Abhorrence To Wickedness

I first remember seeing him in 1995.

I had just given birth to Julie and all the pains of childbirth, along with the same aching love for a newborn, were my first and only priority. I couldn’t think of much else but that small, delicate child, that tiny ball of pink with her wide blue eyes and gurgling mouth.

I couldn’t even think that much about Tim and I don’t think Tim thought that much about me either, it was all about Julie.

But that is when I first saw him and when he must have first seen me.

It was three days after Julie was born. The hospital was living in the usual twilight zone that accompanies midnight. Doctors and nurses sleepily walked the corridors, the whirr of machines contributing some kind of beat to their shuffling feet. I couldn’t sleep. Julie slept though. As I said before, childbirth made everything else secondary, she came first. She could sleep so it didn’t matter that I couldn’t.

I had just turned over, a rather dog-eared copy of Vanity Fair clutched in one hand, my head resting on the pillow, when I caught a glimpse of him.

To this day I still can’t believe that my eyes met his for only a brief moment because I took in so much of his visage in that moment, so much horrific detail. It was like I had been staring at his poised face for months. His demeanour was that of a crouching predator, something easier to say in foresight yet, I’m sure I had the exact same thought at the time. He was hunched, not cowering, but deliberately stooped, like a tiger or a lion, paws forward, head beneath the reeds of some exotic land, hiding from its prey. His gait was so obviously tall yet, he had crouched into himself in an unsettling way. His posture made the long dark hair, thick with curls, fall over his face but they could not fully mask his eyes.

I had never known dark eyes to be so piercing. Piercing was a word reserved for blue eyes, the light, shocking crystals of colour staring from the face of gorgeous models, women on TV who tell you how to get good skin and men with far too many muscles. But his eyes were definitely piercing. They were black, two pits in a sunken yellow face. And they looked right through you, I remember that because they looked right through me.

He wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t a nurse, or a healthcare assistant, or even a hospital cleaner. I don’t know why but if he had been any of those things what happened after would have felt less unfair, less unfortunate. He could have been sat in that hospital waiting for years and it could have easily been another woman that he picked.

But no. He had been passing my room, visiting someone perhaps, and caught my eyes by chance, completely by chance. If I had not turned, if he had been a little quicker or even a little slower, I would have never seen him, nor him me.

It was pure chance.

The next time I saw him was when Julie was five months old. She could just about sit up, her bottom flat on the wood-panelled floor of our home, her tiny spine as straight as a rod, her hands clasped, stunning eyes, now a rare shade of green, staring strongly at mine.

I always talked to Julie. Every single day. I told her what we were going to do, where we were going to go, where Tim was, or daddy as he quickly became known. And she always laughed or smiled, giving her own gurgling response.

I was out. Julie in the buggy, her bright eyes facing the open sky, a smile taught on her face.

We were walking down the high street, the looming figure of the All Saints Church standing as a bastion to the old, a beautiful relic against the harsh, modern tat of the shopping centre.

And then he was there.

Those black eyes. That harsh sharp face, like the edge of a bloody knife angled towards me.

I don’t know to this day why or how I recognised him from the hospital, from that brief glimpse late one night months before. But I did. I knew it was him. We shared the same brief eye contact, the same stare, the same sudden shocking glance.

I saw his jagged face split into a strange look and then he was lost amongst the sea of faces, an ever flowing, ever building wave of passing crowds.

“Let’s go home.”

The words were out of my mouth, levelled at my daughter not yet able to reply. She somehow gave me comfort in that moment as we turned down Gold Street, passed the pound stores and approached the crossing towards the cinema and car park.

I half expected him to approach me. To hear thundering footsteps and slack-jawed breath, the classic horror movie chase scene.

 But he did not follow.

I forgot the man for a number of months.

Julie celebrated her first birthday, crawling about on the floor, strong arms propelling her forward as other children from the local playgroup followed her. Such a strange party, one day she would have one with her own friends but for now she had friends chosen by us which meant it was a celebration for adults and babies.

Tim had just brought in the cake. One solitary candle sat plopped in the middle of a marzipan bear who smiled up at the ceiling. We were all singing, that’s what made the moment so much worse I suppose.

Julie was sat on the table facing me, the open scenery of our garden rolling into the distance from the three French windows, when the central one was suddenly clouded by shadow.

It was him. Face pressed up against the window, a savagery in his features, like he was pawing at the glass, wild in his desperation to break through the barrier.

