Steve Mosby - The Third Person

The footpath followed the canal, which snaked under the freeway and fed back into the city centre, skirting within a few hundred metres of my house along the way. The actual water was stagnant and old. Ten years ago, when I’d been a boy, I remembered riding my bike along the footpath, the gravel crackling beneath my tyres and disturbing all the fishermen who were waiting patiently, like tents, on the banks. Nobody fished here now, though; and the only bikes that came along the footpath were motorbikes on an evening. It was a desolate, sad little route, made all the more so by the city in the distance, like an enormous cybernetic limb where one old vein still remained, unbeating and unused. Soon, they’d concrete it in and build over it. Or maybe just above it, instead, leaving it to solidify beneath: mythic and forgotten.

That night, as always, there were a few shapes beneath the pillars of the freeway, sheltering. A dozen ghosts of Tom Joad, slumped around fires flickering in gigantic, rusted drums, casting hunched shadows over graffiti and fractured rock. The skin of the concrete was coming away in places, like the wallpaper in an abandoned house, revealing layers of older graffiti underneath. Beneath the surface of the city, like so many of the people who lived and worked there, everything was shabby and untended. After the comfort of the police station, it felt like coming home – but maybe that was just wishful thinking. Everybody likes to feel like an outsider at heart, and you can feel that way pretty fucking easily walking along under a road-bridge, but it’s an illusion. They can still hook you up whenever they want to, and then drop you back when they’re done. You’re still their fish, in their pond. It’s all a matter of social physics.

It was a twenty minute walk back along the canal, but I did it in forty. I was thinking about a lot of things – although not in any focused way: rather, I was letting my emotions and feelings wash over me, wave after wave. Sometimes, it’s difficult to separate out the threads that have led to you feeling a certain way, and all you can do is wallow in it: the same way that you can often only taste the end meal, never the individual ingredients. So that’s what I did now, and my life tasted black to me: as ruined and tatty as the underside of the freeway; and as dankly unpleasant as the water beside me. A while ago, there was Claire, and the fact of my affair with her soured my search for Amy, which I’d pretty much dedicated my life to ever since she went missing. That was four months ago.

I’ve always been big on the grand, meaningless gesture, and so at one point I stopped on the edge of the canal and took everything in like a deep breath. The flecked, golden M of the moon’s reflection in the water, spotted and shattered by rainfall. The glow at the horizon, and the black, starless expanse of the city to one side, and then Uptown above it. The slight rush of air. The sound of the rain on the water, and on the path, and on me. And I whispered I love you, Amy so quietly that I hardly said it at all.

A meaningless gesture, though. They always seemed to work that much better in the movies, with soaring music and audience identification, but never so well in real life. I listened to the same sounds afterwards, looked at the same things, and nothing had changed. And it didn’t make me feel any better, either, because with everything that had happened tonight it felt like a lie.

The rain was getting in my eyes by the time I arrived back at my house, pooling there. Stinging slightly. Clouds sponsored by Domestos and Imperial Leather; air sponsored by FreeZee. Even moving my body made me feel cold, and I was shivering as I got my keys out of my pocket. For all my stoic bullshit, I was only human. I wanted to feel independent and tough, of course, but also – a little bit more than that – I wanted a towel.

The house seemed quiet as I closed the door. Quiet and contained. Nothing, as it turned out, could have been further from the truth.

‘Don’t move.’

It was a man’s voice. I heard the sound of a safety being clicked off.

I stopped immediately, and then started shivering.

‘“Freeze” might be more appropriate,’ I said.

A towel was flung at me from the living room.

‘Here. Dry yourself off.’

‘Thanks.’

The guy stepped out as I was doing so, pointing a gun at me rather casually. He was dressed too neatly to be a burglar: I could see a nice, black suit underneath his beige overcoat, which was spotted darker brown in places with rain that had yet to dry. He looked like Dick Tracy without the hat, except his face was pock-marked and his hair receded to behind his ears, making him seem more like an ageing doorman. To complete that image, he had a vicious-looking cut above his eye. The light in the hallway was gleaming on his balding head.

I’d had a gun pointed at me before. When I was nineteen, I was caught up in an armed robbery at the convenience store around the corner from my hall of residence. It was one of those weird things that you beat yourself up about afterwards – Tyler, one of my flatmates, had asked me to pick up a pack of rizlas for him, but I’d forgotten them until after I paid. So I had to hang on for an extra few seconds, and if I hadn’t done that then this bouncer in my flat would have been my first proper gun experience. Instead, I had a shotgun pointed at my head for a full minute, as three other kids took the cash-drawers from the till and scared the counter-girl shitless. The guy who was drawing on me was so fucked up that his eyes were bright red and he could hardly even stand up straight. It was unreal. I mean, the gun didn’t look like they do in the movies: it was wooden and metal, and so alien to me that I figured it had to be a toy, even though I knew it wasn’t. In the movies, guns shine; they’re sleek, not dull and real. In the movies they fetishise these things, but in real life it wasn’t all that sexy. In fact, it wasn’t all that anything until about five minutes after they’d gone.

Now, I dropped the towel on the floor beside me. Upstairs, I could hear the sound of people going through my things. Above me, in the study, I heard something smash and someone swear.

‘Come in and have a seat,’ the guy told me, twitching the business end of the pistol towards the living room.

I made my way through, somehow unsurprised to find that there was somebody already in there, waiting for me. He was an old man – probably in his early seventies – but looked spry and commanding, and he was sitting in my armchair, over by the bay window, with one leg resting over the other, and one hand resting on the bulb-end of a mean-looking iron cane. He looked like some kind of porn king, in fact, with his full complement of silver hair still tinged through to a fake black in places, and skin that was as tanned as the bouncer’s raincoat.

‘Jason Klein,’ he said, as the door was closed behind us. ‘You live like a pig in shit.’

Pigs in shit are supposedly quite happy, but it seemed a foolish point to argue over. I noticed that he was sitting on some kind of blanket, and realised that, whoever he was, his ass was clearly too good for furniture as neglected and woeful as mine. Ours.

‘Sit down.’

He nodded to my other armchair; I walked over and sat.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘We have a couple of things to talk about, you and I.’

‘Right.’ It felt oddly as though I was at some kind of job interview. I supposed that I was, in a way. The post I was applying for was the rest of my miserable life.

‘You don’t know me?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘You don’t have any idea who I am?’

‘No.’

‘What you do know, though, is that you want us out of here as soon as humanly possible. Am I right?’