“So how did you get to know him?” I ask. “Mickey, I mean.”
“Mickey?” She looks confused again.
“Yeah,” I say, softly. “Mickey.”
“Oh.” She shakes her head. “He's my brother.”
“Really?” I say. I don't want it to be too obvious, but I'm wondering if she's got this wrong.
“Half brother, actually,” she says.
“No shit,” I say.
She looks at me and grins. Then she blushes again. “Don't take the piss,” she says.
“I'm not.”
She studies me for a moment. She's gone all serious suddenly. “Really?”
“Really,” I say.
She looks pleased. I've made her happy, I suppose. It's quite touching. Then she jumps up and squeals. “Come on,” she shouts, to nobody in particular. “Let's killsomething.”
When I get home, after a happy day's hunting, I'm starting to wonder where this is all going. I've already told myself not to dig in too deep with Jimmy and his crew, but I have to admit it, I like Eddie, and Jimmy's kind of a challenge. Still, better not to get too comfortable. If I do shag Eddie, it's bound to get back to Elspeth, and that will not only piss her off but it'll put a big smile on Jimmy's face, too. Maybe that's what this is all about, of course. I'm not saying Jimmy would actually tell Eddie to do me, it would have to be subtler than that. To begin with, he probably just wanted to check me out, then Eddie maybe said something after our first run-in and he just told her to go for it. Or something along those lines. Though whatever it is that's going on, I think I'd better watch my step. I remember old Paul Newman, when somebody asked him if he was ever tempted to cheat on Joanne, what with all those women throwing themselves in his general direction, and he said, “Why go out for burger, when you've got steak at home?” Which probably looked like a pretty cool answer at the time, him being put on the spot like that, but it doesn't make that much sense. You can't eat steak every day and they do say that variety is the spice of life. Besides, if Elspeth is steak, that doesn't make Eddie burger. I'd think of her more as pudding, to be honest. Angel Delight, maybe. Crème brûlée. Tiramisu. Definitely not semolina.
Jesus H. Christ, I tell myself, I'm going to have to snap out of this. What I need is a distraction. After I look in on Dad, I head off to my room and try to pick up where I left off with Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But I can't keep my mind on it. I keep thinking about Eddie's legs and those sweet, pouty lips. Eventually, I drift off, lying on the bed with the book over my face, and I have amazing dreams all the way through to morning, but it's not camels I'm dreaming about.
Still, the fates are kind, even if we do work hard to ignore their occasional mercies, and the next day I get the distraction I need, because the Moth Man is here and, for once, I am—as they say in the self-help books— unconditionally happy. It won't last long, but it's something pure, which isn't that common a phenomenon if you live in the Innertown.
But then, that's the big problem with life in this place: there's more to it all than the bad days of wondering when another boy will disappear, because it hasn't happened for a while and so, according to a logic we all know, is bound to happen again soon. And it isn't just those other days, when we all go around in a stupor of fear and anger because, having finally given in to the temptation of thinking that those bad days have come to an end, we receive the news that another soul has been lost, some boy you know at least by name, some kid who plays the trumpet, or picks his nose at assembly, or likes to go swimming. Of course, you can tell yourself that he's gone away, like some fairy-tale character, to seek his fortune in the big wide world. You can tell yourself that, if this is the story the police put out, then they must do it for a reason, but in your heart you know that the boy has been taken, maybe dragged off to some secret place and killed, maybe worse. Maybe alive somewhere and waiting for someone to come, in some pit at the plant, or chained up and helpless in some sewer. And then, even if it's been quiet on that front for a while, there's always the chance that somebody has just died from a disease that nobody's ever seen before. We're definitely not talking Salad Days, out here in the Innertown.
So it might be better if there was no relief, if there were no happy times. Like that bit in Tom Sawyer when Tom wonders if maybe Sundays are just a more refined form of sadism than the usual weekday run of chores and school. Every week, you get one day off, just to remind you how awful the other six are—and even that one precious day is marred by a morning in church, gazing out of the window at the sunshine while some old fart drones on about God. At least we don't have much church here.
