The Glister (13 page)

“A mooncalf?”

“Yes.” She gives me a sad look. “That's what it was,” she says. “There's mooncalfs all over, out here along the shore.” She gazes at me expectantly. When I don't say anything, she looks sad again. “I'm not making it up,” she says.

I shake my head. “I know,” I say. Everybody has a theory about the secret fauna of the headland. People tell stories about all kinds of real or imaginary encounters: they see herds of strange animals, they catch glimpses of devils, sprites, fairies, they come face-to-face with terribly disfigured or angelic-looking mutants from old science-fiction programs on late-night TV. And it's not just animals they see. You hear all kinds of stories about mysterious strangers: lone figures stealing through the woods, gangs of men roaming around at night, a criminal element who come in from the shore side to see what they can steal from the plant, troublemakers and pikeys, sex perverts and terrorists. John the Librarian says the buildings down by the docks provide a perfect hiding place for insurgents to lay up and store their weapons. Or maybe they're counterinsurgents, he'll say with a twinkle in his eyes: revolutionaries,
agents provocateurs
, terrorists, counterterrorists—who can tell and, anyway, what's the difference?

“They have them in books,” Eddie says. “They used to be all over, but now they hide in places where nobody ever goes. Like squirrels.”

I nod.

“They're in Shakespeare,” she says.

I reach out and touch her arm. “I know,” I say, softly. I want her to believe that I believe her, but I don't think she does.

We haven't seen Jimmy in a while. Ernest and Tone are just standing about on a firm island among all this crap, standing up on the highest point, scouting their little horizon, and my mind goes back again to that meerkat film on TV. Finally, Jimmy turns up, and he's got this huge rat on the point of his Chinese knife. He grins at us all as he waves it in triumph. “He shoots, he scores,” he says. Then he looks back and forth to Eddie and me curiously. “You catch anything,” he says to me, and I can see he's not talking rats.

I don't say a word.

“I got one,” Eddie says. “It's just a baby, though.”

“Never mind,” Jimmy says. “You got
something,
at least.” He gives me an amused look.

After we finish killing stuff, we flop down on a grassy bank and Tone and Ernest start building another fire. Jimmy has gone back out into the sea of rubbish, searching for bigger game. I can see he wants a special kill, or maybe an especially disgusting find to mark the occasion of my first outing, but he's not coming up with anything. I sit down with Eddie. I've noticed two things about her: first, she's got this really sexy mouth, real blow-job lips, but sweet with it, and her legs, in her tight black jeans, look almost impossibly long. I saw a John Singer Sargent portrait in a book once, where the girl had long slender legs like this, and I couldn't stop thinking about it for days. Still, I don't push anything. I don't think it would be wise to make Eddie blush twice in one day. Instead, I do the old conversation deal. Playing catch-up.

“So what happened to Ernest?” I say. He's just out of earshot, helping Tone with the fire.

“Who's
Ernest?”
she says. She's already forgotten the introductions. I nod at the fat kid. “Oh, Mickey,” she says. “His name's not Ernest, it's Mickey.” She gives me a puzzled look.

OK, I think. Not the sharpest toothpick in the box. Sweet, though. “So,” I say, “what happened to
Mickey,
then?”

“How do you mean?” She looks over at the guy a bit worried, as if she's expecting him to have his arm hanging off, and she hadn't noticed it before.

“His eyes,” I say. “I'm assuming he wasn't born like that.”

“Oh,” She puts her hand to her mouth and giggles, cute as anything. You have to wonder if she does things like this on purpose. “He got his eyebrow and his eyelashes blown off,” she says. “With a firework. They haven't grown back yet.”

“How did he manage that?”

“Oh, just mucking about.” She looks back to the page in her head marked Guy Fawkes Night. It isn't a big book, but it is clearly labeled. “He lit a banger and threw it at Tone. But nothing happened. So he goes over and picks it up and puts it to his eye. Like he's trying to figure out what's wrong with it. ‘This things's a dud,' he says and then—BANG!—it goes off.” She grins happily. “We all thought he'd blown his eye out.”

“Nice,” I say.

She settles down and looks a bit disappointed. “He hadn't, though,” she says. “He just blew his eyelashes off. And his eyebrow.” She thinks for a moment. “It hasn't grown back.”

I nod. “You said,” I say.

“Maybe it never will,” she says, continuing in her reverie. She seems to be trying the idea out for size. Having one black eyebrow might be OK on a temporary basis, but it's obvious that, to her mind, forever is a different thing altogether.

“So how did you get to know him?” I ask. “Mickey, I mean.”

“Mickey?” She looks confused again.

“Yeah,” I say, softly. “Mickey.”

“Oh.” She shakes her head. “He's my brother.”

“Really?” I say. I don't want it to be too obvious, but I'm wondering if she's got this wrong.

“Half brother, actually,” she says.

“No shit,” I say.

She looks at me and grins. Then she blushes again. “Don't take the piss,” she says.

“I'm not.”

She studies me for a moment. She's gone all serious suddenly. “Really?”

“Really,” I say.

She looks pleased. I've made her happy, I suppose. It's quite touching. Then she jumps up and squeals. “Come on,” she shouts, to nobody in particular. “Let's
kill
something.”

