Apartment 16 (11 page)

TEN

Weakened, his stomach hollow and burning, Seth woke in his room. Pissing into a large saucepan and drinking warm tap water from an old bottle, he had kept himself alive and maintained a basic toilet until the worst of the fever passed.

Through the thin curtains he could see the glow of electric lights spreading in the apartment building at the back of the Green Man. It was dusky and darkening already. The travel alarm clock told him it was four o’clock. Avoiding all daylight now seemed inevitable in this life he led. When he finally saw it, he wondered whether the sun would replenish or kill him.

Upstairs at the Green Man, all was quiet; the other tenants must still be at work, or out wandering, or down inside the bar. Soon they would return and begin frying bacon and eggs in the kitchen. It was all the others ate, fried breakfast. The thought made his stomach deflate.

Wrapped in the duvet, Seth edged off the bed and took the one step required to reach the fridge. He turned the kettle on and opened the fridge door to retrieve the plastic bottle of milk. The vanilla light from the fridge hurt his eyes. There was only a dribble of milk left and he sniffed it. It must have begun to turn some time during the morning when he was out cold. Without milk he couldn’t eat cereal, and there was no bread. He looked across the shelves and saw a nub of hard cheese, some spice bottles with coloured lids, three stock cubes, soy and Worcester sauce, a dried garlic clove and a half-empty carton of withered mushrooms. Nothing to constitute a meal, in combination or if taken separately. On the fold-out table in the centre of the room two small apples had gone soft and become dusty. It would be like biting into the stuffing of a cushion.

It couldn’t be avoided: he would have to go out.

Feeling faint, he sat back down on the end of the bed and rolled a cigarette. Three drags made him dizzy.

Should he wash in the sink downstairs before he ventured out to the supermarket? He decided against the idea. This place was unclean; it was for the unclean.

The kettle was boiling. He poured the water on to a tea bag and heaped four spoons of sugar inside the mug: that would get him up the road to Sainsbury’s. Looking at the floor, he sipped the tea. Cherishing the warmth of the mug in his cupped hands, he thought of the hallucinations of the last few days and nights but was surprised by his lack of concern. The horrific nature of the dreams, their macabre themes and terrifying situations sustained night after night, the reappearance of the hooded boy: all this, surely, gave cause to question his mental state. But to him there seemed to be something both natural and necessary about it all: even the execution of the Shafers in that long and tortuous dream. What followed that nocturnal sojourn in their wretched apartment, he refused to dwell upon. The vaguest recollection of the indistinct apparitions in apartment sixteen still jangled his nerves.

But for the first time in over a year he was intrigued by himself. Never had nightmares seemed so real, though he could not account for this. Perhaps he was just too miserable and lethargic to be bothered by any further signs of slipping away from the path that others walked. Inertia killed motivation. Isolation made him paranoid. Poverty left him wretched. He knew all this. Put yourself through it and you never know how you will react. Hardship was supposed to be good for art. But what kind of art and at what cost?

One month previously, an uninterested doctor had tried to give him Prozac again. ‘Stop working nights. It obviously doesn’t suit you,’ he had said, bored, his pen poised over a prescription pad. But it wasn’t as simple as that, Seth had wanted to tell the man. People make me manic. They exhaust me. They drain me. Isolation is my only defence. I have to be awake when they sleep and asleep when they are awake.

‘Fuck it.’ He stood up and stubbed the cigarette out in the saucer he used as an ashtray. There were over twenty butts in there already, stiff and gnarled like the fingers of old puppets. A cloud of fine grey ash erupted from the dish when he put it on the dining table. What did his lungs look like? That would be worth painting. An exhibition of one man’s decay; his mind and emotions and morals represented in the colours and shapes of his dissected body. Maybe he should try a sketch later.

Seth sat down and rolled another cigarette.

Although they were creased, damp, and a little short in the arms and legs, Seth wore the same clothes he’d worn two days earlier. The cold came through them.

Out on the street it was hard to see anything clearly. It was like looking at this tiny rumple of the world through the watery windscreen of a car with ineffective wipers. Darkness swallowed the yellow street lights. Drizzle smudged definition. But he did notice one thing when standing on the pavement under the creaking sign and dripping gutters of the Green Man: a small boy in a hooded coat on the other side of the road, waiting solemnly between two parked cars.

