Two foreign men have been coming into the bar recently. Both around the same age. Middle aged. Both English. Or, at least, they speak English.

They sit in the same places every day. Separately. They are not together. One sits upstairs, at a table on the mezzanine floor. The other sits in the corner at the bar, facing the door, although he is usually looking out the window to the street. The man on the mezzanine floor spends most of his time looking out the window too. He never reads a newspaper or a book, just sits there staring out over the canal.

They both drink coffee. Black coffee. Never a latte or a cappuccino. Just coffee. Black. Although the man on the mezzanine floor has recently started drinking beer after his two coffees.

The mezzanine man always arrives first. Around 3.30 in the afternoon. He takes his seat upstairs and drinks his coffee. The corner man comes in a little later, usually just after 4. They never speak to anyone. Not really. The mezzanine man makes one phone call, always around 5.30, just after he’s finished his second coffee. He speaks very quietly, like he doesn’t want anyone to know his business. He’s probably only telling his wife what time he’ll be home, but he makes it look like he’s protecting some very important secret.

The corner man sometimes speaks to other men at the bar. At least, he did the first one or two times. He was telling another man at the bar, a regular, about how he had been parked across the street one day, on the other side of the canal. He had parked the car just before the bridge, which rises up in an arch and then comes down again. He said that when women cycled over the bridge towards him in the car, he could see directly up their skirts. He could see their underwear, he said. It was their underwear that he wanted to see too, because he did not need to look into some big blinking horse’s eye, he said. He said it like a joke, but the regular man doesn’t have such good English, or he maybe just didn’t think it was funny. The mezzanine man was listening too, although he was pretending not to listen. He was at the bar, waiting to pay his bill. He usually left after paying his bill, but this time he paid and then asked for a beer, and took that back to his seat upstairs. He probably thought  the story about the women’s underwear was funny, but was too shy to say anything to the man, maybe feeling that he wasn’t supposed to hear the story. He probably thought the beer would give him the courage to speak to the corner man, but then the corner man left, as usual, just before 6.

The corner man always receives a phone call before he leaves. Maybe his wife asking to meet him, or telling him the dinner is ready, although the phone call is always at the same time every night. The corner man never says anything. Or not much. Just, ‘OK’, and ‘thanks’. Actually, it sounds a little too formal to be a phone call from a wife. And it is unlikely that someone who looks so lonely would even have a wife. The mezzanine man too. They both look very lonely. The phone calls could be with their wives back home. But the way they both looking longing across the street, it’s more like they’re waiting for some woman from their dreams to suddenly appear. But she never does appear, and they keep on staring.

They should really start talking to each other. They could swap ideas of what this woman would look like if she ever did appear. They could share their dreams about the places they’d go with her, the lives they’d lead. But what if they’re waiting for the same woman? They might fight. And that would not be good for the bar. There is something threatening about both men. Even though they are middle aged. When they look at someone they look right into that person’s eye like they are memorising every detail of the eyeball. It’s confrontational. A lot of people don’t like to be looked in the eye like that. So maybe it’s better they don’t talk. Who knows what would happen if they looked into each others eyes like that.

(Exercise: Introduce a narrator intimate to the story but outside it. From 3AM Epiphany )

After barely a week in the city, he already has a routine. He could be seen heading to the city-end of the street at 4 every afternoon, his shoulders hunched, buckled towards his chest in an attempt to keep warm. He turns right at the baker’s shop, swerves to miss the open stairwell down to the basement coffee shop, never lifting his hands from his pockets for even a moment. He passes an antique-clock shop on the first corner, a pharmacy on the next and enters the bar on the third. He has walked for less than 5 minutes.

The bar has a large window that faces one of the city’s busiest streets. Anyone passing who looks inside could not fail to see him, to see his face gazing back at them. Most people look away, they don’t like to be confronted by a stranger staring straight back at them, but usually they think nothing more of it because they pass so quickly. Anyone sitting inside the bar could easily see him too. Just as easily as he could see them. He sits on a short stool in the corner, leaning one arm on the low bar, his back to the wall. He can see everyone who comes through the door, although he usually has his head turned to look out the window. And he only has to shift slightly to see the other way, right along the bar to the tables in the back corner or look up to the seats in the mezzanine floor above.

Anyone who was watching him would see him take his time over a cup of black coffee. He can sometimes make it last till 4.45, then lets the cup sit empty for easily another ten minutes before ordering a fresh one. He is clearly uncomfortable about this. He finds it bad form to take up a space in a cafe or a bar and have no drink. It’s already a struggle for him to sit in a bar and not have a real drink, an alcoholic drink. But nobody knows him here, nobody will call him a miserable bastard, and he sees other people doing the same, so he guesses it’s all right.

