The Third Person

CHAPTER TWO

It was a McDonald’s moon that night: two great big, golden arches staring down at me from the black sky, with stars twinkling beside and around. I’ve always hated that one the most: a big M – M for Moon – as though we’re all so stupid that we need everything labelling for us. The Nike tick annoys me, too. Everything’s okay, it seems to tell you, when you know that – really – it isn’t at all. I guess that my favourite, aesthetically speaking, would have to be Pepsi, but Benetton could sometimes be quite inventive.

No, fuck it – my favourite was old-fashioned plain. The night I’d met Amy it had been that way: three-quarters waxing, which was still slim enough to be free from advertising. Not exactly the stuff that poetry’s made of, I grant you – a kind of half-fat and unremarkable moon – but you need to take what free space you can get these days, and so that’s what I’ll take.

Amy.

Wilkinson wouldn’t tell me any more information than he’d told me at the house. They’d found a girl’s body, and they wanted to speak to me. But what else could it be? I couldn’t think of anything. My body rocked with the motion of the car. I was aching slightly from the force of the exercise, but my mind felt very calm and passive.

Amy.

The police car headed quickly through drenched streets. There were a few people around, black as the shadows between the buildings, and the pavements looked so dark it was as though it was raining oil and not water. I supposed that it could have been. Clouds, sponsored by Esso. Bright lights turned to blurs through the front window, before the screeching wipers smeared away the rain; water pattered on the roof, like pins dropping. We tail-ended a pair of bright red lights for half a block, and then headed onto the freeway. The city dropped away to the side, and the driver sped up a little.

The in-car radio was tuned to i-Mart’s main station, and they seemed to have Will Robinson caught on a loop. I could have screamed: if there was one thing I didn’t need right now it was shitty pop music, but I didn’t have long to suffer. In ten minutes, we were there.

The Bracken police centre was floodlit in amber, with enormous, upturned lanterns bathing the building from all four sides and making its naturally orange brickwork all the more pronounced after nightfall. With its black canopies and foyered entrance it was often mistaken for a hotel – all twenty storeys of it – and I figured that more than a few late-night travellers had turned off the freeway over the years expecting a Holiday Inn. It had been built a decade earlier, when the police service was privatised. Bracken was one of three national hubs, connected to a spider’s-web of regional, and then local, offices. Following the i-Mart business model, the police force farmed out their officers to areas where ‘sales’ were lowest, setting up clusters of shops in key target areas and taking them over. In this case, the product on offer was a low crime statistic – coupled, of course, with some exemplary computer produce. i-Mart – to protect and to serve; Microsoft never even saw it coming. Where do you want to go today? Directly to fucking jail.

Wilkinson opened the door to let me out, and then we walked over to the main building while the driver parked the car up, tyres slashing away across wet tarmac.

‘Miserable night,’ Wilkinson said.

I nodded, never really that good at small talk except when it was faked on a computer screen.

He pulled up the collar of his coat and did a silly little half dance as he got beneath the canopy over the main entrance, as though he couldn’t stand another second of rain. I was barely noticing it. My hair was short and the rain couldn’t do any more damage than my face already did. And clothes dry, after a while. I had other things on my mind.

Amy.

I supposed I’d been expecting this eventually, and now it was happening I felt an empty kind of calm. I wasn’t really upset or angry. It was more like nothing was going on in me at all.

‘Come on through.’

The foyer was silver: kitted out from the feet up in the best shiny-metal^TM that i-Mart could provide. Everything looked as though if you touched it, it would leave a smeary fingerprint, so nobody had yet. A bank of blue-backed Powermacs faced out at the incoming public, with a row of pretty receptionists taking 999 calls through headsets, fingers chattering commands to local offices. A pair of cops stood near the mirrored elevator doors to the right, while blue carpeted stairs led up to the left. Wilkinson headed for these, and I followed.

