The Glister (20 page)

After a day or two of this, though, I couldn't stand being in the house anymore, plus we'd run out of all the basics so it was time to get out there and shop. I do like shopping. I always want to buy expensive or decadent shit, like asparagus in tins, or those tiny pots of crème brûlée or Sicilian Lemon Cheesecake, but I mostly manage to confine my choices to sensible stuff, like potatoes, rice, sausages, frozen peas, all the reliable, filling basics that we've always lived on. Give me two days of dressed crab out of a tin and Asti Spumante and I'd be a happy camper, but I'd probably be shitting bullets, or throwing up all over the garden. People like us evolved to eat steak pie, mash, sausages, chips, roast chicken, peas, tinned veg. Feed us on anything else and we are magically transformed into big, sickly babies, all burping and farting and diarrhea. So I stick to what I know. Maybe what I like. I know Dad couldn't handle anything else, though it's not as if he eats that much anyway. He likes Angel Delight. He likes chips. As he slides down the hill toward death, he's getting a second childhood in before it's too late. Good for him. He's one of the few people I can make happy, and it doesn't take any more than whisking some pastel-colored powder up with some milk.

I'm thinking about Dad as I make my way home, dragging my bags of shopping along with me, my mind wandering. It's that old don't-want-him-to-die versus merciful-release argument, and there's still plenty of mileage in that one, so I'm a bit distracted when Jimmy and his crew turn up. So distracted, in fact, that I don't even see them till Jimmy pops up in my path, in
my face,
and starts on his shtick.

“That Rivers bloke didn't rise again like you said he would,” he says.

It doesn't take more than this to wake me up. I put my shopping down to keep my hands free, then I slip one hand into my jacket, where my knife is. I've been carrying it ever since the hunting trip. All I can do now is keep my eye on Jimmy. I know, if anything's going to happen, he'll be the one who decides, so I want to see the sign. When I see it, he's the one I'm taking with me. I think he's working this out for himself too. “I didn't say he would,” I said.

“Well,” he says, “it's in the Bible, Leonard. You're the Bible expert in this gang.” I ignore that. I'm not in this gang, or any other gang. “So, what do you think went wrong, Leonard?” he says. I can see that he's thinking as he says it. He's trying to guess what I will do, if he lets things take their course. I'm not sure, because he still has his gang to back him, but I think he might be scared.

“Him not being Jesus of bloody Nazareth might be the place to start,” I say.

Jimmy smiles. He wants me to know that he genuinely thinks this is funny. I don't take my eyes off him. Eye to eye, and forget the rest of the crew. It's just me and Jimmy. Anybody makes a move and I am going to cut him up bad. “Well,” Jimmy says, his voice slow and deliberate, “maybe you should have thought of that when you killed him.”

“I didn't kill him,” I say. “We all did.”

Jimmy thinks about this for a minute. I can feel Tone getting restless, off to one side. I look for Eddie. Not that I expect anything from her. I think it scared her when I did what I did to Rivers. She's not sure of me now, and probably Jimmy has had something to say to her in the background. So she isn't doing anything, she's just watching. I think, if it came to the bit, she won't pile in with the others, but she won't try to help, either. This doesn't mean she is betraying me, though. If she isn't sure about me, I can't really blame her. More than any of them, she is one of the wild things—a bit formless, maybe, but beautiful too. All she needs is a bit more definition, a bit of focus. Anyhow, I'm hoping she knows that I'm not blaming her. I know she doesn't really know how she feels right now, but maybe later, when she has time to think, she might see that, in spite of who and where we are, I almost got to love her.

Finally, Jimmy decides. He is very deliberately not looking at my jacket pocket. “Nobody blames you for what happened,” he says. “It was just one of those things.”

“That's awfully white of you,” I say.

He laughs at that. I'd read it in a book somewhere, maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I'd thought it might come in useful. He turns to Eddie and smiles. “Sometimes he goes too far,” he says, doing Dennis Hopper out of
Apocalypse Now.
“He's always the first to admit it, afterward,” he says. He has his eyes on Eddie. She smiles. It's a touching moment, really. He's pretending to let me off for her sake. As if she really is in love with me, or something. Maybe she is, in her way, but he put her up to it in the first place, one way or another. That's the thing about people who don't know their own mind, you can leave them to the tender mercies of others and it doesn't matter. Give her a week, and she'll forget everything. Jimmy turns back to me with a sad or maybe a compassionate look on his face. “It's all right, Leonard,” he says. “We won't rat you out.”

“Jimmy!” It's Tone, missing his pound of flesh.

“Shut up, Tone,” Jimmy says. His anger looks momentarily genuine. “Can't you see Eddie's upset?”

Tone looks at me, then he looks at Eddie. He thinks for a minute, and finally the penny drops. “Aw, fuck,” he says.

Jimmy laughs. “You can say that again,” he says. “Come on, boys and girls,” he says. “Let's go kill something.”

And that is that. Jimmy turns and walks away, a sad look on his face, like I've betrayed him or something, and the others follow. First Mickey, then Tone. Finally Eddie. She looks back at me, which is nice. She gives me this silly, hapless, who-knows-what-might-have-been look, and I want to give her a big hug and say some kind of proper goodbye, but I don't.

