Under a Watchful Eye(11)

When Ewan’s murky eyes had found him, and in such attractive company, the bearded face had stiffened and those black eyes narrowed with a hateful intensity. Loathing mixed with a sharp, sudden pain, that Seb remembered seeing in his old friend’s eyes many years ago, when that face had been much younger, and when Ewan had discovered that Julie and Seb were an item. Ewan had seen the beginning of the end then. Seb’s relationship had crippled him with jealousy. Thirty years later Ewan had not forgotten the slight.

The end of the spell had made Seb dizzy enough to grip the table with both hands. The noise and tumult of the world refilled the room and Seb’s ears.

‘Where?’ Becky had said. ‘Where? Where are you looking? The windows? Which one?’

The state of that form and the length of it – how could she have missed it? A hoary face and the bedraggled hair, as if Ewan had climbed out of the harbour, grimacing with teeth better suited to a face from prehistory.

She had seen nothing. Seb knew she was only trying to make him feel better when she claimed that she may not have looked at the right window. But she must have done. There were only two panes of glass behind her chair and she’d looked right at them. Ewan had been standing in plain view.

He’d then vanished behind a passing waitress.

Stunned, and unable to unthaw his mind, Seb had remained still with shock.

Schizophrenia, or the terrible decline of dementia, and probably dementia with Lewy bodies. He’d done his research while searching for Ewan online. You could get that at fifty. Was that worse than the alternative explanation?

Even as a child Seb had been prone to frowning. His natural expression was often described by others as humourless, dour and intense. It made some people wary. But his scowl concealed his insecurity. In photographs of himself he could see his own morbid pessimism and an aversion to conflict, his sensitivity to criticism. None of which he’d shaken off from childhood. Seb harboured grudges. Mere slights, or casual teasing, he was unable to forgive. Ewan had been similar. But as Seb had stared in horror at Ewan’s appearance against the window in the restaurant, the dark shape of the intruder had produced a dim reflection of his own scowl upon the glass, and he’d realized that the most perplexing contradiction in his hallucination theory was how Ewan’s visage had also aged, and realistically. Perhaps too vividly for the imagination alone to depict. Surely he would see a hallucination of Ewan as he remembered him.

He also reminded himself that madness was the most creative human condition. Any alternative explanations of a supernatural cause defied natural law to such an extent that it was, simply, an unbearable proposition to entertain. But if Ewan was dead, and that truly had been his apparition, then it was following Seb like a revenant. And there was nothing that he could do to escape it.

Seb now felt safer back at the house. Maybe because he still hoped that Ewan couldn’t get inside. Otherwise he would have done so. But the idea of him doing so nearly encouraged Seb to expel what little of his dinner he’d managed to swallow.

This really wasn’t what Becky had in mind for the weekend either. Her discomfort had grown with Seb’s agitation in the restaurant. He’d drunk more since their return to the house and now paced the living room at a tilt and weave that he couldn’t correct, no matter how hard he concentrated.

‘What did he actually do to you?’ Becky asked, not unreasonably.

What did he do! They’d be here all night. How did he encapsulate such a force of disruption? There was no stopping him on the subject of Ewan. Out with it all.

Becky appeared shocked by Seb’s intensity as he began to unwind and rewind his memories of Ewan. Images from time reflowing like a tide of sewage raised by floodwater, swilling through his mind and into the sanctuary of his clean, modern home . . .

Ewan’s big red fist leaving dents in the doors. Death metal. Black metal. The sounds of hell making the speakers of that midi system in his room crackle and spit like fat in a fire, hell fire. Reefer smoke, pungent like grapefruit and sausages, filling the unlit hallways under dead bulbs they’d never had the money to replace. Coins in the meter, Seb’s coins. Vomit in the bath. Cheap bread. Horror films on VHS, all night. Cans and cans and cans of cider, the empties filling bags in the garden. Fingertips turning orange from nicotine. Teeth turning yellow from neglect and tobacco and strong tea.

Yellow teeth. Black bearded mouth. A billy goat. Purple gums and yellow teeth. Dog mouth. Dog ivory.

‘The mess, the stench, it filled every room in that house. It grew across every surface and around my feet. It came inside my room.’

‘Students.’

‘No excuse. And it was far worse than that. The squalor merely started it, the opening skirmishes. There was the question of money. Promises and promises to repay the loans that I gave him. Money I could ill afford to hand over from a student grant. He never paid me back, but his parents were loaded. Oh, he kept that quiet until I met them, just once, at the end of the year. This guy who ate my pitiful supplies had been to a private school. A boarding school. His father was an officer in the air force. Top brass too. His stories, his promises, they were as worthless as his literary ambitions.’

Becky shrugged. ‘He used you. I think everyone meets someone like that. Most often in a relationship.’

‘He knew so much, you know, about ideas, bits of philosophy. It all seemed so cool, for a while. And I took it all in, was taken in, and . . . seemed to become of him. I cringe with shame when I think of who I was back then.’