The Third Person (22 page)

She mouths the word
help
at you, and you have to look away.

‘On the bed.’

Marley has her by the arm.

She actually says it to you this time. ‘Help me. Please.’

‘
Sit
down on the edge of the
fucking
bed.’

He drags her back and shoves her down, and she starts to
cry. Sits there and holds her face in her hands, sobbing. Marley doesn’t care; he’s not even looking at her anymore. Long Tall Jack just laughs.

‘Are you ready?’ Marley calls over.

You nod.

Of course you are – this is what you’re here for.

His grandmother gave him the Ithaca pen. It was a present for his twelfth birthday, which was a little after he’d found out about his gift and talked it through with her. He always knew he could write well, but as he hit puberty his talent grew into something else altogether, and it scared him. Sometimes the things he’d write scared other people as well. When his grandmother was ill, towards the end, he went down to the beach and wrote a piece that she could barely even finish; she said it was just like being there, in the dunes where she’d played as a child. As real as a video or an audio recording. Maybe even as real as it actually happening. And while the scene he described for her was deliberately beautiful, he always knew the potential for harm was there, even before she warned him that he had to be careful.

So his grandmother gave him the pen and told him to practise. By the time she died – when he was fourteen – he had his gift on a leash. She’d moved into his parents’ home some time before that – when the doctors realised there was nothing more they could do – and one night she called him in, just like they’d always planned. He sat writing with her for the next four hours, and by the time she finally died, his hand had cramped. He never told anyone that he’d been with her at the end, and he still has that notebook, stored away somewhere that nobody will ever find it. He takes it out and reads it sometimes, although his words are generally lost on him. Regardless of that, it’s a first edition he keeps for himself.

And he kept his talent to himself, as well. He wasn’t sure
why exactly, but he sensed it was for the best. The parade of harried teachers never knew; he turned in bland, uninspired fiction during all the Tests, making sure he was never streamed off to the Factory. His plan was non-existent, but he had the distinct impression that the Factory would seek to kill whatever it was he had inside him.

They finally cornered him when he was sixteen: caught red-handed, passing a note he’d written to a girl on the table across from him. Her name was Kay, and he was very much in love with her. The note had no warning, but it contained explicit content. He hadn’t written it while he was making love to her, but he’d done it from memory almost immediately afterwards: it was certainly good enough to have made her come in the middle of History. But in fact – history records – that particular pleasure went to Mr Cremin, who intercepted the note, confiscated it, and then wished that he hadn’t. The boy’s locker was raided, his parents were called in and serious discussions were entered into regarding his future.

And that was that. Within a week, he’d been transferred to the Factory. He remembered the principal talking to him on the day before he left, adding emphasis with his hands:

‘You’ve got talent, boy – raw ability. Nobody I’ve ever met can describe things like you. And now all you need is discipline and focus.’

But as far as the boy was concerned, he had discipline – and he had focus, too. He’d kept up his practice. Sometimes he’d write for three or four hours a night, taking his pad and pen up into the woods, or catching these puff-a-billy trams out into the countryside with Kay. One weekend, he broke into the stairwell of a block of flats and managed to get onto the roof: thirty storeys above the street – just him and the pigeons, and the tv aerials humming away. He spent ten straight hours writing up there. He knew what he was doing. He was testing his gift and searching for limits, for a direction
that was right for him. Of course, what the principal meant was that he needed their direction and their focus. He needed to learn things like plot and character, so that he could make some money.

It was destined to end in tears.

‘Jim knew the boy was special to begin with,’ Steph said, grinding out the end of her cigarette, blowing the last of the smoke out from the corner of her mouth.

‘But listen – he was just this fucked up kid with too many high ideals. He was a kid who could write, sure, but he wasn’t structured or disciplined. He had no work ethic. The way he was, he had no bestsellers in him.’

I finished the end of my whisky and poured myself another.

‘Jim was a teacher there? At the Factory?’

‘Uh-huh.’ She glanced back at Thornton, who had collapsed over his glass again: a husk of a shell of a man. He was a meta-fuck-up.

‘You wouldn’t know it from looking at him now, but that man there used to be one of the best businessmen in the business.’

The Factory’s where they teach you to write. It’s all they do, day in and day out: nearly five hundred children at any one time, all aged between eleven and eighteen, housed under one long roof and under the nine-to-five tutelage of those who have gone before them. Prospective students are picked out by the Tests at as early an age as possible and then taught the trappings of plot, character and sentence structure before graduating: turned loose into the world as novelists of potential note, standing and bank balance.

He never stood a chance, of course. He couldn’t do plot and character: he just couldn’t abstract things in that way.
Didn’t even want to. What he did was take a snapshot of an event and put it in your head. When he tried to put strings of events together, or create characters, it just didn’t work; the law of ever-decreasing returns applied, and each successive scene became duller and duller. The longer and longer he spent at the Factory, the emptier he felt. His time there was hollowing him out – turning him into a shell they could fill – and pointing him, by force, in a direction he just didn’t want to go.

It was never going to last.

Things came to a head four months after he’d arrived, but by that time he’d had a whole bunch of run-ins with the staff and was just waiting for an excuse. It came during James Thornton’s Commercial Viability class, in which the man explained the rules of publishing to a class of twenty enthralled would-be writers, and him.

‘Writing is purely and simply a business,’ Thornton repeated.

In fact, Thornton simply couldn’t stress that enough, and he hated the man more every time he said it. Not for him, it wasn’t. Not ever.

‘A business. That’s all. You have to approach it in that manner, or you’ll fail. You’ll be a nobody. Nothing. Not a writer, anyway – that’s for damn sure.’

