by Adam Nevill
I turned to go. ‘I have work in the morning. There are neighbours upstairs. No more music.’
‘No, no, no, no, no.’ Ewan swayed out of the chair and tumbled across the room at me. I flinched to the side and he slammed the door shut, trapping me inside the sordid lounge. And he began to weave in front of my face. ‘I have something very, very, very, very, very –’
I made to move past him, but he stumbled in front of me and pushed me backwards with his index finger. Repulsed at the thought more than the reality of his touch, I stepped out of his reach.
‘You’re going nowhere. You see, this is very, very, very, very important. I’ve something to tell you. No . . . show you. Yes, tell you and show you. So just stay where you are. I think you’ll be rather surprised.’
I now thought him boring and rude. Woken in the middle of the night to be cornered and intimidated by a drunken stranger in my own home: had I ever suffered such abuse? ‘I doubt it,’ I said in defiance. ‘So make it quick. Some of us have to work in the morning.’
‘Tut, tut, tut. That’s not the spirit.’
My tolerance of drunks and their self-important babble has never been good. ‘Just get it over with. I want to go to bed. I have to go to work.’
‘That’s not important. As you shall see, it hardly matters in the order of things.’
‘Order of things?’ I hadn’t the energy to pursue another of his ridiculous assumptions. My salary paid the mortgage on the flat that he was now staying in against my will: could he not fathom that much out? The mere thought of explaining it brought on another wave of fatigue.
‘Oh, yes. As you shall see.’
‘What will I see?’ Impatience now replaced the fear that had accompanied me from my sleep. ‘What could you possibly tell me, or show me, that could have any bearing on anything of importance?’
He held a broad hand up to command silence. Then unzipped his anorak and slipped a hand inside. There was a brief struggle with an inside pocket until he pulled out a dirty roll of paper. ‘I want you to read this.’
The ends of the paper were brown and the dog-ears compressed. I thought of the dream and felt uneasy. This whole situation, the coincidence, seemed unreal. It was as if I was no longer part of the ordinary world. I even began to feel slightly ill-defined. ‘It’s three in the morning.’
‘It’s all nicely written out.’ He walked across to the coffee table. Swiped the bags of crisps onto the floor. One of them was open and the contents scattered noisily across the floorboards. Ewan smiled and said, ‘Oh, dear.’ In an exaggerated, mocking posture, he then bowed and laid the manuscript on the table. He wiped the top sheet open and straight, but as soon as he removed his hands, the page curled back upon itself.
‘So here it is. If sir would be so kind.’ He pointed at the sofa, motioning for me to sit.
I sat down. I’d read it quickly and placate the lunatic.
Ewan drummed his black fingernails on the manuscript, cleared his throat and said, ‘I give his lordship The Gospels According to the Goddess.’ He then stood back, his eyes wide with excitement, expecting that I would share his awe at the presence of the soiled paper. I didn’t want to touch it. The man was insane. He needed a psychiatrist. Pressed against an unwashed body and sealed inside a hot plastic coat in all weathers, while he wandered endlessly to find angels in trees, the paper was moist. I could smell it from three feet away and shivered with disgust. ‘It’s not even typed.’
‘You keep asking what I was doing for ten years. Well, there’s your answer.’
It could not have been more than forty pages long. ‘You spent ten years writing that?’
‘Not just writing it. A lot of preparation was involved. And other things. Poetry just doesn’t happen, you know. You may think it, it, it . . .’
The great poet couldn’t express the thought. My face fell into my hands.
Ewan paced the room. ‘You have to read it.’ Teeth clenched and on display, he paused to strum an imaginary instrument. Took the baseball cap off and scratched the tight scalp beneath. It was the first time I had seen the hat removed, and his hair still retained the shape of the cap. He was ridiculous. Drunk, unwashed and ridiculous. ‘Everything will make sense and you will see why I’m right.’ The cap was slapped back onto his head and contentedly he strummed the invisible instrument again. He was happy. This is what he wanted: someone to pay attention to him and his crazy ideas.
