The Third Person

My abruptness seemed to surprise him almost as much as it did me. God only knew where it had come from but – now it was here – I tried the feeling on and found that it felt good. All of it – Amy, me, Wilkinson, Claire – was like a dark room inside me, and anger felt like a small but vital light. One I could burn myself with and enjoy the heat.

‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘I’ve been through the fucking mill this evening, and I’m not in the best of moods.’

The man studied me for a few seconds, as though trying to decide if I might be edible and, if so, whether I could be fed to his dog. Then, he leaned forwards. His eyes were very white in the brown skin of his face; their centres, a perfect sea-blue. The kind of colour you have to have surgery to get.

He said, ‘I want to talk to you about Claire.’

Okay, let me tell you about Claire: about the truth behind the jpeg, as far as I know it. And I don’t know much. There are a few average, everyday statistics which we can dispose of first. She was twenty-one, when I met her. She had curly brown hair, hanging as far down as the tops of her arms; blue-grey eyes, fair skin and a few freckles. A slim figure, but not especially attention-grabbing. The sexiness with which she carried herself – and she was sexy – came from something much deeper than looks, and perhaps also a step sideways from personality. But, whatever it was, you saw her and you just couldn’t look away again. You chatted to her – let her dance with you – and there was no signing off.

After our first conversation, I felt bad. The argument I’d had with Amy was a few hours old by then, and orgasm has a way of removing urgency and replacing it with guilt. I went straight to bed, and fell asleep facing Amy’s back, with my arm around her, hand cupping her stomach, my face in her hair. My last thought was that was a mistake, but what I figured was that I could just put it behind me and not do anything so stupid again, despite having taken Claire’s e-mail address and promising that I’d write. And of course, I did write. The next time the clouds came over, it seemed less like a mistake and more like a good idea. To mail her again; to chat again; to do what we did.

We carried on like that for a couple of months. I’d send her e-mails from work, and we’d get together on-line in the evenings from time to time, when I stayed up late. She sent me a picture of herself. Every time we met, I felt bad afterwards, but not that bad – and less bad on each occasion. I think you can fall into step with the bad things you do: the dance seems mad and impossible at first, and then you get swept away and realise the moves are a lot easier than you thought. You begin to invent motivations and excuses, and then start to believe them.

I learnt a bit more about Claire. Her parents died when she was little, and she was raised by her aunt, who instilled in her this incredible love of life and rejection of the mainstream and the ordinary. She had a hedonistic youth, and had grown into a young woman who adored sex and everything to do with it. She was the most physical person I’d ever encountered: I could close my eyes and imagine her dancing to work, flirting with strangers on the way, doing whatever she wanted. She had freedom written in her DNA. The instructions that had built her body and soul were coded in her genes: make something wonderful, they said; make something that will sweep through other people’s lives and remind them what colour is and what it’s like to be alive. And when the clouds gathered at home, I came back to her, because it felt like I needed to know.

Every day, I trudged into work, and then trudged home. Amy was there in the mornings, and there in the evenings. Sometimes it was okay; sometimes it was great. A lot of the time, though, it was plain old bad. And Claire symbolised something more positive for me. When you’re young, you think you can do whatever you want with your life, and your parents lie to you and tell you that it’s true, but then you grow up and realise that you have to be like everybody else – or at least that you’re going to be, whether you like it or not. You’re not going to be that astronaut they always told you you could be. And you slide into the groove, and that’s that. Claire struck me as being someone who’d never done that, and never would.

I’ll be wearing a white dress, she told me, on the day before that one time.

What time does your train get in?

‘I have friends in i-Mart,’ the man told me. ‘After speaking with them, they gave me the impression you might be able to help me. That you might be able to tell me about Claire.’

‘What about her?’ I asked.

Thinking: what on earth is this about?

‘About what happened to her.’

‘Anything I knew, I would have told the police.’

He looked at me, and I felt press-ganged into carrying on.

‘I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t understand what you’re asking me.’

He said, ‘You met her.’

‘No.’

He ignored me.