Translation: Don't go waking the bastard up till I'm long gone, I don't want him coming after me and making some big scene. Which, as it happens, is exactly what I didn't want either. I didn't want him humiliated, maybe on the street or somewhere else in front of a lot of people. Not by this selfish bitch. She didn't even close the front door behind her, she just walked off down the path and that was it. Haven't seen her since.
Thing is, when I think about it, I remember how she looked standing in that doorway, and I remember that she was pretty. Prettier than she had looked in a long time. She had lipstick on, and she was wearing that nice winter coat that made me think of Ewa Krzyzewska in Ashes and Diamonds. Plus, she had done her hair up, and she looked fucking amazing. At that moment, I had to admit, she was something special. A young woman with the rest of her life ahead of her. If she hadn't been my mother, I would definitely have fancied her. But she was my mother, and there she was going out the door, and I knew I'd never see her again. And all I could think of was how pretty she was, no matter what a hard bitch she was being. I didn't say anything to her when she was going. I didn't want her to think I was accepting anything. As the door closed, I was starting to pack things up in my mind and move on. You have to move on. After a minute, I stood up and went over to the sink. There was a little stack of dishes on the draining board and an ashtray, with one lipstick-smeared stub in it. She must have forgotten to wash that up before she packed. And I was standing there, staring at the little pile of ashes and the red of the lipstick, and the words of some old song came into my head. I don't know where I'd heard it.
Laura is the face in the misty light,
Footsteps that you hear down the hall …
That was her name. Laura. I fucking hated her.
After a while, I went upstairs and looked in on Dad. He was sleeping like a baby and I was about to leave him to it when I saw the envelope on the dressing table. Very quietly, my mind on tiptoe, I walked over and retrieved it. I wasn't sure what I intended to do, but I wanted to see what it said before I let him see it. I went downstairs, closing the door behind me so he could sleep in peace. When I got back to the kitchen, I opened it as carefully as I could. I could easily put it back in another envelope, I thought, before he woke up. But when I read what it said, I couldn't help myself, I just tore the stupid thing into small pieces. What it said was: Gone away, can't say where. I'll send somebody for my things. That was all she said. Two sorry little sentences. She couldn't even do him the courtesy of a paragraph.
They say I was a quick birth, that it was all over before they even got old Laura as far as the maternity unit. I'm not surprised really. Once it figured out whose belly it was in, my little infant brain probably decided to get the hell out of there and try its luck in the wild cold world. Trouble is, the wild cold world is mostly two things I'm not very good at, which is other kids and school. I mean, I don't mind other kids that much, it's just that the politics is so fucking boring. X is friends with Y, but he doesn't like Z, and Z is Y's mate. Cathy wants to go out with Tommy but he wants to go out with Kerry, who is Cathy's best friend. Meanwhile, Kerry wants to go out with him, but she doesn't want to hurt Cathy's feelings. God knows why anybody would want to go out with Tommy in the first place, because he's as thick as two short planks, but there you go, that's kids for you. Little adults, all hurt feelings and consideration. Then, suddenly, they all go crazy for a while, everybody fucks or fights everybody else and, before you know it, you've got history with all kinds of people you wouldn't even give the time of day if you could avoid it.
That's my view, anyway. But then, I'm not that keen on kids. Mr. O'Brien told me once that I was misanthropic, and the other kids in the class all laughed, though I can't imagine any of those fuckers even knew what it meant. I can't remember why he said it, what I'd said or done to provoke such an outburst on his part. Usually he was so positive, all JOY OF DISCOVERY and AMAZING FACTS and ISN'T NATURE BLOODY WONDERFUL. Ironically enough, if there was any kid in that class who could have agreed with him on all that, it would have been me. Up to a point, anyway.
