Adam Nevill: Apartment 16

When he turned back to face the road the figure had gone. Walking into the road, he looked up and down the wet street. There was no sign of the child in the coat.

The Green Man was the last surviving Victorian building on the corner of a scruffy street. Now, the character of its brickwork and buttresses was spoiled by the rubbish at street level. Survivors of the Blitz and looking as if they hadn’t been cleaned for decades, little could be seen through the pub’s murky windows from outside but a variety of posters tacked to the inside of the glass. There was an advert for Guinness he remembered from his teens. Now, the Guinness in the pint glass had faded a lime green in colour, like sucked liquorice. Other adverts for coming attractions, like Quiz Night and Sky Football: Big Screen TV, were only bright and colourful where the windows had been blotched by rain.

He’d lived there long enough to learn something of the customers and culture of the Green Man. Some of the punters were market traders, retired from the stalls but still doing business in the bar with East End accents so broad he was tempted to suspect them inauthentic. There were casualties from labour patterns as sketchy as his own, who drank their benefits from opening until closing, or played the fruit machine. A miscellany of other characters would be positioned about them in the gloom, like unrelieved sentries. This final subculture had no peers in Seth’s experience with whom to be compared; they represented new strains of dysfunction caused by personal tragedy, mental illness, and drink. How long now before he completely gave up on himself too? Some days, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t already.

Weary from waking late in the morning after only a few hours’ sleep, he shrugged off the residual effect of the staring child and approached the door of the pub. His rent was due: seventy quid across the bar once a week. Stepping over some dog shit, he entered the bar.

His vision began to jitter, as if he was being bounced along on someone’s shoulders. He only ever seemed to get fleeting impressions of the place: a panorama of yellow eyes, the foamy sides of pint glasses, Lambert and Butler cigarette packets, an evil fox’s face behind glass, a tier of champagne bottles under genuine cobwebs, a nicotine ceiling, a pool table, a small dog with bristly fur before an opened bag of scratchings, one Arsenal shirt, and a once pretty woman with eyes still attractive but mostly sly. Several heads turned to take him in, then turned away.

Seth nodded to Quin, who was working the bar today. Quin’s skull looked as if it had once been cleft by an axe. The wound ran from his hairless white cranium to his pink forehead and still shined with scar tissue. Quin nodded without smiling. He leant on the bar to accept Seth’s money.

‘There’s a kid,’ Seth said.

Quin squinted and his glasses moved up his nose. ‘Huh?’

The music was loud and someone with cheeks like corned beef was shouting on the other side of the square-shaped bar.

‘There’s this kid outside. Watching the place. Have you seen him?’

‘Eh?’

‘A kid. Just stands over the road. And stares at the pub. Wondered if you’d seen him.’

Quin looked at Seth as if his words confirmed something he’d long suspected: He’s gone a bit funny in the head, this one. Up there on his own all the time. No girlfriend. No visitors. Shrugging, Quin turned to stuff Seth’s rent in the till.

Feeling ridiculous, Seth moved to make his way back to the door, but someone stood in his path. ‘All right, son.’ It was Archie. Archie from Dundee, though he hadn’t been back to the wife and five kids for over twenty years. He was the live-in cleaner and handyman responsible for the rooms above the pub. Though the irony of the position never escaped Seth, as Archie was the prime contributor to the mess and disrepair inside.

Small and old-man-bony, Archie seemed to hover more than walk. But he was still in possession of an incredible thatch of grey hair, cut into the shape of a Saxon helmet. Cragged and sprinkled with whiskers, his face appeared grandfatherly, as if capable of compassion. Archie always called Seth ‘son’, too, though it was only because he couldn’t remember his name.

‘Have ye got a fag on yer?’ Archie asked.

Seth nodded. ‘Sure.’ Seth gave him a crumpled packet of Old Holborn with a last tuft of tobacco in the bottom.

Archie grinned. ‘Ar, yer a pal, son.’ He had one tooth, an incisor, bottom right, that Seth could never stop staring at. Nor the masking tape that held the thick lenses inside the plastic frames of his glasses. ‘Run out. Dinne get paid till Tuesdee,’ Archie said, grinning at his booty.

‘Listen, Archie. Have you seen that kid who hangs around outside the bar? Wears a hooded coat.’

Now he had the tobacco, Archie lost interest in conversation. He was also drunk and had to concentrate on rolling the cigarette. Seth moved out of the bar and back into the porch. He jabbed his key into the lock and climbed the dark staircase that led to the rooms above the bar.

On the first set of stairs, the skirting boards were painted the red of fresh blood. Over the walls a white paper decorated with the impression of grapes had turned sallow and peeled away from the seam. In places, vast swathes had been torn down to the plaster beneath.

On the dark landing of the first floor, Seth guided himself by the light falling from the doorway of the communal kitchen. He could smell the damp beer towels in the washing machine. Bacon had been fried recently on the old gas stove and the fat had cooled. Its smell now mingled with the scent of ripe rubbish, which meant that Archie had not taken down the bin bags. There were mice in there, but no rats, yet.

Across from the kitchen was the bathroom. Frosted glass had been fitted into the top half of the door, but was not quite opaque enough for privacy. Seth switched the light on and peered inside to see if the shower unit above the bath had been fixed. It had not. ‘Cunt,’ he said, and then wondered when he would give up checking on the progress of the repair. Aged thirty-one, with two arts degrees to his name, and he had been reduced to washing his entire body in a sink.

He climbed the second grim flight of stairs to his room. The banisters were painted the same colour of murder as the skirting boards in the rest of the building, but the pattern and colour of the carpet had changed three times by the time he reached the second floor. He shared this storey with two other men he’d never spoken to. Up here, the lack of both natural and electric light plunged Seth into oblivion.

‘Shit!’ He banged a knee against something sharp. Flailing, Seth slapped a hand up and down a wall until it happened across a light switch in a splintered plastic surround, where a fist had once applied too much force. All of the lights were on timers. Pushing the large circular button activated the unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling.

The passage between the three rooms, each fronted with a red door, appeared all the more gloomy and cramped because of the furniture stacked against the walls. It was a fire hazard he navigated daily. Hurrying forward to get to his room before the lights went out, he trampled amongst the broken bones of a discarded sofa bed. By the time he reached the door to his room the passage was dark again. Seth hit the closest switch for another five seconds of sight while he fumbled with his keys. Crossing the threshold of his room, the darkness returned and swallowed everything behind him.

On Seth’s first day at the Green Man, twelve months earlier, it was Archie who had shown him the room. And Archie didn’t hang around for long, as it had been his job to prepare the place for the new tenant. Of the two window frames neither had net curtains and only the window on the left side had fabric ones, the same colour as dress-patterns in the copies of Woman’s Weekly that survive decades in doctors’ waiting rooms. The sash window on the right side had become skewed at a tilt in the frame.