The Glister: A Novel by John Burnside

Author:John Burnside [Burnside, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychological, Missing children, Fiction, Literary, Suspense, Suspense Fiction., General
ISBN: 9780385527644
Google: nAVfv3EknXIC
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2009-03-10T07:47:25+00:00

The news comes on a Friday, at the end of the afternoon. This time it's Tommy O'Donnell's parents who have found their son's room empty that morning, the bed not even slept in, the boy gone. He must have disappeared sometime in the night, because Mike O'Donnell—who is Jimmy van Doren's uncle—had popped his head round the door at around ten on the Thursday night to see if everything was OK and he'd found Tommy at his desk, listening to his Walkman. He'd asked Tommy if his homework was done, and not believed the answer, but he'd not had the heart to nag. Then he'd gone to bed early, leaving his wife downstairs watching a documentary on cosmetic surgery and his only son safe in his room, happily skiving. No, there was no reason for Tommy to go out, he knew the rules about going out on his own at night and, anyway, if he wanted to go somewhere, he only had to ask and Mike would drive him there. Mike O'Donnell worked with his big brother in the landscape business, but he wasn't a partner in the firm. The general view was that, while Earl van Doren swanned around the place pretending to be one of the elite, Mike did all the real work, which meant he often came home exhausted. But that wouldn't have stopped Tommy asking for a lift somewhere, and the temptation to say no wouldn't have occurred to Mike. Everyone knew Mike O'Donnell for a good sort: hardworking, dutiful, absurdly loyal to his brother, a kind husband to a rather ungrateful wife, and a doting father—he would rather have died than deny his son anything. Now the boy was gone but, because there was no sign of forced entry at the house, or any evidence to suggest that he hadn't simply run away, we all know that this is going to be another of those cases that gets quietly buried, while the authorities, including the police, go on with the real business of promoting Brian Smith's Homeland project.

After that, on the Monday, it's supposed to be school again, but nobody goes. It's one of the small gestures that we have available to us: on the school day after one of our kindred disappears, we wander around the town or the wastelands, stealing anything that looks valuable and breaking everything else. It is a mark of the authorities' shame that, no matter what we do, there are no repercussions. They are guilty, because they know they have failed us. We should burn down the town hall and the police house on days like this and maybe force their hands at last. But we never do. We smash windows. We steal cheap wine from the Spar shop. We go out to the plant and sit around sniffing solvent or getting pissed on the wine we've stolen, then we roll home out of our heads and sit around in all our separate bedrooms, plugged into our separate sound

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.