I wanted to physically destroy him. Smash his head against a steel radiator with my fists entangled in his wet hair. I stood up. ‘Forget it.’
Ewan ran to the lounge door and blocked it. ‘You have to read it. It’s important.’
‘Not to me it isn’t. Step aside.’
‘No, no, no, no, no, no,’ he said in a sing-song voice.
My vision was starting to tremble. ‘You solipsistic moron. I’m tired. Can you not see that? You never get up before two in the afternoon. You sit around watching cartoons and eating kids’ junk food. What do you know about responsibility? Look at yourself. You can’t even dress yourself. When was the last time you washed your clothes or took a shower?’
He pursed his generous lips. ‘Mmmm. Let me see. Two years? About that.’
I actually felt my face pale.
And then he was angry again. Almost panting at me. ‘Two years since water touched my flesh. The flesh must be prepared. Same as the mind. These things take time. It’s what she says. Read my book and you’ll see. You’ll see things a little more clearly. You’ve missed the point. Same as everybody else. You’ve all missed the boat.’ He tapped his head. ‘But I haven’t.’ And he refused to move away from the door.
The next day, at the studio, one of my colleagues remarked that I was ‘on another planet’. But her remark was justified. I made mistakes. Misheard things. Couldn’t concentrate. I was preoccupied, listless, and exhausted. The other designers and the familiar surroundings of the company buildings struck me as being incongruously clean and absurdly ordinary.
I’d awoken late that morning, after no more than two hours’ sleep. Anger had kept me awake. Disgust too, at what I had read on those sticky pages of The Gospels According to the Goddess. When I’d finally roused myself and climbed out of bed, there was no time for a shower or breakfast. There were no cups left in the cupboard for coffee either. They were all soiled and sealed within the living room, where Ewan slept and would sleep until the afternoon to ready himself for the night’s fresh festivities.
His manuscript had been written in a beatific style that seemed to me a clumsy attempt at an antiquated idiom. Each line was numbered like the Bible too, and the text was separated into cantos. There was no metre or rhyme, just a relentless, self-important barrage of statements allegedly transmitted by the Goddess and recorded by Ewan, her earthly conduit and representative.
If anything, the passages reminded me of a quasi prose-poetry written by someone hopelessly arrested in their development. Morbidly adolescent, self-aggrandising, deluded: a manifesto for a paranoid man’s persecution fantasies and odd spiritual beliefs. The Gospels made me think of Charles Manson and Helter Skelter; the testament of a shabby misfit with a messiah complex. Only this author was an uncharismatic prophet without a single disciple.
As I read, Ewan had sat perched on the armrest of the sofa, his eyes intense with a kind of euphoria, because someone was finally paying his manuscript the attention he thought it deserved, even if it was a hostage taken after midnight and dressed in a bathrobe.
Given Ewan’s inebriation, how could I have been honest with him? I had found the Gospels to be creepy, the work of a man paralysed by an undiagnosed personality disorder. Thinking only of rest and sleep, I had lied to Ewan and said that it was ‘interesting’. I had promised more of a critique the next day. I’d then edged out of the living room and into the bathroom, intent on washing my hands, while he’d tripped over my feet, pleading for more applause. Ewan waited outside the bathroom too, and then crowded me down the hall. He even tr
ied to enter my bedroom, wheedling and desperate to squeeze more acclaim from his reluctant reader. Eventually, I had to push him out of my room, with two scrubbed hands pressed into his sticky breastbone, before shutting the door in his face.
He entered my room another three times shortly afterwards and switched the light on, before I fell into a coma of fatigue. When I woke at 8 a.m., the light was on in my room and the door was wide open.
1. All doors shall be open unto him. 2. And lo, none shall mock him. 3. For he is a king among men. 4. A god-man who has been given the sight of her and things too holy for other men to withstand. 5. Lo! And woman neither shall lead him astray. 6. This is my will and I am his true love at the centre of all things.
