds and explore whatever lumpy roads and steep hills took my fancy along the green valley of the River Liffey. I often thought of how a tin can of happiness would take form as a human on their bike, legs spinning, eyes on the road, wind at their backs. The only thing that could break the spell was a motorist passing too close or a fly landing in your mouth.

          It was one of those long Dublin summer evenings, the prodigal sun shining in the sky. By the time I got home, the unusual events outside my home were already dimming in my memory. With my forehead lightly powdered with salt, I sat down on the couch drinking a can of fizzy orange. My usual habit was to make some dinner but that night, I felt lazy and ordered a takeaway burrito instead.

          Sitting in my mother’s favourite armchair, I watched the highlights from the Tour de France, having studiously avoided the result all day. I drank three bottles of Leffe with my food and at some point, I must have dozed off, waking a little later with a crick in my neck. It was just after midnight, and I still had not showered. I stood up too quickly so that I felt light-headed and as my blood pressure rebalanced, I noticed a man standing outside beneath the streetlight, his arms resting on top of my front wall.

          It probably doesn’t need to be said that it is even more unsettling to have a stranger standing outside your home in the dark of night. And certainly so, given what had happened that afternoon. I flicked the lights of the glass chandelier of the sitting room on and off four times, hoping to show the house was occupied or better again, to startle him into leaving.

          When I went upstairs, I would ordinarily have drawn the blinds of the master bedroom, but I decided to leave them open. I snuck forward gently, as if the footsteps of my stockinged feet might be heard outside, and I could see he was still there, looking up towards my room.

          ‘I’ll have a wash first,’ I thought to myself, give the man a chance to leave of his own accord. The shower was in an ensuite in the back bedroom, and I peeled off my gear and socks on the landing and took a fresh towel from the hot water press. My toes were sticky on the wood floor and the fresh sweat from earlier was turning sour. On a normal day, I might have spent ten or fifteen minutes with hot water gushing over me, but I showered that night as if I was late for a job interview.

          I dried myself off but as I walked back towards my bedroom, something out the back caught my eye. It was a shadowed face, hovering just above my high back wall, and it seemed to me like it was a middle-aged woman. The wall itself was around nine foot tall; my mother had extended it after a spate of burglaries in the area. And I began to mentally calculate. Either this woman was ten foot in height, or she was standing on a small stepladder.

          There was nowhere in the house from which I could see both persons at once, so I tiptoed from bedroom to bedroom, praying they would disappear. I turned on and off the lights, but it made no difference. I think had they come dashing towards the house, that would have felt more ‘normal’, that they were some kind of night raiders planning a smash and grab for cash or jewellery. But in the minutes that I spent peeking at them from the darkness, I could never perceive any movement.

          It was 00:22 on my watch as I began to search for the number of my local police station. I was tentative about calling 999; it seemed daunting, like an over-reaction, that squad cars might come rushing towards my home.

          “Bridewell garda station,” said the officer who picked up the phone.

          The words to explain what was happening still churned like concrete in my mind.

          “I’m sorry,” I said, “but there is something quite strange going on at my house.”

          “Strange how, Sir?” the policeman asked.

          I was sitting on my bed, from where I could see the stationary man.

          “There are two people standing outside my property and acting suspiciously.”

          “Suspicious in what way?”

          “They’re just standing there, staring in. Not moving. It’s hard to describe.”

          I wondered if I should tell him about the incident from the afternoon but thought better of it.

          “Have they tried to enter your property, Sir?” the garda asked.

          “Nothing like that.”

          “Have they threatened you or damaged anything?”

          “No, they’re just standing there.”

          “Do you recognise either of them?”

          “Never saw them before.”

          “What’s your name and Eircode, Sir?”

          “Daragh Fanning,” I said. “Let me check the postcode. It’s D07-Z92.”

          “We’ve a patrol car down in Phibsboro; I’ll ask them to take a spin by.”

          “Thanks for your help.”

          “No bother at all.”

          I sat on the edge of the king mattress, rubbing my right thumb softly against the whorls of my index and ring fingers. It was a technique I had learned from my cognitive behaviour therapist for when I felt the panic rising, the only technique – apart from anxiolytics – that had ever worked. The minutes passed cliché-like as seconds until I saw the faint flicker of blue lights coming in the distance.

          A garda stepped from his car and I could see a hesitation, like he too found this out of the ordinary. I could see the officer’s lips moving but the triple-glazed windows meant I could not hear the words. I saw that same look in the eyes of the standing man, trance-like, as if he had been torn away from communication with the spirits. He began to walk off as the police officer made his way up the driveway. I met the garda at the front door wearing just my bed t-shirt and boxer shorts.