‘Good for the circulation,’ he insisted, as I looked around. The walls of the stairwell were decorated with old i-Mart advertisements: freeze-frames from computer commercials and adBoard stills. ‘I never take the elevators, anyway. Can’t stand the music.’

I nodded.

‘All they play is Will Robinson,’ he told me as we reached the first floor and he pushed through some double doors. ‘Like in the car. You know that kid? They pipe that shit out day and night. I didn’t know he had so many songs.’

‘He’s got a bunch.’

If I remembered rightly, the last few had adorned i-Mart’s recent ad campaign, which I figured might have had something to do with something.

I said, ‘But they’re mostly the same song in a different order.’

‘Is that right?’ Wilkinson raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I didn’t know you were a musician. You a musician?’

‘You don’t need to be.’

He looked away.

‘Yeah, well. They all suck like a vacuum cleaner, if you ask me. His current single makes me want to fucking kill myself. My daughter loves it, though. She loves all that kind of shit. Here we are.’

He opened the door to an interview room.

‘Take a seat,’ Wilkinson said, closing the door behind him. ‘If you’re nice, the décor won’t bite.’

I had my doubts, but sat down anyway. The silver desk extended out from one wall, blocking two-thirds of the room, with a raised computer panel on Wilkinson’s side. The i-Mart Eye^TM logo looked at me from the back. He took a seat in front of it, opposite me, and started running a nicotine-stained index finger over the screen. It beeped in protest, but a keyboard flicked up out of the desk. He sniffed.

‘State of the art,’ he told me, without looking up. ‘Means it takes half an hour more than pen and paper used to. Bear with me.’

‘Okay.’

I looked around some more as he started tapping keys, starting to have a weird feeling that this wasn’t about Amy at all. Surely, it would have been different if they’d found her – not like this, anyway. A camera was watching me from the far corner of the room, above the door, and there was a plexiglass division running down the centre of the steel desk. I figured that Wilkinson had a button his side, and if he pressed it the plexiglass would raise, and maybe the table would extend out of the wall, caging me in. I thought I’d seen some kind of documentary where they’d shown it happening. I looked up.

There was a gas grill on the roof, slightly behind me.

I looked back at Wilkinson.

‘Can I ask what this is about, please?’

He tapped the keyboard once more and looked up.

‘Yeah, I’m ready now.’

And then, suddenly more serious, the question, coming out of nowhere:

‘Can I ask you, Jason, do you know a girl called Claire Warner?’

Now here was something. She sent me a jpeg of herself, once, and she was as beautiful as she’d always made out she was. I can get any man I want, she’d bragged to me at one point, except that it hadn’t been a boast as much as a plain statement of fact. Not something she was proud of, exactly, more something that bothered her. Because getting exactly what you want is only good when you know what that is.

I took the jpeg into Fireworks and magnified it up to 800%, until her crimson lips filled the screen and were reduced to red squares, darker red squares and dots of black -until it wasn’t recognisable as a face anymore: just a hotchpotch of blocky colour. And I looked at the edges where they touched, imagining that she might emerge from the non-space there, in hiding behind her own bitmap. The same way that I ran my fingers over [claire21] when we chatted at Liberty-Talk, and wondered at the million other words that were hiding between the letters of her name, the ones she didn’t give me in the hours we spent typing messages to each other.

Looking for traces of her on the internet: typing her name into ten search engines at once. They ticked through a hundred thousand sites between them and threw hopeless pages back at me. Not one was of her, or even close. There were a whole bunch of her-names in the phonebook, and any one of them could have really been her, but I couldn’t find out which without ringing them each in turn. And even then her voice would have been a stranger’s, and yet not.

Here was something, indeed.

I don’t know why I bothered stalking her so unsuccessfully, when she would have told me anything and everything I wanted to know – even from that first accidental meeting on Liberty-Talk. She would have met up with me in half a second, fucked me blind with a smile on her face and then whirled away out of my life without a second thought or a backwards glance.

She was single, after all. It was me that was in the relationship.

