Under a Watchful Eye(6)
The mentally ill Indian girl who looked out of the window of a front room, across the road, all day, every day. She’d worn colourful saris that were like vivid colours in a black-and-white film made by an auteur.
Air so cold in Seb’s bedroom it had bruised his skin blue that winter. Sleeping in his clothes and leather jacket under two duvets. The permanent odours of moist timber, the powdery rot of dew spots in the plaster beneath age-clouded wallpaper, and the kind he’d only seen before in crime dramas set in New York tenements. A hint of gas blended through raw sewage. The must of ancient dust under floorboards, mingled with what dirty shoes had left on carpets, where they existed. Cat piss despite there being no cat. A fridge that never worked. Food poisoning from belly pork. Chest infections. No toilet paper. Hunger. Cold. Stomach bugs. Grim.
They had both smelled. It had been too cold to take a bath in that house, though Seb had tried, once a week, in an inch of tepid water, and engaged in a feeble upward splashing of a cupped paw, like a monkey in a stream. He’d never managed to get a full sink out of the old immersion heater. But Ewan’s odours had made his eyes water. An animal odour: cattle and ethanol, with a hint of shellfish left in the sun.
In one entire year Ewan had never laundered his few articles of clothing. Seb’s own gaminess had eventually become a comfort, his bed a compost of sheets with the Turin Shroud on top, concealing a well-used mattress that he’d never dared examine. Fifteen quid a week.
Six lectures a week: Shakespeare’s tragedies, the Romantic poets, the Victorian novelists. Seb had associated with the paupers, the derided, the murdered in every text. Ewan had cast himself as the dark, moody hero in every scenario, the prophet poet, the adventurer, the sage and mystic.
It was all coming back, a landslide in a landfill.
The open bin bag in the kitchen with no bin around it. The lino stained as if the rubbish sack was a giant tea bag. Oddments of crockery and cheap, dull saucepans piled across the counters. All debris from Ewan’s odd mealtimes and hapless, hungover attempts at preparing food. Ashtrays heaped like mounds in crematoria. Living out of cans. A fiver a week on food. A diet of sausage sandwiches and soup.
Seb’s inevitable retreat into his room, away from the tides of Ewan’s squalor and noise that nothing could turn back. Smoking roll-ups and playing vinyl records. Handwritten essays. He’d thought himself a Dostoyevsky sketching notes from an underground, or a Hamsun enlightened by hunger, a Fante who asked the dust. But he was a nobody. Ewan had thought he was William Burroughs experimenting with acid, or a Bukowski drinking himself unconscious before the four-bar heater in the living room, twice each week, six cans of cider empty beside his long, curling form on the filthy rug, whenever Seb discovered him in the morning as he went out for classes, or food.
Ewan’s own mountain of pain one long silence, caged behind those heavy-lidded eyes and never shared. Not even in rare moments of sobriety when he talked at length about Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams, or Algernon Blackwood’s depiction of the numinous, Wakefield’s ghosts or Blake’s visions, and so many other diversionary things, from Shakespeare to Black Sabbath, from Shelley to Slayer.
That was the stuff that had drawn Seb in, his awe at a true outsider who might tutor his own sensitivity to the dark things that confirmed a belief in his own outcast status. Seb had read King, Herbert, Barker, Straub and Lovecraft before university, and he’d watched Romero, Cronenberg, Carpenter, Argento and Friedkin. But Ewan had shared M. R. James with him, M. P. Shiel, Aickman, Campbell, W. B. Yeats, Hughes, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Bosch, Bruegel, Bacon, Spare, Resnais, Bergman, Kneale, and Lynch. Tipped him over with a wallop into another way of thinking it all through, another way of saying things, or not saying them at all and just letting them come out and be there.
He started you off . . .
But Ewan had never wanted to let Seb go, and by the end of that year, Seb had been unsure whether Ewan had cared about anything other than getting drunk or high, while using Seb like a carer, valet, apprentice, housekeeper, and admirer.
Seb had grafted at university and then grafted even harder afterwards. He owed Ewan nothing.
Had Ewan not always encouraged him to turn his back on the material world, on family, friends? Poverty and the avoidance of responsibility and attachments being the only way to become a true artist, according to Ewan. And once Seb had flirted with that set of ideas, and set that course for himself, he’d felt unable to meet the world in any other way. Or had that been inevitable anyway? Was that the reason he’d been so attracted to Ewan in the first place? Had he seen his own destiny in Ewan? Or at least an inevitability in himself to become overwhelmed by his own compulsions? Seb didn’t know, but their association should have ended in Wylding Lane in ’88.
That year was merely the beginning. Ewan broke him in, and his mentor’s legacy had continued through fifteen years of under-employment, often uniformed, often temporary, its only permanence low pay, augmented by occupations of sublets in the corners of cities inhabited by poor migrants and those who’d slipped off the edges. Those others had no choice, but he’d wanted to be an old-school writer and had been unable to resist Ewan’s narrative. Perhaps Ewan’s ghost had now returned to check on Seb’s progress and to correct it, or regress it.
By publishing his early stories, the small presses had encouraged Seb enough to stay the course, though he’d remained anxious about what might befall him if he didn’t make changes to his life. But what changes? A professional job? He’d been clueless about finding one of those. Write one more book and then we’ll see. That had been his mantra. And at least Seb had grafted at the writing. He’d always been a grafter, determined.