The Glister (6 page)

Yet more than any of those kind citizens, Morrison is an expert in mourning—though what he mourns has never been altogether clear to him. The boys, yes; but he doesn't mourn them enough to seek justice on their behalf. He mourns his marriage, especially now that he and Alice have turned from each other and, almost noiselessly, carried on with their separate, quietly desperate lives. He doesn't understand that. It might seem a cliché, now, but when they'd first met, he had known that Alice was the only woman he would ever love. She'd had that quality some people have, if not for everyone then at least for one magical other, of making existence itself feel like a promise. And she had seemed so close to begin with, as much a friend as a wife, even if they had never talked that much. Back then, they hadn't felt the need. She was there, he was there. Later, though, when he needed to be touched, coming to her in a fog of inarticulate longing—a wordless longing to be touched and, in that healing touch, forgiven for a sin he wasn't able to confess—she had just collapsed inward, like one of those sensitive plants they used to grow in school, so there was nothing there, no point of contact. She didn't even like it if he looked at her for too long, as if even that was an impossible demand he was making on her. At such times, she became clinical, almost brutally analytical. “I can't help you,” she would say, “if you won't tell me what's wrong.” As if what he wanted was
help.

Whenever she did that, whenever she crumbled in on herself like that, it made him think of that plant.
Mimosa pudica,
that was it. Pale green, slightly downy plants, with their sensitive, fingerlike leaves and perfectly engineered stems that simply folded at any contact till they were all but absent. A fingertip, the nib of a pen, even a single water drop. That was all it took to make the whole plant collapse. A single touch, and everything fell away, till all you were left with was an indifferent, infinitely patient absence. Sometimes, Morrison feels that this is what he mourns more than anything: that this is the true source of his grief. He had expected to be touched, he had thought that was what married folk did for each other: they touched. They healed each other with this simple instrument. He has never understood why Alice doesn't feel the same way. Now, he hasn't touched anyone, and nobody had touched him, for years. When Alice started having her episodes, he'd hoped this would make a difference, he'd hoped that they were finally equal, in their need if nothing else, and could start again. It was almost laughable, now, to think that he had ever been so foolish.

ALICE

I
N THE POLICE HOUSE, ALICE KEEPS HAVING THE SAME DREAM: PINK,
nerveless fish with lacy, desirous mouths are all around her face, butting and probing at her lips and eyes, eating her away, cell by cell, as she lies half naked and alone on what ought to have been her marital bed. Only it's not a dream, because she's not asleep, and she isn't altogether sure she's alone either; for the last several minutes, she's had the sense that someone is there, in the room, someone or something that feels like a child saying its prayers in some corner that she cannot find. There was a storm in the night, but she'd only been half aware of it, lying on the bed in a tight sleeve of pills and vodka. She had kept those well hidden, and for once Morrison hadn't found them—she always calls him by his surname now, even when he isn't there, even in her private, silent thoughts, because she never wants to allow her contempt to slip or dwindle. She has no intention of letting him get away with anything: not the years of indifference, or the compromises he has made with the good people of the Outertown, and not the part he has played in what she has begun to consider, in herself, an incurable illness. This is the main symptom, this slow realization, as she comes to herself and the pink fish slip back into her mind's haze, that her waking dream, and the quiet, childish voice that she can barely make out in some far angle of the house are the first signals of what she and Morrison choose to call “the shakes.” This is the word they have always used for her delirium attacks; it's Morrison's word, in fact: she remembers him using it first, and she is annoyed, still, that it stuck. Now, whenever she drinks, even a little, she is struck down by the shakes; it happens every time and she still can't get herself to stop. Normally, she has to hide the bottles of pills or booze when Morrison is at home and she takes every possible step to conceal them, even though, half the time, she is desperate to give them up, to lock herself away and, with a little help from someone or something, make some kind of honest attempt to cure the incurable.

As often as he can, Morrison stays home and watches her, probably waiting for her to say something that would allow him to help. This last night, though, he has been out till late, presumably doing something related to the storm, some minor work for which Smith and his cronies find him useful, and which he is only too happy to do. He knows it is hardest for her at night and he does what he can, even though his attention is unwelcome. These days, however, with the disappearances still unsolved—five boys gone, now, and no explanation for their sudden absence—and with so much happening in the background, he is out a fair deal on what he chooses to call police business, which means that he comes home to find her, from time to time, listening to voices in her head or staring at something that
he
knows isn't even there, and the odd thing is, she despises him for his normality, she despises the fact that he knows, without a doubt, that everything she sees and hears at such times is a hallucination. She doesn't care if he comes home and finds her unconscious, or finishing off the last of the drink on the porch at the back, where at least it's cool. She has learned to live for the passing opportunity, the lucky moment. What she does mind is how easily he dismisses those phantoms that populate her world, phantoms that, if anything, should be just as real for him. After all, they are his children too, the only children their marriage has bred.

