The Third Person (38 page)

Fuck him, fuck them. I pressed [NEXT] before the end of the message.

Beep
.

‘Hi Jason, it’s Charlie.’

Oh, yes – there was Charlie to think about. Poor Charlie, who practically idolised me. And what did I do to her? I used her as bait to track down a paedophile, killed him, unburdened half my soul to her and then abandoned her. And after all that, without me even asking, she had covered up evidence of a serious crime on my behalf. What was her current reaction to me?

‘It’s Sunday night,’ she told me again. ‘I’m just calling because I hope you’re okay. I don’t know what happened yesterday – or what I did wrong – but I’m sorry, whatever it was. And I understand; it’s okay.’

She understood. It was okay. In fact, it was possible that she’d even done something wrong. As I pressed [STOP] I thought that if enough of the women in my life got together they might realise that I was the common fucking denominator.

‘I wanted to let you know—’

Click

So: Charlie. Turning up to meet me with make-up on. She was more attractive than she realised – and nicer, too. For fuck’s sake, she’d been sitting there, listening to my worries. She’d encouraged me to talk about Amy and my other problems, and all the time she was doing that she’d had makeup on. Either that, or she’d had her hair cut. I couldn’t even remember which it had been. It was pretty obvious that she deserved better than someone like me.

But she’d be okay, I thought as I headed upstairs with the gun in my hand. My job, too. They’d both survive without me. In themselves, they weren’t loose ends so much as frayed edges. Once you got rid of me, they took care of themselves.

I walked into the study.

Everything was still just as fucked up as Walter Hughes’ friends had left it. The hard drive of my computer was in a couple of clunky pieces on the floor, and one of the guys had pulled the monitor off base and smashed it to shit, no doubt unaware that his boss was about to offer to pay for any damages. Compensation would have undermined the point of destroying my property a little bit. But then I’d gone and killed Hughes, so it was a moot point anyway.

I kicked a bit of circuitry and thought about the internet. The news on the coach was that the damage was starting to repair itself. Where that wasn’t the case, IT firemen were busy pouring gushing streams of water over the flames, trying to limit the spread. Nobody had a clue what had happened, but the consensus was that it seemed to have stopped. For the moment.

I kept a few pictures of Amy in the study. They were pretty much undisturbed: lodged on a shelf in the computer desk. Actually, they weren’t just pictures of Amy: I was on some of them, too; Graham and Helen; Jonny and the guys we’d grown up with. Amy probably wasn’t even on half of them, but I took the whole bundle through to the bedroom.

There, I spread the pictures out, filtering away the irrelevant ones and putting the ones I liked best out on the pillows, the top of the duvet. I covered the bed in them. Shots of us on holiday. Shots of us at New Year’s. Just tens of photographs. Graduation. Engagement. Pictures taken in bars, of long, cheering tables we were at; you had to pick us out, and even then it barely looked like us. I was crying the whole time, touching her face as I let them fall. One. Ten. Thirty. I remembered all of them. Ask me for fifty different occasions when Amy had smiled at me and I’d be stuck by double figures, but I remembered each of these clearly. They were obvious examples. Only God knows all of the times she smiled when I forgot to take a photograph.

When the bed was covered, I lay down on it. Everything shifted and slid, but that was okay. First one elbow, then onto my back. I still had the gun, and – when I was settled – I put the barrel into my mouth, tasting the salt and grease and oily tang of it. The ceiling was not as interesting as I would have liked. Looking down from it, surrounded by these photographs, I imagined I looked pretty good, at least symbolically, but looking up I felt very little at all.

At this angle, the top of my head would be blown out all over the wall at the head of the bed. That seemed to be the general angle. I didn’t know about the gases from the barrel. Maybe they would blow my cheeks apart, scorch my throat, burn my lips. Perhaps the barrel would become hot from the bullet and, even as my head went out on the wall, my mouth would be burned and hollowed and blistered. Nothing is ever as clean as in the movies.

Goodbye Amy
, I thought, and pulled the trigger.

Things are better now. Not perfect by any means, but better. It’s four months on, and there’s a strange kind of poetry to that: it was four months after Amy disappeared when I found her, and now, four months later, I’m beginning to find my feet. I have a new job. It’s nothing special – just grunt work at the moment – but it keeps me busy and keeps me sane and, most importantly of all, it doesn’t involve fucking people over – or at least not directly – and so despite the grease and dirt I get to have an illusion of my hands being clean.

Every night I go home to the house that Amy and I used to share. I’ll be selling it soon and moving somewhere different: not a nicer place or a worse one, just different. I’m okay where I am, but I made the suggestion to Charlie and she seemed to think it was a good idea. She notices how I am much more than I do. I have good days and bad days, just like everybody, and I think it helps that I got a lot of my grieving out of the way a long time ago. There’s still the guilt to deal with, but I’m as resilient as the next person and, when I need to, I can lock all that shit away and pretend it’s not there.

Oh yeah – Charlie.

Well, she’s here some of the time. We’re still just friends, but neither of us is with anyone else and it seems likely that we’ll get together at some point. There’s a closeness between us, and it increases every day. She’s one of those types of people: the kind who seem to have infinite patience. I’m in awe of her in so many ways. She deserves better, of course;
I’m still very much aware of that. But I’m also determined to change it. One day, if I work at it hard enough, maybe it won’t be true anymore. Perhaps she’ll deserve me. Stranger things have happened.

And the gun?

Well, I still have it. Sometimes I take it out of the drawer in the bedroom and look at it. I run my hands over it and imagine what it would be like to load it with bullets and shoot myself. I’d fired it precisely twice. The first had killed Walter Hughes’ bodyguard: an accident. The second, more deliberate, had killed Hughes himself. And then, four months ago, I’d fired it into the top of my mouth, expecting to die. That had been incredibly deliberate. But there were no bullets left. The gun was empty. It had gone
click click click click
.

