Steve Mosby - The Third Person

So we introduced them and encouraged them.

Madness.

On the one side, Graham: a genuinely nice, shy guy who – despite his notable success in several key areas of life – had begun to feel like an abject failure because he didn’t meet the marketed standard of shagging hundreds of women and having relationships which, the movies had assured him, would provide him with that all-important reason to live. On the other side, Helen. She was desperate for a relationship in much the same way, but her subconscious feelings of inadequacy – so well-covered by those false smiles and that cheery disposition – were bubbling up, convincing her that she would never get one.

The way I saw it was this: when you’re falling through the air, you don’t pick and choose your handholds; you grab onto the first branch you can get your fucking hands on, and you cling to it with grim determination. And they were both falling. Putting them together was only ever going to end one way: in a kind of awful, successful failure.

‘Hi, Jason.’

Helen peered around the edge of the door like an anxious child, giving me a big smile. She was one of those people who had to say everything with a laugh and a joke. The subtext every time she opened her mouth was always the same: things are spiralling out of control , she was saying, but you have to laugh, don’t you ?

‘Come on in.’

‘Cheers.’ I wandered into the hall. ‘How are you doing?’ Being quite small, Helen was also quite weak, and she had to push the door quite hard to get it closed. The effort was there in her voice:

‘Oh – just pottering. You know.’

She laughed.

‘Gray in?’ I said.

‘Through in the study.’ She raised her eyebrows by flicking her head back: a Helen tut. ‘Working. As usual.’

‘Keeping you in the manner to which you’ve become accustomed,’ I said, smiling. It was half a joke, with neither half being particularly funny, but she laughed anyway.

‘Well, yes.’ The arms went out in a shrug. What can I do ?

I gestured with my thumb. ‘I’ll just go on through?’

‘Sure, go on. He’s expecting you. Coffee?’

‘That’d be great, yeah.’

I meant it, too. Look – don’t get me wrong about this. As a friend, I didn’t dislike Helen. In fact, in a lot of ways she was lovely: anybody who offers you coffee as a matter of course is okay by me, and – in general – she was personable enough. I just didn’t think she was right for Graham. Nobody thought that, even, I suspect, Helen and Graham, and – coffee and smiles aside – that’s a pretty fucking significant detail. You can have a relationship with anyone, after all, but despite what the books and the movies might tell you, a relationship is not, in itself, what you need. What you need is to add some qualifiers. ‘ Good ’, in the middle of that phrase, for one. And while we’re on the subject, ‘ that you really want ’ at the end is also an idea.

I made my way through to the study, where heavy industrial music was grinding away quietly in the background. In the kitchen, Helen would be listening to glitzy, gloss-sheen pop – slightly despairingly. On the cupboard above the kettle there was an a4 sheet listing the names of friends and how each friend liked their tea and coffee. By my name, it would say white, two sugars, black, no sugar . She’d run her finger over it and tap. Ah ha .

Whereas I’d known Graham for years, but he still had to ask me – and I don’t know why that’s better but for some reason it is. Maybe I’m just suspicious that if you concern yourself too much with little details, there’s no mental space left for the more important stuff.

He leaned back in his chair as I entered the study, putting his big hands behind his head, yawning and stretching. Then, he gave me a smile.

‘Hi mate. How are you doing?’

‘I’m okay, yeah,’ I said, wandering over and taking a seat beside him. In front of him, his computer was chugging through what was, no doubt, another mindless search. ‘How’s tricks?’

‘Ticking over.’

‘You’re busy?’

‘I’m always busy. Is Helen making you a cup of coffee?’

‘I think so, yeah.’

‘Nice to know the bitch is good for something.’ He closed two search windows down with a click of the mouse, and then set another three tumbling. ‘She’s been doing my head in this morning. All morning.’

Every morning .

I remembered parties where Helen would talk to Amy and Graham would come into the kitchen to talk to me, and they’d both say the equivalent of the same thing: goddamn, my juicy burger is squashed and wet and fucking miserable. I can’t believe I paid a pound for this shit .

I said, ‘Getting on your case?’

‘Exactly. I mean, I have work to do. She wants to play house.’

‘Want me to get out of your hair?’

‘No, it’s okay.’ He clicked the mouse again. ‘I can talk while I work. I just can’t Ikea. Or at least I won’t.’

He typed in a few words, his fingers as lightning fast as ever. cola boy coat shoe light [RETURN]

‘Just give me a minute. On top of all the work I have to do, I’m also trying to download the new Will Robinson single from Liberty. To keep her happy.’

‘That would keep anyone happy.’

‘Well, obviously. So just give me a minute.’

‘Okay.’

I looked around while he worked. The study was incredibly old- fashioned, especially given the industry he worked in. As a contrast to the spare, metallic feel of the rest of the flat, this room was decked out in dark wood, with crammed bookcases lining three of the walls, while the other was taken up by the console he was working at. The books themselves were old – classics mostly – with modern reference texts and manuals dotted around, their vibrant spines standing out. You could buy bookcases like these from lifestyle catalogues – I think there were about twenty or so on the market – and save yourself the bother of collecting and reading a lifetime’s supply of literature: you just ordered the bookcase and it came ready-stocked, making your study look authentic and used. I could have been on a ship, or in a Victorian drawing-room.

In the centre of the room was an old table with battered, bowed legs. A series of printed paper sheets was spread upon it, with more paper slipping out of the printer hatch in the wall no doubt soon to join it. This was Gray’s job: professional web gopher. He was one of the most respected information-ferrets in the business, employed by a number of well-known companies and individuals to hunt down details of rival products, research projects, other individuals and then produce easy-to-read reports on what he’d found.

And he was good at his job. The approach he had to the internet was one of Zen interconnectedness. All the information is linked together in a web, he figured, and every little bit of information affects all the others. According to chaos theory, a butterfly flapping its wings can eventually affect weather systems on the other side of the planet. Graham had taken this to heart, and he’d applied the science of it to the web, at first by trial and error and then – as he learned more – by developing systems and approaches. Nowadays, with the internet, he was that butterfly. He flapped his wings in significant little ways that only he understood, and the information he wanted came blowing in from the east. One day, he told me, he was going to write a book and become enormously rich.

After a minute or two, Helen brought a mug of coffee in and passed it to me, along with a cork coaster. I smiled and said thanks, and she left. Graham looked a little resentful.

‘I guess I don’t get one, then?’