          “Mr Fanning,” he said.

          “Yes,” I replied, “thank you for coming.”

          “That man has gone on his way.”

          “Do you mind me asking what he said?”

          “Said he was tired and stopped to rest.”

          “There’s another person, a woman I think, at the back.”

          “Another one?” he said.

          “Looking over my wall.”

          “Well, I can move her on too.”

          “And that’s it?”

          “Not sure what else we can do. If you have any other problems, call the station again.”

          I slept; I suppose. I was perched on that tightrope between wakefulness and unconsciousness, not sure of where I was. In semi-dreams, I saw Watchful people surrounding my house, inching towards my front and back door. In half-lucid moments, I saw the same. I resisted the temptation to rise from my bed until 06:29 when I at last conceded and went down to the kitchen to make a coffee in my Bodum cafetière.

          Perched on a stool in my extended kitchen living room, I liked to watch the robins and wood pigeons that called my back garden home. One could so easily while away five minutes watching them hop between the bush, grass, and washing line. But that morning, my eyes drifted, again and again, to the brim of the back wall. And to the bay window of the living room, the front garden wall, its granite capping, it called out like a banshee.

          It was Thursday morning, and I had no choice but to visit my office. They had tried to bring us back after COVID until they realised it was impossible. There were meetings to be had, a weekly check-in with my manager, all of which could just as easily have been done at home. The important thing was to keep up the pretence, that we needed the personal interaction, that we needed that human touch. I certainly didn’t.

          Getting on the Luas tram that morning, I was relieved there was nobody at either my front or back wall. And if anybody had decided to observe my home that working day, I was comforted by the fact that I would never know. A colleague had a Ring doorbell connected to her phone and spent at least a half an hour each day observing the camera for fear the latest caller was not an Amazon driver or a man delivering pizza menus and newsletters from local politicians.

          As 17:00 loomed, one of my co-workers suggested a drink in Toners Pub, that we might take advantage of the unseasonable summer warmth. By rule, I declined such invites, claiming I had other arrangements which my colleagues knew did not exist. That evening though, I said I would come.

          “Really?” said Maeve, who sat across from me back when we more regularly occupied those office seats.

          “Why not.”

          The first hour passed, my silence unremarked upon or at least tolerated. But I warmed to the task, thinking how much better it was to be there than looking out my windows. I drank more than I was used to, but not so much that I did anything foolish. It was 22:03 when I walked out onto Baggot Street, and I had no trouble in hailing a taxi. He was from Pakistan, and I embarrassed myself by asking whether he liked cricket.

          I suppose it was the drink speaking when I got out from the cab and found a young man leaning over my front wall. He was perhaps thirty, his biceps and forearms bulging beneath a white t-shirt.

          “That’s my house,” I said to him.

          He turned towards me with that vacant stare, like a computer that had just been hard rebooted. The mechanism of his mind engaged again.

          “Who the fook are you,” he said.

          I could see now his arms were grazed and bleeding from the rough granite, and I wondered how long he had been standing there.

          “I’ll call the police,” I said.

          “What for?”

          “Loitering,” I replied.

          “You will in your hole,” he said. I could see a decision spark flashing in his face, whether it was worthwhile lashing out. Instead, like the others, he turned and walked away. In his back pocket though, I was certain I could see the distinctive short triangular blade of a Stanley knife jutting from his skintight Levi’s.

          That night in bed, all I could think of was how I could better secure my home. Could I have shards of broken glass affixed to the top of the back wall, I wondered, or would that end in a legal claim? At the front, I could grow a tall hedge so that the front garden was no longer overlooked. Perhaps I could buy an iron gate for the driveway, or would a Watchful person simply stand peering through the railings? It was 3:07 am and these thoughts ricocheted like a rubber squash ball against the walls of my mind.

          There were a few sleeping tablets in the medicine cabinet gone past their use by date; I didn’t like taking them because they gave me a hangover. But I felt I had no choice. I took half of one and washed it down with water from the bathroom tap. It took every gram of self-control I had not to go sneaking a look around the corners of my bedroom blinds to see if anybody was outside.

          The next morning when I awoke, I had a runny nose, a tickle in my throat, and a dull headache epicentred just above my left eye. It seemed like more than the after-effects of the Zopiclone pill I had taken at 3:11 am. I dashed off an email to work telling them I was unwell. I wondered if my line manager would connect it to the previous night’s drinking. It didn’t really matter though as it was the first day of leave that I had taken since the week my mother died.

          The next week passed in a haze of confusion. My temperature rose to 102 degrees and at one stage, I wondered if I would need an ambulance. That tickle in my throat turned red raw so that it was difficult to eat anything except lukewarm soup. I fell in and out of sleep, and my dreams were so vivid, that they began to coalesce with reality.

