Steve Mosby - The Third Person

‘What it is ,’ Graham told me carefully, ‘is mostly gibberish. It’s random characters, fucked up in weird places with breaking spaces and punctuation. Like someone riffle-shuffled a pack of cards, but did it with hundreds of sentences instead. It’s pretty fucking meaningless.’

‘Shit.’

He carried on, ignoring me.

‘But it’s more random than that. There are whole words in a few places; even a few incomplete sentences. It’s more like the file’s been corrupted somehow.’

He paused again.

‘Jay, who do you know that wants this so badly?’

‘It’s not really important.’

‘Well, I think it probably is.’

Suddenly I felt unsteady. ‘Why? What is it, Gray?’

‘Some of the sentences and words… they’re pretty fucked up.’ He was speaking quietly. He sounded like he was tracing a printout with his finger. ‘I got bl##d here in the middle – like blood, but with two hashes for os ? And there’s a bit about a knife, too – or a blade of some kind.’

I heard the sound of paper being turned over.

‘And about a third of the way through, there’s this.’

He spelled it out to me.

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

‘Jesus,’ I said.

‘Towards the end, there’s something about someone called Long Tall Jack biting something. Biting real hard. Further in, there’s something about him being the pins and knives man.’

‘Sounds like some kind of horror novel.’

‘It’s worse than that,’ Graham told me. I heard him move the paper away. ‘I got a really bad feeling about this, Jay. The text’s all corrupted and messed up, but it still makes a weird kind of sense to me. I can’t describe it; you’d have to see it for yourself. It’s fucking bizarre. Even though it’s mostly rubbish, I can kind of see stuff in it. Bad stuff.’

He sounded frightened.

‘What kind of bad stuff?’

‘Look, I said. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s not when I read bits of it through, line for line – I mean, I do that, and it’s just random. It’s more when I just look at the whole page and take it in all at once. Like the words form a bad shape on the page that I don’t want to see. Except they don’t. I don’t know. I just think that… this is something bad.’

What I heard in his voice was quiet panic.

‘Calm down,’ I said.

He wasn’t interested.

‘I don’t want this on my fucking computer. I don’t want it on my desk. I don’t want it in my life. Listen to me, Jay. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t think it was true. This is something bad.’

‘Can you find out who the server belongs to?’

‘Fucking hell, I don’t want to.’

I pressed the point.

‘Yeah, but can you?’

Silence again.

‘Please, Gray.’

‘I don’t owe you this much,’ he said. Suddenly, it was as though he’d been reading my mind. ‘You know that? I do not fucking owe you this anymore. If I can do it quietly, then I will. But the second the trace turns round on me, I’m cutting it dead. You’re asking too much, Jay. Just like you always do. And I’m not exposing Helen to your kind of freaks. I won’t do it.’

‘Okay, okay.’

‘I won’t do it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Fuck your okays. It’s not okay.’

‘Well… thanks for whatever you can do.’

A pause.

‘Yeah, whatever.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Fuck it.’

‘Yeah, but I am sorry. I’m sorry I lost my temper.’ But not for what I said. ‘There’s something else, though: something you need to hear but probably won’t want to.’

‘What? Just tell me.’

‘There’s a sentence near to the beginning. Well – it’s not a sentence; it’s just three words on their own, and I guess they don’t mean anything. But you need to know what it says regardless. Just in case.’

‘What does it say?’

The silence was all his this time, and I felt angry.

‘What does it fucking say, Graham?’

‘Fuck, man. It says: “pale blue blouse.”’

Another silence, then.

One in which my brain did nothing at all. Not one thing.

I nodded to myself, and then he repeated it, sounding sad and frightened.

‘It says: “pale blue blouse.”’

When people look back on their lives, they have a tendency to stick pins in at key points along the line: little coloured flags that point out the crucial moments. Every moment is crucial, of course – if you remove any single instant, your future falls away from your past – but I’m talking about the moments we choose to view as different. If you do see your life as a line, with points plotted along its course, then it’s far from a straight one, and the truly critical moments are those where the line bends sharply off to one side, continuing at some weird new angle. We mark these points down and remember them, and when we question our current trajectories, it’s these points that we use to explain them. Tapping the board and saying: I’m going this way because of this .

The taxi threaded its way uptown, easing along amidst the rest of the traffic. I still had Walter Hughes’ business card between my fingers, and I was turning it over absent-mindedly. The slightly raised eagle crest insignia had worn a rough smoothness to the end of my index finger.

Cause and effect:

I was going to see Walter Hughes because Amy had vanished.

And Amy had vanished because…

Well.

Everything about the direction I was heading in was as a result of one moment in time, four and a half years before. I didn’t even know Amy back then. The event in question was one that happened to her, not me, but it sent her line skittling off to one side, like a plane with one engine shot out. She crashed into me, and – for a while – we both enjoyed the freefall, finding it increasingly easy to pretend that we weren’t crashing, just flying in an unusual direction. As we drifted apart, it became obvious that the earth was rushing up to meet us both, but by then it was too late to touch hands again. She was a little ahead of me, but it was still obvious that I was going to hit the same ground that she was, and just as hard. Too late to touch hands; too late to change course and pull each other out of this nosedive. Just too damn, fucking late.

There was a time when I could have pointed us up again. I know there was.

The cabbie coughed.

‘Circle round from the north side?’

‘Whatever.’

He hung a left. I watched the people on the corner as we swung past and then hit the lights a second too late. People were just going about their business, hurrying along. Behind them, in the window of a coffee shop, a businessman was mopping his mouth with a napkin, obscured by streaks of sunlight.

Sometimes, when you look at things just right, you see the world for what it is. Cars look like motorised toys, and human beings look like animals in suits, because that’s all they are.

Across from the businessman, a woman was sipping from a delicate cup, and she looked as fragile and breakable as the glass between us. It was as though I could feel her heart beating and her pulse was as weak as china.

The lights changed to green and the taxi lurched off. Heading up onto the north loop out of the city centre, towards where Walter Hughes was going to provide me with some answers about the text that Graham had found, whether he wanted to or not.

‘Oh yeah?’

Suddenly, Amy was resting on one elbow. She didn’t so much climb on top of me as just slide over, using her right hand to hold up her breasts from the side and rest them on my chest as she moved above me. I felt their soft, pleasant weight. Her leg slid over, and she was suddenly on top of me, pressed down tight. Her face came down to mine with a smile, and she stared at me, right in the eyes, so close that it fucked with my vision.