The Third Person

CHAPTER TEN

The writing is always done by hand.

There are a couple of things you need to know, and that’s the first.

He’s gently flexing his wrist as they bring the girl in: warming himself up. It should take about half an hour from start to finish, and that’s a long time to write for, so you need to be prepared. Loose and relaxed. He gives his shoulders a roll and watches the girl. The bed, covered in straight sheets of glinting polythene, is on the other side of the studio. When she sees it, her step falters, but they push her from behind and she starts moving towards it.

The door is locked behind them.

‘Fucking behave,’ Marley tells her. He’s the one that pushed her. She glances at him, scared, but he’s not even looking at her: just grinding out the remains of his cigarette on the floor. The smell of the smoke drifts over, catching his attention just as the girl sees him.

He sees her right back.

For a moment, it’s as though she’s standing on her own, with all the other figures in the room fading into the background: Marley disappears; Long Tall Jack, swinging his limp cock like a length of rope, melts out of view; even the bed seems dim and far away. It’s like the girl is spot-lit: a fragile, scared thing illuminated to the exclusion of everything else.

He wants to smile at her and tell her that it will be okay, but it won’t. And he’s not here to make her feel comfortable, or help her.

So instead, he picks up his pen.

And without taking his eyes off her, he begins to write.

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.

But she’s not smiling.

In fact, she’s close to tears, but it’s as though she doesn’t quite dare cry: maybe she has done in the past and then been punished for it. She doesn’t need to anyway: it’s there in her stance and in the expression on her face. She’s hugging herself slightly, anticipating some kind of blow. And she’s looking at you as though you might be able to stop it from coming.

It breaks your heart that you can’t do anything to help her, but the fact is that you just can’t. That’s not why you’re here.

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.

He explored, and what he found was this: no relief whatsoever. His unhappiness trailed along three steps behind him, and no matter where he went and how much he wrote, it never went away. He collected reams of paper filled, line after line, with beautiful sentences, all of which meant absolutely nothing to him. But he kept pushing his gift to its limits; himself against the world; his pen across paper.

Until finally… well, he ended up here.

There’s a whole writing industry that you won’t find in the bookshops. If you mentioned it in the corridors of the Factory, they’d turn up their noses at you. And they don’t even know the half of it. Go to your local fast-food bookstore and look: you won’t find it. Maybe if it’s a big store you’ll find medium hardcore – sex and horror – but sometimes not even that, because they like to pretend that no-one’s interested. But they are, and if you’re one of the ones whose tastes run to the extreme then you have to go looking. In the independent and second-hand bookstores you can find the beginning of it: the sex books; the kill books. But you know that none of it’s real: just cheap fiction, hacked out in stained motel rooms in the company of cigarettes and neon and bad Spanish radio. If you want it real, you have to look harder than that.

That’s where he started: on these fringes. Churning out fake dross for a handful of change. He wrote the porn and the violence, and if you want to look you’ll find his name – his real name – against a couple of legit titles: one hundred print run; staple-bound. Extreme stuff, but he faked it. You’ll have to look, but they’re there.

But all the time he was doing this, she was still with him, and it wasn’t long before he went deeper still. Testing himself all the time: finding more and more extreme things to write about; looking for edges in his talent to rest against and find some peace, but finding none: day after day.

Now, he was so deep in the industry that you’d probably never find his stuff. It was the real deal these days: each and every word was true. They sold it in shifting markets, sealed in polythene, and behind locked, guarded doors in dark halls, where strangers shuffled from stall to stall, and even in these places you had to search it out, listen for whispers. A stallholder’s friend would be able to provide you with kiddie fiction, say, or rape text, but if you wanted his stuff then you had to go to the stallholder’s friend’s friend, and you had to keep your mouth shut and know when to back off. Because these days, his writing was so far buried that only the truly fallen ever even caught a glimpse of it.

And it was there – as low as you could get – that he began to see a way out.

He closes the front door and flicks on a light. Rain slashes against the window, with an echoing ping as water drips down into the ceramic pot in the bathroom. There’s a towel warming over the radiator in the hall and he uses it to dry his hair. The dripping coat goes on a hanger. He takes the pen through to the front room, along with the towel, kicking off his shoes first and leaving them by the door.

His flat is pretty sparse: a settee and two armchairs, all drawn from different suites, and a folding table by the window, with a flimsy chair underneath it. There’s a pile of blank notepads on the right of the desk. Often, he’ll just sit and stare out of the window and write. He’s ten storeys up, on the top floor, and people on the street below seem so small that their movements are like patterns. He can write about them for hours. Maybe you’re in there somewhere – who knows?

Apart from that, the flat is pretty bare. He has no television, no radio. No paintings on the wall. There is a computer he uses for e-mail, and he has a set of weights over in the far corner, but he hardly ever uses either of them and so they don’t really count. His kitchen is minimal. The only things he does have are books. He has four full bookcases, containing a mixture of his own journals and notepads, and published works by other authors. These books are the accoutrements of his life: his paintings; his pot-plants; his wife and child; the family car; the dog; the cat. They are the things meant to define his life and fill it, and – just like everyone else’s – they are simply not enough.

Because he doesn’t have her anymore.

All he has is this terrible feeling of emptiness which tells him that the best part of his life is over. And it’s joined now, as always, by the feeling of revulsion at what he’s done tonight.

He gets a glass of water from the kitchen, and then places the pen down on the table. Selects a notepad at random from the shelves. There are plain brown envelopes in a drawer beneath the desk, and he pulls one out.

It’s not true, exactly, that when he tears a strip of paper from the notebook and slips it into the envelope he’s doing it out of hate. It’s not a simple feeling of derision or cruelty that leads him to pick up his precious pen, loop two testing swirls of blue ink on the reverse of the envelope, and then write Jim Thornton’s name on the front. It’s more complicated than that. Zoom in on the ink until the screen is filled with a pure blue, and what you see are a thousand sparkles of darkness, and they say: I’m lost.

But he’ll never tell you that. Instead, after addressing the envelope, he sits down at the desk and opens an old jotter pad that’s waiting for him.

Most nights, he just sits and writes. By one side of the monitor on the desk is a plastic pill bottle, containing a large enough amount of prescription chemicals to send him into a gentle, peaceful sleep: one he wouldn’t wake up from. Every night, he sits here, noting down his life in the book in front of him, and the bottle is always in reach. He wants to pick it up, but something always stops him. Perhaps he’s just a coward. Perhaps, with something more immediate like a gun, suicide would be easier. Except he doesn’t know how that would come out on the page: whether his writing would capture the moment or if it would just blurt to a stop.

Tonight, he picks up his pen and begins to write. And – for now – the bottle remains on the desk by the screen.