The Owls Who Watch

Chapter 2 - House of Johnson

Kevin Johnson stood on the pavement opposite his house, looking over his front garden as he leaned against a lamppost, drenched and gasping for air. The garden was as run-down and weed-infested as the other gardens he had seen on his hourlong backtrack home. Its slender iron fencing was battered and stained with the metal gate barely hanging onto its frame. Looming overhead stood the two-story, grey-bricked Johnson household. It would be impossible to visualise his home, and the other homes on the street, as anything other than appalling. As Kevin grew older, it became harder to visualise what the street had looked like when he was a small child, regardless of how little he was allowed to leave his home. Both the government's negligence and the expense of private maintenance services rendered most of Glasgow into such a slum. Silencing his wistfulness, Kevin mustered the courage and crossed the road, opened the screeching gate and walked up the steps into the small front garden.

He froze once he saw the blurred glow behind the clouded windows and its iron bars. His father's wife, Jules always monopolised the living room around this time, watching shallow and disturbing reality programmes. Fuck that, she can play make-believe far away from me as possible. He turned to his right and traversed through the weeds, cigarette doubts and wrappers and around into the windowless side-path to the right of the house. He usually returned through this way when he was younger. Sometimes he snuck off to spend time with one of his few friends, drinking in old train stations. Other times he would buy takeaways with money he had stolen when he was refused dinner from his despicable parents. Friends are a past-time, and family even more so.

The back garden was even wilder than the front, an uninterrupted wall of thick branchy trees stood tall at the back, holly bushes filled in the gaps to shield the narrow path which ran behind the street. Tall, wooden dividers protected this garden from the neighbouring gardens. Nearer the front, the negligence of gardening chores was even more pronounced, with the small greenhouse stained, smashed and littered. His late mother had worked as a gardener. Every time she completed work on a garden, she'd take pictures and keep them around her room like trophies. Once Jules entered the Johnson household, the boxes in the loft containing her things disappeared one day. When Kevin approached his father angrily, he was scolded and spent the night starving.

Kevin always anticipated the porchlights shining down whenever he stepped onto the stone slabs outside the kitchen window, despite having not worked in many years. While he enjoyed the discreetness, the longing for his childhood home overwhelmed him. But that life was over now. As he opened the back door, a fragrance of damp and dirty clothes struck before he even stepped into the laundry room. Two dishwashers and tumble dryers stood to his left against the wall, some petty motivational and religious writings lazily glued above them. Damp clothes overflowed out of one of the baskets while dirty clothes littered the cheaply tiled floor. Jules will be in a bad mood today then; her loving husband has neglected the duties she never helps with. He's too much of an alcoholic to care though.

He walked up the broken steps to the right and entered the dimly lit kitchen. The flickering lightbulb was the first to catch his eyes as many specks of the black soot from outside floated around it. On the counters to the left and right-hand side of him were opened packets of biscuits, crumbs, tools, jars, and other such clutter. One of which was a knife rack, with one knife missing. Kevin knew exactly where he kept it. At the opposite end of the room was a table and some chairs and in the middle of the room on Kevin's right was the sink, half-empty with dirty dishes. He walked over to it, took a cup from the crowded draining board and sipped some water. The window above was open, permitting a cold breeze to freeze the room. If Kevin were to actually spend time downstairs, he may even do the tasks his father did not and clean the hideous soot which stained the blackened windows.