          When I had the energy – and as the fever at last relented – I would look outside, and see somebody, sometimes two, even three people standing over my front wall. When I could muster the strength, I would go to my door and roar.

          “Go away.”

          “Leave.”

          “Why are you doing this?”

          Sometimes, they would hear me, before resuming their intended journey. One I saw carried a ball hammer, another a handsaw. These were just the objects I could see, however, the suspicious bulges in light jackets and trouser pockets I could not identify. I would call the police and a squad car would come and move them on. But they returned, like a flock of pigeons momentarily flustered by a sudden noise.

          It became so that I recognised some of the officers.

          “Can’t you do something?” I asked one, a young garda called Davey, an affable man from County Clare.

          “I’m sorry Mr Fanning, but we can’t arrest people unless they’ve committed a crime.”

          “Is there any way somebody could keep more regular watch?”

          I could see him trying to make gentle his words, as his head nodded side to side.

          “I wish we could do something,” he said, “but we’re stretched wafer-thin.”

          I suppose it seems odd that no neighbours came calling. The house beside me was still in probate after Patrick Rafferty followed his late wife Rosemary into the Hereafter. Most of the other properties on the road had been sub-divided into small, poorly maintained apartments with chipboard furniture and second-hand appliances. At one, a steady stream of men came and went casting furtive glances as they pressed the buzzer. My street was one of the last still standing against the onslaught of gentrification in Dublin 7.

          I had never given much thought to moving house. My parents were gone, and I was an only child. But it was my family home even if, as seemed inevitable, I was to be the last twig of this branch of the Fanning clan. Leaflets would come through the door every week from hungry estate agents promising free valuations and rapid sales. For the first time, instead of making a swift journey into the recycling bin, the flyers remained on the kitchen counter, where I would read and reread them while drinking my morning coffee.

          I knew the house would fetch a good price from some rapacious landlord whose only thought would be how many people he could cram inside. I even got so far as dialling the number of one local property agent. But even before the phone was picked up, I ended the call.

          A month had passed since the first man had stood watching and I had almost become accustomed to their presence. They never set foot on my driveway or my lawn. I used to leave the blinds down in each room so that they would not distract me from my work. And when I wheeled my bicycle out each evening, I chose to ignore them. I knew they could be scared away. But why bother when another would soon arrive.

          When I came home one Wednesday, an unmarked garda car was parked outside. I had given up calling them for help, so it was unexpected to see them there. As I rolled the bike over the gravel and carefully lifted it onto the grass, two plain-clothes officers emerged simultaneously. They were older than the patrol men I was used to, and their bearing told me they carried a foul tide.

          “Howdy, Mr Fanning,” the taller of the two men said, carrying his right leg like he would soon need a hip replacement. “Nice evening for a ride.”

          “Do you want to come in?” I asked.

          “That’d probably be for the best.”

          On my couch sat Detective Inspector Maurice Boland and his colleague Detective Sergeant Denis Foley. Even as we sat there, a Watchful person was outside, her eyes so glazed they seemed almost opaque, looking at me, yet through me, as I stood at the window.

          “It’s about them, isn’t it?” I said.

          “It is,” said Boland.

          “Do you know what they’re doing?”

          I turned around, my legs still heavy from cycling. The two officers were whispering to one another.

          “The pure truth is we don’t know,” Foley said.

          “But something’s changed?” I replied.

          “It’s been happening elsewhere,” Boland answered. “Nine or ten different cities. We were the last to find out. We’ve been watching your home the past fortnight. The comings and the goings. We didn’t want to alarm you … at least any more than you were already.”

          “Is it the same in these other places?” I asked.

          “Much the same,” said Foley, shifting his long right leg like he could never find a comfortable position.

          Detective Inspector Boland interrupted him. “You see, the thing is, Mr Fanning.  They don’t, at least they didn’t, seem to pose any threat. Just standing about.”

          “You know some of them seem to have weapons,” I said.

          “And that’s just it,” said Boland. “One of them has used a weapon. In a house near Santander. In the north of Spain.”

          I had to stop myself from telling him I knew where it was; that I’d been there.

          “Was somebody killed? Is that what you’re going to tell me?”

          “No, thank God,” said Boland. “A stab wound. From an old antique rapier of all things. But not fatal. Or at least they hope.”

          “Am I in danger?”

          “I wouldn’t say you’re safe,” Foley said.

          “You’ll protect me?”

          “I,” Boland said, “we, I mean. We think you might be best leaving Dublin for a bit.”

          “And where do you want me to go?”

