The Third Person

Our second aim is the rescue and rehoming of unwanted texts. Every scrap of used language is alive. We are aware that it is impossible to save them all. Even the most committed animal rights activist tramples down blades of grass and kills bacteria by treating disease or wiping down a surface with a sterilised dish-cloth. We can only do what we can. Not every bus ticket can be saved; not every discarded shopping list, scrunched into a ball. But here at the Society’s centre, our motto is this: we turn away nothing. We run a collection service in several major cities, ready to pick up used and unwanted texts. These units of volunteers will then pass the texts to a compilation team, who will enter their genetic code into the Society’s databanks, where it will be allowed to exist alongside other texts for as long as the Society continues. That way, the genes – at least – of these creatures will be preserved.

Please do not throw away your used texts.

We are only a telephone call away.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A surreal truth: as my consciousness was gradually solidifying, the fractured image inside – hanging in my head like a blurred poster – was the passport photograph of John James Dennison.

He just didn’t look like that anymore.

His hair had been cut – short and neat – and he looked tanned and fit. Maybe seaside living had worked a wonder on him. I recognised him from the eyes, which still seemed to protrude a little, but they were about all that remained of the sallow, ugly, long-haired individual that had posed for that passport photo. He also looked considerably older, and slightly more calm.

I blinked, and it hurt.

‘It’s relatively easy to set up a simple circuit through a metal door knocker,’ he told me, nodding to himself as he crunched into the final third of the apple he was holding. The rest of the words were obscured by his wet chewing, but I could just about make them out.

‘Rapping the knocker completes the circuit. You see? You just wait for the person to lift the knocker away from the metal plate on the door and then switch on the juice.’ He swallowed. ‘Bang.’

I just stared at him.

‘Little switch on the back of the door, see?’

Well, I couldn’t see, because we were in the living room and the front door was at the end of the hallway outside. Obviously stronger than he looked, Dennison had man-handled me through from where I’d fallen down in the street outside. The back of my head seemed to have taken a fair whack on the ground: it was still pounding, and I felt sick. My right arm was half-numb, too, resting limply over my thigh. It didn’t even feel like an arm at the moment – more like somebody had stitched a sock full of rocks onto my shoulder.

The room we were in contained a table and chair, two settees, the pair of us (one of us on each settee, facing each other), and a whole lot of paper. Most of the paper was tethered in bundles against the base of the walls, but in places he’d piled it up to waist height. There was more on and under the table, which was in a curtained bay window at the far end of the room. The sheets on the table seemed more spread out, as though that was where he read things before cataloguing and binding them. And there was a ball of twine on the floor by the chair, so that made sense.

I looked around. More paper.

Paper as far as the eye could see.

When I was growing up, there was an old lady living in the same street. Her house was owned by the council. She was kind of mad – in that harmless, slightly smelly way that some old people manage – but I always got on with her okay, and my mother went round there quite a bit, dragging me along to see if there was anything I could do: shopping, maybe, or odd jobs. What I remember about that old lady, whose name was Bunty, is that she had cats: cats by the armful. Probably twenty or so regulars – all strays – and she knew each of them by name. There were too many for her, of course, and that was why the council came and took them away; she couldn’t clean up after them or feed them properly, and I only had so much spare time for my mother to give away. It used to half kill Bunty every time the men came, and my mother would say that, although they had to, it was a shame – for the cats and for Bunty. I think that was one of my first encounters with the idea that there isn’t always something that’s entirely for the best. There’s only ever a compromise between a bunch of different interests.

Regardless, what I remember is the cats. Cats in the living room; cats in the hallways; cats crawling all over the fucking furniture. And that was what Dennison’s front room reminded me of, except that he had paper instead of cats. They were resting the same, dotted around the same – they even smelled the same: pungent; slightly dirty. The place was like nothing so much as a rescue shelter. Which, I suppose, is what it was.