The Man on the CCTV Was Standing Behind Me

I bought the doorbell camera for parcels, like everyone does, and ignored it for months, like everyone does. It was a bad feeling that made me actually look at it — a creeping sense, over a week or so, of being watched, of the house being subtly wrong, the kind of thing you dismiss as stress right up until you don't. On a restless evening I finally sat down and scrolled back through the camera's saved clips, expecting cats and wind.

I found the man on the first night I checked, and then I found him on every night before it that the camera had kept.

3 a.m., give or take. A man, standing in my front garden, motionless, facing the house. Not approaching the door — the camera only caught him because he was within its wide view, off to the side, near the hedge. Just standing. For long stretches — the clips are motion-triggered and he triggered them by arriving and then, chillingly, stopped triggering them by going so still the camera lost interest, then re-triggered them by finally leaving, so that each night's record is: man arrives, man freezes for I-don't-know-how-long, man eventually leaves, always before dawn. Six nights of it, that the camera had saved. Who knows how many before the storage rolled over.

He never came to the door. He never tried the windows, as far as any camera caught. He stood in my garden in the dark and looked at my house, night after night, and on two of the six nights — I mapped it, with my stomach somewhere around my feet — he had drifted from facing the front door to facing the side of the house, to facing, specifically, the window of the room I sleep in. Standing in my garden at 3 a.m. facing the window behind which I was, those nights, asleep, unaware, a pane of glass and a curtain away from a motionless stranger who had chosen my house to stand and stare at in the dark.

I went to the police, and I'm glad I did, and there's a bit I can't detail because it's ongoing, except to say I was not the only house, and he was known to them by the end, and the standing-and-staring was, an officer told me carefully, sometimes a rehearsal rather than an end in itself. That sentence has lived in me ever since.

I have better cameras now, and lights, and locks, and a dog, and I sleep worse and safer both. But the image I can't put down is the simplest one: not a break-in, not a threat, nothing so active — just a man, six nights running, standing utterly still in my garden in the small hours, facing the glass I slept behind, watching a house that had no idea it was being watched, until a bad feeling and a parcel camera finally turned the watching around.