Steve Mosby - The Third Person

‘I was so angry with you,’ he said, as if reading my mind. ‘Where the fuck were you that day? Do you have any idea what she was going through? She needed you, and you were off wherever you were, doing whatever you wanted. You didn’t care about her at all, and it fucking killed me.’

He looked away, shaking his head.

‘I could never understand how you could be so…’ He screwed up his face in disgust. ‘ Ambivalent to her. You didn’t understand what you had. I would have killed to have what you had, and you didn’t even care. I wanted her, and I wanted to slap her, but most of all I just wanted to slap you.’

I was growing colder by the second. He was talking to Jason, and this was all for his benefit, and that meant that he was intending to give the document I was writing to Jason. So why wasn’t he explaining it all in person?

He’s going to kill me .

I noticed the blood on his jacket then. There was a little on his shirt, and quite a bit more had dried on the backs of his hands. How had I ever missed it?

He was going to kill me.

‘We had some drinks,’ the man said. ‘We had some drinks, and then we had some more. You were at work, Amy said. She said you wouldn’t be back all day. I didn’t believe that’s where you were at all, though, and you know why? Because she didn’t believe it. I could tell. She was so fucking sad, Jason. So unhappy. So I suggested we have some drinks. And it was the middle of the day, but we figured to hell with it, and so we had some drinks. I mean – why not?’

He shook his head again and then looked up at me. There were so many emotions on his face now, beside the anger, that I found it impossible to know what he was thinking or planning to do.

‘And what happened,’ he said, ‘happened.’

You’re a nice guy, Jason. And I’m not into ruining lives .

After I met Claire, I went home, arriving back quite late. Amy was already in bed by then: three-quarters asleep and only vaguely aware of me slipping in beside her. She was naked. She was facing away from me, and I moved up against her, pressing my chest to her thin back, putting my arm around her and cupping my hand on her slight stomach. All I could smell was her hair. I’d come so close to making the worst mistake of my life, and I’d never been more relieved than I was right then.

‘I love you,’ I told her, kissing the side of her neck.

She didn’t say anything, but she moved slightly and took hold of my hand where it rested on her stomach and she gave it a squeeze. And she pressed back against me, giving a noise that might have been contentment.

And I never knew that anything had happened between Amy and Graham that afternoon. Maybe it was because I was so tangled up in my own guilt that it never occurred to me she might have some of her own, or that the issues that affected our relationship would cause her to make the same mistake that I almost had. I mean, why would that be the case? You see, it was all about me by then. The way I’d left her that morning was indicative of everything about our relationship. Once upon a time, I’d been there for her, and now I was only there for me. I’d offered comfort and sacrifice to ease what I knew was difficult for her, and now I only offered questions. Where was my comfort? Who was there to ease things for me when I found it hard?

I should have known it was over by the way I was thinking. Instead, I lay there against her, feeling my own guilt, holding her belly, thinking that it might all be okay after all. It was stupid and fucking delusional. You can put the feelings aside but you can’t throw them, and so they’re always within reach. They find their way into your hands again. Sometimes, people do everything except push them at you. It was never really about her being raped. I can blame that, and I do blame it, but it’s not the whole story. That event cast a shadow, all right, but for a while I cast a light. It wasn’t something impossible and insurmountable. We had a good life, and we loved each other very much, and for a while there it had been just about as perfect as anything Graham had ever dreamed of.

You can’t blame the rape.

But you can, if you choose to, blame me.

‘We had sex three times,’ the man said. ‘And each time, she felt guilty afterwards, but we kept falling back into it. And at the end, she couldn’t believe what she’d done. She started crying. You will never have any idea how much that woman loved you, Jason, and you just… you just fucking… pushed her away.’

He glared at me, and it became too much. I looked down at the paper in front of me and watched myself writing instead. He was going to kill me. In fact, he sounded like he was talking himself up to it.

‘Look at me.’

Despite myself, I did. Slowly and reluctantly, but I looked up at him.

‘You want to write all this fucking shit down,’ he said, pointing at me – me , this time – with the gun. ‘You didn’t bat an eyelid while your friend was killing a girl I loved. So you fucking pay attention, now, and you look at me. Okay?’

I remembered. I’d wanted to smile at her and tell her that it would be okay, but I’d known that it wouldn’t, and I hadn’t been there to make her feel comfortable or to help her. So instead, I’d just picked up my pen and, without taking my eyes off her, I’d begun to write.

I remembered exactly what had happened.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Yes . Anything’s okay. Absolutely anything .

Just please don’t kill me .

There was a pause, and then:

‘You pushed her away,’ he said. ‘You treated her badly. You weren’t there for her when she needed you. How could you not be, after she’d gone through something like that? All I could think of was that I would have been. I would have fucking… I would have fucking sat there with her. I would have talked to her. Held her. I would have had some respect for her. I mean, I would have acted like she had some… some kind of fucking value to me. But you couldn’t even do that.’

He looked down, gathering his thoughts. His voice was quieter when he started speaking again.

‘I asked her to leave you for me,’ he said. ‘And she told me no. She said she couldn’t. She loved you. She wanted it to work. She actually – and I could have killed you when she said this – but she actually thought that it was her fault. Can you believe that? She blamed herself for what happened. You made her blame herself. And she wanted to sort herself out and have you back, and because of that, she said no to me. Told me it was a mistake, and she was sorry to have done this to me, and even more sorry to have done it to you.’

He shook his head.

‘And I cried. I cried – of all things! I was so upset. And you know what she did?’ He looked up at me. Through me, at Jason. ‘She held me. She comforted me. After everything she’d been through she did that. That’s how special she was, and you weren’t even there for this girl. She went off to try to understand what happened to her, and she thought she was doing it for you, and she wasn’t at all. She was doing it because of you.’

For a second, the anger seemed to be gone, and he seemed almost deflated by the conclusion he’d come to. All I could see in his face was sadness. The anger was lost. But then I realised that, no, it wasn’t. It was just pacing in the background: working itself back and forth; taking an emotional run up for whatever was coming next.

‘I killed Marley,’ he said. ‘If you’re hearing this then you probably know that already.’

Fuck .

If he’d killed Marley then he was going to kill me too.

But there was something else in addition to that – something I couldn’t quite put my finger on but that felt as though, when I did, it would be the final nail in this whole, sorry coffin. My mind was circling it, threatening to alight: a hand chasing a feather of memory.