The Western Gate

 I am not sure exactly the date when ‘the watcher’ began to observe my every waking moment, or so it seemed. Paranoia has perhaps gotten the better of me, for even if the occurrence is sparing, brief and momentary, once noticed it overwhelms and consumes. It is like seeing a number and then seeing the same number crop up throughout the day like a foreboding message of doom.

Whenever I placed the incidents out of my mind he would be there again, in the distant, hurriedly moving onto somewhere but casting me a glance, or a full fixed stare. At times I catch his reflection on the opposite side of the road amidst a throng of people and though the crowd are moving this way and that, he stays still, watching. I see him as a fleeting glimpse between buildings, the shadows looming over him and casting an eerie spectacle as his cheekbones and forehead alight a face whose eyes penetrate me.
Many’s the time I have been on a bus and seen him on an approaching bus coming towards me, at the point we pass, almost synchronous his head turns and as our eyes collide, he stops and fixes that awful stare. Other times whilst I am on a bus I have seen him standing somewhere, in a shop doorway or by a bus stop, as I pass him, again, on cue, his eyes seem to swivel towards mine as if a radar is connected between us. Emotionless and fixed he just watches as I pass. Says nothing, gestures nothing and moves not.

Unnervingly as I relate this story to others, and tell them of this stranger the first thing they ask is what does he look like, and the truth is, I cannot answer. It is almost a blur, as if the mind is trying to erase itself of the memory. The clarity of his face is lost just as a dream on awakening merges into the subconscious dustbin and is forgotten forever.
There are times, alone, when I hear footsteps outside that seem to stop when they must be directly facing me. Each time I run to the window to unveil the observer, there is no one there and yet the footsteps were clear and audible, definite and unquestionably real.
As it was, I sat in an old public house in Fitzrovia, with a pint of ale and a window by which I could watch the busy world outside. The irony is, I myself am a fanatical people watcher, there’s nothing better to fill my idle time than observing characters and formulating stories behind their appearance, the way they walk, they way perhaps they are conducting themselves. To myself I found the humour in this, that for the past weeks or so I had anxiously deliberated the idea that a malevolent person had been tracking me, watching my moves and here, I sit, doing the self same thing to strangers, albeit fleetingly, a momentary observation. It wasn’t the same I reasoned.
The old woman over there, struggling against the tide of pedestrians, some quite agitated that she hampers their progress, why cant they all keep left to the direction they go, that they’d avoid the bottleneck the congestion….
That young man there, scouring the pavement and doorways for something or other, perhaps some loose change, perhaps a discarded cigarette, perhaps lost in his own imaginings, hands in pocket, shuffling, again hampering the crowds progress…..
That man, busy, hurriedly, sweating somewhat, his glistening forehead positively steaming in the mid morning fresh air, he rebuffs the old woman, he sneers at the young gatherer, his shoulders up, his neck and skull foreword he barges through invisible barriers to get to where he needs to get…..
That woman, designer clothes barking into her cell phone, her head high and oblivious to the crowd , a sea of angst and misery streaming towards the conveyour belt of life.

The sea of busyness, the fleas of business. All of them, a mass of indifference to each other, a multitude condemned to passivity by this engine of society. And against all this movement, still. Him. HIM!
He stands there staring directly at me, his face, clear and noticeable then my fretting mind reduces it again to a blur, an image I cannot focus on. He says nothing, just stares towards me.
It’s as much as I can take as I rush headlong to the exit and out onto the pavement, I stop at the roadside to await the traffic to clear and in the gaps of the cars I see that the figure is not there. I quickly scan each direction, this way, that way, the backstreets, the alleyways, the doors closing on the shopfronts. Nowhere.
I couldn’t be sure afterwards as I walked those streets whether I could see him again, afar, a quick glance at the buses, was that him? in the taxi, wasn’t he the one? there he is! by the …. no… no its not him.
I turned the road into my turning on the way home, looking down at the

cracks and flaws in the pavement that were singing back to me cruel jibes of a broken life, a failing marriage to contentment, the harbinger of doom and death himself in the scope of my horizon. Alarmed at my daydream wandering I looked up and in the distant saw, still, watching me! It was him!
Quickly with no thought for my own safety, no concern for the consequence sprinted towards him, he stood alarmed at my reaction, he crouched as if to receive a flying object and upon him I fell, his face enraged and he grabbed my shoulders, frantically shaking them screaming at me, “Why are you following me!” he shouted, “everywhere I go, on the bus, if I’m standing alone, in the street… YOU!!!, what do you want !!!”