Apartment 16

Twelve

At midnight Seth was still pacing his room. Moving from the cold by the windows to the warmth near the radiator and then back again. Cigarette after cigarette moved between his fingers and his lips until he felt sick and tight across the chest. ‘Jesus Christ.’ He was seeing things. He’d lost it.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor, seeing nothing. His heart was beating too fast. Sweat cooled under his arms and smelled sour. He stood up and began to pace again until he could stand it no more and threw the window open to gulp at the dark, wet air outside. It sobered him enough to feel the need for an immediate escape from the confines of his room, to flee outside, to make fast feet and pumping legs exhaust the angry bees swarming inside his chest and head.

But he didn’t venture further than the toilet, one floor down, where it required all of his remaining concentration to stand still long enough to finish urinating. By the time the last droplets of clear pee vanished into the sodden toilet paper clogging up the bowl, anxious thoughts of the world outside the pub, and of what might be waiting for him on the street corner, coaxed him back up the stairs and into his room. A thick mist of smoke clung to the yellow ceiling.

He tried speaking to himself in a fast whisper so the neighbours wouldn’t hear, urging himself to calm down; repeating simple sentences in a mantra as if the act of speaking was doing the job of gravity, preventing his body from rising to the ceiling, where he would writhe in the exhaled smoke and tear at the chaos in his own belly with long, dirty fingernails.

He tried to distract himself; he had to do something to channel this electricity under his skin into an outlet before his stomach, and then the rest of his body, combusted. He remembered a photograph of a woman’s leg in a pile of ash beside a gas fire. As a child he’d seen it in a book of mysteries. If anyone could incinerate themselves by pure thought or emotion it was him, right now.

He giggled.

There was no use resisting the desire that had been stagnant in him for so long. Because recently it had begun to simmer again. Right now it was boiling. Without a distracting thought of where it would lead, whom it would please, or what it meant, Seth plunged his hands into the cardboard boxes full of paper, paint and pencils and set a rime of dust loose into the air.

With thick charcoal stubs and a large sketch pad, he fell into an immediate frenzy of creation, only pausing to shake some feeling into his cramped and aching fingers and wrist. Standing up at the table, or sitting cross-legged on the floor, he dragged his papers and pencils about looking for better light, or shifting to appease the pains erupting in his soft, untrained body, but always working constantly.

Violent, hurried, unthinking, he spilled images onto paper in a continual outpouring as if some tremendous turbulent inner pressure had found a tiny pore to squeeze itself through. The pinhole became a sluice.

Tearing one sheet after another from his pad and then discarding the fragments of sketches about him on the hard carpet to start new ones, he attempted to give some shape, an impression, to the faces and images and hideous things that had been pressing upon him or finding peculiar narratives in his dreams. When his hand cramped into a claw, he clenched his teeth against the ache and tried to photograph this crowd in his mind, terrified it would vanish before the lines and smudges of his pencil had captured it, even in part.

It seemed immediately and shockingly vital, this congested stream of image and sound and smell that whirled through him. He was sure he’d never imagined anything so significant before, nothing of this clarity or power. It was original. God, he was being original.

Whenever he paused to change position he would catch sight of the discarded sketches left in his wake across the dirty brown carpet, and be immediately startled by the absurdity, the inhumanity of what he had drawn. Only when the little travel clock read 08:00 did he stop. Still weakened by illness and feeling concussed by sleep deprivation, he absently dropped his pencil and fell upon his bed.

With a trickling sound the central heating came on. A radio began to play upstairs. But moments after dousing the bedside lamp, Seth was asleep, fully clothed.

‘We shouldn’t be in here.’

‘I wanted to show you some stuff.’

Seth’s whispers were tense and hurried in the humid air. ‘But this is someone’s room. It’s private.’ He stood beside the hooded boy in the only available floor space in the shabby attic room.

‘We can go anywhere.’

The ceiling curved under the arc of the roof. It was dark, but the one arched window above the bed let in an infusion of gassy yellow and grey light. It filtered through the smudges on the glass, and although it seemed to die a few feet in front of the window pane, where it was further suffocated by a haze of stale air and shadows from slouching walls, it still allowed Seth to see silhouettes of furniture and flotsam on the floor of the room. Black spore fungus erupted behind the painted plaster and the carpet was brittle as stale bread under his feet. When his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he could see more. Much more.

Milk bottles in varying states of emptiness were littered among tousled newspapers, scraps of discarded clothing, oddments of cutlery and kitchen utensils, stained plates and steel pots dull with grease and dust, from which a kidneyish aroma wafted. Closing his eyes, Seth covered his mouth and nose with one hand in a vain attempt to suffocate the taste in his mouth.

