Things We Nearly Knew Read online

  Jim Powell

  Things We Nearly Knew

  PICADOR

  for Kay

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  1

  Arlene came from Pittsburgh. At least, that’s my provisional opinion. It’s one of the many things about Arlene that remain uncertain. I asked her a few times, like we all did, and never got an answer. Not a direct answer. ‘I come from somewhere out there,’ she said on one occasion. Don’t we all?

  At first I thought Arlene came from New York. I had that fixed in my mind before there was any debate on the matter. Thick black hair, slightly waved, just off the shoulder. Red lipstick, nail varnish. Slinky dresses, curving round her backside like the ones my mother used to wear sometimes, when I was growing up, when we were all growing up. That said New York to me. What the hell do I know? I’ve never been to New York. Come to think of it, neither had my mother.

  ‘That’s not coming from New York,’ Steve said later. ‘That’s wanting people to think you come from New York. That’s what you do when all you know of New York is what you saw in a magazine when you were a little girl.’

  Steve didn’t think that Arlene came from Pittsburgh. He thought she was a small town girl from . . . well, I don’t know where from. By then it was immaterial because Arlene had gone. Gone for the last time, I mean. She left a few times over the course of the nine months that we knew her, or thought we knew her. Every time could have been the last time.

  I was on my own behind the bar when she first came in. It was more than a year ago now, sometime in February, must have been. It was a Monday for certain, because Steve wasn’t there. Steve helps me run the place in the evenings. He has Mondays off: those are the nights he reminds himself what his wife looks like. I don’t remember who else was there. None of the regulars anyhow. Not Nelson, who would soon come to fancy his chances with Arlene. Not Davy, likewise. Not Mike, who would have been more than interested if he was ten years younger and hadn’t got religion. In fact, none of the ones who pay my bills and keep me in cheap cigars. Whoever was there, I’m sure we looked up when she walked in. Anyone would, and not only the men. Arlene would have expected nothing less.

  ‘Vodka Martini,’ she said, then told me how to make it the way she liked it, in case I didn’t know, which I didn’t. We don’t have much call for cocktails round here.

  To begin with, I expected her to be expecting someone. I didn’t ask because you don’t, or not at once. I thought she’d take her drink to a distant table and wait. Instead, she sat on a bar stool, one leg crossed over the other, like blondes do in Hollywood movies, and other women you want to talk to and regret later that you did. It crossed my mind that Arlene might once have been a hooker, and in fact the idea has never altogether left my mind. On the other hand, you could have put her in a lounge on Fifth Avenue and she wouldn’t have looked out of place. Maybe that’s saying the same thing.

  Most women are ill at ease in a bar on their own, in my experience. Few attempt it. Arlene looked like she belonged on her own. She didn’t seem to expect anyone to speak to her. She appeared not to mind that the customers went on talking to each other. Which isn’t to say that she was ignored. While she was there, I’m sure she was the focus of every thought. Once she left, she’d be the focus of every conversation. Arlene would have known that, and it must have been satisfaction enough. After a while, when no one had turned up to meet her, and when she showed no signs of leaving, I spoke to her.

  ‘Passing through town?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure right now. I expect I’ll be staying for a while.’ She reached her arm across the counter. ‘My name’s Arlene.’

  That tickled me. It was the formality of the handshake, like we were being introduced at a glitzy ball. But it wasn’t formal, because she never said her surname.

  It was Mitchell, by the way. We only discovered that lately. It was written in small letters inside her left shoe. Of course, it could have been someone else’s shoe.

  ‘Hello, Arlene,’ I said. ‘Welcome to the best bar in town. Are you from round here?’

  ‘From round abouts,’ she said. ‘I’m from many places, actually. I think we all are, don’t you?’

  ‘No. I’m from one place. Here. Definitely.’

  ‘Born and raised?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Soldered to the town from birth.’

  Arlene absorbed this information. ‘I’m looking for someone called Jack,’ she said. ‘He’s from these parts. Name mean anything to you?’

  Darned stupid question, if you ask me. It’s not a large town, but big enough to accommodate a few dozen Jacks, I’d imagine.

  ‘Jack who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  That was a load of help.

  ‘I’ve known plenty of Jacks,’ I said. ‘So has everyone. It’s not much to go on.’

  ‘I know,’ said Arlene. ‘I think the one I’m looking for used to live in this town.’

  ‘You don’t seem very sure.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘The only Jack I can think of who used to drink here,’ I said, trying to be helpful, ‘was Jack Nightingale. He’s dead, or at least I think he’s dead.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘I don’t know. Five or six years ago, maybe.’

  ‘Not him, then. My Jack was alive three years ago. And his surname doesn’t begin with N. It begins with . . . well, I’m not sure. H, I think. Maybe R. It was hard to tell from the writing.’

  ‘What writing?’

  Arlene ignored the question.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It was a long shot. But I’ll hang around here a while, if it’s the same to you.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll have another vodka Martini.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Arlene. ‘I didn’t take it like that.’

