Glister

by John Burnside

  “So,” I said, “the big boss didn't come to the opening?”

  “No,” he said. “He would have sent some deputy, or maybe one of the younger sons. There were four sons, if I remember.”

  He looked at me curiously. “Come on,” he said. “It's time for you to go. Your dad will be worried.”

  I shook my head. “If my dad's even awake, I'll be fucking surprised,” I said, and he shook his head in mock disapproval at all this obscenity in one so young.

  That was the only time we ever talked about that kind of stuff. Later, it was all about the work he was doing, or maybe stories of the places he'd been to, or little tips for going around in the world and not having too bad a time. That's how it is. He doesn't come very often, maybe once every couple of months, and I never know when to expect him. So that morning, when I catch a glimpse of his van, half hidden behind the big hedge out by the meadows, I'm happy. I don't want him to see it, though, so I just drift over to where he is working and stand watching. He doesn't make a big fuss, either. He's setting up a big net, a high thing taller than he is, and it's obviously got all his attention, getting it just right. Still, he takes the time to register the fact that I am there. “Leonard Wilson,” he says. I think there is a pleasure in the way he says my name, like he's been looking forward to seeing me again. He pauses for a moment and looks at me sideways. “So how are you?” he says.

  “I'm fine,” I say. And I'm happy because it's almost true. True enough to be able to say it without thinking I'm pretending.

  “That's good,” he says. “You want to come over here and help me set this thing up?”

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  He nods. “OK, then,” he says, and we go to work, careful and competent and good-humored, as if we'd been doing this forever. It doesn't take long with us working together, and once it's all done, he sends me off to get some wood for a fire, which I do, but by the time I get back, my arms laden with twigs and fallen branches, he's sitting on this huge fallen log by a fire that has obviously been burning for some time, brewing something in a little saucepan that sits amid the flames, all blackened and scabbed with years of heat, like a miniature witch's cauldron. When he sees me, he looks up and gives me a big smile, one of those smiles that imply a world of shared secrets and a future that only he and I know about.

  “You're back,” he says. He gestures to the place next to him on the log. “Take a seat,” he says. “I'll fix you some of my special tea.”

  I laugh. I'm not annoyed that he sent me off on a wild-goose chase. “Oh yeah?” I say. “What's special about it?”

  He smiles and gives the pot a careful little stir. “You'll see,” he says.

  It takes a while for the tea to brew the way he wants it. It smells terrible, a bit like those traces of greeny shit a caterpillar leaves when you keep it in a jar or a matchbox for a while, or the slurred nubs of rotten cabbage stalk in a rainy field after the machines have been over it. The Moth Man doesn't seem to mind, though; he crouches over the pot, stirring and breathing great whiffs of it, humming to himself absently all the while, completely absorbed in the alchemy of it all. Finally he's satisfied. He looks over, gives me this big grin, and picks up one of the cups. He holds it to his nose for a moment, then he drinks it down quick. I follow suit; the stuff tastes even worse than it smells, but I manage to gulp it down without choking. The Moth Man laughs, then he slips down and sits on the ground, so his back is leaning against the log. I do the same. For a long time—maybe ten minutes, maybe longer—we just sit there like that, two campers out in the woods by their fire, communing with Nature and all that shit. After a while, though, I start to feel odd, kind of warm from the inside, but not feverish, and things look different. The trees have more detail, the colors are subtler, everything looks more complicated and, at the same time, it all makes more sense, it all seems to be there for a reason. I don't mean it's designed, I'm not talking about some isn't-nature-wonderful shit. I mean—it's there, and it doesn't have to be explained. It's all shall be well and all manner of thing, and all that. I look around. The green of the grass is like something out of Plato, every twig and leaf is perfect, but it's not just that, it's not just that the objects I see are perfectly clear and logical and right, it's something else. It's wider. From where I'm sitting, I can see everything around me in perfect, almost dizzying detail, but I can also feel how one thing is connected to the next, and that thing to the next after that, or not connected, so much, but all one thing. Everything's one thing. It's not a matter of connections, it's an indivisibility. A unity. I can feel the world reaching away around me in every direction, the world and everything alive in it, every bud and leaf and bird and frog and bat and horse and tiger and human being, every fern and club moss, every fish and fowl, every serpent, all the sap and blood warmed by the sun, everything touched by the light, everything hidden in the darkness. It's all one. There isn't a me or a not-me about it. It's all continuous and I'm alive with everything that lives.

  Then, almost before it's there, that oneness breaks, and I see someone. A boy. He wasn't there before, and now he is, standing at the edge of the clearing, like he's just come out of the woods, and he's staring at me, not surprised at all, but more like he'd expected me to be there and has been trying to make me notice him, trying to get my attention with that piercing stare. There is something odd about him that I can't figure out, something about his face that seems familiar, though not so much the features as the expression; it's like an expression I know from the inside, an expression I've tried out at some point then given up on, the way an actor might try to get in character by looking at the mirror in a certain way, psyching himself into happy or wise or deranged by changing the way his face works. The expression in this boy's face is faraway, not distant so much as remote, not proud or cold or offended, more plaintive than anything, as if he wanted to call out to me but has momentarily lost his voice. He wants to call out, that's it, and the look on his face is the result of that failed desire to speak. He wants to call, for help maybe, or maybe because he thinks I need help—and I'd felt that plaintive appeal before I saw him, I'd felt the stare that he'd been directing at me a moment before I turned, even though I was happy, or not so much happy as fully alive, totally connected to everything around me, to everything I could see and everything I couldn't see, to the woods and the sky, to the warm blur of headlamps running away along the coast road, or over the hills and away, to the life beyond, the roads and cities, the lights in the office blocks, the paintings in museums and galleries, the Flemish courtyards I've seen in art books, the piazzas and canals, the rice fields and snowcapped mountains, the skies that same blue I've seen in picture books for years, but never in real life, never here: a blue like forgetting, the deep, cool blue of the room where the newly dead are absolved of their names and memories. When I see him, though, I am suddenly back: a local, isolated thing in the woods, a little cold in my own skin and trapped in the slow run of time like a swimmer caught in a current that's too strong to resist, too strong even to tread water—and after a moment I see what is odd about him. It's his face, yes, but it's not just the expression, it's who he looks like. I think, for a moment, I'm seeing one of the lost boys but at the last minute, before he slips back into the green shade under the alder trees, he turns and gives me a long, questioning look—and he doesn't look like Liam, or any of the other boys I know about. For what feels like a long time, I stare at him, trying to hold his eyes, but he's gone before I can even register in so many words that, if he looks like anyone I know, it's me. The same face I see in the mirror every morning: the same face, the same questioning look, the same doubt in his eyes, the same defiance. He looks like me. He was staring at me, and I was staring at him, and now it's as if I've been split in two, as if the whole world has split, one part of it flowing away to the harbors and cities I'd seen in my vision of a moment before, the other fixed, cold, predestined.

  A moment later, this me/not-me vanishes into the woods and, whe
n I turn to the Moth Man, I see that he is also staring at me, with a friendly, slightly questioning look on his face—questioning, but with just the hint of a smile behind it, a good smile, I think, a smile that says everything is fine. From the look on my face, I suppose, he realizes that I've seen something that bothered me and he looks off in the direction I'd been staring into a moment before. His eyes search the trees quickly, then he looks back at me, but he doesn't speak. My face is sad now, I can feel that, I can feel how my expression looks to him, and it's sad, maybe frightened, the face of someone who's been going along on what feels like some big adventure and suddenly gets scared. Like a kid on his first roller-coaster ride who realizes, too late, that he's afraid of heights. But the strange thing is, I'm not sad at all, I'm not scared, I've just fallen back into the flow of time too suddenly, after that beautiful stillness of before. I've come back too abruptly and, for a few seconds, I'm so disappointed that I want to cry.

