‘You dropped your hat when you ran away.’ At the end of the long fingers drooped the hat Seb had lost in the cliff-side gardens in Goodrington. ‘I went back and picked it up. I could have hung it on a fence spike, but I didn’t think you’d be going back there for a while.’
After this, it was hard for Seb to process how Ewan came to be inside the house so quickly. Concussed by his own fear and bewilderment, he retained nothing but a hazy recollection of scuffing his feet to the porch, where he suffered a reluctance to remove the house keys from the pocket of his jacket. During that time, Ewan had kept closing. Hemming him in and making the strength hiss out of Seb like the air from a tyre. Later, he’d likened himself to an elderly person, herded into their own home by a thief driven reckless by intoxicants.
The hallway had seemed to blur brightly around Ewan’s black eyes and their penetrating expression of triumphant mirth.
‘No. No way.’ Seb did manage to say that much in the hall, but his resistance was brushed aside with the waft of one dirty hand. Ewan pushed past him and Seb coughed in the smell wafting from the trespasser’s coat.
Shutting Ewan out would only have deterred the inevitable. He would get in another way. Had he not already?
He needed to know why Ewan was here. The invader’s purpose remained undisclosed, but Ewan wanted something for sure. Seb hoped it was only money.
Following the horrible experience on the drive, the silence of his home, the white walls, the absence of dirt, the right angles and the open spaces took on an aspect of fragility. He might have even been taking a last look at a building marked for demolition, or one perched on an eroded cliff. All that had nurtured and protected him, and confirmed him as a success, now appeared as if it were destined to be lost.
Ewan took an insolently casual moment to look about himself in the stairwell, and at the stacking evidence of affluence that confronted his weather-beaten face. The luxury made his scruffy presence even more dramatic, wild and incongruous.
The intruder’s focus shifted to the framed book covers and prints of the film posters. His posture stiffened. There was a poster of Apparitions on the hall wall and Ewan seemed ready to remove the frame from its hooks before smashing the picture against the floor. Instead, he snorted dismissively and climbed the stairs, assuming the lead in the way he had done twenty years before when they were students. Did he believe that dynamic still existed, with him the dominant half of the friendship?
Alcohol fumes combined with his other odours and trailed behind him, suggesting a tangibility akin to an unclean mist.
Ewan went straight on up to the second floor, light on his feet, but swaying. He glanced into the kitchen and study, but only paused, as if stunned, when he saw the view of the bay through the living-room windows.
‘What do you want, Ewan?’ Seb repeated, while stricken with a suspicion that he was following a dangerous animal deeper inside his own home. ‘You’ve been following me.’
When Ewan spotted the glinting metal and sparkling crystal of the awards that Seb’s writing had acquired over the last decade, his eyes narrowed with the most severe displeasure thus far displayed. In the bookcase beneath the awards, the shelves were lined with the colourful spines of Seb’s first editions, and the foreign-language editions gathered from over thirty countries.
‘Yes. Very nice.’ He nodded as if proving some point to himself. ‘Very, very nice, indeed.’
The house offended Ewan. Perhaps he expected Seb to have put his life on hold, or to have made a catastrophe of the last three decades as Ewan had clearly done. But why show up now, and why not ten years ago when his trajectory as an author went vertical?
Ewan thumped his body down upon the sofa like an oafish teenager. A crack sounded, either inside the sofa or from the tiles beneath the rug.
Seb started, as if the spell holding him rigid for so long was broken. ‘Careful! Jesus Christ!’
‘Oops,’ Ewan said, and tittered.
Anger surged like a hot bile to the back of Seb’s throat. Too late now. He got inside. He’s inside now.
His rage quickly transformed into dread at the sight of those gangly limbs sprawled in a horrible suggestion of entitlement upon his couch. Ewan’s jeans may have once been blue but were now blackened with filth. On his feet, a pair of beaten shoes were split across the bridge of the toes. The soles had been ground to a rubber membrane by the endless, purposeless walks of the transient.
Shiny with stains and ripped in two places, the original colour of his anorak was also impossible to determine. Ewan made no move to remove his coat, and for that Seb was grateful. It suggested the visit might be short.
‘Why are you here?’