Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  Even Becky had looked pale. ‘You’re telling me you’re seeing someone who died?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve had no contact with him for years. The last time was brief. He showed up at my place in London about twelve years ago. I tried to help him, but then I had to get rid of him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was in a bad way. Drink. Drugs. That sort of thing. He’d wanted my help, but I didn’t have any money. Not then. But I gave him somewhere to stay, for a bit. And tried to counsel him, that sort of thing. It was no use. He called me afterwards, the following year, and . . . I could have sworn that he was insane.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Before that, a long time before London, we were roommates at university. Way back in the eighties. It’s a long story. But I never wanted to see him again after I graduated. No one who knew him did. He was . . . let’s just say he was difficult.’

  ‘Arsehole?’

  ‘I thought so. But there was more to it, to him.’

  ‘Was he dangerous?’

  ‘When drunk and roused he might have been. But never towards me.’ Ewan had physically restrained Seb once, after he took mushrooms. That was the only time Ewan had ever touched him, but he’d been strong.

  ‘He put a value on me, our friendship. He didn’t have anyone else.’

  Becky had almost looked over her shoulder. ‘He’s down here?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’

  ‘If you’re seeing him then he must be.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Seb and Becky were as close as occasional lovers can be, which was not that close for this kind of admission, but he had no one else with whom he could confess. A fact that had made him sad. This was also how he felt when ill and alone.

  ‘He’s there and then . . . he’s not there. He’s appearing and kind of moving, or vanishing. He’s been calling my name too. Not out loud. I can hear him inside my head.’

  Becky had now been unable to disguise what looked like deal-breaker discomfort. ‘Get yourself checked out, like straight away. How long has this been happening?’

  ‘Nearly two weeks.’

  ‘Two weeks! And you haven’t been to a hospital?’

  ‘No, because I’m not convinced . . .’

  And if memory is stimulated by a scent from one’s past, and Seb had read his Proust, then what engulfed their table inspired a vivid sense of Ewan in 1988 – the long face, the forehead and cheekbones oily and red from intoxication, the morbid and haunted look that came into his eyes as if another personality inhabited him when drunk. And if the devil also appears when you speak his name, then Ewan Alexander might have been sitting at the next table.

  Seb could actually smell him. No mistaking it. Layers of sweat saturating a leather jacket rarely removed in any weather. Sebaceous and harsh, but piny with fresh alcohol over stale booze, wafting from his clothes and from the furniture he’d sat upon, lingering in the rooms he’d passed through.

  ‘You smell that?’ Seb’s voice was no louder than a whisper.

  ‘You’re freaking me out. Where, Seb, where is he?’

  ‘There,’ he’d said in a voice so tight it hissed. He’d pointed at the windows facing the docks.

  And behind that miserable statement of a man, the masts of the boats had wavered like the banners of a dishevelled army. No longer a vague apparition at a distance, Ewan had practically been in the same room. Becky’s voice had faded as the volume of the world was turned down.

  When Seb had looked right at Ewan, who was near pressed against the window, the chink and clatter of tableware and the murmur of the other diners had retreated. Music failed inside his ears. It was as if Ewan had come that close to take the glare off the glass, to peer into the interior of the restaurant. He’d known Seb was inside, but not at which table.

  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. Vo
mit 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.’

  ‘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.

  ‘But what had he been doing, before he came to see you?’

  ‘After he was chucked out of uni? From what I could work out, he’d quickly forfeited his refuge at an impressive family home. He also claimed he’d had some involvement in squat and commune scenes. That kind of thing. By reading between the lines of his spin, I figured he’d stayed pissed for fourteen years.’

  Though, Ewan’s anecdotes in London had also made Seb feel glum. He’d only struggled uneventfully in bad jobs while grinding away at his writing. Ewan had lived like a writer, though not written anything.

  It had taken Seb ten years after university to complete his first two collections and to see them spark, briefly, in the underground caves of the small and swiftly vanishing horror presses of the nineties. At his first convention in 2003, he’d been surprised to discover that he had at least one hundred readers. He’d near broken himself just to get that far.

  Ewan had just known that Seb’s books were no good.

  Seb had then finished another two books in London, novels, before his big break at forty. He’d finished another seven since and watched them appear in other languages. T
wo had become films. One of the films was actually good. The other one had been more successful at the box office.

  Ewan’s work still had not appeared in a single collection that Seb was aware of.

  ‘He still called himself a writer, and mocked me! What did he ever produce? A few short stories!’

  One or two unusual ideas and startling images that Seb could just about remember, but nothing more, because Ewan had never been more than a dilettante. Seb had been committed from the beginning. Seb finished books, Ewan scratched out fragments. Seb read, Ewan had stopped reading other writers and, thereafter, believed he knew what books were all about with a glance at a cover.

  Becky continued to frown. ‘So Ewan was a kind of mentor. He helped you become this.’ She wafted a hand at the awards in the living-room cabinet and at the framed poster of the first film, the good one.

  Seb cleared his throat. ‘There was some value, yes. He introduced me to things. But he didn’t write my books.’

  She shrugged. ‘But what does anyone know at that age, Seb? You had a kind of late older boy crush on this guy, who wasn’t who you thought he was. That’s not uncommon, but I can see you’ve given it a bit of thought.’ A hint of mockery lingered in her voice. She was finding his testimony hard to take seriously, but he’d had eight days to think of little else. ‘It’s like you’re talking about a girlfriend too. A bad relationship.’

  ‘Strange as it sounds, you make a good point. Both times, I think Ewan was unable to live without me. There was nothing sexual in his co-dependency, no latent desire, nothing like that. But there was a need in him, like an addiction, for acceptance. He’d been alone for a long time before he met me, and then again in London. Nothing had worked out for him. Ewan still needed someone to understand and approve of him, while he exhibited some kind of personality disorder that was counter-productive to him ever achieving his needs. His investigations into himself were never honest. He never understood himself. What he saw was not what anyone else saw. He was never free of who he wanted to be. But he couldn’t see who he was.’