‘Is Claire dead?’ I asked.

Wilkinson was implacable. ‘So you did know her?’

I nodded.

‘Yeah. Kind of.’

‘We knew that you knew her. How did you meet?’

He typed something in.

Suspect admits knowledge of victim, I thought.

Best just to tell the truth.

‘I met her in LibertyTalk. We got chatting.’

‘How many times did you get chatting?’

I shrugged.

‘A bunch of times. You probably know that already, too. Is she dead?’

Of course she’s dead.

Wilkinson was still typing.

‘We need to talk through some stuff,’ he told me. ‘But, yes, Claire’s dead. She was found earlier this morning. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’ I didn’t know whether I felt anything at all. I thought of the pixels in her lips. ‘We hadn’t been in touch for a while.’

‘How long’s a while?’

I thought about it.

‘A fair few months.’

‘Since before your girlfriend vanished?’

A beat. He didn’t look up at me.

‘I guess so. Yeah.’

‘But you can’t remember. You might have seen her since.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not since then.’

‘You sure, now?’

‘Yeah.’

He looked up at me.

I looked away from him, thinking about the train station in Schio. It was the last time I’d met Claire – the only real time I’d met her at all, in fact, outside the internet. How did I know it was before Amy disappeared? Because I’d come home afterwards and crawled into bed beside her, that’s how, and then spent the next day chasing her round to reassure her that I loved her – doing a hundred little things to make her smile even though none of them felt like enough. But I decided that I didn’t want Inspector Wilkinson to know about the train station at Schio.

‘I’m just sure,’ I said.

‘Well.’ He looked back down at the screen. ‘We can come back to that in a bit. Let’s talk about how you first met her.’

It’s easy to meet people. Bracken City Market holds at least three thousand shoppers at any one time. I could walk through it, from one end to the other, and brush against a hundred strangers. It’s limited and irrelevant, perhaps, but so what? The amount you know somebody is always subjective and limited, and so every contact you make is valid, no matter how small it seems and no matter how little you think it reveals. It’s easy to meet people. Easy to meet anyone.

Harder to connect, though.

LibertyTalk was a little bit like the Melanie Room in its basic format: just a bog-standard, generic Chat room. Where you choose to chat on-line is usually pretty much accidental: you find somewhere, you start talking to a few people, you begin to feel at home. It’s like becoming a regular at a pub in a lot of ways. They serve the same beer as everyone else, and people are people – but you get to know these particular people, and the beer starts to be ready for you when you walk in the door. So you stick around. It’s no more – or less – complicated than that.

I ended up there out of a random mix of internet kudos and hyperlinks, both of which I know mean very little in the everyday world. Liberty was the official site of Dave Pateley, who was rumoured to have pioneered the original free code that made places like the Melanie Room possible. The idea was that you downloaded specific software from another user, someone you knew, and it linked you up to a random selection of neighbouring computers – sometimes three or four, sometimes a hundred, and you never knew how many – all around the world. And you shared a folder on your computer with those other users, putting whatever files you wanted in it – music files, text files, government documents, pornography. You gave it a universal key name, which you could also post at the main Liberty site, and left it there. If you wanted to get hold of a particular file – say your favourite song – you just entered the key name in as search criteria, and the program searched through all the computers you were connected to. If it didn’t find it in those, it set them searching through all the ones they were connected to. And so on. When it did find it, it copied it back to you, leaving an additional copy in all the computers along the way.

This achieved a number of things. Most importantly, it got you the file. But there was no way – from looking at your computer – that the authorities could tell whether it had got there by accident or design. You were clearly either a criminal or a victim of crime, but it was impossible for them to tell which. Secondly, there was no way that – from you – they could trace more than a handful of other users. They could bring down a cell, but never disable the entire network. Thirdly, it meant that you had to clear a few gigs of shit off your hard drive every evening, or else install some software that did it for you. A small price to pay for total freedom of information? People thought so. Even the politicians whose private documents were being circulated on a daily basis recognised that it was pretty cool, and attempted to ally themselves with it. Nothing ever changes.

