The Third Person (New Blood)

by Steve Mosby

  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.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  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.

  ‘Maybe I should move on,’ I said out loud.

  As though it was actually still possible.

  But I wasn’t going to get out of anything as easily as that.

  There was an internet café a block and a half away from the coach station: one of those wonderful all night places where you can surf and drink cheap coffee for about a pound an hour while the world outside gets dark and light and then dark again. Throw in the sizzle and smell of bacon, frying behind a counter at the far end, and you had a done deal as far as I was concerned. The dregs of last night’s clubbing circuit were slipping out even as I arrived. I got myself a coffee, a bacon sandwich and an hour’s screen time, and then logged into the account that Graham had set up for me.

  There were six new messages waiting in the inbox, five of them forwarded on from Gray’s own personal account and bristling with multi-coloured attachments. The sixth was a circular from i-Mart. It contained details of a few of their latest products and thanked me for subscribing to what it said was the most popular e-list in the western world. I cursed Gray quietly – but with a smile – and dumped the circular into a greedy trash can. A thousand shreds of digital shit disappeared into the electrical ether.

  The first thing I looked for was the text. It wasn’t there.

  The message was there, and it claimed that the text was attached, but it was clearly lying. I could only imagine it had got lost somewhere in the transfer: dropped off its perch at the base of the e-mail and fallen down onto the internet’s cutting room floor. Which was shit: it meant I’d have to talk to Graham and ask him to re-send it. Since that was going to be a difficult conversation, I decided to leave it for now. It was always possible that I’d be able to pick up the text myself later on. I knew the title, after all.

  The coffee was hot and weak, and the chief ingredient of my bacon sandwich appeared to be grease. Nevertheless, I worked my way through them as I read each of Graham’s messages in turn.

  It seemed that a man named John James Dennison had been responsible for posting the text on the server in the first place – or at least, it had come from his computer. Gray had forwarded some background information on him, along with a few photographs. The server itself was based in Asiago, as was Dennison himself. Claire had lived there, too.

  The waitress had helpfully provided me with a napkin the size of a postage stamp, and by the time I was using it to dab fat from the ends of my fingers I’d requested a hundred credits and set the main documents printing. An ancient bubble-jet over by the tray-stack was stuttering back and forth over sheet after sheet of information.

  I logged out, returned my plate to the counter and waited by the printer, collecting the paper as it came through.

  The way I was seeing things now, I had three leads to work on. I had this guy Marley, somewhere in Thiene, who was obviously a priority. But Gray had turned up nothing on that name – or rather, he’d turned up so much that there was no way of knowing if anything was actually relevant. There were thirty Marleys in Thiene alone. He’d given me the contact details for all of them, but I figured that was a long shot. It might not be his real name, for one thing. Even if it was I’d have no way of knowing which one of the thirty to go for. With time running out, I needed something better than that.

  The second lead was the writer. But if Marley was out of my reach for now then this guy was a million miles away. Without Graham to help me, I was going to have trouble locating him, and it was likely that his address wouldn’t be listed under his real name. And that was assuming he wasn’t living rough or squatting somewhere. That was if he was even still in the country. He could even be dead.

  I figured that if I did find the writer it would be by finding Marley. So first things first.

  Those two leads were big, fat, bloated ones, but they weren’t going anywhere.

  The third lead was John James Dennison.

  The guy who had – apparently – kept the murder text on his computer. Somehow, it had got from Claire to Dennison, and then to Liberty where she knew I’d be able to find it.

  This was the slimmest lead of all. It was also the only one I could really move on right now.

  The paper kept coming.

  Twenty minutes later, I was safely back in the bus station – still officially police-free – with a ticket for the ten-past-ten bus in my hand. I’d bought it with cash, and so there was no legal way that they could trace where I’d gone. Except for the coding which is in the metal strips of the banknotes, of course, but I think they deny that exists. Fuck it, though. I’d ridden my luck this far, hadn’t I, and so I figured maybe I’d ride it to Asiago as well.

  Let’s talk science.

  The human genome consists of twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. Each of these pairs contains several thousand genes, themselves made up of exons and introns. The introns can be disregarded for now: See them as breaks, like the stars dividing sections in a book. The exons are made up of a long series of three-letter words known as codons, and the letters in these codons are called bases. There are four chemical bases: guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine. Or G, A, T and C.

  Consequently, there’s a very real sense in which the human genome is a book. It doesn’t go directly from side to side in its normal form, and it’s not written down on pieces of paper (in reality, it’s written on long DNA molecules: miniscule strands of phosphate and sugar). Nevertheless: in theory you could lay it all out and read it. One letter at a time; one letter after the next. Just like a book.

  Picture the whole genome as a shelf containing twenty-three volumes.

  Pluck out a volume at random and flick through its pages. You will find that there are several thousand chapters in this volume, and each chapter is divided up further into sections and section breaks. The sections of text are built up by a series of words, and these words are three-letter combinations from a total of four different letters.

  Now, replace the volume and look at the shelf.

  That shelf is all that a human being – or any living creature – actually is: nearly eighty thousand chapters formed from three-letter words, sectioned at certain points and distributed throughout twenty-three hardback volumes. That shelf exists twice inside the nucleus of every one of the hundred trillion cells which make up a human body.

  Religion aside: what you are, at your most basic, is information about how to build a body.

  The body is constructed as follows.

  The DNA of a particular gene is copied. Each of the four bases naturally pairs with another, creating a four-letter ‘negative’ of the original information. When this negative makes a copy of itself – in the same way – the original print is revealed: black reverses to white reverses t
o black. An exact copy has been produced.

  When a gene is translated, the copy is made from a different substance: RNA. The introns are removed and the resulting breakless text is then translated by a ribosome, which moves along the RNA, reading each three-base codon in turn. Mathematics dictates that there are sixty-four possible codons. Three of these tell the ribosome to stop; the other sixty-one are translated by the ribosome into one of twenty different amino acids, which build up into a chain that corresponds directly to the chain of codons. One for one. When the chain of amino acids is complete, it folds itself into a protein. Almost everything in an animal’s body is made either by proteins or of them.

  This is not how Life had to be. It is just how Life happens to be.

  We are information that is capable of reproducing itself. Information that forms a recipe of instructions for how to build an organism.

  Every creature on the face of the planet that walks, crawls, flies or swims is simply a word that has found a way to make the world around scream it, again and again and again.

  I made my way through the printed information as the coach wound its unsteady way out of the city centre, and then west to Asiago. I’d managed to secure a free pair of seats close to the emergency exit at the back. Leopard-skin covers? Slightly too narrow for anyone over six foot? A vaguely unpleasant smell of warm plastic? All present and correct. And it was three hours to Asiago, if the traffic was good. I put my feet up and set about wheedling my way into the world of John James Dennison.

  Gray had done me proud, and I took a moment to feel sad about our phone conversation. It was more content for that box inside my head. I imagined myself swinging open the hatch, pressing down hard on three murders, a ten-ton of grief and a good ten gigabytes of rape, perversion and snuff, and then throwing in the loss of my friend on top, giving him a last smile before closing the lid.

  That box must have been getting too full by now, but I didn’t really want to think about that.

  Instead: Dennison.

  I’d got pdfs of his passport, birth certificate and driver’s licence, and pages more information besides, including his national insurance information, bank details, home and work addresses and marital status. He was single.