The Third Person

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

‘She told me about what happened to her that time,’ the man said. ‘She told me about how she was raped, and she told me how difficult it had been for her. I mean, she didn’t fucking need to tell me that, Jason, but she told me anyway.’

He kept looking at me, and it was making everything worse. If he’d just been telling the story, sat there with the gun, it would still be frightening, but it would also be a little easier. As it was, he was involving me. It felt as though I needed to do and say everything exactly right, or else he might involve me in more painful ways. But at the same time, I realised that he wasn’t actually looking at me at all; he was looking through me and past me, at this Jason, and so it didn’t really matter what I did. Whether I got out of here alive seemed to depend on how badly a memory pissed him off.

‘I was so angry with you,’ he said, as if reading my mind. ‘Where the fuck were you that day? Do you have any idea what she was going through? She needed you, and you were off wherever you were, doing whatever you wanted. You didn’t care about her at all, and it fucking killed me.’

He looked away, shaking his head.

‘I could never understand how you could be so…’ He screwed up his face in disgust. ‘ Ambivalent to her. You didn’t understand what you had. I would have killed to have what you had, and you didn’t even care. I wanted her, and I wanted to slap her, but most of all I just wanted to slap you.’

I was growing colder by the second. He was talking to Jason, and this was all for his benefit, and that meant that he was intending to give the document I was writing to Jason. So why wasn’t he explaining it all in person?

He’s going to kill me.

I noticed the blood on his jacket then. There was a little on his shirt, and quite a bit more had dried on the backs of his hands. How had I ever missed it?

He was going to kill me.

‘We had some drinks,’ the man said. ‘We had some drinks, and then we had some more. You were at work, Amy said. She said you wouldn’t be back all day. I didn’t believe that’s where you were at all, though, and you know why? Because she didn’t believe it. I could tell. She was so fucking sad, Jason. So unhappy. So I suggested we have some drinks. And it was the middle of the day, but we figured to hell with it, and so we had some drinks. I mean – why not?’

He shook his head again and then looked up at me. There were so many emotions on his face now, beside the anger, that I found it impossible to know what he was thinking or planning to do.

‘And what happened,’ he said, ‘happened.’

You’re a nice guy, Jason. And I’m not into ruining lives.

After I met Claire, I went home, arriving back quite late. Amy was already in bed by then: three-quarters asleep and only vaguely aware of me slipping in beside her. She was naked. She was facing away from me, and I moved up against her, pressing my chest to her thin back, putting my arm around her and cupping my hand on her slight stomach. All I could smell was her hair. I’d come so close to making the worst mistake of my life, and I’d never been more relieved than I was right then.

‘I love you,’ I told her, kissing the side of her neck.

She didn’t say anything, but she moved slightly and took hold of my hand where it rested on her stomach and she gave it a squeeze. And she pressed back against me, giving a noise that might have been contentment.

And I never knew that anything had happened between Amy and Graham that afternoon. Maybe it was because I was so tangled up in my own guilt that it never occurred to me she might have some of her own, or that the issues that affected our relationship would cause her to make the same mistake that I almost had. I mean, why would that be the case? You see, it was all about me by then. The way I’d left her that morning was indicative of everything about our relationship. Once upon a time, I’d been there for her, and now I was only there for me. I’d offered comfort and sacrifice to ease what I knew was difficult for her, and now I only offered questions. Where was my comfort? Who was there to ease things for me when I found it hard?

I should have known it was over by the way I was thinking. Instead, I lay there against her, feeling my own guilt, holding her belly, thinking that it might all be okay after all. It was stupid and fucking delusional. You can put the feelings aside but you can’t throw them, and so they’re always within reach. They find their way into your hands again. Sometimes, people do everything except push them at you. It was never really about her being raped. I can blame that, and I do blame it, but it’s not the whole story. That event cast a shadow, all right, but for a while I cast a light. It wasn’t something impossible and insurmountable. We had a good life, and we loved each other very much, and for a while there it had been just about as perfect as anything Graham had ever dreamed of.

You can’t blame the rape.

But you can, if you choose to, blame me.

‘We had sex three times,’ the man said. ‘And each time, she felt guilty afterwards, but we kept falling back into it. And at the end, she couldn’t believe what she’d done. She started crying. You will never have any idea how much that woman loved you, Jason, and you just… you just fucking… pushed her away.’