He flinched at the sight of the urchin who had led him through his own dreams. But once the quick jolt of shock dissipated he attributed a sullen insolence to the small figure, imagining a weasel face inside the dark hood, grinning like a bully at the surprise and alarm on the face of its victim.

Leaning into the rain, Seth dug his hands deep inside the pockets of his overcoat and strode away from the pub and the watching figure.

A swift wind buffeted his unprotected head. Blankets of newspaper, made heavy by water, slapped into his shins. Kicking out at the tangled mess, he lost his balance and tumbled into the plate glass of the bookie’s window. It took his weight. He straightened up, swore, and tried to hurry on into the blowing air and pinpricking drizzle. Even the buses and cars on the road seemed to wheeze and struggle against the energy that came down the street like a flash tide. Raising his face in acceptance of the rain and swirling vapours, he called the universe a cunt.

Outside the paper shop a news stand displayed the
Standard’s
headline:
Police give up hope on missing Mandy.

Anger turned to shame. That kid in the hood was out in the rain and cold and darkness. Impulsively, Seth turned towards him and raised an arm. But in the air his hand dithered, useless and indecisive. Did you wave these days or do the thumbs up? Or was some kind of rap salute the only thing cool enough to guarantee a response from a youth? He slid his hand back inside his pocket and waited for a bus to pass the kerb where he had last seen the hooded boy. When his view of the road was clear the child had gone.

Wiping a rivulet of rain from his nose, Seth turned and pushed on to Sainsbury’s. With only nine coppery pennies in the pocket of his jeans he would have to go somewhere where a bank-card transaction was possible. ‘That fuckin’ kid,’ he said to himself, and dodged between two women carrying umbrellas to get to the pedestrian crossing opposite the taxidermist’s shop.

But something was wrong with the supermarket.

Despite most of the shelves displaying a wide variety of products, he could see nothing edible.

As usual, scores of people were pushing and nudging against each other as they filled their wire baskets. But Seth wondered how they were finding anything fit to eat. He was tempted to stop someone and ask how they intended to prepare and then consume the things they were taking off the shelves. But the young woman nearest to Seth filled him with disgust. What was wrong with her skin? Mottled pink and grey and white, it resembled the surface of luncheon meat that came in cans with a self-opening lid. And her red feet made him recoil. Even in December she wore flip-flops. Her feet looked like defrosting beef, with yellow crocodile toenails hanging over the ends of the rubber soles. Her clothes smelled of damp.

Seth moved away from the overripe tomatoes she was prodding with a finger. He would not be able to touch anything in that part of the fresh produce section knowing her salty pork face had been near it. She turned towards him and elbowed him aside so that she could inspect the hard, dry onions. Her muddy eyeballs had a blunt glaze. Her mobile phone began to ring. Clawing it from her clutch bag, she cocked her head back, delighted with the opportunity to shriek in public.

Seth walked away. But none of the other produce was fresh either. A bunch of spring onions that he held before his face sagged between his fingers. When he saw it was priced at one pound and seventy-five pence, he crushed it and threw it into the yellowing Chinese leaves.

His hunger was desperate, but what could he find to eat here? Turning his face away, he dropped celery and a round lettuce into his basket. ‘Compost. I’m buying compost,’ he said with a smile full of teeth.

He turned to look for fruit. The bananas were brown, the pears were fluffy. No oranges left either and everything else was too soft, split, white with thick pesticide, spindly, old, or rotten.

About him, people with grey faces and cheeks encrusted with pimple scars scurried and clawed at the plastic baskets and shelves to gather up rubbery mushrooms, gamey fish portions, fatty mince and expensive imported chillies sealed in jars filled with a murky red embalming fluid.

He tried another aisle, but found himself unable to stop staring at a fat old woman who was collecting bricks of lard in waxy paper. She was going bald and stank of sweat. Through her coat and pink cardigan he sensed the texture of her back: fleshy but slick, possibly fungal.

He shook his head and covered his nose and mouth with the back of his forearm. Burping gassy hunger air from the pit of his stomach, he began to feel faint and leant against a long refrigerated bin full of frozen paper they were selling as chips. Breathing deeply with his hands on his knees, he gathered his wits before moving on.

