The Third Person (23 page)

He explored, and what he found was this: no relief whatsoever. His unhappiness trailed along three steps behind him, and no matter where he went and how much he wrote, it never went away. He collected reams of paper filled, line after line, with beautiful sentences, all of which meant absolutely nothing to him. But he kept pushing his gift to its limits; himself against the world; his pen across paper.

Until finally . . . well, he ended up here.

There’s a whole writing industry that you won’t find in the bookshops. If you mentioned it in the corridors of the Factory, they’d turn up their noses at you. And they don’t
even know the half of it. Go to your local fast-food bookstore and look: you won’t find it. Maybe if it’s a big store you’ll find medium hardcore – sex and horror – but sometimes not even that, because they like to pretend that no-one’s interested. But they are, and if you’re one of the ones whose tastes run to the extreme then you have to go looking. In the independent and second-hand bookstores you can find the beginning of it: the sex books; the kill books. But you know that none of it’s real: just cheap fiction, hacked out in stained motel rooms in the company of cigarettes and neon and bad Spanish radio. If you want it real, you have to look harder than that.

That’s where he started: on these fringes. Churning out fake dross for a handful of change. He wrote the porn and the violence, and if you want to look you’ll find his name – his real name – against a couple of legit titles: one hundred print run; staple-bound. Extreme stuff, but he faked it. You’ll have to look, but they’re there.

But all the time he was doing this, she was still with him, and it wasn’t long before he went deeper still. Testing himself all the time: finding more and more extreme things to write about; looking for edges in his talent to rest against and find some peace, but finding none: day after day.

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.

He closes the front door and flicks on a light. Rain slashes against the window, with an echoing ping as water drips down into the ceramic pot in the bathroom. There’s a towel warming over the radiator in the hall and he uses it to dry his hair. The dripping coat goes on a hanger. He takes the pen through to the front room, along with the towel, kicking off his shoes first and leaving them by the door.

His flat is pretty sparse: a settee and two armchairs, all drawn from different suites, and a folding table by the window, with a flimsy chair underneath it. There’s a pile of blank notepads on the right of the desk. Often, he’ll just sit and stare out of the window and write. He’s ten storeys up, on the top floor, and people on the street below seem so small that their movements are like patterns. He can write about them for hours. Maybe you’re in there somewhere – who knows?

Apart from that, the flat is pretty bare. He has no television, no radio. No paintings on the wall. There is a computer he uses for e-mail, and he has a set of weights over in the far corner, but he hardly ever uses either of them and so they don’t really count. His kitchen is minimal. The only things he does have are books. He has four full bookcases, containing a mixture of his own journals and notepads, and published works by other authors. These books are the accoutrements of his life: his paintings; his pot-plants; his wife and child; the family car; the dog; the cat. They are the things meant to define his life and fill it, and – just like everyone else’s – they are simply not enough.

Because he doesn’t have
her
anymore.

All he has is this terrible feeling of emptiness which tells him that the best part of his life is over. And it’s joined now, as always, by the feeling of revulsion at what he’s done tonight.

He gets a glass of water from the kitchen, and then places the pen down on the table. Selects a notepad at random from the shelves. There are plain brown envelopes in a drawer beneath the desk, and he pulls one out.

It’s not true, exactly, that when he tears a strip of paper from the notebook and slips it into the envelope he’s doing it out of hate. It’s not a simple feeling of derision or cruelty that leads him to pick up his precious pen, loop two testing swirls of blue ink on the reverse of the envelope, and then write Jim Thornton’s name on the front. It’s more complicated than that. Zoom in on the ink until the screen is filled with a pure blue, and what you see are a thousand sparkles of darkness, and they say:
I’m lost
.

But he’ll never tell you that. Instead, after addressing the envelope, he sits down at the desk and opens an old jotter pad that’s waiting for him.

Most nights, he just sits and writes. By one side of the monitor on the desk is a plastic pill bottle, containing a large enough amount of prescription chemicals to send him into a gentle, peaceful sleep: one he wouldn’t wake up from. Every night, he sits here, noting down his life in the book in front of him, and the bottle is always in reach. He wants to pick it up, but something always stops him. Perhaps he’s just a coward. Perhaps, with something more immediate like a gun, suicide would be easier. Except he doesn’t know how that would come out on the page: whether his writing would capture the moment or if it would just blurt to a stop.

Tonight, he picks up his pen and begins to write. And – for now – the bottle remains on the desk by the screen.

I woke up on Sunday morning to the alarm call for the six-thirty-three from Thiene. It had rolled into the docking bay of the bus station to the sound of a hundred bonging announcements.

It must have been the final straw, because I was immediately aware of noise all around me – the rush of air, the tapping of feet, the beeps and clicks and conversation. In the background, a lyricless Will Robinson hit was being saxo-phoned in. I was in a busy, muzak-flavoured Hell: surely far too fiery to have been slept through. But here I was: shocked awake, which meant I’d managed it.

I sat up, well aware that my muscles had solidified through the awkward contortions of a night spent stretched over three plastic chairs. The truth I faced was terrible and complicated: a bus station in full working order. Too many people, doing too many things, and all at the same fucking time. The light was harsh. The décor – a painful, pissy yellow – was harsh. The coffee would, no doubt, be harsh too, but hopefully not pissy. Regardless, after a few minutes’ careful twisting and yawning, and a check to see that my wallet and gun were still with me, I set off in search of a cup, blinking away the last remaining mists of my troubled sleep and running a hand over the stubble of my hair.

