The Third Person

My grandmother was a religious woman and she always used to say that we were put on this Earth to do the best that we could. To make it a better place. I don’t know about that; I’m more material than she was, and less confident that anything has any real value at all. I think that it’s all just words on a page that nobody’s actually reading. But what it seems to me is this: while we’re here, what we try to do is star in as many stories as possible. That’s what being important and influential really means. It’s nothing more than binding yourself into as many narratives as possible, in as many people’s minds. And when you die, all it means is that your stories are over: you’re finished with writing them, and now it’s just a matter of whether anybody reads them and remembers you.

When I woke up, the hotel room was dark and I felt disorientated. Something was wrong. It wasn’t the light: I remembered turning it out, half-asleep, when it became obvious I was dozing off. And it wasn’t the dream I was having either, which had been cut short. It was the door.

A creak of floorboards.

Fuck – the door was open.

I swung myself upright and pulled the gun up from the side of my leg. A figure, which had been creeping into the room from the bright hallway beyond, stopped moving immediately, and then moved its hands up slowly.

I clicked off the safety catch and said:

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘Easy.’ It was the guy from the counter downstairs. ‘Don’t shoot.’

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I said again.

The silhouette shrugged.

‘I heard a gunshot. It sounded like it came from in here.’

I frowned to myself in the dark. From what I could remember I’d been dreaming about gunfire – I remembered loud shots and bright lights. I’d been in a front room, watching a television.

‘I knocked, but there was no answer.’ He shrugged again, sounding more confident now. Obviously deciding that I wasn’t going to shoot him, he turned away and moved back into the doorway.

‘Got to look out for myself.’

‘Right,’ I said, as he closed the door.

The darkness felt uncomfortable, so I switched on the light and rubbed the bad dream from my eyes. The memory of it was fading, and I couldn’t remember too much of what had happened in it. But I knew that, just before I’d jerked awake, I’d been a young boy, sitting in an armchair in a dark front room. I was watching a pale blue television, which was flashing and banging away in the corner, but I didn’t like what I was seeing at all: it was pictures and sounds of people being hurt by somebody. I knew that there were other people in the room who were watching me for my reaction, and so I wasn’t allowed to look away from the screen. These other people were just vague, dark shapes in the other chairs; I couldn’t make them out, or even tell which one was speaking to me. But I remember asking:

‘Why is he doing that?’

One of them said, ‘Because if he didn’t, there wouldn’t be a story.’

I found it too frustrating. ‘That’s a stupid answer.’

The same voice: ‘It’s the only reason anyone does anything.’

And then the guy from downstairs had disturbed me.

I didn’t want to go back to sleep, so I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, feeling sick. Whenever Amy used to wake me up in the night with one of her bad dreams, it felt like this: a kind of awful, sleepy nausea. It always passed, but never quickly. Now, as I waited to feel better, I saw that there was a screwed up ball of paper on the floor in front of me. I put down the gun and picked it up, unfolding it carefully.

Thirty names. Thirty addresses.

I put the paper down on top of the gun and held my head in my hands.

Five minutes later, I went down to the shared bathroom at the far end of the hall, with the gun tucked into my trousers. The whole room seemed strangely sterile: walls of white porcelain; garish lights overhead; and water everywhere – hanging in clean beads on the wall tiles and mixed into muddy footprints on the floor. I ran some into a sink the width and depth of a small well and splashed my face a few times, and then leaned on the edge, inspecting myself in the mirror.

I looked normal: a little tired and rough around the edges, but still me. My standard face. Neither good nor bad looking, neither smiling nor frowning – just weathered and slightly beaten, but not as much as I’d expected. I was my normal tune, played in a minor key. Water dripped down my cheeks and I saw my eyes watching it. Looked back up, only to catch them doing the same.

Thirty names.

The choice was made easier by the fact that I didn’t actually want to kill myself tonight. It felt too soon, somehow. I had a deep, aching pain inside me whenever I thought about Amy, but at the same time I felt like if I died tonight I would have missed something. There was also the small matter of cowardice; I’d be able to do it, I thought, but it would probably be easier if I surprised myself.

So, the choice was made: I wasn’t going to kill myself here in this shithole.