Roland Fournoy is afraid of what he will see when he draws the curtain aside. Last night, all the things he witnessed through the incendiary flashes of light from bursting fireworks and silhouetted against distant walls made him sure that they would come for him before the night was through. Now it is morning and there is still only the room and the orange wallpaper. He knows that when he draws back the curtain he will see them standing there in a thick knot, spilling from his garden into the street. He imagines them coming into the house and pictures himself pressing his form into the very corner of this room. He will be bleating his fear as they stream into his house, bunching into each other as they come through the door. For now he sits on the very corner of the hard mattress, hands folded in his lap. In a minute, he will draw back the curtains.

He remembers that he was going to go into town today on the bus driven by the young man who never speaks. The man they had before was older. He always had a kind word for the passengers and always came on time. This new one always comes late, leaving Roland to stand on the pavement wearing the hearing aid which he puts on before he goes out so he can pretend he can’t hear the things said by the children who pass him on their way to school. They come four abreast, brushing against him before turning and calling him a fucking paedo. He smiles, trying to collude with them that they’re wishing him a good morning, but these girls are able to reach the very core of him. Unconstrained, they direct a ceaseless stream of language and sound at him which passes straight through him and out the back of his head, carrying the splintered fragments of his self-respect. Their expressions resolve so quickly. Their neural paths are like highways, carrying juggernauts of pure, crystalline emotion from the sparse framework of their minds into the world. He knows that he has no authority in the eyes of these girls and no presence. He is a smudged outline in the foreground of a world which belongs to them in a way it never did to him. There is no ambivalence in their treatment of him and the delight they feel in the discharge of their thoughts and his resulting discomfort is unaffected and immediate.

Often, when Roland gets into town, he cannot remember what he is there to do. It is easier if he has a few things to do. If there are a few things, then they hang together in his consciousness like flies on flypaper. If he looks at one, he can see the others. When there is only one thing, it eludes him, and he will stand at the bus-stop until the bus returns. No shopping, the man will ask. Roland will smile enigmatically, encouraging his interest. He wants to describe to the man the sensation of being fellated by a shop-girl in the changing room of the GAP, but the man turns his attention to the other passengers. These cheerless fantasies hover always on the edge of his consciousness. They commingle, using the face of one girl, and the hands of another. They hardly excite him anymore but all the same, they comfort him, as though instead of being authored by himself, they originate outside himself, a gift from the outside world to show that if he is depraved and perverse, well so are the lurid precincts through which he moves. He sees the imminence of sex in every expression and in the angle of every limb. Standing in a queue, a woman behind and in front, he thinks he can smell the parts of themselves they try to mask below the floral tones of less natural scents, and he wonders in turn whether they can smell the semen on his sleeves. Often, when he walks past the shop windows and sees a girl leaning over the counter or arranging clothes on a rack, he is sure that what he imagines has already taken place and that the smile on her face is a glow caused by the memory of it.

Standing in the darkness when he gets home, he remembers why he went into town. By then it is too late and he has to wait until the next day, so he goes to the top drawer of the bureau. This occupies an entire wall of his living room. He takes out one of the hundreds of small green pens so he can start to make a list. He sees the photographs which are also in this drawer. Most of them show a woman and two young girls. The woman is beautiful and her expression wistful. One of the children is prettier than the other. He remembers that the woman’s name is Jane, but cannot remember the name of either child. All he can remember about them is a cold afternoon when the older one was sitting in a trolley at the supermarket. He was telling her to put down a jar of peanut butter she had picked up from the shelf. He remembers that he said it too sharply or too loudly and she had become petulant. She was refusing to return it to the shelf and he had become angry and begun to scream at her and he was screaming into her face, holding on to her arm tightly so that she couldn’t twist away from him. He remembers that she stopped struggling and begun to cry. She dropped the jar which shattered on the floor, and they stayed there until a store assistant came along with a mop and a sign that said caution - wet floor and everyone was staring at him. The child was sobbing, hunched over the handle of the trolley. There is a man in some of the photographs and if he looks at it for a long time, it looks like him. The man in the photographs is thinner, and smiling. There is a mirror above the bureau so he is able to hold the photograph up in front of him at arms length and allow his eyes to flicker from the man in the photograph with his arm around the two girls back to his reflection. When he does this he begins to think that the man in the photographs may be his brother, and this woman and these children his family.

When he returns to his bedroom and draws the curtains back, there is an anaemic light which barely illuminates the street outside. It is the first day of November. The man who lives with his parents at number fifty-seven is the only person he sees. He is washing his car in the street, bending to the bucket, covering the bonnet with wide sweeps. His forearms are bleached white in the cold and his breath is coming in great clouds of steam. He sees Roland staring at him and he stares back, dropping the sponge into the bucket. Roland looks away. He can see the man’s head, immobile at the edge of his vision. The man uses the interruption as a reason to light a cigarette. He looks through the kitchen windows of nearby houses. He sees someone else staring at him – the woman with the russet hair who lives with her husband at number forty-five. He remembers seeing this woman last night. At the moment, she is stirring the contents of a mug.

In the top window of the house opposite stands the girl who came into his garden twice last night and stood with her face only inches from his own through the dirty glass. She is standing wrapped in a towel, blow-drying her hair. The quickening he experiences at her near-nakedness saturates him and he stands transfixed, watching her hair dancing around her face. He sees her switch the blow dryer off. She angles it upwards with an economy of movement which indicates that she will be switching it on again. For now, she places her other hand underneath her elbow. She strikes this pose for a moment and then she moves that hand up to her face. She places her fingers to her throat and draws them down her neck to where the towel is knotted. She loosens the towel, which falls to the floor, and stands there naked. His eyes descend like a bridge suicide to the dark patch between her legs and they linger there. When he looks back at her face, she is still staring at him. Although the arousal always comes before the self-loathing, he realises what he should have realised when she crossed the street toward him for the second time last night. She means to torment him indefinitely, her own pleasure in these encounters ever more visceral. He is bound from escaping this situation by his own limitations, as much as by the limitations he has had imposed on him. He has forgotten what brought him here and can only remember a time when he had been someone else. He thinks maybe that person pushed themselves too far into a world believing the world wasn’t watching. He looks again at the place between her legs, as he must, and when she turns and walks away, he looks at the woman drinking from the mug. He draws the curtains and sits heavily on the bed, listening to the sound of himself sobbing into the room.