He glared at me, and it became too much. I looked down at the paper in front of me and watched myself writing instead. He was going to kill me. In fact, he sounded like he was talking himself up to it.

‘Look at me.’

Despite myself, I did. Slowly and reluctantly, but I looked up at him.

‘You want to write all this fucking shit down,’ he said, pointing at me – me, this time – with the gun. ‘You didn’t bat an eyelid while your friend was killing a girl I loved. So you fucking pay attention, now, and you look at me. Okay?’

I remembered. I’d wanted to smile at her and tell her that it would be okay, but I’d known that it wouldn’t, and I hadn’t been there to make her feel comfortable or to help her. So instead, I’d just picked up my pen and, without taking my eyes off her, I’d begun to write.

I remembered exactly what had happened.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Yes. Anything’s okay. Absolutely anything.

Just please don’t kill me.

There was a pause, and then:

‘You pushed her away,’ he said. ‘You treated her badly. You weren’t there for her when she needed you. How could you not be, after she’d gone through something like that? All I could think of was that I would have been. I would have fucking… I would have fucking sat there with her. I would have talked to her. Held her. I would have had some respect for her. I mean, I would have acted like she had some… some kind of fucking value to me. But you couldn’t even do that.’

He looked down, gathering his thoughts. His voice was quieter when he started speaking again.

‘I asked her to leave you for me,’ he said. ‘And she told me no. She said she couldn’t. She loved you. She wanted it to work. She actually – and I could have killed you when she said this – but she actually thought that it was her fault. Can you believe that? She blamed herself for what happened. You made her blame herself. And she wanted to sort herself out and have you back, and because of that, she said no to me. Told me it was a mistake, and she was sorry to have done this to me, and even more sorry to have done it to you.’

He shook his head.

‘And I cried. I cried – of all things! I was so upset. And you know what she did?’ He looked up at me. Through me, at Jason. ‘She held me. She comforted me. After everything she’d been through she did that. That’s how special she was, and you weren’t even there for this girl. She went off to try to understand what happened to her, and she thought she was doing it for you, and she wasn’t at all. She was doing it because of you.’

For a second, the anger seemed to be gone, and he seemed almost deflated by the conclusion he’d come to. All I could see in his face was sadness. The anger was lost. But then I realised that, no, it wasn’t. It was just pacing in the background: working itself back and forth; taking an emotional run up for whatever was coming next.

‘I killed Marley,’ he said. ‘If you’re hearing this then you probably know that already.’

Fuck.

If he’d killed Marley then he was going to kill me too.

But there was something else in addition to that – something I couldn’t quite put my finger on but that felt as though, when I did, it would be the final nail in this whole, sorry coffin. My mind was circling it, threatening to alight: a hand chasing a feather of memory.

‘I killed him for her, not for you,’ he was saying. ‘I opened up the account I set up for you, and I saw the videos that were there. I didn’t know where they came from but I knew what they meant. She was dead. I guess I’d always known that she would be. I mean, even before I read that file I downloaded for you from Liberty. What else could she be?’

The file.

I glanced at the blank computer screen on the desk in front of us.

‘And you know,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t really read that file too well before that. I’d scanned it, but it was mostly gibberish: just the occasional word, maybe half a sentence or so. It was corrupted, so I hadn’t read that much of it. But I read it through. I don’t know why. Morbid curiosity, I guess.’

The text.

I closed my eyes.

‘Look at me,’ he said.

I shook my head.

Oh God.

‘Open your eyes.’

‘No.’

‘You remember what it said there, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You remember what she said.’

‘Yes,’ I told him. I opened my eyes, understanding perfectly. My mind had caught that feather. The final nail had gone in.

I was going to die, and it was probably the rightest thing in the world that I did.

‘I remember what she said.’

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

Marley dragged her back and shoved her down, and she started to cry. Sat there and held her face in her hands, sobbing. Marley didn’t care; he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. Long Tall Jack just laughed.

‘Please don’t do this,’ she said.

Jack was walking over to her, swinging his cock, as she stood up. There was an awful look on her face: a kind of desperately contrived hope. Something had very clearly occurred to her. She was stuck in this nightmare, yes, panicking, yes, but now she’d suddenly realised that it was actually all going to be okay. She’d remembered a key piece of information that she’d left out. How could she have been so stupid? All that she needed to do was explain, and then everything would be all right.

