The Observer

Winter

1989

It was an extraordinary night for appearing ordinary. 

The air was thick with the flurry of sleet that had tried to be snow; the sort that drips from roofs in great, cold splotches. The sort that permits thick winter coats—shapeless enough to render a frame indistinct—and woollen scarves pulled over mouths. It was that murky hour shared by drunken home-goers and night-shift commuters, and the station was littered with both. Finding my rhythm between their strides and stumbles, I slipped through to the platform. 

The board was barely legible; its flashing message hazy with drizzle. 

11 minutes.

Umbrellas bloomed in response, swallowing yet more prying eyes. Those who had forgotten theirs retreated to the canopy, their bodies slumping with dampness and resigned frustration. I followed suit. Some performances require little effort.

In truth, there is no such thing as an unremarkable appearance. It certainly helps to choose garments that speak of nothing in particular; the leather of my shoes was worn but fair, the case in my hand deliciously ambiguous in purpose. But anyone can become memorable, if you’ve reason to look long enough. 

Ordinariness is a performance art. Walk too quickly and you’re evading, too slowly: loitering. Too much eye contact is an invitation, too little is a shun. We exist in a vast murmuration, and one must react with bird-like acuity to every ripple and disturbance, to turn with the flock, and never against it. Like all good performances, it’s entirely dependent on observation. 

Strange to think that the very conventions I spent so long dismantling had become my greatest tool. He called it regression—a betrayal of all we learned.

I called it rebellion.

The train hissed its arrival, and I hid amongst the belly of the queue, sharing brief glances and eye rolls that said god, this bloody rain! I chose a seat some strides from the doors, but close enough to keep the bulk of the carriage at my back, and perused newspaper and window with languid interest. When others boarded, I gazed towards-but-past them, looking to the end of my tedious journey where home or hotel or some other comfort awaited.

Some performances don’t come as easily.

Had anyone been watching, they might have noticed my one tell. My hand rested on it at all times, as though I needed to feel it to know it was there. As though I hadn’t felt every one of the envelopes' razor-sharp edges threatening to tear through my breast pocket since I’d stowed it away there earlier in the evening. But nobody watches a man who's neither here nor there.

The deliveries had gotten easier with time, in much the same way one becomes desensitised to lying. They eroded me all the same. Part of me wished I would concede to his pleas to stop, to look the other way. But we weren’t the same.

It was the only truth I had left, besides the one in my pocket.

The squeal of the brake signalled the end of my first act. Seven others disembarked alongside me, and I filed myself behind the second, trusting the loud-mouthed punters at the rear to steal the show. Handy, really, that some people held such little regard for the flock. 

The doors opened into shadow and fog, and I slipped into both.

An extraordinary night.

Autumn

1979

The night I first noticed him—for I can’t be sure it was our first meeting—was in a dusty, forgotten corner of Hallward Library. Lost in the existential fog that accompanies the final year of a failing degree, the place had become my stewing pot. I stewed often, and at length. And alone. 

Like every other lost soul seeking the refuge of a box to belong to, I’d chosen psychology. And, like the others, when it became clear that there was no elusive truth hiding in the crusty pages of fifties textbooks, I became somewhat disenchanted with the subject. 

I’d turned to sociology, instead. After all, as C. Wright Mills had said, neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

I intended to. 

I’d been thumbing my way through a shiny new copy of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish when I saw it. It could have been an architectural drawing; I nearly dismissed it as such. Precise charcoal strokes curved into an impressive domed ceiling, a cylindrical watchtower pierced with windows rising beneath it. Both were bound by charcoal bars that could have been a reference grid rather than a cage.

But it was the man in the picture who stilled my thumb. Kneeling behind the bars, nearly headless in his stooped bow, the soles of his boots exposed to us. He appeared to be praying; the watchtower before him an altar. A god. 

I hated it.

I couldn’t look away. 

I left the book at the library, but that picture followed me home. 

By the following morning I had returned and devoured the entire book end-to-end, flipping back to the picture between chapters. 

Docile bodies, the author called us. Trained into unwavering obedience on an institutional level. Hospitals, schools, society at large serving as some kind of perpetual surveillance system we couldn’t escape. A prison. A Panopticon. I was about to indulge in a second read, eager to hunt down every missed detail, when he interrupted. 

Most introductions are made by name, but he made his by question.

Who would you be, if nobody was watching?

It was a dare and a plea. Something in me rose to both.

I had no answer—how could I? But the evening fell away as we searched for one, the conversation fevered by new ideas that built and stacked and eventually saw us shooed from the dusty forgotten corner by an equally dusty librarian.

