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Fleeing deep into the living room, I finally came up against an open window. The coolness of the night air seemed to steady me, almost as if it was somehow blowing in on the panic that was enclosed in my own mind.

Outside, the walls of the surrounding tenements made a glossy pit of blackness. Beyond its rough shape, no detail had reached me about the garden that must be laid out at the bottom. The light from the window that I was standing at had been printed onto the ground down there, giving the effect of a yellow rug that has been spread across the floor of an otherwise bare house.

I wrinkled my nose. Presumably Rose would want her smokers to be in this garden but it looked locked up. I had already registered the dregs of cigarette smoke around the window.

The police couldn’t be mistaken. They had not needed me to identify Basajuan’s body…

 Identifying the body, my mind had gotten snagged on these words.

Who had identified the body? His mother? I was alarmed at the possibility that she had been living in Edinburgh all this time and that he had never mentioned her before to me, not even absentmindedly. Or maybe the police no longer had bodies identified. More and more these days they resemble a group of cringing imposters who are trying to pretend that they are still an official organisation. They had probably found a body in Basajuan’s car and decided that it was altogether easiest to say it was Basajuan. If Basajuan ever turned up again, they would just announce it was somebody else.

If only I could peer around the kitchen doorway and peep at Basajuan’s face without being seen. Peep at it from enough of a side angle to make out the familiar set of his nose and jaw. Yet the horror that was tightening in my throat was that he would automatically turn and look me straight in the eye and that I would have made eye-contact with the life in a dead man’s eyes.

Without thinking, I raised the bottle of beer to my lips before realising that it was still unopened. At exactly the same time as I had shivered at this, Bartek had seen it from across the living room. His bray of delighted laughter had replaced the gasp of embarrassment in my own mind, making me briefly believe that I had been dethroned in there and that he was now producing my thoughts for me.

This gnomic little man was currently strolling towards me through the partygoers, apparently grave but clearly wound up and ticking with his mischief. Yet as he approached and before he had reached me, a number of different fears and options that had been formulating behind my mind were suddenly dislodged and they all slid forward. Basajuan had known that I was going to a party tonight but he did not know where it was or who was holding it. I had no memory of him having ever met Rose. They must have first crossed paths when he introduced himself to her, just a short while ago. She had heard me talking about him over the years but it was otherwise beyond her to have contacted him and invited him to her party.

Maybe he was here, circulating, as a sign. He had been always determined to convince me that the supernatural existed. Now that death had been given to him as a splendid new outfit, and he had robed himself in it, he could parade before me irrefutably, to settle the case for his ghosts once and for all.

This is nonsense, I said weakly to myself. If only I could step into the kitchen and look into his face, I would see the scandalous mistake. That he was not dead, that death had been conferred on him only through an administrative error.

It could be the car, I answered myself again. Perhaps those who were consumed by the car, or by the car’s curse, would be generated as spectres and condemned…

Stop thinking! My mind had shut with a clap as Bartek arrived. I hauled my thoughts around from out of this dreadful interior and arranged them so that they would rest calmly and exclusively on him. I realised that he was scoffing at my error with the beer bottle. Yes, your beer will last a lot longer at this party if you don’t take the cap off, he agreed. His white eyebrows were peaked in their usual mock astonishment and his quaintly pursed and lined face had sustained another crease of crocodile sarcasm.

Then I saw that a slender and very young woman was in his train. His daughter? I had heard before of him having a teenaged daughter.

She had silver-and-blonde hair that hung magically, like a frozen waterfall. But she wore glassy eyes and the careful and respectful innocuousness of a teenaged girl who has gone to a party with her father. A look of blankness that made her smooth face eerily fishlike. Still, Bartek had suddenly spun around, marvelling. “Ah, but my daughter… if you don’t have a bottle opener, my daughter – you have this super special trick, no babe?”

I didn’t have a bottle opener. It would be in the kitchen, no doubt far on the other side of this apparition of Basajuan.

The daughter smiled at me and for a second the glassiness had vanished from her eyes. She reached out and gently disengaged the bottle from my fingers. Bartek was still rolling around his jokes but I wasn’t listening.

She performed her trick too quickly for me to really glimpse what had happened. She had appeared to deliver a smart miniature karate chop to the cap and then she was handing the bottle back to me and it was open with the beer clear and motionless in the neck. For a moment the cap had been visible falling through the light from the window, like a coin flicked into a wishing well. I sensed that this procedure had been entirely painless for her and that it would not have left even a minor red mark on her hand.

