Glister

by John Burnside

  “Tell me about it,” she says. She leans forward and rests her chin on her wrist: warm, sympathetic, interested. She can do that stuff in her sleep, if she needs to.

  He laughs. “Anyway,” he says, like he's avoiding a question she hasn't asked him yet, “I'm almost done here.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “So you're leaving?”

  He nods. “Soon,” he says.

  She nods. She's about to give up, at this point, because she can feel him slipping away, but she gives it another try. “Can I come with you?” she asks him.

  He looks surprised, but he isn't really. “Why would you want to do that?” he says.

  “To get away from here,” she says.

  “What about your folks?”

  “Don't got any folks,” she says, which isn't quite true, even though it is really. “Look, all I want is a lift. I won't jump you or anything.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Well,” she says, “not unless you want me to.”

  He smiles. He has a nice smile and she feels a bit wistful, right then. She feels kind of sorry for him, to be honest. He should fuck her, it would probably cheer him up. It would cheer her up, that's for sure. Still, there's no point ruling anything out. Farther on down the road, and all that. There's nothing as sexy as heading off down the road at night, not quite sure where you're going. Mile after mile of house lights and country lanes, the fields all around full of dreaming cattle and owls flitting in and out of the headlamps. Just like that French film she saw over at Leonard's house. She wouldn't be surprised if he didn't pull over and give her one before they even got off the peninsula. “Well,” he says, after pretending to think it over, “I won't say I'm not tempted. But there's something I still have to take care of before I go.” He looks away across the wasteland, toward the old plant. He seems sad, or maybe a little scared, and she wonders what it is he has to do.

  “Your loss,” she says, trying to shrug it off and come out with her self-esteem intact, but he's starting to worry her now. He's gone all scary and preoccupied on her, and Elspeth can't help thinking that something terrible is about to happen. Because he's different now and, for a moment, she sees it. It's only a glimpse she catches, and she doesn't understand what it is she is witnessing, but she looks into his face and just for that one moment she sees the dark light of the sun, so she has to turn away, out of fear and confusion. It's only a glimpse, though, and when she looks back, out of the corner of her eye, that dark light is hidden and all that's left is sadness. She feels so sad, in fact, that she's on the verge of bursting into tears, like she does sometimes at home for no reason, watching some stupid film on TV or listening to one of her mum's old records.

  The man gives her a long look, then he nods. “I'm sure it is,” he says. He leans forward and pokes at the fire. “It's getting cold,” he says. “It'll be autumn soon.”

  He looks up and smiles—but Elspeth feels cold now, cold and tired, and she really does start to cry. “Don't say that,” she says.

  The man shakes his head. “It's all right,” he says.

  Elspeth wants to believe him, but she can't. She's really crying now; the tears are running down her cheeks and she wishes that, just this one time, everything would work out the way it was supposed to. She looks at the Moth Man, and she thinks, if he could only have been someone else, if he could have just touched her, it would mend everything. Home and school and Jimmy Van Doren and Leonard and the Innertown—it would all melt away and she would be free forever. All he need do is touch her, and that new story can begin. Roads, bedrooms, cities, oceans. Summer. She wishes he could see that. She wishes he would stop being so scary and just put his arms around her and then, after they have fucked for hours in the long grass by the hedge they would drive away in his green van, and the terrible thing wouldn't happen. The terrible thing wouldn't happen and somebody, somewhere, would stay safe—and that's when she thinks of Leonard, without knowing why, without really believing that he's the one who's in danger. She sees Leonard for a moment, in her mind's eye, lifting his head and putting aside his book to welcome someone he has only just noticed and hadn't expected to see, the way he did that first time, in the library, then the cold and the sadness engulf her, till all she can think of is driving away in a green van, traveling west to where it's still summer. Because it's still summer, somewhere, she knows that. It's always summer, somewhere or other, for someone.

