Apartment 16 (2 page)

TWO

The figure was there again, watching Seth from across the street. This time it stood at the kerb between two parked cars and was not slouched inside a shop doorway, or peering from the mouth of a side street as it had done on three previous sightings.

Closer now, open to his attention, the small form was more sure of itself. Unperturbed by the slanting rain, it just stared. At him.

It.

Seth thought it was a boy but couldn’t be certain. Even though the head was no longer dipped, inside the hood of the dirty parka he could see no face. Just a child then, hanging around instead of being at school, where any youngster with parents who cared should be at this time. And directly across the road from the Green Man pub, where Seth lived in an upstairs room.

So perhaps the child was merely waiting for a father or mother inside the bar. But the figure’s attention was directed at him, as if it had been waiting for him. And it had been on the same stretch of the Essex Road for the past three afternoons he’d been off work.

It was such an unusual child: wrapped from the legs to the head in the faded khaki parka. Or was it grey? It was hard to make out the colour of the fabric against the dark background, or the wet silvery air beneath the smudgy red sign of the fried chicken takeaway. But it was one of those old snorkel coats. He’d not seen one in years. Didn’t even know they were still being made.

Dark trousers too. Not baggy jeans or tracksuit bottoms like most kids wore these days, but trousers. Schoolish trousers. Badly fitted and too long in the leg, as if handed down from an elder sibling in a poor family. And completed by black shoes with a chunky heel. He’d not seen anything like those either, not since he’d been at junior school, and that was during the early seventies.

Usually as he marched through London he did his best to ignore the people on the streets, and took extra care to avoid the eyes of any youths on this stretch of road. Many of them had been drinking, and Seth knew what a stare could lead to. There were plenty of them running wild in this area. They had acquired the privileges of adulthood too early, and played at their version of maturity for long enough to eradicate genuine youthfulness. But this one was different. Set apart by its vulnerability, its isolation. He was reminded of his own youth and he was drawn to the figure out of pity. Every memory of childhood was painful, marked by a terror of bullies he could still taste like ozone, and by a quick stab of heartbreak that lingered twenty years after his parents’ divorce.

But what surprised Seth most was the curious and sudden feeling preceding his sighting of the strange watching child. The mere presence of this figure projected such a force that he reacted with a slight shock and temporary bewilderment, as if a voice had suddenly been directed at him, or as if there had been an unexpected hand around his elbow within a crowd. Not exactly intimidating, but enough to give him a start. To wake him up. But before this sense of significance could fully form in his mind, the feeling would pass. And so would the child. It never stayed long. Just long enough to let him know he was being watched.

But not this afternoon. The hooded figure lingered at the kerb.

Screwing up his eyes and facing the figure, Seth expected his attention to force the cowled head to turn away, uncomfortable under his glare. It didn’t. Not a twitch. The figure in the coat remained at ease and just continued to stare from out of the dark oval of dirty fur-trimmed nylon. It appeared to have been in the same position for so long it could have been a permanent fixture on the street, a sculpture indifferent to the people walking by. And no one else seemed to take any notice of the child.

The situation soon began to feel intimate. Speech seemed inevitable. As Seth tried to think of something he could call across the road to the kid, the door of the pub opened behind him.

He heard a series of disquieting sounds from inside the bar. Someone yelled ‘Cunt’, a chair was scraped violently across a wooden floor, pool balls snapped against each other, there was a raucous eruption of laughter, and a muffled love song rose from the jukebox as if trying to calm the other sounds. Seth turned to face the bright orange doorway. But no one entered or left, and the noise only lasted for as long as it took the door to swing closed by itself; everything growing fainter until the hot and noisy innards of the pub were completely shut off from the street again.

When he turned back to face the road the figure had gone. Walking into the road, he looked up and down the wet street. There was no sign of the child in the coat.

