Things We Nearly Knew Read online

  His line of business took him over five or six states. That’s why we wouldn’t see him for weeks at a time. So when he didn’t show up for one week, two weeks, three weeks, it came as no surprise. He must have been gone more than a month before I noticed I hadn’t seen him in a while. I haven’t seen him since.

  How old was Jack at that point? Getting on for seventy, I’d say. Still with the appearance of a ’40s matinée idol, with a Clark Gable moustache that an amateur cartoonist might have drawn with a crayon. Still working; still looking trim; still with young women on his arm. They were probably paid for, but all the same. He could have married one of them and gone to live in Hawaii. I didn’t know he was dead; I sort of presumed he was. The fact is you never know.

  As I told Arlene, it had been a good five years since Jack Nightingale had last walked through these doors. Five years, would you believe it? No one else from the bastard town drinks here, and I don’t see anyone who lives there, so I’ve never known what happened to him. And I wouldn’t go looking. That would be against the rules, if there were any rules. Customers are entitled to their privacy. Even when they’re dead. They’re entitled to their privacy, and they’re entitled to their secrets. They can invent a life story that’s one hundred per cent organic bullshit, and I will be obliged to believe it, and to go on believing it for years.

  I don’t get the same privileges in return. Everyone knows the facts about me and Marcie, most of them, because there’s no opportunity to disguise them, not that I’d want to. It sounds as if I’m bitching about my work, but I’m not. I enjoy it. I can’t think of anything I’d have enjoyed more, apart from teaching. It’s never dull. I don’t know who’s going to show up tomorrow, or who’s never going to show up again. Maybe, one Halloween, an army of the missing will manifest themselves. A regular platoon of ex-regulars.

  For a short while, too short a while, Arlene was one of the regulars. She belonged to an era. No, that’s wrong. The era belonged to her. Along with Davy and Nelson and Mike, and Franky when he came back, and Steve behind the bar, and Marcie and me. That bunch of us. That was Arlene’s era. We never did take a group photograph.

  It started in February last year, as I said. That was when the nine months of Arlene began. The weather was mild, and we thought we’d escaped winter that year. We hadn’t. Winter had gone on an extended vacation and didn’t get back till March, full of energy, wanting to be everyone’s best friend. Temperatures were below zero for much of that month and enough snow lay on the ground to make a statement. It deterred all but the most hardy. My regulars were among the most hardy, Arlene included. I was going to say it was during March that the rest of us got to know Arlene, but we never got to know her. She got to know us.

  I assumed she was also getting to know the town, but I don’t think she ever did. Later, after she’d gone, gone for the last time, I used to mention her to people in the stores and around the place, assuming they’d know who she was. Only a couple of people did. They were both called Jack, as it happens, so she must have been doing her homework. For the most part, when Arlene came to town, she came to the bar, and this was the only place she came. That was what I figured later. Now I think of it, she once called the town a dump, although she had the grace to apologize afterwards.

  That’s why I think she was a city girl. City people think that all small towns are dumps. City people thrive on artificial highs, legal or otherwise. They think that places where people sit around and talk to each other are boring. I appreciate that I’m biased. I was born and raised here, and I like it, and I haven’t travelled much, and I can’t compare it with anywhere else.

  No, Arlene was a city girl. The question is whether that city was Pittsburgh or not.

  This is not a big place: ten thousand people or so. You can get most everything you need here, so why trouble to go elsewhere? It’s not me saying that: it’s the general view of people around here. I asked Arlene what she’d got against the place. She said she’d got nothing against it; the place had something against her. It couldn’t make space for a girl who’d seen the ocean. I told her people had seen the ocean on TV and that was good enough for them. Before TV, folk didn’t have the means to travel. Since TV, they haven’t had the need. Why go to the world when the world will come to you on a screen? Not my point of view exactly, but that’s how people look at things here. Arlene didn’t get it.

  I think she came from another planet, and I’m close to meaning that literally. Some people do, or seem to. Some people’s heads are in a place so different to everybody else’s that they don’t inhabit the same world. Everyone else in the bar, everyone else in my life, is more or less predictable. Once you’ve worked out their personalities, you know how they’ll behave. They’ve been programmed on the production line. Unless some extreme event makes them go haywire, they’ll be faithful to their factory settings till the day they die. I include myself in that description. Not Arlene.

  By March, she was one of the boys. She drank and told stories like the rest of us. She’d been granted the accolade of her own seat at the bar. Most of the counter is long and straight, but at one end it goes bulbous and there’s a group of high stools around that end, where the regulars sit. Sometimes they’re at tables with each other, or with other people, but when they’re at the bar, that’s where they sit. Sometime in March, Arlene got her own stool, in the middle of the group, and from then to November only one other person sat on it. No one has sat on it since, as a matter of fact. At least, not that I’ve seen.

  What separated Arlene from the boys, apart from the obvious, was that she never talked about herself. After four or five visits, we were none the wiser. For one thing, it was hard to say how much money she had. First glance, at her clothes, at her car, at her demeanour, said it must be a lot. First impressions can mislead. As Marcie pointed out, thrift shops sell designer clothes. The shiny black sports car was showy, but it came from one of the cheaper ranges and could have been second-hand. A detailed inventory of her belongings might not have produced a large tally.

