The Third Person

I made the coffee and toast and sat down to eat, but this morning I wasn’t thinking about Amy; I was thinking about Claire, and the phone call she’d made to me. Schio. I remembered it, of course. How could you forget a phone call in the evening from someone like that?

I finished off my toast, licked melted butter from the tips of my fingers and thought about it. Maybe she’d got the right number after all – I’d remembered the word, hadn’t I? And something had happened to her. Since it stretched credulity a little far to imagine that she’d rung me up in a moment of existential anguish, that left only one option: she’d trusted me with something, and I didn’t know what it was.

And…

And my fucking computer was smashed.

The kitchen suddenly seemed more real around me, and an awkward truth settled in: I already had one woman to worry about. I already had a woman to care for, search for and be responsible for and to, and the last thing I needed right now was another. Especially Claire. I mean, one unwanted phone call in the night from her, and here I was: cheating on Amy again.

I wanted to slap myself in the face.

Instead, I took my plate and knife over to the sink, where they could wait with all their friends until I was ready to attempt a wash. Then I took my coffee upstairs and began to gather together today’s selection of clothes from the more promising heaps on the bedroom floor.

It had stopped raining, but only just. Everything was freshly wet. The road looked like it was made from jet-black rubber, and the cars shining along it seemed bright and newly washed. People’s hair was in sodden tufts of disarray, and the sky was a blue-grey watercolour smear: misty and full of cloud, as though it might boil back into a rainstorm at any moment and soak us all again.

My trainers squeaked on the pavement as I walked, heading into the centre of Bracken. As you went from the suburbs to the centre, there was quite a transformation. The gentle noise – laughter; promotional jingles from the increasingly prevalent adBoards – grew louder and gradually more irritating as suburban streets segued into more industrial avenues. Houses became shops, and the shops became taller, until finally they morphed into these enormous, glass-fronted office blocks – the tenets of evolutionary capitalism. Within twenty minutes, I was truly among giants.

Actually, I didn’t know how Graham could bring himself to live this far into the centre, where everything was way too big, noisy and busy for me. The one thing I supposed he had going for him was that he lived quite far up, in one of the more prestigious apartment blocks, slightly west of dead centre. It was the kind of place where, if you opened the window, you were more likely to hear helicopters than cars, and they generally didn’t bother with adBoards that high up – most of the people who lived there invented either the campaigns or the products, and they wouldn’t want to take their work home with them. Can you imagine a twenty-four hour jingle? You’d go insane. Well, city centre life had never appealed to me anyway, but I figured I was in the minority. If they had money, it was where people naturally gravitated to: the best bars; the best theatres; the best restaurants. I mean, in some parts of the suburbs, city centre life was actively advertised, to keep you in line – keep you pointing in the right direction.

Graham had money, all right, and he was one of those vaguely unfocused people who, lacking any impetus of their own, tended to go with the crowd by default, and so it was natural he’d end up there eventually. But I looked at him sometimes, and I’d see this slight look of confusion on his face, as though he was nervous about going the whole hog and actually embracing the emotion he was feeling for what it really was: dissatisfaction. It’s a word you can hiss, and you should feel free to try. In their heart-of-hearts, everybody knows that the life-path is just another branded commodity these days, and that fact can bite you from time to time – when you’re looking around and thinking what’s next? But everything you’ve been taught is telling you that there is nothing next: that you’ve hit the peak and now all you have left to do is balance.

A sad fact: nothing ever looks as good on you as it does in the catalogue. For a pound, you don’t get the juicy steak that’s beaming out of the adBoard at you like some kind of meaty ambrosia. You get a flat fucking burger in a miserable fucking bun. In life, as in fast-food chains.