That night I went down to the docks and climbed into one of the old cranes above the loading area. All I wanted was to sit out and look up at the stars. From up there, you could see them all, and when you looked down toward the coast, you could see where the lights twinkled and winked across the water like the lights in old movies, perfect geometric patterns that stopped for a moment, when you first looked, then started shimmering again, white and cherry red and the odd point of gold from farther away. That night, though, the weather decided to turn and, by the time I got to the top of the crane, a massive thunderstorm was breaking above me, lightning, then a crash of thunder, then lightning again—not just flashes, but the whole sky turning a livid gold over the water, everything reflected and instantaneous. It was beautiful and dangerous, and though I caught myself wondering if I was going to be fried to a crisp up there among all that metal, I couldn't have imagined coming down. Better to die like that, than from some petty ambush at the hands of Jimmy's crew, a blade stuck in my gut, maybe Eddie's blade, and me flopping around on the floor like Rivers, bleeding and cursing and weeping for myself, a lost animal, dying in the eyes of others. If you have to die, die alone, at the top of a crane, and let Nature kill you, with grace and beauty and the gorgeous cruelty of chance. Only, I didn't die; I just sat up there and watched the best light show anybody could ever see, the lightning inches away, it seemed, the thunder echoing in my bones and my muscles. It was beyond description. By the time it was over, I didn't give a fuck about anything. If I had to, I'd pick off Jimmy's people one by one, including Eddie, or I'd seek Jimmy out and cut him to ribbons in front of his own crew. I didn't care. I would have killed anybody that night, because of the storm. Because I knew, if I belonged to anything, it was to this. Not to them, but to the lightning and the thunder. To the black rain. To the cold metal. To the sky.

When I got home, there was a note from Elspeth saying I'd been a naughty boy, and she was coming round at lunchtime to chastise me. I picked it up off the mat in the hallway, and I was still reading it when I walked into the kitchen and found Dad on the floor, next to the table. He was half kneeling, half sitting, with a puzzled look on his face, as if he'd been perched happily on his chair a moment ago and didn't know why he was on the floor now. I thought, at first, that was all it was, that he'd had a fall; then, when he saw me coming in, he opened his mouth and blood came out. I had thought he was going to say something, but it wasn't words, it was blood, a great mass of it, spilling out of his mouth. Then he did the same thing again, like somebody repeating a spectacular trick, and a whole lot more spilled out. He looked even more surprised by this, then he toppled over and fell flat on the floor, on his side. More blood came out. I ran over and knelt down beside him. He had a sad look now, a look that took all the disappointments he'd ever had in a whole lifetime and brought them together in one final foregone conclusion. I put my arms around his shoulders and tried to raise him up, but I couldn't do it, even though he'd got so thin over all the years of being so ill. He was too heavy for me. A dead weight. Now his lips were moving, and he looked like he wanted to speak, but he was afraid to open his mouth again. Finally, he whispered something, but I couldn't make it out.

“What is it, Dad?” I said. Then I realized that I shouldn't be asking him to speak, I should be telling him to be still, to take it easy. “Don't try to talk, OK?” I said.

He looked confused at that, but he opened his mouth again, and this time words came out, along with an odd, seal-like cough and a spray of tiny droplets of blood that landed on my face and neck. “Time to come in, son,” he said.

“Don't talk, Dad,” I said. I didn't know what he was talking about, but he was scaring me with it.

He struggled, then, straightening his legs and trying to haul himself up, but he just skidded and sprawled on the floor like that cow you always see in the films about CJD. He couldn't get up, but he couldn't stop struggling. “Time to come in,” he said again, and he tried to get up, while I tried to keep him down, to get him into the recovery position or something, while I thought what to do. “It's getting late,” he said. Blood was bubbling out of his mouth now, and I could feel that the skin on his hands was cold, but it was the wild look on his face that frightened me more than anything. I had to get a doctor, I knew that, but I couldn't leave him like that alone. Then, after about a minute of this, he was gone, the life ebbing right out of him. Just gone. It was like when you take a bucket of water and carry it over to the sink and pour it away, all the weight just goes and you're left standing there with this sensation of emptiness and lightness. That was how it felt then. He just emptied.

“Dad,” I shouted. He couldn't be doing this. He couldn't be dying, just like that, after all this time. There had to be more to it than this. “Come on, Dad,” I said. “Come on. You can do it.” For a moment, I even believed he could, then I stopped believing that and sat quiet, cradling his shoulders. I stayed like that for a while, not long I suppose, but it could have been, I don't remember. I was away somewhere, maybe going with him some of the way on his journey, in my mind, or my spirit, or whatever, then I came back to myself and struggled to my feet, letting him slip gently onto the floor. There was nothing to him now. I could have carried him anywhere. I remember, when I came back to myself, I was trying to think how old he was, but I couldn't.

That was when I saw what he'd been doing in the kitchen, before he started bleeding. There, on the table, an old album lay open at a picture of Dad and her, some time before I was born, the two of them smiling, a bit shy, maybe, of whoever was taking the photograph, the gray of trees behind them, no place I knew, maybe a honeymoon photograph, or a picture taken when they first met, when they were happy and the future was laid out before them like a blueprint for children and money and happiness. I felt sad then, and I started to cry, because it wasn't fucking fair that it had come to this, him sitting in his old clothes, looking at pictures of his lost life. His lost love. Because he'd loved her, that was for certain, and she'd just walked out on him when he needed her most. Bitch. That was my mother there, in the picture, all smiles, posing for the camera, in a pretty summer dress and her hair all nice, just the way she looked when she left us, pretty and young, with her whole life ahead of her, beautiful, even, if you pushed it. A beautiful woman with her whole life ahead of her. I wished, then, that I knew where she was, so I could write and tell her how her husband died, still thinking of her, his lost love. His lost fucking love.