Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting,
For fear of little men
—from “The Fairies” by William Allingham
The dead are heavier than they used to be, before they were dead. That’s not what the scales say, but it’s a fact none the less. Life is anti-gravity; the earth may suck, but we spit back at it and snicker, and walk just a little taller than we ought, step a little further, not float but—well, you get the picture. You live the picture, you should know. Every cell in your body resists that tug a fraction, and that’s a lot of resistance.
The dead don’t have the same privilege, it’s all switched off. Meat, bone, body: heavy stuff. Even blood has weight to it, when the fizz has gone.
And when you’re dying, when you’re neither hale and whole nor wholly here, when your cells are slowly, slowly shutting down—that’s when you start to acquire that extra weight, what can’t be measured on the machinery but only in the minds and muscles of those who care for and about you, either or both. The dead are worse, the dead can overtopple a man with sheer mass, but anyone on that journey starts to acquire drag, momentum, matter, call it what you will.
We’re all of us dying, of course, from the moment that we cease to grow; only that some of us go faster, and too soon.
As Glen, as he lay upon his bed and turned his head to find me and even his gaze weighed more than it used to, even his lightest thoughts had substance now.
Life is anti-gravity, and so am I; I hated to see him grave, portentous, sinking.
“Who is that,” he said in his horsehair voice, a fibrous scratching of it string on string, the only noise he had remaining to him, “who’s there?”
Who is that one who always waits beside you? Except, be fair, I thought, it might have been any one of us.
“Glenda honey,” blood brother, lazy angel, open your eyes, “it’s me.”
“Daniel?”
“Yes, lover,” and the third time that he’d asked today and it was hard to hold my patience except that I would, of course I would, what in God’s name was I here for unless to do the hard things?
“Daniel. I want you to do me a favour. Big one…”
What, more than my being here and doing this? I’d fetched him bedpans until he couldn’t manage, until so little movement hurt and he hadn’t the control in any case. He was in big man’s nappies now, and I changed them for him on my turn of duty. And I held buckets that he could gout blood into when that was needful, when he haemorrhaged inside and it had to go somewhere and generally came up; and I endured the hellwatch of his dead eyes, which was worse, and bathed them hourly in glycerine and water. And still turned up on time, on schedule, day or night. I caught a lot of night-time watches, often on my own. And came because he was my friend, or had been, and one of us at least had not forgotten. I couldn’t imagine any favour greater than that.
“Daniel?” Seemed he hadn’t forgotten either, or not right this minute. Sometimes he had never known me, ever; sometimes we were still bed-bunnies in his head, flashing rumps across a disco floor. Occasionally, rarely, we could be simply what we were in my head: old friends together, patient and nurse, one who claimed and one who paid the debts of long-gone loving. Those times he recognised my voice and called me by my given name, as now.
“Right here.” Sitting on the high bed’s edge and laying my fingers lightly on his own, as much contact with the world as he could bear.
“Listen.”
“I’m listening.” Every word cost him pain and effort, precious coin; neither one of us would waste them.
“You remember that dog, where we put it, where we dug it under?”
“Christ, Glenda—!” As often as not he couldn’t remember me, and yet he clung to the death of a dog, a nameless stray…
Well, yes. If I was Daniel, he was still or again my Glen, and he’d always held that animal in mind. Why else would I have remembered it myself?
“Yes, love, I remember the dog, and I know where it’s buried. What of it?”
“Dig it up, Daniel.”
“What? What for?” Old dead bones that he’d broken himself, knocked all out of kilter even before the worms and the weight of soil and rock got to them; what was he going to do, cast an augury?
“There’s a body, a boy underneath.”
“Oh, Christ.” He hissed, as my hand tightened; pressure hurt. How much had this hurt him, how long? “What is this, confession?”
“Absolution.”
Glen, man, don’t be in such a hurry… But he was, he had to be, of course. His time grew shorter, every breath he took; every moment’s struggle wore him down.
“All right, then. Who’s the boy?”
“I can’t remember. You find out, Daniel, give him back to his family, let them bury him for real.”
When we went, we went as a team, as we were nursing Glen: his fairy band reformed, all but silent under the weight of him when we were in the flat together and utterly silent now, crammed into Henry’s 4x4, compressed with news.
Henry, Jody, Tim and Blake and me. Tosh had stayed behind, hospital duty, nothing could break that schedule; something of him had come in the car regardless. We carried his curiosity along with his crowbar and shovel, along with our memories of the boy he used to be. We were all of us bonded, beyond the abilities of time or change to part us.
Once we’d been young and foolish, young and rowdy, high on the delights of city life and our own sweet selves, the damage we could do. Once we’d been wild together, following Glen or trying to grab the lead from him and never quite achieving that but loving him regardless.
No longer. Now we were a team again despite him, because of him; we didn’t have a captain.
