Paint. The art of scam. Read Free

himself and feast on a diet of self-indulgence.
    Throughout his
forty years, his work had driven him into deep depressions as well as
exhausting, uncontrollable highs. It had kept his broken heart pumping when the
several women he had pretended to love had left him, usually for other men with
less selfish obsessions, and who actually produced hard cash.
    Painting occupied
his dreams by day and night, gave him erections and made his rare viewers
laugh, cry, hate and love him His art was his window, from which he could
observe everything that was of little concern to him; where he could be smugly
amused by everything out there which made everything in this strange world
happen.
    He had never
actually got to own the window, however, and now, again, it was becoming as
fragile as Polly's buggered front door.
    So far,
pre-Polly, his record duration for a relationship had been around six months
before the rot set in. He had been with Polly for a year now. He or she was on
borrowed time.
    Seymour opened
his eyes again and studied a faithful crack in the decaying plaster ceiling. A
tuft of horsehair, just visible, made it seem organic, yet dead and mummified.
Sometimes when the windows were open the hair would move. He could have sworn
it was growing.
    'Bitch,' he muttered as he slapped the quilt and caught a waft of
Polly's sweetness.

CHAPTER
THREE
     
    The Meeting
     
    Seymour and
Polly met in Brighton just after Madeleine Reece-Jones, a local minor socialite
celebrity, had thrown Seymour out for attempting to shag her mother. In his
defence, he claimed that it had been an accident. He'd forgotten she was
staying with them, it was dark, he was drunk, she felt and smelt the same as
Madeleine and besides, she didn't object. Madeleine just wouldn't understand.
Still, it just went to show how ridiculously insensitive and selfish she really
was. He was better off without her and her money.
    He had sworn to
himself that that was it, no more relationships, no more lies, no more
compromising, no more depending on other people to live. They always let you
down in the end anyway. He would get a job, develop his work, make a bit of
money, travel - whatever. The very idea of it all petrified him, but driven by
the lack of options and imminent destitution, he answered a small ad in the
Brighton Bugle, a small parochial newspaper that boasted headlines like “Parking
space fury!”
    “Night watchman
required, free accommodation, good rate of pay, must be experienced,” it said.
    With the help of
the few tips on interviewing skills he'd picked up at the Job Centre twenty
years before when he'd had a previous close brush with reality, the whole process
of getting the job went surprisingly well.
    It was the
perfect job for someone of Seymour's calibre and within two days he was living
in a musty little caravan under the entrance section of the West Pier, recently
destroyed by a mysterious but convenient fire that had turned it from a once
majestic icon of the Victorian era into an embarrassing political hot potato.
    What he was
guarding against, he wasn't sure. Vandals? A vandal could do nothing but
improve its condemned, rusty frame. Thieves? Help yourselves, nobody wanted
it. His job was pointless and matched his qualifications perfectly.
    The caravan was
disgusting, having been inhabited by several of his predecessors in the past,
all of whom had left their unwholesome mark in some form. The damp, dank stench
of sweat, beer farts, rancid socks and cigarettes would live there forever,
soaked into the itchy nylon upholstery and sticky plywood.
    Outside, the
caravan was caged in a small fenced compound full of abandoned bad ideas and
was sheltered by a decaying, dripping concrete structure that had once served
as the entrance to the pier. The slightest breeze was amplified by sea walls
and sea front buildings, and howled through the sides of the compound. A
blessing on warm days, but cruel on cold nights.
    Just outside the
compound, on the