  That's when everything changes again and the Moth Man's face suddenly lights up, like he's understood everything and he's seen what a stupid mistake I've made, only he's not judging me, he's not pointing out my error, he's seeing the funny side of it, and he's laughing, a silent, fond laugh, with me, even in my folly, because he knows that, once it dawns on me, I'll see how wrong I was to be frightened, or worried, or sad, all things being good and cause for celebration, no matter how bewildering or terrible they seem.

  The news comes on a Friday, at the end of the afternoon. This time it's Tommy O'Donnell's parents who have found their son's room empty that morning, the bed not even slept in, the boy gone. He must have disappeared sometime in the night, because Mike O'Donnell—who is Jimmy van Doren's uncle—had popped his head round the door at around ten on the Thursday night to see if everything was OK and he'd found Tommy at his desk, listening to his Walkman. He'd asked Tommy if his homework was done, and not believed the answer, but he'd not had the heart to nag. Then he'd gone to bed early, leaving his wife downstairs watching a documentary on cosmetic surgery and his only son safe in his room, happily skiving. No, there was no reason for Tommy to go out, he knew the rules about going out on his own at night and, anyway, if he wanted to go somewhere, he only had to ask and Mike would drive him there. Mike O'Donnell worked with his big brother in the landscape business, but he wasn't a partner in the firm. The general view was that, while Earl van Doren swanned around the place pretending to be one of the elite, Mike did all the real work, which meant he often came home exhausted. But that wouldn't have stopped Tommy asking for a lift somewhere, and the temptation to say no wouldn't have occurred to Mike. Everyone knew Mike O'Donnell for a good sort: hardworking, dutiful, absurdly loyal to his brother, a kind husband to a rather ungrateful wife, and a doting father—he would rather have died than deny his son anything. Now the boy was gone but, because there was no sign of forced entry at the house, or any evidence to suggest that he hadn't simply run away, we all know that this is going to be another of those cases that gets quietly buried, while the authorities, including the police, go on with the real business of promoting Brian Smith's Homeland project.

  After that, on the Monday, it's supposed to be school again, but nobody goes. It's one of the small gestures that we have available to us: on the school day after one of our kindred disappears, we wander around the town or the wastelands, stealing anything that looks valuable and breaking everything else. It is a mark of the authorities' shame that, no matter what we do, there are no repercussions. They are guilty, because they know they have failed us. We should burn down the town hall and the police house on days like this and maybe force their hands at last. But we never do. We smash windows. We steal cheap wine from the Spar shop. We go out to the plant and sit around sniffing solvent or getting pissed on the wine we've stolen, then we roll home out of our heads and sit around in all our separate bedrooms, plugged into our separate sound systems, crying our hearts out, or just sitting on a windowsill or a roof somewhere, looking at the sky. Some of us—the lonely ones, the outsiders—just go out to the plant and look for something dangerous to do, some death-defying stunt that will go unwitnessed by others, but will always be there, in the flesh, and in the spirit, a living testament to how willing we are to be done with the world.

  After his cousin disappeared, Jimmy started harping on about Andrew Rivers. Rivers lived alone in an old cottage by the poison wood; everybody said he was a child molester and some of the kids were scared of him, but to me he just looked like a sad inadequate who preferred to keep himself to himself. A smart move in the Innertown. Still, Jimmy couldn't get it out of his head that the guy had something to do with the lost boys and he would talk to the others about how somebody should do something. I was pretty sure he was wrong but I didn't think it would do any harm to let him talk. Get it out of his system. “He was always out there, mucking about in the woods,” he'd say. I didn't even bother to point out that I'd spent a fair bit of time out there too, and I'd seen Rivers in his garden, or twitching the curtains in his front room. I'd passed him right by and I'd seen him looking at me, but he'd never tried anything on. I mean, there wasn't that much to him. Maybe he was a bit of a perv, but I think he probably just liked to look. Besides, I couldn't see someone like that overpowering anybody. Certainly not anybody Liam's size. But I didn't say anything, I just let Jimmy run on. And run on he did. “That fucking pervert was probably just waiting for the right moment,” he says.

  Tone sees this as his cue. “He's a known pedophile,” he says. “He's on the sex offenders list at the cop shop and everything.”

  “Oh yeah?” I say. “Who told you that?”