If we’d been kids still, eighteen, twenty, we’d have been arguing as we drove, wrestling for that elusive leadership: every band of fairies needs its Oberon. Grown men, it seemed, could get along without.
I might have claimed the crown for a while, at least, for a little while. It had been me that Glen had turned to; it was me that knew the way. The others only knew the story. For a wonder, they hadn’t been there when the dog died. Seeking a little transitory independence, perhaps, looking for a new order, or simply sipping city lights on their own to find out how they tasted apart from Glen’s direction, my own more subtle influence. Whatever. They’d been off without us, and they didn’t know what I knew.
“Where now?” Henry demanded, slowing as the headlights showed him how the road divided, left and right.
“Up,” I said unhesitatingly. “Just keep going up. I’ll shout, when we’re near.”
The road climbed the hill, a high moor north and west of the city. It had been a night like this, I thought, when the dog had died: cold and clear, stars and a bright moon, the planet spinning us relentlessly towards a terrible uncertainty. Only difference was, in those days I’d seen hope and wonder in that spinning, in every dawn and sunset. Very heaven, I’d thought the world to be; and myself lieutenant to a power, a principality who held the keys to every pearly gate. I was young, I was a believer: music, dance, drugs, sex, whatever came along I gave it credence, I had faith. I believed in myself, my body, every way it made me feel. Money was votive, it allowed the opportunity to feel more, or feel differently. Even my hangovers I cherished for their immediacy, their potent seize.
Outside my skin I was less certain, perhaps, but I believed in the band, our brotherhood, its tangibility against an insubstantial world. Above and beyond them all, I believed in Glen. He was that little bit older, that great gulf wiser: wherever we went he’d been there before us and knew his way about, whatever we came up against he could find a route through or over or around.
Even now, I supposed, he was leading the way, going first. Checking out the other side. If death was the last taboo, he meant to break it. He’d said that, more than once, before he got too sick to be clever.
Actually, I thought, he’d broken it already, long ago. Swift and hard and meaning every moment, and I’d watched him do it, I’d been sitting right beside him as he did. For a while, later, I’d thought it was for my benefit, a baptism of blood, a lesson given and learned. Now I wasn’t sure.
The night cold and clear, moon and stars overhead but other lights were brighter, nearer, the whole of the city laid out before us like a playground, like a school; just the two of us in Glen’s big car, and I felt special, selected, exhilarated. This didn’t happen often, and it was treasure to me. Whatever he had in mind, I was up for it.
I thought.
We drove down the hill from his place towards the city centre, going slow; his eyes flickered constantly off to the side, to where long terraces and alleys fell away towards the river. Suddenly he knocked the indicator, spun the wheel, dived across the flow of traffic. Horns blared behind us, but he showed no sign of caring.
We were in one of the alleys: high walls of brick on either side, wooden gates and redundant coal-hatches, black bin-bags spilling garbage under our wheels. Ahead of us, eyes shone briefly pale in the headlights. A stray dog, young and hungry, all legs and ribs as it scavenged in the gutters; good street-sense it showed, cringing back against a wall to let us pass.
Glen steered straight for it.
It turned and trotted into its own long shadow, staring back over its shoulder; its eyes gleamed again, bright and empty. For a moment it reminded me of us, any one of us, skinny and scared and bathed in light, running into the dark.
It was running for real now, senselessly down the middle of the alley, forgetting what wisdom it had learned. Glen grinned, or showed his teeth at least, as he stamped on the accelerator.
And me, I just sat and said nothing, did less, didn’t even breathe. I was out there with the dog, sharing its thoughtless terror; I was in here with Glen—my friend, my mentor, my idol—and not sure if I were sharing anything with him. Either way I was trapped, inconsequential, the entire victim.
We thought we were the children of the night; looking back, I think perhaps we were all of us victims, all the time.
“There. By that outcrop, there’s a place you can pull off to park.”
Probably we weren’t meant to park there, it was an overtaking spot where the single-track lane widened suddenly and briefly between its enclosing dry stone walls; but there was no traffic this time of night, we’d met nothing coming down as we went up. And no traffic wardens, of course, no watching eyes.
That was, that had always been the idea.
We climbed out slowly into the road and stood stamping and huffing, swinging our arms the way you’re supposed to, the way you learned to do by reading it or seeing it in other, older men. The way we learned most of our adult habits: from books and magazines at first and then from men. It’s a boy thing, unless it’s just a fairy thing. Perhaps we were enchanted; God knows, we always felt that way.
Blake, Blake the builder reached back into the 4x4, dragged out a canvas bag of tools and passed them around. Pickaxe for Tim, crowbar and sledgehammer for Jody; for me it was three spades and carry-the-bag. Henry got nothing but a heavy torch. Henry had a banker’s belly now, was furthest gone from lean and whipcord boy. Besides, it was Henry’s car, he’d driven it, he’d done his share. We’d always been more socialist than democratic, dividing up the portions with a grand inequality. From each according to his ability: let him hold the light now, let him act as witness if we need one. Not objective, not neutral, never that—one for all and all for one, we few, we fairy few, immutable and indivisible and us—but he had the status we still lacked, he could speak for us if occasion demanded. Better he didn’t have mud beneath his nails at the time. Real mud or figurative. It might not make a difference, but it might.
