Give Scandal [extract ii]
There are three rooms into which I can see, and a fourth in the wall perpendicular, whose light I see go on and off. I suspect it is their kitchen. They are growing herbs in pots on the window sill, and, on certain afternoons, I can catch the smell of baking. I once saw the Husband leaning out of that room to wave at the Wife and Children as they stood in the window furthest right. I believe that to be the younger girl’s bedroom. The middle window is that of the older child’s. What they keep in the third room, furthest left, I do not yet know.
As the summer wanes and the light is changing, it is getting more difficult to see. They rarely keep their windows open anymore, and yet mostly the rooms remain unilluminated. As autumn advances, and the nights close in, I suppose they will start to turn the lights on more reliably, and leave them on throughout the day. That will, perhaps, make things easier for me.
She has a tendency to hunch. Her shoulders are broad, and her hips narrow. She is thin without being lean, nor is she lithe. Her body does not arouse me.
But I like her pale skin and find her beautiful, if not necessarily more so than any woman seen from a fortuitous distance, one which allows the willing imagination to impose on the object of its attention the idiosyncrasies of taste. She has abundant dark hair, and her features promise beauty, which is to say contain within them the promise of loving looks. I can’t, however, be sure that I would recognise her if I saw her in a context other than this. I wouldn’t know her if I passed her in the street.
Form can be filled out with words. One can describe the dimensions of a body, its height and weight, how that weight is distributed, whether around the belly, hips, breast, thighs or backside. One can describe musculature, or its lack, frame and posture. And then there are the features of the face, of course. The setting of the eyes, their colour; the fullness of the lip, the angle of the nose, the refinement of the brow; the hair.
But there is also how the body moves within a space, its grace or lack thereof, its elegance, coarseness, its vitality, how it comports and holds itself. Even when a form is still, the body, in living, is expression.
He speaks of none of this. He sees her and it is enough. He justifies any attraction only to himself. I am left to imagine and speculate. I have often translated using what remains of the memories of the women I have loved.
Just the Husband today. He is responsible for opening the shutters in the morning, and closing them again at night. Once the shutters are closed, I try to sleep.
Fairly soon after my observations having begun, it occurred to me that it would be sensible to allow myself to be seen at my window, to make my presence there obvious. I should, I thought, allow them to see me, say, smoking a cigarette or leaning on the sill taking in a sunset (as I had once regularly done!); permit them to sense me, hear me playing music, notice me “getting up” or “coming home from work” — which is to say throwing open the curtains and my window or suddenly switching on the lights (no matter if I had been awake and installed hours prior, watching them in the dark through a crack of the window, the shutters mostly closed).
The logic was clear: by making my presence flagrant and unmissable at carefully curated instances, I would reinforce the alternate state wherein I was there but undetected. I could train their eyes to a false routine of waking, departure and arrival, and, under the cover of these “habits” remain comfortably unsuspected at my post.
They appear sometimes from the darkness as though from the air itself, a child, the Husband, the Wife, in the afternoons when the rooms are all in shadow. I do not seek them out and they materialise. They pass close to the windows, move by, or play around at the base of one of them in the wan light. One moment they are there and the next they are not. When they go, I try to imagine where they are, where they have gone, where they are going. I become scared if I do not. It is as though I were watching a family of ghosts, their apparitions haunting spots where they had once been, holding to repeated patterns that in decades have gone unchanged: here was where the child played, here the Mother fed her baby; there the Father clothed his daughter, there the Mother combed her hair.
I do not like to think like that. That they are dead. The family seem to lead a happy life.