  Arlene stayed for an hour or two and drank three Martinis. Not wanting to monopolize her, I polished glasses after that first exchange and talked to the other customers. Arlene didn’t talk to anyone. When she’d downed the third cocktail, she put her glass on the counter, swivelled on her stool, slid herself off it, and left without a look at anyone. I watched her go. She wasn’t as tall as she’d seemed. The way she carried herself magicked a few inches on to her height. So did her stilettos. A breeze of perfume lingered behind her. I can smell it now, more than five months since she left. Perhaps I’m imagining it.

  That was how Arlene introduced herself to me.

  The trouble with talking about events in retrospect is that one knows what’s to come. I can’t tell you what happened a year ago without it being coloured by what’s happened since. Even without what’s happened since, Arlene’s first appearance was an event.

  I can’t say that women never drink in here on their own, but it doesn’t happen often. When Arlene came in for the first time, I expected it to be the last, whatever she said about hanging around. She wasn’t meeting anyone. She wasn’t local, so far as I knew. She would brighten one evening, then be gone. It was when she came back a second time, then a third, that I realized that Arlene was rewriting the rule book. By the fourth and fifth visits, it was clear that Arlene didn’t possess a rule book, for this or for anything.

  I can’t deny I was soft on her. It wasn’t just that she was good-looking, and sexy as hell. There was some other quality to Arlene that made me feel protect
ive toward her. I don’t think I was alone in that. I think every guy felt the same way. Arlene was someone who invited protection, then declined it when it was offered. Not that it was on offer from me. There are lines and barriers, and it’s as well to respect them. Still, Marcie sensed my feelings that first night.

  ‘How’s your new girlfriend?’ she asked, when we were in bed.

  ‘You’re not meant to know about her.’

  ‘I had a little peek through the door when you were chatting her up.’

  ‘She’s hot,’ I said.

  ‘The type who likes men fifteen years older than herself, do you reckon?’

  ‘Ten,’ I said. ‘It can’t be more than ten.’

  ‘At least fifteen, I’d say. More like twenty.’

  ‘You’re just saying that. Anyhow, think of all the young men who come in here. I’m allowed the one, aren’t I?’

  This is standard banter. Usually it’s the other way about, and I tease her. It comes to the same thing. We allow each other our fantasies, such as they are, and don’t feel threatened by them. Jealousy doesn’t come into it. Besides, Arlene was no more likely to want me than the young men with big muscles and tight sweatshirts were likely to want Marcie. Our feet are on the ground. We know our market worth. Neither of us has grabbed a bargain, but we’ve each got good value.

  Sometimes I forget how long I’ve been doing this job. That’s assuming you can call it a job. It’s more a way of life, a way of living in one building at split levels. One level is reserved for Marcie; the other for such of the world as passes our way, aka our customers. The levels overlap. At night, it’s a bar where men come as a respite from home, or because they’re lonely, or both. At lunchtime there’s a different clientele. Then it’s all sorts of people coming in from work for a light meal.

  Marcie does lunchtimes. She does lunchtimes and I do evenings. That’s the way it works. When we were younger, I did my shift solo. Marcie has always had help at midday, so she can stand behind the bar looking proprietorial. In the evenings, I do the same now. For the past five years, I’ve had Steve to help me out six nights a week. He does Sunday lunchtimes on his own, and sometimes Sunday evenings. We don’t serve food then, and Marcie and I take the day off. He’s a good kid, Steve. Marcie knows his family: they farm someplace close to where she comes from. I wanted to hire someone else at the time, but Marcie was insistent I should take the kid. I haven’t regretted it. I don’t know why we still call him the kid. He must be nearly thirty now, with two children of his own. He brings them to the bar sometimes and Marcie makes a real fuss of them. His wife’s got a high-paid job, so Steve minds the children during the day and helps me in the evenings. He’s as good-natured as you like, scratching his thick black hair in bemusement at our customers, smiling at the world in his lopsided way.

  The building that houses the bar, and which is also where we live, is in fact two buildings. The bar is the taller part, the older part, and the part nearest the road. Rumour says that it was a farm building once, but rumour says so many things that it’s impossible to say for certain. It has a pitched roof, and exposed beams, and gables at each end. Our living area was bolted on at a later point. It is square and functional, and of no interest. It has a flat roof, out of sight at the back, which we use as a sun terrace when there’s any sun.

  On this roof, there’s a window in one of the gable ends of the bar area. Usually, it’s covered with an old board, in case Marcie or I wander about in the nude without thinking. Not that we do, but just in case. Wouldn’t want to excite the customers. When it’s warm, I eat my lunch up there, while Marcie supervises the midday trade below. Sometimes I take down the board and observe the comings and goings. I have this curiosity about how we function. Why we function, come to that. What’s the point of it? The gofer running from one table to another, putting down plates, picking up plates; Marcie standing behind the counter, taking money, giving money back.

  It’s like a nature programme on one of those channels that nobody watches, where zillions of ants go scurrying around the place as if their lives depended on it. Maybe they do depend on it. All that endeavour. All that ferrying about of leaves, and the nibbling of them, and beating off attacks from hostile ants, and the other stuff that goes with being an ant. What’s the point of it? I mean, we need to eat, but why generally do we do it?