‘Fought you should see it.’

He looked at the slovenly disorder of mismatching linen and rough blankets on the bed. There was no sheet on the mattress. Red and purple stripes like a stick of rock showed through the tangle of soiled bedclothes in which Archie slept. From out of an orange wicker bedspread a gnarled and toothless head protruded. It looked impossibly large, too big for the scrawny remains of the body. Beneath the head Seth could see a suggestion of thin, naked limbs. But it must have been a trick of the light to coat them in so much long white hair.

The hooded boy stepped towards the bed. ‘Look.’

‘Don’t.’

Too late. The boy grasped a handful of bedspread and the sheet that had the texture of a towel and raised it above Archie’s sleeping body.

Yellow bones, shaped like hooves, were revealed as the natural conclusion to Archie’s wasted ankles. Large knees, with surfaces like bleached nut shells, broke through the carpet of white hair — or fur — that covered the rest of the emaciated legs and malnourished groin. But worst of all was the terrible smell of livestock — wet straw, slimed nostril, stale urine — that belched from under the sheets and hit Seth full and hot in the face. Coughing to clear his throat, he took a step backwards and kicked over a milk bottle, discharging a lumpy soup across the carpet.

Archie stirred. In his sleep his oversized hands, stained yellow at the fingernails, clawed at the air to retrieve the missing blankets. Blue home-made tattoos looked like bruises through the hair on his thin forearms. Archie then rolled onto his other side, his sleeping mind still hoping to regain the lost warmth by facing the other way.

After a glimpse of the spine, covered by violent pink skin and more of the white hair, Seth turned away, unsteady on his feet, and breathed through his fingers. He lived in this place; below old goats who pissed in their straw.

‘I want to go. He might wake up.’ Seth’s voice was faint.

‘We’re in this old bastard’s dream, mate. When he dies, this is where he’ll come back to. And stay for a long, long time.’

‘I feel sick.’

‘But there’s more.’

‘No more, please.’

‘Just a little bit. Look closer. By ’is ’and.’

Between two of Archie’s swollen sheep knuckles a thin plume of bluish smoke rose from a hand-rolled cigarette. Around the arm the mattress was dotted with black holes and scorch marks.

‘Christ, he’ll kill us all,’ Seth said.

‘And your pictures will be burnt to ash.’ As the hooded boy said this, Seth noticed a smell of burning wood and flesh that coincided with a brief deepening of the boy’s voice.

‘What do you mean?’

In the dark room the boy raised his face. Inside the impenetrable blackness of the hood, Seth sensed a grin. ‘You’s good at them drawin’s, Seth. But this lot don’t care. No one does. They mean nuffin’ to them. They’d be happy to burn ’em. Like they did to his pictures. But you should paint what you see. That’s what our mate told me. You’ll be the best.’

Seth flushed red. It was the first encouragement he’d had in years.

‘Honest. You been spotted. He’ll help you.’

‘I don’t understand. Who?’

‘He told me to tell you.’ The hooded boy said this slowly like he’d been practising it. ‘He’s been watching you. And what’s inside you, all tight and twisted. He told me to show you stuff. Then you paint it like it is. You know it anyway. You know these things are here.’ He pointed at the bed where Archie lay contorted in the sheets. ‘You always known it. But you too scared of it to draw it. You been stuck in one place for too long, behind bars. I told you before. You know how things really are now. You’re lucky you been shown, mate. You’s can be the best. Like our friend was, before them shits wrecked it all. So it’s not much to ask for you to do summat for us, like.’

‘What? I mean, what do I have to do?’

The hooded boy walked confidently across a yellowing newspaper and vanished through the door. Seth followed. Behind his back, Archie kicked out with a hoof.

Seth stood in the place he recognized as his own room. These walls he’d stared at for hours, only half seeing them as his mind looked at other things. But he noticed the paint was fresher and not such a watery yellow. Thicker and more sickly now, like vanilla ice cream. And there was a shade over the light bulb that contained all the colours inside a tin of fruit cocktail.

Same windows though, and just as grimy. And the same fridge, but the reddish stains down the door were new — soup or blackcurrant. Same curtains too, but stiffer, brighter, and the carpet was soft. Looking at the wardrobes, he saw the doors were not broken any more. It was someone else’s room now, or back then.

All the things he had thought and done in here suddenly seemed trivial. His whole anxious occupation was more irrelevant than ever.

