Steve Mosby - The Third Person

My routine was pretty standard. One hundred jabs with each arm. One hundred jab-crosses, leading with each arm. By that point, my shoulders would be trembling. One hundred hooks, alternating body and head shots, generally at random. And then a combination: jab, jab, hook; jab, jab, cross. Whatever, really. I’d throw in a few kicks for good measure, but only when I could get away with it realistically, and maybe even add in elbows, knees and – rarely – a headbutt or two. Twenty minutes later, I’d be warmed up – ready for the main event.

I warmed up hard that night – so hard, in fact, that I was dripping with sweat and almost unable to throw a punch by the time I’d finished. I didn’t know whether it was the correct way to train or not, only that it was the way I’d found worked best for me. Start at the bottom, feeling as drained as possible, and then try to make it through the workout. If I was in a real fight, fresh and full of energy, then all well and good, but if I was caught on my last legs, I wanted a precedent to work from of how it might feel.

This time, I was cut off before I could even begin.

Maybe the banging at the door had been going on for some time. I don’t know: I only recognised it when I went over to the computer to change the track. I wanted something heavier: more industrial. Instead, in the silence, I got a hammering fist on the front door downstairs. I threw a towel over my shoulder and went to answer it.

It was raining outside, and there were two guys in black raincoats waiting on my doorstep, hunched against the cold. The first one showed me his badge and said:

‘Inspector Wilkinson.’

But I didn’t need that to know he was a cop. The i-Mart logo was all over the left breast of the raincoat. I watched a few droplets of water fall off the edge of his hat, heading down past a slightly pained face.

‘We’re looking for Jason Klein,’ he said.

‘That’s me.’

‘We’d like you to come down to the station,’ he told me. And then eyed my upper body. ‘Preferably with some clothes on.’

‘What’s it about?’

He looked at me. Rain was slashing down on the road behind them, but closer to it sounded more intimate. It was tapping on their hats.

‘We’ve found a girl’s body,’ Wilkinson told me. ‘We need to speak to you.’

It was a McDonald’s moon that night: two great big, golden arches staring down at me from the black sky, with stars twinkling beside and around. I’ve always hated that one the most: a big M – M for Moon – as though we’re all so stupid that we need everything labelling for us. The Nike tick annoys me, too. Everything’s okay , it seems to tell you, when you know that – really – it isn’t at all. I guess that my favourite, aesthetically speaking, would have to be Pepsi, but Benetton could sometimes be quite inventive.

No, fuck it – my favourite was old-fashioned plain. The night I’d met Amy it had been that way: three-quarters waxing, which was still slim enough to be free from advertising. Not exactly the stuff that poetry’s made of, I grant you – a kind of half-fat and unremarkable moon – but you need to take what free space you can get these days, and so that’s what I’ll take.

Amy .

Wilkinson wouldn’t tell me any more information than he’d told me at the house. They’d found a girl’s body, and they wanted to speak to me. But what else could it be? I couldn’t think of anything. My body rocked with the motion of the car. I was aching slightly from the force of the exercise, but my mind felt very calm and passive.

Amy .

The police car headed quickly through drenched streets. There were a few people around, black as the shadows between the buildings, and the pavements looked so dark it was as though it was raining oil and not water. I supposed that it could have been. Clouds, sponsored by Esso. Bright lights turned to blurs through the front window, before the screeching wipers smeared away the rain; water pattered on the roof, like pins dropping. We tail-ended a pair of bright red lights for half a block, and then headed onto the freeway. The city dropped away to the side, and the driver sped up a little.

The in-car radio was tuned to i-Mart’s main station, and they seemed to have Will Robinson caught on a loop. I could have screamed: if there was one thing I didn’t need right now it was shitty pop music, but I didn’t have long to suffer. In ten minutes, we were there.

The Bracken police centre was floodlit in amber, with enormous, upturned lanterns bathing the building from all four sides and making its naturally orange brickwork all the more pronounced after nightfall. With its black canopies and foyered entrance it was often mistaken for a hotel – all twenty storeys of it – and I figured that more than a few late-night travellers had turned off the freeway over the years expecting a Holiday Inn. It had been built a decade earlier, when the police service was privatised. Bracken was one of three national hubs, connected to a spider’s-web of regional, and then local, offices. Following the i-Mart business model, the police force farmed out their officers to areas where ‘sales’ were lowest, setting up clusters of shops in key target areas and taking them over. In this case, the product on offer was a low crime statistic – coupled, of course, with some exemplary computer produce. i-Mart – to protect and to serve; Microsoft never even saw it coming. Where do you want to go today? Directly to fucking jail.

Wilkinson opened the door to let me out, and then we walked over to the main building while the driver parked the car up, tyres slashing away across wet tarmac.

‘Miserable night,’ Wilkinson said.

I nodded, never really that good at small talk except when it was faked on a computer screen.

He pulled up the collar of his coat and did a silly little half dance as he got beneath the canopy over the main entrance, as though he couldn’t stand another second of rain. I was barely noticing it. My hair was short and the rain couldn’t do any more damage than my face already did. And clothes dry, after a while. I had other things on my mind.

Amy .

I supposed I’d been expecting this eventually, and now it was happening I felt an empty kind of calm. I wasn’t really upset or angry. It was more like nothing was going on in me at all.

‘Come on through.’

The foyer was silver: kitted out from the feet up in the best shiny-metal TMthat i-Mart could provide. Everything looked as though if you touched it, it would leave a smeary fingerprint, so nobody had yet. A bank of blue-backed Powermacs faced out at the incoming public, with a row of pretty receptionists taking 999 calls through headsets, fingers chattering commands to local offices. A pair of cops stood near the mirrored elevator doors to the right, while blue carpeted stairs led up to the left. Wilkinson headed for these, and I followed.

‘Good for the circulation,’ he insisted, as I looked around. The walls of the stairwell were decorated with old i-Mart advertisements: freeze-frames from computer commercials and adBoard stills. ‘I never take the elevators, anyway. Can’t stand the music.’

I nodded.

‘All they play is Will Robinson,’ he told me as we reached the first floor and he pushed through some double doors. ‘Like in the car. You know that kid? They pipe that shit out day and night. I didn’t know he had so many songs.’

‘He’s got a bunch.’

If I remembered rightly, the last few had adorned i-Mart’s recent ad campaign, which I figured might have had something to do with something.

I said, ‘But they’re mostly the same song in a different order.’

‘Is that right?’ Wilkinson raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I didn’t know you were a musician. You a musician?’