The Third Person

dozy.

A soothing voice came on over the coach’s tannoy system.

‘Please remain seated until the bus has come to rest.’

This was immediately taken as a sign to stand up and begin removing large and unwieldly objects from the overhead storage lockers. Businessmen were levering out enormous, jet-black briefcases, while women extracted baby-sacks and mountainous coats to hide their horrific children in. For all the equality of the sexes, nothing changes – although it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that some of these people were actors, paid by the coach company to give travel a sense of comfort and the everyday. I gathered my papers together and waited.

In the coach station itself, there were no police waiting for me. Nobody even looked twice. There was a small crowd of scattering people, heading this way and that, and another janitor: so like the one in Bracken I wondered for a second whether he’d been stowed away in the luggage department and let off first. I almost hoped it was true. The more likely alternative – that two different people had the same meaningless job of watering down mud on dirty white tiles – was more depressing.

I moved with the throng, swept out into the sunlit streets of Asiago.

In Asiago, the sky is blue.

You have the sea running alongside, and it’s so pure that it looks almost enhanced. It’s all pale blue and white, and you can see sail boats in the distance moving casually across the horizon. Most of these aren’t real. They’re motorised scenery, and they take them in on rainy days because they look too odd. Up close, at the harbour edge, the water’s actually blacky-green and murky, and you can see the oil and branches and shit on the surface.

Take that effect and extend it to the whole town.

In Asiago, the sand is like silk.

No it isn’t. Anyway, forget the sand. What you have – basically – is a manufactured seaside resort, complete with artificial shabbiness. You have penny arcades and souvenir shops and ye-olde-pubs with barrels instead of seats – but the beer’s no better than anywhere else and barrels aren’t comfortable to sit on for a beer-drinking length of time. Everywhere smells of salt and vinegar – and fat – and you’ll remember your parents hinting that, because it’s a seaside town, the fish should be wonderful here. But it turns out not to be. It’s just as battery and boring as anywhere inland.

In Asiago, as they say, the air is like warm, melted ice.

You have the fresh sea breeze, and the warmth of a hazy sun.

Always Asiago.

Because this is how Asiago was designed: as a place permeated with nostalgia. Time-wise – at least in marketing terms – the grass is always greener. Multi-nationals pull emotion out of us on strings by resurrecting long-dead ages and cultures and making us want them. We go running along, and sooner or later we trip up, or they do. That’s what happened here. Coca-Cola built this place from scratch, marketing it as a return to childhood and, of course, people came. But it was real enough to be really dull, and so people left again. It was too real. Somewhere along the line, manufactured, knowing shabbiness peeled off into real shabbiness, and people stopped coming altogether.

Coca-Cola moved out, and real people took up the leases on fake properties and made them real again. Still nobody came, really, but that was okay because that was how it was. The land had reclaimed itself. Bog-standard society took over, and Asiago began to evolve. Like the majority of genuine seaside towns were a while back, it was now being overtaken by big business developments, high-profile stores and ludicrously expensive condos. Further back from the peeling red and white boards of the promenade, there were office blocks springing up like roots through cracks in the pavement. Twenty years behind the rest of their kind, but giving it a frankly heroic go. Another twenty years and the social grass would have grown through Coca-Cola’s concrete, and you’d never know they’d ever been there.

Dennison’s address was a few streets back from the sea-front, but far enough away from the newer developments to be affordable. I wandered along the promenade, feeling curiously detached from my problems. Just like the adverts had promised, the sun was warm, coming in slow, alternate flashes of brightness and dullness, and the wind was icily cold. I felt young again, what with that sea breeze and the sound of the gulls, and figured that Amy and I could probably have lived here for a while. But, like the paint beneath my feet, the novelty would probably have peeled away from me in time.

There were plaintive little cottages here, built like city-centre back to backs, only with more charm. They might have been marketed as fishermen’s cottages at one time. When freshly built, they were probably the most expensive accommodation you could find, simply because they were the most nostalgic. Now, though, they were cheap as a two-dollar fuck, and maybe half as appealing. The smell of the sea was stained in the brick, and the windows looked misted over and lost. The buildings themselves were ramshackle and small. It was as though the gravity of the town had shifted a few miles inland, and had left these rather sorry-looking buildings in its wake.

Maybe we could have lived here once upon a time, but I hated Asiago now, because of what it represented. This is the truth about why Asiago failed: because nostalgia is a feeling of warmth towards the past, but it’s actually nostalgia itself that feels good, and not the past at all. All your life is in the past: you’re surfing on an ever-expanding cusp of lived time, and everything you think and feel is actually behind you, but you can’t go back. Asiago represented what would happen if you could, and it wasn’t quite as warm and cosy as you would have thought.

If you could go back and have it all again, this is what would happen:

You’d do exactly the same things; you’d waste it all; you’d wish for more.

If I had Amy back, we’d argue again. We’d fight. I’d lose my patience with her. We’d sleep back to back. I’d flirt with strangers and then feel guilty, and then do it all over again. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone – yes: that’s well known. But they never add that, if you actually got it back, all you’d do is forget the value again. Over and over.

And that was pretty much all that the crumbling facade of this little seaside town had to say to me. The truth of it was seeping in with the ozone, chattering in the fruit machines, hanging off the wall in jagged strips. It brought back Graham’s words to me at the coach station.

Maybe you should let it go.

Yeah, maybe.

But I kept walking, working my way slightly inland onto streets edged by pavements of shattered, sodden wood. There were gangs of cats living wild in the branching alleys. I found Dennison’s front door, and checked the number just to make sure: this was it, all right. It had a rusted brass knocker in the middle. I rapped three times, and then took a step back and waited for him to answer.

After a second or two, I heard movements inside, heading for the door.

A pause.

I watched the spy-glass, and could feel it watching me back.

Nothing. I got impatient.

‘Hello?’ I said, and rapped the door knocker aga-.

Natural selection favours the well-adapted: that’s why we’re here. That is why giraffes have long necks, tigers have sharp teeth and turtles have hard shells. These are features which have evolved and become refined because they give those animals a better chance of survival than the animals without them. What this means, in reality, is that many millions of once-living creatures were killed or died because they weren’t as well adapted. To have an advantage, there has to be something for you to have an advantage over.

Animals starve because they are less well-suited to finding food than other animals. They are killed because they are less able to defend themselves, or because they can’t outrun a predator.

In literature, texts die because they are less well-suited to the environment of our culture. They die out when they no longer appeal to us. We burn the books. We shred the paper, reconstituting it as a text we prefer. Once living ideas and themes are destroyed forever as whole paragraphs are excised from existing works. Every time we press delete, something dies.

Every time we reject a novel, we indulge in consumerist eugenics.

Now, at a genetic level, it doesn’t matter when an individual is killed. Matter, after all, is a human word. In nature, there is only well-adapted and less well- adapted: an entirely mechanical process. The individual is a vehicle for the propagation of the genes within, just as a book is a hard, physical machine for the transportation and reproduction of ideas. When a dog or a