The Third Person

sneakers on, but not the sort that ever achieves much.

Jobs followed. Neither of us knew what we wanted to do, beyond paying the rent. Everybody has to eat, right? I got my job at SafeSide early on, starting off temporary in the mail room and ending up – lied to by all those capitalist fairytales – just one floor up, earning a couple of hundred more a year. Small town boy makes average. It’s difficult to make a movie on the strength of that one, isn’t it? Amy panned around a little longer, but still didn’t find any gold. She worked for the post office, for a while, helping to facilitate the downsizing, and then drifted through e-centre work before finally settling into virtual secretarial support. The idea was that companies on the other side of the world could send you work to do – accounting, typing, website work – at the end of their working day (which was the beginning of yours), and when they arrived back the next morning, you’d have done all the work during their night-time. By the time I asked her to marry me, Amy had built up quite a respectable client base of Australian companies, and was thinking of expanding her business by farming work out. I was doing okay by then, too, in my own way, and so it seemed like a good time to make the commitment.

Hardly anyone got married anymore, and we really hadn’t been planning it. I’m not Radically Opposed, the way that a lot of young people are; I knew it smacked of ownership of women, and outdated beliefs in gods we just didn’t need anymore, and yet I still found it symbolically appealing. But I wasn’t at the other end of the spectrum, either – the one where you get seriously married in the top-floor chapel of your chosen company. These days every major company has a licensed CEO, and all that changes from business to business is the logo in the corner of the certificate. I knew I could have got married as a SafeSide employee. But I didn’t want that either: I wasn’t a lifer. I just wanted to put a ring on Amy’s finger, so that she could look at it every so often and know what it meant.

It’s difficult, when you have principles, to know what the right thing to do is. We didn’t want to get properly married – formally, in a registry office – but we both had friends who were getting married as some kind of retro- fashion statement, and we didn’t want to be associated with that, either. So in the end we both agreed that it was no big deal. We’d wear a ring, and in our hearts we’d see ourselves as married. I got down on one knee, unclipped this pissy little green velvet box and asked her, literally, for her hand. She gave it to me. We smiled a lot, and made nervous phone calls to the people who cared. And that was that. We never said husband or wife. We were just us: Jason and Amy.

Two rings, not much more than fifty pounds apiece. Even together they weighed next to nothing, but when we put them down on top of The Collection, they felt like the heaviest items there, and when I looked at it afterwards – in my head – I thought it had never looked so steady and secure.

Of course, things hadn’t really started to go wrong by then.

‘The police figured that we’d had an argument, or something. I mean, we had, in a way, but not like they meant. I explained it all but they said there was nothing they could do. It’s not a crime to leave someone.’

I remembered the conversation all too clearly. I’d felt like a child: desperate and panicked, and simply refusing to accept its mother’s final word on a subject. The officer had told me over and over, maybe six times, that there was nothing he could do, and in the end he’d just told me to get out of his way. Not angrily, because he was too professional for that, but with enough of a threat in his voice to make it clear that this was the last time he’d actually ask.

Charlie said, ‘That sucks.’

I nodded.

‘Can’t you go back to them? It’s been how long? Four months?’

‘Thereabouts. I suppose I could go back to them.’

Except I didn’t want to. The same shift that had seen me quit turning up to work as the default setting had also altered my perspective on other things. A policeman was now just a man with a uniform on, no smarter or more important than I was. Society supports the police force and condemns vigilantes and, although this is often hidden beneath a cloud of moral respectability, it has nothing to do with morality at all: it’s about logistics. As her boyfriend, I felt I had more right to search for Amy than they did. I didn’t have the manpower, but that was another issue entirely. The point was that I had the responsibility. If the situation was reversed, I knew she’d be looking for me. That was what our relationship was about.

‘But you haven’t talked to them again yet?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m making progress, though. I have a few leads.’

By her hair.

I looked at the table.

And then I started to shake. It felt like someone had kicked me in the heart.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, getting up so quickly I shunted the table and sent slops of beer rocking out of my glass. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

There was a note on the kitchen table and my house keys clattered down onto the wooden surface beside it. I’d already switched on the kettle. Behind me, on the work surface, it was beginning to rustle gently as the element set the water stirring. The house was quiet and bright. We’d never got around to putting a shade over the bare bulb in the kitchen, and the note was positioned almost exactly underneath, with light spilling down over it. The shadow of my hand reached it before I did.

Black biro on an A4 sheet: big letters, breaking through the faint blue lines and making the page their own.

Jason.

I love you very much.

I frowned, turning on my heels and moving through to the living room. The light was duller in there, and the page looked more solid.

and I don’t want you to blame yourself for this.

I sat down gingerly on the arm of the chair. Starting to feel something lurching inside myself.

This isn’t some kind of ‘dear John’ letter. I’m coming back again.

It was like the whole room was getting just a little bit darker by the second. There’s nothing reassuring about the phrase I’m coming back if it needs to be said. It means it won’t seem like it.

There are some things I need to sort out. You know how it’s been between the two of us recently,

I closed my eyes.

Of course I knew. Sleeping back to back. Amy crying, and me not being able to comfort her anymore, or not willing to in some obscure, terrible way. Sitting in silence with some unspoken argument hanging in the air between us, ringing slightly. Not knowing what to do or say. Wandering past each other in the hallway without acknowledgement. Resentment. Discomfort.

It wasn’t always like that, but our days could sink like a stone.

I opened my eyes and kept reading.

and it’s not fair on you. I need to deal with the issues I have, just like you said.

It happened four years ago, Amy, I remembered thinking. You really need to sort yourself out.

I should have dealt with them already, but I really need to now.

Please wait for me. I promise I’ll come home as soon as I can.

I love you so much (to the sky and back!).

Your Amy.

The bar’s public telephone was padlocked to the wall in a dark annexe by the toilets. Two soft lights overhead reflected off the ruddy-brown wooden walls and gave the corridor a drawing-room effect. To complete the image, there was a spiralling, hand-crafted coat stand resting between the lavatory doors, supporting the kind of old green raincoat you might wear to place bets while propped by an ashtray in the bookies. I slotted a couple of coins into the phone, my hands trembling, and then leant back against the wall, somehow grateful for the protection the darkness gave me.

Helen answered after three rings.

‘Hey-o?’

Well, I didn’t feel like dealing with her right then.

‘Hi, Helen. Is Graham there?’

‘Oh, yes. Actually, he was hoping that you’d ring.’ She sounded a little bit disappointed by this. ‘Hang on.’

There was a pause and then a clatter, and I heard her shouting his name. A few seconds later, there was a buzz of white-noise and then the click of a phone lifting as she put me through.