  Mike is our go-to guy where money is concerned. He came top of the class in math when we were kids, so I wasn’t surprised that he got a job as a bank teller. Thirty-five years on, he’s still a bank teller, so perhaps math is all he can do. Marcie and I feel protective toward him and encourage him to say more than he does. I asked him how rich he thought Arlene was.

  ‘Whatever she’s got,’ said Mike, ‘it’s not what it looks like she’s got.’

  We were impressed with this pronouncement until we realized we didn’t have the first idea what Mike meant. We asked him to be less obscure.

  ‘What I mean,’ said Mike, ‘is that Arlene is someone who presents as being comfortably off – not rich, not poor – and I’d say that’s the one thing she’s not. I reckon that maybe she’s loaded and what we’re seeing is the tip of an iceberg. Or she’s skint and it’s all done with loans and mirrors. Don’t ask me which.’

  ‘Which?’ I asked.

  ‘If I had to guess, I’d say skint. I’m still waiting for her to buy me a drink.’

  Then there was the fact that no one knew where Arlene lived. She didn’t tell that either, except it was somewhere out in the boondocks, which may or may not have been true. About two nights a week, she’d come to the bar. It varied. Sometimes it was most nights; sometimes we didn’t see her for a couple of weeks. She’d slip into the parking lot and leave her car neatly by the door. Then, a little before closing time, she’d smile her goodbyes and slip out again.

  She didn’t live in town. I suppose I can’t be sure about that either. Let’s just say that, if she did live in town, she can’t have left the house much. None of us saw her there, not in the stores, not out on the street, not anywhere. Nor did we see her car. And it’s not a large town.

  One night, Nelson thought he’d follow her and see where she went. When he came in the next evening, we clustered round to hear the news. There was no news.

  ‘Trailed her to the Inter
state,’ said Nelson. ‘Then she took off like a rocket. Don’t know where she went.’

  ‘Which direction?’

  ‘West.’

  ‘Did she know you were following her?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Nelson.

  ‘She must have done. Wouldn’t have taken off like that otherwise.’

  ‘Maybe she always drives like that.’

  ‘’Bout time you got a faster car, Nelson.’

  ‘’Bout time I stopped chasing shadows,’ said Nelson.

  A couple of other guys tried the same thing in the weeks that followed, guys with faster cars. Didn’t do them any good. Arlene drove a couple of miles down the road, pulled off at a truck stop and waited till they got bored. For all we knew, she could have been living in a trailer park. That wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.

  So many things about Arlene we never knew. I can tell you one thing we did know, though.

  In the corner of the bar stands a jukebox. Goodness knows how old it is. If you press the first button, you can probably hear Moses read the Ten Commandments. I inherited it when I bought the place. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve made me offers for it, but I’m not selling. A bar needs a jukebox.

  It has always played the same records. The fifty discs on it when I took the place over are still on it. I know that jukeboxes are supposed to be up to date. But the customers seem to like it the way it is and, if they don’t, Marcie and I do.

  I was at the counter one evening, in the usual way. I was aware that a song was playing in the background. I couldn’t have told you what it was but for what happened next. Arlene jumped off her stool and rushed up to me in a state of agitation. That was two surprises in one. Arlene didn’t rush and she didn’t get agitated.

  ‘How do you turn the music off?’ she asked.

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘You have to. I can’t listen to this.’

  ‘It’s only a song, Arlene.’

  ‘I can’t listen to it. Please turn it off.’

  I walked over to the machine and turned it off. Then I turned it back on, put in another coin, put on another record. A song that Arlene liked.

  The song she couldn’t abide was ‘My Guy’ by Mary Wells. I don’t know why. I asked her and she wouldn’t tell me. It wasn’t that she disliked the song, she said, it was just that, just that . . . Silence. Something must have happened to Arlene that made her unable to listen to it. Now, whenever I hear ‘My Guy’ playing, I think of her. The song she refused to hear has become her signature tune.

  2

  Holy Moses, it was cold that March. Truly cold. Snow blanketed the fields for weeks. High winds built ridges along the ditches. Gritters kept the roads going, but the traffic flowed slowly, like blood trickling through the arteries of the aged. We kept warm, and I searched for signs of spring.

  ‘Don’t look too hard,’ said Marcie. ‘Cows will be in their barns a while yet.’

  Marcie comes from a farming family, as you might guess. They’ve got a few hundred acres, ten miles west of here, next to the farm where Steve was raised, as it happens. Her dad died some years ago, her mom more recently, and Marcie’s two brothers run the place now. Sometimes we go over on a Sunday lunchtime, while Steve minds the shop. Marcie thinks of the farm as home. A patch of land does that for you. I don’t think of the house where I grew up as home. I don’t think of it much at all.

