Glister

by John Burnside

  The life insurance money had surprised him, but that sum, along with what he raised on the house, had given Brian Smith the start he needed. Three months after his parents were buried, he had given up on any idea of working for someone else and started his own business, the Homeland Peninsula Company. To this day, nobody really knows what this Homeland Peninsula Company does but, from almost the first week of trading, Smith prospered. He played the markets to begin with, he made his little pot of money into a bigger pot so that, when he received the second gift of his career—the closure of the plant—he was ready to take advantage. Nobody wanted to take on the job of cleaning up after the Consortium, but Brian Smith saw that money would have to be thrown at this particular problem. It was politics, pure and simple. Nobody out in the wider world cared about the people in the Innertown, or the environment, or the employment opportunities that might be created by attracting new investment to the eastern peninsula, but it was in all their interests to have somebody local— somebody like Brian Smith—make a good show of developing and regenerating the area with the subsidies and grants they made available. That way, they threw a little money at the problem and somebody else took on the responsibility. A fair amount of money did flow into Homeland Peninsula's accounts, not because the Consortium felt guilty or generous, but because the politicians needed to be seen to be doing something. What made Brian Smith rich wasn't Consortium money, it was public money, and the great thing about public money is that it doesn't stay public for long. Nobody checked to see if Homeland Peninsula could deliver a safer, cleaner Innertown; what mattered was that Brian Smith created the illusion of preparedness, the illusion of competence. Most important of all, he was a familiar face. He knew the problem on the ground, he had his finger on the pulse. What the people here needed was somebody they knew, somebody they could trust.

  Before long, Smith was involved, sometimes openly, sometimes discreetly, in everything that happened at the eastern end of the peninsula. Suddenly, it seemed, he had unheard-of connections to the outside world, to politicians and large commercial concerns, and he conducted business with all kinds of powerful and dubious people—yet he never left the peninsula and, mostly, he stayed in his newly acquired house in the Outertown, looking after his garden, or sitting up all night in his office, with its wide bay windows looking out over the former golf course toward the sea, making calls, reading the newspapers, surfing the Internet. He loved the Internet. It was like a great jigsaw puzzle in the ether, an abstract realm where, no matter what happened in this world, a new logic ruled, a new order was possible, and money and information flowed everywhere, to anyone who had the sense to find it. Yet in spite of his love for this abstract space, where nothing was fixed, so everything was possible, Smith also knew the value of local, real-world connections. As soon as he'd started up in business for himself, he'd started reaching out into his own community and making a mental list of the people who might prove useful. In this he was totally democratic. Nobody, however mean or low, was irrelevant to his purposes. The poor, the criminal, the rejected—nobody was without potential. It had been a drunk driver who'd got him started in business, after all. A small favor that cost him very little might be a waste of time, but it might as easily provide unexpected returns. This was the logic that had led him to adopt Jenner, a man who had proven both unquestioning in his loyalty and totally without scruple or hesitation when a tricky situation needed to be managed—and that same logic had governed his decision to take on Morrison and his sad little wife, Alice, when they had nobody else to see them through the difficult times. Alice Morrison—Alice Taylor as was—had been a pretty, slightly crazy party girl in her teens, though to look at her now, you'd never know it. It had come as a surprise to everyone when she'd married John Morrison, that dim, self-pitying doormat of a man who'd stumbled from job to job before ending up working as a security guard at one of Smith's Innertown properties, but she'd soon gone back to her former ways, drinking and running around with her old crowd while Morrison was at work, doing the usual crazy stuff that small-town girls do everywhere, when there's no future to speak of, and nobody is paying much attention. Finally, though, she'd got herself into a drunk-driving jam that would have attracted everyone's attention—and that was when Smith had stepped in. The previous town policeman, Constable Fox, had presented a temporary problem, but then he'd had that unfortunate accident with the bicycle and his people had taken him home to Strabane in a box. Meanwhile, a little bewildered by her lucky escape, Alice had gone home and stayed there, sad and alone but more or less respectable, while the party went on without her. With the town policeman's job vacant, Smith had arranged for Morrison to be appointed as Fox's successor and it had been gratifying to think that he had reached the point where he had the local policeman in his pocket, even if the potential benefits weren't immediately obvious. That was the thing about potential, it was beyond prediction. It stayed hidden until it showed itself, sometimes in the most surprising ways, according to its own logic.

