The Third Person

a scraping at the back door, go and open it, and there it is. And you don’t know whether it’s loyalty or anger that’s brought it back to you, except that in this case I thought that I did. The blank screen glared at me. If I stared, the emptiness felt like it was burning into my eyes.

Bang. Bang.

Two steady knocks at the front door, and I’d turned around before I knew it. The blank message continued its empty flare in the corner of my eye.

I didn’t move.

My attention was focused on the lock, with the rest of the room fading away around me, and I realised that it was open. My front door was unlocked, and I didn’t even dare move. But then it really was open – opening, anyway – and a large man with a gun was walking into the darkness, bringing sickly light from the hall along with him.

He’d just closed the front door calmly, keeping the gun pointing at me the whole time, and then he’d taken a seat at the table beside me.

‘Get yourself some fresh paper,’ he’d said. ‘And a pen. And then start writing down what’s happening here.’

And so that’s what I’d done.

The smile disappeared now as he told me what I already knew.

‘I don’t want your money. I just want you to listen.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Right.’

‘Yes. Listen and write.’

Okay, I thought. He’s someone who knows about me and what I can do, and maybe he wants to make some money. So perhaps there was an angle here that I could use to help myself. But then again – if that was all that he wanted, he could have taken a dozen notebooks off the shelves behind him and sold them to whatever buyer he had interested. So why not do that? My mind was backtracking, and I couldn’t help thinking of the blank e-mail I’d just received. The corrupted attachment. Did this have something to do with that empty message?

He leaned forward and looked me in the eyes. Just stared into them intently.

‘Are you in there, Jason?’ he said. ‘Are you hearing me?’

All I could do was stare back at him. I didn’t know what to say, but I didn’t have the courage to look down. So I kept the connection, my right hand twitching away as I wrote.

After a second, he leaned away again. ‘Never mind. Either you are or you aren’t.’

I looked down at the paper in front of me, which was nearly full. He must have followed my gaze and realised what I was thinking because he placed another one down in front of me and said:

‘Let’s have a nice clean break, shall we?’

There was a playground near where Graham and Jason grew up, formed in a concrete bubble on the edge of this park that wasn’t really a park at all – just grassland, really, with a couple of chalk-white pitch shapes stained thoughtlessly into it, and the ring of a path for older people to stroll around in summer. There was a maze of trees and bushes which people from the nearby pubs would lose themselves in on an evening, in order to fuck drunkenly. The playground was at the top.

Graham had had his first beer there, and smoked his first joint. He didn’t lose his virginity there, shivering and cold, although he would have liked to.

They shared the place out between about thirty of them, mixed in every way, and they didn’t exactly mingle but they all put up with one another’s presence without much confrontation. Graham’s group consisted of Jason and about five or six other friends from school. One of those was Emma Lindley. She had messy blonde hair that she wore half tied back, and she was always smiling, and she was slim from all the football she played with the boys. Graham thought she was beautiful, and had done for nearly a year. He’d managed to speak to her a couple of times, but the conversation had never done more than skim the surface. In their circle of friends they were at opposite sides, which meant Graham was always looking across at her while she was always turned one way or the other, talking to someone else. But it was okay. He’d accepted that, generally speaking, that was the way things always were. It was certainly how they always had been. He didn’t get the girl. Maybe he was being overly optimistic, but he thought that one day he would. It couldn’t stay like this forever; he was a nice guy.

That night, Graham and a boy called Jonny were sitting side by side on the mound of concrete at the top of the playground. They were next to the slide that curved down its surface, and another boy – pissed to high heaven – was sliding down it, and then clambering up the wedged steps to the top, and then sliding down again, over and over. In about ten minutes he would lean on his knees and be sick in front of them, but for now he was happy.

Across the other side of the playground, Emma was talking to Connor and Jason. They were by the swings. Graham looked from them up to the night sky. It was very dark blue, not black, and the stars were full of colour.

‘Here.’

Jonny passed Graham the bottle of whisky they were sharing. Graham took a swig and winced. It hurt, but it made his head warm and the night hum. Alcohol shaved the edges off. When he was drunk, which he was getting towards being now, he felt a lot more positive about things. Not that they were closer to being within his reach. It just mattered less that they weren’t.

He took another swig, and then said, ‘Here,’ and Jonny took the bottle back again.

Graham looked around. The playground was quite busy tonight, but the groups were as segregated as ever. It was mostly boys and girls he knew from school – people he knew but didn’t know – and none of them really wanted to mix. Occasionally someone would come over and beg a cigarette or beer or rolling paper, and there’d be some perfunctory friendly conversation. It was always amiable, never convincing.

Graham knew he was just one of those guys: background people. He was very smart, but not irritating enough to be a target. He didn’t have that many friends, but enough to coast by, and he was never invited anywhere, but nobody was surprised or annoyed when he tagged along with people who were. He’d never had a girlfriend, but he’d been turned down by a few high-profile players way above his station, and so nobody thought he was gay. Nobody really thought much about him at all. That was all okay, too.

One of the reasons he came here was because it made him feel accepted, but it was weird. In many ways it just underlined how much he wasn’t. For him, it was all kind of an act. Whereas Jason was the real thing.

Graham looked back just as Connor joined them. He took the whisky from Jonny and said, ‘Three’s a crowd tonight.’

Jonny laughed, but not much. Graham’s attention returned to the swings across the playground. Now, Emma and Jason were on their own over there, sitting side by side on the hard rubber seats, twisting gently against the strength of the chains. Just talking, but quietly, without really looking at each other.

‘I know when I’m not wanted,’ Connor said.

Their feet were scraping the tarmac beneath them.

Graham looked away and gestured for the whisky off Connor.

‘Here.’

As he drank it, he thought: well, that’s okay. And it was, too. It was just the way things always had happened and always would. He was used to it. He sat there with Connor and Jonny and got methodically drunk, and he must have looked at Jason and Emma every few seconds, because by the end of the evening it was like he had a stop-start movie of them in his head. But all the time, he chatted with his friends, and on the surface he seemed to have a good time. He was aware that it was very important that he keep anyone from realising what he was feeling, including himself. So he watched them but tried not to think about it, and when they walked off together he didn’t let it bother him. It was okay.

Really, it was-

Okay.

So this is what happened.

What really happened.

Like I said, I saw Claire Warner through the window of the train: an odd moment, but fitting in a way – that my first real-life glimpse of her should be occluded slightly by the sunlight on a streaky window. I recognised her face from the picture she’d sent, and would have known it was her even without the white dress. The way she was standing. It’s like everyone else in the station was forty per cent less real than she was. Crowds, sponsored by Stand-In.

She didn’t know me to look at, but I caught her eye before I’d reached her, smiled, and she smiled back and