“Well done,” I mouthed. I had noticed that she was not holding a drink and I was uncertain whether I should offer to share the beer with her. Would her father allow this or would he – as occurs with him from time to time – hurtle mysteriously into deep offence? He was declaring proudly that he had not taught his daughter the bottle-cap trick and that he had no idea where she could have gotten it from. He was always privately studying his daughter and her teenaged friends and collecting remarkable observations about them, as if he was a lucky anthropologist and they some rare, remote people.

I had allowed a gap to grow in our conversation and with this he and his daughter were smiling politely and moving on. I drank the bottle of beer in a succession of brisk wrenches. Now I was floating across the living room towards the kitchen. I had grown massively alert of everything around me and it felt somehow as if I was being moved through this room on wheels. I had paused before the door to assess what was outside in the hallway. All at once, though, Gavin Balland had thundered up to me.

“How are you? Excellent! TOP MAN!” His face was always wondrously beautiful and heavily haggard at the same time. His thick loin of a brow jutted, his lips pouted like those of a baby and his tiny dark eyes peered out calculatingly. His grey hair was so lank that it could have been poured onto his head from out of a can. It always confused me that I looked down into his face, as if he was an old lady, and yet he still appeared to be much bigger and more physically powerful than me.

“Just here in Edinburgh to mop up a couple of things, and then I have to DASH OFF again.” I reckoned that part of his magic was that you were always allowed only a few seconds with him and that somehow this unveiling left you feeling exhausted and as if it was impossible to continue. Or rather, you felt that if you were a member of his household, and you had to be exposed to his charisma every day, your system would quickly disintegrate, as if it was being poisoned with awesome levels of radiation.

At this point he should have shot away like a comet but next it seemed that for once I was being granted more than the standard, usually allocated portion of time with him. He was leaning forwards and ushering me into his husky confidence. He was speaking under his breath and yet his voice had become strangely thin and oily. “I’ve just been speaking to a really very remarkable young man. Your colocataire, this Basajuan, is really making a TOP impression.” He had said the name Basajuan as I had never heard it pronounced before, spitting out the “Basa” and cleanly severing it from the “Juan” and giving it a hissing emphasis.

With a great plunge, he was away again. He smiled grimly at me from the kitchen doorway. “Well, always nice to see you my man. See you around.” This was a dismissal and a firm message that he did not expect to speak to me again during the party.

I was left standing by myself in the hallway. So this Basajuan wasn’t just an apparition. It could speak to people and make “a TOP impression.” Maybe – my heart fluttered in anguish – this was indeed the pre-deceased Basajuan, chatting in the kitchen in all of his everyday normality. But, if so, why hadn’t he left the kitchen – why wasn’t he actively searching for me?

Rose passed me, clutching an armful of beer cans against her chest. Her eyes appeared to have widened due to the excitement of the party, or her agitation, and it seemed that she was unable to shake her face slack again. I should have taken some of the cans from her – or made her sit down and breathe – but instead I swooped in to interrogate her.

“Ah, so you have met my flatmate? This is the first time, no?”

Her face was hard and pink. “He touched me,” she reported.

What was this? I smiled. Next I was staring at her in utter disbelief.

Her face was still very pink but for a second different expressions were fluctuating within it. “Maybe it was a mistake. It happened… I didn’t know what was happening. He put his hand…”

“Rose…” I shook my head at her. “Are you sure this is Basajuan?”

“I need to think. I’m sorry, I really need to think this all through…”

“Rose?”

“I need to sit down and think through what happened. It’s important, I have to think.”

She broke away from me and, aghast, I realised that she was actually running, or rather scrambling within the corridor just as a panicking animal would do. A door opened and swallowed her up.

I continued to stare at the door. Was this the car?, I puzzled, doubtingly. The evil of the car?

I had not moved within the hallway. Now Bartek was marching up to me. It was beginning to feel rather as if I was a joint in an ashtray that the partygoers here were visiting, each in their turn. But when Bartek spoke to me his voice was curt and flat and shorn of its familiar merriment. “Hey, your flatmate, this Basa-basa-whatever-he-is…?”

“Basajuan.”

“How long have you known this guy?” Bartek sounded suspicious and I sensed that certain signals were being flashed at me that I couldn’t make out yet.

“A long time.” It must have seemed strange that I was still standing back in the hallway and not hastening to greet my flatmate. As though we were a pair of divorcees who were still gingerly processing the news that they were at the same party.

