Glister

by John Burnside

  She shakes her head. “I dunno,” she says. “I forget.”

  I laugh. “Well,” I say, “it can't have been that important.” Now, this being Eddie, I don't know if there really was a message and she forgot it, or if she just made it up as an excuse to come round and see me. Either way, I'm glad she came, and I'm sorry she has to go.

  I'm lucky she did, though, because twenty minutes after I've finished sorting the room out, Elspeth turns up. And she is not happy. “Where the fuck were you?” she says, as soon as I open the door.

  I make desperate hushing signs, but she just ignores me.

  “I was waiting for you, you bastard,” she says. I'm looking to the front-room door, thinking Dad will be out any minute to find out what's going on. As if. “Did you forget, or what?” Elspeth says.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let's not argue. Dad's in there having a rest.”

  “Sounds like he's watching telly,” she says.

  “Well,” I say, “he's listening to the radio. But we should let him get some quiet.” She's giving me this totally pissed-off look, but I'm not sure it's for real now. I think she's starting to remember that I'm not that good with time, plus I've got him next door to look after. Plus—well, she likes me, doesn't she? “So,” I say, “let's go for a walk. We can talk about it, right?”

  She gives me this incredulous look. “A walk?”

  “Yeah. A walk.”

  “You want to go for a walk?”

  “What's wrong with that?”

  “I'm not going for a walk” she says. “I'm too upset to go out for a bloody walk.” She starts up the stairs, not even bothering to look back to see if I'm following. Which means, of course, that we're going to fuck. And after that, everything's negotiable. Almost before we get through the door, she turns round and starts working at my jeans. “Come on,” she says. “I'm in sore need of a good seeing-to.”

  I just stand there and let her get on with it. “You wanton hussy,” I say.

  She looks up and smiles. “That's me,” she says. Then we're on the bed, sideways, doing it in our clothes and I'm feeling a bit guilty about Dorothy Lamour's daughter, though not that guilty. Tiramisu and steak in one day. All I got wrong was the order. Then, when we've both calmed down and started taking it slower, she looks up at me and laughs. “A walk” she says. “He wants to go for a bloody walk.”

  It turns out Eddie did have a message for me, but since she'd forgotten what it was, I don't find out till the next afternoon, when Tone catches up with me outside the library.

  “Jimmy says to ask if you're ready for tonight, or what,” he says, barely concealing his distaste.

  “Why?” I say. “What's tonight?”

  Tone sneers. “I thought you'd fucking back out,” he says. “I knew you wouldn't go through with it.”

  “Ready for what?” I say.

  Tone gazes at me in awe and wonder. “I suppose you're going to tell me you didn't get the message,” he says.

  The penny drops then. “Oh,” I say. “Eddie told me she had a message for me, but she forgot it.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  I give him a look to let him know if he doesn't cut this crap I am going to break his fucking neck. He gives me the same look right back. I have to hand it to Tone, he isn't the one to play statistics. I've got height, strength, and speed over him, and he probably knows it. He just doesn't give a damn. If ever we get to the point when I have to fuck him up, it won't make any difference to him. He'll just keep coming right back till he gets something over on me. It's a fairly chilling thought. “Yeah,” I say. “Right. So just calm down and tell me the when and the where.”

  “You mean you're in?” he says.

  “I said I was, didn't I?”

  Give him his due, he does look slightly penitent then. Not much, but enough. “Ten o'clock,” he says. “At the old substation on the West Way. You know the place?”

  I nod. “I'll be there,” I say, and I can see that he believes me now. I can also see that this is going to be one big mistake from start to finish. Hammer Horror time, or some kind of sad farce. Or maybe a little of both. I ask myself what the fuck I'm doing all this for, or how I ever got involved with Jimmy and his crew in the first place, then I shake my head and turn for home, to get ready.

