Stand Where It Can't See You

You set the monopod down at the centre of the lounge, raise it to one metre sixty, and check the bubble level. It floats true. The house smells of fresh paint and carpet shampoo, that clean vacated smell that reminds you of teeth after the dentist. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, laundry off the kitchen. Afternoon light comes through the ranch slider in a flat, tired rectangle. This is house three of four today, and the agent wants the lot online before Saturday's open homes.

Then the laundry. You tuck yourself behind the door frame. This is the only trick in your job worth knowing. A 360 camera sees every direction at once, so there's no behind the camera to stand in. You hide instead. Agents want rooms empty, waiting for someone else's life to move in.

One tap on your phone fires the shutter.

It clicks, a small dry sound that runs down the hallway and dies near the bedrooms.

The preview loads and you pinch in on the stitch line, the faint seam where the two lenses meet. Things smear there. A curtain edge doubles. A window frame grows a ghost. You know what to look for.

You find it anyway.

On the bare lounge carpet, just behind the monopod, there's a figure. Tallish. Soft at the edges, like a thumbprint on glass. Shoulders hunched and head ducked, as if it's trying not to be seen.

You lower the phone.

The fridge hums in the kitchen, though the kitchen has been switched off at the wall for a week. You walk the rooms. Bedroom one, empty. Bedroom two, empty, one wire hanger in the wardrobe. Bedroom three, empty. The bathroom fan ticks as it slows. Back in the lounge the carpet shows one set of footprints, yours, from the slider to the monopod and back.

So you reshoot. Level. Laundry door. Click.

Clean. Just the room and the light.

After that you shoot the other rooms quickly, faster than usual, and you catch yourself saying "sorry" out loud when you step into the hallway, the way you would if you'd bumped into someone in a supermarket aisle.

It's a stitching smear, you tell yourself. Ghosting from movement. You've seen a cat cross a frame and come out as a grey comma. You drive to house four, shoot it without looking at the previews, and don't think about it again until that night.

That night you scroll back through the month. Seven listings. In the first, a brick unit with an orange kitchen, there's a faint grey wobble along the join that you never noticed. In the second, a townhouse with spiral stairs, the wobble has a shoulder. By the fifth it has a head. The seventh is this afternoon, the hunched shape, nearly a person.

Just to be sure, you open the reshoot, the clean one. You zoom in on the seam to prove it to yourself.

It's there too. Fainter, further back, half behind the monopod, as if it had stepped aside to let you have your picture.

Then you notice where it stands.

Always the same distance from the camera. Always on the side nearest the door you hid behind. Exactly where you'd be standing if you weren't hiding.

It has been standing in your place. In the one spot you always leave out of the shot.

Next door lives Mr. Mummu, who says "one minute" and means twelve. At the street barbecue last summer, Mummu, who hates photos, ducked behind whoever was holding the phone for the group shot. Every time. "The one place a camera can't look," he said, very pleased with himself. Nobody told him the phone had been flipped to the selfie camera. The only clear face in the whole album was Mummu's, peering over a shoulder, eyes wide and guilty, caught in the act of hiding. His saying ever since: "The safest place to hide is where the camera isn't looking. Until it turns around."

A 360 camera is always turned around. There's nowhere it isn't looking. So where exactly have you been all these weeks, while something stood in the middle of the room for you?

The next job is a cold villa with high ceilings, the kind of house where your footsteps come back from the wrong direction. You decide in the car that you won't hide. You'll stand right beside the camera, in shot, and let the agent complain.

The dining room floor creaks under the monopod's feet and the bubble takes a long time to settle, wobbling like it can't decide. Then it floats true. You stand next to the monopod, your hand almost touching it, and stare into the nearest lens. Your face looks back, small and bent.

Click. The sound goes up to the ceiling rose and spreads out.

The preview loads. The room. The monopod. The figure, clear now. It's wearing a jacket like yours, same colour, same length, the cuff a little frayed on the left. Its shoulders aren't hunched any more. It stands straight, facing the lens, right where you are standing.

You aren't in the photo at all.

Where your feet press the floorboards, where your hand still hovers near the monopod, there's nothing but bare boards with the light lying across them.

Out in the hallway, at the door frame where you'd normally hide for this room, you feel the heat before your hand reaches it. The wood is warm. Not sun warm. Body warm, as if someone has just stepped away after standing there a long time.

Somewhere along the way, the two of you swapped. It has been practising standing where you stand. You've been practising not being seen.

Your phone rings while you're folding the monopod. The agent, delighted. The photos from last week were lovely, she says, and your offsider was so polite. He showed the buyers round when you'd ducked out. Answered all their questions about the water pressure and whether the neighbours were quiet.

You don't have an offsider.

Yes, you say, he's good like that. You say you'll pass it on. You hang up and stand in the hallway with the monopod in its bag, and your thumb finds the thumbnail of this afternoon's shot without being asked.

Same room. Same monopod. Same figure in your jacket.

Except it isn't facing the camera now. Its head is turned towards the hallway, towards the door frame, towards the warm patch of wood you're leaning on. Its face is still blurred, but you can see the shape of its mouth.

It looks like it's about to say the thing you always say to agents when they wander into a shot, the same easy sentence you've said a few hundred times in other people's empty houses.

"Just duck out for a minute. I'll be quick."