The Third Person by Steve Mosby Read Free Book Online

his ears, making him seem more like an ageing doorman. To complete that image, he had a vicious-looking cut above his eye. The light in the hallway was gleaming on his balding head.
    I’d had a gun pointed at me before. When I was nineteen, I was caught up in an armed robbery at the convenience store around the corner from my hall of residence. It was one of those weird things that you beat yourself up about afterwards – Tyler, one of my flatmates, had asked me to pick up a pack of rizlas for him, but I’d forgotten them until after I paid. So I had to hang on for an extra few seconds, and if I hadn’t done that then this bouncer in my flat would have been my first proper gun experience. Instead, I had a shotgun pointed at my head for a full minute, as three other kids took the cash-drawers from the till and scared the counter-girl shitless. The guy who was drawing on me was so fucked up that his eyes were bright red and he could hardly even stand up straight. It was unreal. I mean, the gun didn’t look like they do in the movies: it was wooden and metal, and so alien to me that I figured it had to be a toy, even though I knew it wasn’t. In the movies, guns shine; they’re sleek, not dull and real. In the movies they fetishise these things, but in real life it wasn’t all that sexy. In fact, it wasn’t all that anything until about five minutes after they’d gone.
    Now, I dropped the towel on the floor beside me. Upstairs, I could hear the sound of people going through my things. Above me, in the study, I heard something smash and someone swear.
    ‘Come in and have a seat,’ the guy told me, twitching the business end of the pistol towards the living room.
    I made my way through, somehow unsurprised to find thatthere was somebody already in there, waiting for me. He was an old man – probably in his early seventies – but looked spry and commanding, and he was sitting in my armchair, over by the bay window, with one leg resting over the other, and one hand resting on the bulb-end of a mean-looking iron cane. He looked like some kind of porn king, in fact, with his full complement of silver hair still tinged through to a fake black in places, and skin that was as tanned as the bouncer’s raincoat.
    ‘Jason Klein,’ he said, as the door was closed behind us. ‘You live like a pig in shit.’
    Pigs in shit are supposedly quite happy, but it seemed a foolish point to argue over. I noticed that he was sitting on some kind of blanket, and realised that, whoever he was, his ass was clearly too good for furniture as neglected and woeful as mine. Ours.
    ‘Sit down.’
    He nodded to my other armchair; I walked over and sat.
    ‘Now,’ he said. ‘We have a couple of things to talk about, you and I.’
    ‘Right.’ It felt oddly as though I was at some kind of job interview. I supposed that I was, in a way. The post I was applying for was the rest of my miserable life.
    ‘You don’t know me?’ he said.
    ‘No.’
    ‘You don’t have any idea who I am?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘What you
do
know, though, is that you want us out of here as soon as humanly possible. Am I right?’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    He nodded to himself.
    ‘Well, we’re going to make this nice and easy for you, because we’re busy men. Answer quickly and carefully, and we’ll be gone before you know it.’ He gestured with his freehand and looked around my pig shit palace almost hopefully. ‘As though we were never here.’
    ‘What do you want?’ I asked. ‘I’ve had a long night.’
    My abruptness seemed to surprise him almost as much as it did me. God only knew where it had come from but – now it was here – I tried the feeling on and found that it felt good. All of it – Amy, me, Wilkinson, Claire – was like a dark room inside me, and anger felt like a small but vital light. One I could burn myself with and enjoy the heat.
    ‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘I’ve been through the fucking mill this evening, and I’m not in the best of