The Third Person

‘That’s right. I like walking.’ Which was true, especially at night when there was nobody around. ‘And I hate your fucking in-car music.’

‘But it’s pouring down.’

‘Then, I’ll get wet.’

He slapped the table gently.

‘Okay, then. I guess that’s okay. We’re done, here, anyway.’

Wilkinson showed me back to the main entrance. Outside, in the amber glow around the nearest floodlight, I could see the rain spitting through: invisible beforehand, up in the night, and then invisible afterwards, as it smacked into the pavement. When he opened the door, the cold hit me like a splash of sea-water: refreshing but slightly cruel. It was a bad night.

As he opened the door, Wilkinson was wincing. Briefly, I wondered what he would be like if someone ever shot him, or something.

‘Take care, now.’

And then he said something which made me realise that this wasn’t over yet – that we weren’t done here, at all. My private world, which I’d cultivated and focused, was no longer mine alone; my isolation was an illusion. Society had come knocking.

He said, ‘We’ll be in touch.’

CHAPTER THREE

I was drenched by the time I reached the end of the car park, never mind my house, but I find that there’s a certain level of rain that takes away worry. You get as soaked as it’s possible to be and think: fuck it. It had always struck me as a pretty good motto for life in general, and it had served me… not well, exactly, but at least I’d never been disappointed. And so that’s what I said to myself as I reached the edge of the freeway and turned down the footpath beside it. Fuck it. I was soaked already, and anything that didn’t include me slipping and falling on my ass in the mud could only be considered a bonus.

The footpath followed the canal, which snaked under the freeway and fed back into the city centre, skirting within a few hundred metres of my house along the way. The actual water was stagnant and old. Ten years ago, when I’d been a boy, I remembered riding my bike along the footpath, the gravel crackling beneath my tyres and disturbing all the fishermen who were waiting patiently, like tents, on the banks. Nobody fished here now, though; and the only bikes that came along the footpath were motorbikes on an evening. It was a desolate, sad little route, made all the more so by the city in the distance, like an enormous cybernetic limb where one old vein still remained, unbeating and unused. Soon, they’d concrete it in and build over it. Or maybe just above it, instead, leaving it to solidify beneath: mythic and forgotten.

That night, as always, there were a few shapes beneath the pillars of the freeway, sheltering. A dozen ghosts of Tom Joad, slumped around fires flickering in gigantic, rusted drums, casting hunched shadows over graffiti and fractured rock. The skin of the concrete was coming away in places, like the wallpaper in an abandoned house, revealing layers of older graffiti underneath. Beneath the surface of the city, like so many of the people who lived and worked there, everything was shabby and untended. After the comfort of the police station, it felt like coming home – but maybe that was just wishful thinking. Everybody likes to feel like an outsider at heart, and you can feel that way pretty fucking easily walking along under a road-bridge, but it’s an illusion. They can still hook you up whenever they want to, and then drop you back when they’re done. You’re still their fish, in their pond. It’s all a matter of social physics.

It was a twenty minute walk back along the canal, but I did it in forty. I was thinking about a lot of things – although not in any focused way: rather, I was letting my emotions and feelings wash over me, wave after wave. Sometimes, it’s difficult to separate out the threads that have led to you feeling a certain way, and all you can do is wallow in it: the same way that you can often only taste the end meal, never the individual ingredients. So that’s what I did now, and my life tasted black to me: as ruined and tatty as the underside of the freeway; and as dankly unpleasant as the water beside me. A while ago, there was Claire, and the fact of my affair with her soured my search for Amy, which I’d pretty much dedicated my life to ever since she went missing. That was four months ago.

I’ve always been big on the grand, meaningless gesture, and so at one point I stopped on the edge of the canal and took everything in like a deep breath. The flecked, golden M of the moon’s reflection in the water, spotted and shattered by rainfall. The glow at the horizon, and the black, starless expanse of the city to one side, and then Uptown above it. The slight rush of air. The sound of the rain on the water, and on the path, and on me. And I whispered I love you, Amy so quietly that I hardly said it at all.