But in every aisle he became hemmed in, shoved, sneered at. The faces of the children were like Halloween masks, carved pumpkins, spiteful and grinning. They banged into his legs and gobbled freely the sweets that smelled of chemicals. Scruffy old men in dirty trainers shuffled around the tinned beans.

Near the bakery counter he was overwhelmed by the stench of human piss: briny, kidneyish, raw. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ he said, and appealed for understanding from the couple in dirty denim jackets and flared jeans who selected tiny misshapen loaves made from organic flour. ‘Can you smell that? It’s piss.’ They looked at Seth with their pale fish-belly faces and then exchanged glances with each other. When was the last time they’d slept? Dark circles around their eyes had begun to look like bruises. They said nothing and turned their backs on him as if he were raving.

Dropping his basket against the tiled floor, Seth shook with a rage that made him dizzy. Clenching his fists, he stared at a row of birthday cakes; the coloured icing was smothered with fingerprints. Someone had taken a bite out of a chocolate fudge cake and returned it to the shelf.

The smell of piss was even worse by the naan and pitta bread selection. He watched a woman in a smart business suit who had greasy hair arranged in a ponytail. She picked up the spoiled fudge cake and dropped it into her basket. Her leather shoes were misshapen by her long feet and masculine toe joints. Seth wanted to leave.

Vestiges of the fever were still alive in his body. That’s why the world looked this way. Every now and then he would shiver and huddle his arms inside his coat. Bitter white and glaring, the ceiling lights scalded the back of his eyes and made him squint.

A trolley was pushed into his shins. The mother-of-three behind the carriage looked daggers at him and bared her dirty horse teeth. Her breath was a gust of sour yogurt.

‘Fuck off!’ Seth said, his voice cracked. Grabbing her children against her legs, she stumbled away from him, repeatedly looking back over her shoulder as she took flight. Even at ten feet he could see her moustache.

The tins of tuna that he picked up to buy had something sticky on their dented lids that smelled rancid. Contaminated. He put them back. Inside the sardine tins he knew the silver bellies of the dead mothers were full of tiny brown eggs. Seth burped and wiped a layer of milky sweat off his forehead.

Down an adjacent aisle he found it impossible to believe that a cluster of people in smelly coats were buying bags of rice in which moist rodent droppings were clearly visible through the polythene wrappers.

There was nothing in his basket but soft celery and a brownish lettuce. He added a few bottles of still water. The wire handle dug into his tender fingers. He threw out the lettuce and celery. He would have to find things sealed inside metal that had not been tampered with or touched, sniffed at, breathed upon. But not the fish. He wanted uncorrupted edible matter, so much the better if it were a tasteless paste that had been processed by the metal fingers of robots who stood in long lines in dust-free factories. He wanted nothing that had come into contact with people.

Soup! Of course. Seth smiled and walked quickly into the central aisle and looked above his head for directions on the hanging signs. On his third trip down the length of the main aisle his neck ached and still there was no sign of soup.

Someone touched his elbow. ‘Sir.’

Seth wheeled around and saw a black man in a white shirt and blue tie. His eyes were yolky and bloodshot. Above the shirt pocket a plastic name tag revealed his identity: Fabris.

‘Oh, soup,’ Seth said, hurried, harassed, desperate to communicate. ‘Soup. Soup! I can’t find the soup.’ His gibberish was slow and interspersed with swallows. Inside his skull a thick insulation of white fibres seemed to prevent him from putting the words in the right sequence. His tongue was swollen and clumsy. He hadn’t said much in days; it was like he had already forgotten how to push sound from his mouth. Seth cleared his throat so aggressively the security guard took a step back and held his hands out, peroxide palm first.

‘No. No,’ Seth said. ‘Soup. It’s the soup. I can’t find the bloody soup.’ At last! His voice had come back. ‘Where the fuck is it?’

‘Follow me, sir,’ Fabris said.

Seth smiled and nodded. ‘It has to be in tins,’ he told the man. ‘I’ve got water. But I need soup in tins. Won’t touch anything else. People . . . well, you know, you work here. I can’t stand stuff that’s been touched. They don’t wash very often in London. And their clothes. Stink. Someone pissed on the bread, Fabris.’