Hampstead is a really nice place to live. The area is nice, the buildings are nice, the food is nice and the people are nice. My flat is the top two floors of a four storied terrace house on a little road off the high-street. It's beautiful. It's also really, really quiet, so imagine my surprise when I hear the sound of a group of high pitched voices singing a range of 80's pop classics. Actually it was more than just a singular surprise, it was a number of individual surprises all combining to make one big slice of shock.
Surprise number 1: These girls are quite young, how do they know all the words to all these songs that were likely all released before they were born?
Surprise number 2: Oh look, they're on a roof garden. I've heard tales of such things in fantasy and myth but never have I seen one with my own eyes. I wish I had a roof garden.
Surprise number 3: They have a BBQ up there. I'd love a BBQ. I wonder if they'll invite me over if they see me looking longingly.
And then it happened. By looking over, wondering about all these things that were puzzling me so, I inadvertently made myself look like a pervert. The girls, of which there were about ten (are, even. They're still bloody up there singing badly) all noticed me glancing out through one of the big slanted windows in the slope of my roof. At first they waved and squealed the way young girls do when they're excited about something, like in this case seeing the head of a strange man looking out of a window.
"Wooooo" they went. "Look at that man!" I was, of course, delighted that they called me a man. I fully expected to be called a creep, freak, thing, creature, you know... anything like that. Man was quite a nice change. Initially there was a brief hope that maybe now they knew I was there they'd invite me round for BBQ goodness, offer me some burnt sausage and a drink and we'd become best of friends, in the way only a group of teenage girls and a 22 year old man can. But pretty soon that hope, and their wooping, faded away.
"Why is that creep looking at us?" one said. See, creep, it only took a few moments.
"What a perv," another joined in, as I desperately tried to pretend I was doing something else that required me to be leaning out of a window. I thought about taking up smoking just to save my grace but I did not have the time to nip out to the shops and buy any cigarettes, so that wouldn't work. In the end I just did a really unsubtle pretend cough, as if I'd just needed the fresh air or something, and shuffled away in shame.
What started out as me wanting to know why girls were singing Abba on a roof, a really genuine thing to want to know, turned into me running away inside my own flat and hiding from view so as not to be mistaken for a sexual predator. Not many people can say they've done that in an evening.
But then I'm not many people.
I'm a sicko.
