The Third Person Read online

  There was a camera above the main entrance, but by the time I’d seen it it had been too late. I did my best to look away to the left as we came in, but I don’t think I really pulled it off.

  Clothes looked damp – and kinda muddy, too.

  We slid in around the table and ended up sitting beside each other on the corner. I was already wondering how long I had to stay, and whether there was a back entrance to this place I could escape through.

  ‘Thanks for this,’ Charlie said, touching the neck of her bottle with delicate fingers. ‘My father would never approve. He’s a real-ale man.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I was looking around.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She took a swig, and the liquid chinked. ‘He brews his own. Does wines and things, too. There’re demijohns in our attic that have been around longer than me.’

  I smiled. Took a sip of my own beer.

  Awkward silence.

  It was dark and subdued inside the Bridge: everything and everybody was silhouetted by the bright white light of the day outside. Even the slot machines seemed muted, as though wary of making too much noise this early on. Blue smoke was spiralling up from ashtrays. You could actually see the air in here: like mist the colour of gun-metal. A television in the corner was showing horse-racing, but the sound had been turned down until the commentary was nothing but a low murmur. Everybody was watching brown animals pounding soundlessly over green grass.

  ‘So,’ Charlie said after a moment. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m doing okay.’ I nodded. ‘I’m not doing too badly.’

  I looked at her, darkened by the window behind her. She looked different, I realised.

  She’d cut her hair since the last time I saw her.

  ‘You haven’t been in recently,’ she said.

  Or she had make-up on. Maybe that was it.

  ‘No.’

  I was actually thinking that I’d just killed a man. An undertone of thought that rested below all the others. It was almost unreal.

  I’d just killed a man.

  She said, ‘It must have been a few weeks by now.’

  Perhaps I should just get drunk, I thought.

  ‘It’s been a month and a half,’ I said, picking up my glass.

  A month and a half of paid unwork. I’d received my payslip for the end of March and was half-anticipating one for the end of April. After that, I had a feeling they might start to dry up.

  ‘People have been worried about you.’

  I thought about it.

  ‘I’m sorry that people have been worried. I mean, I never meant to worry anybody. I didn’t think anyone would care, to be honest. It just… got to the point where I couldn’t come in anymore.’

  I didn’t know how to explain it any better than that, even though that didn’t really explain it at all. It really hadn’t been a decision I’d made so much as an epiphany: something that happened to me. Somebody else made the decision, and I just realised how much sense it made. I think I did quite well, actually – for a couple of months after Amy vanished, I laboured into work on a morning, through work during the day and then out of work again in the evening: a good, solid pretence of normality. It’s what you do, after all. I was carrying on; I was surviving. My mother would have been proud of me. And then, one day, I realised that I wasn’t surviving at all: quite the opposite. I was being assimilated, and I was slowly dying, one day at a time.

  ‘You couldn’t come in?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It just didn’t seem worth it anymore.’

  I worked for an insurance company. Let me briefly explain how insurance works – in the lower levels, at least. Let’s say you want to insure your house. The first thing you do is get a quote from my company, and in order to do this you have to fill out a breathtaking number of forms and provide us with an almost insurmountable mountain of personal information. This is only to confuse and lull you. What it boils down to is this. You live in a semi-detached house with x number of bedrooms in a certain post code (down to the street name). Now, we know – from our vast database of prior claims and police reports – exactly how likely you are to be burgled or for your house to burn down or whatever, which we read as: how long will it take this person to claim one thousand pounds from us? On average, let’s say, it would take you five years, so we need to charge you two hundred pounds a year in house insurance to break even. It might take less time or it might take more, but the beauty is that they cancel each other out: that’s the benefit of betting on average.

  This is a simple matter of simple mathematics.

  We charge you two hundred pounds a year to break even, and that’s after your claim, if you claim. In reality, of course, we charge you more like three hundred pounds a year, but the amount is entirely variable. Whatever percentage profit we want to make, we make. There is no grey area. There is very little in the way of doubt, and we don’t make many mistakes.

  We’re affiliated to several banks. They keep our accounts and, in exchange for our custom, they direct their own customers our way. They advise it, in fact. What would you do if your house burnt down tomorrow? they ask, frowning with worry. What if you were burgled and lost it all? They’re quite blatant. The sensible thing to do is to take whatever quote we give you and store that much money away in a separate account of your own each year. That way, if you do get burgled, you have the money to act as your own insurance company; and when you don’t get burgled and your house doesn’t burn down, you haven’t given all your hard-earned money to a complete stranger.

  We didn’t work at that end of things, Charlie and I. We worked at the end that tries to fuck you out of the money if and when you do eventually claim. We found clauses you never suspected were there. In a way, we couldn’t lose – even if we ended up paying you, we knew the company was making a profit regardless. But we gave it our sportsman’s best, anyway, because every penny counts. Customers often got angry when they realised that we weren’t their friends, after all. That, at the end of the day, either they lost money or we did. And guess what?

  ‘Do you still feel like that? I mean, are you going to come back to work soon?’