That’s why I ended up there, anyway, wandering through the hundred or so hosted Chat rooms as [JK22], looking at the throb of conversation scrolling up before me: SHOUTs and (whispers); multi-coloured text; emoticons; roses and kisses being passed around like spare cigarettes or bought like free drinks. It was an alien world to me, and every time I saw a new name entering the room, or slid sideways through into another one myself, I felt a thrill of excitement in my gut that I hadn’t felt for a long time.

People as text.

I’d sip coffee after coffee, or sometimes a beer, and have random conversations with complete strangers.

I was never on for that long. By that point in time, Amy was spending a great deal of the evenings on the internet herself, looking at sites she didn’t want me to see, and so I was always grateful for any time with her that I could get. But sometimes – when the clouds came over – I was also glad for somewhere else to go: somewhere I could be whoever I wanted, talk to whomever I please and feel that there were no consequences.

None at all.

And one late evening, with a simple invitation to private, Claire Warner had found me. I knew, because she told me while we were talking, that she was sitting in her bedroom, naked, with the bedclothes wrapped around her a little. (It was cold that night.) Throughout it all – until towards the end, anyway – she was sitting cross-legged on the edge of her bed with the keyboard resting across her bare thighs, and there was a bottle of wine on the bedside table. She had a glass in her hand, and there was hard dance music playing in the background – only she’d turned it down so low that it had the volume and ease of a soft, comfortable ballad.

She always typed to music, she said. It made her fingers feel as though they were dancing.

‘You had cybersex with her?’ Wilkinson asked me.

I tapped my fingers on the table a couple of times, wondering where exactly this was going. All the time, I was remembering things that I’d done my best to bury and forget. Unhelpful things.

[CLAIRE21]: why do you want to know that?

[JK22]:?

[CLAIRE21]: well why are you asking?

[JK22]: (getting all embarrassed…)

[CLAIRE21]: aw – blushing boy!

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘After a while.’

‘That night?’

I stared at the top of his head.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Later on.’

[JK22]: I don’t want to offend you.

[JK22]:…

[CLAIRE21]: you think you could offend me?

[JK22]: maybe

[CLAIRE21]: lol

[CLAIRE21]: doubt it

[CLAIRE21]: feel free to try!

[JK22]: lol

[JK22]: (still blushing tho)

[CLAIRE21]: y r u so worried about offending me?

Wilkinson was still typing, but now he was frowning slightly.

‘So you had cybersex with her that evening.’

‘Yes.’

‘Just the once?’

I almost laughed.

‘Of course.’

He looked up at me, not really smiling.

‘Jason, I don’t know anything about this kind of thing.’

And, although he said it in a neutral voice – deliberately neutral – I could tell that it was a loaded sentence. This kind of thing. This kind of disgusting thing, was what he meant. I checked out his hand. No wedding ring. I figured that Wilkinson was a real man: he picked up his ladies in bars or clubs. Never anywhere so sad as on-line, even though it was exactly the same.

‘You generally only tend to do it once,’ I explained.

He started typing again, his voice more normal.

‘Did you meet her again?’

‘Yes.’

‘On-line?’

‘Yes.’

The excitement, fluttering in my stomach as the train pulled into the station at Schio. The people milling around. My fingertips were pressed on the glass, with a phantom hand touching them from the outside and a slight reflection of my peering face almost cheek-to-cheek with me. Looking for that white dress in the crowd.

‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘It was always on-line.’

He tapped a key.

‘How many times did you meet her?’

I thought about it.

‘I couldn’t say for sure. Maybe eight or nine times, over a period of about… I don’t know. Two months?’ I shook my head. ‘But I’m not sure.’

‘You didn’t keep track?’

‘No.’

A few more keystrokes.

‘And did you continue to have cybersex with her throughout that time?’

A loaded question – again – fired like a blank.

