The Third Person

You deserved somebody better than me.

I’d told her that before, and she’d said the same thing back. And we’d both always said the same thing in reply: But I love you.

Well at least now we knew who was right.

I started to cry again, looking down at the remains. They were as unrecognisable as a tree growing from a grave would have been, and at that moment I couldn’t imagine doing another thing with my life. That feeling of rock bottom again, and then it passed. I wasn’t going to dissolve, or cease to exist. At least, not without some help.

I touched the lump of the gun, hanging in my pocket.

There’s no God. No Heaven. Nothing after death. I didn’t believe in any of that stuff. But nothing seemed like it might feel better than this. Right then, it felt like I could go for nothing.

Nothing felt about right.

But not this second, I thought. I had money in my pocket, and my stomach was achingly empty. I was soaking. For some stupid, undefined reason, it didn’t feel right to die on wasteground, even though Amy was here with me. It felt like I needed to take control and do it right: make some kind of insignificant ceremony out of it.

So I said goodbye to Amy, and then I touched the gun again, turned around and headed back to Fairway Street.

I got something to eat in Combo’s Deli, hesitating for maybe a second before crossing the street and heading inside. But nobody looked at me twice; even the guy showing off his balls seemed to be staring at something in the middle-distance that was more interesting than me. It felt okay – not threatening in the slightest – and I realised why even as I wandered inside: I belonged here. I was downtown, swept under the carpet. Jettisoned from society, unwanted and aimless and uncaring, just like everyone else here. And we can smell our own.

When I was younger, I used to imagine what it would feel like to know you were going to die. I figured it would be both scary and liberating. Scary because I didn’t want to die, but liberating because you could do anything you wanted. I thought that being about to die would make you aware of how much society ties you down. You’d never have to look someone in the eye again if you didn’t want to. Never have to answer to the law for what you did. Not have to worry about the hangover or the injuries, or what anyone might think of you. Never say please or thank you.

But old habits died harder than I would.

‘Coming right up,’ the owner told me, after I’d asked him for a cup of coffee, and a plate of sausages, bacon and chips, and then said please to round it all off. He turned away to his sizzling grill, warning me: ‘You wait here, boy. There ain’t no table service.’

He slopped it up. I paid him (I said thank you, too) and took my food to a far corner of the cafe. It was delicious: as revoltingly greasy as anything I’d ever tasted, and as good a final meal as anyone could have hoped for. As I ate, I watched the outside world of Downtown through the misty window. You could even see the entrance to the wasteground from where I was sitting. Fuck it, though. I dabbed my mouth with a paper towel and took the tray back over to the counter.

‘You rent out rooms, here?’ I asked.

The owner took the tray off me, looking bored.

‘We rent out rooms,’ he said, ‘yeah. Thirty a night, breakfast is extra. Are you on your own?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You want to be?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I just want a room.’

‘Money’s in advance. How long’re you here for?’

‘Just one night.’

‘Just one night. Here you go.’

He slipped a set of keys off a hook behind the grill. I pulled out thirty pounds, and we traded.

‘Stairs over there,’ he said, gesturing to the far corner. ‘You change your mind about the company, I can sort you out with something. With anything.’

‘I won’t.’

‘If you’re not gone by ten tomorrow, we come looking for you.’

Well, that would be nice for everyone.

‘I understand,’ I said, and went to find my room.

The room at Combo’s was as awful as you’d imagine. There was a bed, a table and a chair, and that was about it. The shared bathroom was down the hall. There was a bare bulb hanging down in the far corner, beside the black square of a window, but the light was sickly and weak, and it gave the room an appearance of wasting illness. It was like the room’s liver had failed.

Worse than that, though, were the walls. They had been painted a pale and anaemic green, but there were brown patches on three of them, varying in size and height. The colour had faded, presumably through scrubbing, but it was still recognisable for what it was: blood. It looked like somebody had been butchered in here. There was a spattering of it above the headboard of the bed, and I bet that if I’d have pulled off the white cotton sheet from the mattress I’d have found a stain there, as well. But I didn’t think I was going to do that.

I put the gun on the bed beside the damp pile of papers I’d collected. Then, I went over to the window and closed a pair of thin beige curtains against the Downtown night. If you’re keeping count, there were flecks of blood on the curtains, too.

Honestly, I didn’t know how I was going to do this. I was shaking. To calm myself down, I lay on the hard bed, hands crossed behind my head to form a rough pillow, and closed my eyes.

Breathing slowly, I tried to find a picture of Amy in my mind to steady myself. It came easily enough, but it seemed slightly faded. Lifeless, like a photograph. I supposed I hadn’t seen her in four months and shouldn’t be surprised, but I was -and disappointed, too. I wanted something vivid that I could run towards. I wanted to be with her, in some way, when I did what I was going to do. The last thoughts that got blasted out onto these walls should be of her.

I started to cry, frustrated with myself, and sat up.

The room looked better blurred, and so I cried for a while, and thought unhappy thoughts. I ran through the scenarios. I imagined her cursing me as she died. I saw her crying and screaming as they raped and tortured her to death, and then unfolded these thoughts backwards to see us sitting in our bed, side by side and miles apart. I thought of all the things I should have told her, and I said them to her now instead. Most of all, I imagined sitting with her, trying to explain how sorry I was. Still she wouldn’t come.

Get it together, I told myself.

Just get it together.

I opened the file and flicked through it, maybe for inspiration. But I stopped at the first page, which was the e-mail she’d sent. Except she hadn’t, of course: it must have been somebody else.

I looked at it again, and then rubbed my fingertip over the printed text of the header. If she hadn’t sent me the footage that would lead me to her body, then who had? How had they found it – and me – and why?

It occured to me for a second that she might not be dead at all, and I felt a flurry in my heart. Immediately, I shot it down.

She is dead.

So who wrote the e-mail, then? Who else had access to the account?

I couldn’t think of a single person, but maybe she’d told someone else the password. After all, she hadn’t known about Claire Warner. So maybe she’d had someone that I didn’t know about.

I felt relieved to be thinking this through, without really knowing why, and so I went with it. Either Amy had sent the message, or someone else had. That seemed clear enough. It was certainly Amy in the beginning sections of the video, and the continuation in it suggested that it was her remains that had been set on fire at the wasteground. That was the implication. So she couldn’t have sent it. But who would have been able to find those videos? Certainly not Graham, not in the time he had. Hughes was dead. And why would anyone have sent me them at all?

The conclusion? Nothing about that blank e-mail made sense.

I turned it over and looked at the next page, which was the beginning of Dennison’s insane manifesto that texts were alive. As I skimmed through the pages, I wondered what state the internet was in right now: how much of it