The Green Man was the last surviving Victorian building on the corner of a scruffy street. Now, the character of its brickwork and buttresses was spoiled by the rubbish at street level. Survivors of the Blitz and looking as if they hadn’t been cleaned for decades, little could be seen through the pub’s murky windows from outside but a variety of posters tacked to the inside of the glass. There was an advert for Guinness he remembered from his teens. Now, the Guinness in the pint glass had faded a lime green in colour, like sucked liquorice. Other adverts for coming attractions, like
Quiz Night
and
Sky Football: Big Screen TV,
were only bright and colourful where the windows had been blotched by rain.

He’d lived there long enough to learn something of the customers and culture of the Green Man. Some of the punters were market traders, retired from the stalls but still doing business in the bar with East End accents so broad he was tempted to suspect them inauthentic. There were casualties from labour patterns as sketchy as his own, who drank their benefits from opening until closing, or played the fruit machine. A miscellany of other characters would be positioned about them in the gloom, like unrelieved sentries. This final subculture had no peers in Seth’s experience with whom to be compared; they represented new strains of dysfunction caused by personal tragedy, mental illness, and drink. How long now before he completely gave up on himself too? Some days, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t already.

Weary from waking late in the morning after only a few hours’ sleep, he shrugged off the residual effect of the staring child and approached the door of the pub. His rent was due: seventy quid across the bar once a week. Stepping over some dog shit, he entered the bar.

His vision began to jitter, as if he was being bounced along on someone’s shoulders. He only ever seemed to get fleeting impressions of the place: a panorama of yellow eyes, the foamy sides of pint glasses, Lambert and Butler cigarette packets, an evil fox’s face behind glass, a tier of champagne bottles under genuine cobwebs, a nicotine ceiling, a pool table, a small dog with bristly fur before an opened bag of scratchings, one Arsenal shirt, and a once pretty woman with eyes still attractive but mostly sly. Several heads turned to take him in, then turned away.

Seth nodded to Quin, who was working the bar today. Quin’s skull looked as if it had once been cleft by an axe. The wound ran from his hairless white cranium to his pink forehead and still shined with scar tissue. Quin nodded without smiling. He leant on the bar to accept Seth’s money.

‘There’s a kid,’ Seth said.

Quin squinted and his glasses moved up his nose. ‘Huh?’

The music was loud and someone with cheeks like corned beef was shouting on the other side of the square-shaped bar.

‘There’s this kid outside. Watching the place. Have you seen him?’

‘Eh?’

‘A kid. Just stands over the road. And stares at the pub. Wondered if you’d seen him.’

Quin looked at Seth as if his words confirmed something he’d long suspected:
He’s gone a bit funny in the head, this one. Up there on his own all the time. No girlfriend. No visitors.
Shrugging, Quin turned to stuff Seth’s rent in the till.

Feeling ridiculous, Seth moved to make his way back to the door, but someone stood in his path. ‘All right, son.’ It was Archie. Archie from Dundee, though he hadn’t been back to the wife and five kids for over twenty years. He was the live-in cleaner and handyman responsible for the rooms above the pub. Though the irony of the position never escaped Seth, as Archie was the prime contributor to the mess and disrepair inside.

Small and old-man-bony, Archie seemed to hover more than walk. But he was still in possession of an incredible thatch of grey hair, cut into the shape of a Saxon helmet. Cragged and sprinkled with whiskers, his face appeared grandfatherly, as if capable of compassion. Archie always called Seth ‘son’, too, though it was only because he couldn’t remember his name.

‘Have ye got a fag on yer?’ Archie asked.

Seth nodded. ‘Sure.’ Seth gave him a crumpled packet of Old Holborn with a last tuft of tobacco in the bottom.

Archie grinned. ‘Ar, yer a pal, son.’ He had one tooth, an incisor, bottom right, that Seth could never stop staring at. Nor the masking tape that held the thick lenses inside the plastic frames of his glasses. ‘Run out. Dinne get paid till Tuesdee,’ Archie said, grinning at his booty.

‘Listen, Archie. Have you seen that kid who hangs around outside the bar? Wears a hooded coat.’

