The Third Person

by Steve Mosby

  We made love like this for a while, gradually relaxing into a more circular motion, bringing our groins into pleasurably bruising contact with every thrust. I reached underneath her and pulled her tight against me while her hands explored my back. I moved myself higher up the bed a little to bring the shaft of my cock hard against her. Used my right hand to gently touch her face, and told her that I loved her.

  I was ready to come, but holding back until she was there with me. It didn’t seem like it would take long: we hit a perfect rhythm, where every thrust was bringing her closer to the edge. She’d tensed up a little more, and her quiet cries were growing more eager. This was getting serious.

  And then suddenly, it really was. She stiffened up against me in a way that felt entirely wrong: frozen in a fighting position.

  Her hands started patting my back in panic.

  ‘Oh, stop, stop. Please can we stop? I want to stop.’

  I stopped immediately. My body objected strongly.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘No, no. Please can we stop? Please? I’m sorry. I really need for us to stop.’

  She was starting to cry.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We have stopped. Come on. Shhh.’

  I slid out of her as carefully as I could and clambered back to my side of the bed, rubbing sweat off my face and then adjusting my cock. Her hands went to her face and her body started shaking. She had rolled over on her side, facing away from me. Her naked back was shuddering gently.

  I felt strange: still turned on; frustrated; hurt; apologetic.

  The only thing I could really do was move closer to her and put my arm around her. She was shaking uncontrollably. I pressed up against her back and tried to hold her, but it was difficult to find somewhere non-sexual to place my hand, and I had to lean back from her slightly to keep my cock away.

  I said, ‘Shhh. It’s okay.’

  I said, ‘It’s okay. Shhh.’

  She was gripping my hand ever so tightly. It was the only indication I had that she didn’t want me to leave her alone.

  I kissed the back of her shoulder gently and told her it was okay.

  After a while, she stopped shaking and I could just hear her crying quietly. I gave her body a quick hug. She clenched my hand a little harder in a couple of communicative pulses.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Here – blow your nose.’ I untangled myself from her and pulled a few sheets of paper off the toilet roll we kept by the bed. She rolled onto her back and took it from me. ‘And you’ve got nothing to be sorry about.’

  ‘Yes, I have. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  She blew her nose loudly in reply.

  I said, ‘Well in that case: I’m sorry, too.’

  She dabbed at her nose. ‘Why are you sorry?’

  ‘Because I did something wrong.’

  ‘Can I have some more toilet paper? Thanks.’ She blew her nose again. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’

  ‘I must have done something wrong.’

  ‘It’s not anything that you did. Don’t say that.’

  ‘All right, then, it’s not my fault. But I still did something.’

  ‘You didn’t. Please don’t say that. I don’t know why it happened.’

  She started crying again, and hit her leg in frustration.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said.

  ‘It hasn’t happened for so long.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought I was getting better.’

  It was dumb, but it felt like I needed to say it a thousand times. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It wasn’t you!’ When she realised how angry she sounded, she started crying even harder. ‘Honestly.’

  I just couldn’t help saying it, and so instead I didn’t say anything.

  I had far too many hormones whizzing around my body, looking for somewhere to land, and I didn’t trust myself not to get angry. My cock was still hard and I’d been only seconds away from coming; it was as though I’d been slapped awake. I needed time to adjust, but I could tell that it wasn’t going to work. The world was receding to the size of a pinhead: to a point where nothing mattered to me anymore; where all I could feel was this awkward, badly arranged sensation of self-hatred, anger and disgust. I could have sat staring into space for hours. I could have pounded myself until I just couldn’t anymore.

  And that’s the awful thing: it should have been about Amy and once upon a time it was. It doesn’t matter; it’s okay; here – look – smile! See – that’s better. I’d do everything I could to pick her back up, for no other reason than that I loved her and so that’s what you do. You take it on the chin and stay standing, because someone needs to. And nobody had ever hurt me, so what right did I have to feel affronted or damaged by what happened? And that’s why, for such a long time, I was understanding and sympathetic when something this catastrophic happened.

  But it wasn’t like that anymore.

  And looking back, I don’t know how to feel about how I behaved. It’s easy to judge yourself by Hollywood standards, where a couple of actions dictate your hat colour, but I suppose that life’s not like that. I’d like to think that I was understanding and good ten times out of ten but I wasn’t, mainly because on at least a few occasions it became about me too. There were a couple of times – like this one – when I was too self-centred to do anything for Amy. She had to sit there, propped up on the bed beside me, crying, and handle it all herself.

  I hate myself for that. Fair or unfair, I hate myself so badly I wish that cold, hurt, staring version of me could just be dead.

  I want to have always been good, not just average and normal. Not just a sometimes-man, like everyone else would have been.

  Perhaps that’s the nature of trauma: more like a disease than an actual injury. It eats away at you inside, right in your heart, and anyone you let in there is bound to pick it up themselves eventually. It’s unavoidable. You drop a big enough rock into a lake and it doesn’t matter how wide it is: eventually the banks that hold all that water will feel the vibration as well. And start to erode.

