Had Ewan not always encouraged him to turn his back on the material world, on family, friends? Poverty and the avoidance of responsibility and attachments being the only way to become a true artist, according to Ewan. And once Seb had flirted with that set of ideas, and set that course for himself, he’d felt unable to meet the world in any other way. Or had that been inevitable anyway? Was that the reason he’d been so attracted to Ewan in the first place? Had he seen his own destiny in Ewan? Or at least an inevitability in himself to become overwhelmed by his own compulsions? Seb didn’t know, but their association should have ended in Wylding Lane in ’88.
That year was merely the beginning. Ewan broke him in, and his mentor’s legacy had continued through fifteen years of under-employment, often uniformed, often temporary, its only permanence low pay, augmented by occupations of sublets in the corners of cities inhabited by poor migrants and those who’d slipped off the edges. Those others had no choice, but he’d wanted to be an old-school writer and had been unable to resist Ewan’s narrative. Perhaps Ewan’s ghost had now returned to check on Seb’s progress and to correct it, or regress it.
By publishing his early stories, the small presses had encouraged Seb enough to stay the course, though he’d remained anxious about what might befall him if he didn’t make changes to his life. But what changes? A professional job? He’d been clueless about finding one of those. Write one more book and then we’ll see. That had been his mantra. And at least Seb had grafted at the writing. He’d always been a grafter, determined.
When Seb’s last parent went, his mother, he’d spent two years on antidepressants wearing a security guard’s uniform, and then he’d got lucky. Horror became the new black in publishing and he was noticed.
But why had his own past noticed him now?
Seb remained in bed with the blinds down. Sometime in mid-afternoon he drifted to sleep.
4
Broken Night
A dream of winter, of charcoal skies and grey light. And he walks amongst people he does not know. People who move on their hands and knees. They appear helpless, perhaps lost, or even blind.
‘Is the light over there?’ he is asked.
‘Have you seen my sister?’ he is asked.
‘I cannot get back,’ he is told.
He is on the contoured hillocks of a golf course. A place he often crosses to reach the pub at Churston Court. And up and down those manicured mounds of grass he walks, but more quickly now to remove himself from those drawn to him who are given to crawling like infants. He won’t look at them directly again. They’re too thin and near transparent in some of their parts. The only face he looked into reminded him of creased, wet newspaper.
A wide, hazy sea lies directly ahead of him. Sounds of a distant crowd carries from the opposite direction. Seb turns and sees a large white building, three storeys high, the front flat and white like a vast mausoleum. A building he has never seen before. The patio before the entrance is full of people, and his mother’s voice rises from the crowd. He wants to run for her. She has been gone for nine years, but he thinks he can see her, wearing a red coat.
Seb calls out, ‘What?’ and, in unison, the group points at the sky.
His mother’s voice breaks free from the chatter of the crowd. ‘Come back!’ or maybe she says, ‘Go back!’
He is a boy and has become a younger self in the way selves effortlessly switch within dreams. He remains on the golf course, but the grass is now sawdust, just like that of the butcher’s shop that he used to visit with his nan, where it was scattered over the lino of a cold floor. Sawdust with blood mixed into it. The blood was dark and he was always told not to touch the floor with his small, questing hands. He’d liked the cold sausage and iron smells of the shop.
Seb’s legs sink to the knee into the dust and wood chips, and he soon becomes breathless in an attempt to break free. Water flows fiercely somewhere nearby, as if from between the dunes. He cannot see it and fears the water will appear between the small slopes and cover his head and mouth.
Another enters the sawdust landscape, a thing with a covered head and a whitish body low to the ground. Seb can hear a wet snuffling and he is paralysed with his old terror of dogs.
Those others around him, who are crawling, scatter like crabs beneath upturned rocks. This new entrant moves eagerly to traverse the golf course as Seb flounders and twists and cries for his distant, unreachable mother.
That head, covered by a dirty sack, stiffens with an alertness that communicates an awareness of him, and an anticipation within its horrid form. When it turns to him, Seb cannot find the strength to scream. He stops struggling in the blood-mired sawdust and cries harder.
Into this dream he comes to be sitting in his childhood home, on a green and brown carpet with a pattern that once made him think of chameleons. He sees a silver Christmas tree, a dimpled glass door, a plywood service hatch opening into a kitchen, and the images remind him of what will soon be lost forever. From out of the kitchen comes the sound of wooden sticks being snapped in half while a large, unseen form turns round and round and rubs against the cupboard doors.