  Tone gives me a dangerous look. “Everybody knows about it,” he says. “He's got stacks and stacks of gay porn in his house. He just sits there looking through sicko magazines all the time, he never goes out, he hasn't got any friends or anything.”

  “Well, Tone,” I say, “that makes him sad and lonely, but it doesn't make him dangerous.”

  That's where Jimmy jumps back in. “Same thing, sometimes,” he says. “The fucker thinks about it till he can't stand it anymore. Or there's a full moon or something. Then he goes out and grabs somebody.”

  “I can't see that bloke grabbing anybody,” I say. “I've seen more muscle on a fart.”

  Jimmy shakes his head. “He's probably got chloroform, stuff like that.”

  “What's the chloroform for?” Mickey asks.

  Jimmy gives him an impatient look. “It's an anesthetic,” he says. “You put it on a rag and hold it over somebody's mouth just for three seconds, and he's out like a light.”

  “Really?” Mickey thinks this is great. “So, is that like the stuff you get in plants?”

  Jimmy is getting annoyed now. “What the fuck are you talking about, Ernest?” he says.

  Mickey looks miffed. “Well, that's what you get in plants,” he says. “Chloroform. We did that in biology.”

  “That's chlorophyll” Jimmy says. “Chlorophyll, not chloroform. You stupid fucker.”

  Mickey doesn't say anything. He's looking hard done by, because it was a perfectly legitimate mistake, right? They sound more or less the same. Chlorophyll, chloroform—how is he supposed to keep up when they keep making it so difficult?

  “Anyway,” Jimmy says, “like I was saying. We should look into this guy. This Andrew Rivers.”

  Immediately, this sets alarm bells ringing in my head. But I have to be careful. There's a bit of the if-you're-not-with-us-then-you're-against-us going on here. Not just with Jimmy, but with the whole town. Everybody wants to do something. “What do you mean, ‘look into this guy'?” I say.

  Jimmy gives me a look, but he doesn't answer the question. Instead, he turns to Eddie, who's been sitting there all the time, not saying a word. Which doesn't necessarily mean she's been listening, either. “What do you think, Eddie?” he says.

  “What?” She grins, like she's missed the joke or something.

  “Do you think we should look into this guy Rivers, or
what?”

  Eddie thinks for a minute, all serious. She sneaks a quick look at me and I can see she has no idea what we're talking about. Finally, she nods and grins. “Absolutely,” she says.

  Jimmy purses his lips and looks around. “OK,” he says. “Eddie's in. Who else?”

  Tone doesn't miss a beat. “Deffo,” he says.

  Jimmy nods appreciatively, then turns to Mickey. “What about you, Ernest?”

  Mickey is still sulking, but he sees his chance to rejoin the pack right here. “Let's do him,” he says.

  “All right,” Jimmy says. Finally, he turns to me. He's saved me for last deliberately, of course. He's probably expecting me to wuss out. I notice Eddie's watching me closely now, too.

  “We're going to check him out, right?” I say. I want some terms of reference set, so it doesn't go pear-shaped. Which it will anyway, but I still want some terms of reference.

  “Right,” Jimmy says.

  “Ask him what he knows,” I say.

  “Ask him what he knows,” Jimmy says, his eyes fixed on mine.

  I consider it for a second, but really, there's only one way I'm going to go. It's pretty dumb, and I know it, but I'm not going to let them go without me. Not Eddie, anyway. “All right,” I say.

  Jimmy wants full confirmation, though. “You're in?” he says, his voice all quiet-but-firm.

  I look at Eddie. She's watching me hopefully, like she doesn't want me to screw up. Like some mother at the school sports watching little Herbert in the egg-and-spoon. I can't let her down. “I'm in,” I say.

  Jimmy nods. Eddie grins happily. Tone isn't sure he likes it. He'd probably prefer it if I'd wussed. I look at Mickey. He's sitting there off to Jimmy's left, still nursing hidden wounds, but he's looking at me with an odd expression on his face, as if he's just discovered a new possibility that he hadn't known was on offer. It's a scary moment, that, I have to admit.