Apartment 16

Twenty-six

Bruised by worry and lack of sleep and from having seen things he had no defence against, Seth didn’t recognize his own frightened eyes staring back at him from the dirty mirror he kept on the mantel in his room. He looked away. Inside his mind a crowd jostled in fear.

He struggled to breathe. His heart beat too fast and cold sweat leaked from his pores. He couldn’t sit still and paced up and down his room instead, looking from the walls to the windows. He thought he might be sick.

What had he done?

Shivering by the glowing radiator, he rolled and lit another cigarette; the sixth in as many minutes. Smoked half of it then stubbed it out in the saucer already overcrowded with a hundred other butts on a thick bed of ash. The sight made him feel worse.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He’d been living off mugs of tea and cigarettes for days. Too much tobacco, caffeine and stale air. Nor could he recall the last time he’d opened a window.

The watery grey light of the late-afternoon sun, soon to die into dusk, turned the orange fabric of the curtains whitish in the places they were most worn.

The grubby half-light revealed red-black colours smeared across two walls. The sight of it made his guts convulse. How had it come to this, to fall so far? Had he lost his mind? Or was this a new mind that painted such fragments of faces and body parts over his walls before killing an old woman?

Dear God, did he?

He wasn’t sure what he’d done. In his memory the events of the previous night had a jerky, insubstantial quality. If he could only slow his head down for a moment, maybe then he could remember what he had done, and what he had seen in that flat, on the walls. See if any of it was possible. But his hands still seemed to bear the weight of her bony body. And he couldn’t suppress the image of Mrs Roth lying on the floor, her face stricken but staring. Or of the quick shadow racing across the floor of the mirrored room and covering her up. The room he’d carried her into like a priest taking a sacrifice into the heart of a temple. And then he recalled her body on the floor of her own bedroom, where he’d planted it, at the foot of the bed, unmoving and broken. Where they would find it today. Her nurse would be there already. Any moment someone could call, maybe Stephen, maybe the police.

In the mirror — what did he see in that mirror? Something scrabbling like a thin white bird with a broken wing, with something red stretched over a face that didn’t look right. And dragging her away, deep into the reflection.

He couldn’t trust his memories. Couldn’t even distinguish what was real and what was a nightmare. No. It was not possible. He’d been hallucinating for weeks. First the dreams and then the visions of that boy. His sick mind had made it all up. This is what happened when you spent too much time alone. Sleep deprived, not eating properly, depressed and anxious, a consciousness turns on itself. He’d left the path so long ago and now he couldn’t get back on it. It was too late for all that.

Seth sat down again. Closed his eyes. Clenched his teeth and bit down against the sudden re-emergence in his mind of Mrs Roth’s sharp dead face, and against the morbid hints of that other head framed on the walls of the mirrored room. The one coming apart, being stripped down to the bone. In paint that was still wet.

He had to leave London. Get out of this vandalized and smeared room. Get away from apartment sixteen and what it made him do. Break out of this blockade of misery, aggression and indifference the city was perpetually shrouded within.

He’d completed a shift pattern and now had a few days off work. If questioned, he could say he’d only gone home to visit his mother. Then his desertion of the city might not be seen as an admission of guilt, were he suspected of causing Mrs Roth’s death.

Clinging on to this logic, he rose to his feet. Unsteady on tired legs, his vision almost pixelating from lack of sleep, he fumbled through the pile of clothes in one corner and retrieved a rucksack. Stuffed some dirty clothes inside it. Then snatched up his overcoat, keys and wallet, before leaving and locking his room — a room that was a testament to delusion, to mania, to futility. A place he would never set foot inside again.

The traffic never stopped on New North Road. He waited by the kerb, blinking in the dim light that still managed to make his eyes burn. Cold winds buffeted him from three directions. Dusty, fume-drenched air swirled up around his face.

Eventually the lights changed. He moved on, further up the Essex Road, into Islington. Angel tube station his target. And then King’s Cross and away. As he moved he shivered and sweated at the same time. Feared a re-emergence of the fever. He just didn’t feel right. Staggering about to avoid the loitering pedestrians, he felt like he was either stuck in one place or moving backwards.

The sky was so low. Disconsolate and grey, it appeared to be no more than a few yards above the top storeys of the tallest buildings. Sodden with muck, it silted a brownish murk down to the ugly red bricks and stained concrete of the buildings, so that it was hard to see much further than a few hundred feet ahead.

And the people here, how they looked like the final dregs of a diseased race. Shambling under the grotesque loads of their fat bodies. Huffing irritably, elbowing and shouldering each other as they walked the cramped pavements. He tried not to stare at these faces about him. What had the city done to them? They made him feel sick.