  So that night, when the phone rang, and his modest outlay had borne unexpected fruit, Smith wasn't altogether surprised. Things had been going well for quite some time, but the ugly little scene that Morrison had uncovered could easily have been the spanner in the works. The last thing Smith wanted was publicity, a more professional police inquiry, the press, some kind of public investigation. There had been times, over the last year or so, when he'd considered using Morrison in some minor way, but he had always held back and kept the policeman in reserve. Now, thanks to his patience, that small investment of time and effort had come good big-time, and Smith couldn't help feeling a little surge of satisfaction as he put the phone down and turned to Jenner. “I've got something for you,” he said, sitting back in his chair.

  Jenner nodded. “All right,” he said. He was trying not to look pleased, but not quite succeeding. He did this often, because he thought business was a serious matter, and he felt it would be unseemly to let Smith know how much he enjoyed the more unsavory tasks he was given to perform. It was endearing, this slight scruple, the true mark of a man of action. Even more endearing, though, was Jenner's gravity, the way his manner made it clear that he was capable of doing anything in Smith's service. Sometimes, Smith sensed his disappointment that he hadn't been called upon to kill anyone yet—to really kill someone, with his own hands—but that disappointment, merely hinted at, was always tempered by an unspoken agreement that it was only a matter of time before they came to that point in their work together. This was a possibility that Smith not only did not discount but found just as gratifying, for reasons of his own. For now, though, however exaggerated Jenner's gravity might seem, Smith knew it had to be respected and he adopted a suitably serious look. “This is something that has to be handled discreetly” he said. God, it was a privilege, being Brian Smith. The sheer pleasure of giving a man like Jenner work he could enjoy, the absurdly cinematic quality to this talk about handling things discreetly. For one dangerous moment, he almost allowed himself a pleased, yet ironic smile—but that would have spoiled the moment for Jenner, who did, after all, so look forward to the dirty work, in whatever form it presented itself.

  MORRISON

  LATER, MORRISON TOLD HIMSELF THAT HE'D MADE A SIMPLE, ONCE-IN-A-lifetime error of judgment when he'd called Smith. But that wasn't quite true. Mistakes don't happen in a single, decisive moment, they unfold slowly through a lifetime. They grow invisibly beneath the surface, running for years in the dark like the roots of some patient fungus till something erupts at the surface, some slick, wet fruiting body full of dark spores that stream out into the wind and travel for miles, tainting everything they touch. That was how it was with Morrison: his big mistake had been in ever having anything to do with Brian Smith in the first place, but there was no way he could have avoided that. The fact was that he was bound to Smith in ways that he hadn't even begun to understand and, on what he would come to think of as that fateful night, he was only doing what Smith had expected him t
o do all along. He was following his nature.

  It was a man who picked up, but it wasn't Smith. Morrison knew Smith's voice, and this man was someone else altogether, someone who spoke in a quiet, very formal way, quite unlike Smith's hearty, almost jovial manner. Morrison did not know this person but, whoever it was, he obviously existed as a buffer between Smith and the outside world, and the policeman had had to insist a little to get put through. As he stood waiting, hearing an exchange of voices somewhere in the background but unable to make out quite what they were saying, he remembered the visit Smith had made to him, the very first night he had moved into the police house. The local boy made good had been his usual, friendly self, though Morrison knew that the bottle of whiskey he'd brought, and all the work he'd done behind the scenes, first to make Alice's problems go away and then to set Morrison up as the only possible candidate for the police job, were favors that would eventually be called in. That was how it worked and Morrison knew as much, but he also knew that beggars couldn't be choosers. If you wanted to get on in the Innertown, you had to take whatever help you could get, from whoever was ready to give it—and that was usually Brian Smith. Besides, he'd had no choice but to smile graciously, accept the whiskey— though surely Smith knew that he didn't drink, that he never touched a drop because of Alice—and in so doing, accept the invitation that went with it. Not that anything was stated in so many words. Smith didn't ask for favors, he offered them. Nevertheless, it took nothing more than a smile and friendly handshake for Morrison to know that his soul was being claimed, and there was no turning back, once he'd accepted that bottle of whiskey and returned that insinuating smile. It was, of course, no accident that Smith's gift was something Morrison could not use.

  “Call on me anytime,” Smith had said, standing in Morrison's new hallway in the police house. He had only stopped by for a moment, on his way home from a meeting. Or so he had said.

  “Thank you,” Morrison had answered, feeling dwarfed by this big man in his fancy black coat and expensive shoes. He had only been in the house two days. “Though I'm not really supposed to accept gifts—”

  “Nonsense,” Smith had said. “We're all in this together and we're going to work together to make this a better place to live. Businesses, schools, the police. We should think of each other as friends and colleagues. What better way to show friendship than to offer a small gift, of congratulations and”—he had smiled then, because he had found his former night watchman's weak spot—”respect.”