I was so shocked that I didn’t say anything for a beat, the song dying on my lips before I screamed. It was one of those screams that escaped in panic and fear, the ones you cover with your fingers half expecting the gesture to quell your noise.

And then he was gone.

The party broke down, toddlers crying at my sudden outburst, the candle extinguished by the hubbub, Tim and our friends crowding about me perplexed and worried.

“It was him,” I said.

“It was him I saw him, look outside, check the garden Tim, check it now!”

Tim was looking dumbfounded.

“Who love? Who was it?”

I had never told him about the last two encounters, what did two passing moments of eye contact matter? They didn’t but now they did.

I had begun to cry. Hot tears of panic on my cheeks, the burning of the saltwater scolding my shame and embarrassment, how could I have been the only one to see him?

“He was mouthing the words Tim, I saw him singing along.”

Once everyone had calmed me down and Tim reassured the other parents that I was overly tired from being kept awake at night by Julie, I told him about the man.

“Three times,” I said, careful to keep steady eye contact with my husband, looking deep into his hazel eyes for some sign of doubt.

“That’s unusual, isn’t it?”

Tim pursed his lips in the stupid way he did when he wanted to correct me about something concerning football, or the news, or an alternative strategy for work he didn’t quite agree with.

“It is darling,” he said slowly.

“But are you sure the man at the window was the same man? You said yourself that you only saw him briefly in town and in the hospital before.”

“Even so Tim, aren’t you worried that a strange man is sticking his dirty face in our window and looking in at me and our daughter?”

I was angry and why shouldn’t I be?

“Yes, yes,” he replied, quelling my wrath with a shake of his head.

“But it could have just been some tramp, there are loads near the bypass and they keep wandering into gardens, Kev had one passed out on his lawn only last week.”

Kev, an ever reliable source of information. More trustworthy than me according to Tim, and always would be.

I ceased the argument there and, against my better judgement, took Tim’s words as gospel, convincing myself that the face at the window on Julie’s first birthday was just a homeless man from the bypass, like the one in Kev’s garden.

I further convinced myself that his slash of a mouth hadn’t quivered, singing along to Happy Birthday with the rest of us, that the piercing eyes had not rested on me and then Julie.

I convinced myself.

It was 1997 when I next came across him. It was the first time he had come so close.

I was in a supermarket.

Julie was fast becoming an uncontrollable child at this stage. When she was a young baby she had slept unnaturally well but now she would descend into fits of screaming that never ended. She would scream herself blue, scream herself sick, she would break eye contact whilst I was speaking to her, losing interest in the world around her.

Kev, of all people, suggested, rather politely for someone who knew Tim through the pub, that Julie may be autistic.

Such a thought had never occurred to me. Ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes, two ears, all the usual features were there, she could crawl, she gurgled, she was definitely audible, to us that meant she was healthy and there were no other problems. What I hadn’t counted on was another problem like autism.

“It isn’t a disease,” the doctor told me, looking at me over his horn-rimmed spectacles, as Julie sat on the surgery floor, playing with a number of building blocks.

“It is something that will impact Julie’s behaviour, how she sees the world, sees you, sees your husband and how she makes friends.”

“I know,” I remember replying.

“I’m just scared.”

Shopping had become a chore. Our wailing child in the trolley harness, not listening, or even moving her head to respond to my calls.

I was so embarrassed by the strangers looking at us on this occasion that I didn’t look up when a trolley, wheels screeching, pulled up beside mine.

 I didn’t know whether he went to grab me or the trolley but his hands were claws in my eyes, his reaching grip, the terrible scramble of a monster, coming out of my nightmares to terrorise me.

I couldn’t tell you what he was wearing or which direction he came from. All I can say is that it was him and that his stretching hand fell on thin air as I abandoned the trolley, tore Julie from the seat and sprinted from the supermarket before I could even think.

I would no longer listen to Tim’s simpering explanations and even threatened to leave if he didn’t believe me. He did, begrudgingly but he had no fresh ideas of what to do.

“What do we do? Tell the police that you’ve seen the same man four times in the space of two years?”

I did explode at this point. I was sick of how easily he dispatched my worries, how easily he quelled my fears and doused my problems with the thin pale water called coincidence.

“He stuck his head in our sodding window Tim, he went to grab me in the supermarket,” I hissed.

“He’s dangerous.”

Calling the police made no difference. We had no name, no frame of reference for where he was from, or where he worked, if he even worked.