I led them up to the outcropping rock, to where a buttress thrust suddenly up from earth.
“Here?” Henry asked, breathing heavily.
I shook my head. “Not enough soil, it’s bedrock six inches down. We tried it. Look, see that solus rock on the skyline there?”
They looked, saw, confirmed it with grunts and nods.
“Twenty paces, on a direct line from here,” and my hand slapped the buttress, “to there. That’s where we put the dog.”
“That’s a bit…specific, isn’t it?” Tim murmured at my back. “A bit Treasure Island, X marks the spot in crutch-lengths, Long John Silver?” Tim the Crim, he was a lawyer yet, sharp to spot unlikely detail.
I shrugged. “That’s how Glen wanted it. He wanted to know, exactly; he said it was important. You couldn’t just dump a body and forget it, he said. Even a dog’s body mattered.”
I stopped, listening to myself on half a second’s lag and shivering suddenly for better reasons than the night could offer me.
“He was setting you up, Dan. Just in case. Christ, he even told you so. Dogsbody, right?”
Well, at least he’d said that I mattered…
The dog died in silence, as it had run, pretty much as it had lived, I thought: lurking, sneaking, the opposite of presence. It was the car that made the noise, a thud that shook all the windows and rattled the doors; it was my mind that held it, that has held it ever since, one of those pivots a life can twist around.
Glen had been iconic, up till then. Suddenly he was something more, darker-stained and incomprehensible and human. We understand our idols all too easily, because they’re invested with public virtues and public vices and nothing else. Only real people have private lives. Glen had just admitted me to his.
Though even then it was obvious that this was not habitual, he didn’t kill stray dogs for a hobby. He stopped the car, as quietly as the dog had stopped; he got out and paused for a moment, looking at deductible damage—a bend in the bumper, a wet smear and a ripple on the dirty white bonnet—before he moved back up the alley to look at what was a fixed cost, no deposit and no return.
This was what I was there for, though I couldn’t figure why. The sums wouldn’t add up. Some kind of initiation, surely: maybe he put every boy through it, before they could melt seamlessly into his little band of brothers…
And swore them to silence after? Well, maybe. I didn’t believe it, though. One of them surely would have said. And what was so significant about a dog’s death, anyway? To us, who were not dogs—far from it, we were gorgeous, radiant, the height of delight—and dealt in worse fates daily? We knew all about death already, though he hadn’t yet plunged among us in red braces, greed is good, as he would a few years down the line. The milieu we moved in, of course we knew. We danced on a deliberate edge, for the thrill of it; other boys had fallen off.
Still, I thought this was a message, expressly for me. I went to join Glen, where he stood above the mangled body; he said, “There’s a blanket in the boot. Want to fetch it?”
The boot wasn’t locked. I found the blanket, ancient and moth-eaten, waiting for me. Beneath it, I found a spade. None of this was normal, in Glen’s car.
He made me do the messy work, down on my knees in the gutter, getting blood and muck on my dancing-clothes as I wrapped the dog in its ready shroud; he made me carry it back and stow it in the boot. I saw him smile faintly, as I wiped my hands on a corner of the blanket.
“Blood washes off, Daniel,” he murmured. “Everything washes off in the end, and there’s plenty of water in the world. Come on.”
He drove us out into the country, north and west. He parked on a high moor, found a landmark, paced a counted distance before he tossed me the spade and told me to start digging.
He didn’t say much else, then or later, after he’d taken me back to his house and washed me thoroughly, teasingly, laughingly, working hard to win a laugh out of me; nor after he’d taken me to his bed, when we lay languid and weary and needing another wash. If any or all of this was a message, I thought it was missing me. If it was an exercise in bonding, bondage, I thought it was unnecessary. He should have known that I was bound already.
These days he didn’t say much at all, and less that made sense. If this was an exercise in futility, I thought I might face a little grief from these old fairy friends of mine, here or in the car going home. If they let me get in the car to go home. They might leave me to walk if I’d dragged them up here on a fool’s errand, in pursuit of fool’s gold, buried treasure, buried bones.
Not my fault, but they’d blame me anyway, I thought. I was catching one or two looks already as we paced and counted, hefted hardware, faced the reality of chill air and frost-hard ground.
It wasn’t that hard to dig, once you’d broken the crust of it; I remembered that from last time. And told them so, and caught a glare full-force from Henry. It was only the torchbulb glaring, I couldn’t see his face, but it carried intent enough for anyone to read.
“Glen dreams,” he said. “Hallucinates. What the fuck are we doing here, anyway?”