Now he had the tobacco, Archie lost interest in conversation. He was also drunk and had to concentrate on rolling the cigarette. Seth moved out of the bar and back into the porch. He jabbed his key into the lock and climbed the dark staircase that led to the rooms above the bar.

On the first set of stairs, the skirting boards were painted the red of fresh blood. Over the walls a white paper decorated with the impression of grapes had turned sallow and peeled away from the seam. In places, vast swathes had been torn down to the plaster beneath.

On the dark landing of the first floor, Seth guided himself by the light falling from the doorway of the communal kitchen. He could smell the damp beer towels in the washing machine. Bacon had been fried recently on the old gas stove and the fat had cooled. Its smell now mingled with the scent of ripe rubbish, which meant that Archie had not taken down the bin bags. There were mice in there, but no rats, yet.

Across from the kitchen was the bathroom. Frosted glass had been fitted into the top half of the door, but was not quite opaque enough for privacy. Seth switched the light on and peered inside to see if the shower unit above the bath had been fixed. It had not. ‘Cunt,’ he said, and then wondered when he would give up checking on the progress of the repair. Aged thirty-one, with two arts degrees to his name, and he had been reduced to washing his entire body in a sink.

He climbed the second grim flight of stairs to his room. The banisters were painted the same colour of murder as the skirting boards in the rest of the building, but the pattern and colour of the carpet had changed three times by the time he reached the second floor. He shared this storey with two other men he’d never spoken to. Up here, the lack of both natural and electric light plunged Seth into oblivion.

‘Shit!’ He banged a knee against something sharp. Flailing, Seth slapped a hand up and down a wall until it happened across a light switch in a splintered plastic surround, where a fist had once applied too much force. All of the lights were on timers. Pushing the large circular button activated the unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling.

The passage between the three rooms, each fronted with a red door, appeared all the more gloomy and cramped because of the furniture stacked against the walls. It was a fire hazard he navigated daily. Hurrying forward to get to his room before the lights went out, he trampled amongst the broken bones of a discarded sofa bed. By the time he reached the door to his room the passage was dark again. Seth hit the closest switch for another five seconds of sight while he fumbled with his keys. Crossing the threshold of his room, the darkness returned and swallowed everything behind him.

On Seth’s first day at the Green Man, twelve months earlier, it was Archie who had shown him the room. And Archie didn’t hang around for long, as it had been his job to prepare the place for the new tenant. Of the two window frames neither had net curtains and only the window on the left side had fabric ones, the same colour as dress-patterns in the copies of
Woman’s Weekly
that survive decades in doctors’ waiting rooms. The sash window on the right side had become skewed at a tilt in the frame.

‘Aha,’ Seth had said, in horror and disbelief.

But Archie had merely blinked at him.

On the side of the room opposite the windows, the mattress of the double bed distinguished itself with Auschwitz stripes and gang-rape stains. Of the furniture, there were two badly assembled wardrobes and a little cabinet beside the bed. Still coated in mug rings and make-up, it added a faintly reassuring feminine touch.

Beside the bedside table was a single radiator, painted yellow and speckled with dark droplets. Dried blood. He’d never been able to get rid of the stains and once asked Archie who lived in the room before him. To which Archie had raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Lassy. Lovely girl. Had boyfriend troubles. They was at each other all night.’ Archie had then relished his role as storyteller. ‘Before her was a real strange fella. Quiet as you like. But when the police come, they caught him in here with his step-daughter. And her friend.’

The whole room smelled like old carpet that had been stored in a garage for years. But at least it was dry.

He’d never done much with the place after that, just moved his stuff in and picked some broken glass out of the carpet. The sheer dilapidation of the room made any attempt at improvement seem futile. And now his piles of discarded magazines and Sunday papers made the room look cluttered but somehow vacant at the same time. Desperation led him there; despair kept him there.

During his first night he remembered being filled with a combination of self-pity, feelings of abandonment, and a subtle terror that would have been choking had he let it grow. But he couldn’t afford anything else after moving to London with twenty unwanted paintings to his name. And with the big south-facing windows, he told himself the room would make him a good studio. Old school.