“There’s something off with this guy.” Bartek was regarding me steadily and then sadly, with a confirmed disappointment. “I don’t know what it is, just something majorly off.”

Where is your daughter?, I thought with alarm. Despite myself, I had looked in the direction of the kitchen. Next, however, there was a great peal of booming laughter, the age-old sound of Gavin Balland being richly pleased with something. At this, Bartek appeared flushed and startled. Whenever he is angry, he becomes small and compact, almost Boy-Scout-like in fact. When he is happy, he spreads out again like a perfume. “I know what is happening, I am going to do something about this.” He had turned and he was marching towards the kitchen.

Resigned, I could only follow. Nonetheless, there were two partygoers standing at the kitchen doorway and whereas Bartek had stepped smoothly through them, I took the opportunity to pause. I then berated myself for the enormity of my cowardice. There are times in life when you have to face something and any further thinking about it is simply a pointless repetition. As when a cat has killed most of a bird and you have to just walk in a straight line towards the bird, pick it up and snap its head back.

I would have to look upon Basajuan’s face and look into it and see what was really there. It was all or nothing now. If the familiar, smiling Basajaun was revealed in there, it would be all. Alternatively, if there was some hellish monstrosity or caricature in this face, it would be nothing.

I had entered the kitchen. I braced myself and the living breath seemed to fly from my throat. What I saw immediately was Gavin Balland, hunched over under his lank hair with his head cocked and listening intently. Bartek was remonstrating with him, his compact body almost pulsating and his nostrils rising like wings with impatience. Meanwhile, a third man was hurrying from them and as he left, Bartek spun around. He snapped his fingers at me and his words chased after the man. “Eh, this is really your flatmate?”

I had not known how to react and next the man and I had crashed into each other. I was met with an intelligent-looking Latin face, clean- shaven, bespectacled and with short black hair. He looked swiftly into my eyes and said lifelessly, “Ah hi, I’ll see you later, back at home.”

This was it, there was nothing more. I might have caught the start of a smile or a dot of something mocking but I could not be certain. He had ducked behind me and then he was gone.

“That’s not my flatmate,” I answered Bartek.

Then it came to me, splitting open the sky like angelic bells. Basajuan is dead.

“What IN GOD’S NAME is GOING ON?” Gavin Balland exploded.

He had approached me, looking very dangerous. “Are you IN ON THIS? ARE YOU?” His bleating, thespian’s battle cry could have belonged in a Shakespearean production from the 1950s. At it, every voice in the kitchen was wiped from the air and everybody stood blankly enthralled. “I could snap you LIKE A TWIG, you LITTLE SHIT!” I was unable to speak and my only remaining thought was an awe at the lavish vibrato that his voice had given to the word “shit.”

Rose had appeared in the doorway, weeping. “Please stop,” she implored. “Please… this was meant to be…” her face crumpled, “my party… it was meant to be…” Her breaths were coming up faster and faster.

Her uncle turned from her haughtily, his face an unearthly black. Bartek and I had both rushed to Rose. It was dawning on me now that something was going seriously wrong with her lately. She was like a clock that you glance at one day and you realise it has stopped and then you can’t recall the last time that you had seen it working. But I also knew that in the coming weeks, helping her would help me as well. When you are sick, the best treatment is always to find somebody who is sicker than yourself, who will cause a nurse to rise, magically and majestically, from your own disastrous sickbed.

Gavin Balland owns a large collection of vintage cars. The “Basajuan” who had approached him at this party and who had managed to procure such access to him had had a vintage car that he was looking to sell. He had contrived it so that this had soon come up in their conversation. Gavin Balland had been excited by the pictures that “Basajuan” had shown him and the two of them had swopped numbers.

Bartek had seen what was happening. He had encountered this scheme before and he may have even recognised the operative posing as Basajuan from some previous scam. The vintage car that was on sale had been stolen from Gavin Balland’s own garages. Presumably, in the pictures that Gavin Balland had been shown, its colour had changed and maybe it had been even beaten up a bit to give it some extra character. In the doorway of her party, Rose had probably told the intruder that he “must be Basajuan” and he had simply factored this into whatever loose narrative he was running with. If or when the real Basajuan ever turned up, he would no doubt proclaim that there had been a misunderstanding and dive under a table.

The gang operated in this way, stealing cars and selling them on to greedy and gullible people. It is conceivable that they had also sold Basajuan the methamphetamines that had killed him.