When I get home, after a happy day's hunting, I'm starting to wonder where this is all going. I've already told myself not to dig in too deep with Jimmy and his crew, but I have to admit it, I like Eddie, and Jimmy's kind of a challenge. Still, better not to get too comfortable. If I do shag Eddie, it's bound to get back to Elspeth, and that will not only piss her off but it'll put a big smile on Jimmy's face, too. Maybe that's what this is all about, of course. I'm not saying Jimmy would actually
tell
Eddie to do me, it would have to be subtler than that. To begin with, he probably just wanted to check me out, then Eddie maybe said something after our first run-in and he just told her to go for it. Or something along those lines. Though whatever it is that's going on, I think I'd better watch my step. I remember old Paul Newman, when somebody asked him if he was ever tempted to cheat on Joanne, what with all those women throwing themselves in his general direction, and he said, “Why go out for burger, when you've got steak at home?” Which probably looked like a pretty cool answer at the time, him being put on the spot like that, but it doesn't make that much sense. You can't eat steak every day and they do say that variety is the spice of life. Besides, if Elspeth is steak, that doesn't make Eddie burger. I'd think of her more as pudding, to be honest. Angel Delight, maybe. Crème brûlée. Tiramisu. Definitely
not
semolina.

Jesus H. Christ, I tell myself, I'm going to have to snap out of this. What I need is a distraction. After I look in on Dad, I head off to my room and try to pick up where I left off with
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
But I can't keep my mind on it. I keep thinking about Eddie's legs and those sweet, pouty lips. Eventually, I drift off, lying on the bed with the book over my face, and I have amazing dreams all the way through to morning, but it's not camels I'm dreaming about.

Still, the fates are kind, even if we do work hard to ignore their occasional mercies, and the next day I get the distraction I need, because the Moth Man is here and, for once, I am—as they say in the self-help books—
unconditionally
happy. It won't last long, but it's something pure, which isn't that common a phenomenon if you live in the Innertown.

But then, that's the big problem with life in this place: there's more to it all than the bad days of wondering when another boy will disappear, because it hasn't happened for a while and so, according to a logic we all know, is bound to happen again soon. And it isn't just those other days, when we all go around in a stupor of fear and anger because, having finally given in to the temptation of thinking that those bad days have come to an end, we receive the news that another soul has been lost, some boy you know at least by name, some kid who plays the trumpet, or picks his nose at assembly, or likes to go swimming. Of course, you can tell yourself that he's gone away, like some fairy-tale character, to seek his fortune in the big wide world. You can tell yourself that, if this is the story the police put out, then they must do it for a reason, but in your heart you know that the boy has been taken, maybe dragged off to some secret place and killed, maybe worse. Maybe alive somewhere and waiting for someone to come, in some pit at the plant, or chained up and helpless in some sewer. And then, even if it's been quiet on that front for a while, there's always the chance that somebody has just died from a disease that nobody's ever seen before. We're definitely not talking
Salad Days,
out here in the Innertown.

So it might be better if there was no relief, if there were no happy times. Like that bit in
Tom Sawyer
when Tom wonders if maybe Sundays are just a more refined form of sadism than the usual weekday run of chores and school. Every week, you get one day off, just to remind you how awful the other six are—and even that one precious day is marred by a morning in church, gazing out of the window at the sunshine while some old fart drones on about God. At least we don't have much church here.

Still, it might be better just to get on with the ordinary routine of Dad being sick, and me having to wash out the bowl that he keeps by the bed, all the vomit and bile and spots of blood running out into the sewage, into the water that I will one day drink, after it has been processed and treated, because water goes round and round, the same water all the time: the same, but different. Water is everywhere. You can't escape it. When Miss Golding told us, in Religious Education class, that God was omnipresent, I remember thinking, while she was explaining
omnipresent
to the nincompoops, that God must be water. Even afterward, when I had grown out of the idea, I was still afraid of water; or rather, I feared something the water contained. I found a magazine once, out on the landfill, with an article about how some French guy had worked out some theory about water having a memory: it keeps a record of everything it has ever touched written away in its molecular structure, a whole history of piss and sick and insecticide, laid down in a submicroscopic, illegible script that will take centuries to erase. Everything has its own clock, its own lifetime: stars, dogs, people, water molecules. Human beings only know one version of time, but there are thousands of others, all these parallel worlds unfolding at different rates, fast, slow, instantaneous, sidereal.

Anyhow, whatever else might crop up, you don't normally get unconditional happiness round here. It's always tainted by something: worry, or fear, or just the idiot feeling that it's something you don't really deserve, so it's probably some kind of trap. That day, though, I am happy, pure and simple—because the Moth Man has come, and I like it when the Moth Man comes.

I hadn't been expecting him, because you never know when he'll be here. He comes and goes according to some law that only he understands, and I only know he's back when I see his van, parked just off the road at the gate to the old meadows on the east side, or maybe farther toward the shore somewhere, his little green van, with faded lettering on one side from whoever owned it before, some guy called Herbert, who did some kind of repairs. The first time I saw the van, the Moth Man had just pulled in at the gate to the meadows, and I watched him take his gear out of the back, all the netting and lighting equipment, the tiny, ice-blue tent that he would set up in the middle of the meadow, the rucksack full of cooking utensils, the ancient camping stove. It was like watching a magic trick, the way he got all this stuff out of this tiny van, and then there was more, and still more, till he'd made a little settlement around himself, all the instruments and lights and piles of netting. He didn't say anything to me, all the time he was unloading, though he knew I was there. It was only when he was done that he turned to me and gave me a questioning look. He still didn't say anything, though.

I was thirteen then, if I remember. I bet, for him, I was just some
gosse
who had turned up, one of those local kid spectators he probably got all the time. I didn't want him to think of me like that. “What's all this shit for?” I said. Big kid, blasé as fuck.

He laughed. “What do you think it's for?” he said.

“Dunno. You some kind of photographer?”

“Nope.”

“Scientist?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, if you're here to measure the pollution, you'll need more stuff,” I said.

He laughed again and shook his head. Then he explained about the Lepidoptera survey, and what you could tell about a place by the number and type of different butterflies and moths you found there. Finally, he stopped talking and looked at me, to see if I was getting bored. “So,” he said, “what's your name?”