  RIVERS

  WHEN HE HEARS THE FIRST NOISE, ANDREW IS IN THE MIDDLE OF WRITING a letter to Patricia Franz. It's not a good noise, but he doesn't pay much attention, because this is a difficult letter, the last he will ever write to her, and he's looking for the best words to put down on the paper so she will understand why he has decided not to stay in touch. He knows all the noises in this house, and every sound that happens outside, in the garden or along the road, which is usually empty, though sometimes people walk by, on their way to pick blackberries. Though he can't imagine that anything growing around here would be good to eat. Sometimes a kid from the Innertown drifts by on his own, a nice-looking boy with dark, curly hair, and Andrew watches him go wandering along the path from behind the curtain. That one boy looks good-hearted, someone whose father could be proud of him, but they're not all like that. A lot of the boys are mean. They call him bad names and put stuff through his letter box. Dog shit. Old condoms. Fireworks.

  Sometimes, when he sees that one boy on his own, he goes out and does things in the garden, so he can look up and catch the boy's eye, all natural and easy-seeming, like it had just happened by chance. He likes to look at children, especially when they are on their own. He likes the way they get all wrapped in their own thoughts when they think nobody else is watching. They walk along with their heads down, or they stop and gaze up through the trees at something, or maybe they sing to themselves. He knows what they say about him in the town, but it's not true. He doesn't mean any harm. He just likes children, that's all. He's borrowing moments, borrowing looks and smiles and the odd word from people who are luckier than he is. He's not the kind of person to get married, or have kids of his own, not with him being so shy. Anyway, how would he ever have met anybody, when he'd had his dad to look after all those years? And even if he had met someone, who would want to live out here, on the edge of a poisoned wood? No, the truth is, he'd never even dreamed of anything like that. In fact, he doesn't think he's ever actually talked to a woman. He wouldn't know what to say.

  Still, he had hoped to make some kind of connection with Patricia Franz. Because if ever anybody needed a friend, it was her. That's why he wrote to her in the first place, to be her friend, because he'd read about what she had done. By that time, his dad couldn't see at all well, so Andrew would read out loud to him from newspapers and magazines. His dad loved magazines. Whenever he got a chance, Andrew would go out—in the early morning, say, when there was nobody about, or maybe when it was raining—to search in people's bins all across the Outertown, and he'd bring home any magazines or decent-looking papers that he found. They were clean, though; he didn't take any that were crumpled or dirty. Most of the time, in fact, they were like new. He would read stories that he thought his dad might like to hear, maybe something funny to cheer him up, but it didn't seem to make much difference toward the end. His dad was in too much pain. Which is a funny thing to say, when you think about it, because if there can be such a thing as too much pain, that means there could be just enough, or too little. But then, when you think again, maybe that's exactly right. Maybe you can have too little pain. Maybe you can be condemned to have just enough.

  The stories he liked best were the spectacular murders, whole families killed in their beds or on their living-room floor, rooms of blood and silence in the spooky police photos they sometimes printed. That was what started him thinking about Patricia Franz. He read about her in a long article with lots of pictures—the killer, the victims, before and after, the detectives— and even though what they said about her was horrible, he knew it wasn't the whole story. He could see in her face that she wasn't all evil. He studied those pictures a long time. Some of the dead people on the flo
or of their living room, a collection of knives and guns that were used in the various killings, and then, larger than the others, two images of Patricia: one, as an eighteen-year-old with long dark hair and a pretty face, the kind of picture they usually say was taken “in happier days,” and another as she looked after she was arrested, in her orange overalls and her hair cut short. Those court pictures are never very flattering, of course, because the person is being portrayed to the world as a brutal criminal, and they are probably upset and angry. Even in that picture, though, there was something innocent about her. She had the look of a little girl thinking about something else to make all this ugliness go away, or maybe just trying to work something out. Andrew thought she had a good face, in some ways. It seems now that he was wrong, but at the time he thought somebody ought to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  Not that he didn't understand that what she did was wrong. It was a terrible crime, one of the worst mass killings by a woman in history. Patricia killed seven people: three men, four women. One of the women was just a girl of fourteen. She murdered the first three in one house—it was her uncle and his second wife, along with her stepcousin—then she drove four miles to another house and killed the others. At the trial, she said her uncle had abused her as a child, but they didn't believe her. She didn't offer any reasons why she killed the second family. According to most witnesses, she hardly even knew them. In one interview, she said she was prone to fits of confusion and helpless fear, so that, even though other people seemed to think she was functioning normally, she barely even knew what she was doing. She called these fits her “clouds;” when she was in one of her clouds, she started drinking, and doing crazy things, but nobody seemed to notice until she did something really terrible, like killing people. Andrew thinks she intended that as a joke. As soon as she started talking about clouds, though, the prosecution took it as the first step in an insanity defense and brought in experts to say there was nothing wrong with her mentally. Which meant that they thought it was a perfectly normal, sane act, to kill seven people before tea -time.