‘Please don’t do this,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

Jack kept coming, and the look on her face disappeared.

It began with a punch.

You know what I remember most? It’s the note she left for me on the kitchen table.

Jason, she’d written.

I love you very much and I don’t want you to blame yourself for this. This isn’t some kind of ‘dear John’ letter. I’m coming back again. There are some things I need to sort out. You know how it’s been between the two of us recently and it’s not fair on you. I need to deal with the issues I have, just like you said.

I should have dealt with them by now, but I really need to now.

Please wait for me. I promise I’ll come home as soon as I can.

I love you so much (to the sky and back!),

Your Amy.

There it is: my Amy.

So, even after everything that happened, she was still mine at that point. I’d been human enough to be not good enough for her, and she was still prepared to be mine. Maybe I should take comfort from that: she didn’t want Graham, and she felt bad about what had happened between them; and she loved me and wanted it to work between us. But I don’t take any comfort. It’s not about Graham. I don’t care about that; everybody makes mistakes. But there’s this: she told me in the letter that she needed to sort herself out for me, and she shouldn’t have thought that; there shouldn’t have been the need for her to think like that. And once upon a time there wouldn’t have been. So it was my fault, not hers.

I keep thinking about what she wrote.

I should have dealt with them already, but I really need to now.

And I think that she really needed to deal with them now because she’d found out she was pregnant and had suddenly been faced with all the responsibilities and uncertainties that go along with that. Amy had wanted to keep me – or she had wanted me back – and so she’d gone to sort herself out in the way she thought she owed me. Never mind for a moment that she didn’t owe me anything. More importantly, there’s the pregnancy to think about.

The baby.

Was it mine or was it the result of that afternoon with Graham? I’ve done the maths and it could have been either. I guess Graham thought it had been his, but maybe he was wrong. It really doesn’t matter. I’ll never know, and so to all intents and purposes it might as well have been.

You look at the line of your life and stick little coloured flags in at key moments: the ones where the line bends sharply off to one side, continuing at some weird new angle. You mark those points down and remember them, and when you question your current trajectory, it’s those points that you use to explain them. Tapping the board and saying: I’m going this way because of this.

And that’s what it comes down to in the end. The rape was one little tag – one that sent her life spinning off in a different direction, crashing into mine – but there was another change in trajectory after that, and that’s really what’s important here. Stupid, but true.

Amy was dead because I went to see Claire Warner that day.

If it hadn’t been for that, there would have been none of this.

But as usual, it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

On the day she disappeared, Amy took the bus into the city. After a brief, purposeful walk, she went into a café called Jo’s and sat in the window. She was there for half an hour in all, and drank two cups of coffee, taking her time over each. Between the two cups, she sent a text message. Mildly annoyed but mostly anxious, she didn’t write much. She simply put:

[r u on ur way???]

A few blocks away, Graham read the message, and then immediately deleted it. He didn’t trust Helen not to look through the phone if he left it lying around. Perhaps it was guilt. When you’ve done something wrong, you often expect other people to share your standards.

‘Who was that?’

‘It was Jason,’ he said. ‘It was nothing.’

So: the footage of the café was actually the first bit of film that Graham ever located. Since he’d been supposed to be meeting Amy there, he knew where to look. He sat on it for a while, of course, until he could realistically produce it – until he’d found enough of a trail for it to lead him there without it seeming suspicious. He wasn’t stupid. Neither was she, though, and I should have thought of it earlier. Would she really have disappeared off to meet a man like Kareem without telling someone where she was going? Of course not. She wouldn’t have told me, obviously, because then I wouldn’t have let her go, or I would have insisted on going with her. But she might have told Graham, especially after everything they’d been through together. So she arranged to meet him in that café, and I can only guess what was on her mind. Was she wanting him to go with her? Was she just going to tell him where and who she was going to see? I’ll never know.