  The best answer I can come up with is that it’s to do with continuity. It’s to do with prolonging the species into the future. It’s to do with performing repetitive tasks for millions of years, so there’s always a next generation to go on performing them. To what ultimate end, I’ve no idea. All I know is, when I think of purpose in these terms, I have to stop thinking. I have to pretend to myself that it’s to do with shifting plates and glasses, and counting money. I don’t want to think of the next generation anymore. We don’t now, Marcie and me.

  I tend to put customers into boxes. There are the regulars, the ones that turn up several times a week, the ones that think this entitles them to a piece of us: a time share in the real estate that is Marcie and me. There are the semi-regulars, the ones I see a few times each month, whose names I know, if I can remember them, whose stories I know, if I don’t confuse them with someone else’s. Then there are the strangers, the ones who turn up once or twice and are gone in the wind. These are the evening customers I’m talking about. I expect much the same can be said of the lunchtime trade. I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask Marcie.

  The ones who belong in a box are Marcie and me. We’re the ones who live here, who work here, who spend our lives in the place. Others flow in and out, at times of their own choosing, with no respect for boxes and labels. The most loyal of them begin as strangers. You see them for the first time with no idea if you’ll see them again. Later, when you feel you’ve known them your entire life, you forget that you once met them for the first time, and you forget what impression they made on you, or whether you liked them. You like them now, that’s for sure, or at least you go out of your way to notice their good points. Of course you do. They give you money, so why wouldn’t you be well disposed toward them? Doesn’t mean you liked the look of them when they first walked in.

  Once I kept a sign behind the bar that read ‘NO POLITICS ALLOWED HERE’. That was after we’d had a couple of fights and the cops had to come and sort them out. Both fights made the front page of the local paper. For a while afterwards, people we’d never seen before came in and looked around, as if weighing up the prospect of another showdown. I didn’t reckon on making my bar a haven for every screwball out there, so I put up the sign. Later, I took it down again. The place had gotten too quiet. We still talked, but about things we agreed on, which takes half the point out of talking. Human beings need to argue and, if you ask me, we need to argue more than we did before.

  Nelson used to disagree with that proposition, which proves the point in my opinion. Nelson disagreed with every proposition. He would disagree with his own propositions if he heard them made by someone else. Nelson was our resident propagandist at the time. He was all right, but he did like an argument.

  ‘People have always argued,’ Nelson said. ‘Why should you think they need to argue any more or any less than before?’

  ‘Because everything’s gotten the same,’ I said. ‘It’s standardized. We’re born the same, grow up the same, work the same, eat the same, live the same, die the same. Time was when we were individuals, when we knew what was different about us. Now, the only way we can assert ourselves is to tell other people they’re wrong. It makes us feel there’s a point to us.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Nelson. ‘I tell other people they’re wrong because they are wrong, not to make a point about myself. But what the hell do I know?’

  That used to be one of Nelson’s phrases. He said it to make the opposite point: that he knew everything about most things, and it was other people who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. He put it the other way round to make it sound better. Nelson is
a failed politician, which he also put differently. A bull of a man, late forties I’d say, he runs a state-wide charity, based here in town. My personal theory is that, if you run a charity, you have to spend your days being nice to people, which must be tough for someone who prefers having arguments. I think the bar was Nelson’s antidote to the day job. He’s an OK guy, but not someone we’d have chosen as a friend if we got to choose. In the end, I did get to choose, which is one reason we don’t see him any longer.

  We don’t have much time for friends, doing this. It’s not that we don’t have them. Having both grown up in the town, we’ve got plenty. But we don’t get to see them much, unless they drink here, and the only one who does that reliably is Mike. I was in the same class as Mike at school. We’ve been friends since we were knee high. In practice, our friends are the regulars, which is a one-sided arrangement. They decide that they like our bar. They decide that they like us, or can tolerate us. They spend their money here when they feel like it, and expect us to talk to them in return. We don’t have a say in the matter, assuming we want to build a clientele. They self-certify as our friends. Except that they wouldn’t refer to us as their friends, most of them, because they have other lives, from which this is a diversion, and they have other friends. We don’t have another life.

  The worst of it is when you lose a regular, someone who’s been coming in for years, most nights maybe, who suddenly stops coming. Sometimes they tell you the reason face to face: they’re moving to another town, for example. Those ones come and say goodbye, visit again if they happen to be passing. Sometimes you don’t know the reason at the time, but you find out later: they’ve split up with their wife, let’s say. Other times, you don’t know, and you never discover.

  Jack Nightingale was a case in point. I hadn’t thought of him in a while, until Arlene reminded me that first night she came in. Jack had been a good customer for ten years or more. I couldn’t call him a regular, because his habits weren’t regular. He’d come in most nights for a week or two, then we’d not see him for a couple of months. Jack lived in what I call the bastard town next door, for reasons I’ll explain later if I remember, but he liked to drink in my bar. I expect it had to do with the women who sometimes accompanied him. Not to put too fine a point on it, they looked like tramps. You wouldn’t want to be seen canoodling with women like that in your own home town, I imagine. Jack said he was divorced. Lots of people say that, and maybe they are and maybe they’re not.