The Third Person (2 page)

‘Well, whatever. I mean, I know that you’re having a bad time, and you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want.
Obviously
, but – you know. I just wanted you to know that I’m here for you. If you want to talk, that is. We can have a chat. Hey – I could buy you a coffee some time.’

She always made sure I had a coffee each morning at nine. Bless her. Over the weeks, she’d even kept track of my
increasing lateness, with the coffee starting to arrive on my desk at nine-fifteen, and then nine-thirty.

I smiled, and clicked stop, but I didn’t delete it. Instead, I shrugged off my coat onto the chair and headed through to the kitchen.

There was beer in the fridge, as there should be in every decent, civilised home. I collected a bottle, and then went upstairs, to the study, clicking the computer on at the plug and settling in for the night.

The Melanie Room.

Not a room in the normal sense that you might think of a room, but I’d say it still had a good claim. It had two walls, a floor and a ceiling – of a kind, anyway – and rooms branching out in all directions that you created as you went. It was a Chat room: white space filled with text, divided into two vertical sections. The section on the right listed usernames; the larger section on the left was the chat space, steadily scrolling away upwards as users typed in messages that appeared at the bottom. The Room was named after Melanie Shaw, a five-year-old girl who had disappeared in Central England a few years ago. She was still alive somewhere. The Room had been named in her honour after a user named JACKJILL posted a picture of what was claimed to be her: a bound, naked girl, with her head wrapped entirely in black electrical tape, breathing through straws in her nostrils. That was two years ago, and he’d posted a picture a month ever since.

There were thirty-seven users in the Room that night, which was about average. Sometimes there were more and sometimes less, but it hardly mattered. As always, the main room was almost entirely empty. Little in the way of real conversation ever went on there – the real action took place privately. By double-clicking on someone’s username you could enter into a private room with them – just the two of
you, unless you invited others – and chat one-on-one. You could cyber or discuss cases in the news, or exchange favourite photographs and links, all out of the way of prying eyes.

I’d logged on as Amy17, and it took all of thirty seconds for the first private message to come through:

Invitations to ‘private’ – however primitive – almost always came up in a separate window, and you could choose to
chat
or
cancel
. I took the first sip of my beer and pressed
cancel
. That thing about my boss? It goes for perverts on the internet, too.

A few more windows flashed up over the next twenty seconds, but none of them were that much better than just plain annoying.

I pressed
cancel
on each of them in turn, all the time scrolling down the list of users until I found the one I wanted. I’d been talking to this guy for the last couple of weeks, hiding behind the Amy17 name, and trying to get a little closer to him. Recently, it felt as though I’d been succeeding. Now, I peered at the screen, moving my head closer and closer. His name – <~KaREEM~> – did not dissolve into dots the way the gifs he often sent me did: the lines remained solid and connected. It was just text on a screen, this man’s name, but you still couldn’t see through it; it didn’t break down. It gave me the sense that this really
was
happening now, and that – somewhere nearby – he was looking at his
own screen, perhaps running a finger over the text I was hiding behind, and thinking something similar.

I took a sip of my beer, and waited for him to come to me.

A few facts about Amy17. She was seventeen years old, five feet and three inches tall in her bare feet. She had short, blonde hair, cut off in a line just before it touched her shoulders, blue-green eyes and clear skin – a pretty girl. Generally, she wore plain white tops, sometimes a skinny-rib, and a skirt to mid-thigh. Both items showed her off well, because she had tanned, toned legs from her thrice-weekly gym visits, and firm 34C breasts. Amy17 was sexually experienced, and had discovered the boys very young. Her favourite position was missionary, held down firmly by that lovely hair of hers, but she was always open to suggestions. Kareem generally had a few.

I sat and waited for him, wondering how long he could hold out. A few more revolting hopefuls approached me, and I cancelled them all. Mr Hard4U tried me again, and I responded by telling him to fuck
himself
in the ass, and try his mother out first for practice. I was beginning to despair until, after five minutes, I felt his breath on my neck and the room went that little bit darker. The window appeared.

Got you
, I thought, taking another sip of my beer. As always, my heart was pounding and my palms felt sweaty: slightly shaky. That feeling of connecting with someone over the net has always made me feel strange. It’s a feeling that’s never gone away.