“Looking for a body.” You brought us, you know.
“What body? Anyone here missed a boy? It’s just Glen, he’s half mad with it, lesions in his brain…”
“Maybe so. He sounded clear to me,” and maybe it was my fault after all, maybe I did deserve all the grief I might yet receive, if I couldn’t tell when the captain was seeing true and when he was simply babbling. “Let’s just dig, shall we? See where we get?”
Tim swung the pickaxe; Jody cracked the ground the way he used to crack doors, safes, whatever, with swift and judicious use of crowbar and sledge. I plied a shovel, as Blake did beside me.
Soon Jody abandoned the crow and grabbed the last of the spades. We built up a quick stack of spoil; I was relieved when Tim yelled out, I’d just been starting to wonder if I’d struck quite the right spot after all, because surely I hadn’t buried the dog that deep.
“What?”
“Pick went through something. Not earth, it didn’t feel right. Dig here. Henry, give us some light…”
We dug there in the circle of torchlight and scraped soil back off the rotten remnants of a blanket, with the rotten remnants of a dog beneath, snapped bones linked by slimy stringiness. Only the skull seemed whole, and only for a moment; it crumbled as Tim worked the pickaxe blade beneath.
I made some noise, I guess, some protest. He said, “We’re not archaeologists, Dan. Nor priests. This isn’t what we’re here for.”
No. And it was only a dog, in any case, and never mind that I’d seen it die and thought now that it might have died for this precisely, to be what people found if they should dig here.
Even so, “Treat it gently,” I said, “show some respect. We’ve got to put it back after, whatever else we find.”
“It’s dead, Dan.”
“That’s my point.” A sacrifice, a victim: we all knew how that felt. I felt understanding settle like the silence, all around me. We shifted that dog in spadeloads—Tim was right, we were not archaeologists—but did it as gentle as we could manage, and laid the bones all together in a separate place. We wouldn’t get them back in any order, but at least its ghost could find itself again.
Beneath where the dog had lain, we needed pick and crow once more, to work through hard-impacted earth. A forensics genius, I thought as I hacked uselessly with the spade’s edge, an expert with light and time and tender loving care could say this had been stamped to such solidity. We had none of those advantages, but worked a little slower as it started to make sense. I felt happier, less happy, both at once. No trouble in the car, perhaps, but plenty after.
Even doubting Henry watched us closely now, slipping torchlight under every clod of earth we raised, looking for another gleam of bone.
And spotting it, first among us all, and crying out to warn us. We stepped back in a moment, rested on our tools, rubbed hot sweat from our faces and felt the cold touch of the night come back to claim us.
“There,” he said, pointing with the torch, close as a finger, “see it?”
We saw it, just a streak of pale in the dark; and now I did want to play archaeologist, I wanted to get down and grub with my fingers in the dirt.
That was too much respect, we couldn’t afford it. More cautious spadework then, the most care we could manage; in ten minutes we’d laid him bare, we and the years of worms between us. A boy, as Glen had promised: huddled close around his death, laid down with his knees drawn up tight against his chest to make him dog-sized, make him fit the grave. He still had rags of skin and flesh and tendon, as the dog did; he still had rags of clothing also. His trainers had survived the worms, as had his nylon jacket. The rest was shreds and patches.
“There’s a tarpaulin in the bag, Dan,” Blake said. “Lay that out, and let’s see if we can lift him.”
“Why bother?” Henry asked. “We’ve found him, okay; what are we going to do with him now? Cover him up again and leave him, that’s my suggestion.”
“Henry, we’ve got to find out who he is. Give him back to his family. Glen said.”
Henry’s face suggested that we’d done enough for Glen already, and too much perhaps. “We could give the police a tip, let them come and fetch him.”
“And let them find what we can’t, some clue to lead them back to Glen? No way. We’ll do this ourselves, as anonymous as we can make it.”
I thought we’d end up dumping bones in a box on someone’s doorstep. Not pretty, but we’d done ugly things before. I’d do anything, I thought, to make these last days easier for Glen. Never mind how hard they were for the rest of us. There was a debt, our bright and shining tiger-years, we owed them all to him. Now in his grey descent, he could ask more and far more than he had thus far.
When we got back to his place, he wasn’t asking anything. Like consciousness, lucidity came and went in tides, as though there really were a lunar link. He could be aware, he could be self-aware, but the rhythms of both were different and they were rarely in sync one with the other.
Tosh didn’t want to see what we’d brought back with us, and no blame to him for that. I didn’t want to see it myself, in the bright garage-light where Blake was laying it out on a pasting table, like a makeshift morgue. Plenty of space in there, we’d long since got rid of Glen’s old car. We had joint power of attorney, all six of us; Tim had fixed that six months before, when we made this pact with Glen. He wasn’t dead yet but his estate was ours none the less to keep or sell, to divide up as we chose. I’d thought his car, his house, his books would be the most of our responsibilities; I hadn’t thought we might take possession of his history, his skeletons, the bodies he’d left in his burning wake.
