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suddenly had his epiphany. They were perfect. That was what attracted him so magically. The absolutely perfect family. The attractive father who earned good money. The beautiful, intelligent mother. The pretty, lively child. The cute black cat. A nice house. A well-kept garden. Two cars. Not rich or flashy, but solidly middle-class. An ordered world.
    The world he had always dreamt of.
    The world he would never be part of. He had realised that he found some consolation in watching it over a fence.
    He went closer to the house, right up to the garden gate, and tried to spy into the kitchen. He could see Gillian bent over the table. Aha, she had poured herself a cup of coffee. She held the thick mug in her hands and took the same small, pensive sips he had seen before.
    What did she think about? She often seemed to be deep in thought.
    He hurried on. He could not afford to linger too long in one place, certainly not out on the street like that. He was dying to know what Gillian was worried about, and he knew why: he hoped that finding out would calm him down. It had to be something temporary. Nothing, please nothing, to do with her marriage or her family. Perhaps her mother or her father was ill and she was worried. Something like that.
    He walked down Thorpe Hall Avenue, past Thorpe Bay Gardens, the long stretch of lawns and tennis courts along the seafront, and crossed Thorpe Esplanade to reach the beach. The hectic early-morning traffic was only slowly easing off. The beach lay there cold, abandoned and wintry. Not a living soul in sight.
    He took a deep breath.
    He felt as exhausted as others did after a long, hard day at work. He knew why: because he had seen Gillian. Because he had almost bumped into her. This situation, which he had not been prepared for, had caused him such emotional stress that – as he now realised with hindsight – he had marched double-quick to the beach. Anything to get away. To a more peaceful place where he could calm down.
    He watched so many people. He memorised their daily routines and habits. He tried to fathom how they lived. He would not have been able to explain to anyone what it was that fascinated him so much, but he could not help himself. It was impossible to stop once you had started. He had heard of geeks who built up a parallel life for themselves online in Second Life . That seemed close to what he did. Living a second life as well as your own real life. Dreaming your way into other people’s fates. Roles you could slip into. Sometimes he was Thomas Ward, the successful man with the lovely house and expensive car. Sometimes he was a cool guy who did not stutter or blush, who asked the pretty woman with the dog out on a date – and was of course not refused. It brought light and joy into his days, and if it was dangerous or disturbing (he had the feeling that a psychologist would have expressed a number of serious doubts about his hobby), it was the only chance he had to avoid the sadness that enveloped him.
    But gradually something was changing, and that made him uneasy.
    He went a little further down the beach. It was more windy here than up in the streets. He was quickly frozen to the bone. He had forgotten his gloves and kept blowing into his hands to warm them up. Naturally that was not reason to deviate from his clearly defined walking schedule. He had even started a file in his computer on the objects of his attention. His sense of duty did not allow him to forget to note down each evening everything that he had seen and experienced. But he no longer did it with the same enthusiasm as he once had. And he knew why that was so: it was down to the Wards, especially Gillian. They had become more and more important to him. They had become his family. His daydreams were full of them. There was nothing that he did not know about them, that he did not want to experience with them.
    It was probably an inevitable development that his interest in the other people who had fascinated