We took to the city instead. We spoke of Foucault, yes, but also of childhood, of culture, religion, identity, of anything and everything that popped into our mind. Unburdened by disinterest, we shared and sparred until the new day had turned its leaf, and then some. By the time tiredness claimed us, it felt as though the whole of Nottingham had passed underfoot.

Winter

1979–1980

Winter passed underfoot with squelch and crunch, a blur of late-night debates and frantic confessions that made my heart beat fast for all sorts of reasons. We had sought one another out every night since the library, the conversations winding and circling along with the streets and brimming with as much life. Parts of myself I’d never dared to linger in seemed to surface in his presence—no, I exhumed them. Compulsively. They made old topics feel new, me feel new, and I became addicted to the bare nakedness of it all. He called it our yard time. True enough, everything else became confinement.

By the time the year turned, we’d stopped speaking of the great minds; of Weber, Marx or Comte. Stopped turning their ideas over with forensic scrutiny. Cowards, he called them. Too busy studying their cages from the inside. What good is it to understand a prison if you can’t break out of it? 

Prison.

That word became the pith of every discussion, the bottom line of every observation. Soon it was written everywhere; in traffic cones and grocery queues and parking meters. The entire city was caged by charcoal bars.

We’re behind them, too.

Yard time became cell-search. Everything I did—or didn’t do—became indisputable proof of my own imprisonment.

Why wait for a light to turn green if there are no cars? 

Did you just smile at him? I thought we hated him? 

Is it not quicker to walk over the lawn?

Arguing with him was like holding my breath: taxing, inevitable, failure. How could I deny what I could see? I could not palate it; the truth of my own conformity. 

The hum-drum grew unbearable. Polite smiles no longer felt like my own. Sitting straight on the bus became an act of degradation. Everywhere, the city bent and stooped to an invisible watchtower, and though I tried, I could not stop myself from bowing with them.

We were living in the Panopticon. There was no escape.

Do you really believe that? 

How can there be? It’s everywhere. It’s too ingrained.

Assumption is everywhere.

Does it make a difference? If we can’t know for sure whether we’re being watched—

Then we won’t risk it.

Right.

And we’ll never be able to know if our good behaviour was in vain.

Exactly. We can’t know. 

There’s no way to know.

Yes. Wait. I’m confused, I thought you were disagreeing—

There’s always an escape. You wouldn’t be talking to me, if you didn’t believe that. But sometimes we look so hard, we’re not really seeing. Think about it. 

It was all I thought about.

Winter

1989

I thought about taking the long route. I should have. But the night had given up entirely on snow, instead embracing the kind of bone-soaking wetness that comes down in sheets and soaks through even the best of coat linings. I made a mental note to store the letters in the case in future, and quickened my pace.

It was a relief, to take a path he hadn’t. 

The walk was brief, the streets devoid of the late-night loiterers one sees in less well-to-do areas—though perhaps that was courtesy of the weather. Holden Drive was fast asleep by the time I arrived, only the faint glow of the odd hallway light leaking from behind blinds.

Georgia and Elliot Stanstead should be asleep, too. They should have finished their two agreed-upon glasses of Spanish rosado—plus a further two bartered over a handful of ‘just one more’ games of blackjack—tucked in their elderly sheepdog and retired to their master bedroom on the third floor; the one with the trailing clematis above the lintel. By now, the couple should be somewhere on the road to REM.

And yet, as I approached the chocolate-box townhouse, its door dripping with premature Christmas foliage, Georgia and Elliot Stanstead were not asleep.

Framed by their white sash windows, the pair were draped over the settee like throws. Drunk, yes, but fighting sleep like their youth wasn’t behind them. Their eyes roamed over one another, full of promise that was both fueled and hampered by the empty bottles on the coffee table. Twenty-six years of marriage, and still they had hunger in their eyes.

Because there’s an empty nest, for once.

I cast the thought aside, refusing to feel the sting of a guilt that didn’t belong to me. 

They should have already had this night. It was theirs. 

The letter grew hot against my chest. 

I didn’t retrieve it. I didn’t move at all. Rooted to the red-brick porch, I simply watched, as though I could set the moment in amber for them, hold onto it on their behalf.

It changed nothing, and everything: them being awake. 

Spring

1980

Being awake was as thrilling as it was terrifying. 

He was right, of course, though it took me the best part of winter to truly accept it.

We’ll never be able to know if our good behaviour was in vain. 

It was like learning to write backwards at first. Even inaction—withholding apologies for tardiness, dropping pleases and thank-yous—triggered such enormous discomfort inside of me.

There are no report cards in life. 

At some point, pushing through became chasing. By our second semester we made it a rule to only attend lectures we weren’t enrolled in—a hard role to sell, when one knows nothing of physics or law. Soon, we stopped attending altogether. Rules became suggestions, items that could fit in our pockets were free. We edged the boat further out each day, testing for the promised searchlights.

