Peeping Tom

by shyster

Posted to Stories on 2002-08-16 01:48:00

This neighbourhood is just so fucked up. I come home for the first time in ages and my parents tell me all the local gossip amidst cups of green tea and nasty biscuits, most of it I would have no interest in even if I still lived here, until they get to the case of Claire’s new lodger. Claire is this alcoholic rich lady who sits in her garden sunbathing naked whenever there’s a glimmer of sun and drinking and smoking the whole time. I’d admire her if she wasn’t such a walking horror. She likes to flirt with my dad which really shows the desperation of the lady (my dad is like a whale, although in his youth he did resemble Gil Gerard, the original Buck Rogers, but that was a hell of a long time ago now) and she’s always trussing up her sagging body with tiny strips of leather and knee-high boots, but enough, she takes lodgers.

The general thought on this is so that she can alway have a date for the neighbourhood parties. Well, seems her latest lodger is a Peeping Tom. Claire herself is unaware of this little idiosyncracy, and thinks he just likes going for midnight walks, she refers to him as her ‘Phantom Lodger’. My mother barrels on, with a face of rising glee, that it is possible to follow his route by watching the automatic lights click on as he passes through the neighbourhood. My parents laugh at this for a moment, and that gives me a chance to ask why no one seems to have complained to the police. Oh, no one else knows, comes the reply. It seems my parents are peeping on the Tom from their vantage point at the top of the hill. I’m a little taken aback at this, and quietly drink my tea as I take this in. They go on to describe him, he claims to have an MBE and has a long white beard and a red bobble hat. I snigger into my tea and say, he sounds like fucking Santa Claus. Silence. I take my eyes from the rim of my cup and look at my parents. They are looking back, shocked. Like, what the fuck?


The Literary Kicks message boards were active from 2001 to 2004.