The Third Person (New Blood)

by Steve Mosby

  I had a vague idea of the area and knew where to get off the bus, but I had to ask the driver for directions to the street. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who gave directions very often, but he took one look at me and decided it would be easier, and probably smarter, not to be difficult. He told me exactly what I needed to know.

  It was only a five minute walk from the stop, but when I arrived I was soaked through and cold. And past caring. It was an apartment block with about six storeys, but it looked more or less derelict, and it was difficult to imagine anybody actually living here. There were a couple of lights on close to the top, though, so I figured somebody must be home. A helpful friend of society had already kicked the front door open for me, so I made my way inside and found the stairs.

  There was a pretty good chance that whoever had killed Marley had also come here, as this place had been on the page at which his address book had been left open, and so I took out the gun as I made my way up to the top floor. There was nobody around, but every second staircase found me approaching a black-blue window, criss-crossed by a thin metal grid on the inside, pattered upon and streaked by the rain outside: an incessant tapping that made the building seem even older and weaker that it was. By the time I reached the sixth floor, I was so unnerved by it that I almost wanted someone to pop out of a door and say hi, just to prove that there were people here at all. But there was nothing apart from the rain.

  And on the top floor it was literally raining: the ceiling was open to the sky in a couple of places, letting in a steady spatter of water that was probably not doing the wiring much good. The lights hung down from a brown ceiling, and I walked carefully. Getting electrocuted would, in theory, solve all my problems, but it didn’t seem like a particularly appealing prospect.

  There had been no name in the address book: just the street, and then the building and room numbers. I didn’t know who I was going to find here, as I made my way down the old, battered corridor, searching for six-one-two. The décor left a lot to be desired. If the paper hadn’t been peeling in places, I might have believed there were no walls beneath them at all: just the paper, stretched and fragile and breakable. I could have torn it down and moved from one dank room to another, from empty flats into inhabited and stained ones. I could have held the surprised occupants at gunpoint as I stalked through and then ripped my way into the next one, and then the next, looking for whoever lived at this blank address. Room six-one-two. Here it was.

  I listened at the door for a moment and, in a way that was becoming all too familiar, there was nothing to hear. Somehow, I hadn’t expected there to be. And when I tried the handle, it didn’t surprise me that the door opened. Unlocked, just like Marley’s had been. Was I going to find a body in the bath here, as well?

  The room was dark, illuminated only by the pale blue glow from a monitor over by the window, with a wedge of carpet revealed by light from the open door behind me. I couldn’t see much, but I could just about make out the shelves of books lining the walls – hundreds of books and notepads and files and roughly bundled sheafs of paper – and I knew that I was in the right place. The computer was giving out a quiet electric hum, overlaid every few seconds by a small splashing noise of water falling into water. That was coming from deeper inside the flat. I guessed the bathroom.

  And on top of those noises, the buzz of flies.

  I found a light switch on the wall to my right, and it brought the room to life. All the shadows were sucked back under and between things, and I could suddenly see it all, or what there was to see anyway. Mostly just books. There were some weights in one corner, as well – tiny little things – and a desk by the window, where the computer was. Other than that the room was bare. Except for the man lying down on the floor by the desk.

  I closed the front door quietly, as though he was sleeping and I didn’t want to disturb him. But he wasn’t sleeping. There was something about the curled angle of him, and the stillness, not to mention the flies. And the smell, more than anything. It was the same odour that there’d been in Marley’s flat. I recognised it for what it was, and I knew the man on the floor was dead even before I saw the blood pooled out from his hair, the spray of it on the books to the right, and the gun, discarded, not far from his mottled hand. On the desk in front of the computer were a few sheets of paper. A suicide note, I guessed.

  Everybody was dead before I could get to them, and it didn’t seem fair.

  I nudged the corpse with my foot, rolling it onto its back, and I watched as the head came unstuck from the floor, moving absently on its lifeless neck. And then I saw the face, and took a shocked step back. A half stumble. It was Graham.

  What the fuck was this?

  It couldn’t be, I thought, but I hadn’t taken my eyes off him and there was really no doubt at all. Apart from a ruined section above his ear, the nearest side of his head was intact – pale but whole – and I’d known him for how long? I’d known him since we were little kids. I’d known him for years.

  What had happened here? What was Graham doing here in this flat? It looked like he’d killed himself, but if so then what did that fucking mean – had he been involved in this all along? I couldn’t make it fit: none of it made any sense.

  I looked around the room, over and over, not really taking any of it in. It was like my mind had put the shutters down and blocked out anything new until it got a handle on the shit it already had, but then I remembered the suicide note and the shutters went up again.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I picked up the sheets of paper and started to read.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘Are you writing this down now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Look at me while you’re doing it.’

  So I looked over at him, sitting next to me. He was a large man: tall and solid, without being muscular or fat. Clean shaven. Brown hair. Blue eyes behind the glasses he was wearing. In fact, apart from the gun he was holding, pointing only vaguely at me but with his eyes doing most of the damage, he seemed normal. Just an average, everyday guy: the kind you passed in the street all the time without noticing, caring about or looking twice at.

