Yet more than any of those kind citizens, Morrison is an expert in mourning—though what he mourns has never been altogether clear to him. The boys, yes; but he doesn't mourn them enough to seek justice on their behalf. He mourns his marriage, especially now that he and Alice have turned from each other and, almost noiselessly, carried on with their separate, quietly desperate lives. He doesn't understand that. It might seem a cliché, now, but when they'd first met, he had known that Alice was the only woman he would ever love. She'd had that quality some people have, if not for everyone then at least for one magical other, of making existence itself feel like a promise. And she had seemed so close to begin with, as much a friend as a wife, even if they had never talked that much. Back then, they hadn't felt the need. She was there, he was there. Later, though, when he needed to be touched, coming to her in a fog of inarticulate longing—a wordless longing to be touched and, in that healing touch, forgiven for a sin he wasn't able to confess—she had just collapsed inward, like one of those sensitive plants they used to grow in school, so there was nothing there, no point of contact. She didn't even like it if he looked at her for too long, as if even that was an impossible demand he was making on her. At such times, she became clinical, almost brutally analytical. “I can't help you,” she would say, “if you won't tell me what's wrong.” As if what he wanted was help.
Whenever she did that, whenever she crumbled in on herself like that, it made him think of that plant. Mimosa pudica, that was it. Pale green, slightly downy plants, with their sensitive, fingerlike leaves and perfectly engineered stems that simply folded at any contact till they were all but absent. A fingertip, the nib of a pen, even a single water drop. That was all it took to make the whole plant collapse. A single touch, and everything fell away, till all you were left with was an indifferent, infinitely patient absence. Sometimes, Morrison feels that this is what he mourns more than anything: that this is the true source of his grief. He had expected to be touched, he had thought that was what married folk did for each other: they touched. They healed each other with this simple instrument. He has never understood why Alice doesn't feel the same way. Now, he hasn't touched anyone, and nobody had touched him, for years. When Alice started having her episodes, he'd hoped this would make a difference, he'd hoped that they were finally equal, in their need if nothing else, and could start again. It was almost laughable, now, to think that he had ever been so foolish.
ALICE
IN THE POLICE HOUSE, ALICE KEEPS HAVING THE SAME DREAM: PINK, nerveless fish with lacy, desirous mouths are all around her face, butting and probing at her lips and eyes, eating her away, cell by cell, as she lies half naked and alone on what ought to have been her marital bed. Only it's not a dream, because she's not asleep, and she isn't altogether sure she's alone either; for the last several minutes, she's had the sense that someone is there, in the room, someone or something that feels like a child saying its prayers in some corner that she cannot find. There was a storm in the night, but she'd only been half aware of it, lying on the bed in a tight sleeve of pills and vodka. She had kept those well hidden, and for once Morrison hadn't found them—she always calls him by his surname now, even when he isn't there, even in her private, silent thoughts, because she never wants to allow her contempt to slip or dwindle. She has no intention of letting him get away with anything: not the years of indifference, or the compromises he has made with the good people of the Outertown, and not the part he has played in what she has begun to consider, in herself, an incurable illness. This is the main symptom, this slow realization, as she comes to herself and the pink fish slip back into her mind's haze, that her waking dream, and the quiet, childish voice that she can barely make out in some far angle of the house are the first signals of what she and Morrison choose to call “the shakes.” This is the word they have always used for her delirium attacks; it's Morrison's word, in fact: she remembers him using it first, and she is annoyed, still, that it stuck. Now, whenever she drinks, even a little, she is struck down by the shakes; it happens every time and she still can't get herself to stop. Normally, she has to hide the bottles of pills or booze when Morrison is at home and she takes every possible step to conceal them, even though, half the time, she is desperate to give them up, to lock herself away and, with a little help from someone or something, make some kind of honest attempt to cure the incurable.
