Apartment 16 (18 page)

Seth tried to get to his knees. The panicked child in his mind was screaming now.

Was it never going to end? The kicking just went on and on. Both of his legs were dead from the thigh down and one arm had become useless. The pain in his ribs stopped him from moving. Had splintered bones speared his purple organs inside? He could see it all inside his shrinking mind.

So that’s it, a tiny voice said inside the white sphere in the middle of the darkness, where all of him had withdrawn. Soon, it’ll just all be black. This is how it ends. And then, close by, beyond the swollen, hot darkness of clenched eyelids and hands over face, he heard a bus shudder and wheeze to a stop. Feet then slapped down to the pavement from the platform.

Saviours were coming to drag these hyenas off, to call the police and an ambulance, to make him comfortable on the ground with a jacket under his head. Warm hope expanded the tiny sphere of consciousness inside his skull. He almost cried out with relief. But then he heard the bus drive off, and the stamping resumed.

All that kicking in soft training shoes was hurting their toes. It was much better to stamp a cushioned sole down onto a body. So they smashed him flat. Bent his arms and legs. Compacted an ear into his head and made it hot and whistley. Ripped hair out from the root with rubbery training shoe traction that made a sticky-tape sound; these soles were designed to grip in all weather conditions.

Someone walked past, stopped, and then sang, ‘Easy, easy, easy,’ in a lazy though joyous voice. The stampers stamped. The final kicks hurt the most; the second to last one pushed his belly into his throat and made his eyes pop.

When they were finished, worn out, limping from kicking a body so hard, they swaggered away, tired, euphoric, and fulfilled.

It was too hard for his mind to register all of the parts of his body that were damaged, so it flooded the whole of him with a fluid warmth. And, impossibly, he stood up with no trouble at all from broken bones. He looked down at his body. Not too bad, he thought. Dirty and wet from being kicked around the pavement, but no blood or meat on the bone. There seemed only to be footprints from the stamping, criss-cross brandings from the soles of their footwear. He felt almost disappointed that he had nothing to show for his labours; nothing to show the jury. But when Seth decided to walk, the idea never got past his hips. And all the stabbing hell of bodily pain rushed into the marrow of his bones.

He fell down.

Then dragged his broken-doll body into a shop doorway.

Too scared to move in case the white heat of pain grew any worse, he lost track of time, slumped in the porch of the charity shop. He wanted to puke and weep at the same time. He was waiting for the ambulance, the police. They must have been called. So many people were on that bus. Scores of feet had walked past since he’d been on the ground, since those dirty feet had finished their kicking and stamping.

A little rocking back and forth seemed to ease the pain for a while, until it made things worse. There was no way to sit or lie down without the agony swelling up like a gigantic wave. The skin of his face was hot and tender and tight because of the huge lumps growing out of his head – lumps that were hard like bone. To breathe he sucked in shallow whispers of air because his ribs felt as though they had been smashed like old wooden banisters and the splinters had gone everywhere. His left hand was numb and his right knee had grown as big as a deformed vegetable made out of salty, fibrous flesh. That leg could not be bent, and even the weight of his jeans and the shoe on that foot hurt it terribly; it might never bend again. The right side of his neck was raw and sticky.

People continued to walk past in the rain. They sped up when near him. Twice he called out for help. Two girls looked at him, but walked on, their pace quickening after they had seen his ruined face. Could they see the big black crack in his skull? It was there, he could feel it. All of his soft pink-grey brain was pushing at it, trying to get out and into the air after decades caged inside its watery prison. The stamping feet had tried to free that tortured organ. He wanted to get to a hospital and be injected with morphine.

His breathing sped up at one point and he passed out, then woke up dizzy and was sick down his coat. When the choking terror passed, he rose to his good knee. Using his numb hand and letting the uninjured knee take the weight, he pushed himself up against the glass door. It was about half a mile to the Green Man. It could take all night, and he was sure he could slip into a coma at any time. He would call for help from his room if he could make it that far.

He briefly closed his eyes to recover from the exertion of standing, but was made quickly alert again by the sound of feet coming from the left. A burly shape staggered up to him and thrust out a hand. Seth flinched and jumped back at the same time, crashing against the door of the charity shop.