I clicked
chat
, which opened up a private window. When I typed in my reply, it appeared underneath his:

There was a brief pause. The white background of the window seemed to buzz with possibility. Somewhere, Kareem was busy typing his own reply: the next line in our own little play, a long way past first night nerves. I took another sip of beer.

I typed quickly, hitting [RETURN] to post the messages and then immediately writing the next one.

There are probably a few facts you should know about me, too. I didn’t know what Kareem was imagining, sitting at his computer, talking to me. I didn’t know if he figured that Amy had told him the truth on the first night we met, but she really hadn’t.

I wasn’t five foot three; I was six foot two. My hair was blond – true – but it was cut short, shaved at the sides and back. I never used to wear it that way. In the old days, before Amy disappeared, I’d had it longer, and in a far more friendly style. These days, I looked like a thug, but that was no bad thing and, more to the point, it was an efficient cut. Reality over appearance. I shaved it once every fortnight, and didn’t
have to think about it again, which suited me just fine. One less thing to worry about.

I weighed fourteen stone. At the other end of the study, which had housed our main computer suite ever since we moved in, two years before, I kept a bench and some weights and a punchbag. Generally, I did a few hours a day on both, listening to music so loud it almost made my head bleed. Unlike Amy17, if Kareem had ever started to chase me through a dark forest, I wouldn’t have been running away from him.

I could never know for sure what Kareem imagined Amy’s motivation was for coming here and subjecting herself to this. I’d never known any woman who
really
wanted to be raped, although I knew there was a male myth that they existed. I guess Kareem knew that, too – or wanted to believe it, anyway. I mean, maybe he figured I was just another bloke, like him, doing the decent thing and enjoying the fantasy in my own way, even as I helped to create it – but I doubted
that. I’d sent him a picture of Amy; we’d chatted at length. I’d invested time and effort in making her seem real, giving her a credible background, getting her name posted at websites, generally making her presence felt in places I knew he could check. After all this time, she seemed real to me, and I was hoping that she would to him, too.

My guess? Kareem thought he’d struck lucky. He’d found a beautiful, young girl who got off on the idea of being raped. Risk-free, trouble-free: his dream come true.

That was what I was counting on, anyway.

I sipped my beer and continued to type. On screen, Kareem was describing how he was raping Amy. Like a good little girl, I made sure I (SCREAM)ed in all the right places.

Cybersex takes place in every Chat room on the internet. Due to the ephemeral nature of the web, most of these Chat rooms are open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They never close. Members vary, of course, but a good Chat room could expect to have an average of at least one hundred people logged in and talking at any hour of the day, and some of those people will be having sex in private rooms. There are thousands of Chat rooms on the internet. What this means is that there might well be as many people fucking on-line at any given moment as there are people dying, or being born.

You meet someone in a Chat room – usually by a random message inviting you to go private, and you chat for a while, sizing each other up. It works best if you’re both fast typists, and there’s no point at all unless there’s a chemistry there. In that sense, it’s the same as a physical meeting. Think it’s boring and clinical? You’re wrong: it’s not. It’s amazing how much personality shines through in the way you type. People fall in love on-line. It’s exactly as real as any other conversation, and often more telling: you can always scan back through what you’ve said to clarify meaning. It’s not like
spoken words, which just drift away. Nothing on-line can ever be properly forgotten.

The act itself, then.

Some people cyber with strangers: others prefer to be in a relationship. And there are as many ways to do it as there are with physical sex. Some people talk through an actual, imagined sexual encounter, complete with (bracketed physical instructions) and
hyperlinks
to on-line pictures, while others just talk about what they’re physically doing at the time: undressing; masturbating; being masturbated. Maybe it’s real and maybe it isn’t. The cybersex ends when it ends – usually with both partners having reached orgasm, however many miles apart from each other. Sometimes, the whole procedure will progress to phone sex; more often, though, the two people involved will never encounter each other again. Such is life. At least on the internet it’s nice and clean, you can break it off at any time, and there’s no risk of disease. No shrieking, unwanted kids for the state to support afterwards.