  Except for that gun.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said. I was surprised by how frightened I sounded. ‘I don’t have any money.’

  He smiled, but even as I’d said it I’d known how stupid it was. He wasn’t here for money. My flat was on the top floor of a half-abandoned, three-quarters derelict shit-stack, and that was hardly the sort of place you came at random just to turn somebody over. On top of that, he clearly knew all about me. He hadn’t got me on the floor; he hadn’t tied me up or told me not to fucking move and asked where the money was.

  What had happened was this.

  It had been pouring down outside. There was a cacophony of clicks and splashes as the rain hit windowsills and cars and awnings below: a deep, dense, wet sound; a three-dimensional noise that you could walk through. The rain smelled warm, almost spicy. The street and pavements far below seemed suitably black and charred.

  I’d been sitting, staring at the blank e-mail I’d received. There was no actual message, only the attachment, and I kept alternating between reading sections of the text it contained and staring at the empty e-mail and wondering what it meant.

  Somehow, it had sidled through all the broken and breaking servers and found its way here, to my inbox.

  The screensaver woke up – a featureless black background and I nudged the mouse to send it away. The blank message returned. Implacable. It was almost surprising how full of meaning no words could be.

  I opened the attachment again and read it through.

  It was very much incomplete: I guessed that there was less than a quarter of the original text there, and the rest was corrupted to the point where the meaning had gone, but I could make out some of the words and I recognised enough of the others to know what this was.

  she screams se har(d thyt wf jjkpeopllr hurt h..r

  I c
losed the attachment and clicked back to the blank message. Nothing – no words anyway. The malformed text made me think of a dog. It was like an old dog you’d dragged out back and shot in the head, but then you hear a scraping at the back door, go and open it, and there it is. And you don’t know whether it’s loyalty or anger that’s brought it back to you, except that in this case I thought that I did. The blank screen glared at me. If I stared, the emptiness felt like it was burning into my eyes.

  Bang. Bang.

  Two steady knocks at the front door, and I’d turned around before I knew it. The blank message continued its empty flare in the corner of my eye.

  I didn’t move.

  My attention was focused on the lock, with the rest of the room fading away around me, and I realised that it was open. My front door was unlocked, and I didn’t even dare move. But then it really was open – opening, anyway – and a large man with a gun was walking into the darkness, bringing sickly light from the hall along with him.

  He’d just closed the front door calmly, keeping the gun pointing at me the whole time, and then he’d taken a seat at the table beside me.

  ‘Get yourself some fresh paper,’ he’d said. ‘And a pen. And then start writing down what’s happening here.’

  And so that’s what I’d done.

  The smile disappeared now as he told me what I already knew.

  ‘I don’t want your money. I just want you to listen.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Right.’

  ‘Yes. Listen and write.’

  Okay, I thought. He’s someone who knows about me and what I can do, and maybe he wants to make some money. So perhaps there was an angle here that I could use to help myself. But then again – if that was all that he wanted, he could have taken a dozen notebooks off the shelves behind him and sold them to whatever buyer he had interested. So why not do that? My mind was backtracking, and I couldn’t help thinking of the blank e-mail I’d just received. The corrupted attachment. Did this have something to do with that empty message?

  He leaned forward and looked me in the eyes. Just stared into them intently.

  ‘Are you in there, Jason?’ he said. ‘Are you hearing me?’

  All I could do was stare back at him. I didn’t know what to say, but I didn’t have the courage to look down. So I kept the connection, my right hand twitching away as I wrote.

  After a second, he leaned away again. ‘Never mind. Either you are or you aren’t.’

  I looked down at the paper in front of me, which was nearly full. He must have followed my gaze and realised what I was thinking because he placed another one down in front of me and said:

  ‘Let’s have a nice clean break, shall we?’

  There was a playground near where Graham and Jason grew up, formed in a concrete bubble on the edge of this park that wasn’t really a park at all – just grassland, really, with a couple of chalk-white pitch shapes stained thoughtlessly into it, and the ring of a path for older people to stroll around in summer. There was a maze of trees and bushes which people from the nearby pubs would lose themselves in on an evening, in order to fuck drunkenly. The playground was at the top.

  Graham had had his first beer there, and smoked his first joint. He didn’t lose his virginity there, shivering and cold, although he would have liked to.

  They shared the place out between about thirty of them, mixed in every way, and they didn’t exactly mingle but they all put up with one another’s presence without much confrontation. Graham’s group consisted of Jason and about five or six other friends from school. One of those was Emma Lindley. She had messy blonde hair that she wore half tied back, and she was always smiling, and she was slim from all the football she played with the boys. Graham thought she was beautiful, and had done for nearly a year. He’d managed to speak to her a couple of times, but the conversation had never done more than skim the surface. In their circle of friends they were at opposite sides, which meant Graham was always looking across at her while she was always turned one way or the other, talking to someone else. But it was okay. He’d accepted that, generally speaking, that was the way things always were. It was certainly how they always had been. He didn’t get the girl. Maybe he was being overly optimistic, but he thought that one day he would. It couldn’t stay like this forever; he was a nice guy.

