The Previous Owner Left A Note In The Meter Cupboard: "HE ONLY WATCHES"

When you buy a house you get a folder. Boiler manual, warranty for a washing machine that has already gone, a leaflet about the bins.

In our meter cupboard, cable-tied to the pipe, there was a laminated card.

One side has the stopcock instructions and a diagram, which is genuinely useful and which I have used twice.

The other side says, in the same neat capitals:

"HE ONLY WATCHES. HAT AND COAT. UPSTAIRS LANDING, MOSTLY WINTER. HE HAS NEVER DONE ANYTHING IN 31 YEARS. DO NOT SPEAK TO HIM AND DO NOT MOVE THE WARDROBE."

We laughed. We laughed for about four months.

I saw him in December, on the landing, at about two in the morning, on my way back from the bathroom.

Hat. Coat. Not close. Standing at the far end, by the wardrobe — the wardrobe, which is a built-in thing from the sixties that we had been talking about ripping out.

I did not speak to him. I would like to tell you that was a decision. It was not a decision; my mouth simply did not work.

He was there for as long as it took me to walk into my bedroom and shut the door, which is maybe four seconds, and I have never in my life covered four seconds so carefully.

We have not moved the wardrobe.

That is the whole story, and I know it is unsatisfying, and I am aware that a better writer would go into the wardrobe and find something. I am not going into the wardrobe. I have a mortgage and two children and a wife who has read the card and who has said, in the flat voice she uses when a discussion is finished, "We are not moving the wardrobe."

I have tried to find the previous owner. He is dead. He was ninety-one and he lived here for thirty-one years, and his daughter, when I very carefully raised it, said only: "Oh, Dad and his notes."

She did not ask what the note said.

She already knew. I could hear her not asking.