I hadn’t known there were any literal bodies, though it didn’t come as too much of a shock. Thinking about it, looking back, I was only surprised that all six of us survived him in the one sense, as he had been then, and again that we would all survive him in the other sense, that he would be the first of us to die. The Seven Sisters they used to call us, we used to call ourselves, but he was always more than elder sister and guiding light. Devil, tempter, bully, scourge—all of those and more, he whipped us wild and we were too young to do anything but dance maniacally at his heels, spinning faster, skidding further, desperate to outdo him if only to show that we could do it too. Boys did die, then as now; one of us surely should have died, perhaps we all deserved to. It seemed bizarre sometimes that it was Glen who was dying now, before any of us had had the chance to nip ahead of him. He always used to lead the way, but he’d had intuition or seemed to, he always seemed to know just where to stop.
No great surprise, then, that some other boy had died, a greater sacrifice. I was only shocked that I didn’t know, that none of us had known. I slid my hand beneath Glen’s, and gazed reluctantly into his eyes. When he was truly living, when he was light they were gravity, blue and potent, blinking at nothing. Now they glittered dully, crazed and smeared, frantic behind a veil of murk. He was blind, we thought, as near as we could tell; for sure he didn’t see us, nor anything we tried to show him. In losing sight or just forgetting how to see, it seemed that he’d forgotten how to blink also, or else lost sight of the point of it. His tear-ducts were dry, his fund, his reservoir exhausted; we bathed his eyes to keep them moist, to soothe them.
Trying to soothe him if he should need it, if those trapped and frantic eyes weren’t doubly deceptive, saying no more than they saw, I gave him senseless words to match his senselessness: “It must be a weight off your mind, my love, that must have been some burden to carry all these years…”
I didn’t think Glen had carried it at all except as a fact, one little historical detail, a truth that he remembered: I killed a boy and buried him in the hills, Daniel knows where. He’d left it to us to carry, as we carried him now and the ever-increasing weight of him, as we’d carry his coffin between the convenient six of us when he was dead. I thought Glen might even have planned that. Perhaps that was why we none of us had died, he’d known that he would need us at the end.
As it turned out the boy wasn’t hard to name, and only a little harder to identify. He’d carried a purse in his jacket, in a zipped inner pocket; it was barely marked, despite the years of rotting. Inside the purse was a cashpoint card.
“Mr D B Tunnicliffe,” Henry read out, holding the card between fastidious fingers that had been scrubbed and disinfected like my own, like everyone’s; dirty boys once, we’d all learned to be scrupulously clean. “Mean anything to anyone?”
We played with the name, the initials, as we would have done before. DB—Dirty Boy, Dust Bin, Dave Brubeck, Dandelion & Burdock? Dog’s Breath, Dog’s Breakfast? (Dog’s Body, but I kept that to myself.) Tunnicliffe—Tunk, Tuna, Tuna Fish? Tinkerbell, if the kid had been a fairy…?
Nothing tinkled any of our bells, though. Henry slipped the card into a pocket of his suit and said he’d make enquiries.
Took him less than twenty-four hours. The following evening, we had the lad all lined up, named and tagged and wrapped up, ready to return.
Derek Brian Tunnicliffe, according to his records: seventeen years old when his account fell into disuse, presumably around the same time that he fell into that dark hole on the moor. Not living at home, not officially employed, not in a steady relationship (amazing, the details that banks record), he seemed to have been gone a while, a lag of a few weeks between the last transaction on his account and the police putting him down as a missing person. Even then, they had apparently done little more than fill in the paperwork. One more gay boy skipping town, and so what? He might have been running from his dealer, his pimp, one of his clients, anyone. Happened all the time: boys came, boys went, it made no difference. They all looked the same to the law.
Seven years later—exactly on the first day they were allowed to—his parents applied to have him rendered officially dead. More paperwork, no passion, and the account was closed. Records had only been kept this long, Henry said, because of the unusual circumstances, against the remote chance of his returning. Officially dead didn’t necessarily mean defunct, and his bank was covering its back as banks do, Henry said, the world over.
He sounded as though he approved. In this case, so did I. We had the parents’ last-known address, we could dump the bones in a cardboard box and give them back their boy, however little they wanted him.
Except that I didn’t want to. That was what Glen had asked and all that he had asked: a local habitation and a name, find out who he was and give him back. He hadn’t suggested going further. Well, he wouldn’t, would he? He’d known the truth himself, necessarily. If he’d felt no need to share it over all these years, why should he want it shared around now, even if he could remember? He wanted the ends tied off and tucked away, nothing more than that.
