Glister

by John Burnside

  Because, looking at Mickey, sitting there in the half-light with that weird expression on his face, I have an overwhelming sense that something very bad is about to happen. And I'm totally signing up for it, right on the dotted line, though I have no idea why. Once I am in, though, I know there can be no turning back.

  The next day, when I see Elspeth, I'm in a bad mood. We don't go back to my place, because some professional type is round there, doing stuff around the place for Dad, some nurse-cum-home-help type. He gets that off the social, or somebody, because of his condition. So we can't go back there, and we can't go to Elspeth's for the same reason we never can, which is that her parents are there, and she fucking hates her parents. Plus they watch her like a hawk, and they'd know right away what we're getting up to. So we go out to the plant, but it's raining and it's wet everywhere, so we just sit in a corner in one of the storerooms, where there's an old table and some crates. It's dry in this corner, more or less, but rain is dripping through a hole in the roof on the far side, and it's not that warm. I just sit there, moping, not even trying to get anything going.

  “So what the hell's wrong with you?” she says.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Oh, right,” she says. “Doesn't look like nothing.”

  “I'm tired,” I say. “I had to get the house all tidied up for Jenny or whatever her name is coming round.”

  She comes over to me then and leans against me. “Tired? Lacking in energy? Can't seem to concentrate?” she says in this voice-over tone.

  I nod.

  “Need a pick-me-up?” she asks.

  “Probably,” I say.

  She steps back and gives me a wounded look. “Well, don't put yourself out,” she says.

  I don't say anything. I do need a pick-me-up, but I'm not in the mood for her brand of pick-me-up. What I want is something more—I don't know. Personal. Like the other day, when I was talking to Eddie, just talking and mucking about.

  Elspeth isn't a quitter, though, I'll give her that. She waits a moment for her point to register, then she leans back in and puts her hand up my sweatshirt. It feels cold, which is nice, actually. She moves her hand in slow strokes over my chest and then slides it down to my belly. Then she leans in closer and starts nibbling on my ear. I have to give it to her, she has a very special gift. A talent. She sticks her tongue in my ear, then she draws back a little. “Resistance is futile,” she whispers, then she bites me, very gently, in the softest part of my neck.

  So we end up on the floor, getting all dusty and damp, fucking like bunnies. It's pretty amazing, because it always is with her, no matter how unpromising the venue, but afterward, when we stop and roll just that little bit apart, I feel like she's miles away and it all feels stupid and pointless. I sit up then, and start doing up my belt.

  “Where you going?” she says. “I'm not finished with you, sonny.”

  “I'm not going anywhere,” I say.

  She sits up too. She's about to speak again, some saucy and smart remark no doubt, but she gets distracted by something she's seen over on the far side of the room. I follow her look and I see it too: it's some kind of animal, lying on the floor, barely moving, though even from here we can see it breathing, or maybe not breathing so much as gasping for breath. “Fuck,” she says. “I got a fright there.”

  I pick myself up and go over to where the thing is lying. It's quite big, but I don't know what it is. I've never seen anything like it before. It's about the size of a small dog, with a piggy-looking head and big, staring eyes. It's obviously in a bad way because, even when I get close, it doesn't do anything. It just lies there, staring at me and panting.

  “What's wrong with it?” Elspeth asks. She is up now too, but she's standing a little way off. “Is it sick?”

  “Worse than that,” I say. “I think it's dying.”

  She gives an odd little shout then, and turns away. “Oh shit,” she says. Then she turns back, her hands half covering her face. “Leonard,” she says. She hardly ever says my name. In fact maybe this is the first time she's ever said it in earnest. “You've got to do something.”

  “What?” I say. “I can't help it. I'm not a vet.”

  “Put it out of its misery,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “‘Cause it's suffering,” she says.

  “How do you know?” I say. I know how ungracious I'm being, but the idea of killing something just because it happens to be dying in Elspeth's general vicinity strikes me as wrong. The animal isn't wailing, or screaming in agony, it's just lying there, trying to breathe. Maybe it's saying goodbye to the air. Maybe it's making its peace with the god of its small world. I have no idea what it's thinking, but I have no intention of killing it just because Elspeth is feeling squeamish.