“You're a nasty little misanthrope, Wilson,” he said, standing over me, gazing into my face with a sudden and surprising air of loathing. I was quite taken aback. “Do you know what a misanthrope is, Wilson?” That was something he did, he always used our names. At the end of the sentence when he was asking a question, at the beginning if he wanted you to stop doing something. He was a big man, very tall, with lank grayish hair and a long, thoughtful-looking face, like a Swedish actor. Think Max von Sydow as the Knight in The Seventh Seal. All he needed was the accent.
I nodded. “Misanthrope,” I said. “Somebody who, for good reason, doesn't think much of the human race. Also a play by Molière, the French dramatist.”
Mr. O'Brien snorted. “Which you, of course, have read,” he said.
I did smug for him. “As a matter of fact,” I said “I have.”
“Well,” he said. “We're very clever today, aren't we, Wilson?”
“I'm very clever every day,” I said. Some of the other kids laughed. I could see Liam out of the corner of my eye, shaking his head and making cut-throat signs with his finger.
“Are you now?” O'Brien said. “Well, if you're so clever, Wilson, perhaps you could write me a nice long essay about—let me see … ‘Great Philanthropists of History' How does that strike you as a title, Wilson? I think it has a certain ring to it.”
“All right, then,” I said. I picked up my pen.
O'Brien laughed a sad, dry laugh. “Oh no,” he said. “Not on my time. I have the education of your highly advanced little brain to attend to.” He smiled graciously. “Give it to me tomorrow,” he said. “You've got till lunch -time.”
He looked around. “Do any of you know what a philanthropist is? Cunningham?” He walked over to the smallest boy in the class and stood towering over him. You find that with teachers: as soon as they have a run-in with somebody, they go straight to the weakest cub in the pack. It's how they restore order. Just like hyenas.
Cunningham looked up at him hopefully. “Is it a stamp collector, sir?” he said.
I didn't know what to write at first, for O'Brien's essay. I didn't want to do it the way he wanted me to do it, writing shit about Andrew Carnegie and stuff. I wanted to do what I needed to do, so I wouldn't get any more extra assignments, but I had to work in something else, too. Something oblique. Then I remembered this old story about three brothers. Or maybe it was seven. How, one after another, the eldest first, they leave home and go out into the world, to travel the gorse-scented roads in search of fortune and fame, or to perform some task, to find a horse that can run faster than the wind, or a bird with feathers of gold. The older brothers are strong and confident but, in the end, they fail the test. Perhaps they come close, perhaps they catch the bird, or they find out that the horse is concealed in some far valley where nobody goes, but each has a fatal flaw, not a vice so much as a failure of attention, a tendency to be pulled off course by the noise and warmth of a busy tavern, or the smile of a pretty girl. Only the youngest comes through. He is smaller and weaker than his brothers, but he is clever and modest and he is wise enough to know that good fortune comes from the least promising encounters. He understands that, when you meet a talking animal, you had better listen to what you are being told. He knows how to pass the door of a tavern and not be drawn in; he knows how to flirt with a pretty girl, then move on unscathed. At the end of the story, he captures the golden bird and he gets to keep the magic horse; sometimes he even marries the princess—and because of the cunning he has shown, and his readiness to accept the good luck that the world offers to those who come ready to accept it, he gets to help his wayward brothers. He drags one from some vile tavern, the other from the King's prison, he settles debts and pacifies wronged fathers and, at the last, he brings his brothers home to share in his happiness. Which does not please them in the slightest. They feel humiliated, they want to steal away the princess, the
y wonder why the pipsqueak of the family got all the luck. Maybe they try to betray him, but they do not succeed, and he forgives them even this sin, as he forgave all the others. It's the one thing he can do by himself, this forgiveness. Everything else was a gift: he was born small, and cunning, and modest, and all he did, as he traveled through the same adventures that ruined his brothers, was to follow his own nature. Except for the forgiveness, nothing really came from him. It was grace, pure and simple. A grace that, for one reason or another, his brothers never got to share.
