Invisible

I’m invisible, not literally, I’m old, which amounts to the same thing. Even the birds ignore by me, they hop so close, seem to think I’m part of the park bench. I had a wren, last week, jump onto my foot like it was a protruding root. I suppose it’s my stillness and silence. It’s amazing what you can see when you’re still and silent, what lets itself be seen. People do the oddest things even though I’m sitting here looking on. It’s as though I am a statue to them, or that my eyes don’t see; yet my vision is almost as good as that buzzard up there, the one that’s been circling for some time. Haven’t you noticed it? I notice everything. 

Now and then, someone will sit next to me. Mostly they’ll bury their head in a phone – used to be a newspaper, but you never see anyone on a park bench reading a newspaper anymore – and pretend I’m not here. Doesn’t take much pretence since, as I’ve told you already, I’m invisible. There’s one bobby (I’m showing my age by calling him that) who speaks to me. Does a daily round, old-fashioned, the way police used to, and he always stops, sits, we catch up.

‘Anything strange, Ted?’ – that’s his opening line every time, and he hands me a takeaway tea: milk, two sugars. Some days he’ll offer me half of his snack, a macaroni pie, chocolate shortbread; keeps offering, even though I’ve yet to accept. Doesn’t take much to feed me. The appetite wanes with age. For food that is, not for what’s going on. Watching is my hobby. I have an appetite for life, for people, for the small comings and goings of the day. I’m not nosey, mind you, I’m engaged. 

There’s so much to learn through watching. I’ve become good at profiling people, and they are never what you think. The homeless man with the mongrel is far more likely to stop and bag his dog’s shit than the than the well-dressed woman with the French bulldog who has a quick glance around, then walks on quickly when she thinks no one has seen what her dog left by the kids’ climbing frame. Remember, I don’t count, I’m invisible.

The bobby’s called Bob, you couldn’t make it up. I laughed when he told me, but he didn’t think it was funny. ‘They don’t call us that anymore,’ he said, ‘if only. These days we’re “pigs” and “scum” and “filth”. To be called bobby would be nice.’

Bob’s moving up the ranks fast. He’s been off the beat for years now, got some big job in drug enforcement, wears a suit, no uniform anymore. I was a young pup when we first met twenty years ago. I had just retired, had taken to the park bench to pass the time. ‘You must see things,’ – Bob said to me one day when he sat beside me. ‘Quiet people see things,’ and he looked around as though something interesting might occur there and then. But the fact is, everything is interesting, the smallest actions are significant. I know that, and Bob knows that. He recognised my curious nature, and knew it would be useful for him.

At first, I felt like a snitch, I was loath to tell him anything. ‘What if I put you on the payroll,’ he said. Gave me four locations, none of them far, said I could rotate them as I wished, suggested I juggle my times to come and sit. ‘Be yourself, just keep on watching and I’ll give you £10 a day.’ 

I know most others would scoff at a tenner, say it’s nothing, but when you get older, it doesn’t take much to keep you, it takes enough, but not much, and £10 a day makes all the difference. All for sitting here quietly, doing what I’d be doing anyway. He tells me I’ve solved hundreds of crimes over the years. Isn’t that something? Who’s talking to who, when and where, the shape and sizes of packages changing hands. None of this taking-pictures-on-a-phone business. I file it all in my head, good for the memory. 

I’m known round here, in a forgotten-about way. Old Ted the caretaker, they call me, if they call me anything. Four decades I put in as caretaker at the local primary, then the wife dropped dead of a heart attack a week after I retired.  Only one son, and he’s in Australia, never comes home. I thought I was all washed up, but turned out I had a whole new career waiting for me. Who’d have thought it? Now, what’s happening over there at the corner of the swing-park?