The Third Person

In fact, she’s close to tears, but it’s as though she doesn’t quite dare cry: maybe she has done in the past and then been punished for it. She doesn’t need to anyway: it’s there in her stance and in the expression on her face. She’s hugging herself slightly, anticipating some kind of blow. And she’s looking at you as though you might be able to stop it from coming.

It breaks your heart that you can’t do anything to help her, but the fact is that you just can’t. That’s not why you’re here.

She mouths the word help at you, and you have to look away.

‘On the bed.’

Marley has her by the arm.

She actually says it to you this time. ‘Help me. Please.’

‘ Sit down on the edge of the fucking bed.’

He drags her back and shoves her down, and she starts to cry. Sits there and holds her face in her hands, sobbing. Marley doesn’t care; he’s not even looking at her anymore. Long Tall Jack just laughs.

‘Are you ready?’ Marley calls over.

You nod.

Of course you are – this is what you’re here for.

His grandmother gave him the Ithaca pen. It was a present for his twelfth birthday, which was a little after he’d found out about his gift and talked it through with her. He always knew he could write well, but as he hit puberty his talent grew into something else altogether, and it scared him. Sometimes the things he’d write scared other people as well. When his grandmother was ill, towards the end, he went down to the beach and wrote a piece that she could barely even finish; she said it was just like being there, in the dunes where she’d played as a child. As real as a video or an audio recording. Maybe even as real as it actually happening. And while the scene he described for her was deliberately beautiful, he always knew the potential for harm was there, even before she warned him that he had to be careful.

So his grandmother gave him the pen and told him to practise. By the time she died – when he was fourteen – he had his gift on a leash. She’d moved into his parents’ home some time before that – when the doctors realised there was nothing more they could do – and one night she called him in, just like they’d always planned. He sat writing with her for the next four hours, and by the time she finally died, his hand had cramped. He never told anyone that he’d been with her at the end, and he still has that notebook, stored away somewhere that nobody will ever find it. He takes it out and reads it sometimes, although his words are generally lost on him. Regardless of that, it’s a first edition he keeps for himself.

And he kept his talent to himself, as well. He wasn’t sure why exactly, but he sensed it was for the best. The parade of harried teachers never knew; he turned in bland, uninspired fiction during all the Tests, making sure he was never streamed off to the Factory. His plan was non-existent, but he had the distinct impression that the Factory would seek to kill whatever it was he had inside him.

They finally cornered him when he was sixteen: caught red-handed, passing a note he’d written to a girl on the table across from him. Her name was Kay, and he was very much in love with her. The note had no warning, but it contained explicit content. He hadn’t written it while he was making love to her, but he’d done it from memory almost immediately afterwards: it was certainly good enough to have made her come in the middle of History. But in fact – history records – that particular pleasure went to Mr Cremin, who intercepted the note, confiscated it, and then wished that he hadn’t. The boy’s locker was raided, his parents were called in and serious discussions were entered into regarding his future.

And that was that. Within a week, he’d been transferred to the Factory. He remembered the principal talking to him on the day before he left, adding emphasis with his hands:

‘You’ve got talent, boy – raw ability. Nobody I’ve ever met can describe things like you. And now all you need is discipline and focus.’

But as far as the boy was concerned, he had discipline – and he had focus, too. He’d kept up his practice. Sometimes he’d write for three or four hours a night, taking his pad and pen up into the woods, or catching these puff-a-billy trams out into the countryside with Kay. One weekend, he broke into the stairwell of a block of flats and managed to get onto the roof: thirty storeys above the street – just him and the pigeons, and the tv aerials humming away. He spent ten straight hours writing up there. He knew what he was doing. He was testing his gift and searching for limits, for a direction that was right for him. Of course, what the principal meant was that he needed their direction and their focus. He needed to learn things like plot and character, so that he could make some money.

It was destined to end in tears.

‘Jim knew the boy was special to begin with,’ Steph said, grinding out the end of her cigarette, blowing the last of the smoke out from the corner of her mouth.