‘Yer man down there is too fine to drink wi’ the likes of you and me. But I’ll tell you something. And I’ll tell you for nothing . . .’ The tramp’s face was a mess of scar tissue and broken veins. Each eye looked in a different direction. His smell was choking; alcohol, scrotal rot, unfathomable layers of sweat in second-hand wool. A black can was shoved under Seth’s nose. He moved his head to one side and breathed out through the side of his mouth.

The tramp was standing too close, leaning in, spitting on his face as he talked about ‘yer man’. Who was yer man? Seth was confused. The soiled arm of the tramp went around Seth’s neck. There was a sleeve patterned with grey and red diamonds, brown and unravelling at the wrist. The pain of that dreadful wool on his neck made him cry out. ‘I’ve been attacked. I’ve been fucking attacked. Don’t touch me. Don’t hold my neck.’

But the tramp wasn’t listening; he just wanted to talk about ‘yer man’ and to spray his rotten breath all over Seth’s bleeding face.

Dragging his straight leg behind him, his head bowed in concentration, Seth lurched away from the vagrant and began the hardest and most exhausting journey of his life, where every crack in the paving stones or slight incline in the road registered in every damaged nerve and made his skin repeatedly coat itself in cold sweat. The tramp, who had mistaken Seth for one of his own, followed him home, raving about ‘yer man’.

It was as if none of these events had been random. As if there was nothing coincidental or accidental about his fate that night; as if this was all the deliberate work of something in the city, or of the city itself. Whatever it was, this malign intelligence, it wanted him humiliated and reduced for daring to forsake it. It had been watching him. It knew he had few defences and claimed him for its own.

He began to sob. The tramp swung his arm around Seth’s swollen neck again and nearly pulled him down. He came close to passing out from the pain. No amount of punishment would ever be enough. To be kicked and stamped close to death was not enough for one night. He had to be dirtied as well. Assaulted by a madman with sweat that smelled of vomit. The night and its torments must now stretch forever because he had dared to defy the will of the city. Had planned to reject it, to reject the role and the misery it had bequeathed him.

‘I’ll fucking break every stone in two,’ he whispered to the damaged man in the rotten jumper. ‘I’ll bring the whole thing to its knees, I swear by almighty god. Then I’ll turn the fucking heap to rubble.’

The tramp laughed and offered him the black can. Seth had made contact. Broken through. Their eyes were the same. They spoke the same language now and shared the same secrets about the city.

This is what you get when you call 999 and asked for the police
. There had been a long wait for someone to pick up the phone. Then a recorded message about all the operators being busy. Seth’s chest grew tight with an indigestion of frustration. The message was always clear: Don’t let anything go wrong or happen to you because there is no help, only the promise, the illusion of service. But surely this wasn’t the case with the police as well?

Seth hung up. Slammed the handset onto the receiver so hard the entire phone crashed down the side of the bookcase and bounced onto the floor.

Dumbfounded, bent over in pain, he rocked back and forth, cradling his ribs and a swollen hand. There were bitter tears until the weeping hurt and had to be stopped. Weeping uses the stomach muscles, the lungs, the throat, the face, even the spine: he never realized this until they were all too damaged to squeeze out the tears. His assailants had even denied him grief. He just had to take it, to be in pain, to not complain, to allow their empowerment.

Loose bleeding teeth filled his slack mouth. Blood bubbled over his lips. Fantasies were entertained. Red, wet ones in which the gingery weasel died slowly beneath Seth’s skull face; it was the last thing he would see, had any right to see. And a butchering for the black one, who held the collar of Seth’s coat so fists could break his teeth; equal opportunities for all the swaggering dog boys.

First he tried lying on the bed, but the pillows and mattress and bed linen felt like rope burns. Then he curled up against the radiator, but the floor was merciless. A chair offered no relief and standing up was agony. He crunched on handfuls of paracetamol, but they were like tiny firefighters, uselessly directing thin streams of water from the ground up and into roaring walls of flame that turned both solid and liquid into a gas of pain.

He could only comfort himself with visions of the next confrontation, after he had hunted them down. He must refuse to let time and the inevitable healing process soften his murderous resolve. He could not allow his mind to protect itself by repressing their faces. The dog faces. The animal yellow eyes.

Seth clawed around the dry carpet for paper and a pencil. One of his eyes was filling with smoke and jelly. He found it difficult to see the lines, the definition. The lights were too dim. And the sketch pad was too pitiful a canvas on which to placate his desire to capture these faces that kept rearing up in his mind; the universal faces of ignorance and cruelty.

