The Third Person

There, I spread the pictures out, filtering away the irrelevant ones and putting the ones I liked best out on the pillows, the top of the duvet. I covered the bed in them. Shots of us on holiday. Shots of us at New Year’s. Just tens of photographs. Graduation. Engagement. Pictures taken in bars, of long, cheering tables we were at; you had to pick us out, and even then it barely looked like us. I was crying the whole time, touching her face as I let them fall. One. Ten. Thirty. I remembered all of them. Ask me for fifty different occasions when Amy had smiled at me and I’d be stuck by double figures, but I remembered each of these clearly. They were obvious examples. Only God knows all of the times she smiled when I forgot to take a photograph.

When the bed was covered, I lay down on it. Everything shifted and slid, but that was okay. First one elbow, then onto my back. I still had the gun, and – when I was settled – I put the barrel into my mouth, tasting the salt and grease and oily tang of it. The ceiling was not as interesting as I would have liked. Looking down from it, surrounded by these photographs, I imagined I looked pretty good, at least symbolically, but looking up I felt very little at all.

At this angle, the top of my head would be blown out all over the wall at the head of the bed. That seemed to be the general angle. I didn’t know about the gases from the barrel. Maybe they would blow my cheeks apart, scorch my throat, burn my lips. Perhaps the barrel would become hot from the bullet and, even as my head went out on the wall, my mouth would be burned and hollowed and blistered. Nothing is ever as clean as in the movies.

Goodbye Amy, I thought, and pulled the trigger.

EPILOGUE

Things are better now. Not perfect by any means, but better. It’s four months on, and there’s a strange kind of poetry to that: it was four months after Amy disappeared when I found her, and now, four months later, I’m beginning to find my feet. I have a new job. It’s nothing special – just grunt work at the moment – but it keeps me busy and keeps me sane and, most importantly of all, it doesn’t involve fucking people over – or at least not directly – and so despite the grease and dirt I get to have an illusion of my hands being clean.

Every night I go home to the house that Amy and I used to share. I’ll be selling it soon and moving somewhere different: not a nicer place or a worse one, just different. I’m okay where I am, but I made the suggestion to Charlie and she seemed to think it was a good idea. She notices how I am much more than I do. I have good days and bad days, just like everybody, and I think it helps that I got a lot of my grieving out of the way a long time ago. There’s still the guilt to deal with, but I’m as resilient as the next person and, when I need to, I can lock all that shit away and pretend it’s not there.

Oh yeah – Charlie.

Well, she’s here some of the time. We’re still just friends, but neither of us is with anyone else and it seems likely that we’ll get together at some point. There’s a closeness between us, and it increases every day. She’s one of those types of people: the kind who seem to have infinite patience. I’m in awe of her in so many ways. She deserves better, of course; I’m still very much aware of that. But I’m also determined to change it. One day, if I work at it hard enough, maybe it won’t be true anymore. Perhaps she’ll deserve me. Stranger things have happened.

And the gun?

Well, I still have it. Sometimes I take it out of the drawer in the bedroom and look at it. I run my hands over it and imagine what it would be like to load it with bullets and shoot myself. I’d fired it precisely twice. The first had killed Walter Hughes’ bodyguard: an accident. The second, more deliberate, had killed Hughes himself. And then, four months ago, I’d fired it into the top of my mouth, expecting to die. That had been incredibly deliberate. But there were no bullets left. The gun was empty. It had gone click click click click.

I’d rested there, wanting to kill myself and yet totally unable. It felt like insult added to fucking injury, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end, I laughed.

Eventually, the curtains lightened and the shadows in the room began to fade out. Birds started singing outside. At some point I fell asleep. When I woke up it was afternoon, and the photographs were scattered everywhere and there was blood from my face all over the pillows and the top of the sheets. I’d tried to kill myself – I really had – but the bruised side of my head was throbbing too much for me to be anything other than woefully alive. I’d even fucked up my own suicide, and now I was going to have to pay the price: the day ahead.