  Now, facing a crisis he could never have been expected to handle by himself, Morrison was having to beg to get through to his supposed friend and colleague. “It's an emergency,” he said. “A police matter. I can't emphasize how urgent or how important it is.”

  The man wavered a moment, then consulted with his boss. Morrison heard the voices in that warm, faraway room, and stood waiting, wondering how much more change he had. Finally Smith came on the line.

  It hadn't taken the big man long to grasp the situation. “All right,” he said. “It's good that you called me. That shows clear thinking. You just wait there, and I'll send someone.”

  “Send someone?”

  “We need to sort this out quietly,” Smith said. “God knows what will happen if it gets out. We can't let this get in the way of our larger goal. We certainly don't want the whole world coming down on us. And think of the boy's parents. They're better off thinking their son has run off to join the circus than having to hear this awful—” He thought for a moment, like a PR man finding the right copy. “This awful, awful tragedy. Wouldn't you say so, Constable?”

  Morrison didn't know what to say. There had been a trace of irony, he thought, in the way Smith had put the question. Constable. “I think,” he began. He wanted to say that “this” had to get out, that there was no other way, that there would have to be an investigation before another child was murdered. He wanted to protest, to take back the call. He wanted to scream. Instead, he stood silent, unable to say anything. He wasn't a policeman, he was an employee of Homeland Peninsula. The police uniform might just as well have been livery.

  Smith broke in quickly. “We really don't want some big investigation over this,” he said. “The people of the Innertown have had enough to deal with, and we don't want to dash their hopes for the Homeland project. That's the last thing they need.” He listened for a second, trying to judge the quality of Morrison's faraway silence. He seemed satisfied. “I think we're agreed on the best way to handle this,” he said. “You just stay there. My people will be right with you.”

  Twenty minutes later, a man whom Morrison recognized vaguely as Jenner arrived in a black van. He was dressed in a suit and tie, but he looked like a ditchdigger, with his huge hands and his flat nose. He parked the car by the telephone box and got out. “You must be Morrison,” he said. He had that air of calculated affability that let you know he didn't give a fuck about you or anybody else.

  Morrison nodded. “I really think Mr. Smith—”

  Jenner laughed. “Mr. Smith doesn't do this line of work,” he said. “That's why he's got people like us.” He looked Morrison up and down in the half-light. “Well,” he said, “people like me, anyway.”

  Morrison wasn't offended. He felt sick to his stomach by now, and he was beginning to understand what he had done. Being insulted by a navvy in a suit was the least of his problems. “Listen,” he said, “maybe we should take a step back—”

  Jenner took hold of his arm. “It's all right,” he said. “Just show me where the kid is, and I'll sort it out.”

  “But what do we tell his family?” Morrison said, trying to slip his arm free.

  Jenner tightened his grip. “We don't tell anybody anything,” he said. “Mr. Smith asked me to make it very, very clear to you that this is strictly entre nous.” He leaned closer. Morrison could smell his aftershave now, and he felt sicker than ever. “Is that very, very clear?” he asked.

  Morrison nodded. He was trying to remember what entre nous meant. “Clear,” he said finally, pulling his arm free just as the man let go.

  “Good,” Jenner said, cheerfully. “Now. Where's this body?”

  After he had been shown to the den among the trees, Jenner told Morrison that he wasn't needed anymore, and the only full-time policeman on the east peninsula walked back up to the road in a haze of exhaustion and misgivings. He didn't look back. Two days later, he had called Smith, to find out what he was supposed to do next, but Smith's secretary said he was away on business.

  “When will he be back?” Morrison asked. He knew she was lying, and he knew that she knew he knew.

  There was a moment's hesitation at the other end of the line, before the woman answered. He recognized her voice, she was a woman he had known in school, but he had to think for a few seconds before he could place her. Elaine Harris. That was it. A plain girl, with very pronounced grayish freckles on her arms and face. “He'll call you on his return,” Elaine said, her voice flat and slightly hard. By her tone, Morrison could tell she was looking to someone—probably not Smith, maybe Jenner—waiting for instructions.

  “It's quite important,” Morrison said. “It's police business.” He felt stupid as soon as he said it, as if he were making an idle threat and, at the same time, playing a role for which he wasn't quite right.

  “He will certainly call you on his return,” Elaine Harris said and, before Morrison could think of what to say next, she hung up.

