The Glister Read Online Free PDF Page B

who normally delight in logic problems. Nor had they ever been unduly troubled by the fact that, as young Brian progressed dutifully through primary school, his teachers not only described him as below average, lazy, and almost entirely lacking in flair or imagination, but also implied that he was universally disliked by both staff and pupils. The truth was that this did not surprise them in the least.
    What those school reports failed to mention explicitly was that their son was suspected of playing a wide range of cruel and humiliating practical jokes on the other children in his year group. Apparently, he was particularly vicious toward female pupils. He would find a way of placing fake blood or real excrement in a girl's satchel, or he would lace another child's black-currant drink with a special dye that turned her urine bright red. He left dead frogs and birds in desks, he sent Valentine's and Christmas cards with cruel messages or captions—never handwritten, always clipped from newspapers and magazines—or he would send photographs of stick-thin children in stripy Belsen pajamas to the fattest person in his class, a pasty, desperate-looking girl called Carol Black. He put drawing pins on chairs and slipped tiny shards of glass or copper wire into apples and toffees. For several months running, he paid special attention to Catherine Bennett, the class beauty, who regularly discovered pools of sour milk, or sticky masses of Cow Gum and horsehair among her belongings. On one occasion—the morning of her tenth birthday, to be precise—she found a sheep's eye and a packet of Love Hearts on her desk when she came back from milk break. Everybody knew who had put them there but, as with all Brian's other little acts of pointless malice, nobody could prove anything and the boy's parents were never informed. Most of the teachers could see that it wouldn't have mattered anyway. As was so often the case, the child's behavior was an all-too-obvious symptom of parental indifference.
    Brian's nasty streak had disappeared, however, when he discovered the world of puzzles. Logic games, join the dots, jigsaws, anagrams, crosswords, number sequences—these things provided him, not so much with distraction as with a means of salvation. Solving a puzzle, he could see how everything was connected and he was privy to the secret order that underpinned the day-to-day world that had so bewildered him till then. Solving a really difficult puzzle would give him a deep, almost physical satisfaction that lingered for hours, or even days afterward; at an age when other boys locked themselves away with a fistful of tissues and a dog-eared copy of Fiesta, Brian would go to his room and take out a thousand-piece jigsaw, or some elaborate wooden puzzle that his mother had picked up in a junk shop. There were even times, during his teens, when he seemed to disappear: on rare days out with his parents, or all through the long hours of a school day, it was as if something had been switched off in his head, so it wasn't like being with other people at all, it wasn't even like being present, it was just nothing — and Brian was grateful for that, because Brian didn't like people. In the puzzles, everything depended on the connections, the logical sequences, the intrinsic order that was always waiting to be discovered; but with people there were no connections, and no logic—or at least, nothing very elegant or interesting. Compared to a number puzzle, or a complicated jigsaw, people were like those dodgem cars at the fair, going round in circles and bumping into one another noisily to no real purpose.

    So it was that, during the years when he was lonely and despised, puzzles had saved Brian Smith from the world and kept him true to himself, in spite of everything. Yet now that he is a man, he has no time for puzzles. He still sees the connections between one thing and another, but the links he discovers are larger and more tangibly rewarding than