The Third Person (5 page)

Harder to connect, though.

LibertyTalk was a little bit like the Melanie Room in its basic format: just a bog-standard, generic Chat room. Where you choose to chat on-line is usually pretty much accidental: you find somewhere, you start talking to a few people, you begin to feel at home. It’s like becoming a regular at a pub in a lot of ways. They serve the same beer as everyone else, and people are people – but you get to know these particular people, and the beer starts to be ready for you when you walk in the door. So you stick around. It’s no more – or less – complicated than that.

I ended up there out of a random mix of internet kudos and hyperlinks, both of which I know mean very little in the everyday world. Liberty was the official site of Dave Pateley, who was rumoured to have pioneered the original free code that made places like the Melanie Room possible. The idea was that you downloaded specific software from another user, someone you knew, and it linked you up to a random selection of neighbouring computers – sometimes three or four, sometimes a hundred, and you never knew how many – all around the world. And you shared a folder on your computer with those other users, putting whatever files you wanted in it – music files, text files, government documents, pornography. You gave it a universal key name, which you could also post at the main Liberty site, and left it there. If you wanted to get hold of a particular file – say your favourite song – you just entered the key name in as search criteria, and the program searched through all the computers you were connected to. If it didn’t find it in those, it set them searching through all the ones
they
were connected to. And so on. When it did find it, it copied it back to you, leaving an additional copy in all the computers along the way.

This achieved a number of things. Most importantly, it got you the file. But there was no way – from looking at your computer – that the authorities could tell whether it had got
there by accident or design. You were clearly either a criminal or a victim of crime, but it was impossible for them to tell which. Secondly, there was no way that – from you – they could trace more than a handful of other users. They could bring down a cell, but never disable the entire network. Thirdly, it meant that you had to clear a few gigs of shit off your hard drive every evening, or else install some software that did it for you. A small price to pay for total freedom of information? People thought so. Even the politicians whose private documents were being circulated on a daily basis recognised that it was pretty cool, and attempted to ally themselves with it. Nothing ever changes.

That’s why I ended up there, anyway, wandering through the hundred or so hosted Chat rooms as [ JK22], looking at the throb of conversation scrolling up before me: SHOUTs and (whispers); multi-coloured text; emoticons; roses and kisses being passed around like spare cigarettes or bought like free drinks. It was an alien world to me, and every time I saw a new name entering the room, or slid sideways through into another one myself, I felt a thrill of excitement in my gut that I hadn’t felt for a long time.

People as text.

I’d sip coffee after coffee, or sometimes a beer, and have random conversations with complete strangers.

I was never on for that long. By that point in time, Amy was spending a great deal of the evenings on the internet herself, looking at sites she didn’t want me to see, and so I was always grateful for any time with her that I could get. But sometimes – when the clouds came over – I was also glad for somewhere else to go: somewhere I could be whoever I wanted, talk to whomever I please and feel that there were no consequences.

None at all.

And one late evening, with a simple invitation to private, Claire Warner had found me. I knew, because she told me
while we were talking, that she was sitting in her bedroom, naked, with the bedclothes wrapped around her a little. (It was cold that night.) Throughout it all – until towards the end, anyway – she was sitting cross-legged on the edge of her bed with the keyboard resting across her bare thighs, and there was a bottle of wine on the bedside table. She had a glass in her hand, and there was hard dance music playing in the background – only she’d turned it down so low that it had the volume and ease of a soft, comfortable ballad.

She always typed to music, she said. It made her fingers feel as though they were dancing.

‘You had cybersex with her?’ Wilkinson asked me.

I tapped my fingers on the table a couple of times, wondering where exactly this was going. All the time, I was remembering things that I’d done my best to bury and forget. Unhelpful things.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘After a while.’

‘That night?’

I stared at the top of his head.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Later on.’

Wilkinson was still typing, but now he was frowning slightly.

‘So you had cybersex with her that evening.’

‘Yes.’

‘Just the once?’

I almost laughed.

‘Of course.’

He looked up at me, not really smiling.

‘Jason, I don’t know anything about this kind of thing.’

And, although he said it in a neutral voice – deliberately neutral – I could tell that it was a loaded sentence.
This kind of thing
. This kind of
disgusting
thing, was what he meant. I checked out his hand. No wedding ring. I figured that Wilkinson was a real man: he picked up his ladies in bars or clubs. Never anywhere so sad as on-line, even though it was exactly the same.

‘You generally only tend to do it once,’ I explained.

He started typing again, his voice more normal.

‘Did you meet her again?’

‘Yes.’

‘On-line?’

‘Yes.’

The excitement, fluttering in my stomach as the train pulled into the station at Schio. The people milling around. My fingertips were pressed on the glass, with a phantom hand touching them from the outside and a slight reflection of my peering face almost cheek-to-cheek with me. Looking for that white dress in the crowd.

‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘It was always on-line.’

He tapped a key.

‘How many times did you meet her?’

I thought about it.

‘I couldn’t say for sure. Maybe eight or nine times, over a period of about . . . I don’t know. Two months?’ I shook my head. ‘But I’m not sure.’

‘You didn’t keep track?’

‘No.’

A few more keystrokes.

‘And did you continue to have cybersex with her throughout that time?’

A loaded question – again – fired like a blank.

I said, ‘A couple of times, maybe.’

‘So, yes?’

‘I suppose so. Yes. But not always.’

‘Sometimes you just talked?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s right. Just like in any other relationship. Sometimes we just talked.’

Wilkinson tapped in a few more lines of text, recording the strange fact that – from time to time – two people had actually
managed to talk without having sex. I shifted in my seat a little. He looked up, then, catching my movement.

‘You okay? You comfortable?’

‘I’m fine, yeah.’

‘You want a coffee?’

Of course I wanted a coffee. But not as much as I wanted to be out of here.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, thanks.’

‘Okay. You know – this is just routine.’ Suddenly, he leaned back in his chair and seemed more relaxed.

‘Your name was on her computer: a bunch of old transcripts and stuff. She’d erased a load of it, but some were still left. Not just you, by the way.’ He leaned forwards again. ‘A whole load of guys. She was on the internet a lot, huh?’

I shrugged.

‘I don’t know. Not that I know of.’

He just nodded, dismissing it.

‘She was on the internet a lot. Look, are you sure you don’t want a coffee? I mean, I want a coffee. Do you want a coffee? I’m going, anyway.’

‘In that case, sure,’ I said. ‘Black, no sugar.’

‘Virgin coffee.’ Wilkinson stood up. ‘That’s the way I have it, too. I don’t like people fucking with my coffee.’

‘Lol,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I’m laughing out loud.’ I gave him a smile. ‘That’s all.’

‘Okay.’ He turned around, nodding to himself. ‘Laughing out loud. That’s very clever. That’s a computer thing, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, that’s very clever.’

He returned five minutes later with two coffees. While he was away, I tried to get my thoughts together. Claire was dead, and I didn’t know whether I felt much about that or not. I mean – she’d always seemed like a sweet girl, but when
it came down to it, I’d hardly known her. She’d been there for me at a difficult time: that’s all. And because Wilkinson hadn’t told me anything about it, it seemed somehow less real – as though it wouldn’t have actually happened until I’d heard all of the grim details. Maybe I was just numbed from all the stuff I’d seen on the internet. Murder? Give me photographs and tape recordings, or don’t expect me to feel anything.