The Third Person (30 page)

Although I couldn’t make out their faces, the two figures were very clearly watching me.

I watched them right back.

And after a few seconds, they turned and walked into a nearby doorway and were gone. Just like Kareem. The chit of their feet, and the tap of the cane echoed down the empty blue street, and then faded away to nothing.

It felt like my heart was singing in my chest.

In the distance, far over on the other side of Downtown, somebody laughed. It was an insane sound: high and long, dying away into a sad moan. There was a moment of silence, and then more voices came, like dogs answering the call. Jeers and laughs and giggles. Somebody barked –
whoo whoo whoo
– and the sounds seemed to fill the air, circling around me. I knew it was only the sound of people, but it made my hair stand on end.

Eventually, the calls died down. There were a few quiet noises from the buildings around me: murmurs of conversation; half-contained belly-laughs; the crunch of broken glass being stepped on.

I began moving down Fairway Avenue, keeping my eye out for any signs I might recognise. A few times, I heard the
tapping
coming from over to the right, but – try as I might – there was nothing to see. The buildings were implacable, and I didn’t see the two figures again.

Cut to—

It’s the entrance to some wasteground. It looks like nighttime, but it’s quite obvious where this scene was filmed: we’re in Downtown, and so for all I know it could be the middle of the day. It feels like night-time, though, and these are certainly night-time activities taking place within the four solid walls of the camera frame. The entrance to the wasteground – a gap in the grey chain-link fence – is situated halfway between two inefficient streetlamps. One is flickering, turning on and off and on and off, while the other has attracted a globe of fluttering insects, in themselves too small to see, but you can detect them in the slightly shifting, blurry fuzz of the brightness.

The frame looks like this: a bright, pale blue explosion in the bottom left-hand corner; the same in the middle at the top. In between, there’s a mixture of black and grey pixels and if you look at it right they give the rough impression of a street edge, a pavement and the entrance to a black hole of wasteground.

A moment passes.

Then, the camera zooms in, moving between the two stars of the streetlights and arriving at the gap in the chain-link fence in time with the van. All the colour has been drained from it – and most replaced by shadow – but you can tell it’s the same van from scene two. The one they took Amy away in.

Dark figures emerge from both sides, and something clambers out of the guts of the vehicle. The big man again. There’s some brief conversation; a few heads looking this way and that. A shake and a nod, and then something that might be a laugh. One of the men – the same one as before – is smoking; the tip of the cigarette burns a bright, dancing red
pixel into the screen. Beyond that, it’s difficult to make out the details. You can only really tell that they’re men at all from the way the spaces between them interact as they move. When they stand still, they vanish.

They unload something from the side of the van.

You can’t tell what it is, but there are two men carrying it between them. One of them backs onto the wasteground, and then they disappear through the gap carrying something which might be a bucket of some kind.

The smoker waits by the van, sitting down in the open side, elbows resting on his knees. He’s smoking thoughtfully. The camera stays on him for a second, and then cuts to—

—a different view of Downtown.

It’s more comprehensive than the last, and the light is better. As a result, the road is clearly visible, and you can see that somebody has painted the words FAIRWAY STR down the middle of it in such enormous white letters that it’s like a signal for rescue helicopters. The buildings are clearly visible as well: we’re on a street corner, and the centre of attention is what looks like a café. There are chairs and tables outside, and even a few people sitting at them. The inside looks bright. The view is too fuzzy to make out any details, but it’s certainly a place of business – although whether that business has anything to do with coffee or doughnuts anymore is difficult to say. A green canopy hanging over the outside seating area tells us exactly what this place used to be, regardless of its current occupation.

Cut back to the original camera.

The van is gone, and the street is empty. It’s lighter than before, though, and a shadow of the chain-link fence is dancing on the ground.

Cut to—

Combo’s Deli.

Despite all my negative expectations, it actually looked like a genuine soup kitchen, or – at the worst – a down at heel café. It was brightly-lit, which made all the windows into pale, yellow squares. It also appeared to be full of various kinds of smoke, and you could smell each of them from across the road: tobacco mingling with cannabis, mingling with something else, mingling with burning grease and frying food. I could hear the sizzle and scrape of metal spatulas chiselling burnt matter from the base of metal woks, and the shake of pans as onions and peppers were sent spinning. It made me hungry. I’d spent about six hours of the day in transit with little to show for it, and my stomach was clearly beginning to wonder why exactly it had kept up with me. I promised so much and delivered so little. With my stomach as with everything else in my life.

There were a few people hanging around in the Deli and a few more outside. One guy in tight blue jeans was trying to show his tightly-packed balls to the world, sitting spread-legged and lounging, sucking on a bottled beer. At the same table, another man was smoking a joint and considering the empties. That pair formed the centrepiece. On other tables around them: a gaggle of whores, deep in enthusiastic conversation; an old man, trying to form a loop of warmth with his coffee cup; an even older lady wrapped up in a tartan shawl, staring into space; a chef on his break, playing games with his lighter – the flame going on and off, hanging in the air in front of him.

None of them seemed to give much of a shit about me.

I looked over my shoulder. Halfway up the building on the opposite corner to the Deli, there was a video camera. If I hadn’t known it was there, I’d never have seen it.

The chain-link fence ran along the edge of the pavement to my left.

Beyond it, the wasteground.

The broken-down section was a little further ahead, almost directly opposite the Deli. I walked up to it. When I got there, I stopped in my tracks. The butt-end of a cigarette was resting in the gutter, looking faded and folded and old. My mind flicked back to the man in the video clip, and I stared at the butt for a few seconds, my heart beating hard and fast.

And then I looked through the break in the fence to my left.

