Steve Mosby - The Third Person

Now, he was so deep in the industry that youd probably never find his stuff. It was the real deal these days: each and every word was true. They sold it in shifting markets, sealed in polythene, and behind locked, guarded doors in dark halls, where strangers shuffled from stall to stall, and even in these places you had to search it out, listen for whispers. A stallholders friend would be able to provide you with kiddie fiction, say, or rape text, but if you wanted his stuff then you had to go to the stallholders friends friend, and you had to keep your mouth shut and know when to back off. Because these days, his writing was so far buried that only the truly fallen ever even caught a glimpse of it.

And it was there as low as you could get that he began to see a way out.

Thanks for some of the ideas in this book are due to Matt Ridley and Richard Dawkins. More personal thanks to: Suellen Luwish and Simon Logan for comments on early drafts, along with much online entertainment; Jonny, Tilly, Neil, Ken, Ben, Cassie, Tom, Gaz, Nicole, Keith, Steve and Simon for various friendships and encouragement over the years; Marie, Debbie, Carolyn, Keleigh, Sarah, Jodie, Liz and Nicola and everyone else in the sociology office for taking enormous amounts of piss but generally being excellent; a fair few teachers along the way, including Mr Walker, Ms Charles, Mr Horobin, Mrs Hadley and Sally Roberts; my agent, Carolyn Whitaker; Sarah Such, for helpful comments; Jon Wood, Nicky Jeanes and everyone else at Orion; Katrina and Sal and Emma, for being great; Becki, for aiding my commitment to editing with her atrocious choice of television programmes (and being really, really, great); Angela, for being my best friend in the whole world; and Mum, Dad, John and Roy for all of their encouragement and love over the years.

Most of all, thanks to Janny, who always had more faith in me than I ever did or deserved.

The writing is always done by hand.

There are a couple of things you need to know, and thats the first.

Hes gently flexing his wrist as they bring the girl in: warming himself up. It should take about half an hour from start to finish, and thats a long time to write for, so you need to be prepared. Loose and relaxed. He gives his shoulders a roll and watches the girl. The bed, covered in straight sheets of glinting polythene, is on the other side of the studio. When she sees it, her step falters, but they push her from behind and she starts moving towards it.

The door is locked behind them.

Fucking behave, Marley tells her. Hes the one that pushed her. She glances at him, scared, but hes not even looking at her now: just grinding out the remains of his cigarette on the floor. The smell of the smoke drifts over, catching his attention just as the girl sees him.

He sees her right back.

For a moment, its as though shes standing on her own, with all the other figures in the room fading into the background: Marley disappears; Long Tall Jack melts out of view; the others go; even the bed seems dim and far away. Its like the girl is spot-lit: a fragile, scared thing illuminated to the exclusion of everything else.

He wants to smile at her and tell her that it will be okay, but it wont. And hes not here to make her feel comfortable, or help her.

So instead, he picks up his pen.

And without taking his eyes off her, he begins to write.

Did you know that its possible to watch rape, twenty-four hours a day, in the comfort of your own home? I bet you didnt know that, but its true. You can just sit in front of your computer screen with a cold beer in one hand, clicking a mouse with the other and watch rape after rape after rape. The scenes vary, but the reality remains the same. And thats what I was doing, on the evening when the end of it all began: I was watching rape, drinking a Bud.

There are certain ways to do it. Ive found that the best is to abstract yourself from what youre actually watching and listening to: you quit hearing screams and, instead, you hear pitches and tones; and you dont so much see skin anymore, as you see pixels: patterns of colour that remind you of things. Pink flesh; a black open mouth.

Its the best way, but still not good.

Ive grown up in a generation where reality is constantly mediated, though, and so its really not that different. When you see a war on television, for example, youre not actually watching a war. Get close to the screen and you can see the little blocks of colour shifting, and thats really all it is: a lot of second-hand light. Its not really people dying at all. Reality, mediated. Youre not seeing what happened, youre just seeing an effect it had on film in a camera. In every way that matters, its no different to someone describing it to you afterwards: someone whose eye is a lens; someone whose memory is camera film. Purely and simply, what you are seeing is hearsay.

The hearsay on the internet varies, depending upon where you go to listen. If you enter the word rape or snuff into a search engine, youll find the tip of the iceberg. Seriously its that easy. The first few porn sites youll visit will be mostly if not totally legit. They offer violent, hard-core porn for download, generally for money but there are ways around that, and youll know, from watching them, that theyre fakes. Therell be a plot structure that gives the whole thing away. Sometimes, there are even credits at the end. These are stories: fantasies designed to give you a thrill, acted out by paid, willing models.

I had a few hours worth of this type of movie on my hard drive: some good quality and some bad. Id seen enough to know I wasnt interested. I wouldnt find Amy here. These staged travesties werent an abyss, merely a gutter, and I knew from the beginning that I was going to have to look deeper to find her.

Heres something else Ill bet you didnt know: