Under a Watchful Eye(5)

Ewan Alexander.

God, no. Not possible.

A lot had happened in the intervening decade since he’d last seen his ‘old friend’. For one thing, Seb had moved on. It had taken a long time, but he’d made a success of his literary aspirations. A goal that he and Ewan had once shared as students.

So had Ewan come to . . . haunt him?

Seb didn’t want any reminders of that time coming back. Not now, not when he had everything just about right, give or take a book that he was struggling to finish.

The last time they’d met, in London, Seb had been convinced that Ewan was not long for this world. When was that, 2003? Surely no one could drink so much and avoid a premature grave. And the drugs? He’d watched Ewan neck neat MDMA from a brown bottle as if it was a shot of whiskey. Just one of his many assurances that Ewan’s demise had been imminent a decade gone.

Ewan had been committed to self-destruction when they’d first met, in the late eighties. That was thirty years ago, in a Student Union bar, and even then Ewan had been too drunk to focus his eyes. He’d rambled and spat about music: Mercyful Fate, Venom, Bathory, stuff like that. Ewan’s life had formed into the immediate shape of a slow, proxy suicide.

They’d only shared a house for one year. Much of which Seb had spent listening to Ewan through the walls, when the man was out of his mind.

So how could he still be alive?

But if he isn’t, then . . . Even briefly entertaining the ludicrous idea made Seb breathless.

Another cascade of brandy splashed into his crystal tumbler. He slumped onto his favourite sofa in the living room.

A panorama of sea stretched round the rear of the house, visible through floor-to-ceiling windows. But the bay’s wild beauty failed to offer its customary balm. Nor did the awards, pictures, ornaments and furniture provide their usual reassurance. In fact, Seb’s advantages had developed a horrible feeling of impermanence. Wasn’t that similar to how Ewan had always made him feel, even when he’d had so little to lose?

Seb didn’t know what to do, so he remained seated, bewildered and sagging with the self-pity that follows misfortune and finds succour in inebriation. Eventually he moved downstairs and drew the blinds in his bedroom, then lay upon his bed. He needed to calm down and think things through.

Going to the doctors was still on the agenda and he’d try the following morning. Can’t go now, can’t go pissed.

But how do you explain something like this? He feared being sectioned.

In the gloom and silence, his memories of Ewan insolently pushed through his thoughts and trampled the happier times standing guard at the outer walls of his mind, the barriers against back then.

1988. Ewan was his first lesson of who to avoid in life.

Back then was horribly vivid as his mind hosted a carousel of dim, brownish rooms with thin curtains that were always closed, and spaces echoing with a drunk’s rampages. Seb had written about that time in his first two books, and he’d succeeded in leaving Ewan out of those stories as a character. Even then, in the processing of memory through his writing, he’d been concerned that a fictional consideration of Ewan ran the risk of bringing him back from the past.

Those who live alone often speak to themselves, as Seb did in his bedroom. ‘I was young. Inexperienced . . . and lonely.’

He’d been captivated by Ewan too, an older man. Shyness and courtesy had made him the victim of a misfit.

Their old house on Wylding Lane laid new foundations inside his thoughts. If every house had a face, then that one had suffered greatly, for a long time, and been forgotten behind barbed wire.

A concrete terrace, tide-marked by green mildew. A building slipping backwards down a muddy bank of a front yard with a broken gate. Sash windows clouded with condensation, or brittle with ice that resembled mucus, depending on the season. Every inch of kerb on both sides of the narrow road cramped by parked cars. Vehicles passing through all day long, and into the night, initiating noisy stand-offs.

Three bedrooms and communal areas untouched by improvements since the sixties. And within those narrow spaces, his old mate had never risen before four in the afternoon. Seb saw Ewan again, grey with a hangover, his eyes reddened, his breath gluey, a washed-out Reign in Blood shirt hanging from his bony shoulders, the cotton smelling of something you might walk downwind of in a zoo.

Ewan had been ten years Seb’s senior, a mature student without maturity, his studies on the rocks. He’d been retaking a year of university. Only Ewan had failed the foolproof first year. What is he even doing here? How did he get in? That’s what people had asked. Ewan’s parents had paid for the course, and many other courses after it. Maybe to keep him away from them. But Ewan’s parental contributions had been transmuted into strong cider and cannabis smoke, which is why he’d been co-dependent on Seb for food and money, in a matter of weeks after he’d moved into the house on Wylding Lane.

That was Seb’s second year and spent out of halls. Cut out of every other potential house-share going, he’d drifted too far away from the college, and that was when it really went wrong. Marooned inside a house with no central heating on the outskirts of town, with Ewan, his sole option. Two miles from campus in a neighbourhood for the abandoned, the jobless, the neglected seniors, vast but poor families: the uncared-for in the community. An area part-derelict, ashamed of itself, but curiously industrialized. A bottled-sauce factory had covered the area with the smell of molasses and diesel.