I could only give a description and it was one that you knew would draw sneers of disbelief and contempt from the officers who heard it.

Yet I began to see his face around so much more.

Abington Park was next, the same year, that’s when I started writing down each time I saw him. Recording each encounter.

He was stood in amongst a smattering of trees, shielded by their petty shadows, in the midday sun of a November day, the rough face pointed towards me and Julie, as we made our way across the dewy grass.

Once again I fled the scene, breaking Julie’s routine in a way I had never wanted to and causing her to scream the house down until she fell asleep hours later.

I couldn’t decide whether this had become scary, or frustrating, whether I was more angry or annoyed that he was disrupting my life, or Julie’s, or whether the difference between the two no longer mattered, only that he was always there.

I would have thought him harmless, surely. Mentally ill, living with some learning difficulty, perhaps friendly on the inside but there was something about him that screamed the opposite.

1997 bled into 1998 and I saw him three more times before the end of January.

He was there, as I left playgroup with Julie in the pram, at the end of our street, as I unpacked her from the car and I saw him stood metres from my mother-in-law’s when I dropped Julie off.

That was the final straw for Tim. It incensed me that it had taken until my problem, this cruel, horrific shadow, had interfered in Tim’s mother’s life for him to finally take my fears seriously. He did always love that old crone more than me, more eager to believe the old battle-axe, the child of the 1940s, than his wife.

“He’s stalking you,” I remember that particular conversation with Tim almost word for word.

“He’s stalking you, like properly, like a fucking film or something, he knows where Mum lives where you go, everything.”

No shit Tim. No shit.

We contacted the police again but what could they do? Give me an armed guard? Spend taxpayers’ money putting a bobby on the corner of our street and another to escort me and Julie on our walks? They released a composite and I briefly remember seeing it in the Chron. But it conveyed so little of his true features that I shouldn’t have bothered. It didn’t have the dark eyes, the serrated features, the same fear-inducing stare.

Tim vowed to chase him down, pin him to the curb until the police arrived but he never showed when Tim was around.

He followed me home from one of Julie’s swimming lessons soon after, stalking me through the car park of the leisure centre until I dashed to the car, held Julie on my lap and sped away without bothering to do up my seat belt.

I spotted him four more times before 1999, each moment I gazed upon those black eyes was more fleeting than the last, as though he knew we were on to him. As though he was sensing a more covert approach was needed. He didn’t visit the house again which was lucky for me because I started leaving it less and less.

I had planned to return to work at the council but I no longer wanted to risk seeing him turn up at work, to see him hound me on my coffee breaks, to see his exploits turn to following potential childminders or baby sitters. It was like I had some kind of unshakeable disease that would infect everyone I got close too.

By the following year,Tim was on the phone to the police every week and we had put the house on the market. Desperate to escape the world this stranger had pushed us into, desperate to shake off his presence.

Tim became more irritable. Julie became more anxious and her autism turned into a strict and fully regulated agenda that enforced our life choices daily. My day was her routine and, because I couldn’t face taking her out anymore, that routine consisted of hours indoors.

Julie was four, then five, yet she still couldn’t talk. Her autism had rendered her mute while the rest of her life was dominated by our fears of a stranger, watching, stalking.   

Suddenly, his appearances became so numerous I was unaware whether they were real or not. I fell asleep and he infiltrated my dreams, I left the house and he was stood on the street opposite, he watched me as I walked through town, surveying me from the window of every building I passed.

I started only leaving the house with Tim by my side, which limited my time outdoors to the occasional weekend and evenings. They were not fun excursions. Tim was so alert that the trips were like military training, our family platoon taking regimented laps of a parade square until it was time to be at ease and return home.

By the Summer of 2000, we had sold the house and finally found somewhere new. It was out in the sticks, away from the suburbs. We left quickly and efficiently. I doubt even the neighbours noticed the moving vans and I thought, perhaps, we were free of him at last.

 “A fresh start,” Tim had called it, a token line following an extra-marital affair I thought but true all the same.

“He can’t know this place, he just can’t, we have shaken him off, he won’t bother you again.”

And he didn’t.

The morning of September 5th, 2000, was the last time I saw Julie.

The police told me that a man with dark hair and dark eyes had picked her up from school on her first day during lunch. He had given Tim’s name and details and that was it. Still unable to talk, and with her silent protests misunderstood by the teachers, Julie had gone with the stranger. I never saw either of them ever again.

He had not been following me, he wanted her.