  She didn't reply to his first letter, or the one after that, but he wasn't surprised. She probably decided he was just some weirdo with a thing for murderers. Or maybe she thought he was a journalist trying to get an angle on her. By the time he wrote to her, the press had made her into a monster. They said she was cold and calculating, but Andrew told her that he had seen the good in her face, and he wanted her to know that somebody, somewhere in the world, was on her side. He was quite proud of those letters. He showed the first few to Dad, but he wasn't that interested. It might have been more interesting for the old man if Patricia had replied, but she never did. Andrew kept trying, though. He imagined she would take her time to work out if he was genuine, and then she would write back. When she did, she would be really friendly and kind, not saying that much really, but apologizing for taking so long to reply and explaining what had been going on with the case. She would also thank him for the birthday card he had sent her, or she would say some of the things she wanted people to understand about her, maybe ask him to help her tell her real story. She would want people to know that she wasn't cold, like the papers said, she was a person with feelings like everybody else. In her long interview with the first journalist, the one she probably trusted because he was going to tell the story from her point of view, she said she only killed those people because they had abused her. That's not what the guy said in the newspaper, though. He spoke to Patricia and then he spoke to other people, and he decided that she did it for money. Patricia Franz denounced him after that, but it was too late.

  Andrew was disappointed that she wasn't replying to the letters, but he kept on writing. That was his life for over a year: looking after Dad, and writing to Patricia Franz when he got some time for himself. He had to give the old man his painkillers, and try to get him to eat; he had to clean up after him and tidy the house, so it was a busy time, but whenever he had a free moment, he wrote a letter or sent a card. But Patricia still didn't reply, not to any of them. He didn't even know if she had read any of the things he wrote. So, after a while, he got a little annoyed. He wanted her to know what an effort it was, to keep the faith, and to go on writing to her, when there was no dialogue, it was all just one-sided. Of course, when his dad died, Andrew had a lot of stuff to arrange, and he was never very good at that kind of thing. It was hard, and he thought he could use a friend, too, but she was all tied up with her appeal, and she didn't have time for him. They've put back her execution date three times so far, but she's still going to die, unless she can get her sentence commuted. Andrew doesn't really understand these things, though—and Patricia is on record as saying that she doesn't care that much about dying. She says that she got used to the idea long ago. The only thing that makes her mad is that she will die from being poisoned, when she would rather be shot. To be poisoned is so disgusting, she says. That was the word she used to journalists, when she talked about her own death. Disgusting.

  People drive by here, though not usually at night, and when he first notices the noise, he's surprised to see that it's already dark. He looks up, he notices the blackness outside, and he should be working out that something bad is going to happen. He should be registering, but he's not, he's all caught up in the constant whirring of self. This noise isn't a car, as it happens. He's not sure what it is and he doesn't really focus, because he's distracted, thinking about Patricia. He wants to tell her that he isn't going to write anymore, and it's a hard thing to say. He doesn't want to add to her problems. He's sitting in the dining room, with all Dad's decorations around, the wall of cuttings and photographs and stamps off old letters that the old man kept for years, to make this room, what he used to call his study. This used to be his favorite room and now it's Andrew's favorite room, because the two of them spent so much time together here, reading books and doing puzzles, or watching television. His dad had made the room by himself at first, pasting pictures onto the walls, images he'd found in magazines, or scraps from soap or jam labels, stamps, anything he could lay his hands on, really. After a while, though, Andrew had started helping him. They'd made books, too. They would build them over days, or weeks sometimes, from cuttings and stamps, then they would write or draw in them, little mottoes and sayings they had found. When his dad became too ill to continue, he moved upstairs permanently, but Andrew kept the room going and he would tell his dad about it sometimes. For a while the old man took a real interest; eventually, though, he couldn't remember anything, and his mind started to wander. He liked to sleep, and that was about it. But Andrew kept alive the man he really was, in his mind and in the room, and even in his letters to Patricia, mentioning him from time to time and putting in little reminiscences and facts about his life.