  For a long time after that, Morrison had wanted to quit. His small world had fallen to pieces, and he didn't know how to put it back together again. He felt as though someone had broken into his body in the night and switched everything to its lowest setting: his blood, his heart, his nervous system—they were all just barely working, just ticking over. Every now and then, when he was alone, sitting at his desk or lying awake in the middle of the night, alone even when Alice was lying right next to him, it came to him that he would probably live like this for another thirty or forty years, then d
ie without anyone even noticing. He lost interest in work, in his garden, in Alice. She seemed to want to help but, as she kept telling him, she couldn't help if she didn't know what the problem was, and he didn't dare tell her. After a while, quietly, and with only a little bitterness, they had reached a kind of stalemate that had lasted a surprisingly long time before Alice started drinking again. Not long after that, she had the first of her little incidents, as she liked to call them.

  Meanwhile, the other boys began to disappear, one by one, at intervals of around eighteen months. The first to go was William Ash, the boy who had been with Mark that Halloween night. After that, two years passed, then Alex Slocombe vanished, quickly followed by a little Scots-Italian kid called Stewart Riva. Finally, just a few months ago, Liam Nugent had gone out for a walk and never come back, though he'd been seen with a sports bag over his shoulder, and his troubled relationship with his drunken father was a matter of record, so it was easy for Smith's people to suggest that he'd just given up and run away. With each new case, Morrison resolved to go back, to start again. He told himself he would accept his punishment for his part in the cover-up, if it would help stop this nightmare. But he hadn't made his move, and he was always aware of Smith—and Jenner—watching him from the genteel shadows of the Outertown. Gradually, by degrees that weren't quite apparent as they happened, Morrison had settled into a small, clouded, unshakable limbo. All he had left was this shrine, and even that was unofficial, a guilty man's secret. Meanwhile, he had to sit with the parents while they filled out missing persons reports, he had to lie to people about what he thought had happened to their children. William Ash. Alex Slocombe. Stewart Riva. Liam Nugent. No trace of those boys was ever found, so it was easy to say that they had simply run away, leaving a life without prospects for the bright lights and the big city. The reward for Morrison's continuing silence, if it could be called a reward, was a more or less honorary inclusion in Smith's lowest circle, not as an equal, but as a hireling, doing little jobs that Jenner brought him: smiling, ironic Jenner, who knew that all this was just a sop, a way of keeping Morrison busy and, at the same time, testing his loyalty. He knew that if he refused just one of these little jobs Smith would let Jenner loose on him, and there was no doubting where that would lead. Now, eight years later, he is in limbo, and he's thoroughly used to it. All he has is this little garden, three square feet of flowers and broken china and glass. It's something at least, so better than nothing and, late in the day, far, far too late, it's almost honorable. Morrison has always believed that, in spite of its troubles, in spite of its history, the Innertown is really just an old-fashioned town with a police house and a library, soft autumn days of leaf drifts along the high street and girls playing hockey in the fog, summer fetes and white Christmases, children growing up and having children of their own. It's a town that remembers its dead, a town where everyone remembers together, guarding the ancestors in their ancient solitude, long after they might have imagined themselves forgotten. It is, in other words, a good town, a town where people have detailed and carefully nurtured memories. Here, an elderly woman will cut flowers from her garden some weekday morning and carry them in a shopping bag to the cemetery, where she will leave them on the grave of a long-dead school friend. It is a simple act of remembrance she intends, nothing more: she will not stay long, perhaps pausing a while to pick up a few stray sweets wrappers or tidy the gravel before going home to her radio and her baking. Or a man in his middle years, a husband and father, will find himself, some damp October evening, reading the banal inscription on the grave of a girl he knew in school. He is not at all sure why he is there; somebody else would cite nostalgia, sentiment, a midlife crisis, but that's far too simple an explanation. The girl he remembers now never existed; for most of the years she spent being alive, he hardly noticed her, or perhaps it would be truer to say that she hardly noticed him—but once, on a warm summer's night at the town dance, or on some hazy winter's afternoon at the end of term, she had smiled at him, and they had gone for a walk together, or stood talking awhile in the school foyer, and he'd realized how miraculous she was. Two days later, she was dead: a tumor, a rare infection, a hole in the heart. It wasn't uncommon, in the Innertown, that such a girl might die young, but this girl had stayed alive long enough to make her mark, to take up residence in his imagination. To haunt him. Now, through her, he mourns and celebrates everything that life has denied him, all the beauty, all the magic. This is how it happens: the dead go away into their solitude, but the young dead stay with us, they color our dreams, they make us wonder about ourselves, that we should be so unlucky, or clumsy, or so downright ordinary as to carry on without them.