The Third Person

He glared at me, and it became too much. I looked down at the paper in front of me and watched myself writing instead. He was going to kill me. In fact, he sounded like he was talking himself up to it.

‘Look at me.’

Despite myself, I did. Slowly and reluctantly, but I looked up at him.

‘You want to write all this fucking shit down,’ he said, pointing at me – me, this time – with the gun. ‘You didn’t bat an eyelid while your friend was killing a girl I loved. So you fucking pay attention, now, and you look at me. Okay?’

I remembered. I’d wanted to smile at her and tell her that it would be okay, but I’d known that it wouldn’t, and I hadn’t been there to make her feel comfortable or to help her. So instead, I’d just picked up my pen and, without taking my eyes off her, I’d begun to write.

I remembered exactly what had happened.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Yes. Anything’s okay. Absolutely anything.

Just please don’t kill me.

There was a pause, and then:

‘You pushed her away,’ he said. ‘You treated her badly. You weren’t there for her when she needed you. How could you not be, after she’d gone through something like that? All I could think of was that I would have been. I would have fucking… I would have fucking sat there with her. I would have talked to her. Held her. I would have had some respect for her. I mean, I would have acted like she had some… some kind of fucking value to me. But you couldn’t even do that.’

He looked down, gathering his thoughts. His voice was quieter when he started speaking again.

‘I asked her to leave you for me,’ he said. ‘And she told me no. She said she couldn’t. She loved you. She wanted it to work. She actually – and I could have killed you when she said this – but she actually thought that it was her fault. Can you believe that? She blamed herself for what happened. You made her blame herself. And she wanted to sort herself out and have you back, and because of that, she said no to me. Told me it was a mistake, and she was sorry to have done this to me, and even more sorry to have done it to you.’

He shook his head.

‘And I cried. I cried – of all things! I was so upset. And you know what she did?’ He looked up at me. Through me, at Jason. ‘She held me. She comforted me. After everything she’d been through she did that. That’s how special she was, and you weren’t even there for this girl. She went off to try to understand what happened to her, and she thought she was doing it for you, and she wasn’t at all. She was doing it because of you.’

For a second, the anger seemed to be gone, and he seemed almost deflated by the conclusion he’d come to. All I could see in his face was sadness. The anger was lost. But then I realised that, no, it wasn’t. It was just pacing in the background: working itself back and forth; taking an emotional run up for whatever was coming next.

‘I killed Marley,’ he said. ‘If you’re hearing this then you probably know that already.’

Fuck.

If he’d killed Marley then he was going to kill me too.

But there was something else in addition to that – something I couldn’t quite put my finger on but that felt as though, when I did, it would be the final nail in this whole, sorry coffin. My mind was circling it, threatening to alight: a hand chasing a feather of memory.

‘I killed him for her, not for you,’ he was saying. ‘I opened up the account I set up for you, and I saw the videos that were there. I didn’t know where they came from but I knew what they meant. She was dead. I guess I’d always known that she would be. I mean, even before I read that file I downloaded for you from Liberty. What else could she be?’

The file.

I glanced at the blank computer screen on the desk in front of us.

‘And you know,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t really read that file too well before that. I’d scanned it, but it was mostly gibberish: just the occasional word, maybe half a sentence or so. It was corrupted, so I hadn’t read that much of it. But I read it through. I don’t know why. Morbid curiosity, I guess.’

The text.

I closed my eyes.

‘Look at me,’ he said.

I shook my head.

Oh God.

‘Open your eyes.’

‘No.’

‘You remember what it said there, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You remember what she said.’

‘Yes,’ I told him. I opened my eyes, understanding perfectly. My mind had caught that feather. The final nail had gone in.

I was going to die, and it was probably the rightest thing in the world that I did.

‘I remember what she said.’

‘Sit down on the edge of the fucking bed.’

Marley dragged her back and shoved her down, and she started to cry. Sat there and held her face in her hands, sobbing. Marley didn’t care; he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. Long Tall Jack just laughed.

‘Please don’t do this,’ she said.

Jack was walking over to her, swinging his cock, as she stood up. There was an awful look on her face: a kind of desperately contrived hope. Something had very clearly occurred to her. She was stuck in this nightmare, yes, panicking, yes, but now she’d suddenly realised that it was actually all going to be okay. She’d remembered a key piece of information that she’d left out. How could she have been so stupid? All that she needed to do was explain, and then everything would be all right.

‘Please don’t do this,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

Jack kept coming, and the look on her face disappeared.

It began with a punch.

You know what I remember most? It’s the note she left for me on the kitchen table.

Jason, she’d written.

I love you very much and I don’t want you to blame yourself for this. This isn’t some kind of ‘dear John’ letter. I’m coming back again. There are some things I need to sort out. You know how it’s been between the two of us recently and it’s not fair on you. I need to deal with the issues I have, just like you said.

I should have dealt with them by now, 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.

There it is: my Amy.

So, even after everything that happened, she was still mine at that point. I’d been human enough to be not good enough for her, and she was still prepared to be mine. Maybe I should take comfort from that: she didn’t want Graham, and she felt bad about what had happened between them; and she loved me and wanted it to work between us. But I don’t take any comfort. It’s not about Graham. I don’t care about that; everybody makes mistakes. But there’s this: she told me in the letter that she needed to sort herself out for me, and she shouldn’t have thought that; there shouldn’t have been the need for her to think like that. And once upon a time there wouldn’t have been. So it was my fault, not hers.

I keep thinking about what she wrote.

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

And I think that she really needed to deal with them now because she’d found out she was pregnant and had suddenly been faced with all the responsibilities and uncertainties that go along with that. Amy had wanted to keep