The Third Person

Now, he was so deep in the industry that you’d probably never find his stuff. It was the real deal these days: each and every word was true. They sold it in shifting markets, sealed in polythene, and behind locked, guarded doors in dark halls, where strangers shuffled from stall to stall, and even in these places you had to search it out, listen for whispers. A stallholder’s friend would be able to provide you with kiddie fiction, say, or rape text, but if you wanted his stuff then you had to go to the stallholder’s friend’s friend, and you had to keep your mouth shut and know when to back off. Because these days, his writing was so far buried that only the truly fallen ever even caught a glimpse of it.

And it was there – as low as you could get – that he began to see a way out.

Cover

Title

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Epilogue

Thanks for some of the ideas in this book are due to Matt Ridley and Richard Dawkins. More personal thanks to: Suellen Luwish and Simon Logan for comments on early drafts, along with much online entertainment; Jonny, Tilly, Neil, Ken, Ben, Cassie, Tom, Gaz, Nicole, Keith, Steve and Simon for various friendships and encouragement over the years; Marie, Debbie, Carolyn, Keleigh, Sarah, Jodie, Liz and Nicola and everyone else in the sociology office for taking enormous amounts of piss but generally being excellent; a fair few teachers along the way, including Mr Walker, Ms Charles, Mr Horobin, Mrs Hadley and Sally Roberts; my agent, Carolyn Whitaker; Sarah Such, for helpful comments; Jon Wood, Nicky Jeanes and everyone else at Orion; Katrina and Sal and Emma, for being great; Becki, for aiding my commitment to editing with her atrocious choice of television programmes (and being really, really, great); Angela, for being my best friend in the whole world; and Mum, Dad, John and Roy for all of their encouragement and love over the years.

Most of all, thanks to Janny, who always had more faith in me than I ever did or deserved.

The writing is always done by hand.

There are a couple of things you need to know, and that’s the first.

He’s gently flexing his wrist as they bring the girl in: warming himself up. It should take about half an hour from start to finish, and that’s a long time to write for, so you need to be prepared. Loose and relaxed. He gives his shoulders a roll and watches the girl. The bed, covered in straight sheets of glinting polythene, is on the other side of the studio. When she sees it, her step falters, but they push her from behind and she starts moving towards it.

The door is locked behind them.

‘Fucking
behave
,’ Marley tells her. He’s the one that pushed her. She glances at him, scared, but he’s not even looking at her now: just grinding out the remains of his cigarette on the floor. The smell of the smoke drifts over, catching his attention just as the girl sees him.

He sees her right back.

For a moment, it’s as though she’s standing on her own, with all the other figures in the room fading into the background: Marley disappears; Long Tall Jack melts out of view; the others go; even the bed seems dim and far away. It’s like the girl is spot-lit: a fragile, scared thing illuminated to the exclusion of everything else.

He wants to smile at her and tell her that it will be okay,
but it won’t. And he’s not here to make her feel comfortable, or help her.

So instead, he picks up his pen.

And without taking his eyes off her, he begins to write.

Did you know that it’s possible to watch rape, twenty-four hours a day, in the comfort of your own home? I bet you didn’t know that, but it’s true. You can just sit in front of your computer screen – with a cold beer in one hand, clicking a mouse with the other – and watch rape after rape after rape. The scenes vary, but the reality remains the same. And that’s what I was doing, on the evening when the end of it all began: I was watching rape, drinking a Bud.

There are certain ways to do it. I’ve found that the best is to abstract yourself from what you’re actually watching and listening to: you quit hearing screams and, instead, you hear pitches and tones; and you don’t so much see
skin
anymore, as you see pixels: patterns of colour that remind you of things. Pink flesh; a black open mouth.

It’s the best way, but still not good.

I’ve grown up in a generation where reality is constantly mediated, though, and so it’s really not that different. When you see a war on television, for example, you’re not actually watching a
war
. Get close to the screen and you can see the little blocks of colour shifting, and that’s really all it is: a lot of second-hand light. It’s not really people dying at all. Reality, mediated. You’re not seeing what happened, you’re just seeing an effect it had on film in a camera. In every way that matters, it’s no different to someone describing it to you afterwards: someone whose eye is a lens; someone whose
memory is camera film. Purely and simply, what you are seeing is hearsay.

