‘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. Two 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.’
‘Maybe he did know, but the truth was too sad to acknowledge. Or maybe he was a total narcissist. A psychopath. No conscience. And you were his perfect victim. That might explain why he’s tracked you down. You might not be hallucinating, Seb. Because that’s what I don’t get, why you keep seeing him . . . or think you’re seeing him now.’
‘That makes two of us. No one can appear and disappear like that. It’s no trick. And it doesn’t explain how . . . everything seems to change before he appears.’
6
Down the Last Valley
A sense of having been amongst a group of whispering people, who were moving through a cement culvert, receded from his mind.
Seb could see the darkened room surrounding the bed.
Becky was already sitting up, her fingers spread across her cheeks. A gesture she made if something upset her in a film.
She said, ‘Can you hear it? Outside?’
Her frightened eyes increased the disorientation of Seb’s own rousing. And he could hear something too, a noise that he shouldn’t have been able to hear from inside the bedroom. For the second time recently, he believed that a large animal was moving along an external wall of the house.