The Third Person

by Steve Mosby

  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.

  But that wasn’t true.

  By the time he returned, the only thing I’d really figured out was that I wanted to go home and forget about this. Forget all about Claire, as bad as that was, and prepare myself for tomorrow. The police didn’t mean shit to me. They didn’t figure in the cycle of my life at all these days.

  ‘Here you go.’ Wilkinson passed me the coffee, taking his seat again. ‘It’s hot, be careful, etcetera. Now, where were we?’

  It wasn’t directed at me. I turned the cup around on the table between my fingers, and waited for him to catch his place, trying to remain calm and patient.

  ‘So, all of this – this was all before your girlfriend disappeared?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Amy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean, what we’re talking about here is an affair.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘I suppose that it is.’

  ‘Brass tacks, that’s what it is. An affair.’ He typed something in. ‘Did Amy Foster, your girlfriend – did she know about Ms Warner?’

  The coffee cup stopped turning.

  [CLAIRE21]: (shocked) what would your gf say?

  {pause in proceedings}

  [JK22] that doesn’t matter right now

  [JK22]: does it?

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She never knew.’

  Wilkinson looked at me for a second or two, judging me. I think those few seconds held a great deal for both of us. For him, they held a murdered girl who had conducted an affair with a man whose girlfriend had then disappeared two months later. For me, they held all that and more, but from such a different and darker angle that I figured Wilkinson could never even have contemplated the view.

  ‘I guess she wouldn’t have known about it, though,’ he said. He was speaking more to himself than to me. ‘Would she?’

  There’s a certain kind of hole that your heart can plunge into, and you only really find out about it when you care for someone very much. Nobody ever teaches you about it, and nobody talks about it much, either: it’s one of those things that you have to learn about by yourself. The first time that you fall into it, you feel as though you’ll never stop falling and, when you do, that you’ll never escape – that you could never climb out of anything this deep and this black: you can’t see the handholds, and there are probably too few, even if you could. After a few trips down to this place, though, you figure out the truth: you just need to relax, and forget about how far down you are. You float out by yourself, given time.

  It happens mostly because of communication breaking down. I don’t mean that in some kind of talk-show bullshit way, either; it’s just what it is. You’ll be talking to each other, and a word will go wrong. Or you’ll argue over a trivial sentence that neither of you care about and that, after three more lines of dialogue, neither of you can even remember properly, and so neither of you can ever really win. If one of you sees this coming and tries to end the conversation, the other resents it. And if you follow it through, you hate each other for a few black minutes, as a thousand buried irritations come flooding out. They’re like demons spilling out through an argument that, on the surface, has nothing to do with them, but deep down has everything.

  All that matters is not saying you’re wrong. That’s what keeps you down there in the pit, and you only float back up when enough time has passed for you not to care about the argument anymore. It sounds kind of hokey, but it’s love that pulls you out: the knowledge that what you have is too good to let go of, and that the other person is too good to let you go. So, the truth is this. You only end up in this place when you love somebody very much. Clouds don’t matter much at night-time – only when there’s a sun for them to cover.

  But while you are in there, you have to be careful. It’s dark and cold, and while you’re down there you can’t even remember what love feels like. Worse than that, you don’t want to. And there are things down there with you that will whisper things, and suggest things – that have an upside-down logic to them, and which seem quite appealing and sensible in the cold dark of day. Come deeper, they say. And it sounds so right. You never want to feel love again, and damaging it feels good. But they’re things that you really don’t want to listen to, and when the clouds come over forever you’ll wish that you hadn’t.

  Wilkinson asked me a few more questions about my relationship with Claire, coming back more than once to the concept of us having met outside the internet. I denied it, and then denied some more. At one point, I looked at my watch and saw it was after midnight. We’ll be done, soon, Wilkinson told me. But we weren’t.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I told him, as it reached one o’clock. ‘We’ve talked about everything there is to talk about, and I just… want to go home.’

  He sighed, leaning back in his seat. I stared at him, not letting him off the hook. Yes, I’d known her; yes, I’d had an affair with her; no, I wasn’t proud of it.

  Yes. I wanted to go home.

  ‘Okay, Jason,’ he said after a second. ‘I’ll have an officer drive you back.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk.’

  ‘You’ll walk?’

  ‘That’s right. I like walking.’ Which was true, especially at night when there was nobody around. ‘And I hate your fucking in-car music.’

  ‘But it’s pouring down.’

  ‘Then, I’ll get wet.’

  He slapped the table gently.

  ‘Okay, then. I guess that’s okay. We’re done, here, anyway.’

  Wilkinson showed me back to the main entrance. Outside, in the amber glow around the nearest floodlight, I could see the rain spitting through: invisible beforehand, up in the night, and then invisible afterwards, as it smacked into the pavement. When he opened the door, the cold hit me like a splash of sea-water: refreshing but slightly cruel. It was a bad night.