I wanted more, and didn’t believe I was alone. I used to follow Glen without question, but no longer. How? and why? were beacons blazing in my head, and the man who had the answers neither would nor could tell me now. We had a tame GP to supervise our nursing, but he wasn’t really one of us. We couldn’t take him to the garage, show him bones and ask him to tell us how the kid had died, stabbed or strangled, what. I doubted his ability in any case. I thought a specialist with a lab at his disposal might have thrown his hands up in defeat. There was too little flesh remaining to give any easy reading, and we’d hacked the bones about some despite our care, as we dug them out. Blake and Henry between them had done more, washing the mud away while I’d sat with Glen. Likely they’d washed off a putative scientist’s last chance.
Why was another matter, and we had perhaps some hope of working that out. Gifted the boy’s full name, Tim remembered him, and prompted memories in the rest of us. Glen had loved Python, so we had too; we’d called the kid Brian, with a giggling tag-line, he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy…
More than naughty, he’d been a sinner by our lights. Good boys steal, of course they do, but never from their mates. Brian had been compulsive, unless he was simply stupid. When he was around—in bars, in clubs, at parties; jealous of our own company, we’d kept him at what distance we could manage—we were always careful to keep a hand on our purses and an eye on our bags. At a gig one time I’d been dancing, I’d stripped off a favourite silk shirt to sweat half-naked under the lights, under the beat; when I went to cool off, the shirt was gone from where I’d left it. Next time I saw Brian, he was wearing it.
Compulsive or not, he was definitely stupid. I took the shirt back, left him with bruises for a finder’s fee. Any bright kid would have taken the lesson with the lumps, and been grateful. You needed to be bright, to survive that world we lived in then; when Brian vanished, I guess some of us wondered if maybe he’d been dimmer than we knew, if he’d turn up in the river one night with bad drugs in his blood or worse than bruises on his body. Both had happened before, both would happen again. When you took yourself to market the way we did every night, you needed to be part of a conglomerate, you needed at least one buddy to watch your back. Brian was always peripheral, always alone.
Now we were wondering if maybe it had been a different story, though the ending was the same: if the little toad had wangled his way into Glen’s house, and tried to make off with something. Glen had always been protective of his assets. My shirt had cost Brian a serious beating; it took little imagination to write that just a little larger, to remember Glen’s temper and his sheer physicality, the strength those extra years had given him…
“What I don’t get, though,” I said slowly, “if that’s what happened, if he laid into the jerk and Brian died, then okay, he thought he’d bury the body and stick a dog on top of it in case anyone saw the disturbed earth and came to check, fine—but why drag me into it, why make me dig the grave, or start it? Why make such a ritual of it, something I was bound to remember?”
“That’s easy,” said Henry, as Tim had before him. Smart boys, these professionals. “He was setting you up. Glen could lie for England, but not you. That’s why you got a record, Dan, while the rest of us stayed clean; your face is like a signed confession. Anyone came asking questions about a grave on the moor, you’d blush and stammer, give yourself away without saying a word. It’d be clear as day that you knew something, where it was at least. That would’ve been enough. You remember what the cops were like back then, go for an easy target and fit him up if need be, if they couldn’t find the proof. And Glen knew you’d say nothing, he’d be safe.”
I shook my head, more a plea than a refusal. “He wouldn’t do that. Not to me.”
“Why not? You didn’t have fifteen years of history together, not back then. You were the last of us to join up, remember, the last one Glen found. He probably hadn’t known you six months, you certainly weren’t a fixture yet. Why would he give you a break? He used us all, Dan, you know that.”
And was using us still, and we still let it happen. That was the hold he had, the debt we owed. Henry was right, of course, I’d never have grassed him up; I’d have served his time if I had to and thought myself a martyr for the doing of it, thought it a far, far better thing than ever I’d done before.
Even so it was a cold picture that Henry painted, a banker’s view of the world, investments and returns and selling short. I didn’t want to believe it. Neither, I thought, did the others.
Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. Please? Make it flourish, make it strong…?
In pursuit of that, perhaps, I urged them all to do some serious thinking, to drum up whatever memories they could. We’d been living half in that world anyway for months now, back in orbit around Glen again as we had not been for years; we carried it with us daily, and fresher every day. There must be more stories about Brian, someone surely must have spent more time with him than I had. He was a toe-rag, but a persistent toe-rag. A barnacle, even—as witness how he was clinging still, despite being fifteen years dead. Any little thing might help.
Myself, I went to sit with Glen a while, to talk him through this latest revelation. And had nothing back from him besides his nerveless stare—he was failing fast now, the doctor said he’d likely not pull himself into proper consciousness again—but I didn’t mind that. I was scared, I think, of what he might say if he could get a grip on what I was telling him. Yes, Daniel, it’s true, you were my fall-guy if I needed one. Or worse, perhaps, he might deny it and I’d never believe him now. It was true, he was a born deceiver. His greatest gift was to lie by misdirection, to let drop a word or two and watch how people misconstrued him. I used to envy that so much, trapped as I was in my own directness, where I said no and my whole body said yes, that’s right, officer, take me away.
