The Glister by John Burnside

she kept telling him, she couldn't help if she didn't know what the problem was, and he didn't dare tell her. After a while, quietly, and with only a little bitterness, they had reached a kind of stalemate that had lasted a surprisingly long time before Alice started drinking again. Not long after that, she had the first of her little incidents, as she liked to call them.
    Meanwhile, the other boys began to disappear, one by one, at intervals of around eighteen months. The first to go was William Ash, the boy who had been with Mark that Halloween night. After that, two years passed, then Alex Slocombe vanished, quickly followed by a little Scots-Italian kid called Stewart Riva. Finally, just a few months ago, Liam Nugent had gone out for a walk and never come back, though he'd been seen with a sports bag over his shoulder, and his troubled relationship with his drunken father was a matter of record, so it was easy for Smith's people to suggest that he'd just given up and run away. With each new case, Morrison resolved to go back, to start again. He told himself he would accept his punishment for his part in the cover-up, if it would help stop this nightmare. But he hadn't made his move, and he was always aware of Smith—and Jenner—watching him from the genteel shadows of the Outertown. Gradually, by degrees that weren't quite apparent as they happened, Morrison had settled into a small, clouded, unshakable limbo. All he had left was this shrine, and even that was unofficial, a guilty man's secret. Meanwhile, he had to sit with the parents while they filled out missing persons reports, he had to lie to people about what he thought had happened to their children. William Ash. Alex Slocombe. Stewart Riva. Liam Nugent. No trace of those boys was ever found, so it was easy to say that they had simply run away, leaving a life without prospects for the bright lights and the big city. The reward for Morrison's continuing silence, if it could be called a reward, was a more or less honorary inclusion in Smith's lowest circle, not as an equal, but as a hireling, doing little jobs that Jenner brought him: smiling, ironic Jenner, who knew that all this was just a sop, a way of keeping Morrison busy and, at the same time, testing his loyalty. He knew that if he refused just one of these little jobs Smith would let Jenner loose on him, and there was no doubting where that would lead. Now, eight years later, he is in limbo, and he's thoroughly used to it. All he has is this little garden, three square feet of flowers and broken china and glass. It's something at least, so better than nothing and, late in the day, far, far too late, it's almost honorable. Morrison has always believed that, in spite of its troubles, in spite of its history, the Innertown is really just an old-fashioned town with a police house and a library, soft autumn days of leaf drifts along the high street and girls playing hockey in the fog, summer fetes and white Christmases, children growing up and having children of their own. It's a town that remembers its dead, a town where everyone remembers together, guarding the ancestors in their ancient solitude, long after they might have imagined themselves forgotten. It is, in other words, a good town, a town where people have detailed and carefully nurtured memories. Here, an elderly woman will cut flowers from her garden some weekday morning and carry them in a shopping bag to the cemetery, where she will leave them on the grave of a long-dead school friend. It is a simple act of remembrance she intends, nothing more: she will not stay long, perhaps pausing a while to pick up a few stray sweets wrappers or tidy the gravel before going home to her radio and her baking. Or a man in his middle years, a husband and father, will find himself, some damp October evening, reading the banal inscription on the grave of a girl he knew in school. He is not at all sure why he is there; somebody else would cite nostalgia, sentiment, a