It is late. I’m walking the long way back because I feel, or at least felt before I started out, the need to exercise before eating.
The road and pavements are still wet from the recent rain, and glint when light from the streetlamps strikes them. The wind is rearranging the remaining leaves on the trees, casting shifting shadows and making the wet road-shine of the streetlamps flicker. I’m tempted to use the simile of disco lighting, but that implies an intensity of light that isn’t present. The streets round here are gloomy, despite the lighting. Between the amply spaced lamps there are patches, often by alleys, nooks and concealing alcoves, where it is very dark indeed.
I walk briskly through the heightened night of these unlit pools. It doesn’t seem sensible to linger. My heels sound a quickening volley as I hurry past. I’m not sure high heels are especially sensible either.
The road at this point is long and straight, but there are occasional intermissions where the pavement falters and a tributary of the road curves away to form a cul-de-sac, a small avenue or another darkened street stretching away unseen into obscurity.
Cars on the street are few. This is an area where vehicles are wrapped up safely in garages for the night or at least brought on to the drive, close to the house.
There are houses on both sides of the street, some with their lights still on, most dark and shuttered for the evening. I’ve walked this road so often over the years, I’m familiar with them all. Though every now and then the change wrought by a new family moving in takes me by surprise.
As I walk, I like to think about the people living inside the houses I pass, their thoughts and aspirations. I imagine absorbing their accumulated knowledge and experience. What secrets would I learn?
Just past a badly lit turning onto a smaller avenue, I pause outside a house with a newly painted bright red door – surprisingly bold for this area. It is then that I hear them: footsteps, heavier than mine, flat – not heeled – shoes, coming up rapidly behind me.
I freeze. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I am standing in a sustained pool of darkness where one of the streetlamps has died.
The footsteps keep coming, growing louder, until I hear them turn away down the small avenue I’ve just passed. They fade into the suburban night. I relax and continue on my way. I still have a long walk ahead of me.
The wind is getting up now, drying the hard surface of the tarmacked road, the stone slabs of the pavement and the autumnal fallen leaves starting to swirl around my feet. The rat-a-tat-tat of my heels sounds more muted. What other sounds might the muffling, rustling leaves be hiding?
In answer, the wind begins to tug on my hair, whispering away in my ear that I should pay more attention to it, to the sounds it carries, to the sounds it chooses to keep from me. I keep walking.
I continue to study the houses slowly flowing past, the people within them; a self-propelled, moving diorama of life.
In their fortress home, the Wentworths are locked up for the night, curtains tightly drawn, all lights turned off. They are not a family to draw attention to themselves.
On the other side of the street, the Patels are similarly secure for the evening. The Simaks next door, a young couple, not long resident, are still up. A light glows through the closed, pink-tinged bedroom curtains on the first floor of the house. I allow myself to wonder what they are doing – are they getting ready for bed? But then I dismiss my thoughts as inappropriately intrusive. My heels continue their muffled clack along the road.
Two doors down, the lights in old man Parsley’s place cast pools of soiled yellow light onto his unkempt front garden. He isn’t one for drawing his curtains. I wish he was. I’ve seen the inflatable human doll propped up on the settee in his lounge. I have no need to wonder about his thoughts or activities, and no desire to know them better.
As I walk on by, I hear footsteps again. Like before, they sound male, moving rapidly and headed towards me. No one likes to linger at this hour, I think. Everyone wants to be home, warm and safe.
The footsteps are becoming quicker and growing closer. They are on my side of the street. Without stopping to rationalise my actions, I walk briskly towards the next patch of darkness, close to the Stukelys’ high brick wall, and pause beneath the remains of the overhanging buddleia. I think it provides additional camouflage. At least, I have a sense of being hidden. I remain motionless and as quiet as possible, while I wait.
The footsteps are close now. Quick, purposeful, unwilling to be deflected from their intent. If I peer out from my imagined shelter, I will be able to see him as he hurtles down the street towards me, but I remain concealed within the shadows.
I can hear his heavy breathing, feet thumping out an unhesitating rhythm. He’s almost on me, but at the last moment the footsteps turn away, veering across the road to the other side of the street. At which point he begins to run, breath rasping unevenly, away not towards me. Perhaps he has sensed the tension in my thoughts, and it has quickened his pace.
I step away from the shelter of the brick wall and carry on down the street, speeding up my own stride. This is not a night to linger outside. I think about being warm indoors, eating, feeling comfortable, no longer hungry.
Down the street I can see my brief nocturnal walking companion running past the Majewskis’, their bread van one of the few vehicles parked on the roadside, past the Patchetts’, children’s toys tidily packed away beside the front door, though I have a sense of them being put away in haste, and then the Coleys’, seven souls packed tightly in a house designed for three, maybe four, at most.
The runner slows, pauses, throws open a gate into the front garden of an old, detached house, a sold sign still standing upright in one of the flower beds, and scurries down the garden path to the front door. Keys rattle. The black painted front door opens. Light floods briefly onto the front path. A brief snatch of domestic hubbub is glimpsed and the door slams shut. More actions and thoughts for me to savour. I am not surprised by the house that has welcomed him.
I step forward with purpose, no longer listening for footsteps in the road. I can see my destination in front of me now. The house where I grew up, lived for such a long time. I know the house. It knows me. I have absorbed so much of it, the people who have lived in it, that coming back is always a celebratory homecoming.
The lights are still on, of course. I imagine the thoughts and activities of those inside. Do they sense my imminent arrival? What trivial, mundane thoughts currently occupy their heads. What stories can they tell?
I open the gate, walk past the estate agent’s sign erected in a front flower bed, down the garden path to the heavy, black painted front door, behind which, four consciousnesses, four sets of thoughts, hopes, fears and aspirations, flicker on and off like fireflies or the reflection of streetlights on a rain-dampened road. I sense they have no awareness of what will come next. I envy them their innocence.
I am so very hungry now and ready to celebrate my return. The front door swings open. I step silently inside. It feels good to be back – the house so full of fresh, warm, waiting sustenance. I am eager to devour each screaming thought. I close the door behind me with a final click.
J.S. Watts is a UK poet and novelist. Her poetry, short stories and non-fiction appear in diverse publications in Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and America and have been broadcast on BBC and independent radio. Her published books include: Cats and Other Myths, Songs of Steelyard Sue, Years Ago You Coloured Me, Underword andThe Submerged Sea (poetry) and A Darker Moon, Witchlight, Old Light and Elderlight (novels). For more information, see her website https://www.jswatts.co.uk/
Published 8/7/26