He could settle for nothing less than a vast depiction of this parasite corrupting the flesh of mankind: the antithesis of reason and talent and progress. Such a work would need long, bold, primitive strokes; an absence of subtlety. Blue fists. Tommy Hilfiger. Raw meat. Gucci. Black gums. Stone Island. Yellow eyes. Rockport.

He wanted to roar like a lion on a cement floor. And bellow like a polar bear with yellow fur worn down to pink skin against the tiles of an enclosure in a zoo. The disgust must come. Let it drip down the walls. Scorch the ceiling black with hatred. Liberate rage. Forgiveness is overrated. Compassion is dead.

Seth opened the paint tins and went at the walls with wet hands.

SEVENTEEN

Miles Butler smiled. ‘But what I can’t figure out is why you’d have any interest in Hessen.’ In his intelligent eyes Apryl glimpsed mischief. Since they’d met at seven for dinner in Covent Garden, she hadn’t stopped laughing. He was one of those rare men who won you over by being modest to an extreme degree and who seemed never likely to take himself too seriously, while being accomplished at the same time. An underplayer, but a player all the same.

His face was thoroughly lived-in, but still handsome, distinguished. Even the lines around his blue eyes were sexy. And Apryl had fallen in love with his vintage hairstyle, reminiscent of an army officer in the Second World War: grey now, but shiny and neat and graded up the sides. His clothes looked classic too: high-waisted trousers worn with suspenders that she noted when he took his jacket off and draped it across the back of his chair. The only thing she would have added to his wingtip shoes, his white shirt with cufflinks and his retro silk tie was a trilby hat. They complemented each other in a way she couldn’t have anticipated: she’d worn one of her great-aunt’s exquisite woollen suits, seamed nylons that were called
Cocktail Hour,
and Cuban-heeled shoes with a little bow over the toe strap.

‘And anyway, what’s so weird about me being interested in art? Do I look like a schmuck?’

Miles laughed and shook his head. ‘No. But you’re, well, not like any other Hessen enthusiast I’ve ever met. You’re too attractive for one thing, Apryl. And far too stylish to be messing around with the
Puppet Triptych.
Let alone
Studies of the Lame.’

‘Should I be in Harvey Nicks trying on Jimmy Choo shoes instead? Or chasing Mr Big around an office?’

‘Absolutely. Why spend so much of your vacation investigating an obscure European artist? And not a very wholesome one at that.’ Miles might have been flirting, but he wasn’t dismissive of her. She could tell he was genuinely intrigued by her reasons for calling him and enquiring about Hessen. ‘You are a mysterious girl. Quite the enigma.’

She laughed, and drank from her wine glass to hide the warmth of the blush suffusing her entire body. Why hadn’t she thought of dating older guys before? ‘Well there might be a family connection.’

‘Yes, you mentioned that on the phone. I’m all ears.’ He took a mouthful of his linguine vongole.

‘My great-aunt Lillian lived in the same apartment building. Barrington House. And she passed recently.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘It’s OK. I never knew her. But she left the apartment to my mom. And because she’s terrified of flying I came over to sort out the estate.’

‘In return for half the spoils.’

‘I’ve already earned it. You should see the place.’ She thought of making light of the mess, but levity seemed inappropriate; the apartment just wasn’t something she could laugh about. ‘She writes about him in her diaries.’

‘You’re having me on.’

Apryl shook her head, relishing his interest, the pause of fork from plate to mouth. ‘And they never got on. But the thing is, Lillian, my great-aunt, wasn’t well. You know? She was really disturbed, and she kind of blames Hessen for it, so I just had to find out more about him. And I found this website and read your book. And . . .’

‘Now you’re smitten.’

‘Not exactly. I find his pictures like really creepy, but . . . this whole mystery about him and his connection to my great-aunt, it’s quite a kick. I never guessed I’d be into all of this, but I have to know what happened to Lillian and Reginald in that building. What he really did to them. Because he did something. And the more I find out about him and his art and the people that knew him, the more I just know there’s something not right. Something terribly wrong, in fact. My great-aunt may have been crazy, but she wasn’t making it all up. I’m convinced about that now. But what was he doing to her, and how did he do it?’

She then bit down on mentioning her own experiences with unexplained phenomena inside the apartment. He’d think her mad.