  As he opened the door, Wilkinson was wincing. Briefly, I wondered what he would be like if someone ever shot him, or something.

  ‘Take care, now.’

  And then he said something which made me realise that this wasn’t over yet – that we weren’t done here, at all. My private world, which I’d cultivated and focused, was no longer mine alone; my isolation was an illusion. Society had come knocking.

  He said, ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  I was drenched by the time I reached the end of the car park, never mind my house, but I find that there’s a certain level of rain that takes away worry. You get as soaked as it’s possible to be and think: fuck it
. It had always struck me as a pretty good motto for life in general, and it had served me… not well, exactly, but at least I’d never been disappointed. And so that’s what I said to myself as I reached the edge of the freeway and turned down the footpath beside it. Fuck it. I was soaked already, and anything that didn’t include me slipping and falling on my ass in the mud could only be considered a bonus.

  The footpath followed the canal, which snaked under the freeway and fed back into the city centre, skirting within a few hundred metres of my house along the way. The actual water was stagnant and old. Ten years ago, when I’d been a boy, I remembered riding my bike along the footpath, the gravel crackling beneath my tyres and disturbing all the fishermen who were waiting patiently, like tents, on the banks. Nobody fished here now, though; and the only bikes that came along the footpath were motorbikes on an evening. It was a desolate, sad little route, made all the more so by the city in the distance, like an enormous cybernetic limb where one old vein still remained, unbeating and unused. Soon, they’d concrete it in and build over it. Or maybe just above it, instead, leaving it to solidify beneath: mythic and forgotten.

  That night, as always, there were a few shapes beneath the pillars of the freeway, sheltering. A dozen ghosts of Tom Joad, slumped around fires flickering in gigantic, rusted drums, casting hunched shadows over graffiti and fractured rock. The skin of the concrete was coming away in places, like the wallpaper in an abandoned house, revealing layers of older graffiti underneath. Beneath the surface of the city, like so many of the people who lived and worked there, everything was shabby and untended. After the comfort of the police station, it felt like coming home – but maybe that was just wishful thinking. Everybody likes to feel like an outsider at heart, and you can feel that way pretty fucking easily walking along under a road-bridge, but it’s an illusion. They can still hook you up whenever they want to, and then drop you back when they’re done. You’re still their fish, in their pond. It’s all a matter of social physics.

  It was a twenty minute walk back along the canal, but I did it in forty. I was thinking about a lot of things – although not in any focused way: rather, I was letting my emotions and feelings wash over me, wave after wave. Sometimes, it’s difficult to separate out the threads that have led to you feeling a certain way, and all you can do is wallow in it: the same way that you can often only taste the end meal, never the individual ingredients. So that’s what I did now, and my life tasted black to me: as ruined and tatty as the underside of the freeway; and as dankly unpleasant as the water beside me. A while ago, there was Claire, and the fact of my affair with her soured my search for Amy, which I’d pretty much dedicated my life to ever since she went missing. That was four months ago.

  I’ve always been big on the grand, meaningless gesture, and so at one point I stopped on the edge of the canal and took everything in like a deep breath. The flecked, golden M of the moon’s reflection in the water, spotted and shattered by rainfall. The glow at the horizon, and the black, starless expanse of the city to one side, and then Uptown above it. The slight rush of air. The sound of the rain on the water, and on the path, and on me. And I whispered I love you, Amy so quietly that I hardly said it at all.

  A meaningless gesture, though. They always seemed to work that much better in the movies, with soaring music and audience identification, but never so well in real life. I listened to the same sounds afterwards, looked at the same things, and nothing had changed. And it didn’t make me feel any better, either, because with everything that had happened tonight it felt like a lie.

  The rain was getting in my eyes by the time I arrived back at my house, pooling there. Stinging slightly. Clouds sponsored by Domestos and Imperial Leather; air sponsored by FreeZee. Even moving my body made me feel cold, and I was shivering as I got my keys out of my pocket. For all my stoic bullshit, I was only human. I wanted to feel independent and tough, of course, but also – a little bit more than that – I wanted a towel.

  The house seemed quiet as I closed the door. Quiet and contained. Nothing, as it turned out, could have been further from the truth.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  It was a man’s voice. I heard the sound of a safety being clicked off.

  I stopped immediately, and then started shivering.

  ‘“Freeze” might be more appropriate,’ I said.

  A towel was flung at me from the living room.

  ‘Here. Dry yourself off.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The guy stepped out as I was doing so, pointing a gun at me rather casually. He was dressed too neatly to be a burglar: I could see a nice, black suit underneath his beige overcoat, which was spotted darker brown in places with rain that had yet to dry. He looked like Dick Tracy without the hat, except his face was pock-marked and his hair receded to behind his ears, making him seem more like an ageing doorman. To complete that image, he had a vicious-looking cut above his eye. The light in the hallway was gleaming on his balding head.