  Four years ago. You need to sort yourself out.

  I never did say that to her, of course – I’m not that bad a man – but I think she probably heard it from me all the same. She probably couldn’t help but hear it in the silence between us, which was deafeningly loud. I wish I’d been selfless enough to say something to break that silence and hide that thought every time she could hear it. But I wasn’t. Instead, sometimes, it ended up like this: both of us sitting there, crying for our own reasons, so far apart in so many ways that we might as well have been in different rooms.

  There are only two roads in and out of Uptown, but probably a hundred or more ways to actually get there. It’s a strange place. The place was founded about fifty years or so ago, in the northern part of the city, at a time when it was fashionable for offices to let their employees have access to the open space on the roofs of their buildings. The more prestigious companies even started to have their tops turfed and professionally landscaped: sculpted bushes and stereotypically pretty flowers were planted, and the grass was maintained at a very false, but undeniably vibrant, shade of green. You could take your sandwiches up top during your lunch break and catch some sun – and it was one of the few remaining areas of the city where you were actually allowed to smoke. I mean, if you wanted, you could even flick the butts over the edge of the building when you were done. Chances are there’d be nobody important underneath when they touched down.

  It was only a matter of time before people had the bright idea of linking up the rooftops. The main points were already there, and it was just a matter of smoothing over the spaces in between. Building firms were drafted in to rig up supporting structures between the buildings, and then enormous, street-spanning platforms were constructed to connect the roofs. These, too, were turfed and tended. The council, unsure exactly how to deal with this, became guilty of letting
all this grass grow under their feet, and by the time anybody started to object at the increasingly dark street-level, planning permission had been granted via backhanders to local politicians – which was normal – and large sections in the north of the city were already under cover. The companies with the most money bought roof space on the smaller buildings, extending their empire upside and building elaborate floral logo designs to catch the eye of captive audiences in passing planes. Then the whole thing began to really take off.

  Houses. Shops. Whole mini-communities sprang up. Vice-presidents no longer went home for the night, but travelled two floors up and left a bit. Access was immediately restricted, with people once again being forced to smoke secretly in the toilets and grumble about how dark it was outside. They still flicked their butts out of the window, of course, but there were fewer people for them to land on now, and the ones who were still there were even less important than before. And getting paler by the day.

  After a while, the council decided that enough was enough. It declared the green land between the rooftops as public property, looped the existing ring road up a few hundred feet, and then negotiated with the various ruling companies to create an effective network of streets and avenues, replete with sponsored signs and traffic police. Begrudgingly, they agreed, and Uptown was born. It became a place for the ridiculously rich to live, and the depressingly fashionable to window-shop and be seen. Underneath the surface – as always – it was a different story.

  At the street-level, things were winding down. The air was becoming stuffy and unbreathable. The smaller businesses were either closing down through lack of traffic, or being driven out by the expansion of larger businesses. Disused buildings were boarded up, or cemented into solid pillars. These days, most of Downtown is superficially abandoned – with only the occasional through road, converted into a sealed, amber-lit tunnel, leading to ground-floor access for the richer companies. The rest of it is bricked up and forgotten by the mainstream. Generally, employees access the companies from the roof down. It’s safer.

  It’s the same as it’s always been. The companies innovate and rebuild, restructuring a thousand lives along the way, and you’re still left with basically the same as you started with. In this case, everything was just a few hundred feet higher up. There’s talk of renovating the underside and clearing away the debris – turning it back into a proper place to live and work – but there’s always talk. Deep down everybody knows that it’s never going to happen. Because we need somewhere dark underneath it all for the bad things to be swept.

  Just a quick point: everything that happens here is happening for a reason.

  It’s always like that, of course, but in this case there’s something special going on: everything is happening because of just one thing. If you take every event I tell you about apart, you’ll find genetic code leading all the way back to this single common ancestor. Chop out that ancestor, and you’re talking blank pages. Empty from top to the bottom, from first to last.

  And – like I said – what happened had nothing to do with me. Weird the way things turn out, isn’t it? What happened is a story.

  Amy knew it off by heart, and sometimes – when I asked her nicely enough – she’d tell me. Why did I ask? Because once upon a time, as the stories say, I thought that each time she told the story she might unlearn it a little. It wasn’t something you really needed to remember, and I thought it might help her to forget. But that’s not what ended up happening.

  Don’t bother sitting comfortably, because I never did.

  A girl was at a student party, Amy would tell me. This girl had gone there with her best friend, and it had been a spur-of-the-moment, last minute decision to go: she was still debating it on the way there, in fact, as they leap-frogged from their shared house to the off-licence to the party. Her friend really wanted to go and so she’d persuaded the girl that it would be good for her to go, too. The girl figured she wasn’t going to know many people there, and as it turned out she was right, but she was chatty and pretty, and things usually worked out okay. It was a student party, after all: you just need to smile and drink, and then after a while a friend is anybody who’s in the same room as you.

