The Third Person

He explored, and what he found was this: no relief whatsoever. His unhappiness trailed along three steps behind him, and no matter where he went and how much he wrote, it never went away. He collected reams of paper filled, line after line, with beautiful sentences, all of which meant absolutely nothing to him. But he kept pushing his gift to its limits; himself against the world; his pen across paper.

Until finally… well, he ended up here.

There’s a whole writing industry that you won’t find in the bookshops. If you mentioned it in the corridors of the Factory, they’d turn up their noses at you. And they don’t even know the half of it. Go to your local fast-food bookstore and look: you won’t find it. Maybe if it’s a big store you’ll find medium hardcore – sex and horror – but sometimes not even that, because they like to pretend that no-one’s interested. But they are, and if you’re one of the ones whose tastes run to the extreme then you have to go looking. In the independent and second-hand bookstores you can find the beginning of it: the sex books; the kill books. But you know that none of it’s real: just cheap fiction, hacked out in stained motel rooms in the company of cigarettes and neon and bad Spanish radio. If you want it real, you have to look harder than that.

That’s where he started: on these fringes. Churning out fake dross for a handful of change. He wrote the porn and the violence, and if you want to look you’ll find his name – his real name – against a couple of legit titles: one hundred print run; staple-bound. Extreme stuff, but he faked it. You’ll have to look, but they’re there.

But all the time he was doing this, she was still with him, and it wasn’t long before he went deeper still. Testing himself all the time: finding more and more extreme things to write about; looking for edges in his talent to rest against and find some peace, but finding none: day after day.

Now, he was so deep in the industry that you’d probably never find his stuff. It was the real deal these days: each and every word was true. They sold it in shifting markets, sealed in polythene, and behind locked, guarded doors in dark halls, where strangers shuffled from stall to stall, and even in these places you had to search it out, listen for whispers. A stallholder’s friend would be able to provide you with kiddie fiction, say, or rape text, but if you wanted his stuff then you had to go to the stallholder’s friend’s friend, and you had to keep your mouth shut and know when to back off. Because these days, his writing was so far buried that only the truly fallen ever even caught a glimpse of it.

And it was there – as low as you could get – that he began to see a way out.

He closes the front door and flicks on a light. Rain slashes against the window, with an echoing ping as water drips down into the ceramic pot in the bathroom. There’s a towel warming over the radiator in the hall and he uses it to dry his hair. The dripping coat goes on a hanger. He takes the pen through to the front room, along with the towel, kicking off his shoes first and leaving them by the door.

His flat is pretty sparse: a settee and two armchairs, all drawn from different suites, and a folding table by the window, with a flimsy chair underneath it. There’s a pile of blank notepads on the right of the desk. Often, he’ll just sit and stare out of the window and write. He’s ten storeys up, on the top floor, and people on the street below seem so small that their movements are like patterns. He can write about them for hours. Maybe you’re in there somewhere – who knows?

Apart from that, the flat is pretty bare. He has no television, no radio. No paintings on the wall. There is a computer he uses for e-mail, and he has a set of weights over in the far corner, but he hardly ever uses either of them and so they don’t really count. His kitchen is minimal. The only things he does have are books. He has four full bookcases, containing a mixture of his own journals and notepads, and published works by other authors. These books are the accoutrements of his life: his paintings; his pot-plants; his wife and child; the family car; the dog; the cat. They are the things meant to define his life and fill it, and – just like everyone else’s – they are simply not enough.

Because he doesn’t have her anymore.

All he has is this terrible feeling of emptiness which tells him that the best part of his life is over. And it’s joined now, as always, by the feeling of revulsion at what he’s done tonight.

He gets a glass of water from the kitchen, and then places the pen down on the table. Selects a notepad at random from the shelves. There are plain brown envelopes in a drawer beneath the desk, and he pulls one out.