Things We Nearly Knew Page 10

  Franky said nothing.

  ‘It’s your turn, Franky,’ I said. ‘What’s your take on Mr Hammond?’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I know a great deal more than the rest of you. Mr Hammond was a friend of my mom and dad. When I was a kid, I saw him quite often. He was real good to me. Used to bring me presents and stuff.’

  We were electrified.

  ‘You never told us that,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t been around to tell you,’ said Franky. ‘Anyway, years ago, when I hadn’t seen him for a while, I asked my mom what had happened to him.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said he was ill and was confined to bed. Apparently he used to work for a pharmaceutical company. Earlier, he’d been their sales manager in some country in Africa, where he contracted this incurable disease. He didn’t know he had it for a while. The bug lay dormant for years. Then he got taken ill. His company bought the house next door for him to live in, and hired a nurse to care for him. From what you’ve said, there were several of them over time. As long as no one touched him, it seemed to be OK. He’s dead now. At least, I imagine he is. I presume the house is empty.’

  ‘Very good,’ I said. ‘Now would you care to tell us which parts of that story are true, if any, and which are made up.’

  ‘From what you said at the beginning, those aren’t the rules of the game. We tell our stories and you decide which one’s the winner. Isn’t that right?’

  There was silence round the table. Arlene dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ asked Marcie.

  ‘I was thinking of that poor man and his illness,’ said Arlene.

  It’s amazing what bullshit can achieve.

  No one said a word. If I’d been asked to vote that second, I expect I would have voted for Franky’s story. That didn’t make it true. Franky’s career had been founded on inventing stories that people believed. The other stories weren’t true either. Unless someone had been smitten by a flash of intuition and had got close to the truth by accident.

  I can’t remember the detail of the other stories that night, except for Arlene’s, which came at the end. There was the usual quota of aliens and spies. We had a retired mobster from Chicago with the real name of Giuseppe Amendola. Someone, Mike I think, said that Mr Hammond suffered from a rare condition called . . . I can’t remember what it’s called. It means fear of the daylight. Someone tried to persuade us that we had Elvis for a neighbour. We played ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ full blast on the jukebox, and opened the doors so we could hear if he came out to duet with himself. He didn’t.

  ‘OK,’ said Franky to Arlene. ‘You’re the last to go. Beat my story.’

  ‘It’s not complicated,’ said Arlene. ‘It doesn’t involve weird religions, multiple wives or incurable diseases. Mr Hammond doesn’t exist. He never has. Nor have his housekeepers. The women themselves have existed, I suppose, but no one has asked them who they are, so no one knows. When the storekeepers in town see a woman they don’t recognize, they assume it’s Mr Hammond’s latest housekeeper. They keep the myth alive. Everything has been assumed. Everything has been guesswork. It’s all gossip, built up over the years. There’s an empty house. Big deal. The country’s full of empty houses. No one lives in it, or has done in living memory. So no Mr Hammond. No housekeepers. No nothing.’

  I declared Arlene the winner of the competition. In the many debates about Mr Hammond over the years, I don’t think it had occurred to us that he might not exist, and that no one lived in that house, or ever had done.

  Afterwards, Marcie went to bed and everyone else went home. Except for Franky and Davy. When I’d cleared away, they were sitting at the bar, deep in conversation.

  ‘Davy thinks the two of us should go over to Mr Hammond’s house one day and take a look around,’ said Franky.

  ‘It was you that suggested that, Franky.’ Davy looked at me. ‘Want to come with us?’

  ‘You mean, take a look around the garden?’

  ‘Yeah, and perhaps the house as well,’ said Franky. ‘Depends what we find. What do you think?’

  The first thing I thought was that it was trespass. I’ve got more law-abiding these days. The second thing was that I was curious. The third thing was that Franky and Davy were going to do it whatever I said, so I might as well join them.

  ‘I’m in,’ I said.

  I was happy to be in on something for once. I was beginning to feel left out of whatever was going on around me.

  8

  Once he’d got the idea into his head, Franky didn’t waste time. He and Davy came round the next Saturday morning and off we went through our parking lot to Mr Hammond’s place. We could have gone in by the main gates, but didn’t want to run the risk of being noticed. I provided the wire cutters and clipped the fence. Franky took the lead. ‘You shouldn’t have let him do that,’ Marcie said afterwards; ‘it’s not his town now; you’re not kids anymore.’ It was nothing to do with being kids or not being kids. Some things don’t change.

  I cut the wire with care, enough to let us in without wanton destruction. After the wire came the undergrowth, thickets of brambles and shrubs, and within the thickets were the trunks of pine trees. We walked on a carpet of needles, knees raised high to avoid entanglement, like we were playing Grandma’s Footsteps. It took several minutes till we got through into what had once been the garden; until we got our view of the house.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Davy.

  When Franky and I had done this as kids, there had been a lawn, of sorts. Now there was no lawn, just thick, long grass, full of weeds that had tumbled under their own weight like matted dreadlocks. Then the house had looked, well, I wouldn’t say cared for, but not entirely uncared for. Unkempt; not dilapidated. Now the paintwork peeled, a window hung off its hinges, and dark green stains ran down the walls where clogged and broken guttering had diverted the rainwaters from their course.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Davy again.

  ‘Arlene was right,’ said Franky. ‘No one living here now.’

  ‘How long has it been empty, do you reckon?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t be less than five years, I’d think,’ said Davy. Was that right? How long did it take for cobwebs to spread, for floorboards to creak, for windows to leak? How long did it take for life to seep out of a house?

  We looked at each other and pressed on. I don’t know what the others were thinking. To me it felt an intrusion, like treading on ground where a sadness had been buried. It didn’t feel that we had a right to be there. Of course, we didn’t have a right to be there, but now we’d come we weren’t going back. I didn’t want to be there, and I didn’t want to leave.

  Franky picked his way toward the back door, like we’d done thirty years earlier, although there was now no reason not to try the front. The door was not locked. In fact, it was slightly ajar. It creaked on its hinges as Franky pushed it open, me and Davy close behind him. I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight. I hadn’t imagined we’d really go inside the house. We were going to take a look around, I thought, to see what was going on, in a general kind of way. I hadn’t guessed that nothing was going on.

  Franky took a hesitating step down what seemed to be a corridor, the doors that led from it securely closed. We were in darkness. If I’d been on my own, I would have skedaddled at this point. I’m a scaredy-cat when it comes to situations like this. Franky wasn’t a scaredy-cat, and neither was Davy. They weren’t for going. Franky paused for a while, letting his eyes acclimatize to the darkness, then turned a handle and pushed open a door. He fiddled for a light switch and found it. No light came on.

  There were shutters on the window. They didn’t fit too well and a shard of light lay on the floor from the gap between them. Enough light to see that the room was empty. Enough light for Franky to reach the window and open the shutters. The three of us stood there and looked around and said nothing. It was a warm, bright day outside. Inside, it felt cold. The warm
air chilled as it percolated through the window and circulated round the room. It felt like the first air the room had known in years. Dust lay thick on the surfaces and swirled like confetti in the sunbeams coming through the window. A moth with damaged wings stirred on the windowsill. The extremity of the silence screamed at us. Franky looked at his footprints on the floorboards. There was a set of smaller footprints next to them.

  ‘I told you I saw someone here,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s look upstairs,’ said Franky.

  I wasn’t keen to go upstairs. I let the others move a few paces ahead of me, so they could discover whatever nastiness there was. It seemed to me that most things were possible. At any turn we might find a skeleton or, worse, a body in the act of decomposing. Not that decomposing is an act, I suppose. It’s a process: a stage in the journey from something to nothing. Perhaps a protracted journey in this environment. Franky and Davy had no such qualms. They flung open doors and marched up staircases, unconcerned with what they might find. The other rooms were barren, like the first, except that upstairs there were no footprints. The only inhabitants of the house were dust and silence and a multitude of specimens from the insect kingdom. The place had been picked clean.