  LEONARD

  I WAS BEING FOLLOWED. OR NOT FOLLOWED SO MUCH AS WATCHED. Someone was watching me, from among the trees, or in one of the ruined kilns. Still, it didn't bother me to begin with. I was scared that Morrison, or somebody, would come for me, but I didn't think this watcher was from the Innertown. Which wasn't that logical, maybe, but I figured, if I was next— and for a couple of days, there, I really was convinced that I would be the next kid to be taken—if I was next, if the bastards wanted me, they could find me anytime at home, but I didn't think they could touch me out here on the headland. Which was stupid because I had to have known that, if they wanted me, they would just come and get me, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. The police were in on it, that was obvious now, and the town hall was probably in on it too. The Homeland bloody Peninsula Company weren't just in on it, they were probably running the whole thing from somewhere in their Outertown offices, some kind of ethnic-cleansing scheme, clearing the streets of potential troublemakers or whatever, or maybe just keeping us all scared, so that when their great Homeland plan finally kicked into motion, they'd have a docile population to man the waste-incineration units or whatever it was they were going to build to replace the plant. Or maybe it was some weird religious thing, like when God let Satan kill Job's sons, or when He sent the angel to kill all the eldest sons of the Egyptians, but spared the Israelite kids. You had to give it to those Israelites, they were hard bastards. They just painted a white mark on the lintel of the door, or whatever, brewed up a mug of Ovaltine, and went off to bed. Some fucking angel was going to be running through the town killing children, and they just lay down and had a good night's sleep, without a second thought. Me, I'd have felt a bit bad about some of those Egyptian kids. I'd have wanted to tip somebody off, maybe that nice brick merchant across the street, or the baker at the end of the road, the one with the cute wife. Or I'd be up all night, in case it rained and the white mark on my door got washed off. It's your eldest kid for God's sake. You wouldn't want any misunderstandings.

  I had thought I'd be safe for a day or two, time enough to think what to do about what I knew, which was next to nothing, but I had a start and as a start it was better than torturing that guy Rivers with razor blades. Now, I was being followed. I didn't know who it was and at first they kept their distance, but midmorning the next day I was in one of the old warehouses, one of the big echoey ones with ivy and such growing through the holes everywhere in the roof and birds flying in and out all the time, and I could feel that someone was close. Very close. Only I couldn't see anybody. All I could see was sun and shadow, and bird shapes flitting here and there, and all I could hear was the singing. I stopped dead still and looked around, then I called out: “Jimmy?” That was more wishful thinking than anything else, because Jimmy I could deal with, but I pretty much knew it wasn't Jimmy out there among the shadows. This was something else altogether. This was a person, I thought, someone bigger and quieter than Jimmy or any of his crew. Someone who was used to being alone and very quiet. A watcher, like one of those characters in old mystery books. The Watcher in the Shadows. The Watcher of the Skies. Only, now, I didn't know if he was there because he was after me, or because he wanted to protect me. To watch over me. Or maybe he was just there, watching. It didn't matter that it was me, it could have been anyone. And maybe it wasn't a person at all, maybe it was just a presence. The spirit of the place. They say every place has its own spirit, but when they talk about it in books and poems and stuff, they always mean places like bosky groves, o
r dark reed beds where Pan sits playing his pipes to some lost nymph, or maybe some lake with a lady sleeping just beneath the surface, but why not an old warehouse, or a cooled furnace? Why not a landfill? Don't they play that game just so that these things—these spirits—get to belong to somebody else? I'd always felt something out at the chemical plant, no matter where I went. You could call it a spirit, or a genius loci—why not? It was present, and I always thought it was trying to talk to me. Not in words, though. Not like that. It was more like pointing. It was there, pointing to something I should know about, something I should have seen beyond the things I was seeing, but it wasn't concerned with what you could say in words. You get a huge moon in an indigo sky, floating over the dusty water by the docks, over the rusty cranes and the old boat eaten away by rust, you get that big moon over the harbor and you can hear owls calling from the woods above, on the West Side—what words are you going to have for that? It's not a description you want, anyway, it's something finer. It's like parsing, or chromatography Sometimes, the whole world points to something you can't see, some essence, some hidden principle. You can't see it, but you can feel it, though you have no idea how to put it into words. And sometimes, it's just that things are beautiful, only what you mean by beautiful is different from what people usually mean when they say that word. It's not sentimental, or choccy box. It's beautiful, and it's terrible too. It takes your breath away, but you don't know if that comes from awe or terror. Sometimes, I wonder why people think so little of beauty, why they think it's just calendars and pictures of little white churches or mountain streams in adverts and travel brochures. Why do they settle for that? I'm only fifteen, and even I can see there's more to it than that.