  “Come on, Leonard,” she says. “Do something.”

  I shake my head. “No,” I say.

  She shivers. “Christ!” she says. “It was probably lying there all the time we were fucking.”

  “Probably,” I say.

  “You bastard,” she says. She's really upset about this now.

  “Probably,” I say. I'm just being stupid, I know that. And this is just an excuse. I know that too.

  Anyhow, that's it for Elspeth. She starts straightening her clothes out. “If you don't do something, right now, I'm going,” she says.

  “OK,” I say. I'm watching this animal and trying to figure out what it is. It's not a native species, that's for sure. Maybe an escapee from some wanker's private zoo. You hear about that, sometimes: some jerk gets together a whole collection of exotic wildlife, then he forgets to lock up one night and the countryside is overrun with boa constrictors or bobcats. Maybe that's what's happened here. At the same time, while I'm trying to figure it out, I'm also trying to send out an aura of compassion and concern, because I don't want the thing to be scared. It will be better when Elspeth goes. Right now, she's just scaring it.

  “That's it,” she says. She storms toward the door, giving the dying creature the widest possible berth. “By the way, Leonard Wilson. You're chucked.”

  I don't say anything. I don't really care right now. I just stand there, a few feet away now, while the animal slowly dies. And I know it's probably fanciful to say this, but I think, toward the end, it knew that I didn't mean it any harm. I think it knew that I was a friend, and I think it might have been glad I was there, to keep it company in those last minutes. Because there is something about its eyes, a kindness, a softness, that I think I understand. It's like a person's face when they smile: the way you know it's a real smile is by the eyes. Not that this animal was smiling, but it had that look in its eyes. The look that makes a smile genuine in a person. Only it's an animal, and it can't smile. Or maybe what I mean is, whatever this animal does to smile is something that I could never recognize, because the only kind of smile I know is a human smile.

  Afterward, when I know for sure it's dead, I go out. I'm expecting Elspeth to be long gone by now, but she's not. She's standing out by a patch of willow herb about ten yards away. I go over to her and she gives me a slightly tearful look. “Is it all right?” she says.

  “It's dead,” I say.

  She starts to cry, then. For a moment, I think she's going to walk out on me again, but she doesn't. She throws herself against me, and just cries on my chest, waiting to be held. It's like the young Elizabeth Taylor in one of those movies where you can't believe how beautiful she is, even at that part in the movie when her horse has just died, and she goes to some man and her body language silently says, “Hold me.” So I hold her. Not Elizabeth Taylor, of course. I should be so lucky. Young Elizabeth Taylor is gone now and, as they say, they don't make ‘em like that anymore. So I suppose nobody's ever going to be that lucky again.

  I was trying to find a way of getting Eddie away from the rest of the crew. It was all going fine with her, but I didn't want to take it any further with the others watching. That might be exactly what Jimmy is waiting for. Then, a few d
ays after the animal-in-the-storeroom incident, I receive a gift.

  Sometimes that happens. The world just turns around and gives you a gift, and the only thing to do is accept it. Not that gifts don't sometimes have consequences you could have done without.

  I'm sitting in the front room with Dad. He is stony silent as per, sitting in the chair by the fireplace staring at a fashion magazine he's found somewhere. It's a really old magazine with those washed-out pictures that look like they've been left out in the rain. I have no idea where he found it. That's what he does, he goes around the house looking for stuff that reminds him of the old days. That face in the misty light and all. It's not healthy. I just wish he would forget about the so-say beautiful past and make the best of what's left to him.

  He's so absorbed in reminiscing, he doesn't even look up when the doorbell rings. I look at him. “Somebody at the door, Dad,” I say, but he still doesn't look up. I wait a few seconds. “Might be for you,” I say. Still nothing. I get up quietly then and go see who it is.