And neither will Graham. He never made that appointment. He knew that Amy was making it work with me, or trying to, and he wasn’t going to get in the way of that, even if he wanted to. And I guess he was annoyed with her, in his own way. There had been times since they’d slept together when he’d been there, again and again, to listen to her and try to help her through whatever stupid shit I’d done that week, but there was no way that could continue forever, not considering how he felt. Even good friends lose their patience with you occasionally. That day, he thought fuck it. Perhaps, having found out how needy she could be, he might have started to empathise with me in some small way. He spent the day with Helen instead, and thought about Amy only once or twice.

So: Amy went to meet Kareem because of me, but she went on her own because Graham didn’t go to meet her, even though he’d told her that he would. That’s what it comes down to; we both had our parts to play in letting her down.

I imagine her sitting in that café, enjoying her first cup of coffee as she waits for Graham, and then she becomes increasingly nervous and undecided as he fails to arrive. She sends that text message and starts thinking: should she go alone, or shouldn’t she? Deep down, she knows he’s not coming. That’s the second cup of coffee. It would be so much easier just to go home, but the thought of that is crushing. This is something that has been keeping her going, giving her hope for our relationship, and going home is defeat. It’s an emotional back-flip over the edge of a cliff.

Amy made her decision. She went on her own that day, and that was the last she ever saw of us.

‘Close your eyes,’ Graham said.

‘What?’

‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘And keep writing.’

The man did as he was told, but he was badly frightened now: shaking; his face looking like he was dreaming, all full of nervous twitches and concentration. And even in this extreme state, the pen kept skittering across the page in front of it, steady and even, recording each and every one of these terrible sensations like some kind of fucking polygraph. Graham stared at him for a couple of seconds, watching the words come, spilling across the empty lines, slowly filling the page. The man was like a machine. Like some kind of camera. The sense-data was coming in, being processed, and then out came the text before him. A permanent record.

How quick was he, Graham wondered as he raised the gun and aimed it at the side of the man’s head. Was the translation instantaneous? He took a good, solid two-handed grip, fingers uncurling and then curling back, and he thought: is this man quicker than a bullet? Will the split-second feeling of his skull opening, his brain rupturing – will the beginnings of that make their way onto the page? And, if so, what will become of the person who reads that?

Graham closed one eye and thought: goodbye, Jason.

‘Wait,’ the writer said.

Graham kept his eye closed.

‘Wait,’ the writer said again. He licked his lips. ‘I know what you want to do, but you have to give me a second. There’s something you need to see.’

‘What?’

‘An e-mail,’ the writer said. ‘Someone just sent it to me. There’s something there that you really need to see. That you should see, really, before you decide what you’re going to do.’

Graham stared at him. The man still had his eyes shut, and his head was nodding slightly, as though he was counting something in his head.

He stared at him for another couple of seconds.

‘Show me.’

The writer opened his eyes. He looked like someone coming out into the light from a long, dark tunnel. With his free hand trembling a little, he reached out for the mouse on the computer table in front of him, and Graham – still aiming the gun – said:

‘Slowly.’

The writer moved the cursor and the black screensaver vanished. Hidden underneath it was an empty e-mail.

‘It’s not the message you need to see,’ he said. ‘It’s the attachment.’

He clicked on a couple of options. The screen changed view to reveal a page of text and the writer scrolled for a second and then pointed at a section of it. ‘Here. This bit.’

Graham leaned across and looked at what was there.

He was watching the big man: Jack. Jack couldn’t work the skirt down over her kicking legs, and her voice was getting louder and more desperate – No-o-o! – and so he punched her so hard between her legs that the whole bed shook.

Jack watched her to see whether there was going to be any more fighting. When it was obvious that there wasn’t, he started moving again. He finished undressing her, throwing the skirt to one side, and then he climbed on top of her, his elbows pressing down hard on the inside of her upper arms, knocking her palms away from her red, tear-stained face. His hands pulled her head right back by the hair. In this surrender position, with her pinned there and sobbing, he started to rape her.

I was watching the man with the gun. It was still pointing at me, but there was no conscious thought attached. He was wrapped up in the text on the screen, lost in it, and – although he probably wouldn’t have known it – he had started to cry.

I had seconds. If I was going to get out of here alive, then this was going to be my only chance to do it. He was going to kill me, and I wasn’t a killer – not really – but there was no way I was going to let him hurt me: if it was me or him, then it was him.

The gun was wavering in the air. Before I could think about the danger, or what would happen if I couldn’t overpower him, I grabbed it and started to fight.