The Glister (7 page)

I used to come out here with Liam. That was before he disappeared— before he
went away
, as the adults always say, though I know they are hiding something. I know something bad happened to him, just as I know—we
all
know—that something bad happened to the others who have vanished. Five, now: all boys around my age, with parents and friends and school desks, vanished into thin air, leaving nothing but a tangle of sheets, or a book set facedown on a bedside table, to show they had once been present. Five boys from the Innertown, a place nobody cares about, a polluted, discolored town at the far end of a peninsula most people don't even know is there on the maps. Five boys: Mark Wilkinson, William Ash, Alex Slocombe, Stewart Riva—and Liam Nugent, the last to go, lost somewhere between his house and the sports hall, and nothing to show where he had gone, or when he was last here. No mark, no clue, no sign of a struggle, no note, no stain on the air at the point where he turned and walked away—if, as the adults tell us, he
chose
to go, of his own free will, tired, as the others were, of this dying town at the end of a desolate peninsula, a place where nothing good can ever happen, where boys like Liam, or Alex, or Stewart, have nothing to look forward to. Liam was my best friend. He was a long, thin guy, a good swimmer, not handsome or anything, though some of the girls liked him for his personality. He was fucking crazy, to be honest, and he didn't have much of a home life, but then there's not many of us have much of a home life. His dad was then and still is the peninsula's number-one piss artist, and the only way that Liam's disappearance has changed his life is that he occasionally gets bought a sympathy drink at the club that he mightn't have got otherwise. That old fucker has got grief down to a fine art: humble, stoical, but essentially a shattered man, he sits at the bar and waits for one of the gullible to wander by. He never had a good thing to say to or about Liam when he was still here. He even stole his paper-delivery money to buy vodka. Liam was pretty pissed off about that, and he'd taken pretty much all he was going to take from the old fucker, but if he'd been planning to leave, he would have told me about it. He would have wanted me to go
with
him, for God's sake. That was how things were with us: I can't remember a day going by when I didn't see him; we had secrets that nobody else knew; we did everything together. If he had decided to leave, there's no way he would have gone without me.

But he didn't go away. Nobody goes away. The kids talk about it all the time, but the truth is, none of us really knows what's out there, twenty, or fifty, or a hundred miles along the coast road, because nobody has ever gone that far. People from the Innertown don't leave, not even to go on holiday or visit relatives. They talk about leaving all the time, of course, but they never actually get out. So when the adults put about the story that Liam had gone off to seek his fortune in the outside world, just like those other boys before him, I knew something was wrong. Liam hadn't left the Innertown, he wasn't halfway along the peninsula, walking away in the evening rain, he wasn't standing by a road a hundred miles distant, hitchhiking to some city he had seen on television. He wasn't just gone from his desk in Room 5A, he wasn't just missing from the five-a- side team, he wasn't swimming somewhere in a big, Olympic-size pool or off some beach in Greece, he was gone from the world altogether. Lost. I knew it, because I could feel it.

It was like when the snow melts, and afterward it seems that something is missing. Some essential piece of the apparatus of the world, some necessary presence has vanished overnight in the quiet patter of rain and wind gusting through the cracked pane in the landing window. That was how it felt to me when Liam disappeared: something essential was gone, and it didn't seem right that everything else should just continue, the way it had done before. I missed his voice, and the way he had of making faces at me in the changing-room mirror, just as I missed the white glare of the snow on the railings of the public library: it was the same thing, the same local flaw in the world that should have caused the whole system to crash. I think about him all the time, and I know he wouldn't have run away without me. It might be a funny old world, like my dad used to say when he was still talking, but it's not
that
funny.

When I say the plant is beautiful, I'm not saying that I think it was ever a good thing for the town. I know it's made people sick, and I can't imagine all the hours I spend out there will do me any good when I'm older. But then, who knows if I'll even get older. Some kids don't even make it to twenty, and when they die, nobody knows what was wrong with them. So I have to be realistic. I have lived here for fourteen years. Fourteen and two-thirds. I have breathed this air for more than five thousand days. I have breathed and swallowed and digested the smuts and tainted dust and blackened rain of the headland for around seven million minutes. How many breaths does that come to? How many pints of water? How much bread? How many eggs? With every breath I take the world into my lungs, with every swallow I take in, not just food and drink, but everything that it contains, all the traces and smears and soot falls, all the threads of copper and nickel and 2,4,5-T and who knows what else. People say we are what we are, the future is written in our blood—and you have to admit, there's no avoiding chemistry. If you lived out here, I don't think you'd argue with that.

A large percentage of the people who worked in production at the plant are either sick or dead now. My dad, for example. My dad has been sick for almost as long as I can remember. I don't suppose he ever was much of a talker, but now he doesn't say anything, not one word. Of course, folk from the Innertown don't like to talk anyway, not unless they're teachers, but at least they exchange greetings, a “good morning” here, a remark about the weather there, the little bits and bobs of conversation that allow people to get around one another peaceably. My dad doesn't do any of that. When he was first ill, he would sit in the kitchen listening to the radio, or he would go out into the garden if it was warm and watch the weeds growing. After my mother left, though, he just collapsed in on himself. These days, he stays in his room most of the time, living in utter silence. Sometimes he sleeps all day, but quite often he just lies on the bed and stares at the ceiling. When he does get up, he just sits in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil. It never does, though, because he keeps forgetting to switch it on. When Elspeth comes round, we go into my room and play games that we make up as we go along, but we do it quietly so he can't hear. I don't think he'd like it if he knew what we were doing. Not that he suspects anything, as far as I can tell, and he likes Elspeth. Sometimes he even smiles when he sees her. It's good when he smiles. I wished he'd do it more, and preferably not just when my cute girlfriend comes round.

Though I suppose I ought to be glad he doesn't talk much because, if he did, he'd probably just go on about my mother and how unhappy he was when she walked out. Or worse, how much he loved her and how great she was. In fact, I know that's what he would do. My mother wasn't really that interested when she was here, as far as I remember, but at least she was around. I remember when she left, she sat me down at the kitchen table and tried to explain what she was doing. She didn't try explaining herself to Dad, she just threw a few things in a bag and pissed off while he was upstairs sleeping, but she took a few minutes to give me the lowdown on how difficult it was for her.

“I'm going to be gone awhile,” she said. “So you'll have to keep an eye on your dad for me.” She was doing that tone of voice she'd used since I was two, only now I was ten, and I knew exactly what she was doing. “Can you do that for me?” she said. “Can you look after your dad for a bit, till I get back?”

I shook my head. “You're not coming back,” I said.

Her face crumpled a bit. I suppose she was hoping I wouldn't make this any more difficult for her than it already was. “Why do you say that?” she said, all pathetic.

“ ‘Cause you're not,” I said. “You're going for good.”

She started to cry then. Christ, it was so fucking
hard
for her all the time, looking after my dad, looking after me, no time to herself. She was still young, she had a life ahead of her. I heard her say that once to Jenny Allison's mum outside the Spar shop, and I knew exactly what she was up to. “I'm not,” she said. “I just need to get away for a bit.” She smiled through her tears. “You can understand that, can't you?” she said.

I didn't smile back. “Sure,” I said.

She nodded and put her hand on my shoulder. “Of course you can,” she said.

“I mean,” I said, “you're still young. You've got your whole life ahead of you.” I started to wonder, then, how old she was. I don't think I knew.

She looked at me as if I'd slapped her. “What?” she said, all innocent. “Where did you get
that
from?”

“You,” I said. I looked her in the eyes. She'd stopped crying now and she wasn't smiling anymore. She stood up. Here we go, I thought. Time for the tough, what's-love-got-to-do-with-it routine. That woman could go from sweet salt tears to hard as nails in thirty seconds flat.

“Well,” she said, “I thought you'd understand. I mean, you're not a little kid anymore.”

“I never was,” I said. “You just liked to
think
I was.”

She didn't say anything. Her suitcase was in the hall and she headed out there then, hard bitch, nobody understands her, so fair enough, she'll just get on with it. She put her coat on, and those fancy leather gloves Dad bought her, then she opened the front door and picked up the suitcase. The last thing she said, before she disappeared forever, was, “Let your dad sleep. He needs his rest.”

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.