All this time he is waiting for a phone call. It usually comes around 5.30. The caller will tell him where to be to start work at 6pm. It is his job to be in his car at that time, and to follow another man – the ‘target’ – for 12 hours, right through the night. He has to note all the places the target goes and, around 5am, call in his position, which so far has always been outside the target’s home. He assumes that someone else takes over from him at 6am. But he doesn’t like having to make such assumptions. He would like to know for sure if there is someone else following the target during the day, and he would like to know who this colleague is. And so, he waits in this bar from where he can watch the target’s office (where he has – so far – always started his shift) and, presumably, where he can see the colleague waiting in a car. If he can identify the colleague, he can find out more about him. So, when he’s not watching the target, he watches for the colleague. He doesn’t yet know what the colleague looks like, and wouldn’t be able to recognise him even if that colleague was sitting in the same bar, on the mezzanine floor, for example, which gives a perfect overview of the target’s office and the hunched man sitting in the corner seat by the window.

(Exercise: Write an observer who indirectly reveals a complex reading of the events he is describing. From 3AM Epiphany )

After the two police officers had left, they sat in the living room for a long silent minute. Dad was in his usual easychair, the one that looked directly at the TV, but he didn’t look so comfortable. Neither did Mum, perched on the arm beside him, looking like she could hop away any second to make a cup of tea or go back to peeling the spuds. Nearby was Michael, at one end of the couch, on the edge of the cushion, desperate to get out to his mates to give them the gossip. At the opposite end of the couch, the far end, was Jill. She pulled at a strand of hair so she could bite it.

Nobody knew what to say, where to begin. Should Mum and Dad start by apologising for 19 years of lies? Was lies too strong a word, since they’d argue they had her best interests at heart the whole time? If it wasn’t lies then it was certainly deception. All those times when Jill needed her birth certificate but Mum couldn’t find it, only to come up with it later and bring it personally to the school or to the Post Office to get her passport that time. Or should they start by going over the events of that morning, talk about how frightened Jill had been, how she hadn’t been paranoid this past week after all? That guy really was stalking her, and not just for a week – for three years! Freak. He was clearly mentally unstable, not the kind of person you’d want passing on genes to a new generation. But here they were, coils of that man’s DNA right in this room. Were they all replaying the moments of Jill’s past when she too had been difficult, a little obsessive, a touch too sensitive? She spat out the ring of hair, then fought hard not to pick at the fingers in her lap.

‘At least we won’t hear from him anymore,’ said Mum.

‘No,’ agreed Dad. ‘They’ll lock him up for a long time.’

‘Not bloody long enough,’ said Mum.

Dad only mumbled, only half-nodded his head. If he’d been watching this on the telly, seeing it unfold on some mid-afternoon talk show, he’d have been outraged. He’d have been shouting at the flickering colours on the box, trying to make himself heard, trying to get them to lock up the bastard up for good, throw away the key, while Jill and Michael sniggered at his impotent rage. But he wasn’t saying any of that, now that it had come to his door, was interfering with his family. His mind was elsewhere, perhaps calculating his own guilt, thinking about what he could’ve done better, how he could’ve prevented all this, how he should’ve been protecting his little girl these last three years. She was, still, his little girl after all. After all that had happened that morning.

Mum seemed more secure, more confident that everything she’d done was the right thing at the time. For the best reasons, and with the interests of her whole family in mind. But then, Mum never did admit mistakes. She remained stubbornly steadfast in her decisions. She was the parent. She was there to be obeyed. Even if hindsight appeared to prove her wrong, she would still refute any criticism. ‘It’s all right saying that now,’ she’d say, ‘we’re all very clever after the fact, aren’t we?’ And with that, the conversation would be closed, no ‘but Mum’ allowed. It would be: up to the room to get the homework done.

Were they thinking about that? Were they thinking about how Jill was so good at school? The first of their family – meaning extended family too, and going back generations – to go to university. And not only that, but to finish third in her course, behind the two guys that were obviously going to get PhDs and work in a lab the rest of their lives. Were they wondering about that? Where her brains had come from? After all, you’d have to be pretty smart to stalk a young girl for three years and never be caught, never even get noticed. Today was his own fault, like he couldn’t sit back any longer. He practically gave himself up. That takes a certain type of person too, a certain type of courage.

Dad shuffled, looked at the white rug under his slippered feet. He clapped his hands together and looked up, looked round them all. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I suppose we should make that statement now.’

(Exercise: Dip into the consciousness of a family in a short piece of prose)