A janitor was pushing a four-foot wide brush through the hall, collecting crisp packets, bus tickets and dust. He almost collected me, too, but I managed to stumble out of the way
and – by luck – found the bathroom. It wasn’t a coffee machine, but it was a start. I used one of the sinks to freshen up, splashing water on my face and hair, and trying to rub the sleep out of my eyes. I looked like shit when I’d finished: a pale, blotchy nightmare with punched eyes and a gormless expression. But I figured, what the fuck. I was going to get coffee and – by the law of averages – kill a few more people. Neither required me to look my best.

I withdrew the dregs of my account from a hole in the wall outside. It was a risk, but I was barely caring. At some point – if not already – Kareem’s body would be found, and I was sure it wouldn’t be difficult to trace me from either the physical evidence at the scene or eyewitness testimony in the Bridge. I was fucked, basically, and the police would no doubt be checking my bank details to see when and where I’d made my most recent withdrawals. That was too bad, because I needed the money. When you’re basically fucked, you might as well get yourself a coffee. And maybe a small onion bagel.

There was a mini, make-believe park outside the bus station, and I spent the next hour and a half waiting there for an acceptable time to ring Graham. It wasn’t too bad, actually: a central floral display; some grass; an old-fashioned streetlamp. Three benches. I took the one with a good view of the bus station and waited for the police to arrive with guns, grimaces and sniffer dogs. At a quarter to nine I was still waiting, and by then I figured the hour was decent enough for me to make my phone call.

‘Hello?’

Helen didn’t sound as chipper as usual. Normally, she answered the phone like she answered the door, which was as though it was the most cheering thing to have happened to her all day, but right now she sounded annoyed: wary and impatient. She must have known it was me.

‘Hi Helen,’ I said. ‘Is Graham there?’

‘Wait a minute.’

She was gone. I swapped the phone to my other ear and watched the traffic rolling past. None of it seemed to be watching me back.

The phone clicked through.

‘Jay, hi.’

‘Hi. I didn’t get you guys up, did I?’

‘No, we were up already.’ He sounded subdued, and I figured:
argument
. There was a time, right back before Amy disappeared, when I might have thought that them arguing was a good thing, but I didn’t know what to think anymore. Fuck them and good luck to them at the same time.

‘How are you doing?’ he said.

‘Fine,’ I lied. ‘And I’m making some headway.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ I didn’t feel like going into my headway with him over the phone, so I just said:

‘I’ve got a few leads.’

‘Well, I’ve got some information for you, too. The stuff you wanted.’

It sounded like there was meant to be a
but
at the end of that sentence, and I heard it even though it wasn’t technically there. Invisible words: language seems like such a solid thing until you start reading all the spaces.

‘That’s great,’ I said.

‘The server information. The user ID. Some background. I couldn’t get as much as I wanted, because my computer’s fucking up.’

‘I appreciate you looking for me. I really do.’

I was trying to sound friendly, but his tone didn’t alter.

‘Jay, you remember what I told you yesterday afternoon?’

‘I remember.’

‘About me backing out if this got dodgy?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember.’

I wished he’d just say whatever was on his mind. But it
probably wasn’t that easy for him. We had history, after all, and when you’re throwing out memorabilia you take a last look, don’t you? It’s not like throwing away a milk carton.

‘What are you saying, Gray?’ I prompted him. ‘You want out on me?’

Without any hesitation, ‘I want out on you.’

‘It got dodgy?’

‘Not exactly. It didn’t need to get any more dodgy than it already was. I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t really want to explain it, but that doesn’t bother me too much.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, for what it’s worth, I understand.’

It wasn’t worth anything and we both knew it.

‘I’ve set up a Yahoo account for you,’ he said, and then gave me the address. ‘Find yourself an internet café and check the inbox. Everything you need to know is there. I’ve sent the text, the user details, some background. As much as I could find.’

‘Thanks. I mean it.’

‘And that’s the end, okay?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s the end.’

‘You don’t ring here anymore.’

I could imagine Helen leaning in the doorway, watching her boyfriend make this oh-so-difficult, oh-so-necessary phone call to his old friend. Secretly so pleased. She’d make him a nice coffee afterwards, and say some comforting shit about how he’d done the right thing. Which, of course, he probably had.

I closed my eyes.

He said, ‘You don’t call round.’

Maybe they could even stop buying sugar now. One less thing to worry about.

‘It’s just . . . that’s it, Jay. That really has to be it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. Just don’t call or phone or come round. Maybe you should even let go of all this.’

‘All this.’

‘Amy. Maybe you should let go of her and move on.’

‘Maybe I should move on.’

‘You there?’

I blinked, realising that I hadn’t been speaking these last few things, just thinking them.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you in the next life, Gray.’

And the receiver was down before I even knew that I’d done it. The traffic was still making its way past. Moving on and up as I stood there by the side of the road. None of the drivers were watching me: they were all watching the cars directly in front and behind, and that was all. In the cold morning sunshine there was something about that that struck me as being almost profound. But then it went.