by Adam Nevill
‘Like what, sorry?’
‘If you can’t see it, then I’m not explaining it to you.’
‘But you’re not making sense. You want me to go somewhere else’ – he embellished his point by waving a long hand above his head – ‘but you can’t tell me where. So how do I know where to go?’ He finished with a smile. Pleased with himself, he showed me his yellow teeth.
With a tremendous concentration of will, I kept my voice steady. ‘Loot. The newspaper. Buy Loot. Find a room in there and move into it.’
Considering my advice, he took another leisurely swig of beer. ‘Not really my scene. And you’re still not making sense. It all sounds a bit cuckoo to me.’ He started to laugh. He was also drunk. ‘You need a deposit to get a room in there. I don’t have enough money. And the rooms are terrible places. I lived in one and I’m never going back. I like it here.’
‘Does any of what you’re saying strike you as absurd?’
‘I don’t follow, sorry?’
‘You just show up here. At my flat. It’s been ten years. We were never even close. And you . . . you get inside here and just . . .’
‘What, sorry?’
‘Make this terrible mess and refuse to leave when I ask you to.’
He looked around the room again. ‘It’s not so bad. I’ve seen worse.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me. But to me, it’s terrible. Horrible. We clearly have different standards. And as it’s my flat I decide who lives here and what happens here. Do you understand that?’
‘I think you’re missing the point –’
‘No! You are missing the point. This is a private residence. Not a drinkers’ hostel. You have no rights here.’
He looked at the can in his hand and a glum, doleful expression returned to his face.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m a very private person. I don’t ever want to live like a student again. I need my own space.’
‘So do I,’ he said.
‘Then move out. This place is too small for two people. It’s a one-bedroom flat for one person. Me.’
‘I don’t agree. It’s big enough.’
‘What you think is irrelevant. You’re just not listening to what I’m saying, are you?’
‘I am.’
‘Then you’re going to leave.’
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘You’re confused. You’ve just missed the point.’
‘What point is this?’ I began to think about who I should call first: the police or Social Services.
‘Somewhere along the line, you got it all wrong,’ he said, utterly sure of what he was saying.
My face was in my hands again. I clawed at my scalp with my fingers. I couldn’t bear to look at him. ‘I’ll find you somewhere to live. I’ll pay the deposit.’
There was a long silence. ‘It’s a nice offer. But I’m not so sure it’s the right thing to do. You see, I don’t want to live on my own again. It’s too hard to keep everything going. It’s better if I stay here.’
I stood up, wrenched open the curtains and threw the sash windows up through their frames.
Ewan blinked in the tangerine light.
I clutched at the piles of old newspapers and flyers and leaflets and sandwich wrappers strewn around the floor, all collected by Ewan during his forays outside the flat. Each day’s refuse was arranged in a little rubbish pyramid.
He leaped out of the chair. ‘Leave them!’
Startled, I stepped away from him and stared at his wild eyes, red cheeks and trembling lips.
‘Don’t touch them.’
‘It’s rubbish.’
‘But I need them.’
‘Why?’
‘They’re not finished with.’
‘But it’s rubbish. The papers are days, weeks old.’
‘Just leave them.’ It was the first time that I had seen Ewan angry and my scalp prickled. He began to weave and pointed a dirty fingernail at my face. I recalled what I had read of shut-ins living with their stacks of old newspapers and heaps of garbage; every item of vital importance to some incomprehensible inner life; landfills secluded inside flats or single rooms that they eventually expired within. Ewan was mad, and this was his goal; to surround himself with refuse and filth in my home. To seal himself off from a world that he could not function in, with me for company, so that he didn’t get lonely. I was to be a provider of victuals and companionship, a guardian. I wanted to laugh.
I dropped the papers on the floor. ‘It’s all garbage. I want all of it out of here and all of these dishes washed. Then I want you gone.’ But my voice held no strength. It sounded like a rehearsed platitude, half-heard at best, ignored almost certainly. Something that just dispersed around Ewan’s head.