I said, ‘A couple of times, maybe.’

‘So, yes?’

‘I suppose so. Yes. But not always.’

‘Sometimes you just talked?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s right. Just like in any other relationship. Sometimes we just talked.’

[CLAIRE21]: y r u so worried about offending me?

[JK22] because you’re nice

[JK22] you know?

[CLAIRE21]: I think you’re nice, too.

[CLAIRE21]: you’re not like the other bastards on here

[CLAIRE21]: r u gonna blush now?

[CLAIRE21]: whaddyou think?

[CLAIRE21]: lol

[JK22] no. I’m glad you think I’m nice

[CLAIRE21] (shocked) what would your gf say?

Wilkinson tapped in a few more lines of text, recording the strange fact that – from time to time – two people had actually managed to talk without having sex. I shifted in my seat a little. He looked up, then, catching my movement.

‘You okay? You comfortable?’

‘I’m fine, yeah.’

‘You want a coffee?’

Of course I wanted a coffee. But not as much as I wanted to be out of here.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, thanks.’

‘Okay. You know – this is just routine.’ Suddenly, he leaned back in his chair and seemed more relaxed.

‘Your name was on her computer: a bunch of old transcripts and stuff. She’d erased a load of it, but some were still left. Not just you, by the way.’ He leaned forwards again. ‘A whole load of guys. She was on the internet a lot, huh?’

I shrugged.

‘I don’t know. Not that I know of.’

He just nodded, dismissing it.

‘She was on the internet a lot. Look, are you sure you don’t want a coffee? I mean, I want a coffee. Do you want a coffee? I’m going, anyway.’

‘In that case, sure,’ I said. ‘Black, no sugar.’

‘Virgin coffee.’ Wilkinson stood up. ‘That’s the way I have it, too. I don’t like people fucking with my coffee.’

‘Lol,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I’m laughing out loud.’ I gave him a smile. ‘That’s all.’

‘Okay.’ He turned around, nodding to himself. ‘Laughing out loud. That’s very clever. That’s a computer thing, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, that’s very clever.’

He returned five minutes later with two coffees. While he was away, I tried to get my thoughts together. Claire was dead, and I didn’t know whether I felt much about that or not. I mean – she’d always seemed like a sweet girl, but when it came down to it, I’d hardly known her. She’d been there for me at a difficult time: that’s all. And because Wilkinson hadn’t told me anything about it, it seemed somehow less real – as though it wouldn’t have actually happened until I’d heard all of the grim details. Maybe I was just numbed from all the stuff I’d seen on the internet. Murder? Give me photographs and tape recordings, or don’t expect me to feel anything.

But that wasn’t true.

By the time he returned, the only thing I’d really figured out was that I wanted to go home and forget about this. Forget all about Claire, as bad as that was, and prepare myself for tomorrow. The police didn’t mean shit to me. They didn’t figure in the cycle of my life at all these days.

‘Here you go.’ Wilkinson passed me the coffee, taking his seat again. ‘It’s hot, be careful, etcetera. Now, where were we?’

It wasn’t directed at me. I turned the cup around on the table between my fingers, and waited for him to catch his place, trying to remain calm and patient.

‘So, all of this – this was all before your girlfriend disappeared?’

‘Yes.’

‘Amy?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean, what we’re talking about here is an affair.’

‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘I suppose that it is.’

‘Brass tacks, that’s what it is. An affair.’ He typed something in. ‘Did Amy Foster, your girlfriend – did she know about Ms Warner?’

The coffee cup stopped turning.

[CLAIRE21]: (shocked) what would your gf say?

{pause in proceedings}

[JK22] that doesn’t matter right now

[JK22]: does it?

‘No,’ I said. ‘She never knew.’

Wilkinson looked at me for a second or two, judging me. I think those few seconds held a great deal for both of us. For him, they held a murdered girl who had conducted an affair with a man whose girlfriend had then disappeared two months later. For me, they held all that and more, but from such a different and darker angle that I figured Wilkinson could never even have contemplated the view.

