Lonely Hearts.

Modern love is something like this: dusk falling and a man staring out over rainswept front lawns and empty tarmac. The lid has blown off someone’s recycling and bits of plastic wrapper skitter round a drain. In the open box, a week’s worth of news is getting soaked, the pages fusing and returning to pulp. If we could look up at him from the street, the man standing at the window would remind us somehow of a character in a story, of someone imprisoned in the highest room of a tower at the end of the world. But he doesn’t share this view; he sees only wet lawns, dripping walls and the sediment of darkness tracking down the face of the day. He is about to move, to go downstairs and find something to conceal this vast emptiness, when something happens that makes him pause; something blocks the light that was previously falling into his eyes. He looks up, across the flatly shining tarmac to the house over the road. The light is coming from a lamp in the bedroom of the couple who live opposite, and it was momentarily obstructed by the woman who lives there coming into the room. The man feels himself flush as he realises that she is wearing only a towel, her hair straggling wetly over her shoulders. He looks away, embarrassed, then looks back again. She has stopped in front of a mirror and bunched her hair up in one fist. Now, with one arm still raised above her head, she lifts her chin through various angles, appraising herself, noting where her body has betrayed her, and where the defences still hold. He drinks in the unselfconscious purity of the moment, of a woman unwatched and wholly herself. Then the towel slips and his heart surges against his ribs. The blare of the television downstairs grows instantly louder and farther, the silence roars. He looks away. When he looks up again, the towel is back in place and his neighbour has turned to face the window. She is looking directly at him across the gulf of shadows in the street below, and her gaze feels like iced-water poured over him, like falling into a dark and whirling nothingness. Then, after a weightless instant, she lets the towel fall entirely. For a moment they stand there like that, the empty orange glow of the streetlight washing shadow into the hollows of her belly and her groin. Eventually she draws the curtains, leaving the man in darkness. The following evening he goes back to the landing and waits, hoping she’ll return. When she does, the process is repeated again: the towel drops and time hangs suspended until the curtains are pulled across the window. It is the same the next night, and the next. On the fourth night, something different happens. As they stand there, eye beams locked, she runs a hand over her body, tracking a course from one of her breasts to the shadow pool of her groin. She pauses, seeming to deliberate, and then draws the curtains. The next night, her hands again begin to wander and then stop. She looks up and nods to the man on the landing. The meaning is clear: he must give something, too. So it is that each night of that autumn, as the ragged ends of the day are drawn down to darkness and their partners go about their lives elsewhere in the house, the man at the landing window drops his trousers and masturbates at the woman across the road, while she masturbates in her turn. And of course it ends in the most predictable way, with her husband coming upstairs a little more quietly than usual at precisely the moment when she can’t hear anything but the blood in her ears, and they all get divorced and move to different streets in different towns, there to stare out of different windows at the same endless sunsets, the same moon obscured by high-blown skeins of cloud and the same upstretched arms of winter trees.