There wasn’t much actual ground visible in the waste-ground. It was probably thirty metres wide, twenty deep, with a few other sections leading off from the main one, cornering around and between the surrounding buildings, as black as bad teeth. The floor was swollen with angles of discarded metal and rusted debris. Once upon a time this had been a park, perhaps: a nice place to come and sit. And then, when Uptown was being built, it became a place to toss superfluous machinery and unused bolts, struts and sections of frame. And then everything else. Mouldering suitcases. Old clothes. Furniture. Stuff that nobody wanted.

Stuff that nobody wanted anymore.

I looked up. A few spotlights on the buildings had gone in-growing, spreading light up at the roof and casting shadows downwards. A torrent of dirty rain was falling from the ruins above, spattering over the wasteground, and the air was full of the stink of corrosion and dying iron. Where the water spilled past the spots it turned into flashes that looked like laser fire.

I went in.

The air seemed to be darker through the fence, and the pattering of the rain sounded louder. It was like somebody pissing on wet soil – a moist, clicky noise. Over on the left-hand side, somebody had left a dead dog in a white bag beneath a strong flow. I grimaced, and then turned away when I realised it wasn’t in a bag at all. The steady cascade was nudging off its slack skin.

I moved deeper, edging between metal sculptures. It was
difficult to make out much detail. Everything was just pieces of shadow or obscure shapes piled on top of even more underneath. Everything smelled of decay. There was rotting laundry, here, and food, and the air was itchy with spores of rust. There was a warm breeze tugging through from between the buildings, and a dangerous snake-like hum of electricity was coming from one corner.

Far above me, something groaned, and then the ground shuddered a little. Everything rattled for a second.

A tram, passing overhead in Uptown.

I didn’t know what I was looking for, but in the end I found a smell and followed it, like it was a black ribbon hanging in the air. It was tenuous at best, but it led me to the back of the wasteground, to a narrow space between two of the surrounding buildings. The smell was strongest here, filling the air and giving it a sharp little twist, but there wasn’t much light to see by. I could make out a tent of black, charred iron resting loosely over a slight dip in the muddy ground, but hardly anything else. I looked to one side. More mud. More rubbish.

Water dripping down from above. One drop at a time.

Not mud.

Another drop.

Not rubbish at all.

Another drop of water.

Without knowing how I’d got there, I was on my knees, pulling fistfuls of black muck away from the ground. The mud that wasn’t mud made my hands go as black as the night.

Everything seemed suddenly concentrated, including time. I was smelling what was in my hands, and breathing in the long-cold memory of ash and fire, but I didn’t remember moving my hands to my face. And I was sobbing, too, but I didn’t even remember starting to cry. My head was filled with the smell of a hundred thousand pages burning down to black nothing, while a fire cast flickering shadows of a chain-link
fence onto the pavement beyond. I could hear the crackling and popping as ink ignited, and see the curling tension in the spine as the book was engulfed.

Another drop of water. The rain was spattering down onto my face.

In my mind’s eye, I could see black bin-liners soaked in petrol and set alight, and, without thinking, I reached over and scattered the rubbish piled up on my right. Most of it was scorched and ruined: disjointed plateaus of sodden ash. But there were a few scraps, here and there.

Cloth.

Something harder, too: the pared-down bone of a blackened knife. Its handle was burnt away.

I heard the tapping sound again, drifting in from somewhere between the Deli and where I was kneeling, shins growing cold from the mud soaking into my trousers. I turned around. Walter Hughes and his bodyguard were silhouetted at the entrance to the wasteground. Just standing there quietly, watching me. Behind them, in the middle of the street, I could see Kareem.

I turned back to where Amy’s remains were lying. You couldn’t call it lying anymore, of course: if she was anything, she was lost at sea. My face had clenched up into this strange thing; it felt unreal. I was sobbing, and I realised I couldn’t even keep myself upright properly. I allowed the slide to happen, collapsing into the mud and rocking slowly onto my left-hand side. Feeling the cold seep into my body, but at the same time not really feeling it at all.

I reached out to gather up a loose armful of burnt rubbish, and I held it as close to me as it would come.

You often hear about this idea of hitting rock bottom – of being as low as you can possibly go – and you imagine that, if you ended up there, then that’s about it for you. It really is The End. It’s like you disappear out of existence when you land on rock bottom. The floor’s made out of a trillion snapping scissors that shred you into blood and shit in half a second. You’re so far down that you don’t even need to pull a trigger or take a pill. Sheer depression and social abstraction will blink you out of existence.

But of course it doesn’t work like that.

Nothing shreds or pulps you. Your heart feels as broken as it ever could, like a physical injury inside you that you can’t possibly bear, but you don’t die from a broken heart, and everything is bearable. It’s impossible but true: the pain goes on, but it doesn’t kill you. Your whole body feels like this fatal wound, but you’re still aware of it: it’s curled up on the floor, collecting a numb handful of indifferent sensations, and no amount of concentration or desire can rob you of it. This is where you are. Not dead. Not even dying. You’re just waiting to get up, and – sooner or later – you’re going to have to.

It’s just difficult.

Some emotions feel so enormous that by rights you should be able to fall into them forever; they should be able to close up around you until there’s nothing left for people to see. But they’re never as deep as you expect. Ultimately, you still need
to pull yourself off the ground and do something, however ‘just difficult’ it might seem. Even the most desperate of suicides still needs to jump.

And so, after a while, I got up. I’d stopped crying by then, but the water was still splattering down from above and I wandered underneath it, soaking my face to the bone and my body to the skin. It was ice cold, but I didn’t care; I needed to wash her away from me. Never had anything felt quite so important. The noise the water made on me was softer than on the ground, and I tested out shifts in tone as it pattered on my head, shoulders and then, ever so quietly, on my outstretched hands. I moved away, and the harsher sound returned: a silenced, spluttering machine pistol.