  It's Eddie. She's looking really good, like she's cleaned herself up nice and done her hair a bit less spiky. She's wearing a white blouse and this really short pleated skirt, kind of school uniform for prize day. “Hiya,” I say.

  “Hiya.” She stands there on the doorstep looking at me, with a sweet, but slightly absent smile on her face.

  “Want to come in?”

  “Yeah,” she says. She steps inside, but I hardly move, so we're really close together now, and I can smell her hair and her skin. I close the door, and it's just us, standing in the hallway. “I've got a message from Jimmy,” she says.

  I shake my head. “No you haven't,” I say.

  She looks confused for a second, then she figures I'm mucking her about. “I have, though,” she says, and she grins.

  I put my hands on her shoulders. “Tell me later,” I say. Then I kiss her. At first she doesn't do anything, then she kisses me back, and it's really wet and sweet, not like Elspeth at all. I mean, I like Elspeth, and she is amazing in all kinds of ways, but there's something a little bit hard about her. Something too deliberate, as if she's thinking things up all the time instead of just letting them happen. With Eddie, it's all soft and wet and sweet and a little bit helpless, like we're just falling into each other. I like that. I could stand here all day, just kissing her, but then I think about Dad. He's just behind the door and I don't want to disturb him. I'm not that keen on his stardust-memories routine, but I can't really begrudge him his one small pleasure. Besides, he might be decades away in his own mind right now, but that doesn't mean he won't snap out of it and come wandering through, on his way back to bed. I peel myself away from Eddie for a moment. “Let's go upstairs,” I say.

  “What about your dad?”

  I nod to the front room, and she makes a little aha face, then she smiles. “You're not going to lead me astray, are you?” she says, but she doesn't wait for an answer. We just go up the stairs, very quiet, and shut the door behind us. Dad never comes into my room, so I've finally got Eddie all to myself. “Alone at last,” I say. She giggles and we start kissing again. Everything else disappears, Dad, Jimmy, the plant, the town, the lost boys and, for a moment there, I think I am in love. Just like in the movies.

  Over the next three hours, I find out a few things about Eddie. First, that she's not really as dumb as she acts, it's just that the way she thinks is a bit different from how other people think. She's not that good at attention, so everything is all over the place. She starts a thought, then she goes off somewhere else in her head and she doesn't often come back to the same place she started. A really straightforward little question will get all twisted till it's some big complicated thing and she just gives up. She has this little squeal she does when she's happy, and this giggly little laugh that makes people think she's not right in the head. Maybe she isn't. But she's not dumb, either.

  She's a bit like me, in some ways. She's in a lone-parent household too, only it's her mum who's at home, not her dad. She doesn't have any real brothers and sisters; Mickey is almost exactly the same age as her, just a couple of months younger, and he's the child of her dad's first marriage. What happened was, he ditched the first wife and got together with Eddie's mum, who's got this beautiful old-fashioned name, Dorothy. I've never see Eddie's mum that I know of, but I've got this picture of Dorothy Lamour in my head and I can't let it go. I don't suppose she's anything like Dorothy Lamour, but it's nice to imagine her like that, because then I'm in bed with Dorothy Lamour's daughter, which is more than kind of sexy. Anyway, Dad, who sounds like a bit of a rascal, gets Dorothy pregnant with Eddie, but he meets the old wife and they have a bit of a tumble, for old times' sake. This is just a few weeks later, before Dorothy even knows she's expecting, so it's probably a bit of a shock when Dad gets the news from both wives about the patter of tiny feet. While Eddie's telling me all this, I keep remembering that Groucho Marx bigamy gag and I'm trying to keep from laughing, because now I've got Groucho Marx and Dorothy Lamour having it out about all this, with the first wife—I'm thinking Maureen O'Hara—standing by with this big seen-it-all-before look on her face. Anyway, Groucho decides that he's going to stay with Dorothy, but he's going to keep both kids, and Maureen O'Hara doesn't mind, because she doesn't really want any big connection to Groucho, what with all she knows about him from the first marriage. Which is acceptable, if not exactly hunky-dory, in Dorothy's book, only now Groucho changes his mind and pisses off with some other woman he's met—Veronica Lake, let's say—and leaves Dorothy with both kids. Meanwhile, Maureen O'Hara has vanished, last seen walking out along the West Side Road with a cardboard suitcase and a hatbox. When Eddie's telling all this, she's really funny and she strings it all together somehow so it sounds like a really daft movie script. “So that's how I get to have a brother who's the same age as me,” she says.

