The Third Person (26 page)

These are nothing more than themes and ideas, and they have evolved within us because they are tremendously good at surviving in us. They are concepts with real appeal. Human beings do not have claws or razor-sharp
teeth; we have society, and the themes of right and wrong are ones which promote kinship. They bind us together in our society, continually tightening it around us as we promote them and propagate them.

We don’t allow our handicapped to be ripped to shreds. We heal our sick, and look after our elderly. Those less well-suited to the environment are given benefits and helped to live and work by the state. Infants without parents are put up for adoption and brought up by genetic strangers who grow to love them regardless. We feel a strong sense of duty to help those less fortunate than ourselves, and when a weaker, less advantaged individual is hurt, or dies, we feel a sense of shame and regret that we didn’t do more to help.

Natural selection still occurs, but we have shifted it onto an entirely different plane – even with animals. If a man tortures or kills an animal – even something as insignificant as a rabbit or a mouse – we put him in jail. It is wrong to hurt and wound. It is even wrong to neglect. We set up shelters for homeless animals, to stop them shivering and starving on the streets, and people spend years training in medicine solely so they can treat injured animals, often returning them to the wild afterwards. We employ our value system liberally and indiscriminately. The human instinct is becoming universal: when something is weak, exposed and vulnerable, we try to help it. And more than that, we think it would be wrong not to.

Our Society has two main aims.

The first is to campaign against practices which inflict unnecessary death, torture and cruelty on unwanted texts.

Our main target in this area is censorship. When a tiger is loose amongst the general population, we make an attempt to recapture it because it is dangerous. We house it in a zoo or return it to the wild. But when a dangerous idea is manifested in a dangerous text, that text is simply eradicated or not allowed. This is a heinous double-standard. There is no difference between burning a book and burning an animal, and when you slice out a paragraph, you gouge out an eye or hack off a leg. We propose safe, managed environments, where supposedly dangerous animals are allowed to exist in small numbers. In short: we support a rating system (but oppose any racial value judgements based thereon).

Our second aim is the rescue and rehoming of unwanted texts. Every scrap of used language is alive. We are aware that it is impossible to save them all. Even the most committed animal rights activist tramples down blades of grass and kills bacteria by treating disease or wiping down a surface with a sterilised dish-cloth. We can only do what we can. Not every bus ticket can be saved; not every discarded shopping list, scrunched into a ball. But here at the Society’s centre, our motto is this: we turn away nothing. We run a collection service in several major cities, ready to pick up used and unwanted texts. These units of volunteers will then pass the texts to a compilation team, who will enter their genetic code into the Society’s databanks, where it will be allowed to exist alongside other texts for as long as the Society continues. That way, the genes – at least – of these creatures will be preserved.

Please do not throw away your used texts.

We are only a telephone call away.

A surreal truth: as my consciousness was gradually solidifying, the fractured image inside – hanging in my head like a blurred poster – was the passport photograph of John James Dennison.

He just didn’t look like that anymore.

His hair had been cut – short and neat – and he looked tanned and fit. Maybe seaside living had worked a wonder on him. I recognised him from the eyes, which still seemed to protrude a little, but they were about all that remained of the sallow, ugly, long-haired individual that had posed for that passport photo. He also looked considerably older, and slightly more calm.

I blinked, and it hurt.

‘It’s relatively easy to set up a simple circuit through a metal door knocker,’ he told me, nodding to himself as he crunched into the final third of the apple he was holding. The rest of the words were obscured by his wet chewing, but I could just about make them out.

‘Rapping the knocker completes the circuit. You see? You just wait for the person to lift the knocker away from the metal plate on the door and then switch on the juice.’ He swallowed. ‘Bang.’

I just stared at him.

‘Little switch on the back of the door, see?’

Well, I couldn’t see, because we were in the living room and the front door was at the end of the hallway outside.
Obviously stronger than he looked, Dennison had man-handled me through from where I’d fallen down in the street outside. The back of my head seemed to have taken a fair whack on the ground: it was still pounding, and I felt sick. My right arm was half-numb, too, resting limply over my thigh. It didn’t even feel like an arm at the moment – more like somebody had stitched a sock full of rocks onto my shoulder.

The room we were in contained a table and chair, two settees, the pair of us (one of us on each settee, facing each other), and a whole lot of paper. Most of the paper was tethered in bundles against the base of the walls, but in places he’d piled it up to waist height. There was more on and under the table, which was in a curtained bay window at the far end of the room. The sheets on the table seemed more spread out, as though that was where he read things before cataloguing and binding them. And there was a ball of twine on the floor by the chair, so that made sense.

I looked around. More paper.

Paper as far as the eye could see.

When I was growing up, there was an old lady living in the same street. Her house was owned by the council. She was kind of mad – in that harmless, slightly smelly way that some old people manage – but I always got on with her okay, and my mother went round there quite a bit, dragging me along to see if there was anything I could do: shopping, maybe, or odd jobs. What I remember about that old lady, whose name was Bunty, is that she had cats: cats by the armful. Probably twenty or so regulars – all strays – and she knew each of them by name. There were too many for her, of course, and that was why the council came and took them away; she couldn’t clean up after them or feed them properly, and I only had so much spare time for my mother to give away. It used to half kill Bunty every time the men came, and my mother would say that, although they had to, it was a shame – for the cats
and
for Bunty. I think that was one of my first encounters with the idea that there isn’t always something that’s entirely for the best. There’s only ever a compromise between a bunch of different interests.