  ‘Who told you that Mr Hammond lived here?’ asked Davy. ‘Or that anyone did?’

  Franky and I looked at each other. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was something we knew. Everybody knew it.’

  ‘Did your parents tell you? Someone must have told you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘When you’ve known a fact for forty-odd years, you don’t question how you know it.’

  ‘You didn’t know it,’ said Davy. ‘Because it was wrong.’

  ‘It was right once,’ Franky said. He paused. ‘According to my parents.’

  ‘What about the housekeeper?’ I said to Davy. ‘And the other housekeepers? We haven’t invented them.’ I was keen to hang on to something concrete, something that could not be dematerialized so easily.

  ‘How do you know they lived here? How do you know they kept house for Mr Hammond, or for anyone? How do you know there was a Mr Hammond?’ I hadn’t figured Davy for a state prosecutor. He could have made a decent job of it.

  Good questions. How did we know? All I could say was that, at some point, we must have known, because facts like that don’t simply get invented. Some certain knowledge had started it off, and we couldn’t now remember what it was. There was no denying that the house was unoccupied, and looked as though it had been that way for several years. Someone must once have lived here and they must have moved out or died, and they, or someone else, must have cleared the place of furniture and belongings, must have pulled the doors and shutters closed behind them. And the second set of footsteps said that someone had been back since, and recently.

  There were other questions too. Who owned the house now? Did they know they owned it? Who would deliberately leave a valuable piece of real estate for this length of time, letting it crumble to pieces?

  That evening in the bar, minus Franky, but aided by contributions from the female side of the brain in the shape of Marcie and Arlene, we laid the pieces on the counter and tried to put the puzzle together. Couldn’t be done. Too many pieces missing. If Franky had partly been telling the truth on ‘Mr Hammond Night’, then there had indeed been a family connection between Hammond and the Albertinos, as Marcie had half remembered. I hoped that she would now pluck a further clue from her childhood memory that would make sense of everything. She couldn’t do that, and said she was as mystified as the rest of us. She thought the clue was there, though, lodged somewhere beyond her reach. Arlene wasn’t able to be of historical assistance, but she had a quirky mind and I thought she might find another way of looking at the puzzle that had escaped us.

  ‘I gave you the answer the other night,’ said Arlene. ‘There’s no Mr Hammond. No housekeepers. No one lives there.’

  ‘That was a game,’ said Davy.

  ‘Not to me, it wasn’t. I was being serious. I won the competition, remember?’

  ‘Someone must have lived there once,’ I said.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Arlene. ‘Someone bought the land, had the house built, died before they could occupy it. Why not? Can’t have been the first time it’s happened.’

  ‘When we went there years ago,’ I said, ‘there was a klaxon to warn us off.’

  ‘So? An alarm system was fitted when the house was built.’

  ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ I said. ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘The point,’ said Arlene, ‘is that if you don’t know for certain what happened, anything could have happened. You can make up what you like and it’s as possible as anything else. Anyone can choose to believe it or not to believe it. That’s the point.’

  ‘You were right,’ said Marcie, looking at Arlene. ‘You should start a religion.’

  On the Monday, Marcie and I chewed over what we’d learned. Once upon a time, there may have been a genuine Mr Hammond and a genuine housekeeper who looked after him. Several millennia ago, back when Noah was parking his ark on Mount Ararat. Since then it had been assumptions.

  ‘Where would the world be if we all carried on that way?’ I asked Marcie.

  ‘Same place as it is,’ she said.

  ‘It has occurred to me,’ I said, ‘that the second set of footprints in the house might have belonged to Arlene.’

  ‘Why should they?’

