My annoyance lessening steadily with each bewildered scan of the all-too empty scene. Where had the duo, for I had assumed from the voices it was no more than a duo or at the very least a person talking into a mobile, scampered to so quickly? It wasn't possible that one or two persons could have exited so swiftly without sight or sound, not in the blaze of the on-all-night security lights that I'd had to procure a black-out blind for and yet still don a none too fetching eye mask to leave the land of living but which didn't protect against noise.
Noise that possibly only an overly sensitive person would become aware of, breaking into their light sleep or preventing a deeper layer. Noise of the sort that could be felt to be inconsiderate, which on other occasions had been tolerated to the extent they were awake but remained motionless, lying under the duvet, irritated but unwilling to leave its body-heated swaddling.
This, after four nights of similar and lying motionless with the occasional muttered or shouted swear word, was the night, as you will have gathered, an overly sensitive person (namely me) broke that passive pattern prepared to, if need be, be aggressive with a barely thought-out plan of attack: a blasted exchange or a washing up bowl of water.
That, as you already know, didn't come to pass (or has since) which sometimes I feel downhearted about for opportunities such as that are rare. I never get the chance or the justification to be 'nasty', although neither plan a or plan b would have given the result I desired, that of quiet, and would instead have further fuelled the flame of indignation.
But back to that night, another night of no reckoning, as my bewilderment turned to intrigue, stood there like a blundering Watson without a Sherlock simply marvelling at the lack of running footfalls and echoed hoots of laughter, and as if I expected the conjurer of this mysterious act to show his shaded face. To perhaps look up at me as Romeo might his Juliet, although all he'd probably see is a window framing a child in pyjamas.
A pale face pressed to the glass and a form silhouetted with light as if I'd been torn out of a comic strip or were a film poster, captured there for all time, at the same age, in the same unflinching pose.
That of course didn't transpire. Why is it so easy for me to put myself into another's position, even though to my knowledge that other or others that night didn't exist?
Here, a measured voice might interject to state the reasons why: She's highly imaginative, and believes too much of what she reads, in at least the possibility of it. She's not easily shocked or surprised, and believes that you can't, though others say it, be both. How can you both? she demands of whoever feeds that line to her, regardless of whether it's direct or via a more public radio mike or camera crew. It's her one impossibility. An oxymoron that cannot be, so it's pointless saying it....ha, ha, ha....fade like Michael Jackson's Thriller as the needle slips and scratches.
An ongoing commentary that you can't hear which explains you to others would at times I think be helpful. Was it? or was it just weird? The latter probably...I've lost control...this anecdotal account doesn't know what it wants to be. How can it? when it was a one-time, one-night only event, which unlike an LP or video that can be repeated hasn't been, though some of the same elements have reoccurred as surely as night follows day: after midnight conversations and curses sent up to the ceiling or in the direction of the bedroom window as sleep's been stolen from me, but never, to date, have I been tempted or that frustrated to pierce these talkers with a glare.
Picture credit: Girl by the Window, artist unknown