  This girl lost her friend at one point, but she thought fuck it. She’d kind of expected it, anyway – her friend had only wanted to come because of some boy, and so in a way her disappearance was excellent, fanfare, mission accomplished. The girl figured she’d get monumentally drunk to celebrate, and so set about demolishing wine at an astonishing rate. She talked shit to people; they talked shit back. And at one point, she met this boy.

  His name was Jack, and she fancied him from the moment she set eyes on him. It was reasonably obvious that the feeling was mutual and they got talking, but – although he was flirting with her quite openly – she sensed that he was also holding back a little. The reason became obvious when she met the people he’d come with: four male friends… and his girlfriend. Foiled again, she thought, and so drank more wine. But she sat with them for a while anyway, and seemed to get on with them all. The male friends seemed all right, although it was clear that they knew what was going on. The girlfriend seemed oblivious and dull. Perhaps she was used to Jack, or simply not very bright.

  They chatted for a while, and then Jack told her that they were all going back to a shared flat in their halls of residence, and would she like to come? They were going to drink and hang out: maybe play some guitar, listen to some CDs, and it would be fun, so how about it? The girl was drunk by then, and so she said yes. Like a good little girl, she even managed to find her friend, break her off her conquest’s face and tell her where she was going.

  It was a quarter of an hour walk through the cold to get there. Jack walked with her, deliberately holding back way behind his girlfriend so that they were out of sight as they walked. He reached around and put his hand on her ass as they walked, giving it a squeeze. She looked at him and smiled. She wasn’t sure why, but she was drunk and she wanted him, so she gave him that smile and swigged from the wine bottle she was carrying. They arrived at half-past ten.

  Oh shit, said Jack as the group settled down in the lounge, we forgot to get booze. Who’s out?

  His girlfriend said, I need some, and – after sharing a glance with Jack – one of the other guys said he needed some too.

  It’s only just around the corner, this other guy continued. Why don’t we both go?

  So Jack’s girlfriend and this guy left the flat on a last-minute booze run. A few other people wanted stuff as well, but had been keeping quiet, and so the pair of them went away with quite a list. As the front door closed, someone flicked on a Pulp CD and everybody collapsed into armchairs and sofas. Except for Jack and the girl.

  Come on, he said, I want to show you something.

  Her heart was beating quickly with the excitement. Jack led her down the hall to his bedroom, and they fucked quickly and gracelessly on his bed. Here. She just pulled her knickers to one side as he unzipped himself and climbed on top of her. It was dictionary-definition bad sex, but she’d never wanted it so much in her life; he came in under a minute, with her nowhere near, but it didn’t even matter. Thanks, she told him afterwards, as he wiped his wet, reddened cock on tissue paper and grinned at her. I needed that.

  They returned to the living room to knowing smirks, a few minutes ahead of the returning booze party. And then it all started to go wrong.

  What happened was – after a while – Jack and his girlfriend went off to bed and left the girl with his friends, who were yawning and stretching and talking about heading off to bed. Despite herself, the girl was annoyed. She’d had a lot more to drink in the meantime and wasn’t necessarily thinking straight, but she felt rejected, frustrated and angry. She felt used. Hurt, even. The kind of resentful feeling that’s more directed at yourself than anyone else – you’re an idiot – but when you’re drunk you attach it to others in the same way you grab their shoulder to stop yourself falling over.

&
nbsp; All in all, the evening felt like a bad day at work: nothing much accomplished, but she didn’t want to leave, head home and go to bed, because that felt like defeat. Here everyone was, though: a few of them asleep already; others collecting their coats. It was depressing.

  So when this quiet boy – who she’d barely even spoken to all evening – wandered over and told her uncertainly that he had some wine upstairs in his room, and would she like to come up if she wasn’t ready to go home yet?, she thought about it for all of a second, and then said yes, of course, I’d love to. She thought, did you read my mind? He was big and cumbersome: average-looking. She didn’t fancy him in the slightest, but from his virtual silence he was obviously an outsider in the group, and at that moment she hated Jack’s group for using her and smirking and generally being bastards.

  She said, Let’s go.

  At that point in the story, there was always a break: a fracture. The way Amy always told it, the girl and the boy sat and drank wine in his room, and talked, and then at one point the boy told her that she was going to have sex with him. The girl laughed and said no, I’m not, and the boy said actually: yes, you are. The girl hadn’t even been thinking along those lines up until that point. According to Amy she experienced something dropping away inside herself. She reframed everything that had happened. Mentally, she unpicked the seams of their conversation, pulled away the cloth and for the first time saw his intent for what it was.

  She was scared – but not properly. It was too soon to be properly scared and, after all, this wasn’t going to happen.

  No, she said more definitely, standing up. I’m really, really not.

  The boy looked back at her. Yes, he told her again. You really are.

  Then he stood up and took hold of her arm. She tried to shake off his hand, but she couldn’t even move him. He was half as big as her again, and for the first time she started to appreciate what that fact meant.

  Properly scared now: You’re hurting me.