15 year old Amelia from No. 56

It happened at the same time every day. And each time, I berated myself for my cowardice.

For the last few weeks builders had been working in the house opposite. Since the moment they arrived in their dreary, grey overalls, they’d spent half the working day smoking and belching in a repeating cycle. But it wasn’t this that annoyed me. Every day around 8:30, fifteen year old Amelia from number fifty six would leave her house and walk to the bus stop at the end of the road. Along the way, Amelia would walk past the dreary builders who would without fail taunt her. They would eye up her skirt and ask her what colour panties she was wearing. They would puff smoke into her face as she tried to pass them hurriedly. Once they even tried to brush against her by “accident”. Each time I saw this, clouds of smoke and dust trailed behind her. Each time I saw this I remembered the first time.

The first time, I was leaving my house when I noticed Amelia walking past the house opposite. I raised my hand to wave at her and say hi as I usually did but she hadn’t seen me. Instead she was walking at a faster pace than usual because the brawny, beefy builders at the house opposite had started whistling. “Nice legs”, one of them shouted. My instinct was to swear and hurl profanities at them but being a coward I backed down. I didn’t defend her. I knew that I should have. As soon as I walked away in the opposite direction to go to work I knew that I’d regret my decision but I still never walked back. And every day afterwards, I saw Amelia gradually walk faster. I never did anything. The first day she wore a skirt, on the second day she wore tights and on the third day she wore trousers. On the fourth day she tried wearing a skirt again but she never did after that. As for me, I still never did anything. I never told anyone. I knew that shouting or even talking to them wouldn’t make them feel guilty. But it would have made a difference to Amelia. Every day I would watch her walk past and I'd walk in the other direction, trying to ignore what I heard them say. I still never did anything.

Finally the builders completed their job and they left. Amelia seemed to be more cheery and started saying hello to the neighbours again. Even I stopped to chat to her a few times. I wanted to ask her if she was okay. I wanted to apologise for never saying anything about what I saw. But again I was a coward and I pretended that we'd been missing each other in the mornings for the past few weeks. Once the builders had left, I noticed that Amelia’s walk became more relaxed. I noticed her smile reappear. I pretended when I spoke to her that I hadn’t witnessed her being sexually harassed for two weeks. I pretended that I hadn’t seen her switch skirts for trousers and a fast pace for a slow one. I never asked her why she started to look closely into the windows of cars as she walked past them or why she would walk quickly past large groups of people. I never asked her why on warmer days she never wore that cute floral skirt she used to love so much.

These were the things I couldn’t ask her and the things I wished I didn’t have to.