My boyfriend had been gone for an hour, and I had been in the bathroom for about thirty seconds, when the door knocked. I froze, mid-shit. I told myself that it was just a leafleter, but as I thought this there was a second knock on the door. I thought with dismay about the fact that I had just been lying on the sofa in the living room, where we had taken the curtains down from the windows so that we could paint around them. The man (for I imagined, felt, that the knocker was a man) could have put his face up to the window and peered in at me, and I would not have had time to leave the room. I felt that he was probably doing that now, looking in at the empty room, at the television which was still on, at my sheepskin slippers in the middle of the rug. He would know that I was in and know that I was hiding from him and sure enough, yes, there it was, the third knock. I felt unable even to flush the chain, as though the man might hear it. I sat on the floor of the bathroom and wished that he would go away. The house did not feel secure when I was in it alone, I felt like an animal in a zoo, there were windows in every room. The bathroom window was okay because it was frosted, and because the bathroom was upstairs; if it had been downstairs on the ground floor the frosted glass would not be enough, I would have lain down on the linoleum so that my silhouette could not be seen by anyone standing outside looking in at me.
When, after five minutes or so, I came out of the bathroom and onto the landing, I felt that I was being watched, because a person in one of the houses opposite could have looked out of one of their windows and through my own bedroom window, at the front of the house, through to where I stood exposed on the landing. I was sure that everybody in the street had seen my breasts before. I walked into the bedroom and stood between the two windows with my back against the wall, and tried to look down to see if there was anybody at the door, but could see nobody. When I went downstairs I saw a leaflet in the hallway. It was a missed delivery slip, and the message scrawled on it said that a parcel had been left by the side gate. I felt relieved to know the reason for the knock, but was unable to open the front door to pick the parcel up in case the neighbours were watching the house, wondering why I had not answered. I saw myself as they saw me, a nervous woman in a dressing gown, pale and pointless. I walked into the kitchen and opened the back door, then around to the side of the house to the gate, but saw that the parcel was not at the gate as the slip had said, but at the side of the house, meaning that the delivery man had opened the gate and came into the garden. I knew it was just a man doing his job but I did not like the fact that somebody had been in my garden, that I could have been sitting out there, with my earphones in, my eyes closed, a man looking at me without my knowing. I did not feel safe, I did not feel safe at all on the ground floor of this house. Despite this I went back into the living room, knowing that I must. I was to lie back down on the sofa. I put on a documentary about the fast fashion industry. I was having a year of not spending any money on new clothes, and I liked to watch documentaries about rivers being polluted by textile dyeing, they strengthened my resolve. It was a good documentary, but I felt unsettled and unable to concentrate. Somebody on a nearby street was having a garden party. The music was loud and I felt tense and agitated. I did not feel that I was in my house, safe and secure, I felt that I was merely hunched in a brick cage in the midst of all the partygoers, willing things to end. I felt that at any moment somebody would appear outside and look in at me through the window. I was waiting for it to happen, the sudden appearance and the knock on the glass, and then the triumphant glint in the person’s eyes. Somebody could shatter the glass easily. Somebody could kick the door down and I had no weapon to defend myself. There was a carving knife in the kitchen but it did not calm me much.
The vision of the lone man turned into a vision of protesters walking down my street, into my little cul-de-sac, chanting things at me through the windows. It was not impossible, only unlikely. I had no protection from this but the assumption that it would not happen. I imagined that if an angry mob stood outside my house then somebody would kick the back door down with ease. I felt a sense of dread, and I wondered what this meant, if it meant that my unease was the unease of a white woman uncomfortable at the Black Lives Matter protests taking place in the city. That did not feel right to me, even though I sensed that I would be accused of it. No, my unease was something else. When I heard the knock at the door, the person that I imagined to be standing at the door was the man that lived opposite, and he was white. He was the sort of man who would be uncovered as a serial killer to the surprise of the street, the surprise of everybody but me, because I saw through all his performative bonhomie, his whistling, his chairmanship of the local allotment society, his neighbourly greetings. I felt sure that this man often watched me through the front room window.