People Watching Part 7 - An Icicle in the Sun
In Boomtown, everybody’s business is everybody’s business
and its difficult to escape the feeling you’re being watched – hell, you are
being watched….all the time. In People
Watching Pt 5, I wrote about Boomtown’s seldom-explored coast and how some
people seem to strike lucky and escape the urban sprawl to make a quiet life
for themselves out on the bay.
Needless to say, people watching is a completely different
proposition on the coast. In the city,
no one cares if they’re drawing a little too much attention. No one worries if the CCTV cameras track them
down the long sodium-lit streets, but among the more reclusive denizens of the
coast, people watching can be far more challenging.
I remember one late autumnal day, catching a glimpse of a
woman stood in her window at the end of a terrace of old fisherman cottages. Although the setting sun was casting a deep
amber glow across everything, looking at her was like looking at a black and
white photograph. She had no colour in
her face, in her clothes…in her life. As
she sighed at the prospect of yet another evening alone, her swirling breath
fogged the cool glass and in that instant, the story of her life and her loves
seemed to open up before me.
Although today, you’d quickly lose her in any crowd, in her
younger days she’d been a Boomtown debutante – a silly pretty thing that used
to sparkle and shine for the boys in the bright suits. She could be seen at all the best parties and
delighted in the men she got to know. Men
that with painful predictability, would each eventually wave goodbye. In that moment, it felt as if her sadness was
reaching out to me across the windswept space that separated us. Just as I acknowledged the loss she felt for
each of her departed lovers, I saw a tear fall, briefly flashing in the last of
the sunlight.
The wind dropped for a moment and I could hear music playing
from inside the house, perhaps a worn-out tape of her favourite songs – the
ones that could still make her smile. It
was then that she saw me watching. I
felt uncomfortable for having intruded on her world and she offered me an
embarrassed smile – embarrassed because she was aware that briefly, inexplicably,
I’d been able to share her inner sadness.
For a moment, her smile made her face shine…only for that glimpse of her
former beauty to fade away as she lowered her eyes and pulled the curtains to shut
out the night.