So that's what I write about. Grace. Then I put in some stuff about the Innertown and its problems and how the self-appointed philanthropists in the Outertown aren't doing much to help us. I tell how the people who live here are trapped, how they can't imagine any other life. I give a little history of the place: how, two generations ago, there was almost nothing here, just a couple of farms and some cottages along the shore. How most of the people who live here are the children, or at most the grandchildren of people who came from somewhere else. I say how it's a fairly young community, how, for example, Constable Morrison is only the fourth policeman to live in the police house, full time at least. We should be connected in all kinds of ways to the outside world, and yet we're not. The Innertown is a young settlement that grew old before its time, old and tired, the people bound to this soil, not by work or family or some more general fondness for the light or the weather, but by inertia. I even chuck in a bit of mystical stuff, about how it sometimes feels as if the headland has some kind of hidden power, drawing people in for no real reason and holding them there for what seems like an eternity. By the time I've done with it, the Innertown is starting to sound like hell. Still, it's not a bad essay and it says something, I think. Not about philanthropists, of course, because I don't believe in any of that crap. Guys like that, the ones who spend their whole time getting rich, they don't love other people. For them it's all tax deductions and PR. Still, whatever the essay might have said, however faulty its logic, O'Brien never got back to me about it. When I handed it in, he took it and said some mealy-mouthed stuff about me learning a lesson, though I'm not sure what lesson he wanted me to learn. He didn't mark the essay and give it back to me. In fact, he didn't say anything more about it. I wonder if he even read it. Not that I care, I'm just curious. It would say a lot about a teacher, if he could make you write something like that and then just chuck it in a bin, because he'd only set it as a punishment for cheek, or whatever. Like he threw out a challenge that he couldn't be bothered to live up to himself. Like he was a fucking wanker to be frank, and all that JOY OF DISCOVERY stuff was just plain bullshit. Something like that, it could make a kid cynical for life. Didn't bother me, though. After all, I'd kept my side of the bargain.
The one thing you can count on kids to do is talk. Round here, they talk about all the usual shit, but they also talk about what is happening to the boys who disappear, and speculate as to where they are. The boys get all sensitive, and the girls put on sentimental voices for the lost boys. Or they argue constantly about how to get away from this poisoned little town. It's the same argument Liam and I always had before he disappeared: he would tell me various plans he'd made for us getting out into the big wide world and making our way, but I would just shake my head and laugh, while he went on, making up more and more incredible stories about the possibilities the outside world might offer, if only we would dare to go and find out. To be honest, those stories of his made me feel a bit desperate: I couldn't understand how he could believe in stuff like that, all that stupid naïve crap, like the stuff you get on TV.
“We can't go anywhere,” I would say. “Not without money.”
“We could get money,” he would say.
“How could we do that?”
“We could ask people to help us,” he would say. “Like those sponsored bike rides. They could sponsor us to see how far we'd get.” He thought about this for a moment and decided he liked the idea. “Yeah,” he said. “A sponsored escape. We could go around door to door, put up posters, the whole shit.” He marqueed his hands. “Sponsor a new life,” he said. “Send these boys out into the world and watch them prosper.”
I encouraged him. “Make the impossible possible,” I said.
“Make the possible impossible,” he said.
“Make the probable unlikely,” I said.
He did a double take. “What the hell does that mean?” he said.
“Damned if I know,” I said. “Anyway, you don't get the sponsor money till afterward. You have to do the bike ride first, that's how it works. First you do, then they pay.”
“Well, that wouldn't work,” he said. “Couldn't we do it the other way round?”
“It wouldn't be proper sponsoring then,” I say. “How would people know you were going to do what they were sponsoring you to do?”
“Why wouldn't we?” he said. “Why else would we want the money?”
“They don't know that, though.” I looked at him. He seemed genuinely frustrated, like the idea had been some kind of a go before, and now I was ruining it. “They don't know that, do they?” I said.