          “Wherever. Anywhere. Not here. We can help defray any expenses that might arise,” said Boland.

          As I packed up my car the next morning, I had this sense like I might not return. I put two weeks’ worth of clothes in a suitcase and packed up my cycling gear. I removed the two wheels from my bike and very neatly stacked them alongside the carbon frame in the boot of my Volvo. It was 09:27 a.m. when I set off for Donegal. There were two Watchful persons outside and two more at the back wall. A patrol car was parked on the footpath, observing.

          Driving past Connolly Hospital, I was surprised at just how relieved I felt. When you find yourself in distress, sometimes the ropes tighten by degrees so that you do not fully realise just how tight they have become. In the last weeks of my mother’s life, I remember driving to and from the adjoining hospice every day, hoping for a good day that never came. Each time my mobile phone rang, a small rush of panic would break like a wave over me, that this would be the terminal call. Then it was over. A thimble full of relief. Afterwards, a headstone and a void.

          With every passing mile, my troubles receded a little more. I ate a toasted ham and cheese sandwich in a pub in Aughnacloy and broke my informal rule of not drinking at lunch time. That single pint of Guinness left me wanting another, but I had never driven drunk in my life and didn’t plan on changing that.

          I drove on past Omagh, the Sperrin Mountains rising gently to my right. In Strabane, I got caught in traffic as I passed back across the border into Donegal. Circling Letterkenny, I turned on Google Maps to take me into the hills above Ramelton, snaking up a narrow boreen, and at last to the door of my white-washed holiday cottage.

          I punched in the code that opened the key lockbox in the porch. The house was more spacious than I expected and had a large living area with exposed timber beams and a small kitchen. A set of binoculars sat on a coffee table. There were two large bedrooms, the walls decorated with photos and paintings of Irish birds of prey: kestrels, peregrines, kites, and hen harriers. I chose the room that overlooked the long descending driveway.

          After unpacking the car, I reassembled my Cannondale bike and changed into my cycling gear. I had no destination in mind as I set off, hands and forearms rattling as I dodged the potholes. By the time I returned to my cottage, it was 18:43. There was a wooden bench out front, and I sat like a lizard in the sun, a light breeze drying the sweat from my clothes and brow.

          When I had showered, I drove back down into Ramelton and stocked up on groceries at the local supermarket. Coming back up the country lane, with my family home, my garden walls, and the Watchful people 254 kilometres away, I wondered if I could live here. Most of my job could be done remotely. If I sold up in Dublin and bought something in Donegal, I would have a couple of hundred thousand euro left over. I wouldn’t have to cycle in search of countryside anymore; it was all around me.

          I sat back out on the bench. The wind had picked up, so I wrapped a light merino wool blanket around me. I got lost in a book by Robert Louis Stevenson on my Kindle and had just opened my third can of Kinnegar pale ale. When it got too cool, I went inside and lay on the grey fabric Chesterfield couch. With eyes closed, I turned on some ambient electronica.

          The sound that disturbed me was of a steel farm gate scraping the ground, its rusted hinges softly screeching. Until then, the only thing I could hear was cows lowing in nearby fields and a cuckoo. I stood up. Too abruptly. As my head began to spin, I could see Watchful people approaching from the fields. Through the binoculars, I was able to see one carried a sickle, another a spade fork. There was an elderly woman with a hatchet, a young man with a hunting rifle.

          He held the rifle in his hands, shotgun-like, and fired, the bullet ricocheting off the whitewashed wall. I sat crouched beneath the living room window reaching for my phone. I keyed in the digits of 911 before realising there was no signal; it had been lost somewhere on the hillside. I could hear heavy footsteps then, the sound of shoes and boots scraping on gravel. There was a knock on the door, like no knock I had ever heard. The wood began to splinter while at a window above the kitchen sink, the face of a teenager appeared.

          Above my head, the window shattered, showering me with glass. I could see the rifle barrel poking through the fragments, and I grabbed it. As I stood up, the Watchful person’s hands were still raised as if firing a weapon that he no longer held. When I shot him, he fell – his face expressionless – like he had just decided to lie down on the ground and die. I clambered out through the broken window, running down the driveway. Each of the intruders turned and began to follow me, slowly, remorselessly. If they had moved faster, they would have caught me.

          The state ‘protects’ me in an old military prison now. Twenty-foot walls surround the facility, and I am the sole occupant. I imagine the Watchful people, vacantly forming a perimeter, armed with blades and blunt instruments. And I often wonder if, up in the hills above Ramelton, I should have let them kill me.

Ken Foxe is a writer and transparency activist in Ireland. He is the author of two non-fiction books based on his journalism and likes to write short stories of horror, fantasy, SF, and speculative fiction.

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