The Third Person (8 page)

I thought about it. As weird an idea as it should have seemed, suddenly it didn’t. In fact, I realised that I really
did
want to talk to Claire about Amy – that it seemed right. The feeling of relief was getting stronger and brighter. I figured that I had a lot I needed to say.

‘Okay,’ I told her, nodding. I even managed a smile. ‘That’d be really nice.’

‘We talked for a couple of hours,’ I told the old man in my flat. ‘And that’s all we did. She bought me another coffee; I bought her one later on. We wandered out into the city square for a little while. Weird, I guess.’ I laughed. ‘It was a nice day. And then we went our separate ways. And that’s it.’

And that
was
it, too – stripped down to minimal detail, anyway. But it had been an important afternoon for me: I’d told her about Amy, and the distance that was growing between us. I’d said that it felt like a light that was going out, and she’d listened and been sympathetic. Like a best friend – or the closest thing to it, with Graham seconded. As my train
pulled away from the station that afternoon, I watched her from the window – standing there in much the same way as she’d been standing when I arrived. The whole afternoon felt like a beautiful holiday, or a dream, and it made me feel sad to see her move backwards away from me, reduced to a tiny white blur, and then swung out of sight by the corner of the track. I was never going to e-mail her again or chat to her. It wouldn’t have worked. It was just one perfect day. The End.

‘You never saw her again?’ the man asked.

‘No.’

‘Never spoke to her?’

‘No.’ I looked at him steadily. ‘Never saw her again, online or off. Never exchanged a word with her. That was it.’

He kept looking at me, almost as if he could smell the lie but couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. So, I furnished the lie with a few final truths.

‘I loved my girlfriend,’ I told him. ‘I still love her. My relationship with Claire, as much as it even
was
a relationship, was a mistake. We both knew it. We both left it at that.’

I didn’t feel like saying anything else, so we just sat and stared at each other for a second. The old man seemed about to say something, but then we both heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Two guys walked into the room. They were both dressed the same as the bouncer with the gun, but they didn’t look half as mean. One had glasses, foppish brown hair and seemed to be about eighteen; the other was all pasty-faced and mid-thirties. They looked like nothing so much as a couple of half-harried computer geeks, and they seemed nervous about whatever it was that they’d found:

‘Nothing.’

‘You checked everywhere?’

The younger guy nodded, pressing his glasses back up his nose.

‘His hard drive’s clean. And there’s nothing in the deleted
data that could be recovered. If there was, we’d have found a trace at least. No sign of it on his disks either. I think he’s clean.’

The old man stared through him, looking disappointed and suddenly distant. Then, he nodded to himself, and started to ease his old body out of the chair.

‘Never mind.’

As the bouncer moved over to help him, the old man turned to face me.

‘Don’t get up, Mr Klein. We’ll see ourselves out.’ He seemed suddenly contrite. ‘I’m sorry for any . . . inconvenience.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ I said, wondering how many pieces my computer was currently resting in. ‘Any time.’

As if as an afterthought, he reached inside his suit and retrieved his wallet; from that, he produced a business card and passed it to me. I took it, and turned it over.

Walter Hughes
, it said, along with an address uptown, telephone and e-mail details, and a stylised eagle watermark.

‘If you should hear anything,’ he said, replacing his wallet, ‘I’d like to hear it, too. I can be contacted as it says there. And if you drop my secretary a note on Monday morning, I shall arrange to have any breakages paid for and replaced.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

The situation seemed to have gone from one extreme to the other, and it had been a long night: my brain was having trouble keeping up with the swerves.

Hughes nodded to me once, and then turned to his accomplices.

‘Gentlemen.’

The four of them swept out of my living room, and I heard the front door close behind them. Within a few seconds, a car engine began gunning outside. I waited for it to drive away and then – when the sound had become a distant whine,
barely even audible – I let out an enormous breath and went to find that second beer I’d been dreaming of, so long ago.

I had a dream that night, or a vision.

Sometimes, Amy used to wake me up, when she’d had a bad dream – it happened less and less as our relationship became stronger, and then more and more as it weakened again. Often, I’d already be awake; she’d be fighting with the bed, and you couldn’t sleep through something like that. I’d lie there, watching, wondering whether I should touch her or not. I wanted to; I wanted to reassure her. But I knew it would probably frighten her more than anything else, and so I had to wait for her to lurch awake, turn to me in the dark and cling there, shaking. That was how it always ended. Sometimes my back would bleed, she’d hold on to me so hard.

And that was what I dreamt about. I dreamt that I woke up and she was there, lying beside me on the futon – more of a dark shape beneath the covers than a real person – with blue dawn light coming through the curtains and brightening her edges. She had her back to me this time, not clinging at all, and she was quietly sobbing. Her hand was over her face; the futon was trembling beneath her. In the dream, I moved up against her, pressing my front to her back, and put my arm around her, curling it into the warmth of her belly. She ignored me. I whispered that I loved her, but she just kept crying. And that was when I realised the truth.

She was dead: not really here with me at all. I was alone on the futon, and it was like someone had opened a window beside me that allowed me to see into the world where she was. She was crying, oblivious to my touch, because somehow she’d found out about Claire. In my mind, the room she was in became a cell. The blue light was streaking through a food slat high in the door, and Amy was curled upon cool
flagstones, crying inconsolably because she was dead and betrayed.

I don’t know how the dream ended – only that at some point it was finished and I was sitting up in that blue light of dawn, covers pooled around my waist, totally alone and crying. And I stayed that way for a while, wishing she was home, while all the time the memory of Claire’s voice was intruding into my grief.

Jason, if anything ever happens to me
, she was telling me, sounding both scared and exhilarated, and I didn’t want to hear it then any more than I wanted to hear it now. The phone call had come out of the blue; I didn’t even know where she’d got my number from.

