Nowhere Man

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‘Hey! Look, it’s him!’

The devilish grins of a gang of kids glowed beneath the streetlights as they cackled with delight. Ambling past, his back arched and his eyes down, was a man with a long, grey coat, a cloth cap and a dark, bushy beard obscuring his face. In his gnarled hands were two carrier bags from the 24-hour Spar, for like a fairy-tale monster, he only comes out at night. Some kids run away into the darkness, satisfied just by seeing this strange creature with their own two eyes. The braver ones creep up behind him, daring each other to poke him in the back, to throw stones and eggs at him.

‘Hey! Nowhere Man!’ one boy taunted him. They call him Nowhere Man, because no-one knows his name. The damp, unread letters piled outside his door were all addressed to different names. Nowhere Man lived in the basement flat of number nine, Cambridge Street; sunlight only reaches his cave-like home at dawn, when all tenants but the Nowhere Man are safe in their beds.

He brushed two young girls in the hall on their way out to the pub. ‘Nowhere Man,’ one of them whispered. This nocturnal oddity was something of a legend amongst the students living on Cambridge Street. The girls showed looks of disgust, and hurried to leave his ominous presence.

Nowhere Man slipped stealthily behind his front door, ignoring the letters that were now a permanent fixture in the dank corridor, as much as the flickering lights, and the badly-laid carpet. He grunted at the state of his living room; the floor was paved in bits of screwed-up paper, discarded words from a novel that had been taunting him this last thirty years. He kicked the paper aside, and emptied his shopping onto the coffee table: a pack of economy biros, more paper, three bags of Fox’s glacier mints, a Victoria Sponge and The Guardian. He took one of the new pens and began to scribble. He didn’t know what he was writing, only that he must write. For years the blankness of the page had tormented him; filling it with words was as painful as drawing his own blood as ink. He supposed at one time it must have made sense, but now the words barely held together. Sometimes his hands shook so much that even the letters didn’t come out right. His eyes had aged faster than the rest of him in this dingy room, and now he could barely make out the fine lines on the blaring white.

It sounded like hailstones were battering against the window. He didn’t need to look behind him to know it was those damned kids again, throwing pebbles against the glass.

‘Nowhere Man! Oi!’

‘’E can’t even hear us! Deaf as a post, me mam says!’

‘Blind, too! Didn’t even notice us before, did ’e?’

‘Blind, or just bloody stupid!’

Their booming laughter was sinister with cruel delight. After ten minutes or so, they grew bored, and left Nowhere Man to his silence. Only the chill of the night through the cracked windowpanes could touch him now.