The Third Person

And he was thinking – as they crossed the road, with her a little ahead of him, dragging him by the hand – and then she was just suddenly taken away. His right arm jolting, and he lurched: spun a little. The side of a truck flashed in front of him; a strong waft of air; a screech of tyres. Then, the truck was past, skidding to a halt, and he was left standing there, staring at the other side of the sunny street, his arm beginning to throb. The face of a woman standing beneath a green plastic canopy opposite slowly contorted into a scream of shock, and he blinked at her.

In his left hand, he was still holding his notebook. His right was empty.

They start to put the girl’s body into bin bags, and Long Tall Jack heads off for a shower. He’s coated with blood from his knees to his abdomen, and from his neck to his nose, so he really needs one. They’ll blast down the shower later. Of course, he’s worn gloves the whole time – they all have – but they’ll wipe the place for prints, as well.

He holds his right hand at the wrist and cracks it gently. Then, he flexes his fingers and thumb, working the cramp out of them. One of the crew pulls the girl off the bed by her arm, and her dead eye tracks the ceiling before the rest of her follows.

He looks away.

Marley will copy the text and then send it off. And it was good work today. Today, he just let himself fall into it and he’s still on a high. There’s something a little like joy fluttering in his heart, even though he’s also very sad. It is always like this, and he half hates it, half loves it.

He allowed himself to be washed along by the grief. He used it as a tool to lever himself into movement, the way a shoehorn slides your foot into the shoe and then you’re ready to go outside.

The day before the funeral, he packed. He took the bare minimum and squashed it down into as small a rucksack as he could find. He had his pen, and enough money to buy paper and food, and figured that he could always sell surprising snippets of writing to tourists and make a few dollars here and there if things got tight. What was more important was the overall picture. He was going into the desert to temper and forge his talent: to beat it into something he could feel the edges of, like hammering out the metal walls of a hut you’re going to spend the rest of your life sheltering inside. Everything else felt empty and small.

The last thing he did, before leaving for the funeral with the bag on his back, was address the package to Jim Thornton. He wasn’t even sure why he did it – only that it seemed to give a sense of closure to a period of his life. ‘Here,’ he was saying, ‘this is what I think of you and your fiction; this is what I think of you and your attitude; this is what I think about you and my life.’

I can do something a hundred times bigger than you.

The package contained a description of heartbreak so pure that it would reach off the page and turn a man inside out: destroy him; ruin him. A thousand fashionable romance novels, with all their relationship difficulties and tragedies, would be like a matchstick to the sun beside this text. It was possible that you’d read it and never be able to set pen to paper ever again. It would always be on your mind.

After Kay had been knocked down and killed, he’d sat down at a table by the cafe, and he’d written a description of what he’d seen and how it had felt. What it had been like to have the best part of you – the only thing which seemed to give you meaning – ripped away in a moment of carelessness.

He posted the two sheets of grief on his way to the funeral. After that, he went to the bus station.

Over the next few years, he saw the world and set it in paper. He wrote down a sunset in every place he visited, and a sunrise in all but one – Verona, of all places, where he and some friends were rousted from their digs in the middle of the night by an army of carabinieri, raiding the hideout for imported tobacco and liquor. He wrote a short description of the waves from the cabin of a Russian steamship, with an icy breeze all around him and vapour rising off the bright, white sheets of half-frozen sea. The cold followed him onto the page. There were three hours spent tracking a street market in Jerusalem, all cloth and pots and graffitied sandstone, and men with guns: really not half as religious as he’d been led to believe. And more besides. So much time spent scribbling and dreaming: a madhouse in Dhaka; an illegal distillery in a desert hut in Saudi Arabia; the early morning mist in the streets of the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where he captured the drizzle on Balzac’s tomb.