Steve Mosby - The Third Person

Then, for what it was worth, I went and checked out of the hotel.

And I went home.

The first thing I did when I got in was check the messages on my answerphone. It was the same two messages as before, but I listened to them again anyway.

Okay, I’m not the only loose end.

My job. As I listened to Nigel prattle on, with his odd inflections and even odder assumption that I might give a shit, my job had never felt more meaningless to me. They had paid me for a month of work I hadn’t done, and that was all I needed to know. It was possible that they’d pay me for another month – I was, after all, a troubled young man – but frankly I couldn’t have cared less. I listened to Nigel’s voice and I knew it was intended to sound like some kind of authority – something that would make me feel guilty, or bring me to heel, or make me worried – but it didn’t. I received those emotions, but they were filtered through dream logic; they were feelings I might have experienced in another life and, now that I’d woken up, they meant next to nothing to me.

Fuck him, fuck them. I pressed [NEXT] before the end of the message.

Beep .

‘Hi Jason, it’s Charlie.’

Oh, yes – there was Charlie to think about. Poor Charlie, who practically idolised me. And what did I do to her? I used her as bait to track down a paedophile, killed him, unburdened half my soul to her and then abandoned her. And after all that, without me even asking, she had covered up evidence of a serious crime on my behalf. What was her current reaction to me?

‘It’s Sunday night,’ she told me again. ‘I’m just calling because I hope you’re okay. I don’t know what happened yesterday – or what I did wrong – but I’m sorry, whatever it was. And I understand; it’s okay.’

She understood. It was okay. In fact, it was possible that she’d even done something wrong. As I pressed [STOP] I thought that if enough of the women in my life got together they might realise that I was the common fucking denominator.

‘I wanted to let you know-’

Click

So: Charlie. Turning up to meet me with make-up on. She was more attractive than she realised – and nicer, too. For fuck’s sake, she’d been sitting there, listening to my worries. She’d encouraged me to talk about Amy and my other problems, and all the time she was doing that she’d had makeup on. Either that, or she’d had her hair cut. I couldn’t even remember which it had been. It was pretty obvious that she deserved better than someone like me.

But she’d be okay, I thought as I headed upstairs with the gun in my hand. My job, too. They’d both survive without me. In themselves, they weren’t loose ends so much as frayed edges. Once you got rid of me, they took care of themselves.

I walked into the study.

Everything was still just as fucked up as Walter Hughes’ friends had left it. The hard drive of my computer was in a couple of clunky pieces on the floor, and one of the guys had pulled the monitor off base and smashed it to shit, no doubt unaware that his boss was about to offer to pay for any damages. Compensation would have undermined the point of destroying my property a little bit. But then I’d gone and killed Hughes, so it was a moot point anyway.

I kicked a bit of circuitry and thought about the internet. The news on the coach was that the damage was starting to repair itself. Where that wasn’t the case, IT firemen were busy pouring gushing streams of water over the flames, trying to limit the spread. Nobody had a clue what had happened, but the consensus was that it seemed to have stopped. For the moment.

I kept a few pictures of Amy in the study. They were pretty much undisturbed: lodged on a shelf in the computer desk. Actually, they weren’t just pictures of Amy: I was on some of them, too; Graham and Helen; Jonny and the guys we’d grown up with. Amy probably wasn’t even on half of them, but I took the whole bundle through to the bedroom.

There, I spread the pictures out, filtering away the irrelevant ones and putting the ones I liked best out on the pillows, the top of the duvet. I covered the bed in them. Shots of us on holiday. Shots of us at New Year’s. Just tens of photographs. Graduation. Engagement. Pictures taken in bars, of long, cheering tables we were at; you had to pick us out, and even then it barely looked like us. I was crying the whole time, touching her face as I let them fall. One. Ten. Thirty. I remembered all of them. Ask me for fifty different occasions when Amy had smiled at me and I’d be stuck by double figures, but I remembered each of these clearly. They were obvious examples. Only God knows all of the times she smiled when I forgot to take a photograph.

When the bed was covered, I lay down on it. Everything shifted and slid, but that was okay. First one elbow, then onto my back. I still had the gun, and – when I was settled – I put the barrel into my mouth, tasting the salt and grease and oily tang of it. The ceiling was not as interesting as I would have liked. Looking down from it, surrounded by these photographs, I imagined I looked pretty good, at least symbolically, but looking up I felt very little at all.

At this angle, the top of my head would be blown out all over the wall at the head of the bed. That seemed to be the general angle. I didn’t know about the gases from the barrel. Maybe they would blow my cheeks apart, scorch my throat, burn my lips. Perhaps the barrel would become hot from the bullet and, even as my head went out on the wall, my mouth would be burned and hollowed and blistered. Nothing is ever as clean as in the movies.

Goodbye Amy , I thought, and pulled the trigger.

Things are better now. Not perfect by any means, but better. It’s four months on, and there’s a strange kind of poetry to that: it was four months after Amy disappeared when I found her, and now, four months later, I’m beginning to find my feet. I have a new job. It’s nothing special – just grunt work at the moment – but it keeps me busy and keeps me sane and, most importantly of all, it doesn’t involve fucking people over – or at least not directly – and so despite the grease and dirt I get to have an illusion of my hands being clean.

Every night I go home to the house that Amy and I used to share. I’ll be selling it soon and moving somewhere different: not a nicer place or a worse one, just different. I’m okay where I am, but I made the suggestion to Charlie and she seemed to think it was a good idea. She notices how I am much more than I do. I have good days and bad days, just like everybody, and I think it helps that I got a lot of my grieving out of the way a long time ago. There’s still the guilt to deal with, but I’m as resilient as the next person and, when I need to, I can lock all that shit away and pretend it’s not there.

Oh yeah – Charlie.

Well, she’s here some of the time. We’re still just friends, but neither of us is with anyone else and it seems likely that we’ll get together at some point. There’s a closeness between us, and it increases every day. She’s one of those types of people: the kind who seem to have infinite patience. I’m in awe of her in so many ways. She deserves better, of course; I’m still very much aware of that. But I’m also determined to change it. One day, if I work at it hard enough, maybe it won’t be true anymore. Perhaps she’ll deserve me. Stranger things have happened.

And the gun?

Well, I still have it. Sometimes I take it out of the drawer in the bedroom and look at it. I run my hands over it and imagine what it would be like to load it with bullets and shoot myself. I’d fired it precisely twice. The first had killed Walter Hughes’ bodyguard: an accident. The second, more deliberate, had killed Hughes himself. And then, four months ago, I’d fired it into the top of my mouth, expecting to die. That had been incredibly deliberate. But there were no bullets left. The gun was empty. It had gone click click click click .