  I’d had a gun pointed at me before. When I was nineteen, I was caught up in an armed robbery at the convenience store around the corner from my hall of residence. It was one of those weird things that you beat yourself up about afterwards – Tyler, one of my flatmates, had asked me to pick up a pack of rizlas for him, but I’d forgotten them until after I paid. So I had to hang on for an extra few seconds, and if I hadn’t done that then this bouncer in my flat would have been my first proper gun experience. Instead, I had a shotgun pointed at my head for a full minute, as three other kids took the cash-drawers from the till and scared the counter-girl shitless. The guy who was drawing on me was so fucked up that his eyes were bright red and he could hardly even stand up straight. It was unreal. I mean, the gun didn’t look like they do in the movies: it was wooden and metal, and so alien to me that I figured it had to be a toy, even though I knew it wasn’t. In the movies, guns shine; they’re sleek, not dull and real. In the movies they fetishise these things, but in real life it wasn’t all that sexy. In fact, it wasn’t all that anything until about five minutes after they’d gone.

  Now, I dropped the towel on the floor beside me. Upstairs, I could hear the sound of people going through my things. Above me, in the study, I heard something smash and someone swear.

  ‘Come in and have a seat,’ the guy told me, twitching the business end of the pistol towards the living room.

  I made my way through, somehow unsurprised to find that there was somebody already in there, waiting for me. He was an old man – probably in his early seventies – but looked spry and commanding, and he was sitting in my armchair, over by the bay window, with one leg resting over the other, and one hand resting on the bulb-end of a mean-looking iron cane. He looked like some kind of porn king, in fact, with his full complement of silver hair still tinged through to a fake black in places, and skin that was as tanned as the bouncer’s raincoat.

  ‘Jason Klein,’ he said, as the door was closed behind us. ‘You live like a pig in shit.’

  Pigs in shit are supposedly quite happy, but it seemed a foolish point to argue over. I noticed that he was sitting on some kind of blanket, and realised that, whoever he was, his ass was clearly too good for furniture as neglected and woeful as mine. Ours.

  ‘Sit down.’

  He nodded to my other armchair; I walked over and sat.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘We have a couple of things to talk about, you and I.’

  ‘Right.’ It felt oddly as though I was at some kind of job interview. I supposed that I was, in a way. The post I was applying for was the rest of my miserable life.

  ‘You don’t know me?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t have any idea who I am?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What you do know, though, is that you want us out of here as soon as humanly possible. Am I right?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  He nodded to himself.

  ‘Well, we’re going to make this nice and easy for you, because we’re b
usy men. Answer quickly and carefully, and we’ll be gone before you know it.’ He gestured with his free hand and looked around my pig shit palace almost hopefully. ‘As though we were never here.’

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked. ‘I’ve had a long night.’

  My abruptness seemed to surprise him almost as much as it did me. God only knew where it had come from but – now it was here – I tried the feeling on and found that it felt good. All of it – Amy, me, Wilkinson, Claire – was like a dark room inside me, and anger felt like a small but vital light. One I could burn myself with and enjoy the heat.

  ‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘I’ve been through the fucking mill this evening, and I’m not in the best of moods.’

  The man studied me for a few seconds, as though trying to decide if I might be edible and, if so, whether I could be fed to his dog. Then, he leaned forwards. His eyes were very white in the brown skin of his face; their centres, a perfect sea-blue. The kind of colour you have to have surgery to get.

  He said, ‘I want to talk to you about Claire.’

  Okay, let me tell you about Claire: about the truth behind the jpeg, as far as I know it. And I don’t know much. There are a few average, everyday statistics which we can dispose of first. She was twenty-one, when I met her. She had curly brown hair, hanging as far down as the tops of her arms; blue-grey eyes, fair skin and a few freckles. A slim figure, but not especially attention-grabbing. The sexiness with which she carried herself – and she was sexy – came from something much deeper than looks, and perhaps also a step sideways from personality. But, whatever it was, you saw her and you just couldn’t look away again. You chatted to her – let her dance with you – and there was no signing off.

  After our first conversation, I felt bad. The argument I’d had with Amy was a few hours old by then, and orgasm has a way of removing urgency and replacing it with guilt. I went straight to bed, and fell asleep facing Amy’s back, with my arm around her, hand cupping her stomach, my face in her hair. My last thought was that was a mistake, but what I figured was that I could just put it behind me and not do anything so stupid again, despite having taken Claire’s e-mail address and promising that I’d write. And of course, I did write. The next time the clouds came over, it seemed less like a mistake and more like a good idea. To mail her again; to chat again; to do what we did.