Morrison would say the shakes are caused by the drinking and the pills, and that's that, but Alice isn't so sure. Who's to say that the shakes don't come first, in some quiet, or hidden form, driving her to do those things to herself, just to be at peace? She doesn't like passing out from drink, it's not what she ever wanted to do with her life. She remembers the time when she and Morrison first met, how sweet and thoughtful he was, and how he had his own ways about him, before he fell in with Brian Smith. At one time, he had wanted to do his job according to his own standards, he'd been determined to make a fresh start. When he wasn't working, he would do stuff in the garden, making things grow, taking a childish pleasure that he didn't even try to disguise in bringing in fresh vegetables and setting them out on the kitchen table, firm orange carrots with dark crumbs of soil still clinging to them and those bright curly leaves, radishes, turnips, lettuce, all of it a minor celebration, the man happy with his work, the produce looking good and clean and tasting fine, in spite of where it had been grown. In those days, Morrison had been an optimist, and she had wanted to love him for that. She had, in fact, wanted to love him for a long time, but she hadn't succeeded. Even before he grew distant, and fell in with Smith's people, she hadn't been able to love him. He was too meager, too commonplace. There simply hadn't been enough of him to love.

Now, she wants to go out into the world and walk away. Or not walk away so much as just
walk,
without even that much of a sense of direction. One of these days, she will take too many pills, or her body will just give out, and she will die while Morrison is out somewhere doing Brian Smith's bidding. She will die alone in her claustrophobic little police house, with nobody there to tell her goodbye; though if you took Morrison's word for it, everybody died alone because, no matter who was there when they were going, the actual departure had to be a solitary one, and the destination— whatever it might be—was one that you alone could reach. But then again, supposing it was different. What about all those stories of people who entered a brilliant circle of light and saw other bodies, other faces around them, welcoming, sweet faces, bringing them home? What if, when you died, you didn't move away into the ultimate loneliness, the ultimate separation, but instead, you returned to some other state, a state you had known before? What if death wasn't a solitary thing, after all, but a point where everyone who had ever been separated out, everyone who had wandered a lifetime, separate, but trying to connect in some way with someone or something else, returned to the shining, communal oneness from which they had all originated, tiny fragments of light and consciousness merging into the whole? She had read about such things; there were people—millions of people in Asia or some such place—who believed this. They thought there was one single mind that we were all a part of, and that we returned to it in death, to be separate no more, but to share in the one single, eternal thought that all of us had, and were. That thought was the universe, or being, or something like that. It was Buddhists, she seemed to remember, who believed this idea—Buddhists, or maybe Hindus—and they believed it as a matter of fact, the same way other people believed in gravity, or medicine. At times, the sheer mass of this belief, so many millions, almost persuaded her that it was true, and for giddy minutes she would sit wondering if any of those millions ever saw what a terrifying idea it really was.

ET IN ARCADIA

E
GO.

Still there and gone away at the same time. Here and there, lost and found, in the everlasting present.

I can't help thinking that, if you want to stay alive, you have to love something. I used to have a friend, a boy called Liam Nugent, and I think I loved him, but now he's gone, and I don't know if I love anybody. Not Dad, that's for sure. Once upon a time, yes, but not now, because he's not really
here
now. He's lying in bed, silent, far away, and it's like he's dead already. Maybe I could love Elspeth, but I can't really see it. Sometimes I don't even think I like her, but then she does something funny, or she just says something outrageous, and I think I could almost be
in love
with her, like some character in a book. Though everybody says there's a big difference between being
in love
and actual
love.
It gets difficult around about there and I don't like it when things get difficult for no good reason. Complicated, yes; I can do complicated. The world is complicated, there's all kinds of stuff going on. Some books are really complicated. But love probably isn't that complicated, it's just difficult. And maybe love is the wrong word here, anyway, at least when it comes to people. People are hard to love, even if you're having sex with them, or good, funny conversations like the ones Elspeth and I sometimes have. People are difficult, that's just how they are made.

Still, if you want to stay alive, which is hard to do in a place like this, you have to love
something,
and the one thing I love is the chemical plant. Well, that, and books. I love books. In a place like this, that's almost as weird as saying you love the plant, but at least it's more or less normal. Because you're definitely
not
normal, you're definitely
weird,
if you love the plant.

The thing is, I know everybody says it's dangerous, that it's making us all sick, that they should have razed it to the ground years ago and cleared the entire eastern peninsula instead of just leaving it to rot—and that's all true, I know that, but you still have to admit that it's beautiful. Maybe there are more obviously beautiful places in Canada or California, maybe they have gardens and parks with clear lakes and honest-to-Betsy live trees with autumn leaves and all the stuff you see on television, but we don't have those things. All we have is the plant. We're not supposed to go there and I suppose most of the kids don't, but there are plenty who do.