Still, it might be better just to get on with the ordinary routine of Dad being sick, and me having to wash out the bowl that he keeps by the bed, all the vomit and bile and spots of blood running out into the sewage, into the water that I will one day drink, after it has been processed and treated, because water goes round and round, the same water all the time: the same, but different. Water is everywhere. You can't escape it. When Miss Golding told us, in Religious Education class, that God was omnipresent, I remember thinking, while she was explaining omnipresent to the nincompoops, that God must be water. Even afterward, when I had grown out of the idea, I was still afraid of water; or rather, I feared something the water contained. I found a magazine once, out on the landfill, with an article about how some French guy had worked out some theory about water having a memory: it keeps a record of everything it has ever touched written away in its molecular structure, a whole history of piss and sick and insecticide, laid down in a submicroscopic, illegible script that will take centuries to erase. Everything has its own clock, its own lifetime: stars, dogs, people, water molecules. Human beings only know one version of time, but there are thousands of others, all these parallel worlds unfolding at different rates, fast, slow, instantaneous, sidereal.
Anyhow, whatever else might crop up, you don't normally get unconditional happiness round here. It's always tainted by something: worry, or fear, or just the idiot feeling that it's something you don't really deserve, so it's probably some kind of trap. That day, though, I am happy, pure and simple—because the Moth Man has come, and I like it when the Moth Man comes.
I hadn't been expecting him, because you never know when he'll be here. He comes and goes according to some law that only he understands, and I only know he's back when I see his van, parked just off the road at the gate to the old meadows on the east side, or maybe farther toward the shore somewhere, his little green van, with faded lettering on one side from whoever owned it before, some guy called Herbert, who did some kind of repairs. The first time I saw the van, the Moth Man had just pulled in at the gate to the meadows, and I watched him take his gear out of the back, all the netting and lighting equipment, the tiny, ice-blue tent that he would set up in the middle of the meadow, the rucksack full of cooking utensils, the ancient camping stove. It was like watching a magic trick, the way he got all this stuff out of this tiny van, and then there was more, and still more, till he'd made a little settlement around himself, all the instruments and lights and piles of netting. He didn't say anything to me, all the time he was unloading, though he knew I was there. It was only when he was done that he turned to me and gave me a questioning look. He still didn't say anything, though.
I was thirteen then, if I remember. I bet, for him, I was just some gosse who had turned up, one of those local kid spectators he probably got all the time. I didn't want him to think of me like that. “What's all this shit for?” I said. Big kid, blasé as fuck.
He laughed. “What do you think it's for?” he said.
“Dunno. You some kind of photographer?”
“Nope.”
“Scientist?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, if you're here to measure the pollution, you'll need more stuff,” I said.
He laughed again and shook his head. Then he explained about the Lepidoptera survey, and what you could tell about a place by the number and type of different
butterflies and moths you found there. Finally, he stopped talking and looked at me, to see if I was getting bored. “So,” he said, “what's your name?”
“Leonard,” I say. “Leonard Wilson.”
He nods and stores the name away in his head, but he doesn't tell me who he is. He just starts getting some stuff out of a bag to make himself some lunch. As he does, he asks me if I'm hungry. I say I am, and so I get into it with him, fetching stuff and helping him get it all together. Finally, when we're sitting down to baked beans and sausages, he looks at me. “Some people say there are no mysteries anymore,” he says. “Do you think that's true, Leonard Wilson?”
I don't say anything at first. He's treating me a bit too young, maybe, but I don't mind. Later on, I'll let him know that I read books and such, and he can talk normal. Besides, right now, I'm enjoying being treated like a kid. Most of the time, I'm fixing Dad's food, or his medicine, or I'm doing stuff around the house, or shopping. It's fun to be a kid for a while, so I play along, just a bit. “I suppose,” I say.
