Free The Glister by John Burnside Page B

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