I was angry at myself for remembering the rubbish, and for allowing the impact of Ewan’s unexamined conceit to intrude so far into my mind, where it then recited itself at the studio. And even there, in my office cubicle, another unpleasant consequence of Ewan’s occupation awaited me. Sat before the Head of Human Resources before lunch, I was asked several questions in a benign interrogation, the kind adopted by management to delve into a member of staff’s personal problems. Alice Fairchild was smiling when she asked me if things were ‘all right at home’. She was still smiling when she explained ‘how difficult it always was to discuss the issue of personal hygiene’ with someone whom she considered ‘a friend and not just a valued colleague’. Several people in my studio had complained about me, and she had noticed my body odour too when passing me in the corridor.
I began to aggressively claw at my shirt and to sniff at my armpits, and quickly understood why she was alarmed. I attempted to explain about the ‘guest’ in my flat, but Alice struggled to understand what I jabbered at her. I quickly apologised and promised that no one would be ‘troubled’ in future.
‘We all get preoccupied,’ Alice had said in a confidential tone, ‘and forget about the simplest but most important things at these times.’
42. And his flesh will be made stronger with her incense. 43. Indeed, the king in rags, her servant and most dear love, will be robed in divinity that escapes the eyes of men but will leave their other senses in awe of him. 44. And he shall leave his flesh unclean for the passing of eight seasons, drink strong drink and eat rich foods in readiness for his passing into her kingdom. 45. And he may choose companions to follow him, and to follow her, through him, till they too be granted passage. 46. For lo! Look up all believers and she will be revealed to you in all her magnificence and glory and beauty, and ye shall be nourished and anointed by her incense also.
I left work early and stopped at a supermarket to buy deodorant and a fabric neutralising agent before catching the tube to Julie’s flat.
‘Did you notice it too?’ I asked her upon arrival.
Julie nodded. ‘At the weekend. In the cinema.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’
‘You’ve got to get rid of him.’
‘Don’t you think I’m trying?’
‘Don’t shout at me!’
Julie’s roommates fell silent in the lounge outside the dining room.
‘I’m sorry.’ We finished the remainder of our evening meal in silence. Julie was hurt when I told her that I couldn’t sleep over, and that I had to go home and fetch clean clothes for work the next day, if such a thing as clean clothes even existed at my address.
Briefly, we also Googled my legal position and tried to figure out if Ewan qualified as a squatter. I couldn’t even lock him out, as Julie suggested, because Ewan had a key. Besides his monumental walk to Peckham while I’d slept, he never left the apartment when I was there. And I no longer believed this was coincidental. If I was at home, I doubt Ewan ventured much further than the 24-hour shop across the road. Even if he did slip outside when I was indoors, there would be no time to call a locksmith and drill out locks. I could only leave the catch on while I was inside the flat. I would have to leave at some point for work, and that would give him ample time to get back inside and to redouble his efforts to remain at the address. The situation was preposterous.
I promised Julie I’d phone the police in the morning. She vowed to speak to a friend who practised family law. But what still perplexed me was how Ewan had managed to find me in the first place. I was certain his ‘bumping’ into me on the street, a few weeks before, had been no accident. Ewan had been looking for me.
Socially, he had always been on the periphery of the alternative undergraduate crowd at university. Rarely speaking, painfully shy but tolerated by the self-styled bohemians in the Student Union bar. The long hair and beard hadn’t changed either. Several times back then, out of curiosity and sympathy, I had spoken to him. At the time I was fooling myself that I was an Expressionist painter and I remember us sharing a passion for Francis Bacon and Hieronymus Bosch. In fact, Ewan was the only other person in my peer group who had heard of Grosz.
Back then, Ewan also drank heavily, fancied himself a poet and was always carrying around a copy of some Arthur Machen short stories. People had shaken their heads at my association with him. Girls were especially hard on him. They thought him creepy, and things like that. He failed his first year and moved on. And that was the extent of my knowledge of Ewan. So what had he been doing for the last ten years? Where had he been living? Estranged from his parents and unemployable, had he been secured in an institution? And if the Gospels were in any way autobiographical, he hadn’t washed or laundered his clothes in two years.