  ‘She wasn’t far off on “Mr Hammond Night”, with the idea of an abandoned property. Maybe she’d been there.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Marcie. ‘It’s not that far-fetched an idea that the place might be empty. If Arlene knew something about the house that no one else knew, everything we’ve learned of Arlene says she’d have kept it to herself.’

  ‘Maybe Arlene has some connection with the house, and that’s what she’s keeping secret.’

  ‘Arlene’s been around for nearly six months,’ said Marcie. ‘She hasn’t shown any interest in the house. Franky’s the one who’s done that.’

  ‘We’ve no idea what Arlene’s interested in beyond Jack. We don’t know she’s not interested in the house, or that she hasn’t been there.’

  That might have been the end of the debate, but it wasn’t. A day or two later, Franky approached me in the bar and asked if he could have a word. Sure, I said. A quiet word, he said, motioning with his head to the corner. Franky and I took our drinks to a vacant table.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Franky.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I like it here. Feels like I’ve come home. I wouldn’t mind staying. However, there’s a slight problem. Fact is, I haven’t got too much money.’ Uh-oh, I thought, here comes the sting. I’d been expecting it for weeks.

  ‘What I was thinking,’ said Franky, ‘was here’s this house, right next door to you, that doesn’t seem to belong to anybody. With a bit of attention and a lick of paint, it would make a real nice home. It’s a shame to see it go to waste like this. I’d be doing someone a favour.’

  ‘You want to squat there?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it that way,’ said Franky. ‘I’d be renovating the place, doing it up. I’d be more like some kind of caretaker.’

  ‘And if the owner showed up?’

  ‘I’d move out. And the owner would be glad to have a smart property at no expense. Winners all round, so long as it doesn’t happen anytime soon. If you ask me, it isn’t going to happen at all. In time, I dare say I’ll become the legal owner.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Possession’s nine tenths of the law, so I’ve been told.’

  ‘I don’t think that applies to real estate, Franky.’

  ‘It did when we were building this country. It was ten tenths then.’

  ‘What about electricity and water?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. That could be a problem,’ said Franky. ‘Not the water. I tried two of the taps when we were there and the water’s still on, fo
r some reason. I’m not sure if the drainage works. That might be a problem. And the electricity’s definitely a problem. Perhaps I could get a generator. I’ve got another idea, though.’

  ‘What is it, Franky?’

  ‘I’ve worked in the electricity business. Know a lot about it. On the technical side.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘This place of yours is the next property. If you could tell me where your electricity supply comes in, I think I could divert some of it next door. I mean, before it gets to your meter. It wouldn’t cost you anything.’

  ‘That would be illegal, Franky.’

  ‘Possibly. Technically speaking.’

  ‘Definitely. You can’t go round stealing electricity.’

  ‘My risk,’ said Franky. ‘You wouldn’t need to know. Officially.’

  ‘Why are you telling me, if I don’t need to know?’

  ‘It’s a neighbourly thing to do,’ said Franky. In his mind, he was already our neighbour.

  I don’t think that was why he told me. If this was what he wanted to do, he could have gone right ahead and done it. The electricity supply was a long way outside, and I bet he knew that. He could have tampered with it without my knowledge. I think he wanted Marcie’s approval for the scheme. He knew that if he told me, I would tell Marcie. Approval is too strong a word. Marcie was never going to approve such a scheme, or any scheme that Franky proposed. What he wanted was Marcie’s acquiescence. He didn’t want her going round town bad-mouthing him for what he was doing. She didn’t have to be positive. She could say nothing. That would do fine.

  ‘You shouldn’t have told me, Franky,’ I said. ‘The answer’s no. I can’t possibly agree to that.’

  ‘I’ll have to find another way round the problem then. I’m moving in and that’s for certain.’

  I related this conversation to Marcie later that evening.

  ‘Now we know why he wanted to look next door,’ she said.

  ‘He said it was Davy’s idea. Davy said it was Franky’s idea.’

  ‘Who would you believe?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said.