Under a Watchful Eye(12)

‘Seb, that was a long time ago—’

‘I read more of his books than the set texts on my course. I even grew my hair long because Ewan wore his long. I started to drink and smoke weed. But he could not, at any level, acknowledge what a terrible person he was to be around. And I learned why, because confronting that was never in his best interests.’

This information hardly prepared the ground for the other stuff he wanted to tell her. There was always something else that was never right about Ewan. ‘There was something he kept hidden. It often crept out of him. That was much worse. The things that made everyone else avoid him.’

‘Like what?’

‘Standing and staring, in total silence, at the mud and broken concrete in that wretched back yard. Coming and going at night. The sobbing in his room, for hours. Ranting outside my room when I started seeing Julie . . .’

God, Julie. Remember Julie?

Ewan had also boasted about dreams so lucid he’d considered them to be journeys through another place that existed, where others had been on hand to guide him. Druggy, pisshead nonsense, but from Ewan it always felt a little too believable, a possibility. And Ewan had claimed to have seen figures, faces above his own when he woke in the early hours, forms standing upright beside his bed, voices in the attic.

There were those dreaded silences when he’d thought Ewan had died in his room. When he hoped he’d died so it could end . . . Silences capable of a further lowering of the house’s temperature. Sometimes the absences had lasted for days.

‘Poor guy. Might it simply have been about her?’

‘Julie?’ He could almost smell her red hair again. ‘No. By the time she appeared, and that was in the third term, we hated each other. I was counting down the days until I finished my exams, so I could get my deposit back and leave him behind. He’d been chucked out of college by then.’

‘What was he like the second time? You said he came to see you in London.’

‘Much worse. And it wasn’t a visit as such. He found out where I lived and followed me home. He must have done.’

Seb could still remember his shock when he’d first seen Ewan in West London. That had been a few days before his first visit to the house where Seb had lived in Hammersmith. He’d seen the tall but hunched figure in an old blue raincoat, muttering anxiously to himself while never looking another in the eye. Pacing, agitated, jobless, alone, whispering and getting closer to the one thing that he considered companionable.

Seb had avoided him. He’d ducked into a second-hand clothes shop, and the second time had hurried into the Hammersmith and City Line station.

So how had Ewan found him back then? How had Ewan known where to look for Seb in the first place, in West London? Seb had never been certain, and given recent events was even less sure now.

Ewan had claimed he’d called Seb’s mother and that she had volunteered his Hammersmith address. Seb had mentioned this to his mother that Christmas and she’d no knowledge of the phone call. Ewan had lied.

Once Ewan had finally left his room in London, after one barely endurable month, Seb had checked with four friends from university with whom he still maintained email contact but no longer saw. None of them had heard from Ewan since he’d been kicked out of college, fourteen years before.

He’d only been able to assume that Ewan had figured out he was living in Hammersmith from a Friends Reunited profile, and had headed there and come across Seb in the street, or when coming out of the tube station, before following him home.

Ewan had always liked to play the enigma card, to know things that Seb did not. It was partly how he’d maintained the balance of power when they were students.

His old friend had resorted to begging Seb to let him stay and to sleep on the floor of his room. And his need for shelter and support had become a wheedling insistence, cries for help from an old friend across successive visits. He’d claimed he was sleeping rough and had nowhere else to go. Dishevelled, drunk before noon, his big face held in a cage of long fingers, the nails black with dirt, he’d sobbed while Seb had fidgeted on the office chair set before the small table where he’d written one of his small press collections and the majority of his first two novels.

That had been a hot summer too, but Ewan had worn a battered jacket, zipped to his throat. And a black cap, similar to the one he wore now, jammed tightly onto his unwashed hair.

At the time, Seb’s take-home pay from the bookshop had been a shade over eight hundred pounds each month, and he’d saved a thousand pounds from several years of temporary work. He’d rented a small room and had a few friends. Not much, but a massive improvement on Ewan’s situation. Even so, Ewan’s shocking and inebriated state had made Seb acutely afraid for his own future. He remembered that much. Ewan had served as a warning of what might become of Seb if his literary ambitions were thwarted.

He’d allowed Ewan to sleep on the floor of his room for a night that became a week, that dragged into a month. His orderly room was transformed into a slurry pit of free newspapers, empty sandwich cartons, cider cans, dirty crockery and black hairs.

When Seb knew the temporary arrangement showed signs of co-dependency, he’d asked Ewan to leave and also requested that he no longer visit the house. By then, his two female housemates had expressed strong aversions to the house guest. His relationship with Katie and Cleo had never been the same after Ewan had finally sloped off. The girls distrusted Seb merely for knowing a person like Ewan.