  I know what ugly is, too. That day, in the broken warehouse, standing there in that dance of sunlight and shadow, nobody there but me and the birds, and this person, whoever or whatever it was, the world looked more than usually beautiful to me, but I knew that was partly because of the contrast with how ugly things were back in the town. Everybody thought the plant was a terrible thing, that they should finally demolish what was left of it and build something new on the headland, but they were getting it the wrong way round: it was the town they should demolish, the Innertown and the Outertown, the terraces and the villas, the poor and the rich, everything. They should pull everything down and start over, maybe in shacks or mud huts, so the people could learn how to live again, instead of just watching TV all the time and letting their kids run wild. They should move the people farther along the coast and teach them to fish, give them little plots of land to look after, little allotments, and some tools and a few bags of seed, and they should leave them for a generation, learning how to live, and how to teach their children. It wouldn't take any more than that. In one generation, they would have new skills, new homes, new stories. Then they could start moving out from there, a few at a time, moving out into the world to teach others, beautiful nomads, moving from place to place, making it good to be alive again.

  I was standing there, thinking all this, and I wasn't sure whether it was me thinking it, or whether it was someone else. Thoughts came into my head of their own accord, from nowhere, or maybe from whoever was out there, watching me: thoughts at first, then pictures and sounds, pieces of memory, fragments, but not fragments, because I could see that somewhere, behind it all, everything was connected to everything else, only I couldn't see all the connections, because I wasn't ready. I wasn't used to connections, I was used to the bits and pieces. I was used to the fragments.

  Then, after I don't know how long of just standing there, I looked round and saw a shape. It was the shape of a man, a living man who had just stepped out from somewhere. Only there was nowhere to step out from, he was in the middle of the place, right in the midst of all the song and sun and shadow, and yet, still, he looked like he had just stepped out from somewhere because he had. He had just stepped out of that—out of the light, out of the shadow, out of the birds' singing. He was a man: taller than me, but not much; he was standing very still, just gazing at me, no intentions, nothing to be afraid of.

  “Who are you?” I asked him. I really wasn't afraid. I was just curious— only it wasn't the usual curiosity, where part of you wanted to know and part of you didn't really give a damn, because what difference does it make anyway, right? This was a pure, sweet, delectable curiosity that was an end in itself, and maybe it didn't have an answer anyhow. It was the wondering that mattered.

  It was a long moment before he stepped forward into a pool of sunlight and I saw his face. He looked familiar, but at first I couldn't place him. I'd seen him somewhere, but I didn't get it till he spoke, though even then, I didn't quite hear what he said. It was just a sound, a voice on the air, like something you might hear if you tuned your radio to some new wavelength. For a moment I thought I had wandered into some new place, into some dream of heaven, or the afterlife at least, and I was in the presence of something unworldly, some otherworldly being that, as strange as it might seem, saw me as a friend. Because it seemed to me that this was my friend. The one I had been looking for, for as long as I could remember. Then he moved, just a little, and I saw that it was the Moth Man. I recognized him now, though he looked different; or rather, he was the same as before, only bigger—not larger, but bigger in himself, more defined and, at the same time, full of possibilities. He was the Moth Man and nobody else, yet as he stepped out of the shadows, I thought I saw someone else in him, someone I knew, and I was confused for a moment, and I almost turned away, because I thought something was wrong, but then I looked again and I saw that it really was my friend the Moth Man, and he was smiling. He took another step forward and looked into my face, as if he were checking to see if I were awake or sleepwalking. Then he laughed softly and turned away. “Come on,” he said, as he walked away. “I'll make you some tea.”