I stalked out of the living room and went into the kitchen. I switched the heating off at the boiler and opened the two windows overlooking the Greek restaurant.
‘What are you doing?’ he said from behind me, calm again, now that his precious newspapers had been returned to disorder and chaos. He was standing in the door-frame, holding a two-litre bottle of Dr Pepper.
‘What does it look like?’
‘But I get cold.’ The gangly figure, with the anorak zipped up to its throat and the baseball cap jammed onto its head, pretended to shudder.
‘Tough. You’re not going to be here for much longer and I’m going to make a start on getting rid of that smell.’ Now I was one of them – I could read it in his face – one of his tormentors. ‘And get ready for some hard physical labour. You’re cleaning the bloody mess you’ve made before you go.’
‘I don’t know how, sorry.’
‘Clearly.’
‘What do you mean, sorry?’
‘Those clothes need to be thrown away. I’ll give you something to wear, otherwise you’ll never get a room.’
‘Some things are the way they are for a reason.’
‘Not in my flat, they’re not. You can’t just invade someone’s life and fill every room with that awful smell, and leave garbage all over the floor. I mean, what were you thinking? This is my home. My flat. A private space.’
‘But how is it private? Julie comes over.’
He was referring to my girlfriend at the time, who used to stay over at least three times each week. But since Ewan had arrived I’d been sleeping over at her place, which I realised had been a mistake. She’d met Ewan once and subsequently refused to visit again until he was gone. The very fact that he had mentioned her as some kind of obstacle to his occupation made me angrier than I had ever been. ‘What the fuck has that got to do with you?’
‘Well, think about it,’ he said, the grin back.
‘Think about what?’
‘I have no place to go when she’s here.’ He looked triumphant. ‘It’s not a very nice thing to do to a person.’
I suddenly realised that the surreal, childlike debate could run for ever. Was he trying to wear me down? Was he a congenital idiot, or was this some carefully rehearsed obfuscation? I didn’t know, but I was exhausted by the drunken imbecile. I looked about myself at the kitchen that I would now have to clean again. In one week, I’d fallen into a role of obscene servitude to his beguiling will. It seemed so long ago that I would prepare a meal after work and eat it with wine, read a book, fall asleep in my chair by the window. Or lie on the sofa with Julie and watch a film. How did this happen? How did this come about? These situations are unexpected. There are no defences against them. ‘I’ll have whoever I want here. Especially Julie. You have no say in anything.’
‘I’m right about this. You know I am.’
‘No, I don’t!’
He smiled, as if patronising a misguided child. ‘Oh, yes, I think that you do.’
‘I’ll tell you what, you can leave now. Right now. Leave the keys. Go.’
He sniggered and shook his oily head. ‘Where? I asked you before and you couldn’t give me an answer. Where do I go? Do I just vanish? What you’re saying doesn’t ma
ke sense.’
‘So, you’re going to stay here for ever, turn my flat into a compost pit, destroy all of my possessions, and I’m not allowed to have guests over. Is that it? Is that the plan? Can you not see why I might object? Why I am seriously alarmed by your behaviour?’
He laughed and shook his gigantic head, as if pitying my delusions. ‘Now you’re being dramatic. Getting ahead of yourself. We’re not there yet. All I am saying is it’s not fair, not considerate when you bring people here. Because they’re not my friends and not my girlfriends. And I have no place to go when they’re here. It’s quite simple.’ He turned and left the kitchen and I stood alone in silence, stupefied.
From the living room, I heard the rattle and thud of closing windows. Followed by the shriek of the curtains, tugged across plastic rails to seal out the beauty and light of a summer’s evening. With a blare, the television erupted back into life.
I walked, as if possessed, into the living room. My lips moved rapidly. I was close to violence and tears; which would come first, I did not know. Livid with anger, I stood in the doorway. Ewan looked at me, his face inscrutable, or perhaps vaguely puzzled by my insistence. ‘You are fucking mad,’ I said.
And a change occurred in his expression, his posture, in the very energy that seemed to project from the slumped, dark form in the chair. By the light of the television I could see how his face purpled with rage, how the watery eyes darkened. Leaping from the chair, he rushed at me.
