20 August 2021
Friday. A man stood across the road all evening holding a box that beeped. He pointed it at my window. Then at a bin. Then at a seagull. It beeped at all three, so I think it is a very friendly box.
At nine he came to the front desk and asked to carry the box upstairs. The grown-ups said nothing that records or glows or beeps comes into my house: no telephones, no watches, no little cameras, no boxes. Everything goes in the metal cupboards downstairs, and you get a key. He looked at the cupboards as if they had said something rude about his mother.
He didn’t come in. He stood on the footpath until very late, writing in a notebook. I waved from the window. He wrote that down too.
I am going to call him the Beeping Man. Pudding thinks he is lonely. Pudding would know.
— Cathy (please come back)