Thornton had a moustache and the kind of confidence you get from a string of successful relationship novels, but he couldn’t swear for shit. He said
damn
too slowly: rolling it around and drawing out tension that simply wasn’t there. A girl at the front tittered appreciatively. Thornton was pretty famous.

He went on.

The gist of it was this. Fiction is business, and publishing houses aren’t always likely to risk investment on an untried, untested author. Even if they did, and you got your book
published, there was no guarantee that you’d actually sell. A stamp of approval from the Factory gets you halfway in life; marketing takes you that little bit further; but smarts get you the rest.

‘Once you’ve got your foot in the door,’ Thornton said, leaning on the desk in front of him with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, ‘act quick. And act smart. Your book is out. What do you do? What you do is approach your bank and take out a business loan, and then you scour. You scour the country from end to end, and you buy up every copy of the book you can find.’

He stood up, staring at a few of them in turn.

‘And that’s it. The publishing company says “Wow”, and offers you a contract on the spot. Hundreds of thousands of pounds flutter down into your pockets as if by magic. As much goddamn dental work as your mouth can cope with. And when they put your second book out, they market it so hard you don’t even have time to breathe. You’re in.’

A boy at the front had his arm up straight as a flag pole. ‘Is that what you did, Mr Thornton?’

Thornton leant on the desk again and showed the boy his teeth: perfect and white.

‘We’ve all done it, son,’ he said. ‘We’ve all done it.’

Two weekends after that, he went back home and saw Kay, who he missed now he no longer sat next to her in class. He was slightly relieved to see that she missed him right back. They made love a couple of times, and he took her for drinks in the café they’d had their first date in, which felt like an age ago. It was a sunny day, and he took his notepad and jotted down descriptions of the trees, the people and the lake, surprising her with them as they walked – giving her little linguistic trinkets to remember him by. She folded each one up carefully and placed it in the pocket of her jeans, giving
him a secret smile in exchange. The Factory had never felt so irrelevant and far away.

They talked about their future together and, as they did, he could feel it solidifying. The prospect felt far more real and important than anything he’d ever write down in a notebook, or sell for a million.

And he was thinking – as they crossed the road, with her a little ahead of him, dragging him by the hand – and then she was just suddenly taken away. His right arm jolting, and he lurched: spun a little. The side of a truck flashed in front of him; a strong waft of air; a screech of tyres. Then, the truck was past, skidding to a halt, and he was left standing there, staring at the other side of the sunny street, his arm beginning to throb. The face of a woman standing beneath a green plastic canopy opposite slowly contorted into a scream of shock, and he blinked at her.

In his left hand, he was still holding his notebook. His right was empty.

They start to put the girl’s body into bin bags, and Long Tall Jack heads off for a shower. He’s coated with blood from his knees to his abdomen, and from his neck to his nose, so he really needs one. They’ll blast down the shower later. Of course, he’s worn gloves the whole time – they all have – but they’ll wipe the place for prints, as well.

He holds his right hand at the wrist and cracks it gently. Then, he flexes his fingers and thumb, working the cramp out of them. One of the crew pulls the girl off the bed by her arm, and her dead eye tracks the ceiling before the rest of her follows.

He looks away.

Marley will copy the text and then send it off. And it was good work today. Today, he just let himself fall into it and he’s still on a high. There’s something a little like joy
fluttering in his heart, even though he’s also very sad. It is always like this, and he half hates it, half loves it.

He allowed himself to be washed along by the grief. He used it as a tool to lever himself into movement, the way a shoehorn slides your foot into the shoe and then you’re ready to go outside.

The day before the funeral, he packed. He took the bare minimum and squashed it down into as small a rucksack as he could find. He had his pen, and enough money to buy paper and food, and figured that he could always sell surprising snippets of writing to tourists and make a few dollars here and there if things got tight. What was more important was the overall picture. He was going into the desert to temper and forge his talent: to beat it into something he could feel the edges of, like hammering out the metal walls of a hut you’re going to spend the rest of your life sheltering inside. Everything else felt empty and small.

The last thing he did, before leaving for the funeral with the bag on his back, was address the package to Jim Thornton. He wasn’t even sure why he did it – only that it seemed to give a sense of closure to a period of his life. ‘Here,’ he was saying, ‘this is what I think of you and your fiction; this is what I think of you and your attitude; this is what I think about you and my life.’

I can do something a hundred times bigger than you.

The package contained a description of heartbreak so pure that it would reach off the page and turn a man inside out: destroy him; ruin him. A thousand fashionable romance novels, with all their relationship difficulties and tragedies, would be like a matchstick to the sun beside this text. It was possible that you’d read it and never be able to set pen to paper ever again. It would always be on your mind.

After Kay had been knocked down and killed, he’d sat
down at a table by the café, and he’d written a description of what he’d seen and how it had felt. What it had been like to have the best part of you – the only thing which seemed to give you meaning – ripped away in a moment of carelessness.

He posted the two sheets of grief on his way to the funeral. After that, he went to the bus station.

Over the next few years, he saw the world and set it in paper. He wrote down a sunset in every place he visited, and a sunrise in all but one – Verona, of all places, where he and some friends were rousted from their digs in the middle of the night by an army of carabinieri, raiding the hideout for imported tobacco and liquor. He wrote a short description of the waves from the cabin of a Russian steamship, with an icy breeze all around him and vapour rising off the bright, white sheets of half-frozen sea. The cold followed him onto the page. There were three hours spent tracking a street market in Jerusalem, all cloth and pots and graffitied sandstone, and men with guns: really not half as religious as he’d been led to believe. And more besides. So much time spent scribbling and dreaming: a madhouse in Dhaka; an illegal distillery in a desert hut in Saudi Arabia; the early morning mist in the streets of the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where he captured the drizzle on Balzac’s tomb.