The Third Person by Steve Mosby Page B

through.
    ‘Thanks for this,’ Charlie said, touching the neck of her bottle with delicate fingers. ‘My father would never approve. He’s a real-ale man.’
    ‘Is that right?’ I was looking around.
    ‘Uh-huh.’ She took a swig, and the liquid chinked. ‘He brews his own. Does wines and things, too. There’re demijohns in our attic that have been around longer than me.’
    I smiled. Took a sip of my own beer.
    Awkward silence.
    It was dark and subdued inside the Bridge: everything and everybody was silhouetted by the bright white light of the day outside. Even the slot machines seemed muted, as though wary of making too much noise this early on. Blue smoke was spiralling up from ashtrays. You could actually see the air in here: like mist the colour of gun-metal. A television in the corner was showing horse-racing, but the sound had been turned down until the commentary was nothing but a low murmur. Everybody was watching brown animals pounding soundlessly over green grass.
    ‘So,’ Charlie said after a moment. ‘How are you doing?’
    ‘I’m doing okay.’ I nodded. ‘I’m not doing too badly.’
    I looked at her, darkened by the window behind her. She looked different, I realised.
    She’d cut her hair since the last time I saw her.
    ‘You haven’t been in recently,’ she said.
    Or she had make-up on. Maybe that was it.
    ‘No.’
    I was actually thinking that I’d just killed a man. An undertone of thought that rested below all the others. It was almost unreal.
    I’d just killed a man.
    She said, ‘It must have been a few weeks by now.’
    Perhaps I should just get drunk, I thought.
    ‘It’s been a month and a half,’ I said, picking up my glass.
    A month and a half of paid unwork. I’d received my payslip for the end of March and was half-anticipating one for the end of April. After that, I had a feeling they might start to dry up.
    ‘People have been worried about you.’
    I thought about it.
    ‘I’m sorry that people have been worried. I mean, I never meant to worry anybody. I didn’t think anyone would care, to be honest. It just . . . got to the point where I couldn’t come in anymore.’
    I didn’t know how to explain it any better than that, even though that didn’t really explain it at all. It really hadn’t been a decision I’d made so much as an epiphany: something that happened to me. Somebody else made the decision, and I just realised how much sense it made. I think I did quite well, actually – for a couple of months after Amy vanished, I laboured into work on a morning, through work during the day and then out of work again in the evening: a good, solid pretence of normality. It’s what you do, after all. I was carrying on; I was surviving. My mother would have been proud of me. And then, one day, I realised that I wasn’t surviving at all: quite the opposite. I was being assimilated, and I was slowly dying, one day at a time.
    ‘You couldn’t come in?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘It just didn’t seem worth it anymore.’
    I worked for an insurance company. Let me briefly explain how insurance works – in the lower levels, at least. Let’s say you want to insure your house. The first thing you do is get a quote from my company, and in order to do this you have to fill out a breathtaking number of forms and provide us with an almost insurmountable mountain of personal information. This is only to confuse and lull you. What it boils down to is this. You live in a semi-detached house with x number ofbedrooms in a certain post code (down to the street name). Now, we know – from our vast database of prior claims and police reports – exactly how likely you are to be burgled or for your house to burn down or whatever, which we read as:
how long will it take this person to claim one thousand pounds from us
? On average, let’s say, it would take you five years, so we need to charge you two hundred pounds a year in house insurance to break even. It might take less time or