The Third Person

the eye of captive audiences in passing planes. Then the whole thing began to really take off.

Houses. Shops. Whole mini-communities sprang up. Vice-presidents no longer went home for the night, but travelled two floors up and left a bit. Access was immediately restricted, with people once again being forced to smoke secretly in the toilets and grumble about how dark it was outside. They still flicked their butts out of the window, of course, but there were fewer people for them to land on now, and the ones who were still there were even less important than before. And getting paler by the day.

After a while, the council decided that enough was enough. It declared the green land between the rooftops as public property, looped the existing ring road up a few hundred feet, and then negotiated with the various ruling companies to create an effective network of streets and avenues, replete with sponsored signs and traffic police. Begrudgingly, they agreed, and Uptown was born. It became a place for the ridiculously rich to live, and the depressingly fashionable to window-shop and be seen. Underneath the surface – as always – it was a different story.

At the street-level, things were winding down. The air was becoming stuffy and unbreathable. The smaller businesses were either closing down through lack of traffic, or being driven out by the expansion of larger businesses. Disused buildings were boarded up, or cemented into solid pillars. These days, most of Downtown is superficially abandoned – with only the occasional through road, converted into a sealed, amber-lit tunnel, leading to ground-floor access for the richer companies. The rest of it is bricked up and forgotten by the mainstream. Generally, employees access the companies from the roof down. It’s safer.

It’s the same as it’s always been. The companies innovate and rebuild, restructuring a thousand lives along the way, and you’re still left with basically the same as you started with. In this case, everything was just a few hundred feet higher up. There’s talk of renovating the underside and clearing away the debris – turning it back into a proper place to live and work – but there’s always talk. Deep down everybody knows that it’s never going to happen. Because we need somewhere dark underneath it all for the bad things to be swept.

Just a quick point: everything that happens here is happening for a reason.

It’s always like that, of course, but in this case there’s something special going on: everything is happening because of just one thing. If you take every event I tell you about apart, you’ll find genetic code leading all the way back to this single common ancestor. Chop out that ancestor, and you’re talking blank pages. Empty from top to the bottom, from first to last.

And – like I said – what happened had nothing to do with me. Weird the way things turn out, isn’t it? What happened is a story.

Amy knew it off by heart, and sometimes – when I asked her nicely enough – she’d tell me. Why did I ask? Because once upon a time, as the stories say, I thought that each time she told the story she might unlearn it a little. It wasn’t something you really needed to remember, and I thought it might help her to forget. But that’s not what ended up happening.

Don’t bother sitting comfortably, because I never did.

A girl was at a student party, Amy would tell me. This girl had gone there with her best friend, and it had been a spur-of-the-moment, last minute decision to go: she was still debating it on the way there, in fact, as they leap- frogged from their shared house to the off-licence to the party. Her friend really wanted to go and so she’d persuaded the girl that it would be good for her to go, too. The girl figured she wasn’t going to know many people there, and as it turned out she was right, but she was chatty and pretty, and things usually worked out okay. It was a student party, after all: you just need to smile and drink, and then after a while a friend is anybody who’s in the same room as you.

This girl lost her friend at one point, but she thought fuck it. She’d kind of expected it, anyway – her friend had only wanted to come because of some boy, and so in a way her disappearance was excellent, fanfare, mission accomplished. The girl figured she’d get monumentally drunk to celebrate, and so set about demolishing wine at an astonishing rate. She talked shit to people; they talked shit back. And at one point, she met this boy.

His name was Jack, and she fancied him from the moment she set eyes on him. It was reasonably obvious that the feeling was mutual and they got talking, but – although he was flirting with her quite openly – she sensed that he was also holding back a little. The reason became obvious when she met the people he’d come with: four male friends… and his girlfriend. Foiled again, she thought, and so drank more wine. But she sat with them for a while anyway, and seemed to get on with them all. The male friends seemed all right, although it was clear that they knew what was going on. The girlfriend seemed oblivious and dull. Perhaps she was used to Jack, or simply not very bright.

They chatted for a while, and then Jack told her that they were all going back to a shared flat in their halls of residence, and would she like to come? They were going to drink and hang out: maybe play some guitar, listen to some CDs, and it would be fun, so how about it? The girl was drunk by then, and so she said yes. Like a good little girl, she even managed to find her friend, break her off her conquest’s face and tell her where she was going.

It was a quarter of an hour walk through the cold to get there. Jack walked with her, deliberately holding back way behind his girlfriend so that they were out of sight as they walked. He reached around and put his hand on her ass as they walked, giving it a squeeze. She looked at him and smiled. She wasn’t sure why, but she was drunk and she wanted him, so she gave him that smile and swigged from the wine bottle she was carrying. They arrived at half-past ten.

Oh shit, said Jack as the group settled down in the lounge, we forgot to get booze. Who’s out?

His girlfriend said, I need some, and – after sharing a glance with Jack – one of the other guys said he needed some too.

It’s only just around the corner, this other guy continued. Why don’t we both go?

So Jack’s girlfriend and this guy left the flat on a last-minute booze run. A few other people wanted stuff as well, but had been keeping quiet, and so the pair of them went away with quite a list. As the front door closed, someone flicked on a Pulp CD and everybody collapsed into armchairs and sofas. Except for Jack and the girl.

Come on, he said, I want to show you something.

Her heart was beating quickly with the excitement. Jack led her down the hall to his bedroom, and they fucked quickly and gracelessly on his bed. Here. She just pulled her knickers to one side as he unzipped himself and climbed on top of her. It was dictionary-definition bad sex, but she’d never wanted it so much in her life; he came in under a minute, with her nowhere near, but it didn’t even matter. Thanks, she told him afterwards, as he wiped his wet, reddened cock on tissue paper and grinned at her. I needed that.

They returned to the living room to knowing smirks, a few minutes ahead of the returning booze party. And then it all started to go wrong.

What happened was – after a while – Jack and his girlfriend went off to bed and left the girl with his friends, who were yawning and stretching and talking about heading off to bed. Despite herself, the girl was annoyed. She’d had a lot more to drink in the meantime and wasn’t necessarily thinking straight, but she felt rejected, frustrated and angry. She felt used. Hurt, even. The kind of resentful feeling that’s more directed at yourself than anyone else – you’re an idiot – but when you’re drunk you attach it to others in the same way you grab their shoulder to stop yourself falling over.

All in all, the evening felt like a bad day at work: nothing much accomplished, but she didn’t want to leave, head home and go to bed, because that felt like defeat. Here everyone was, though: a few of them asleep already; others collecting their coats. It was depressing.

So when this quiet boy – who she’d barely even spoken to all evening – wandered over and told her uncertainly that he had some wine upstairs in his room, and would she like to come up if she wasn’t ready to go home yet?, she thought about it for all of a second, and then said yes, of course, I’d love to. She thought, did you read my mind? He was big and cumbersome: average-looking. She didn’t fancy him in the slightest, but from his virtual silence he was obviously an outsider in the group, and at that moment she hated Jack’s group for using her and smirking and generally being bastards.

She said, Let’s go.

At that point in the story, there was always a break: a fracture. The way Amy always told it, the girl and the boy sat and drank wine in his room, and talked, and then at one point the boy told her that she was going to have