As often as he can, Morrison stays home and watches her, probably waiting for her to say something that would allow him to help. This last night, though, he has been out till late, presumably doing something related to the storm, some minor work for which Smith and his cronies find him useful, and which he is only too happy to do. He knows it is hardest for her at night and he does what he can, even though his attention is unwelcome. These days, however, with the disappearances still unsolved—five boys gone, now, and no explanation for their sudden absence—and with so much happening in the background, he is out a fair deal on what he chooses to call police business, which means that he comes home to find her, from time to time, listening to voices in her head or staring at something that he knows isn't even there, and the odd thing is, she despises him for his normality, she despises the fact that he knows, without a doubt, that everything she sees and hears at such times is a hallucination. She doesn't care if he comes home and finds her unconscious, or finishing off the last of the drink on the porch at the back, where at least it's cool. She has learned to live for the passing opportunity, the lucky moment. What she does mind is how easily he dismisses those phantoms that populate her world, phantoms that, if anything, should be just as real for him. After all, they are his children too, the only children their marriage has bred.
Morrison would say the shakes are caused by the drinking and the pills, and that's that, but Alice isn't so sure. Who's to say that the shakes don't come first, in some quiet, or hidden form, driving her to do those things to herself, just to be at peace? She doesn't like passing out from drink, it's not what she ever wanted to do with her life. She remembers the time when she and Morrison first met, how sweet and thoughtful he was, and how he had his own ways about him, before he fell in with Brian Smith. At one time, he had wanted to do his job according to his own standards, he'd been determined to make a fresh start. When he wasn't working, he would do stuff in the garden, making things grow, taking a childish pleasure that he didn't even try to disguise in bringing in fresh vegetables and setting them out on the kitchen table, firm orange carrots with dark crumbs of soil still clinging to them and those bright curly leaves, radishes, turnips, lettuce, all of it a minor celebration, the man happy with his work, the produce looking good and clean and tasting fine, in spite of where it had been grown. In those days, Morrison had been an optimist, and she had wanted to love him for that. She had, in fact, wanted to love him for a long time, but she hadn't succeeded. Even before he grew distant, and fell in with Smith's people, she hadn't been able to love him. He was too meager, too commonplace. There simply hadn't been enough of him to love.
Now, she wants to go out into the world and walk away. Or not walk away so much as just walk, without even that much of a sense of direction. One of these days, she will take too many pills, or her body will just give out, and she will die while Morrison is out somewhere doing Brian Smith's bidding. She will die alone in her claustrophobic little police house, with nobody there to tell her goodbye; though if you took Morrison's word for it, everybody died alone because, no matter who was there when they were going, the actual departure had to be a solitary one, and the destination— whatever it might be—was one that you alone could reach. But then again, supposing it was different. What about all those stories of people who entered a brilliant circle of light and saw other bodies, other faces around them, welcoming, sweet faces, bringing them home? What if, when you died, you didn't move away into the ultimate loneliness, the ultimate separation, but instead, you returned to some other state, a state you had known before? What if death wasn't a solitary thing, after all, but a
point where everyone who had ever been separated out, everyone who had wandered a lifetime, separate, but trying to connect in some way with someone or something else, returned to the shining, communal oneness from which they had all originated, tiny fragments of light and consciousness merging into the whole? She had read about such things; there were people—millions of people in Asia or some such place—who believed this. They thought there was one single mind that we were all a part of, and that we returned to it in death, to be separate no more, but to share in the one single, eternal thought that all of us had, and were. That thought was the universe, or being, or something like that. It was Buddhists, she seemed to remember, who believed this idea—Buddhists, or maybe Hindus—and they believed it as a matter of fact, the same way other people believed in gravity, or medicine. At times, the sheer mass of this belief, so many millions, almost persuaded her that it was true, and for giddy minutes she would sit wondering if any of those millions ever saw what a terrifying idea it really was.
ET IN ARCADIA
EGO.
Still there and gone away at the same time. Here and there, lost and found, in the everlasting present.
