The Glister (14 page)

“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 the 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.

“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.