  I thought about it, even though I didn’t need to, and then shook my head.

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  Even if I found Amy, I wasn’t going back. I’d let my life unravel to such a point, now, that it would be all but impossible to tie it back together again. For once in my life, there were no plans for the future. I really couldn’t imagine what was going to happen.

  Okay, so what was she like?

  Amy had brown curly hair, with streaks of gold that seemed yellow in the sun, and a warm, happy face that always looked flushed and enthusiatsic. Not exactly beautiful, but pretty – and far too confident and in love with life for it to be an issue anyway, at least to begin with. I know that’s a cliché – but for what it’s worth she was in love with life in the real way, not the fairytale way. Most of the time, she adored it; some of the time, though, she could barely face the day. That’s love for you.

  She was slim, but curvy. And she was sexy as anything, but you’ll have to take my word for that. Imagine your ideal person. Amy probably didn’t look like that, but she had the effect on me that the person does on you. There were days when I almost had to pinch myself. It seemed like a whole fresh side of me had opened up.

  I told her that I loved her after a few months; I don’t remember exactly when that was, but – if you really want to know – she told me first. In fact, she was very definite about it: she loved me from about the fifth week, and then, at three months, she was in love with me. It took me just that little bit longer to come out with it, but I tried it on for size eventually and found that I liked it. I love you. You should have seen her face light up when I told her that. She always looked happy, but when I told her that I loved her she looked like she was going to explode with joy.

  I mean, have you ever seen joy in someone? Not just happiness, but actual joy? That was one of the o
nly times I ever have, and it was like the sun came out inside her. Like everything just flipped right-side up. Suddenly, I couldn’t hold her tightly enough, and she held me back just as hard, with the back of my shirt bunched up in her small hands and her knuckles digging into my shoulder blades. Have you ever had somebody grip you with a passion you never thought existed outside the fucking movies? As though they found you the most precious thing in the world? I felt it then, and couldn’t believe that somebody would actually want me that much. I don’t believe in Heaven as a place, but I sometimes think that if a person could write down how I felt at just that moment – if they could describe it perfectly – then that sentence would be something like Heaven to me. And as a final resting place, I’d be happy to have my name shrunk down and rested, invisibly, on the collar of the full stop at the end. That would be fine for me.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Charlie said.

  ‘You miss making me coffee?’ I did my best to smile, but I could still feel the ice cold water rushing over my hands as I drowned Kareem. My bones hadn’t quite thawed out yet.

  She smiled back, playing with the neck of her bottle but then looked away.

  ‘Yeah. I miss making you coffee.’

  The way she said it made me realise I’d come off as sounding too playful.

  ‘I kind of miss it, too,’ I said. ‘But that’s all I miss, and most of the time I don’t even miss that. It’s moments like those that cloud everything over.’

  ‘Cloud what over?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘The fact that we work for something intrinsically evil. In a benign way, if that makes any sense. We spend our days fucking good people out of their money. That’s the reality. The appearance is that you make me coffee in the morning, and we have a laugh, and we take the piss out of Williams behind his back. We’re okay people. I mean, we are okay people.’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘We take our cheques at the end of the month, and that’s the only important thing.’

  ‘Everybody’s got to eat, Jason.’

  ‘Yeah, everyone’s got to eat. Exactly.’ I sat back, listening to the cars shoot past outside. ‘Everybody has to eat. So it’s all okay.’

  ‘Is that why you’re not coming back? Because of this.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, not really. Maybe a bit. If Amy was here then I’d still be in work; still carrying on like before. But she isn’t, and it’s put things in perspective for me. It’s a waste of our fucking time to be doing something so worthless.’

  That was an understatement, but I couldn’t describe it any better. The thing is, a working life is one of those things you’re taught to respect and admire. Because a man pays his way. A man supports his family. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And so on. In reality, what you have are thousands of people doing the same thing, day after day, and it’s not admirable: it’s tragic. It’s just a convincing fiction. So for a while after she disappeared, I shuffled back to work, all the time knowing deep down that the most important thing was Amy and the fact that she wasn’t with me. It got harder and harder, as though I was tied by elastic to something in the past, and each day was one miserable footstep forwards. So I stopped going in – just made the decision one day – and it felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off me.

  I felt like I had a purpose again.

  I felt like I was looking at the scenery, for once, rather than just speeding past.

  What I didn’t feel was guilty, worthless, small, tragic or pitiful. For the first time in years, it felt like I’d taken hold of my life by the scruff of its neck, like a spitting, scratching cat, and turned its angry face around to have a good, honest look into its eyes. If I ever let go I’d have myself slashed to shit, but that didn’t feel important: whenever you grab a tiger by the tail, you know you’re going to get scratched eventually. You don’t take it as a career path. It’s not a long-term thing. It’s just an awesome thing.

  ‘Are you looking for her?’ Charlie said.

  ‘As much as I can. I have a friend who helps me. We’ve made some ground.’

  ‘What about the police?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘They won’t help.’ I sipped my drink. ‘She left a note.’