In the end I took myself away, I left Glen to Blake’s more practical care and went home, went to bed. Stayed away all the next day, losing myself in my own memories, rebuilding us in my head the way we used to be, less brightly shining now, more tawdry in perspective; and was woken the morning after by a phone-call, early.
“Dan, it’s Jody. I’m at Glen’s.” Of course he was at Glen’s; it was his watch. I didn’t need to check the rota, I knew it by heart, and I wasn’t on until that evening. For a moment I thought this was the call we were all waiting for, all dreading, he’s on his way, come now if you want to say goodbye. But Jody went on, “Tim’s supposed to take over, I have to be early at work today; and he hasn’t turned up, and his wife doesn’t know where he is, he didn’t come home last night. Can you stand in for him?”
“On my way,” I said wearily. I was the one among us who didn’t work, at least not nine-to-five. Hence I was the one among us who got these calls day or night, the permanent standby as well as a regular lead.
Never before for Tim, though. Tim was the guy who lived his life to a metronomic standard, who was always where he should be when he said he’d be there. For Tim not to show was disturbing; if his wife Lisa couldn’t find him, that made it serious. I wanted to say call the hospitals, call his office, call the police, but she’d have done all that already.
I got to Glen’s sooner than Jody had expected me, largely by virtue of
not showering, not cleaning my teeth, forgoing coffee and turning up in yesterday’s clothes, if any of those are virtuous. Virtue must be relative, I guess.
“How is he?”
“Quiet.”
I nodded. That was what they’d told me on the phone yesterday, so I was more or less prepared when I looked into the room we’d set up for him on the ground floor, back in the days when he was still occasionally mobile but couldn’t manage stairs any more. He lay quite still in his high hospital bed; someone had persuaded his errant eyes to close, and I couldn’t see the least movement in the sheet that covered him, I couldn’t see his breathing.
“Glenda, love…”
I licked my finger and laid it lightly on his upper lip, felt the faintest touch of air. The doctor had warned us about this, had said that he could slip into a coma at any time and linger maybe for days before he died. He hadn’t eaten for a while now; we had a drip going into his arm, enough to keep him comfortable, pain-free, hydrated, not enough to keep him alive. He’d said he didn’t want that. “When the time comes, let me go,” he’d said.
Well, we would do that. Slowly, reluctantly, but we would.
I sat in the chair beside his bed, put my hand on top of his and found the fluttering pulse that lingered there. Like a bird on a wire, like smoke in a breeze, it gave not the least promise of permanence.
Well, no more could any of us. If the most solid, the most settled, the most reliable of us could fail wife and friends and solemn oath and all—hey, we’re all friable under pressure, it’s the human condition. Glen had his pressures, we had ours. I wondered what Tim’s were, beyond the ticking of a mortal clock: time presses was one of his most lawyer-like catchphrases, I’d heard it a hundred times this year and we’d all watched the truth of it being acted out on Glen’s body. I wondered if that were the problem, if he’d suddenly reached his limit, simply couldn’t bear to witness these last days, the end of a long song.
And didn’t believe it, couldn’t make that coalesce with what I knew of Tim. Besides, even if he wanted to run out on us, why would he run out on his wife also? It didn’t add up. So instead, inevitably, I wondered if there might be a connection with what else was new, a boy’s body brought to light and laid out in the garage.
Tim had always been the focused one among us, the one who could
party tonight but still keep an eye on tomorrow. For a while all he was looking for tomorrow was another party, but that changed. Quite suddenly he signed up for a college course, and then university after; while we dossed, he studied. He’d still come cheerfully to market with the rest of us, selling himself along with an acid chaser for the extra cash, but renting wasn’t a career-choice any longer, it was just a means to supplement his grant and have some fun along the way. Inevitably, he found other ways to have fun, in other company; it wasn’t much of a surprise to me when he faded away after he’d qualified, after he’d got his first job. Nor when he turned up again, only to invite us to his wedding.
It was always going to be Henry who missed him most. Those two had been the closest among us, the ones who seemed almost enough for each other until Tim started reaching further, the ones who didn’t really need to follow Glen. Once Tim had gone, I’d watched with a kind of cynical amusement as Henry aped his journey into respectability. Not into marriage, never that: but first he took a daylight job as a bank clerk, then he started taking courses—to improve his prospects, he said, to advance his career—and before long we never saw him except in a suit and tie, even around the clubs.
Those of us who were left had settled slowly into other lives, the way you have to as entropy sets in, as the fire starts to cool. We were all of us cooler now, fallen out of orbit and fear no more the heat o’ the sun: Glen was a vast red giant, all-engulfing and all but entirely burned out, too close to collapse. Swallowed within his dimness, his gravitational suck, it was hard to remember quite how brightly we’d burned.
One of us, though—I thought one of us must have flared once at least like a sun through a lens, to make a blister-point all unnoticed while the rest of us danced our wild wasteful scatter.