‘I guess she wouldn’t have known about it, though,’ he said. He was speaking more to himself than to me. ‘Would she?’

There’s a certain kind of hole that your heart can plunge into, and you only really find out about it when you care for someone very much. Nobody ever teaches you about it, and nobody talks about it much, either: it’s one of those things that you have to learn about by yourself. The first time that you fall into it, you feel as though you’ll never stop falling and, when you do, that you’ll never escape – that you could never climb out of anything this deep and this black: you can’t see the handholds, and there are probably too few, even if you could. After a few trips down to this place, though, you figure out the truth: you just need to relax, and forget about how far down you are. You float out by yourself, given time.

It happens mostly because of communication breaking down. I don’t mean that in some kind of talk-show bullshit way, either; it’s just what it is. You’ll be talking to each other, and a word will go wrong. Or you’ll argue over a trivial sentence that neither of you care about and that, after three more lines of dialogue, neither of you can even remember properly, and so neither of you can ever really win. If one of you sees this coming and tries to end the conversation, the other resents it. And if you follow it through, you hate each other for a few black minutes, as a thousand buried irritations come flooding out. They’re like demons spilling out through an argument that, on the surface, has nothing to do with them, but deep down has everything.

All that matters is not saying you’re wrong. That’s what keeps you down there in the pit, and you only float back up when enough time has passed for you not to care about the argument anymore. It sounds kind of hokey, but it’s love that pulls you out: the knowledge that what you have is too good to let go of, and that the other person is too good to let you go. So, the truth is this. You only end up in this place when you love somebody very much. Clouds don’t matter much at night-time – only when there’s a sun for them to cover.

But while you are in there, you have to be careful. It’s dark and cold, and while you’re down there you can’t even remember what love feels like. Worse than that, you don’t want to. And there are things down there with you that will whisper things, and suggest things – that have an upside-down logic to them, and which seem quite appealing and sensible in the cold dark of day. Come deeper, they say. And it sounds so right. You never want to feel love again, and damaging it feels good. But they’re things that you really don’t want to listen to, and when the clouds come over forever you’ll wish that you hadn’t.

Wilkinson asked me a few more questions about my relationship with Claire, coming back more than once to the concept of us having met outside the internet. I denied it, and then denied some more. At one point, I looked at my watch and saw it was after midnight. We’ll be done, soon, Wilkinson told me. But we weren’t.

‘I want to go home,’ I told him, as it reached one o’clock. ‘We’ve talked about everything there is to talk about, and I just… want to go home.’

He sighed, leaning back in his seat. I stared at him, not letting him off the hook. Yes, I’d known her; yes, I’d had an affair with her; no, I wasn’t proud of it.

Yes. I wanted to go home.

‘Okay, Jason,’ he said after a second. ‘I’ll have an officer drive you back.’

‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk.’

‘You’ll walk?’

‘That’s right. I like walking.’ Which was true, especially at night when there was nobody around. ‘And I hate your fucking in-car music.’

‘But it’s pouring down.’

‘Then, I’ll get wet.’

He slapped the table gently.

‘Okay, then. I guess that’s okay. We’re done, here, anyway.’

Wilkinson showed me back to the main entrance. Outside, in the amber glow around the nearest floodlight, I could see the rain spitting through: invisible beforehand, up in the night, and then invisible afterwards, as it smacked into the pavement. When he opened the door, the cold hit me like a splash of sea-water: refreshing but slightly cruel. It was a bad night.

As he opened the door, Wilkinson was wincing. Briefly, I wondered what he would be like if someone ever shot him, or something.

‘Take care, now.’

And then he said something which made me realise that this wasn’t over yet – that we weren’t done here, at all. My private world, which I’d cultivated and focused, was no longer mine alone; my isolation was an illusion. Society had come knocking.

He said, ‘We’ll be in touch.’