The Third Person

I shrugged, feeling awkward.

‘Yeah. I guess that’s what I mean.’

She shrugged herself.

‘Well, we don’t have to do that. Don’t worry about it.’

‘But that’s why we’re here. We’ve both been on the train for over an hour.’

‘Sure,’ she told me, standing up. ‘But we’ll have a coffee instead. Another one, anyway. Same again?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I don’t think I’d ever felt so pathetic in my life, but at the heart of me there was this strange kernel of light, and I think it came from knowing that I’d made the right call. Suddenly, all the excitement I’d been feeling over the past couple of months felt like tension, and what I was experiencing now felt more and more like relief.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said, and then looked at me with that expression – the one that said she liked me but was slightly disappointed at the same time. She touched my shoulder gently, and then gave it a squeeze. ‘You’re a nice guy, Jason. And I’m not into ruining lives.’

‘Maybe I should go,’ I said.

She shook her head.

‘Why? Come on – let’s have another coffee. We can talk.’ She gave me a nice smile. ‘You can tell me about your girlfriend. Okay?’

I thought about it. As weird an idea as it should have seemed, suddenly it didn’t. In fact, I realised that I really did want to talk to Claire about Amy – that it seemed right. The feeling of relief was getting stronger and brighter. I figured that I had a lot I needed to say.

‘Okay,’ I told her, nodding. I even managed a smile. ‘That’d be really nice.’

‘We talked for a couple of hours,’ I told the old man in my flat. ‘And that’s all we did. She bought me another coffee; I bought her one later on. We wandered out into the city square for a little while. Weird, I guess.’ I laughed. ‘It was a nice day. And then we went our separate ways. And that’s it.’

And that was it, too – stripped down to minimal detail, anyway. But it had been an important afternoon for me: I’d told her about Amy, and the distance that was growing between us. I’d said that it felt like a light that was going out, and she’d listened and been sympathetic. Like a best friend – or the closest thing to it, with Graham seconded. As my train pulled away from the station that afternoon, I watched her from the window – standing there in much the same way as she’d been standing when I arrived. The whole afternoon felt like a beautiful holiday, or a dream, and it made me feel sad to see her move backwards away from me, reduced to a tiny white blur, and then swung out of sight by the corner of the track. I was never going to e-mail her again or chat to her. It wouldn’t have worked. It was just one perfect day. The End.

‘You never saw her again?’ the man asked.

‘No.’

‘Never spoke to her?’

‘No.’ I looked at him steadily. ‘Never saw her again, online or off. Never exchanged a word with her. That was it.’

He kept looking at me, almost as if he could smell the lie but couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. So, I furnished the lie with a few final truths.

‘I loved my girlfriend,’ I told him. ‘I still love her. My relationship with Claire, as much as it even was a relationship, was a mistake. We both knew it. We both left it at that.’

I didn’t feel like saying anything else, so we just sat and stared at each other for a second. The old man seemed about to say something, but then we both heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Two guys walked into the room. They were both dressed the same as the bouncer with the gun, but they didn’t look half as mean. One had glasses, foppish brown hair and seemed to be about eighteen; the other was all pasty-faced and mid-thirties. They looked like nothing so much as a couple of half-harried computer geeks, and they seemed nervous about whatever it was that they’d found:

‘Nothing.’

‘You checked everywhere?’

The younger guy nodded, pressing his glasses back up his nose.

‘His hard drive’s clean. And there’s nothing in the deleted data that could be recovered. If there was, we’d have found a trace at least. No sign of it on his disks either. I think he’s clean.’

The old man stared through him, looking disappointed and suddenly distant. Then, he nodded to himself, and started to ease his old body out of the chair.

‘Never mind.’

As the bouncer moved over to help him, the old man turned to face me.

‘Don’t get up, Mr Klein. We’ll see ourselves out.’ He seemed suddenly contrite. ‘I’m sorry for any… inconvenience.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ I said, wondering how many pieces my computer was currently resting in. ‘Any time.’

As if as an afterthought, he reached inside his suit and retrieved his wallet; from that, he produced a business card and passed it to me. I took it, and turned it over.

Walter Hughes, it said, along with an address uptown, telephone and e-mail details, and a stylised eagle watermark.

‘If you should hear anything,’ he said, replacing his wallet, ‘I’d like to hear it, too. I can be contacted as it says there. And if you drop my secretary a note on Monday morning, I shall arrange to have any breakages paid for and replaced.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

The situation seemed to have gone from one extreme to the other, and it had been a long night: my brain was having trouble keeping up with the swerves.

Hughes nodded to me once, and then turned to his accomplices.

‘Gentlemen.’

The four of them swept out of my living room, and I heard the front door close behind them. Within a few seconds, a car engine began gunning outside. I waited for it to drive away and then – when the sound had become a distant whine, barely even audible – I let out an enormous breath and went to find that second beer I’d been dreaming of, so long ago.

I had a dream that night, or a vision.

Sometimes, Amy used to wake me up, when she’d had a bad dream – it happened less and less as our relationship became stronger, and then more and more as it weakened again. Often, I’d already be awake; she’d be fighting with the bed, and you couldn’t sleep through something like that. I’d lie there, watching, wondering whether I should touch her or not. I wanted to; I wanted to reassure her. But I knew it would probably frighten her more than anything else, and so I had to wait for her to lurch awake, turn to me in the dark and cling there, shaking. That was how it always ended. Sometimes my back would bleed, she’d hold on to me so hard.

And that was what I dreamt about. I dreamt that I woke up and she was there, lying beside me on the futon – more of a dark shape beneath the covers than a real person – with blue dawn light coming through the curtains and brightening her edges. She had her back to me this time, not clinging at all, and she was quietly sobbing. Her hand was over her face; the futon was trembling beneath her. In the dream, I moved up against her, pressing my front to her back, and put my arm around her, curling it into the warmth of her belly. She ignored me. I whispered that I loved her, but she just kept crying. And that was when I realised the truth.

She was dead: not really here with me at all. I was alone on the futon, and it was like someone had opened a window beside me that allowed me to see into the world where she was. She was crying, oblivious to my touch, because somehow she’d found out about Claire. In my mind, the room she was in became a cell. The blue light was streaking through a food slat high in the door, and Amy was curled upon cool flagstones, crying inconsolably because she was dead and betrayed.

I don’t know how the dream ended – only that at some point it was finished and I was sitting up in that blue light of dawn, covers pooled around my waist, totally alone and crying. And I stayed that way for a while, wishing she was home, while all the time the memory of Claire’s voice was intruding into my grief.

Jason, if anything ever happens to me, she was telling me, sounding both scared and exhilarated, and I didn’t want to hear it then any more than I wanted to hear it now. The phone call had come out of the blue; I didn’t even know where she’d got my number from.