Steve Mosby - The Third Person

‘What the hell just happened?’

Charlie said, ‘Son of a bitch jumped out at me.’

We both looked down at the son of a bitch in question: a mildly overweight man in blue jeans and a checked shirt. He was struggling upright, with the aid of the tree beside him, and seemed as stunned as I was. He looked up at us. He was shaking, and I saw an average face, filled with a kind of stupid, awful terror. Then, he turned around and began to flounder off in the direction of the Beck.

‘Wait here.’

I started down after him.

Leave this , my mind told me, even as I was running. Or stamping, anyway – the embankment was forty-five treacherous degrees of dry mud, spotted with a slalom of trees. You couldn’t run down something that steep; it was more like a semi-controlled, high-stepping fall that jarred your legs and hurt your stomach. As the ground evened out, the world juddered around impossibly quickly. I hit the woodland floor and was after him like a gunshot.

Leave this .

Kareem glanced back, saw that I was coming after him and found a higher gear. His shirt came untucked as he ran deeper into the woods. His arms were pistoning. In fact, he could move pretty quickly when he wasn’t having his ass kicked by a girl.

I was exhilarated, but also feeling like I was a worm that had been let off the hook and had then jumped right back on again.

Leave this. What the fuck are you going to do when you catch him?

Kill him? Now that Charlie’s seen him?

But I was still running in the wrong direction, regardless.

Straight after him, slapping past trees as I went. He veered right, heading deeper still. I could hear the stream and knew we must be getting close. He’d need to level out soon: just head straight right and hope he could outpace me to the ring road. But that was five minutes’ run, or more, and he must have known he wouldn’t make it.

I could hear his frantic breaths.

This feeling was the same feeling I’d had waiting at the station for the train to Schio on the day I’d gone to meet Claire. It was the shaking, stupid anxiety of a man who knew he was about to do the wrong thing; that he was going to disregard all the pleading, desperate advice that his mind was throwing at him, and go on and do the wrong thing regardless.

I put on a last jolt of speed as I reached him, punching into him from the side and driving him over towards the beck. Kareem went down; I heard a splash as my leg smashed into the water. Then grunting as I got my arm to the side of his head and pushed him.

He wasn’t a serious contender. I punched him again – hard – as we were getting to our feet. His nose shattered, and suddenly he was flat on his ass again, with blood spattered onto his shirt. He brought up his hands to hold his face together.

‘Shit,’ he said simply.

I wandered back up the bank and checked out the woods. There was no sign of Charlie, so I figured that she’d stayed up on the footpath out of the way. Either that or she was wandering, unsure where we’d ended up. I backed down to the edge of the stream. Over on the other side, there were just green fields: empty and desolate. The grass was long overgrown and untended.

It was still possible to walk away. I really did know this.

Instead, feeling sick, I pulled the stanley knife out of my jacket pocket, clicked the blade out three notches and turned back to where he was lying.

‘Hey Kareem,’ I said.

He stopped massaging his face and looked up at me. Confused.

And then with a little more understanding.

I’d well and truly boarded the train now.

I grabbed him by his hair and put the blade to his face. It was a weird thing. Like something out of a movie: not at all like I’d expected it to feel. It was too sunny, for a start.

‘We’ve got some talking to do,’ I said.

‘Please don’t hurt me.’

His voice was this stuttering, fragile thing. He couldn’t even think about fighting back; couldn’t think about anything right now apart from how he was suddenly all past, no future.

‘Amy Foster,’ I told him, tightening my grip on his hair. He winced a little. ‘You tell me about her, and you get away from here today alive.’

The words came out in a gush.

‘Who? I don’t know any Amy Foster. I swear I don’t-’

And so I cut his cheek. I’d never cut anyone before and I wasn’t really sure how to do it. It was meant to be a warning cut – a taster – but it didn’t turn out that way. The blade went through his cheek like paper, and with about the same sound. Blood spilled out of the side of his mouth.

He started crying.

My hand was shaking, but I told him:

‘You know who she is. You met her in the Melanie Room about four months ago. And then you met her in real life. She took a train to come see you.’

I didn’t know that any of this was true until he started crying harder, and then I knew that it was all true. Suddenly, it didn’t feel too sunny for this anymore; something went out inside me. Some light. I cut him again, digging the stanley knife over his cheekbone, pressing down so hard that the muscles in my forearm bunched and my teeth gritted.

‘You fucking killed her.’

‘I didn’t! I didn’t! I swear to God! Jesus, ahhhh!’

The train leaving the station now: rolling out backwards. It was out of my hands.

‘You met her and you killed her.’

Easier to just sit back now, as I carved his face apart.

‘I didn’t kill her,’ he sobbed. ‘Please stop hurting me!’

I let go of his hair, throwing his head back in disgust, and stepped away from him. Then, I went to the top of the bank and checked the woods again. In the distance, I heard Charlie calling my name. She was a long way away by the sound of it. If she’d been closer, I might have left it there.

Who am I kidding?

Back with Kareem, by the side of the stream. In the sun. With the breeze making the grass in the field shiver, and the trees above us nodding thoughtfully.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘I don’t know what happened.’ He was knuckling blood and spit off his chin. His cheek was bright red and looked utterly destroyed.

‘Jesus. Oh, Jesus.’ He looked up at me desperately. ‘Marley took her. I owed Marley some money, and he fucking took her. That’s all I know.’

I made to grab him again, and he flinched away.

‘You sold her?’

He shook his head.

‘Not like that. I didn’t have any say in it. We were just talking about things.’

‘About what?’

‘About rape. About why I wanted to do the things I did. Why I like that stuff. We were just talking, I swear. We weren’t doing anything!’

I pictured this man in a room with Amy. Just talking. Either side of a table, elbows resting there. Cups of coffee between them. Just shooting the breeze.

‘What happened?’

‘I owed this guyMarley. He’s like this big underworld guy in Thiene, and I owed him money. I’d been gambling, and taking shit from him on loan, and I didn’t want my wife to know. He was gonna tell her. Gonna beat me and tell her everything. Maybe beat her too.’

‘So you gave him my girlfriend?’

White rage: I took hold of his hair again, ready to put the knife through his face a hundred thousand times.

‘NO! He just took her, man. I didn’t have any say in it, I swear. He had a couple of other guys with him – real big guys – and they just took her out by the hair. I tried to stop them, but-’

I attempted to picture him trying to stop them, but the image wouldn’t come. I couldn’t see it somehow. All I saw was Amy being taken away by her hair, and I knew exactly what had happened. Kareem had paid his debt by giving Amy to this man, Marley. Before I even knew what I was doing, I’d punched Kareem in the stomach so hard that the knife flew out of my hand and landed on the bank. All the air went out of him in a whoosh, and then I was dragging him up by the hair, pulling him towards the beck, then kicking his legs out from under him, and down he went, face first, into the water. He couldn’t help sucking it in. Blood spilled away downstream in little tendrils.