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The road curled around the trees and ran, in a slight incline, alongside a stone wall, until eventually the wall ran out of time and was replaced by an open park. In the park two men were mowing the lawn. They wore luminous orange tunics and blue trouser pants. The sound of their tractor throbbed in the still midday and, looking at them from the road, their bodies danced and shimmied in the heat. 

The man who drove the tractor wore earmuffs to block out the sound; the other man, in protective goggles, wandered along behind the tractor raking up the forgotten grass. Occasionally he would stop and, leaning on his rake, stare out across the park towards the houses that lay beyond and the aeroplanes that flew in above them to land at the local aerodrome. He had dreams of being a pilot. 

Beneath the protective earmuffs and with the throb of tractor and the intermittent rush of passing cars, the men would not have heard the lightly whistled contralto, carried broken on the breeze that blew up the hill. In a moment or two the whistler appeared from behind the trees that shielded the bend in the road. When, later, they were asked about him, the men couldn’t really remember anything about this man. He was altogether unremarkable in dress and in appearance.  

Perhaps they thought he was a resident from nearby, for there was little reason why anyone else would be walking along this little road: it led only to another road like it, and beyond that another, and ultimately into a cul-de-sac. He carried no briefcase, no tools of a trade, no goods for sale. His air was of someone with nowhere to go and, as he tripped along, he looked all around him, taking in the surrounds and the quietude of this suburban road. 

At a certain point, just before the edge of the field, he stopped and, with arms crossed, stared out approvingly at the men in the park. He watched them for a while as though he were waiting for them to turn and look in his direction so that he could wave them on with their activities or walk up to them to give some implausible guidance. But they were absorbed in their own thoughts and activities and, shortly, he gave an insouciant shrug of his shoulders and walked off, his hands cocked in his pockets and the tune back on his lips. 

He was not an old man – perhaps halfway through his years. It was difficult, the men said, to place his age. He could have been young; he could have been old; but not very young, or very old. At the end of it all, the most telling thing about him was that he was walking around on a day like this at all, when most of his peers were at work. If he didn’t live around here then perhaps he belonged to a religion. 

If anyone had looked closely enough they would have seen that his clothes, although casual, were expensive, his jacket tailored to fit his tall frame, his paunch well hidden by the elegant cut. (He was definitely no resident.) On his right wrist he wore a gold bracelet; in his breast pocket a thin bill-fold with a few clean notes. He carried no identification. 

He walked beyond the edge of the field and away from the working men. As he walked his whistle changed to a soft humming and, then, changing tune completely, he sang quietly to himself. A few more bars followed, sung slowly and with breathless pauses for by now he was tiring from his exertions as he walked on up the hill. 

And then, suddenly, without any warning, he interrupted his singing, dropped down on his haunches in a crouch, and peered through the hedge that bordered this part of the road. The action was surprising: as though he had happened unexpectedly upon something that he had been searching for all along.

‘Well, Hello there!’ in his best, most cheerful voice. There was no response and so he tried again. ‘Hello?’

He crouched down even lower until his face was no higher above the ground than his knees and, from this position, he inverted his head to look through the hedgerow, one hand on the ground to balance him, the other reaching out to move aside a small branch. Through the gap a small boy could be seen, crawling about in the flattened grey sand of the flower bed on the other side of the hedge. The boy wore faded pants with a cartoon patch on the one knee. He had on a homemade knitted sweater and, in the shadows formed by the hedge, his left cheek showed a smudge of purple. In his one hand he pushed a small metal car and in the other he held a plastic figurine from a popular children’s television show that the man recognised as such without knowing who it was (he made a mental note of it). From the child’s pouting lips there came the sound of an imitated engine and the occasional gruff comment from the imagined hero. 

He was three, maybe four.

The man settled himself a little more comfortably, resting on the haunches of his one leg, the other foot slightly in front of him, looking all the while away from the hedge and down the road in the direction from where he had come. From where he sat he could not see the men in the field. Nor could he be seen by them. Perhaps he was doing no more than resting in the shade of the hedge after the exertions of his walk. As if to make the point, he took a cigarette from the packet in his jacket pocket and lit it from a box of matches. Then he turned and exhaled the smoke over his shoulder, flicking the burning match out in his fingers before slipping its husk back into the box. ‘What’s your name?’

Feigning indifference to this stranger, the little boy continued his imaginary play: screeching and explosive sounds to the accompaniment of orders and instructions and occasional exclamations of pain and horror from the characters of his imagined game. The man stole another glance through the hedgerow at the odd assortment of trinkets that served as villain or victim or impromptu stage props. ‘What are you playing? Are you playing soldiers?’ He leaned forward a little more confidently now, bending back the branch again, studying carefully the toys and the game as it was played, assessing the distance between the boy and the corner of the house set back in the yard. ‘Who is that, Superman? No, that doesn’t look like Superman. It must be Batman?’