The hearsay on the internet varies, depending upon where you go to listen. If you enter the word
rape
or
snuff
into a search engine, you’ll find the tip of the iceberg. Seriously – it’s that easy. The first few porn sites you’ll visit will be mostly – if not totally – legit. They offer violent, hard-core porn for download, generally for money but there are ways around that, and you’ll know, from watching them, that they’re fakes. There’ll be a plot structure that gives the whole thing away. Sometimes, there are even credits at the end. These are stories: fantasies designed to give you a thrill, acted out by paid, willing models.

I had a few hours’ worth of this type of movie on my hard drive: some good quality and some bad. I’d seen enough to know I wasn’t interested. I wouldn’t find Amy here. These staged travesties weren’t an abyss, merely a gutter, and I knew from the beginning that I was going to have to look deeper to find her.

Here’s something else I’ll bet you didn’t know:

The deeper you look, the darker your house gets.

It’s a strange thing. You start to feel very lonely, sitting in front of the screen. The heating starts clicking; pipes creak. The ticking clock in the other room starts to sound like cover for movement downstairs. You feel things standing behind you. The shadows become gloomier and the light less sufficient. The first time I felt this – and it felt like cold breath on my neck – was when I was looking at the carcass of one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s kills: a medium-sized jpeg image of a corpse, resplendent in streaks of red and white, propped up beside a stained bath. And suddenly, I felt watched. The silence in my house – our house, I mean – started to ring, and I slept with the light on later, lucky to sleep at all.

The death sites and the rape sites go hand in hand. Do you
want to see dead people? You can. More specifically, you can view them by category. Do you want to see burn victims or hanging victims? Do you want to see gunshot wounds and people smashed beneath fallen rubble? You can see all these and more: rotting corpses; naked women, murdered and in various states of dismemberment; rape victims, discarded like torn bags of old clothes beside forest paths; deformities, both congenital and deliberate. The sites are often white text on black, adorned with skulls and candles, and the tone is generally humorous and genial. If you don’t like it, you can leave. These sites are not illegal.

Some skirt close, though. I found one site which showed photographs taken by two killers as they raped, tortured and murdered a young girl. They had also audiotaped it, and the track was available at the site. I listened, deliberately hearing it as pitches and tones: fluctuations in sound. The site claimed, incorrectly, that it was the closest thing to snuff available on the internet. I’ve seen closer. Other sites are devoted to animals, both sexually and otherwise. A woman being raped by a horse (real). Cats being flayed alive, their skins coming off like sellotape unsticking from a parcel (real). During the time of the Waco siege in Texas, FBI agents played tapes of rabbits being tortured to death into Koresh’s compound in order to wear down those inside. I have that sound file, and it wears me down, too.

But like I said: none of this is
actually
real. It’s all just hearsay after the event, like a newspaper report, or the Bible. And that’s the best way to think of it: maybe the only sensible way, if you’re going to think of it at all.

Just dots of colour or beats of sound.

Just words on a page.

‘You have one message . . . Message One.’

Beep
.

I recognised her voice straight away, and pictured her face as she started talking to me from the pocked, steel-grey grid of my answerphone.

‘Jason? It’s me. Charlie. I was just calling to find out how you are. I mean, I know that you’re not great, but . . . you know. Williams is going spare about you not turning in this week.’

Charlie had just turned eighteen and was cute as hell. Short blonde hair, trim figure, pretty face. She had a pierced nose: a little gold stud, as though someone had banged a painless nail into the perfect skin on the side of her nostril. Whenever she spoke, she didn’t seem to have a bad word to say about anyone. For me, for some reason, they were all good.

‘He’s tried to ring you a couple of times, but there was no answer. He’s left messages, though. Have you not got them?’

I nodded to myself, picturing Williams behind his desk. White shirt, dark tie. Neat hair and glasses. He always had little red flushes in his cheeks, as though he was constantly embarrassed about something. I think he was slightly paranoid that the other guys all took the piss out of him when they were out of ear-shot, but in reality they couldn’t give a shit about him, and I felt the same way. He was my direct superior, and he’d left increasingly angry messages on my answerphone for the last few days. I’d deleted them as soon as I heard the first few nasal notes. A lot of times, you don’t need to hear people to know what they’re saying.