The man grins. He's beginning to work me out, maybe, but he's started, so he's going to finish. “You suppose?” he says. “OK. What about that tree over there? What kind of tree is that?”
I don't move my head, just glance over with my eyes. “It's a sycamore,” I say. Pretty dumb question: it's all sycamore round here.
“OK,” he says. “No mystery there, then.”
“Nope.”
“OK. So how did it get there?”
I know this one, I think. Any minute now, he'll be talking about God and eyeballs and all that Divine Craftsman stuff, like Mr. O'Brien in full-on MYSTERIES OF NATURE and THE BENEFICENCE OF THE DIVINE ORDER mode. Still, I'm happy to go along. I like his voice. It's all soft corners and friendly, but it's in its own place, it doesn't intrude. “Well,” I say, “I don't know for sure. But I imagine a seed blew there on the wind and—”
“And how did the wind get here?”
“What?”
“How did the wind get here? How did you get here?” He's making a point, but his voice doesn't change. He doesn't do the JOY OF DISCOVERY like old Mr. O'Brien. “How did any of it get here?” he says.
I shake my head. Here comes the God part. “ I don't know,” I say.
“So that's the mystery,” he says. Then he just sits there, smiling.
He sits there smiling, then he looks up into the leaves overhead, like there was something he'd forgotten to check, before he turns back to me. “Let's go,” he says. He gets to his feet in one quick movement and starts off into the trees to show me something that, for him, is of vital significance. I mean, here is a guy who can read the landscape. I thought I knew a bit about the headland, from coming out here so long and checking things up, birds and flowers and such, in field guides at the library—but I'm just looking at the pictures, while this guy is reading the fine print. Over the next several months, as he came and went, he showed me all kinds of stuff, from downright silly to little pieces of natural magic. He showed me how to nip the back off a flower and suck out the nectar inside. He showed me what henbane looks like and told me about how the witches used to smoke it in a pipe when they had toothache. He told me more than I will ever need to know about various obscure moth species. What I get from him is that he likes kids, and he listens to what you are saying. Sometimes he gets all enthused about something, and when he's like that, he can talk for hours. And sometimes he's a bit too grown-up-to-kid, but you can see he really cares about this stuff and he wants to share it with you, not to make himself look smart, but because he loves it all so much. Sometimes I think he might be lonely, because I get the impression he hasn't got a proper home, he just seems to drive from place to place in his van, camping in fields and setting up his nets, his only companions the moths he catches then releases, or curious kids like me that he attracts along the way. It must be a fine life, sometimes, just camping out in one place for a while, then moving on, like some nomadic tribesman, at home, not in one place, but everywhere. But he doesn't seem to have a wife, or a girlfriend or anything like that, and I sometimes wonder what he does for sex. Maybe he's got some floozy he sees someplace, as he passes through. Maybe he's got a few. I think, though, that he's really married to his work. Which means that the Innertown probably isn't his favorite spot, because the results he gets here can't be all that satisfying. Not that he doesn't catch anything. On the contrary: he nets thousands of moths every night, but they're all the same, small, peppery creatures that blunder into the net so readily it almost seems they're doing it on purpose.
So he's a bit of a mystery, in some ways. I like him, though. That first day, I knew he was going to be a friend to me, even though he was old—he's probably about forty, maybe a bit younger. He'd been talking about moths and mysteries, and about his work, then he realized it was getting on for evening. “Right,” he says. “It's probably time you got home to your family, Leonard Wilson. You do have a family, don't you?”
“It's just my dad now,” I say.
“Oh?”
“My mum left,” I say. “When Dad got ill she just fucked off and left us to it.”
He shakes his head. “I'm sure there was more to it than that,” he says.
“Maybe,” I say. I don't really believe it, but I'm not going to argue about it and spoil things. I've argued with myself for long enough about it. “So,” I say, “what about you?”