  I kept going back and forward from the place where I was sitting by the fire and some other place that I must have seen sometime in a film or a dream, but neither of those places was an illusion and neither was more real than the other. And I was sure I wasn't hallucinating. One moment I was sitting on a low concrete wall, listening as the Moth Man talked about the machine his father had built deep in the inner reaches of the plant, the next, I was standing in a field of bees, up to my waist in oxeye daisies and golden-rod, the bees swaying in their hundreds back and forth around me, the sun on my face in a place that was impossibly clean, the air scented with grass and pollen. Then I was back by the fire, looking up at him, listening. I had no idea what was in the tea he'd just given me, but it had made me sleep and in that sleep a dream had come, though now, almost awake, I couldn't remember it exactly, I could only see pictures. I knew I had only slept for a short time because it was still daylight there, in the campsite at the edge of the woods, and then, a moment later, in the wide meadow where I stood in the to-and-fro of the bees. That's a surprise: I don't remember falling asleep, I don't even remember feeling strange or drowsy, but all of a sudden I'm waking up and everything is altered—though it feels, not that I'm still in a dream, but that I'm too awake, every detail of every leaf of grass and curl of flame is utterly there in my head, so it's almost unbearable, how real and close it all is.

  After a while, I realized we were walking, but I didn't know where we were, or where we were going. It surprises me now, looking back, that I didn't recognize the building we were walking toward, or the room that he led me into, after producing a key and opening a real, working lock on the door, but we must have been in a place that I'd never come across before that day, an enormous, dusty room that looked like a school laboratory at one end—three rows of careworn laboratory tables with sinks and gas taps, a single, not quite dead houseplant on a blackened windowsill by the door— then stretched away into a cold, dim space beyond, a long emptiness as far as my eyes could see in the half-light, as much corridor as it was room. As soon as we were inside, the Moth Man closed the door, and everything went dark.

  �
�Wait a moment,” he said, before he ventured into the darkness, leaving me alone in the blackness. I know, looking back, that the wait was no more than a few seconds, but at the time it felt long—so long, even, that I forgot he was there, forgot why I had come to this place, and, like a child lost at a carnival, I had begun to feel abandoned, when a faraway gold light came on and the Moth Man came back for me, his face kindly, and perhaps a little concerned, as if he had read the fear in my eyes and wanted me to know there was nothing to worry about, that everything was good. All will be well and all manner of thing shall be well, I thought, as he reached out and touched me gently on the arm: words from a book, I knew, but they had been something else once, they had been words that someone had thought, in a moment like this one. “Come on,” he said. He gazed at me for a moment, his face calm, his eyes empty of all emotion, then he turned and started walking slowly, back into the gold light. I followed. All the way, I had the sense of something watching me—not a person, not people, but something small, something concealed in the fabric of the room. Some animal in the wainscot, whatever a wainscot is, some creature hidden in the shadows.

  “This is a sacred place.” He was standing in front of some kind of machine, maybe a kiln, or a gas chamber—I couldn't make it out, but then I couldn't make anything out, it was hard to see clearly and it was hard to hear what he was saying. I kept missing things, phrases melting on the air before I could pin them down, his hands moving as he spoke, the metal fascia of this machine I'd never seen before, in a room I didn't even know existed, even though I'd been wandering around this old plant all my life. I made that out, though, that phrase he liked so much. He'd said it before, said it more than once when we were outside, in the woods, or trapping moths in the waste ground between the town and the foreshore. I'd laughed the first time he said it, though even then I think I had a glimmer of what he meant. Still, sacred wasn't a common word for people to use when they talked about the plant and I'd laughed.