  “Ernest,” I say.

  She laughs. “Mickey,” she says. “After his mum.”

  “What? His mum is called Mickey?” Actually, this is OK, when I think about it. It doesn't change anything, in fact. I can see Maureen O'Hara as a Mickey. Some John Ford thing, where she's a tomboyish beauty waiting for some man to come and find her. John Wayne, probably.

  “No,” she says. “Michaela. It's Mickey for short.”

  “Oh,” I say. “So what's Eddie short for?”

  She looks at me like this might be a trick question. “How do you mean?” she says.

  “Well, how did you get to be called Eddie?”

  She thinks about this. “I dunno,” she says.

  “It's not short for anything?”

  “I don't think so.”

  “You don't think so?” I say. “You mean your parents called you Eddie?”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  I'm not convinced. She's hiding something. “It's short for something,” I say.

  She gives a little shrug and looks worried, but she doesn't say anything.

  “Edwina,” I say.

  That makes her squeal. She gives a half-disgusted, half-incredulous laugh. “No!” she says, all indignant.

  “Edina,” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  “Edaline? Edwardiana? Éditions Gallimard?” I say this with the best French accent I can manage and she rolls her eyes.

  “You made that up,” she says. She's not annoyed, though.

  “Theodora?”

  “No.”

  “Thandra?” I say, lisping it.

  “No.”

  I jump up, and do an Archimedes. “I know,” I say.

  She looks excited, like I'm about to tell her something she's needed to know her whole life. “What?” she says.

  “It's Rumpelstiltskin!”

  She punches me then, in the upper arm, and she hits hard. “Fuck you,” she says. Next minute we're laughing at each other and a minute after that I'm fucking Dorothy Lamour's daughter again, and it's just like it was the first time, all salty and sweet and close-up-and-personal, jus
t like before, only better. When we stop again, and I'm thinking I could do this forever, she leans up on her elbow and looks at me. “Did you know,” she says, all grave and didactic, “that if you pick a Chihuahua up by the scruff of its neck, its eyeballs pop out?”

  When I sneak Eddie out again, Dad is still in the front room, only now he's got the radio on, which is actually quite a promising sign, because at least he's listening to something. I mean, something is going into his head. Sometimes he watches TV, but he always has the sound turned down low, or even mute, and you can see from his face that he's not really making any sense of what's going on, he's just looking at the colors and movement in between sleeps. So the radio is good. It's Radio 4, some arts program, and some new young American director is talking about a film he's either made, or wants to make, where he and Janet Leigh—he's put himself in the film—are building this sculpture in the desert from pieces of magnetic rock. Only the work keeps getting interrupted, because some guy with a huge silver knife is after them, and then there's a gang of kids in leather jackets, with switchblades and stuff, who are also after them, so they have to keep escaping and starting again, over and over, just him and Janet against the world. I stand and listen for a while, then I give up trying to follow it. Obviously, here's a guy who's seen too many movies. I look at Dad to see what he's making of it all. He looks absolutely rapt, his head turned to one side, like a bird, just sitting in the big armchair, listening.

  I decide to leave him and go upstairs and tidy up. I'd wanted Eddie to stay longer, but she'd said she had to go. So, just before we say goodbye, I ask her about the message.

  She looks at me all confused. “What message?” she says.

  “The message from Jimmy.” I'm grinning at her. “Remember?” Her face is a blank. “You told me, when you got here, that you had a message for me. From Jimmy.”