“Me?”
“Well,” I say, “I suppose you have a family too?”
He laughs. “Not really,” he says. “But I'm all grown up. I can look after myself.”
“So can I,” I say. I like him, but he's a bit insulting sometimes, with all this grown-up stuff. He might not be all JOY OF DISCOVERY but he's treading a fine line right now.
He smiles. “I didn't say you couldn't,” he says. He seems sad, now, as if he's thought of something that he'd rather not remember.
“So where's your dad, then?” I ask him, just to break the mood, but then I see from his face that it's thinking about his dad that made him sad in the first place.
“He's dead now,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. I feel awkward. “Sorry,” I say—which makes me feel even more awkward, and fucking stupid too. What am I sorry about? What difference does that make?
“Don't be,” he says. “He was getting on. And he wasn't himself at the end, there.” He looks away, off into the trees, like he's trying to picture something.
I read once, in this really terrible book, that you have to talk to people about things like this. I don't know why, but I suppose it's good for the dead to be remembered. Maybe not when they were sick, but how they were before, when they were still young, or happy, or something. And I can see the logic of that. It bothers me, that I can't remember Dad from before his illness. It would be useful to be able to remember him as a young man— dancing, say, or at a football match, shouting for the home team. Or maybe sitting in the pub, just after opening time on some warm summer morning, sitting there on his own before the crowds come in, with a paper and a pint of bitter, the bluish smoke from his first cigarette of the day spiraling up in a long thin streamer through a fall of golden light. That would be good and maybe it would be good for the Moth Man to think about something like that. So I give it a go. “So,” I say, “what was he like, your dad?”
He looks at me, the kind of look that says: Do you really want to know, or are you just being polite? I'm not sure I know myself, but he seems satisfied. “My dad was an engineer,” he says. “That was how he earned his living, and that was what he loved. That's why he came here, to do a job of work. Later, though, when he came back, he was supposed to be retired. A lot had happened to him between his first visit here and his last.”
“What happened to him?”
“My dad was a bighearted, innocent man,” he says. “He was an enthusiast, which also made him something of a fool. He trusted people, which can be fine, but he was too open, too easy to reach. He also liked a drink. In th
e end, he was just wandering about the world, bumping into the furniture. He would fall over from time to time, but he always got up again. Sometimes, I wished he would just quit and stay down.”
I listened. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about, but I could see how sad it all was. Still, I couldn't help being surprised at the way he talked about his old man. It was like he was talking about somebody he hardly knew, or some character in a book.
“Your father worked at the plant,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, surprised at the sudden change of tack. “Till they shut it. Then he got sick.”
“My father helped build the plant. He worked on the first plant, back in the early days. At that time, there was a whole group of companies working for the Consortium, divvying up the first, highly lucrative contracts. Arnoldsen's. Nevin's. Lister's. My dad knew them all, they were like family to him. Sometimes, when he was talking about those days, he would be saying the names, and you'd realize how much they meant to him. They were familiar, like the words he used in his work, all the technical stuff, which he would also talk about, even though he knew nobody understood it. But those names were special, too. They were his litany. All the deep words that he treasured, the way somebody might treasure the words of prayers or old songs.” He stopped and looked back to where his dad was inside his head, saying his private litany.
“So what went wrong?” I said. I hadn't expected to say this, but when I did, it was like I'd been waiting years to ask somebody this exact question.
He snapped out of his reverie and looked at me. I think my question startled him, but he did his best to give me an answer. Not the one I was looking for, but an approximation, a good guess. “Dad was proud of the work he did here,” he said. “People were proud of the plant back in those days. Even later, people would reminisce about the time when old George Lister himself came out there, when they finished the first phase and the plant was officially opened, but that wasn't so. People like my dad—and yours—never saw those people. They made their money from far away, and they spent it far away on things that working men couldn't even imagine.” He looked off into the distance and I thought I'd lost him again.
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