‘That’s just disgusting,’ Julie said, when I told her.
‘He is disgusting,’ I said. ‘Repellent.’
‘I feel sorry for him. He’s ill. Maybe I should have a word with him. See if I can get rid of him.’
‘No way. My place is out of bounds until he’s gone. It’s embarrassing.’
‘Perhaps you’re too soft. And he’s so manipulative. Alcoholics are. He’s turning you into an enabler.’
‘Soft? Physical violence is the only thing that I haven’t tried. And, believe me, I’ve come close.’
‘Please, let me have a go at him.’
‘Why? He doesn’t even like you.’
‘What do you mean?’
I mentioned Ewan’s complaint about me having guests.
‘Bastard. What a bastard.’
‘Now you’re talking, but look at us. He’s all we ever talk about. And I can’t sleep. He’s affecting my work. He’s taking over my life.’
‘The bare-faced cheek.’ Julie wasn’t really listening to me; she was still smouldering because Ewan objected to her visits, which was probably what prompted her to make one the following evening; though that was the last time that Julie ever set foot in my home.
But I still had to go home that night.
Across the road, in front of the Cypriot deli, I looked up and watched the windows of the first floor of my flat – the living-room windows. And immediately I began to wonder what Ewan was watching on television to make the edges of the curtains flicker and flash a blue-white colour, as bright as a magnesium flare. The curtains were thin, but I was still surprised at the effects of the TV’s luminosity. Was it always like that when I watched television? Perhaps Ewan had tampered with the contrast.
Slowly, on weary legs, I crossed the road and made my way to the front door, only to have it opened from the inside as my key slid into the lock. I stepped back, my heartbeat thickening inside my throat. But it was only Holly and Michael, my neighbours, coming out and carrying two cat cages with Marmalade and Mr Chivers inside.
‘Oh, hi,’ Holly said. ‘Afraid we’ve got to take the boys over to my sister’s for a sleepover.’
‘Hey, mate,’ Michael said, joining her on the pavement.
I was compelled to apologise. ‘Look, I’m really, really sorry about this. I’m having a spot of trouble with a guest. A visitor. But he’ll be gone soon.’
‘You know, I’m glad to hear it,’ Michael said, smiling. ‘That guy in the baseball cap?’
I nodded, my face a ma
sk of shame.
‘It’s that music,’ Michael said. ‘We couldn’t believe that it was something in your collection. What’s he doing, pushing vinyl backwards against a needle? But it’s just freaking the cats out. Sorry, mate. I had to come down and knock, but no one is answering.’
‘We turned the TV up,’ Holly interjected. ‘But the boys can still hear that noise. It took us an hour to get them down from the top of the wardrobe. And look at these scratches. They’ve never scratched me before.’ Holly showed me a lined forearm. I apologised again and made my way up the stairs to the front door.
The music thumped about me on the communal staircase of the building. A hammering of drums beneath a squealing of guitars. Why would Ewan have the stereo and television on at the same time? I then thought of his childish affectations for visual things, for sweets and noise, his inability to concentrate on anything that required effort, and so dismissed the query. No wonder he’d only written forty pages in a decade.
As I approached my front door, I was also reminded of his verse, his performance the night before, and the curious and unpleasant dream that I’d suffered. I began to wish that I’d stayed at Julie’s. Increasingly, I was afraid of what Ewan might do next. After all, he’d convinced himself that he was a god-man in the service of an all-knowing deity.
Without making much of a sound, I slipped inside the flat.
The smell was all the more potent for my having being away for twelve hours. Sharper, more acrid. Almost living, I felt. But despite the stench and the contained heat, I soon realised that the situation had changed. All of the lights were switched off, though the hallway was intermittently lit by the ghastly phosphorescent light flashing from beneath the door of the living room. With some discomfort, I thought of the dream again.