  His dad was self-taught. He probably could have been very clever, if he'd had the opportunity. So, when Andrew didn't want to go to school, his father had decided to teach him at home. The only thing he knew about was logic, but he said that was enough. All that really mattered was to be able to think for yourself and make the right connections between one thing and another. Knowledge wasn't about facts, his dad said. It wasn't about things. It was about the relationships between the things. It was about systems. They didn't have textbooks, or anything like that, but there was one big book that his dad had built up over the years, a huge scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, some of them faded to yellow, some almost ghostly white and fragile as a moth's wings. Every time they opened up that book, it was like opening the door to another room, a lighted space whose orderliness had acquired an almost living form, the logical fauna of some distant, yet still perceptible world. Andrew trusted that world more than anything else he had ever seen, even though he knew it was a kind of dream.

  The rest of his education came from television and films. His dad told him what to watch at first, mostly documentaries and old films, films in a slightly milky black-and-white, films that looked so much like memories that, eventually, it s
eemed that they really did belong to his own past. For instance, he remembers Fred Astaire in a car, driving on a beach at the end of history, maybe the last man alive in the whole world. Farther along the coast, the people are gone; all that remains are faint palm prints of water and oil on a kitchen window, or the singed pages of a school Bible, or maybe just the moon peering in at the door of an abandoned cabin, finding a lamplit room, a deck of cards, and the remains of something that might once have danced, in a top hat and tie, to the music of some old Hollywood film. Andrew loved to watch old films on television, to see the real people who only exist in celluloid. They are the only ones who are free, because in their world, time does not apply, you can do what you like with it. He liked watching other programs too, but for the opposite reason: there it was all about time, because time is fast and relentless on television, nobody can stop it or slow it down. It's always there, threatening. The best thing, though, is when you see a woman with a torch, going through a building and either she's going to find something terrible, like a dead body, or someone is waiting for her there, in the darkness. He loves watching a woman walking slowly through a building at night with her torch panning across the unknown darkness, Agent Scully in a warehouse, looking for a suspect with superhuman powers, Catherine Willows in a suburban mansion or a sorority house, finding one body after another as she works her way through the building.

  Now, sitting in the room, with his letter almost finished, he hears a new sound, closer this time, and he knows for sure it's a bad sound, but it's too late because whoever is there is already inside the house. He can hear them: there's definitely more than one, maybe four or five, and they are gathering just outside the door. And they are there, and he can't believe that he didn't register the danger, because he always hears everything, inside and outside. He can't sleep for it, sometimes. He hears owls moving in the trees, he hears a sound and goes straight out to it in his mind, so he can tell, without even seeing, that it's a fox, or a deer, or one of the feral cats that live out on the headland, coming through the bushes at the edge of the garden. So it comes as a shock when he reckons how close this danger has come without his knowing. A shock, yes; but more of a shock when he sees them coming into the room where he has been alone for so long. They are not cautious, like burglars. No, they are confident, casual, strolling into the room like it was their own house: three boys, then a girl with spiky dark hair, four of them—no, four at first, but then another comes, hanging back a little, looking like he doesn't really want to be here. He's in the shadow of the others at first, but then Andrew realizes that it's the boy he's seen before, the boy with the curly black hair who comes along the path sometimes, on his way to God knows where.