My breath caught in my throat.
He raised one long clumsy arm, the nylon of the anorak whipping through the air like a sail on a boom.
But paused, when a moment of sense in his eyes became restraint in his ungainly body, and he stopped short of striking me, and brought that arm down against the wooden drying rack beside the radiator. Wooden struts snapped and splintered before being silently engulfed in the bathroom towels that were hanging there. The clothes horse collapsed upon itself.
‘You know nothing!’ Long thin arms swept around his head. Spittle frothed on his vulval lips. ‘You got it all wrong! You missed the boat!’ And with that final exclamation, he seized the handle of the living-room door and slammed it with all his might, sending me reeling backwards into the hall.
From Ewan’s first night in the flat I had slept badly. A fretting anxiety made it difficult to fall asleep, and would continually bring me back to either full consciousness or a troubled half-sleep in which I found it impossible to become physically comfortable. In retrospect, I realised that I had completely lost the ability to relax after his odoriferous intrusion into my life. But the quality of my sleep the night following our row and his destruction of the drying rack was not only fitful but harassed by awful dreams that I only partially recalled in the morning.
Thinking as rationally as I was able, I put the nightmare down to the intensification of my feelings of victimisation and powerlessness, through the loss of control that I was suffering within my own environment. But the experience of these disturbing dreams made me resent Ewan even more; his physical pollution of my home and maddening, autistic will were but the first level of my torment. At the time, it seemed to me that he had reached far deeper into my life, and that it wasn’t enough that he was now my only topic of conversation with Julie, or the only thought that continuously distracted me from my work at the studio. No, his intrusion went much further; I felt that Ewan was now unwilling to be without me at any time. Even as I slept.
The setting of the nightmare was my apartment, though the landscape was much enlarged – big enough to hold me for ever – and much changed. Physically diminished, I was a skeletal and hairless thing with no genitals. Some crude operation had been performed between my legs and the wound had been stitched shut with the brown twine that I kept under the kitchen sink. And I stumbled and fell about, exhausted by a long march down the even longer hallway. My flesh was cut by the floor of broken toenails. His yellow toenails. My discomfort from the quickly infecting incisions on my knees, the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands was constant, and I repeatedly collapsed on the strange beach that had been formed from his discarded foot claws.
A naked thing, luminous as a pale worm in dark clay, I also found it difficult to see in the stinging blizzard of dandruff and scurf that constantly blew at us from the direction in which we headed: the living room. In my ears, mouth and nose, the oily matter built up and had to be scraped away. Dirty light seeped from above us to partially illumine him in this storm of decay. Thin-limbed, large-footed, pot-bellied, he forged ahead and swept one arm about in the air as he read aloud from a cluster of dog-eared sheets of A4 paper torn from a refill pad. Incanting words that I could not catch, he forced a quick march onward while I scurried behind on a lead, choking on the stench.
The flat was also insufferably hot, which served to intensify the ever-present miasma. But Ewan was indifferent to my choking and sobbing. There was to be no delay in our reaching the far-off flicker of whitish light that crackled through the storm. And there was something else in the flat with us that I never saw. Never laid eyes upon, because I was too afraid to look at it. Crouched behind the naked, ranting giant whose crown of black hair stuck to his skull and neck as if his head had been revolved round a basin of grease, I felt safer. I had to stay close to Ewan and remain concealed from the thing that was waiting up ahead in the streak-lighting static of the living room. I instinctively knew that it was old and full of glee and looking forward to seeing me.
In the dream, Ewan, the naked, bearded prophet with that paunch, was soon swinging one of his old shoes like a bishop’s censer. The shoe was full of excrement, and, as he paraded through my flat, he finger-painted figures onto the walls. Childish figures, but all the worse for it, those hunched-up things in matchstick trees that he daubed on the walls. And I had crawled behind him, holding aloft my best Habitat salad bowl, a vessel choked with filth, so that he might refill the tatty shoe. And down that hallway we went with Ewan spreading graffiti all the way down to the place that I soon feared with a ferocity. A flashing room inhabited by a third presence, something that existed in the whitish blue crackles. Something on the ceiling that Ewan worshipped.