Miles nodded, and began to refill her glass. ‘Did you know that everyone who was at all close to him had a personality disorder? They all died young or ended up in institutions. He attracted the disturbed, the damaged and the eccentric. Misfits and outsiders all of them. People who couldn’t function in the world they were born into. Individuals who saw things. Other things. And not necessarily what everyone else was able to see. They orbited him. But I think you are suggesting that he made your great-aunt that way. Which is a novel perspective. So maybe it was his effect on others that explains their behaviour. An idea I never considered.’

Apryl’s glass was full. He rotated the bottle to avoid a dribble. He was trying to get her drunk. To remove the last vestiges of her nervous formality. She decided she didn’t mind at all. It was good to unravel a little. London was a bewildering place, but just when the city had begun to make her feel really low, it suddenly had this romantic side too. It had been ages since she’d made a real effort and dressed up for a date. And tonight, it was the sense of infinite opportunities in the city that seduced her. How could you ever get to the end of such a place? Miles filled his own glass.

Apryl took a sip of her wine, narrowing her eyes over the rim. ‘You know so much about him. But can you respect a man who was so fucked up? Why
you
are into him is more interesting to me right now.’

Miles smiled. ‘I like the underdogs in the art world. And he was interesting. Fascinating, in fact. He felt compelled to try and complete an artistic vision outside the values and tastes of his own time. I’m impressed by that. It must have taken courage. Great courage to go where he went.’

‘To draw corpses? And skinned animals? And those nasty puppets? A fairly bleak world view, isn’t it?’

‘It is. But then his world changed so much, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. Imagine what Darwin and Freud did to religious belief. Not to mention the horrors of the First World War. Mechanized slaughter. And industrialization. The rise of Marxism. The beginnings of Fascism. The great war of ideology brewing. The flux was represented in so many ways. Fractious, discordant, chaotic ways. Modernism, if you like. And he took his place there, but his reputation could only be posthumous. I think he knew it all along. But he wasn’t interested in acclaim. He never cultivated peers or curried influence. He did it for its own sake. And for himself. Don’t you find that incredible? Especially these days? To dedicate your life to one vision with no thought of reward?’

Apryl smiled. ‘Sorry, I was only playing devil’s advocate. It’s a bad habit.’

He winked at her. ‘It is. Life could have been very comfortable for Hessen. Privately wealthy . . . educated at the Slade . . . handsome . . . erudite . . . cultured . . . talented. Come to think of it, he was a bit like me.’ He said this with a straight face until she began to laugh.

He offered her the basket of bread. ‘He had access to the great minds and talents of his age. Not to mention the queue of eligible connected beauties who would have fawned over him. But he made decisions guaranteed to make life difficult for himself. Incredibly difficult. He looked for and drew death, constantly. The moment of death in hospitals and the moment after death in the morgues and operating theatres. He obsessed over medical curiosities. Deformity. Disfigurement. He spent his best years trying to understand death and the idea of being trapped. By disability, and by social immobility. Wallowed in it. Spent his weekends bribing undertakers in funeral homes, his days sketching skinned sheep and offal in the abattoirs of the East End. Or drawing the deformed limbs and faces of the poor wretches who suffered every conceivable disease and incapacity.’

‘Must have been a barrel of laughs.’

‘Precisely. And what about his evenings when he was a younger man? No parties for Felix. Instead, he investigated every mystic, seer, and black magic practitioner in town, or attended séances held in front rooms and parlours. There is no evidence of him ever relaxing. Or being in love. He never seemed to do a single thing not directly connected to his vision. I know of no other artist so determined. To spend a decade trying to perfect line and perspective, and then to launch into distortion, which he claimed was the only true vision. A recreation of the Vortex. The absolute epitome of wonder and terror and awe. A place after this world, accessed only by madness, by dream, by the deep subconscious, and by death itself.’

‘You really think he was that good?’

‘Hard to say. Because what of that did we see? What survived? Those terrible final drawings of the human and the animal, imprisoned in those unformed landscapes. You see, I think Hessen is more interesting from the perspective of what he was trying to achieve. The drawings are only studies. Initial plans for the paintings no one has ever found. And to also go public in support of fascism with his Vortex paper – how could I not be fascinated by the guy?’

Apryl smiled. ‘I’m convinced. What was his name again?’

‘Don’t make me come over there.’ He raised one eyebrow and looked at her in such a way that she felt part of herself melt.

‘I looked on Amazon and there’s only your book.’ She didn’t mention the dozen bad reviews written by members of the Friends of Felix Hessen.

