Apartment 16 Read Free Page B

the street again.
    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