He had to tighten the belt around my throat to drag me inside the white flickers where sound travelled backwards. A place inside which I began to suffocate, while being unable to flee because my whole body was beset by a paralysing sensation of pins and needles. And as I crawled upon a floor that reeked of an ape’s enclosure, I would slip back to the place directly beneath whatever it was that I feared upon the ceiling.
When I awoke, my face was taut with dried tears.
It was still dark outside my bedroom. I sat up in damp sheets that still contained vestiges of his smell, from where he’d sat on the bed while inspecting my room the day before. And I immediately became aware of the light burning under my door from the hallway, and also of the loud music, partially muffled by the walls, that boomed from the living room.
Music? I looked at my alarm clock. It was not yet three in the morning, but a rumble of drums and cacophony of buzzing guitars assaulted my senses the moment I opened the bedroom door. I thought of my neighbours upstairs, Holly and Michael, and became convinced that a knock at the front door was imminent.
Wrapped in my bathrobe, I scurried down the hall to the lounge. Wincing, I covered my mouth and nose from a fresh assault of his peculiar smell. It seemed fresher than ever, but mere hours ago I had thoroughly disinfected the hallway, bathroom and kitchen floors. How was this possible? Not even bleach could withstand him.
I thrust open the door of the living room. And saw Ewan dancing. Leaping drunkenly from foot to foot and throwing his arms out wide, and shaking his big head about so that coils of wet hair lashed and stuck to his shiny face. His dirty shoes, with their flap, flap, flapping soles, skittered through the newspapers and empty beer cans on the floor. His cracked lips pulled apart at the sight of me, and he stuck out a tongue better suited to the maw of an ox. And even with me
there, he never stopped the clumsy prancing, but instead unleashed a deep moan, utterly discordant and bestial. Opening his mouth even wider, he wiggled his tongue across those yellow teeth obscenely, before issuing another hoarse roar into the punishing din that erupted from the speakers.
Ewan was playing his Necrophile Autopsy album. The only CD he owned, recorded by some Scandinavian black metal outfit that I’d never heard of before he came to stay. The case was long lost and I was surprised the disc even played; there were scratches and oily fingerprints all over the playing surface.
I moved into the room and shut the music off. I was afraid. I had no idea who this person was, or what the misfit I had vaguely known at university had been doing for the last decade. But there was no point in reprimanding him. Little point even talking to this inebriated oaf who lived exclusively on a diet of children’s party food and beer. He was in control; I was just there to listen.
Ewan flopped his entire weight down into the chair and the frame cracked. The legs dug grooves into the floor boards. Two cans of extra strong beer were balanced on the arm of my chair. He must have gone out at some point to buy the chips, the king-size Mars Bar and the half-dozen bags of crisps that were also piled upon the coffee table.
Drunk and excited, Ewan tried to keep his slurred words together to make sentences. ‘I’ve been walking, walking. I’ve walked miles. I went to William Blake’s old house. And then Peckham Common. The place where the angels are in the trees. They’re still there.’
As if my body temperature had suddenly dropped, I began to shiver and closed the robe around my neck. ‘It must have been dark.’ My voice sounded tiny.
‘There’s plenty of things you can see without light.’ He stretched his legs out and slurped from a beer can, then gasped with satisfaction.
‘I bet.’
His expression became challenging, then hateful. Ewan had always been ugly, but at that moment I thought he looked particularly primitive and dangerously delinquent. Despite his delusions about being a poet at university, I suddenly understood that I’d underestimated him; when drunk, he could become a thug and a bully. ‘You’d better not be thinking of laughing at me,’ he said, and the subtext was obvious. He grinned, and showed me those yellow teeth, satisfied with my reaction. Yes, Ewan wanted to be feared and respected. ‘I’ve done a lot of thinking about you,’ he slurred. ‘About what you said. And you were wrong. I was right.’