I don't think anybody spends as much time out there as I do, though. When the storms come, I go out and stand at the entrance to one of the old kilns, to watch the rain pouring down. Or I sit up on a ruined crane above the docks and look out over the water, to a point on the horizon that seems to belong, not just to another place, but also to a different time, the past maybe, or maybe the future, when the derelict buildings rot away and the poison in the ground, the poison nobody can see, loses its deadly power. I'm not supposed to go there—nobody is—but it doesn't scare me and it doesn't scare some of the other kids, because I see them out there sometimes, moving like shadows among the ruins, not wanting to be seen, and not wanting to see that anybody else is there with them. I imagine they go out there for the same reasons I do: because it's peaceful, and it doesn't belong to anybody, and, maybe, because it's the only beauty they know. It's odd to say that, but it really, really
is
beautiful, the way those old horror films they show on TV are beautiful, or the way Annette Crowley in 4B is beautiful, with the white scar running across her cheek and neck where her face was cut open in a car crash.

This beautiful place is called the chemical plant because that's what it once was, though now it's just hundreds of derelict buildings and a network of abandoned railway tracks running past the edge of the Innertown to what remains of the old harbor. If you were to draw a map of this end of the peninsula, you'd have the Outertown first, all mock-Elizabethan and ranch-style villas with wide, miraculously green lawns and hedges. Then there's the former golf course, conveniently situated so as to divide the good people in the nice houses from the ghosts and ruffians of the Innertown, now nothing more than a ghetto for poisoned, cast-off workers like my old man. Finally, with virtually nothing to separate it from the town, what remains is an industrial wilderness where the plant used to be. It's called the chemical plant, because it never had any other name, even the land it stands on is almost nameless, a stretch of nowhere that people sometimes call the headland, though the adults rarely talk about it and, when they do, they mostly just refer to it as
out there.
If you listen to some of the great and good around here, the whole lot comes as one unit, which they've started calling Homeland, and they've got big plans for us all, what they call a “regeneration program.” That's Brian Smith's territory, though, so nobody in the Innertown is holding his breath.

The chemical plant is always beautiful, even when it's frightening, or when you can see how sad it is, when all the little glimmers of what was here before—the woods, the firth, the beaches—show through and you realize it must have been amazing, back in the old times. Sometimes you can still get that feeling. Like when it's early on a summer's day: half-light, ruined buildings looming out of the shadows, the last owls calling to one another from hedge to hedge on the old farm road that runs past the east woods and down to the water. An hour later, and it's completely different. The farm road is straight as a rod and ash white, still ghostly at this hour, soft and uncertain, as if it hadn't quite recovered from the moonlight. The hedges are dotted with pale, brave-looking flowers. Sometimes you can see a boat in the channel, far out on the water and, sometimes, it will be a passenger boat, not the usual utility vessels that wander back and forth, bearing cargos of industrial waste or spent fuel to the lucky towns farther along the peninsula. You can't see anyone on the decks, but this boat is in good condition and it has little round porthole windows all along the side, where there might be cabins. Maybe the people are asleep down there, or sitting in cheerful little circles in the dining room, having breakfast and planning the day ahead. This end of the peninsula isn't a place they would want to see, not even for curiosity's sake. If they did look out at some point—farther along the headland, say, beyond the last of the concrete piers—they might see smoke in the east woods, thin yellowish wisps of it among the leaves like the smoke signals in old Westerns. That might be me, or some other boy from the Innertown, sitting out all night because he can't stand to listen as his father lies breathing in the next room, every breath a step away from total absence, a reason to be afraid, but also for celebration.

There are plenty of places to go out on the headland: the poison wood, the docks, the warehouses, the kilns. The old processing plants, where the smell is still so strong you can almost taste the poison you are breathing. There are places to go, and there are still places you can't get into, inner rooms within rooms that you don't know for sure where or what they are, though you know
something
is there. I like the strips of ground between one place and another, and all the places where you can go and never see anybody, the mudflat-and-oil smell of the farther edge, the old loading yards with their rusting cranes and that one crippled boat, eaten away by years of wind and salt water, deserted, of course, though I always feel that someone might be there, not a ghost, or anything of that ilk, but not a man either, or not a man from anywhere
I
know. It would have been immense once, that boat; now it's just a broken hull, the decks rusting, the lower levels a mass of rotting stairs and gangways, dangerous and unsteady under my feet, leading down to a reddish darkness, where the vast, stagnant tanks lie, heavy with salt and nickel. This was where everything led to once: the road, the train tracks, the walkways—their only purpose had been to fill huge boats like this with unimaginable quantities of poison and fertilizer and dark, oily liquors that would travel halfway around the world in the sealed hull while great oceans raged around them. When one of those anonymous-looking ships broke on rocks, or foundered in difficult waters, you can imagine all the government types and PR folks back home figuring out the angles— what lies to tell, what they think they can get away with, what they know for sure they can deny. And all the way down, in sweet water teeming with the cast of
The Blue Planet,
the ship would fall, split open like a coconut, pouring out gallon after gallon of its venomous cargo.

