Read Online The Glister by John Burnside - Free Book Online Page A

don't like it when things get difficult for no good reason. Complicated, yes; I can do complicated. The world is complicated, there's all kinds of stuff going on. Some books are really complicated. But love probably isn't that complicated, it's just difficult. And maybe love is the wrong word here, anyway, at least when it comes to people. People are hard to love, even if you're having sex with them, or good, funny conversations like the ones Elspeth and I sometimes have. People are difficult, that's just how they are made.
    Still, if you want to stay alive, which is hard to do in a place like this, you have to love something, and the one thing I love is the chemical plant. Well, that, and books. I love books. In a place like this, that's almost as weird as saying you love the plant, but at least it's more or less normal. Because you're definitely not normal, you're definitely weird, if you love the plant.
    The thing is, I know everybody says it's dangerous, that it's making us all sick, that they should have razed it to the ground years ago and cleared the entire eastern peninsula instead of just leaving it to rot—and that's all true, I know that, but you still have to admit that it's beautiful. Maybe there are more obviously beautiful places in Canada or California, maybe they have gardens and parks with clear lakes and honest-to-Betsy live trees with autumn leaves and all the stuff you see on television, but we don't have those things. All we have is the plant. We're not supposed to go there and I suppose most of the kids don't, but there are plenty who do.
    I don't think anybody spends as much time out there as I do, though. When the storms come, I go out and stand at the entrance to one of the old kilns, to watch the rain pouring down. Or I sit up on a ruined crane above the docks and look out over the water, to a point on the horizon that seems to belong, not just to another place, but also to a different time, the past maybe, or maybe the future, when the derelict buildings rot away and the poison in the ground, the poison nobody can see, loses its deadly power. I'm not supposed to go there—nobody is—but it doesn't scare me and it doesn't scare some of the other kids, because I see them out there sometimes, moving like shadows among the ruins, not wanting to be seen, and not wanting to see that anybody else is there with them. I imagine they go out there for the same reasons I do: because it's peaceful, and it doesn't belong to anybody, and, maybe, because it's the only beauty they know. It's odd to say that, but it really, really is beautiful, the way those old horror films they show on TV are beautiful, or the way Annette Crowley in 4B is beautiful, with the white scar running across her cheek and neck where her face was cut open in a car crash.
    This beautiful place is called the chemical plant because that's what it once was, though now it's just hundreds of derelict buildings and a network of abandoned railway tracks running past the edge of the Innertown to what remains of the old harbor. If you were to draw a map of this end of the peninsula, you'd have the Outertown first, all mock-Elizabethan and ranch-style villas with wide, miraculously green lawns and hedges. Then there's the former golf course, conveniently situated so as to divide the good people in the nice houses from the ghosts and ruffians of the Innertown, now nothing more than a ghetto for poisoned, cast-off workers like my old man. Finally, with virtually nothing to separate it from the town, what remains is an industrial wilderness where the plant used to be. It's called the chemical plant, because it never had any other name, even the land it stands on is almost nameless, a stretch of nowhere that people sometimes call the headland, though the adults rarely talk about it and, when they do, they mostly just refer to it as out there. If you listen to some of the great and good around here, the whole lot comes as one unit, which they've started