The hooded boy spoke. ‘Everything is in the same place. Even the old stuff that’s stuck in here. None of it goes away. If you stay long enough you get to hear all the old voices and see some of the faces. But in here, I only ever find the same fing.’

Seth looked down at him, at the back of the water-stained hood and threadbare fur trim.

‘Look at the bed,’ the boy said calmly, self-assured, knowledgeable and content, proving his point.

Seth turned and flinched as if the solitary figure had leapt from where she sat against the vinyl headboard, the plastic cover faded to a dirty cream by hand grease. ‘Who is she?’

Lank brownish hair fell to the shoulders of her pink cardigan. Pointy chin on scabbed knees, hands clasping white knee-length socks about the bony ankles, scuffed sandals on the brown and yellow blanket, the girl stared at the door, grim anticipation a rictus on her pale face. She couldn’t have been older than ten, but her eyes were blank. Seth took in the thin thighs, mottled with a raspberry-ripple blemish all the way up to her cotton pants, and quickly looked away. There was something indecent about her pose, but not intentionally. It was as if she were immune to the scrutiny of strangers. Tears and snot had dried on her face; the red rims of her eyes were sore from crying. Chocolate wrappers were littered around her grey pleated skirt. There was an old-looking camera, made from metal and painted black, on the bedside table. And a ball of green twine that Seth remembered seeing on roses in his parents’ garden during the hottest summers of his childhood. Rough, fibrous rope that tasted bitter, like creosote. Couldn’t be snapped no matter how hard you pulled, it just hurt your fingers.

‘She used to come here to see a man.’

Seth tried to smile to overcome the dread that filled him up. He swallowed, but couldn’t move or speak for a while.

‘Police took him.’

Seth remembered Archie’s story. One of his eyelids twitched.

‘Young ones and the old ones don’t go easy. They stuck all over the place. Even if she got older, which she never did, she’d be back here again, one day.’

‘Enough.’ Seth’s voice started to crack. ‘Get her out. You were let out of that pipe, and you got me out of that chamber, so get her out of here.’

‘Can’t let ’em all out, Seth. Too many of ’em, mate. Can’t have ’em hanging round us, like. What can she do for us? She don’t understand nuffin’. Best leave her be. All she knows is it’s the afternoon and she’s waiting for her step-dad to come up from the pub.’

‘How long’s she been here?’

‘Dunno,’ the boy said with disinterest. ‘Long time. No one wears them sandals no more. If she was waiting a few hours before he come in, then it’ll always feel like a few hours. For ages. Till it goes dark.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Told ya. Down in the pub.’

‘Can she see us?’

‘Sometimes. But it don’t do no good. Watch.’

The hooded boy went and sat on the bed by her feet, bouncing his body down as if to try the springs in the mattress. ‘All right?’

‘Right,’ she said, without taking her eyes off the door.

‘You wanna go?’

‘Nah. Me dad’s coming soon. He told me to wait.’

The hooded boy turned to Seth. ‘She always says the same thing. She’s stuck.’

‘But. but how can she always be there?’

‘’Cus she is.’

‘Not at the same time as me?’

The hood nodded with enthusiasm. ‘Always. Now you’ll be able to see her too. And all kinds of stuff that’s stuck, with more and more coming in all the time.’

This was the biggest room in the guest house above the pub. It overlooked the main street outside. But when Seth found himself inside the room, the jumble of pizza boxes, beer cans and unwashed clothes of his landlord’s occupancy were absent: during trips to the bathroom in the morning, he often caught glimpses of the room as Quin came out wrapped in a dressing gown.

Free now of dust and clutter, the bed was made with a white sheet turned down over a tartan blanket. The doors to the wardrobe were shut and the articles of furniture had been polished and set at right angles to the bed. There were no clothes or shoes in sight, besides a single black overcoat hanging on the rear of the door, and the only personal effects were arranged on a white sheet of notepaper on the bedside table: a watch, a wedding ring, a silver fountain pen, loose change neatly stacked. The room could have been described as spartan but well-maintained.

All of this detail should have been in the background, at the periphery of his vision, but Seth’s eyes were avoiding the slim figure of the old man who hung by his neck from the light fitting.

Still swaying from the infinite momentum of stepping off the chair, after his weight jolted down with a snap, the man’s limbs had straightened inside the dark suit, and his manicured hands were relaxed. From his left trouser leg, a liquid dripped onto the polished upper of his black shoe, ran off the toe and fell a few inches onto the carpet.

Seth didn’t look him in the face, but knew the man’s eyes were open and bright.