Why are you ringing me
?

Because you’re nice
, she’d said quietly, and then carried on, as though it was a difficult task that needed marching through.
If anything ever happens to me, I just want you to remember one word
, she said.

I want you to remember
Schio
.
Just that
.

Click

There’s no easy way of projecting a brand logo onto the sun, which meant that the light coming streaming into the bedroom the next morning was a roughly natural amber – albiet stained a couple of shades closer to piss by the tepid tone of the curtains. I sat up, rubbing my face, aware through my feeling of rested nausea that I’d slept in. Ever since I was a little boy, I’d never slept much, and in adulthood – or as close as I’d gotten to it – I still tended to get up early and do my own thing. It has its benefits. The roads aren’t filled with traffic; there aren’t bunches of irritating fucking people around; even the adBoards are generally quiet apart from a sort of low-key buzzing. Shit-all on the television to even pretend you want to watch. It almost felt like the world was unspoilt.

I pulled on a dressing gown and made my way downstairs, figuring it was about ten-thirty, or so. That was bad, in a way. My dream had made me feel empty and miserable enough as it was, and now I got to feel lazy as well.

I had a ritual.

Every morning, what I’d do was get up early, come downstairs and put a pot of coffee on. I’d slip bread into the toaster, get the butter and milk from the fridge, and maybe even put some music on quietly: something that would’t disturb her. And then I’d sit at the kitchen table and wait for breakfast to be ready, and for a few brief minutes I’d be able to pretend that Amy was still upstairs, half-asleep, ready to come down in a bit when she was properly awake. A few
minutes of denial? Sure: guilty as charged. But it was too late to go through that today.

I made the coffee and toast and sat down to eat, but this morning I wasn’t thinking about Amy; I was thinking about Claire, and the phone call she’d made to me.
Schio
. I remembered it, of course. How could you forget a phone call in the evening from someone like that?

I finished off my toast, licked melted butter from the tips of my fingers and thought about it. Maybe she’d got the right number after all – I’d remembered the word, hadn’t I? And something
had
happened to her. Since it stretched credulity a little far to imagine that she’d rung me up in a moment of existential anguish, that left only one option: she’d trusted me with something, and I didn’t know what it was.

And . . .

And my fucking computer was smashed.

The kitchen suddenly seemed more real around me, and an awkward truth settled in: I already had one woman to worry about. I already had a woman to care for, search for and be responsible for and to, and the last thing I needed right now was another. Especially Claire. I mean, one unwanted phone call in the night from her, and here I was: cheating on Amy again.

I wanted to slap myself in the face.

Instead, I took my plate and knife over to the sink, where they could wait with all their friends until I was ready to attempt a wash. Then I took my coffee upstairs and began to gather together today’s selection of clothes from the more promising heaps on the bedroom floor.

It had stopped raining, but only just. Everything was freshly wet. The road looked like it was made from jet-black rubber, and the cars shining along it seemed bright and newly washed. People’s hair was in sodden tufts of disarray, and the sky was a blue-grey watercolour smear: misty and full of cloud, as
though it might boil back into a rainstorm at any moment and soak us all again.

My trainers squeaked on the pavement as I walked, heading into the centre of Bracken. As you went from the suburbs to the centre, there was quite a transformation. The gentle noise – laughter; promotional jingles from the increasingly prevalent adBoards – grew louder and gradually more irritating as suburban streets segued into more industrial avenues. Houses became shops, and the shops became taller, until finally they morphed into these enormous, glass-fronted office blocks – the tenets of evolutionary capitalism. Within twenty minutes, I was truly among giants.

Actually, I didn’t know how Graham could bring himself to live this far into the centre, where everything was way too big, noisy and busy for me. The one thing I supposed he had going for him was that he lived quite far up, in one of the more prestigious apartment blocks, slightly west of dead centre. It was the kind of place where, if you opened the window, you were more likely to hear helicopters than cars, and they generally didn’t bother with adBoards that high up – most of the people who lived there invented either the campaigns or the products, and they wouldn’t want to take their work home with them. Can you imagine a twenty-four hour jingle? You’d go insane. Well, city centre life had never appealed to me anyway, but I figured I was in the minority. If they had money, it was where people naturally gravitated to: the best bars; the best theatres; the best restaurants. I mean, in some parts of the suburbs, city centre life was actively advertised, to keep you in line – keep you pointing in the right direction.

Graham had money, all right, and he was one of those vaguely unfocused people who, lacking any impetus of their own, tended to go with the crowd by default, and so it was natural he’d end up there eventually. But I looked at him sometimes, and I’d see this slight look of confusion on his
face, as though he was nervous about going the whole hog and actually embracing the emotion he was feeling for what it really was: dissatisfaction. It’s a word you can hiss, and you should feel free to try. In their heart-of-hearts, everybody knows that the life-path is just another branded commodity these days, and that fact can bite you from time to time – when you’re looking around and thinking
what’s next
? But everything you’ve been taught is telling you that there
is
nothing next: that you’ve hit the peak and now all you have left to do is balance.

A sad fact: nothing ever looks as good on you as it does in the catalogue. For a pound, you don’t get the juicy steak that’s beaming out of the adBoard at you like some kind of meaty ambrosia. You get a flat fucking burger in a miserable fucking bun. In life, as in fast-food chains.

I had to pass through one of the main shopping precincts to get to Graham’s building, and it was heaving with people. It always was on a Saturday. All those weekday-workers came out window-shopping. Couples went strolling. Kids hung out in baggy, coloured posses, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. And there was this genuinely unpleasant, slightly threatening undertone to everything. It was as though, despite the smiles and hum of conversation, at any moment somebody might buy something.