They never found us.

It became clear that the power of the signs and lights were entirely in the readers’ mind. Trespassers and thieves were not prosecuted, and no one gave two shits where a nonchalant person went, or what they were doing. We didn’t shatter the bars, we simply stepped through them, as easy as stepping through a staff door. Or a bedroom window, left open. 

Retrospect painted everything before with the clammy sheen of insanity. Docile bodies. Slaves. We’d been bound entirely by illusion and empty threats.

No more.

We had seen the light.

Summer 1980

Summer brought with it a new kind of light. It was no longer just the world I saw differently. Every line that I crossed had another version of me behind it; one that saw thieves as opportunists, the rude as pioneers of autonomy. One that dared to want. It was strange to think how readily I’d swallowed the mass-produced moral compass, how deeply my inner world had been shaped by the system. My entire personality had been manufactured, the truth of myself smothered before it could be known. The more I left the cage, the less I knew the man who was kept in it, and the louder he screamed for me to come back.

He called it the observer—the culmination of ultimate control.

The bars are in our minds. 

I know.

We’ve become instruments of our own oppression.

I know.

I journalled more often than not. Every thought I had was recorded, cross-examined. I wanted to know where they came from, who they came from. Which were truly mine. 

They all had my voice.

I found myself thinking more about thoughts than having them, and then thinking about that, too. Everything was tangled. Nothing was mine.

Books brought impurity, studies became tools of machination. At some point, I started burning my own journals. It felt like a contamination risk, as though revisiting a thought might change it somehow, make it less my own. 

You can only trust your first thoughts. Everything that comes after is conditioning. Everything after belongs to someone else.

What if my first thought is bad?

Who can say whether it is, if nobody is watching? 

I don’t know.

Autumn

1980

I don’t know how I made it to graduation. My dissertation; The Psychology of the Panopticon: Interactions between Social Surveillance and Sense of Self, earned me a first-class degree, and an internship with a recently up-and-came newspaper. My professor called it transcendent.

He called it studying the cage from the inside.

The articles kept me busy. My column, The Observer, climbed from a hard limit of five hundred words to a guideline of one thousand within months. It was the closest feeling I had found to those first conversations; the pure catharsis of pouring ideas into willing ears. Aside from the odd letter I refused to acknowledge, no one spoke back. It was pure.

It’s performance.

I knew I’d returned to the cage. He called me weak; said that I was too afraid of my own truth. I knew he was right. For the first time since that night at the library, I could see where I ended, and he began.

Winter

1980

He began hiding things from me. 

Small, at first—eclectic purchases he wouldn’t explain, strange marks on his clothes that he couldn’t account for. 

Where do you go?

Wherever I want to.

We became passing ships, until soon I saw only traces of him; in the whorled notes left behind in margins, the glass and muck trodden in from his late nights. I should have seen it, then.

We see what we want to see.

I didn’t want to.

By the time that night happened, we were so torn at the seams that it felt like meeting him for the first time again. He bore no resemblance to the man at Hallward Library. Not just for the blood that lined his nail beds, or the bruised pits that dragged on his eyes. But for the absolute, unwavering clarity with which he spoke; the intoxicating wildness in his voice as he told me of his ascent, his escape.

Did it even happen, if nobody was watching?

Winter

1989

I was still watching by the time the Stansteads broke from their living room. Tangled completely in each other’s kiss, they were shedding clothes before they even reached the stairway, determined to make the most of their freedom.

It would haunt them, every day after, that they ever took pleasure in her absence. Wished for it, even.

I waited, until they’d cleared the first flight, before releasing the envelope, fluttering, to the herringbone tiles. It was hard to believe how quietly such heavy words fell.

I darted for the shadows. I could almost feel him in them.

I should have left, should have left it there. But I needed to know I hadn’t stolen it; their final night.

It was the dog, who found the letter.

A piece of me died with them, as I watched them re-trace their steps down the stairs, relinquishing their final, perfect evening. 

I knew what would happen before it did. Elliot would still, convince himself it was a joke, a misunderstanding. Georgia, too, at first. He’d hold her whilst he tried the phone, making his way through the few of her friends' numbers that she bothered to add to the phone book. They wouldn’t answer. 

Then they would.

Georgia would know from his face, but it wouldn’t feel real until he hung up the phone. The letter would fall, its scarlet envelope a blood stain on the tiles. It would take a moment, or longer, but she would join it eventually. Spill herself all over the herringbone floor, her scream a full-stop in their lives. And Elliot would watch, and shake, and wonder if he would ever be able to put her back together again.

I wanted to bolt, to save myself from the truth of him. The truth of us.

But I couldn’t. 

It was all I could do, all I had ever been able to do since that first night, nine years before.

I never broke free of the observer. 

I became his.