I can't help thinking that, if you want to stay alive, you have to love something. I used to have a friend, a boy called Liam Nugent, and I think I loved him, but now he's gone, and I don't know if I love anybody. Not Dad, that's for sure. Once upon a time, yes, but not now, because he's not really here now. He's lying in bed, silent, far away, and it's like he's dead already. Maybe I could love Elspeth, but I can't really see it. Sometimes I don't even think I like her, but then she does something funny, or she just says something outrageous, and I think I could almost be in love with her, like some character in a book. Though everybody says there's a big difference between being in love and actual love. It gets difficult around about there and I don't like it when things get difficult for no good reason. Complicated, yes; I can do complicated. The world is complicated, there's all kinds of stuff going on. Some books are really complicated. But love probably isn't that complicated, it's just difficult. And maybe love is the wrong word here, anyway, at least when it comes to people. People are hard to love, even if you're having sex with them, or good, funny conversations like the ones Elspeth and I sometimes have. People are difficult, that's just how they are made.
Still, if you want to stay alive, which is hard to do in a place like this, you have to love something, and the one thing I love is the chemical plant. Well, that, and books. I love books. In a place like this, that's almost as weird as saying you love the plant, but at least it's more or less normal. Because you're definitely not normal, you're definitely weird, if you love the plant.
The thing is, I know everybody says it's dangerous, that it's making us all sick, that they should have razed it to the ground years ago and cleared the entire eastern peninsula instead of just leaving it to rot—and that's all true, I know that, but you still have to admit that it's beautiful. Maybe there are more obviously beautiful places in Canada or California, maybe they have gardens and parks with clear lakes and honest-to-Betsy live trees with autumn leaves and all the stuff you see on television, but we don't have those things. All we have is the plant. We're not supposed to go there and I suppose most of the kids don't, but there are plenty who do.
I don't think anybody spends as much time out there as I do, though. When the storms come, I go out and stand at the entrance to one of the old kilns, to watch the rain pouring down. Or I sit up on a ruined crane above the docks and look out over the water, to a point on the horizon that seems to belong, not just to another place, but also to a different time, the past maybe, or maybe the future, when the derelict buildings rot away and the poison in the ground, the poison nobody can see, loses its deadly power. I'm not supposed to go there—nobody is—but it doesn't scare me and it doesn't scare some of the other kids, because I see them out there sometimes, moving like shadows among the ruins, not wanting to be seen, and not wanting to see that anybody else is there with them. I imagine they go out there for the same reasons I do: because it's peaceful, and it doesn't belong to anybody, and, maybe, because it's the only beauty they know. It's odd to say that, but it really, really is beautiful, the way those old horror films they show on TV are beautiful, or the way Annette Crowley in 4B is beautiful, with the white scar running across her cheek and neck where her face was cut open in a car crash.
This beautiful place is called the chemical plant because that's what it once was, though now it's just hundreds of derelict buildings and a network of abandoned railway tracks running past the edge of the Innertown to what remains of the old harbor. If you were to draw a map of this end of the peninsula, you'd have the Outertown first, all mock-Elizabethan and ranch-style villas with wide, miraculously green lawns and hedges. Then there's the former golf course, conveniently situated so as to divide the good people in the nice houses from the ghosts and ruffians of the Innertown, now nothing more than a ghetto for poisoned, cast-off workers like my old man. Finally, with virtually nothing to separate it from the town, what remains is an industrial wilderness where the plant used to be. It's called the chemical plant, because it never had any other name, even the land it stands on is almost nameless, a stretch of nowhere that people sometimes call the headland, though the adults rarely talk about it and, when they do, they mostly just refer to it as out there. If you listen to some of the great and good around here, the whole lot comes as one unit, which they've started calling Homeland, and they've got big plans for us all, what they call a “regeneration program.” That's Brian Smith's territory, though, so nobody in the Innertown is holding his breath.
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