Everyone was being worn down in increments here. Some, like him, had just fallen further than the others. And it didn’t help to dwell too long on those who were most damaged, in case you hastened your own descent to their musty forgotten corners: the stale bedsits, the damp rooms and labyrinthine concrete estates where trees didn’t grow and where the air constantly shouted with the belligerent voice of the fast angry traffic.

Away from this. Oh God, to just be removed from this place that didn’t work. A city regenerating its timeless contamination through the misery of the occupants. That was how it found nourishment. By dousing hope and disturbing minds. By instigating crisis and breakdown. With the shock of poverty and the tyranny of wealth. With the eternal frustration of being late; the suffocation of mania and the binding of neurosis; the perpetual cycle of despair and euphoria; the murderous anger at the trespasser who sits too close; the dead stares of faces at bus windows; the mute absorption and quiet humiliation of the underground; delinquency and drink; a thousand different tongues snapping in selfish insistence. City of the damned. So ugly, so frenetic. And all beneath the white sun in the forever greyness of sky. Where the damned are swallowed and forget who they are. He loathed it.

His horror spurred him on. Made him walk faster even though he was out of breath and uncomfortably sweaty under his bag. In the dull windows of the shops and cafes he caught glimpses of himself: shabby and hunched over like a beggar with its old sack. And when he saw his face it looked sickeningly white. Bleached by fear, sharpened by anxiety, lengthened by misery, but the eyes were full of the bewilderment of a man tormented by an absence of sleep. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered, amongst the other mumblings in which he rehearsed the directions of his journey, over and over again: ‘Northern City Line to King’s Cross. Buy a ticket to Birmingham. Get on the first train. ’

Near the glassy face of a building society he rested before the final surge to Angel tube station. He was close to the crossroads and the air was all wrong. It felt like a hand on his chest was holding him back while his legs went numb with pins and needles. At this place a stream of visions poured into his head, appearing and vanishing quicker than heartbeats. They were everywhere, the damned.

The two tramps on a bench told him to fuck off. They were using drink to hold back their own visions.

This was a place only the mad could see. But the insane are so filled up with it they can only stand and stare, or wander and mutter like forgotten prophets and dethroned kings.

‘You cunt of a whore,’ he said to the pavement that tripped him up. ‘You cunting shite of Christ the devil,’ he said, before spitting at the speeding cars. ‘Stinking bile and shit of shit of shit. ’ he said at the tube station when he found it closed due to industrial action.

He prayed for the strength to destroy the city with a hammer.

He’d have to continue on foot. Stumble down the Pentonville Road to King’s Cross Station. Rage drove him. He ground his teeth to sand. He would not be defied. Not by the uneven pavement, the lights that never changed, the sudden roadworks that forced a lengthy diversion, or the yellowy faces that looked up, beseeching, with their horrible parchment mouths moving in the darkened windows of basement flats. Something like a crab, with legs as thin, scuttled behind a dusty privet hedge. He closed his eyes against it.

It seemed to take hours, with frequent stops becoming necessary to wipe the sweat from his eyes and readjust the backpack that was close to giving him a spinal injury. His vision was beginning to dissolve at the edges into white flashes. Sound was slowing down, and elongating.

At King’s Cross most of the road was open around the front of the station and surrounded by orange plastic mesh. No one was working in the strata of tarmac, soil and clay piping. The signs had been knocked down. People were walking across them. The sound of their heels against the dented tin ricocheted inside his skull. The roof of his brain was a bruise now, pushing darkness into his eyes.

Two police cars were parked outside the main entrance to the station, but he couldn’t see the officers. Six feral dogs on rope leads were fighting, blocking the main entrance. One of the owners had a beard that reached his waist. It was grey and tangled into dreadlocks. The other was a skinny punk with acne-covered cheeks and stripy leggings, trying to sell the Big Issue. They tugged at the ropes fastened to their dogs and swore at each other. People with jobs walked past the commotion eating sandwiches from Pret A Manger and talking on mobile phones. Inside the station someone was screaming, ‘Get your stinkin’ hands of me. Get them off me you stinkin’ ape,’ and then three police officers burst out of the station dragging a black woman out. She had no shoes. All of the officers had lost their hats.

The black woman looked derelict, homeless, insane from huffing crack. In one hand she still clutched the stub of a half-chewed baguette. Two little Chinese women followed the struggle. They wore the red and white uniforms of catering staff. Their expressions were identical — silent indifference.

If he’d had a gun, Seth believed this would be the time to start shooting. To clear his path of dogs and degenerates. But the red flare of anger only made him feel weaker. Close to a faint.

Once inside King’s Cross Station, and once he’d managed to keep his eyes focused on the departures board, he realized he was in the wrong place. Trains didn’t run from King’s Cross to Birmingham New Street. It was Euston he needed. Fucking Euston.