The little boy’s right hand closed protectively around the figurine. For as long as a child of his age could he studied the man on the other side of the hedge and then his attention wandered, along with the finger of the left hand, which probed up his nostril until it found a little morsel that he covertly pushed into his month. His game interrupted by this persistent stranger, the boy retreated into a cowed silence and, with the fixed feet of the action figurine, he stirred little circles into the soft sand.

‘My favourite is Batman. But I always felt sorry for Robin.’ There followed another long pause during which the adult drew deeply on his cigarette, blowing the smoke in the direction of the field. 

He appeared to be in no hurry to move on, enjoying his cigarette and contemplating the quietude around him. When he had smoked enough, he stubbed the cigarette out on the ground and then rubbed the filterless butt between his index finger and thumb, crushing it into little pieces, which he dispersed loosely around where he was sitting. 

‘Mommy says it’s bad to smoke.’ 

‘Your mommy is quite right. We should always listen to our mommies.’ He sat, deep in reflection, staring out away from the hedge and away from the boy and his toys hidden behind it. After a while the boy carried on playing, driving his car over the sand roads that he had carved through the flower-bed and talking all the while on behalf of the figurine. He had dropped his voice until it was barely audible. 

A buzzing overhead signalled the approach of a low-flying aircraft, which was off-course. ‘Piper-Beechcraft,’ said the man. ‘Very low. Is it in trouble?’ With studied concentration he watched the aeroplane fly overhead, tracking its movements from over the houses in front, around over his shoulder until it disappeared from his sight beyond the hedge. He was conscious that the boy’s gaze followed his own and then, when the aircraft had disappeared, the boy turned back again to the game, glancing at the man as he did so. He continued to play, keeping watch on the man out of the corner of his eye. 

And so it was that he watched the man put his hand into his jacket and, after rustling it about for a moment, withdraw a sweet wrapped in a clear twisted wrapper. The man took hold of either end of the wrapper and, pulling slowly, released the sweet from its plastic coating. 

The game had stopped completely as the boy watched the sweet travel from hand to mouth. The man, slurping falsely on the sweet as he swapped it from cheek to cheek, sat and watched down the road, never looking at the boy. ‘Grape, hmm, my favourite.’

Then – slowly, with deliberate contemplation – the man reached into his pocket and withdrew another sweet. He held it in his hand and looking all the time away from the boy he asked, ‘Would you like one?’ There was no response. He held the sweet out towards the hedge, gripping it by the one end of the wrapper. 

The little boy crawled a little way out from the sanctuary of his garden, hesitating at the hole in the hedge, before pushing his head through and out into the full view of the man. The man could now clearly see the purple bruise over the cheekbone. He moved the sweet a little closer to the hedge, but still out of reach of the boy who stared out, crouched down on hands and knees and with only his head protruding. 

‘Oh, hello. What’s your name?’

Hesitation . . . then, ‘Damian.’

‘Damian. That’s a lovely name Damian; and how old are you?’

Hesitation again, with another look at the sweet and then over his shoulder, before looking at his four raised fingers and saying ‘free.’ 

‘Lovely.’ The hand with the sweet moved — almost imperceptibly — closer towards the little boy who, without hesitating this time, reached out and took it. He retreated immediately back through his hole, but sat for a moment on the other side, unwrapping the sweet, which he popped into his mouth, before gathering up the figurine and a matchbox car to run back to the safety of his house. 

‘Would you like another sweet, Damian?’ 

Arrested in his flight, enough time had passed for Damian to have savoured the fruitiness of the juices that rolled down his throat. In the moment or two while he thought about the offer, the hand went back into the jacket and retrieved another sweet. This time the grip was held a little tighter around the candy, but the offer was still temptingly close to the hedge. For a second or two, sucking hard all the while, Damian watched. Then, without his having finished the first sweet, he dropped his toys and darted back out through the hole. 

But this time, to Damian’s great surprise, the man’s hand moved quickly away, rather than towards him. The man clutched the sweet close to the silk kerchief in his breast pocket. ‘Is your mommy here?’

Taken aback, Damian was stunned into an immediate answer: ‘Uh-uh. Mommy’s working.’ 

‘Are you here all by yourself? You are a big boy!’ The man smiled and looked admiringly into the boy’s open eyes. 

‘Granny’s here, but she’s sleeping.’ He lisped slightly. Perhaps it was only the sweet in his mouth.

‘Your granny must be old; I bet she sleeps a lot?’

‘Uh-huh.’

The hand with sweet leaned closer to the hedge and to the outreached hand of Damian. Damian took — rather than snatched — the sweet. ‘Would you like another sweety tomorrow?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘All-right then. I’ll see you again tomorrow.’

Damian took his cue that there would be no more sweets today and dashed away, holding toys and sweet, ready to savour his delicacy elsewhere. The man stood up and, looking first up to the sky and then all around him, adjusted his hat and set off back down the road. He started to whistle again as he walked, fingering the sweets that rustled in his pocket. He smiled quietly to himself between whistles.

He paused once again at the park to check on the men, but they had now settled down under the shade on the far side of the park to take their lunch.

Turning from them, the man hummed a few bars before his spirits overwhelmed him and, a little louder than he had done previously, he sang again his lines of happiness.