  We spent the next year of University doing exactly the same things: getting drunk, jumping up and down in time to loud music, grinning, fucking and hanging around, as though life was a bus we were waiting for that wasn’t due for a while yet. Certainly, looking back, I have a tendency to see it as a time in my life when nothing felt urgent or pressing, and when everything seemed fun and new. The week would see casual study. The weekend would find us in pubs and in clubs, or propped up in single beds: logged on to illegal internet movie channels, the monitor flashing harsh light around the dark bedroom as we tucked into takeaway pizza and drank bottles of cheap Cabbage Hill vodka mixed with superstore cola.

  The third year of University – our second as a couple – we moved in together and started The Collection. Crockery and cutlery. Pans and dishes. Furniture. Posters and paintings. Mutually agreeable albums, videos and friends. All sorts of things that didn’t exactly belong to either of us, but to this weird new thing called both of us.

  You start The Collection because you have to, of course, but it always struck me that there was more to it than that. It’s like your relationship is a very beautiful, delicate cloth that either of you could accidentally blow away and ruin at any time, and the more stuff you pile on top of it – to weigh it down – the less likely that is to happen. So that’s what we did. We put our new stereo on it. We put the signed Kimota hardback anthology down. And so on. We put a hundred things on top of it and then a hundred more, and with each came the knowledge that if we wanted to do anything so dumb as to blow that cloth away, we’d have to move our friends and our books and our casserole dishes first, and then we’d have to figure out where to put them.

  We both graduated. Our parents’ houses have very similar pictures in them on the mantelpiece: Amy and I, side by side, dressed in our black gowns and holding our degree certificates. Apart from our smiles, we look like we’re in mourning. During the ceremony, along with a handful of others, we’d both worn A3 sheets of paper on our backs, denouncing the University’s investment in various overseas arms companies, but our parents had made us take them off for the photographs. I guess it wouldn’t have made for a nice picture. We did it to keep them happy – rebellion was okay so long as it was nice and controlled. The kind of rebellion that you can probably brand a pair of sneakers on, but not the sort that ever achieves much.

  Jobs followed. Neither of us knew what we wanted to do, beyond paying the rent. Everybody has to eat, right? I got my job at SafeSide early on, starting off temporary in the mail room and ending up – lied to by all those capitalist fairytales – just one floor up, earning a couple of hundred more a year. Small town boy makes average. It’s difficult to make a movie on the strength of that one, isn’t it? Amy panned around a little longer, but still didn’t find any gold. She worked for the post office, for a while, helping to facilitate the downsizing, and then drifted through e-centre work before finally settling into virtual secretarial support. The idea was that companies on the other side of the world could send you work to do – accounting, typing, website work – at the end of their working day (which was the beginning of yours), and when they arrived back the next morning, you’d have done all the work during their night-time. By the time I asked her to marry me, Amy had built up quite a respectable client base of Australian companies, and was thinking of expanding her business by farming work out. I was doing okay by then, too, in my own way, and so it seemed like a good time to make the commitment.

  Hardly anyone got married anymore, and we really hadn’t been planning it. I’m not Radically Opposed, the way that a lot of young people are; I knew it smacked of ownership of women, and outdated beliefs in gods we just didn’t need anymore, and yet I still found it symbolical
ly appealing. But I wasn’t at the other end of the spectrum, either – the one where you get seriously married in the top-floor chapel of your chosen company. These days every major company has a licensed CEO, and all that changes from business to business is the logo in the corner of the certificate. I knew I could have got married as a SafeSide employee. But I didn’t want that either: I wasn’t a lifer. I just wanted to put a ring on Amy’s finger, so that she could look at it every so often and know what it meant.

  It’s difficult, when you have principles, to know what the right thing to do is. We didn’t want to get properly married – formally, in a registry office – but we both had friends who were getting married as some kind of retro-fashion statement, and we didn’t want to be associated with that, either. So in the end we both agreed that it was no big deal. We’d wear a ring, and in our hearts we’d see ourselves as married. I got down on one knee, unclipped this pissy little green velvet box and asked her, literally, for her hand. She gave it to me. We smiled a lot, and made nervous phone calls to the people who cared. And that was that. We never said husband or wife. We were just us: Jason and Amy.

  Two rings, not much more than fifty pounds apiece. Even together they weighed next to nothing, but when we put them down on top of The Collection, they felt like the heaviest items there, and when I looked at it afterwards – in my head – I thought it had never looked so steady and secure.

  Of course, things hadn’t really started to go wrong by then.

  ‘The police figured that we’d had an argument, or something. I mean, we had, in a way, but not like they meant. I explained it all but they said there was nothing they could do. It’s not a crime to leave someone.’

  I remembered the conversation all too clearly. I’d felt like a child: desperate and panicked, and simply refusing to accept its mother’s final word on a subject. The officer had told me over and over, maybe six times, that there was nothing he could do, and in the end he’d just told me to get out of his way. Not angrily, because he was too professional for that, but with enough of a threat in his voice to make it clear that this was the last time he’d actually ask.