Steve Mosby - The Third Person

I’d just killed a man.

She said, ‘It must have been a few weeks by now.’

Perhaps I should just get drunk, I thought.

‘It’s been a month and a half,’ I said, picking up my glass.

A month and a half of paid unwork. I’d received my payslip for the end of March and was half-anticipating one for the end of April. After that, I had a feeling they might start to dry up.

‘People have been worried about you.’

I thought about it.

‘I’m sorry that people have been worried. I mean, I never meant to worry anybody. I didn’t think anyone would care, to be honest. It just… got to the point where I couldn’t come in anymore.’

I didn’t know how to explain it any better than that, even though that didn’t really explain it at all. It really hadn’t been a decision I’d made so much as an epiphany: something that happened to me. Somebody else made the decision, and I just realised how much sense it made. I think I did quite well, actually – for a couple of months after Amy vanished, I laboured into work on a morning, through work during the day and then out of work again in the evening: a good, solid pretence of normality. It’s what you do, after all. I was carrying on; I was surviving. My mother would have been proud of me. And then, one day, I realised that I wasn’t surviving at all: quite the opposite. I was being assimilated, and I was slowly dying, one day at a time.

‘You couldn’t come in?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It just didn’t seem worth it anymore.’

I worked for an insurance company. Let me briefly explain how insurance works – in the lower levels, at least. Let’s say you want to insure your house. The first thing you do is get a quote from my company, and in order to do this you have to fill out a breathtaking number of forms and provide us with an almost insurmountable mountain of personal information. This is only to confuse and lull you. What it boils down to is this. You live in a semi-detached house with x number of bedrooms in a certain post code (down to the street name). Now, we know – from our vast database of prior claims and police reports – exactly how likely you are to be burgled or for your house to burn down or whatever, which we read as: how long will it take this person to claim one thousand pounds from us ? On average, let’s say, it would take you five years, so we need to charge you two hundred pounds a year in house insurance to break even. It might take less time or it might take more, but the beauty is that they cancel each other out: that’s the benefit of betting on average.

This is a simple matter of simple mathematics.

We charge you two hundred pounds a year to break even, and that’s after your claim, if you claim. In reality, of course, we charge you more like three hundred pounds a year, but the amount is entirely variable. Whatever percentage profit we want to make, we make. There is no grey area. There is very little in the way of doubt, and we don’t make many mistakes.

We’re affiliated to several banks. They keep our accounts and, in exchange for our custom, they direct their own customers our way. They advise it, in fact. What would you do if your house burnt down tomorrow? they ask, frowning with worry. What if you were burgled and lost it all ? They’re quite blatant. The sensible thing to do is to take whatever quote we give you and store that much money away in a separate account of your own each year. That way, if you do get burgled, you have the money to act as your own insurance company; and when you don’t get burgled and your house doesn’t burn down, you haven’t given all your hard-earned money to a complete stranger.

We didn’t work at that end of things, Charlie and I. We worked at the end that tries to fuck you out of the money if and when you do eventually claim. We found clauses you never suspected were there. In a way, we couldn’t lose – even if we ended up paying you, we knew the company was making a profit regardless. But we gave it our sportsman’s best, anyway, because every penny counts. Customers often got angry when they realised that we weren’t their friends, after all. That, at the end of the day, either they lost money or we did. And guess what?

‘Do you still feel like that? I mean, are you going to come back to work soon?’

I thought about it, even though I didn’t need to, and then shook my head.

‘I don’t think so, no.’

Even if I found Amy, I wasn’t going back. I’d let my life unravel to such a point, now, that it would be all but impossible to tie it back together again. For once in my life, there were no plans for the future. I really couldn’t imagine what was going to happen.

Okay, so what was she like?

Amy had brown curly hair, with streaks of gold that seemed yellow in the sun, and a warm, happy face that always looked flushed and enthusiatsic. Not exactly beautiful, but pretty – and far too confident and in love with life for it to be an issue anyway, at least to begin with. I know that’s a cliché – but for what it’s worth she was in love with life in the real way, not the fairytale way. Most of the time, she adored it; some of the time, though, she could barely face the day. That’s love for you.

She was slim, but curvy. And she was sexy as anything, but you’ll have to take my word for that. Imagine your ideal person. Amy probably didn’t look like that, but she had the effect on me that the person does on you. There were days when I almost had to pinch myself. It seemed like a whole fresh side of me had opened up.

I told her that I loved her after a few months; I don’t remember exactly when that was, but – if you really want to know – she told me first. In fact, she was very definite about it: she loved me from about the fifth week, and then, at three months, she was in love with me. It took me just that little bit longer to come out with it, but I tried it on for size eventually and found that I liked it. I love you . You should have seen her face light up when I told her that. She always looked happy, but when I told her that I loved her she looked like she was going to explode with joy.

I mean, have you ever seen joy in someone? Not just happiness, but actual joy? That was one of the only times I ever have, and it was like the sun came out inside her. Like everything just flipped right-side up. Suddenly, I couldn’t hold her tightly enough, and she held me back just as hard, with the back of my shirt bunched up in her small hands and her knuckles digging into my shoulder blades. Have you ever had somebody grip you with a passion you never thought existed outside the fucking movies? As though they found you the most precious thing in the world? I felt it then, and couldn’t believe that somebody would actually want me that much. I don’t believe in Heaven as a place, but I sometimes think that if a person could write down how I felt at just that moment – if they could describe it perfectly – then that sentence would be something like Heaven to me. And as a final resting place, I’d be happy to have my name shrunk down and rested, invisibly, on the collar of the full stop at the end. That would be fine for me.

‘What are you going to do?’ Charlie said.

‘You miss making me coffee?’ I did my best to smile, but I could still feel the ice cold water rushing over my hands as I drowned Kareem. My bones hadn’t quite thawed out yet.

She smiled back, playing with the neck of her bottle but then looked away.

‘Yeah. I miss making you coffee.’

The way she said it made me realise I’d come off as sounding too playful.

‘I kind of miss it, too,’ I said. ‘But that’s all I miss, and most of the time I don’t even miss that. It’s moments like those that cloud everything over.’