‘They’re great.’ He’d unintentionally sounded unimpressed, and caught a shade of dismay in Becky’s expression. It registered in a lowering of her satin eyelashes over the green eyes that had first attracted him to her.
‘And you should see what else I’ve got on.’ She’d stroked knees that appeared slippery with a sheen created by the afternoon sun that fell across the seat.
Seb had reached for her then and held her tightly. Not with desire but with affection and relief. He held her like the friend that he so desperately needed – this pretty girl whom he’d always kept at an arm’s length, and with whom he’d been unable to drop an act of indifference. He suspected she’d fallen for him during the six months in which they’d been lovers, without strings, and living in different places.
Becky found his ear. ‘I want to go for a walk and a paddle in the sea. And I want to get pissed. But I’m not going out dressed like this. So let’s get reacquainted properly in your room and then I’ll get changed.’ She’d reached between his legs and applied a gentle pressure. ‘I thought you’d be a rock by now. Am I losing my touch?’
She wasn’t and he’d wanted to say as much. She was as lively and cheeky, playful and sweet smelling, as kind and just as lovely as she had been, since the first time they’d met at a literary festival. Seb had wanted to tell her all of these things but he didn’t, and not because of his reticence about taking an intimate friendship one step further. He’d remained quiet because he was cornered and muted by wretchedness. He was a man who felt twice his age and had no mental capacity for the erotic. Because of him, Ewan, or whatever it was that he was seeing.
During the previous week, Ewan had come for him again, and then again. And he was getting closer with each ‘visit’.
Two days after the episode near the pier, and after the onset of a series of ghastly persecution nightmares, Seb had been compelled to leave the house. Needing to immerse himself within crowds during daylight hours, he’d driven to Plymouth. And while wandering the broad precincts of the town centre, he’d seen Ewan standing before St Andrew’s Cross, at the bottom of the Royal Parade.
His clutch of shock had been instant, followed by a sense of being swallowed by a vacuum, or strange absence, his thoughts unravelling and transported somewhere else. Traffic, gulls, the crowd’s chatter, a pushchair’s wheels on cement, a ship’s lonesome horn, and the clanking of a delivery van’s door, all withdrew as if his hearing had lost its power source. But the face and murky mouth confronting him were distinct enough to reveal a most unpleasant smile, one triumphant and sneering.
There had been something more threatening about Ewan’s appearance in Plymouth, too. He’d moved from out of the corner of Seb’s eyes and deliberately positioned himself in Seb’s line of sight, at the end of the street, and in the direction Seb walked, as if a meeting was inevitable.
Ewan had then passed away, without Seb being aware of the figure moving its feet. Two separate groups of people had crossed the monument from each side and Ewan had vanished.
Seb had seen more of Ewan that time. Streaks of white in the beard. What had looked like a dark raincoat was zippered to his neck and pulled in tight at his waist, covering the thin torso. Jeans too. Black jeans that were worn too tight for a man of his age, and were too short for the length of his legs. When they were students, Ewan’s jeans were always too short, an inch of sock always visible above his dirty trainers.
Seb had returned to his car, but at once disliked being inside the gloomy parking level where he’d left his Mercedes and was alone. Hurrying to be anywhere but inside the shadows and silence of a multi-storey, he’d tripped up and scuffed a shoe, his jog up a concrete stairwell poorly coordinated. But Ewan was long gone by then.
Hoping that a short voyage on water would place him beyond the range of the visions, or whatever they were, he’d then intended to drive to Dartmouth, to take a boat to Totnes. This was two days later, but Ewan had appeared again, and at the side of a road a few hundred metres from his home.
Seb had been driving in the direction of St Mary’s Bay and had turned into Ranscombe Road, only to then struggle to keep the car straight after seeing Ewan standing alone on the pavement. At full height too, without the shy man’s stoop that had also been strangely absent during his previous appearances. At that point, Seb still refused to call them manifestations, but this would change.
What he’d seen of Ewan’s face from the moving vehicle, and within the passing of a second, suggested an unappealing pallor embellished with a grimace. There was no smile. Just the bloodless features staring at him, with loathing.
A great discomfort, fuelled by fear and sharpened by shock, had impacted his senses and he’d veered towards the side of the road, at a parked vehicle. Forced to brake, a horn had then blared from behind. A tradesman’s van had passed his car with a roar of acceleration.
Classic FM, on the radio, returned to the car’s interior.