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and I almost called out to the man to stop, to go home and forget his treasure hunting. But of course I didn't. I stalked away from him, cursing Helen and Seamus for the way in which they'd rattled me.
        Back in my room I realised it was time to unpack my things and turn the place into somewhere in which I could relax. I'd made quite a mess; my suitcase in the corner was like a mouth, its tongue of clothes lolling all over the carpet. My easel I'd leaned against the windowsill. Most of my canvases were back at my parents' house in Warrington; a dozen or so had made the journey north with me, the ones that had affected me most directly upon painting them. Terry had allowed me to store half of them in his pantry-I didn't have enough space up here. I looked at a few of them now, watercolour roughs of the urban aspect to my town. I had chosen to interpret the seamier joints as a conflict to the pastures and farmhouses I'd been concentrating on the previous summer. I'd made the decision consciously, I remembered, for the challenge it would represent and as a cautionary measure, a way of jolting me out of the comforts of landscapes.
        I liked the work I'd achieved, the dilapidated shopfronts, the vandalised phone booths and railway sidings choked with litter. I'd painted the mangled remains of the gasometer after the IRA bomb and a night scene outside a dead end pub, sketched on the night of a police raid. But it was this picture, of Seven Arches viaduct-a Liverpool-Manchester Sprinter surging across it-that I liked best. It worried me that Seamus had posited his idea so accurately, although I recalled no bad tidings at the time I had painted it, an afternoon in late August, no sunshine left in the sky, just a few dregs of colour slipping like vividly coloured medicine down the gullet of night.
        Sometimes you know when the paint is going to work for you, when the whiteness of the canvas seems filled with an autonomous air; you could almost leave it alone to complete itself. It doesn't happen often, which is probably a good thing, but when it does it's the best high I know. It would be interesting to see if new surroundings influenced my work; gave it a fresh impetus or helped me hone my style. Nice to have some of them placed about the room-something to lose myself in when the view through the window lost its appeal. Which wouldn't take long. All I could see was the house across the way and a tired Ford Escort with a sticker in the window which read MAD BASTARD DRIVING THIS CAR. No trees. The only green to which I had access was in a tube marked viridian.
        I put an old Pixies cassette in the player and sang along which helped distract me from the dip in my pillow where her head had rested. I caught a whiff of her perfume as I turned the sheets and I felt both angry and weakened by the strength of Helen's presence. It has always distressed me, the way you can miss somebody even when they are still a part of your life. Did she have a clue as to the way I still felt for her? If she did, she was hiding it well.
        With everything tidy, the room seemed more like a cell. There was a lounge I could use downstairs but that was even more uninviting: the TV didn't work and the room's ceiling was often obscured by a fug of smoke; I think I was the only person in the building who didn't share the habit.
        I wished Helen hadn't stayed with me last night even though it was my fault. I'd assured her it would be on purely platonic terms; that I wouldn't make any move on her. It had been raining and we'd drank quite a lot in Lancaster where we'd gone to see a film-her idea; we'd been going out to quite a few places since I'd landed in Morecambe, possibly because it reduced the time we had to talk about what was going on. After the film we caught a bus, which conveniently stops just round the corner from me. It wasn't that hard to persuade her to sleep over but there was a moment's awkwardness when we'd