I’d rested there, wanting to kill myself and yet totally unable. It felt like insult added to fucking injury, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end, I laughed.

Eventually, the curtains lightened and the shadows in the room began to fade out. Birds started singing outside. At some point I fell asleep. When I woke up it was afternoon, and the photographs were scattered everywhere and there was blood from my face all over the pillows and the top of the sheets. I’d tried to kill myself – I really had – but the bruised side of my head was throbbing too much for me to be anything other than woefully alive. I’d even fucked up my own suicide, and now I was going to have to pay the price: the day ahead.

I cleaned myself up as best I could, but I could tell that the cuts weren’t going to heal on their own: they weren’t bleeding much anymore, but I’d need stitches. Whether I would go and get them was another matter entirely; maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t. For the moment, I balled up an old T-shirt, dabbed at myself every so often, and made my way downstairs.

I think I mentioned: I had this ritual.

I started a pot of coffee percolating in the kitchen, clicked some bread down into the toaster and got the milk and butter out of the fridge. I couldn’t find anything relaxing enough on the crappy little radio-cassette we kept on the cabinet, so I settled for silence. I just sat down at the kitchen table, the gun in front of me, waiting for my late breakfast to be ready and imagining that Amy was asleep upstairs. She’d come down in a bit, but for now she was only half-awake. Drifting; sleepy.

But I couldn’t do it. She wasn’t there. There was just a load of fucking photographs. I’d been upstairs all night and morning, and she’d been conspicuous by her absence.

Instead, I watched the grey, featureless sky out of the window, just gazing really, but still peripherally aware of the gun, the coffee machine, the toaster. I wasn’t thinking of much. Eventually the toast leapt up and the coffee was ready. And, after a moment, I got up and had my breakfast.

I had just finished, and was wondering what to do with the rest of my day, when the phone rang.

It hadn’t been Charlie or my boss. I’d let it slip onto the answer-phone just in case, but when I heard Dennison’s impatient, excited voice –
Jason, pick up the fucking phone
– I walked across the room and did just that.

He told me what they’d found in the writer’s flat, sounding like a breathless little kid on Christmas morning, detailing the wonders of the notebooks and jotters – of the few he’d looked at, never mind all the rest. It was pretty clear that here was someone who’d found his vocation in life. I guess it was nice, but it was also tedious and eventually I told him to cut the shit and get to the chase.

Oh yeah
, he said.
That’s not why I rang at all
.

And so he explained. While searching the flat, they’d checked the writer’s computer, which was still connected to
the slightly stalled internet, and they found an item of e-mail that was rather strange. It was blank, Dennison said, but it caught his eye because of the address of the sender. Like the video clips I’d received that day at his house, the e-mail had been sent to the writer by Amy Foster.

But it wasn’t just an e-mail. There was an attachment, too, and it sounded from Dennison’s description of it as though it might be the schio file. He was sending it on to me at the address that Graham had set up, but he’d already read it through and he told me that he had a theory.

Throughout the file, the majority of the text was decayed and ruined. You could make out odd words and the occasional phrase. Part of the beginning of her murder was complete, and I didn’t know whether I’d be reading that again any time soon. That aside, the only section that read relatively cleanly was near the start of the text. But Dennison’s theory, despite the evidence, was that this section had changed too.

He painted me a picture. He imagined this text. It would have begun to be corrupted already, he said, by swapping data with the other files on his Society’s server, but then it was downloaded by Graham and let loose across the internet as it dropped off the e-mail he’d sent. I’d imagined it lost on an ethereal cutting-room floor, but Dennison saw it flying instead: flinging itself from server to server, collecting and swapping letters and words. In the process, it had fucked half the computers in the world, if only in miniscule ways, but it had also – he felt – had impetus. The damage was the downside of purpose; the text had been reinventing itself as it went.

He said the text was conscious. During its travels, it had abandoned most of itself; the unnecessary sections were forgotten, left to erode. The real progress was deliberate and concentrated, and the result of this poaching and shifting was the attachment that had arrived at the writer’s computer,
probably only slightly before Graham himself. Along the way, it had collected the video evidence and deposited it in my inbox. Then, had it waited? Did it know Graham was on his way, and that I would end up there too? I couldn’t know – probably never would. All I could do was read what it had written of itself and take from it whatever was there. Read into it whatever I wanted.

So some nights, when the house feels dark – when I start to feel very lonely, and the heating starts clicking, and the pipes creak, and the ticking clock in the other room starts to sound like cover for movement downstairs – I go and read the printout I took of the document when I could finally access my e-mail, and it makes the house a little lighter around me.

You are looking at a girl.

She is wearing a pale blue blouse and a white cotton skirt: frail clothes that you can’t quite see through but which still manage to give you an idea of the slim but womanly figure beneath. Her skin is tanned and clear, and her hair is shoulder-length, brown and full of body. Not curly exactly, or frizzy, but a kind of pleasing combination of the two, streaked through with patches of blonde where the sun seems to have bleached it. Her face is pretty, but not exceptionally so – although you can tell that if she was smiling she’d be very attractive indeed. It’s just one of those faces that lights up when it smiles and makes everything else seem somehow less important.

And ever so slowly, she gives you that smile.

She doesn’t need to, though: it’s there in her stance, and in the expression on her face. She’s completely at ease, and not in the least bit angry with you. Perhaps once upon a time she was, but she’s over that now. She’s looking at you as though she understands that you’re just another frail human being, exactly the same as her. You’re not perfect, but it’s not
something she blames you for. It’s not something that’s your fault.

It breaks your heart that you can’t go over and hold her, but the fact is that you can’t. Not anymore. That’s not why you’re here.