Hands on his knees, head bowed, he tried to contain both his anger at himself and his delirium from lack of sleep. It had been so long since he’d left London for even a day. A year since he’d travelled to Birmingham. He’d forgotten how to get out. But he would get out. He’d walk all day if necessary, until he collapsed, to find a way to leave this hell.

Back out on the Euston Road, he plodded west. Euston Station wasn’t far. The signs said so. Above him the sky was turning white. Or rather, he could see a bright shimmer through the gaseous sheet of grey. His face was hot and now his vision swam. Streets, buildings, lamps, cars, stunted trees, road signs and pedestrians all rotated and blurred about him. If he lay down he would pass out.

Slowly, slowly, he made his way up the long white glaring tunnel of the road to the station. A sudden flood of hope pushed him across the grass to the main doors of Euston.

But inside the station he felt even worse. The effect was immediate. He began to panic. Within the glare of white lights and chatter of sound, the push and sweep of the crowds, the buffeting of bags and screech of cases on wheels, he felt an overriding desire to run back outside.

An echoing announcement he couldn’t fully understand was listing delays and cancellations. He couldn’t see Birmingham on the departures board. Woozy and screwing up his eyes against the vertical judder in his eyesight, he soon found it too painful to look up at all.

He went in search of help, which was in short supply. Non-existent in fact. He decided he would ask at the ticket office, then saw the enormous queues that turned in serpentine coils and decided he’d better head for the toilets. But in the middle of making his way through the crowd on the main concourse he suddenly paused. Standing before the red-yellow smear of the Burger King facade was the figure of a hooded child. His hands were pressed deep into the nylon pockets of the snorkel coat and the face was lost in darkness, but he turned in Seth’s direction.

A man behind Seth knocked him off balance, then wheeled round in a whirl of overcoat and tie not in order to apologise but to grimace. Seth looked back to where he’d seen the hooded figure, but it had gone.

Breathing hard from the shock at the sighting, he told himself it was a hallucination. But then he caught a flash of schoolish trousers and scuffed chunky-heeled shoes flitting past a concession that sold sunglasses and watches.

Impossible; the boy couldn’t move so quickly. There were other kids in here. it must have been one of them. He was being paranoid; was paranoid and sick. He pushed his way through a cluster of French travellers and headed for the ticket office.

But maybe the boy was here to prevent him from leaving. There had been nothing but obstacles in his path since he left the Green Man. It was like the whole city was conspiring to keep him stuck within certain boundaries.

In the queue, he kept his eyes down and closed so he wouldn’t see something in a hood watching him. Trying to focus his vision, he took deep breaths of the warmish air to hold the panic back; the panic boiling at the back of his throat and threatening to come up as a high-pitched scream. It made him want to tear at his clothes and run madly through the crowd.

Instinctively he believed that if he moved back eastward, back towards the Green Man, he would feel better again. Something was letting him know he was not allowed to leave the city. Something he had willingly gone into partnership with the night he opened the door to apartment sixteen.

Finally he stood before the glass screen, behind which sat a fat man in a red waistcoat. Seth rediscovered his voice and asked for a ticket to Birmingham.

The man looked exasperated. ‘Have you not heard the announcements or seen the signs? No services to Birmingham today.’

‘What?’

‘No services from Euston.’

‘So how do you get to Birmingham?’

‘Marylebone. Chiltern Railways. Or the coach station at Victoria.’

But just the names of those distant places, so far off in the cluttered and crowded city, doused the last flicker of his spirits. He wanted to punch the wall until his hand was jelly and bone fragment loose inside purple skin.

‘Can you move aside for the next customer,’ the man in the red waistcoat said.

Seth drifted away from the counter. He knew the Tube and the buses wouldn’t take him anywhere he wanted to go, and he didn’t have the strength to walk any further. All of his energy was gone apart from the reserve set aside to feed his panic. Even if he managed to reach another station the swift sickness would swamp him again.

He had to sleep. To go home and lie down. Maybe he could try later, after some sleep. He could think of nothing else now, and refused to even acknowledge the hooded boy who waited for him outside the ticket office, and who then fell into step beside him as he left the station.

The following day he tried to walk south, but could go no further than the Strand, where he vomited in a pub toilet.

The north presented an impossible maze. He was disoriented by brick walls, pointy black roofs, iron railings, bitter air and the half-seen whitish things that called out to him from building sites and moved quicker than rats down there in the uprooted foundations. His effort to escape was turned back to the centre, where he discovered himself to be in the evening, somewhere between Camden and Euston, wasted by hunger and exhaustion.

On the third day, in the east, he nearly suffocated between a row of grey terraced houses with front gardens full of rubbish. He shook and wept, watched by Pakistani children in strange clothes. And then he turned for home: the only direction that offered any relief from the nausea, the hot-cold sweats, the gasping for breath, and the constant calls from the bone-things in windows with their yellowy faces and wide-open maws.

The next evening, he went back to work.