Apartment 16 Read Free Page A

hanging around instead of being at school, where any youngster with parents who cared should be at this time. And directly across the road from the Green Man pub, where Seth lived in an upstairs room.
    So perhaps the child was merely waiting for a father or mother inside the bar. But the figure’s attention was directed at him, as if it had been waiting for him. And it had been on the same stretch of the Essex Road for the past three afternoons he’d been off work.
    It was such an unusual child: wrapped from the legs to the head in the faded khaki parka. Or was it grey? It was hard to make out the colour of the fabric against the dark background, or the wet silvery air beneath the smudgy red sign of the fried chicken takeaway. But it was one of those old snorkel coats. He’d not seen one in years. Didn’t even know they were still being made.
    Dark trousers too. Not baggy jeans or tracksuit bottoms like most kids wore these days, but trousers. Schoolish trousers. Badly fitted and too long in the leg, as if handed down from an elder sibling in a poor family. And completed by black shoes with a chunky heel. He’d not seen anything like those either, not since he’d been at junior school, and that was during the early seventies.
    Usually as he marched through London he did his best to ignore the people on the streets, and took extra care to avoid the eyes of any youths on this stretch of road. Many of them had been drinking, and Seth knew what a stare could lead to. There were plenty of them running wild in this area. They had acquired the privileges of adulthood too early, and played at their version of maturity for long enough to eradicate genuine youthfulness. But this one was different. Set apart by its vulnerability, its isolation. He was reminded of his own youth and he was drawn to the figure out of pity. Every memory of childhood was painful, marked by a terror of bullies he could still taste like ozone, and by a quick stab of heartbreak that lingered twenty years after his parents’ divorce.
    But what surprised Seth most was the curious and sudden feeling preceding his sighting of the strange watching child. The mere presence of this figure projected such a force that he reacted with a slight shock and temporary bewilderment, as if a voice had suddenly been directed at him, or as if there had been an unexpected hand around his elbow within a crowd. Not exactly intimidating, but enough to give him a start. To wake him up. But before this sense of significance could fully form in his mind, the feeling would pass. And so would the child. It never stayed long. Just long enough to let him know he was being watched.
    But not this afternoon. The hooded figure lingered at the kerb.
    Screwing up his eyes and facing the figure, Seth expected his attention to force the cowled head to turn away, uncomfortable under his glare. It didn’t. Not a twitch. The figure in the coat remained at ease and just continued to stare from out of the dark oval of dirty fur-trimmed nylon. It appeared to have been in the same position for so long it could have been a permanent fixture on the street, a sculpture indifferent to the people walking by. And no one else seemed to take any notice of the child.
    The situation soon began to feel intimate. Speech seemed inevitable. As Seth tried to think of something he could call across the road to the kid, the door of the pub opened behind him.
    He heard a series of disquieting sounds from inside the bar. Someone yelled ‘Cunt’, a chair was scraped violently across a wooden floor, pool balls snapped against each other, there was a raucous eruption of laughter, and a muffled love song rose from the jukebox as if trying to calm the other sounds. Seth turned to face the bright orange doorway. But no one entered or left, and the noise only lasted for as long as it took the door to swing closed by itself; everything growing fainter until the hot and noisy innards of the pub were completely shut off from