The Third Person

I’d been friends with Graham since we were little kids; our families lived next door to each other and we got on from day one – peas in a pod, and all that. Except he was always more brilliant than me academically, while I outshone him socially. When I was already happily esconced with Amy, he’d never even had a girlfriend. What about Helen? Amy asked me one day. Helen was a childhood friend of Amy’s, but the revolutions of our social circles were such that Graham and Helen had yet to actually meet. What do you think about them as a couple? I thought it sounded cool. I wanted Graham to be happy: he’d been growing increasingly insecure and introspective as time went by, and it was starting to worry me. Helen seemed nice. Is nice, really, in her own way.

So we introduced them and encouraged them.

Madness.

On the one side, Graham: a genuinely nice, shy guy who – despite his notable success in several key areas of life – had begun to feel like an abject failure because he didn’t meet the marketed standard of shagging hundreds of women and having relationships which, the movies had assured him, would provide him with that all-important reason to live. On the other side, Helen. She was desperate for a relationship in much the same way, but her subconscious feelings of inadequacy – so well-covered by those false smiles and that cheery disposition – were bubbling up, convincing her that she would never get one.

The way I saw it was this: when you’re falling through the air, you don’t pick and choose your handholds; you grab onto the first branch you can get your fucking hands on, and you cling to it with grim determination. And they were both falling. Putting them together was only ever going to end one way: in a kind of awful, successful failure.

‘Hi, Jason.’

Helen peered around the edge of the door like an anxious child, giving me a big smile. She was one of those people who had to say everything with a laugh and a joke. The subtext every time she opened her mouth was always the same: things are spiralling out of control, she was saying, but you have to laugh, don’t you?

‘Come on in.’

‘Cheers.’ I wandered into the hall. ‘How are you doing?’ Being quite small, Helen was also quite weak, and she had to push the door quite hard to get it closed. The effort was there in her voice:

‘Oh – just pottering. You know.’

She laughed.

‘Gray in?’ I said.

‘Through in the study.’ She raised her eyebrows by flicking her head back: a Helen tut. ‘Working. As usual.’

‘Keeping you in the manner to which you’ve become accustomed,’ I said, smiling. It was half a joke, with neither half being particularly funny, but she laughed anyway.

‘Well, yes.’ The arms went out in a shrug. What can I do?

I gestured with my thumb. ‘I’ll just go on through?’

‘Sure, go on. He’s expecting you. Coffee?’

‘That’d be great, yeah.’

I meant it, too. Look – don’t get me wrong about this. As a friend, I didn’t dislike Helen. In fact, in a lot of ways she was lovely: anybody who offers you coffee as a matter of course is okay by me, and – in general – she was personable enough. I just didn’t think she was right for Graham. Nobody thought that, even, I suspect, Helen and Graham, and – coffee and smiles aside – that’s a pretty fucking significant detail. You can have a relationship with anyone, after all, but despite what the books and the movies might tell you, a relationship is not, in itself, what you need. What you need is to add some qualifiers. ‘ Good ’, in the middle of that phrase, for one. And while we’re on the subject, ‘ that you really want ’ at the end is also an idea.

I made my way through to the study, where heavy industrial music was grinding away quietly in the background. In the kitchen, Helen would be listening to glitzy, gloss-sheen pop – slightly despairingly. On the cupboard above the kettle there was an a4 sheet listing the names of friends and how each friend liked their tea and coffee. By my name, it would say white, two sugars, black, no sugar. She’d run her finger over it and tap. Ah ha.

Whereas I’d known Graham for years, but he still had to ask me – and I don’t know why that’s better but for some reason it is. Maybe I’m just suspicious that if you concern yourself too much with little details, there’s no mental space left for the more important stuff.

He leaned back in his chair as I entered the study, putting his big hands behind his head, yawning and stretching. Then, he gave me a smile.

‘Hi mate. How are you doing?’

‘I’m okay, yeah,’ I said, wandering over and taking a seat beside him. In front of him, his computer was chugging through what was, no doubt, another mindless search. ‘How’s tricks?’

‘Ticking over.’

‘You’re busy?’

‘I’m always busy. Is Helen making you a cup of coffee?’

‘I think so, yeah.’

‘Nice to know the bitch is good for something.’ He closed two search windows down with a click of the mouse, and then set another three tumbling. ‘She’s been doing my head in this morning. All morning.’

Every morning.