‘In this country, we’re very bad at looking after our artistic heritage. America is the place to find anything of value about British painting or poetry in the twentieth century. Ironic, I know, but there’s nothing left of him here. Though I believe there was very little to begin with. Hessen’s contribution to modernism is hard to gauge. That’s the problem. The myths that surround him are far greater than any actual evidence of his ability or influence. Besides the drawings there’s nothing left. Had he painted it would have been different. But sketches and chalks are not enough. Some of them are extraordinary, I know, and perhaps hint at a formidable vision. But I doubt it was ever realized. No one ever saw a single painting apart from a few acquaintances. And one must, surely, cast some doubt over the reliability of their testimony. I mean, they all saw something different.’

Miles took a long draught of his wine and she liked the way his face flushed with excitement as he talked. And that voice. She didn’t want to interrupt his flow. He could have been reading from the back of a detergent box for all she cared. She could listen to that voice all night.

‘But he was ahead of his time. He potentially created a new visual language, steeped in an anti-aesthetic, and in philosophy and radical politics. Outside vorticism, futurism, cubism, surrealism, he operated alone, and followed his own creative discourse from an early age. You could even call him an occult philosopher. Misunderstood in his own day and virtually ignored ever since. The scourge of middle-English conservatism and safe Bohemia. A painter who saw art as the worship of something supernatural. And as the means of finding it. What’s more startling is that no one wrote of him before me.’

That mention of the supernatural made her feel suddenly uncomfortable. It nearly spoiled her mood. ‘Do you think . . .’

‘What?’

‘That he had powers or something?’

‘Powers?’

‘I know it sounds freaky, but my great-aunt was really scared of him.’

‘Well, he was steeped in occult ritual. Was probably tutored by Crowley, the Great Beast
666,
in the most advanced summoning rituals. Who knows what Felix could have suggested to the impressionable.’

‘But what if it wasn’t all suggestion?’

Miles laughed and tore a bread roll apart with his fingers. ‘You’re pulling my leg again.’

‘I guess.’ It was a foolish question and one she immediately regretted having asked. All around her people were eating and talking under bright lights in a modern restaurant. Outside, taxis were trundling past and people were lining up to enter an opera house. This was a world of cell phones and credit cards. There were no ghosts. Maybe she was starting to lose the plot by filling her head with so much of Hessen’s and Lillian’s madness.

‘And the mysticism, of course, is not in his favour as far as the critics are concerned,’ Miles continued. ‘In fact, all the informed responses from art historians and curators who were familiar with Hessen were the same when I was researching the book. They all thought him absurd, and a minnow in comparison to his contemporaries.’

‘I guess you can believe anything you put your mind to,’ she said quietly.

Miles didn’t hear her but was looking intently into his wine glass at the syrupy crimson surface. She took a sip from her own glass. ‘Do you really think he painted anything?’

‘I don’t doubt he painted something. But I suspect he destroyed it when it fell so short of his ambition. Which was considerable. He was hard on himself. Set himself unfeasible expectations. Either that, or prison ruined him.’

‘I wonder about it. You know, whether he did produce paintings, and if people really saw them. Like my great-aunt and uncle.’

‘You think there is some dusty cache of crates filled with his work? Some have suggested he produced paintings more radical than any other modernist, or than any artist since his time. Now that would be nice. But where are they?’

‘You’re taking the piss.’ She liked the expression, had picked it up since arriving in England.

‘No. I’m not. I’m merely echoing my own disappointment at finding nothing. And you know I looked hard. I contacted the estate, distant relatives, and the children of anyone who ever mentioned him. Not to mention the family of the collector who acquired the sketches prior to Hessen’s imprisonment. Hessen gave them away. They had served their purpose. But I didn’t find one genuine lead to provide reliable evidence that he produced a painting.’

‘But what about after the war? Did you find out anything about him then?’

‘Barely ventured beyond the front door of his flat. Became a recluse. He never had more than a small crowd of acquaintances, and they were mostly gone before the forties. And there’s no evidence of any correspondence after his release from Brixton prison. So even if he painted something, who would have seen it? I once wondered if he might have given away any paintings he produced before he disappeared, perhaps to a private collector. But unless that individual comes forward, or their descendants, it’s gone. It’s tragic. I do believe he was on the verge of painting something incredible, but for some reason he either never began it or he destroyed it. I find the latter the more likely course of action. For all of his determination and grit, he was very unstable.’