Henry came to relieve me, on time and in character, the button-down banker. Half-drowning in nostalgie de la boue, I made a mad effort to see him as he used to be, short and skinny and fiery in orange jeans, glitter in his hair and his mascara. Hopeless; only the height remained, or the lack of it. Otherwise he was like the rest of us, a victim of the ever-turning world.
I fetched coffee and whisky and a second chair, so that we could both sit with Glen while we talked.
“I don’t think it was Glen killed Brian,” I said bluntly.
“No?” His frown made his cheeks pudge out to emphasise the weight he’d accumulated, his hard-won gravitas. “How not? He sent us to the body.”
“Oh, he knew. He must have helped to bury him. After he’d killed the dog for cover—and yes, all right, after he’d set me up. Double indemnity.” This might not be the first time Brian had been laid out in his garage. They must have stored the body somewhere until I’d done the spadework, the groundwork, laid the dog down in the first instance for them to slide Brian beneath. “But I think he’s doing the same thing again, only setting himself up this time. If the story leaks, it can’t hurt him, how could it?” Henry was shaking his head; I said, “Look. If one of us had killed Brian, for whatever reason, skip over that for now—what would he do? Back then? We were kids, remember. When we needed help, where did we run to? Every time?” To the source, inevitably: to the mythmaker, to the guiser, to Glen.
Now he was nodding, not following me, trying to skip ahead. “You think—Tim? You think that’s why he’s vanished, in case it all came out?”
Oh, he was quick. Quick with his sums, at least, though he had no imagination. I almost smiled, as I said no. “No,” I said softly, “not Tim. Think about it. Brian was a thief; what could he ever have stolen, that Tim would give a fuck about? Tim didn’t care. He knew where he was going, and how to get there. Nothing else mattered, not to him. There was only one of us who was desperate to hang on to what he’d got.” I gave him a moment, then went on, “What did he steal from you, Henry? What was so important, Brian had to die?” When he didn’t answer, I added, “There’s only the three of us here, and Glen’s not listening. No tapes, I’m not wired for sound. Trust me.”
That far, I thought he would. And I was right. He sighed; he sipped in rotation, glass and mug; he looked at me and said, “Brian was stealing my life.”
“Explain?”
“It was watching Brian that made Tim think about the way we were, the way we’d end up. Dead or addicted, or scavenging on the margins. The rest of us were too busy to look that far, or too stupid, or else just dazzled by Glen, thinking we could all be like him. Small chance of that, he was the exception; and even then he was only a survivor. Everyone’s a survivor, until they lose it.” One rapid glance aside, to show me just how badly Glen had lost it in the end. “Tim wanted better than that. It was Brian that drove him, every day; he used to tell me so, Brian’s my criterion, he’d say, it’s Brian who makes me work to get away. I could be Brian so easily, we all could, we’re halfway there already… And he was right, I knew that, but I didn’t care. I was young, I liked what we had and I wanted to keep it, I wanted to keep it all. Tim too, Tim especially. If I lost him, I knew I’d lose you all sooner or later, and likely soon. I wasn’t ready for that. So I thought, if I got rid of Brian, Tim might lose his impetus and we could all go on as we were…”
And when it didn’t work, when Brian’s disappearance was a spur if anything, he cut his losses and went after Tim, rather than cling on to what was already fraying. He didn’t need to say that, I understood him all too well.
I sat and watched him drain his glass, put down his mug; I watched him walk away, I listened to the door close behind him and his car start in the street outside.
There were questions I hadn’t asked him, but again I didn’t need to. Whose idea was it, to line me up as fall-guy at need? Glen’s, it must have been; Henry didn’t have the imagination.
More importantly, where’s Tim?—but I knew where to find Tim now, if I chose to go looking. Again, Henry had no imagination, He’d use Glen’s old tricks one more time, double indemnity, once he’d seen the danger. Tim had to go for fear of what he might remember, how many times he’d talked about Brian and what Henry had said in response. He was too lawyerly to let the memory slip, for old times’ sake; he might not betray Glen, but no one else was safe. Usefully, he could be set up in his absence, with his absence. And if that pointing finger failed, he could still be hidden where people would stop looking before they got that far. For Glen’s sake, give him back to his family, I thought I might write a postcard to the police. With gloves on, not to give hostages to fortune. I thought I’d tell them to go dig on the moor—where it was easy, freshly turned, not too hard a labour for an unfit man—and when they turned up a dog’s bones they should just keep digging deeper, however hard the soil had been stamped.
It seemed as though I had a night watch now, to follow my long day. I poured myself another slug of whisky, turned to Glen—and found that Henry had turned thief despite Tim’s care that he should not. He’d stolen from me the one thing I’d been hoarding, what I’d worked for all these months.
Glen was gone and I’d missed the moment, the chance to see him off. Only the weight of him remained, star-stuff without a hint of shine.