Sometimes I think the headland is at its most beautiful in winter, when everything you take for granted, everything you don't bother to look at during the rest of the year, all the hidden angles and recesses, the unseen pipework and fields of rubble, come back new, redefined by the snow and, at the same time, perfected, made abstract, like the world in a blueprint. Everything looks closer together and, at the same time, it's like there's more
space
than there was in autumn. When the first snow comes, you start to see new things, and you realize how much of the world is invisible, or just on the point of being seen, if you could only find the right kind of attention to pay it, like turning the dial on a radio to the right channel, the one where everything is clearer and someone is talking in a language that you understand right away, even though you know it's not the language you thought you knew. And then there's the way it's all transformed, how it all looks so innocent, as if it couldn't hurt you in a million years, all those drums of crusted and curdled effluent, all those pits with their lingering traces of poison or radiation, or whatever it is the authorities want to keep sealed up here, along with the dangerous mass of our polluted bodies. Under the snow, it all looks pure, even when a wet rust mark bleeds through, or some trace of cobalt blue or verdigris rises up through an inch of white, it's beautiful. Really, they should send an artist out here, some artist who isn't squeamish, but isn't just cutting sharks in half, either. A war artist, maybe. Because if this resembles anything, it's a war zone. But then, isn't a war zone beautiful too, if you look at it the right way?

Years ago, the railway still ran along the coast, bringing in freight cars full of raw materials at night, when the people were sleeping, so their dreams were laced with the noise of goods trains and the shifting of points, an undercurrent of shunts and whistles that continued into the daytime, reminding them that they belonged to this place, that it was in their blood and their nerves. That's what I imagine, anyway: for about as long as I have been alive, the plant has been closed—not only closed, in fact, but condemned, a government-certified zone of irreversible contamination that no one is officially supposed to enter. Not that anybody makes any great effort to keep us out, either. That would mean drawing too much attention to the place and people would start getting worked up again about what might be out there. Because, really, nobody knows what's out there. This is what makes it interesting, for me, and the others like me: for as long as I have known it, the plant has been empty and silent, a vast labyrinth of corridors and abandoned rooms, some open to the sky, others with glass or metal roofing and, above each kiln—we call them kilns, but there's no real evidence to say what they were used for—a giant chimney rises up into the clouds, a wide brick chimney that, in the wet months, fills with great cascading falls of rain, just as the glass roofs and the sheets of corrugated metal on the storerooms will break into a music that sounds repetitious when you first hear it, but soon begins to reveal itself as an infinitely complex fabric of faint overtones and distant harmonics that is never quite the same from one moment to the next. Maybe they should send a musician out here, not a painter. Turn it into music. That would be something. I can picture trendy people in warehouse apartments, people in public relations or something, sitting on their prayer mats and meditating to the sound of the rain bouncing off the corrugated roof of an old storeroom, all of it carefully sampled and filtered through a hundred synthesizers or whatever, with some Tibetan singing bowls and a dulcimer thrown in.

They don't make any huge efforts to keep people out now, but they don't really need to, do they? To begin with, we had scavengers and such, industrial beachcombers looking for something to sell, but they soon gave up. Now, nobody comes out here except a few kids, and I know that we all feel the same way when we are out on the headland by ourselves. I've stumbled upon others now and then, and I've felt something break, not just in my own mind but in theirs, too: a sense of being part of the quiet, of being outside time and, harder to put into words, and impossible to convey to someone else, a feeling of reverence for the place, whether for the clumps of wildflowers and grasses that grow amid the broken glass and rubble, or for how still it can be on a summer's afternoon—so still, it's as if nothing has ever happened, here or anywhere else. So still, it's as if no one had ever existed, and time was just about to start. Maybe it seems daft to talk about reverence, but this complex of ruined buildings and disused railways that runs as far as I can walk in any direction, whether along the coast, or inland through scrubby woodlands and fields of gorse, this apparent wasteland is all the church we have, and I know, when I meet someone out there, some boy with a kite or a box of matches, some girl I recognize from school, I know I am interrupting, not some childish game or one of those acts of supposed vandalism the adults are always complaining about. No: what I have chanced upon is a secret ceremony, a private ritual. When that happens, I can tell that the other person, this other boy or girl, is unquiet, unsettled, as if he or she has been caught out in some way: perhaps we stop and talk, exchanging a few pointless words before going on our way; more often, we exchange shy, almost guilty looks, then steal away, hurrying back to the safety of the long grass or a dank storeroom, out of the flow of time, and away from the gaze of others.