  That night, Graham and a boy called Jonny were sitting side by side on the mound of concrete at the top of the playground. They were next to the slide that curved down its surface, and another boy – pissed to high heaven – was sliding down it, and then clambering up the wedged steps to the top, and then sliding down again, over and over. In about ten minutes he would lean on his knees and be sick in front of them, but for now he was happy.

  Across the other side of the playground, Emma was talking to Connor and Jason. They were by the swings. Graham looked from them up to the night sky. It was very dark blue, not black, and the stars were full of colour.

  ‘Here.’

  Jonny passed Graham the bottle of whisky they were sharing. Graham took a swig and winced. It hurt, but it made his head warm and the night hum. Alcohol shaved the edges off. When he was drunk, which he was getting towards being now, he felt a lot more positive about things. Not that they were closer to being within his reach. It just mattered less that they weren’t.

  He took another swig, and then said, ‘Here,’ and Jonny took the bottle back again.

  Graham looked around. The playground was quite busy tonight, but the groups were as segregated as ever. It was mostly boys and girls he knew from school – people he knew but didn’t know – and none of them really wanted to mix. Occasionally someone would come over and beg a cigarette or beer or rolling paper, and there’d be some perfunctory friendly conversation. It was always amiable, never convincing.

  Graham knew he was just one of those guys: background people. He was very smart, but not irritating enough to be a target. He didn’t have that many friends, but enough to coast by, and he was never invited anywhere, but nobody was surprised or annoyed when he tagged along with people who were. He’d never had a girlfriend, but he’d been turned down by a few high-profile players way above his station, and so nobody thought he was gay. Nobody really thought much about him at all. That was all okay, too.

  One of the reasons he came here was because it made him feel accepted, but it was weird. In many ways it just underlined how much he wasn’t. For him, it was all kind of an act. Whereas Jason was the real thing.

  Graham looked back just as Connor joined them. He took the whisky from Jonny and said, ‘Three’s a crowd tonight.’

  Jonny laughed, but not much. Graham’s attention returned to the swings across the playground. Now, Emma and Jason were on their own over there, sitting side by side on the hard rubber seats, twisting gently against the strength of the chains. Just talking, but quietly, without really looking at each other.

  ‘I know when I’m not wanted,’ Connor said.

  Their feet were scraping the tarmac beneath them.

  Graham looked away and gestured for the whisky off Connor.

  ‘Here.’

  As he drank it, he thought: well, that’s okay. And it was, too. It was just the way things always had happened and always would. He was used to it. He sat there with Connor and Jonny and got methodically drunk, and he must have looked at Jason and Emma every few seconds, because by the end of the evening it was like he had a stop-start movie of them in his head. But all the time, he chatted with his friends, and on the surface he seemed to have a good time. He was aware that it was very important that he keep anyone from realising what he was feeling, including himself. So he watched them but tried not to think about it, and when they walked off together he didn’t let it bother him. It was okay.

  Really, it was—

  Okay.

  So this is what happened.

  What really happened.

  Like I said, I saw Claire Warner through the window of the train: an odd moment, but fitting in a way –
that my first real-life glimpse of her should be occluded slightly by the sunlight on a streaky window. I recognised her face from the picture she’d sent, and would have known it was her even without the white dress. The way she was standing. It’s like everyone else in the station was forty per cent less real than she was. Crowds, sponsored by Stand-In.

  She didn’t know me to look at, but I caught her eye before I’d reached her, smiled, and she smiled back and knew it was me. Amazingly, she didn’t look disappointed. I walked over to her feeling nervous, not knowing how to greet her or what to say. In the end, it was easy. We said hi to each other softly, and she kissed me on the cheek, her body like air in front of me. Would you like to get a coffee? And I said yeah, please – this is really weird, isn’t it? Isn’t this really weird?

  That much all happened.

  What I didn’t tell you was that that day was one of Amy’s darker days. I’d like to say that I didn’t know, but I did. We argued that morning. I’d told her in advance that I had to do overtime and was heading into work for the day, but she was upset with me, or maybe just plain upset, and she asked me not to go. Maybe I could call in sick or something? Because she was really down and it would be nice for us to spend some time together. After all, we’d hardly seen each other lately. She was forgetting what I looked like.

  She was lying in bed when she said all this to me. Propped up on one elbow, watching me getting dressed, giving me that look.

  And you know what? I was fucking irritated.

  I’m not proud of it, but what I thought was: there you go again, spoiling it for me. It had happened before. In fact, sometimes it seemed as though Amy had this psychic ability to know when something mattered to me, or when I was looking forward to something, and those were the times when she suddenly needed me. She’d ask me to cancel; sometimes she’d cry; and – always – she’d give me the look that she was giving me now. Half begging me to say yes and half wondering how I couldn’t. Amy would have dropped the world for me without even thinking.