Regardless, what I remember is the cats. Cats in the living room; cats in the hallways; cats crawling all over the fucking furniture. And that was what Dennison’s front room reminded me of, except that he had paper instead of cats. They were resting the same, dotted around the same – they even smelled the same: pungent; slightly dirty. The place was like nothing so much as a rescue shelter. Which, I suppose, is what it was.

Dennison was sitting across from me, wearing pale blue jeans and a beige shirt. My gun was hanging loosely from his left hand. In the other, the apple.

He took a last bite, just as I wondered whether he knew how to work the gun, or not. Although that obviously hadn’t stopped me.

‘So you want to tell me who you are?’ he said. ‘Scratch that, because you probably don’t. So instead – just tell me who you are.’

A complicated question for my bruised head.

‘Jason Klein.’

‘Okay.’ He nodded. ‘That’s good. And who the fuck might you be, Jason Klein?’

I started to shrug, but my numb arm would have made it lop-sided. Instead, I attempted a rather intricate question of my own in reply.

‘Do you electrocute everyone who knocks on your door?’

It must have come out okay, because it got an answer.

‘If I don’t know them,’ he nodded, ‘these days, yeah. It’s a good job, too, when they turn out to have a fucking gun in their pocket, isn’t it?’

He tossed the apple core into the far corner of the room and then pointed that gun at me, suddenly more serious.

‘What do you know about my girlfriend, Jason Klein? Is that why you’re here?’

I looked away.

What I was dealing with was a mirror image of me: an ordinary guy, dealing with other ordinary guys doing very fucked up things. Except that he seemed to be more in control of the situation than I was – nodding aside – and he was dealing with those guys much better. I would probably have shot me and run away by now. I’d be well into the existential crisis part.

I said, ‘I don’t even know who your girlfriend is.’

Although I did, of course.

‘She was called Claire Warner.’

‘Fuck.’

It was obvious: Claire gets the file; Claire stores it on her boyfriend’s computer system. They were together, or had been. Could I see her with Dennison? I think I probably could, although perhaps not as seriously as I imagined he’d done.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘
Fuck
. Absolutely. Are you here to kill me, too?’

‘I didn’t kill Claire.’

‘You didn’t?’

‘No.’

So, I figured, what happens is this. Claire rings me up and tells me the filename just in case something happens to her. That meant that her boyfriend probably didn’t know about it. Because if he did, why would she bother telling me at all? He’d be the back up for if anything went wrong.

‘How did you know her?’ he said.

‘We met in a Chat room. Ages ago.’

‘On the computer?’

The idea pissed him off a little.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We met on Liberty. She was a friend of mine.’

‘A friend?’

A friend, he was asking, with a silent
just
.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A friend.’

‘Well, she never mentioned you to me.’

‘She never mentioned you to me, either. How about that?’

Although he looked doubtful now, my attitude wasn’t making Dennison point the gun at me any less.

‘Look – I haven’t seen her in a while,’ I said. I sounded as tired of this as I felt. ‘We met for a drink once – six months or so back – but I haven’t heard from her since then. Not properly, anyway. So I can’t think of any reason why she would have mentioned me, or even thought about me.’

‘How did you find me?’

I tried a weary look.

‘Oh, it was incredibly fucking difficult.’

‘Very not funny.’

‘I found you through Liberty.’ I said. ‘A while back, Claire told me the name of a file she’d stored on your system. She obviously used your log in, because there it was – sitting right beside it. It’s not difficult to trace a person from server details.’

If I was feeling tetchy, I think I had good reason. The one lead I could realistically follow up was very clearly a dead end: Dennison didn’t know anything. Claire had just used him as a means to store the file so that it couldn’t be found on or traced back to her own computer. The guy wasn’t going to be able to tell me anything about where it had come from or what it was really about; he didn’t have the first clue. He wasn’t anything to do with this at all.

And on top of all that, the fucker had electrocuted me.

He was still pointing the gun at me – but of course he was.

His girlfriend had been found murdered, and he was affiliated to a vaguely militant underground organisation. The man was probably scared shitless. In fact, the more I looked at him the more obvious it was. He was completely fucking lost.

I sighed.

‘I know what happened to Claire,’ I said. ‘If you want to know, then I can tell you.’

From the way his gun hand faltered slightly, I figured that he did.

‘And if it makes it any easier, I can also tell you that the men responsible for it are dead. Because I killed them last night.’

Dennison looked as though he was almost going to cry. Instead, he just shook his head and lowered the gun. It rested on his thigh, and he looked so weary that I felt more of a connection with him than ever.

‘Tell me what’s going on?’

So I did.

Dennison made me go over the facts a couple of times, but by then he’d put the gun down on the settee beside him and I didn’t mind so much. I was thirsty, though.

‘Look, can you get me a drink?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

He started to get up, and then glanced at the gun.

‘I’m not going to shoot you,’ I said. I probably couldn’t even stand up. ‘For God’s sake.’

‘Okay. I hate the thing anyway.’

He was away for a couple of minutes, and I took the time to recover myself, but didn’t make a move for the weapon. Dennison wasn’t about to shoot me anymore and the people he was nervous about – the men who had killed his girlfriend – were currently smelling up a mansion a few hundred miles west of here. I was after a man named Marley and the gang he
worked with, and I was probably being pursued by the police. But neither of those parties seemed likely to be turning up at Dennison’s house in the near future. I almost wished they would.