He was quiet for a minute, then he shook his head. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I look at you in awe and wonder.” That was a quote from a film we'd seen on TV. And the Band Played On. It was just this little piece of badinage that runs through the film, between the Centers for Disease Control guys, played by Matthew Modine and one of my favorite actors, Saul Rubinek. Liam and I had sort of adopted it. Usually it was funny, but this time it felt a bit sad. A couple of weeks later, he was gone.
What I felt, when he disappeared, was grief. But it didn't start with him going, it started long before that, maybe on that day, or during some other conversation we had about getting out. After he disappeared, I wanted people to do something, to make something visible, to say something that wasn't already scripted. At the same time, though, I couldn't stand all that public stuff. Because the public stuff isn't grief, and it doesn't help anybody. It isn't grief, it isn't anger, it's just going through the motions, doing all the stuff that you think you're supposed to do. Anger might have given rise to something, it might have made a difference, but this was all uncertainty and constant second-guessing, that feeling you have that it's probably somebody you pass on the street who is doing these bad things, some pervert maybe, who just looks like a saddo, or maybe like an ordinary guy, maybe one of the Outertown people, somebody with a wife and kids and a big car and an office somewhere. Brian Smith, maybe. Because you have to ask yourself how a creep like that operates. Anybody who gets away with the kind of crap he's gotten away with for so long either has to be very clever, or he's got some kind of power. That's how the world works. The bad people win and the rest pretend that they haven't noticed what's going on, to save face. It's hard to admit that you're powerless, but you have to get used to the idea. That's why they have school, of course. It's there to train you in the vital discipline of being powerless.
Of course, the opposite of school is books. Me, I love books, but I can't afford to buy them. Nobody round here can, except maybe the business people over in the Outertown. But then, the Outertown kids all go to college somewhere, and they probably don't read anyway. I heard Suzie What's-her-name is doing Business Studies now, whatever that is, and little Steven Fuckface whose dad has the nice midnight-blue Mercedes is away at some fancy school where they dress up in funny clothes and toast muffins all day. I don't imagine it involves much reading in either case. It's so typical of how the world works: the people who love books, or whatever, can't afford to buy them, while the people with tons of cash do Business Studies, so they can get more money and keep the book readers powerless. All us poor folks have is the public library. Though I keep seeing in the papers that Brian Smith and the other bigwigs gave loads of money, tax-deductible, for that, so I suppose that trickle-down crap works after all. I mean, hardly a day goes by when I don't thank my luckies that the Brian Smiths of this world have enough money to sp
are to maintain the public library in the Innertown. Hardly a day goes by when people don't ask themselves how the Brian Smiths of this world got all that hard-earned in the first place, but there's a whole ecology of cash flow and accounting to ensure we don't work that out. And to keep us sweet, they build libraries and sponsor charities.
So they built a new public library, right next to the old snooker hall— and a very fine building it is, by Innertown standards. I imagine they even bought some new books but, for a long time, I didn't see them. Most of the books in the library are crap, romances and thrillers and cowboy stuff, because that's what the people of the Innertown like, right, moronic books about cowboys and nurses and spies that are all scuffed and old. What new ones they have are even worse: fucking self-help books and novels about rich people having mad passionate affairs with their tennis coach and shit, books about home improvements—really useful to us Innertown folk, what with all our disposable income—and folkloric hemstitching or whatever. How to make a patchwork quilt from leftover sweaters. Novels by former politicians who were never that good as politicians, or television celebrities who need a sideline to pay for their alimony settlements. Cookery books by ex–rugby stars and models, books about Pilates by former soap actors, books about traveling around France or Bolivia on a donkey or a motorcycle, books about plastic surgery, books about how you ended up hating yourself and why you should love yourself in case you, like the celebrity author, develop a cocaine habit and a seven-figure debt. These are the books we have in the Innertown library, mostly, because this is what morons like us like to read. This is what we need to know. How some celebrity did ten years of barbiturates and vodka, then saw the light. How some fucking millionaire made his money. How some government minister fought his way out of the inner city so he could take bribes with the best of them.
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