  She was nineteen when we started dating and I was twenty-one. She wasn’t a great looker, and neither was I. Marcie’s on the short side, trim, with mid-brown curly hair. Smart with it. And she’s got a great personality, as long as you don’t get on the wrong side of it. I’ve taken care not to do that. People said we made a good team, the way they do when they can’t think of anything better to say. It was true, though, and it still is, and although I once hoped for a more dynamic phrase to define us, I settle for that one now. We’d known each other for a while because we went to the same school. We were in different years, but it was almost like we sized each other up then and filed the conclusions away for future reference. By the time we started dating, we’d made up our minds about each other a long time before.

  I won’t talk about children. I’ll just say that we had twins, a son and a daughter, and now we don’t. It has brought us closer. At least, I think it has; maybe I’m deluding myself. At the same time, it has made us more distant from other members of our families. I have relatives, somewhere, some of them in this town in fact, but I seldom see them, and it’s the same with Marcie, apart from her two brothers. We see more of those two these days, now their children have grown up. We didn’t see so much of them when their kids were at the farm.

  Marcie was a shop girl when we married. She worked at the haberdasher’s on Main Street. It’s not there now. I was training to be a teacher, something I did for twelve years or more. It wasn’t a coincidence we both did jobs that involved talking to people. It’s what we like doing. I thought I’d be a teacher for the rest of my life, but things happened, life changed, and I stopped wanting to be with kids every day. Fifteen years ago, with some money from my parents, and some from Marcie’s, and some savings, we got this place and here we are.

  It was in those weeks before the snows melted that Arlene began to talk more freely. Most nights she sat on her stool like the proverbial mouse, silent, whiskers twitching at what others were saying. Then, from time to time, she’d decide to hold court.

  ‘When I was growing up,’ she said on one occasion; ‘when I was, I don’t know, maybe fourteen or fifteen, I used to watch the man across the street in his room. We lived on the fourth floor, and so did he, and the street was quite narrow, so he wasn’t far away. He didn’t have curtains. When it was dark and he had the light on, I could see him clearly. He couldn’t see me, though. I didn’t want him prying on me. I’d draw my curtains, and turn the light off, and pull a chair up to the window. Then I’d peep through the curtains and watch him. I’d do it for hours on end sometimes.

  ‘I called him John, like he was John Doe. He became a friend of mine. I never met him. You’d think that, living so close, we’d be bound to meet in the street, or in the corner store, but we never did. I kind of liked that. He could stay the person I wanted him to be. If I’d met him, there would have been something that wasn’t what I expected, or what I wanted. I don’t know what he did in the daytime. He could have been at work, I guess. I was at school most of the time, and besides, it was one of my rules not to look in the daytime. He was my stranger in the night, except that by the end he no longer seemed like a stranger. He seemed like an old friend.’

  ‘Did you see him naked?’ The question came from Marcie. I had toyed with asking it, and hadn’t dared. If that question had come from a man, it would have taken the conversation somewhere else. Coming from a woman, it sounded almost innocent.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Arlene. ‘Certainly not.’ She seemed shocked at the suggestion. It wasn’t the only time it occurred to me that, while Arlene might look tarty, underneath she was prim as hell.

  ‘There was nothing like that,’ she said. ‘He must have had a bedroom at the back. At least I imagine he did, because at eleven every night he turned out the light and he was fully clothed when he did it. That was the death moment, what I called the death moment. There was a split second before the room went dark when his silhouette was framed in the halo of the dimming light. I thought that dying must be like that, except that death doesn’t happen every night. Or perhaps it does.’

  ‘What did he do all evening?’ I don’t know why I asked. I wasn’t interested in what he did. Why would I be? I suppose I was interested in what Arlene had done, and why she did it.

  ‘Not much. Sometimes he’d watch TV and I’d see the blue light of the screen flickering. Sometimes he’d read a book, or a newspaper. Other times he sat there. I suppose he didn’t do anything. It was a life stripped down to the essentials, just John and his room, and a few items of furniture, and what was in his head
.’

  ‘Poor guy,’ I said.

  ‘Why? Perhaps he liked to live that way. I don’t know that he was unhappy. It could have been his choice. He might have said to himself at some point that life was too complicated, and it was best to stick to the basics. I admit it was sad, though. Did he fear being overwhelmed, do you think? Or was it a sense of inadequacy? Did he think he had nothing to say, and that no one would be interested in him? Or didn’t he know how to do it? Had no one taught him how you go up to a stranger and talk to them? I don’t know. What seems simple often isn’t simple at all. I’m not sure what’s natural in people. It varies, I think. My natural state is to be alone, and then force myself to make the effort of being sociable.’

  ‘Or,’ said Marcie, ‘your natural state is to be sociable, but you like to think of yourself as someone who’s alone.’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Arlene. ‘I suppose the issue is whether you’re frightened of being alone. Completely alone. I don’t think I am frightened of that, not anymore. I think you can teach yourself not to be frightened of it. Maybe that’s what John learned to do, and I wanted to copy it by watching him. In summer, he’d raise the window and lean half out of it, smoking a cigarette and drinking a can of beer, staring out at the street. I used to imagine what he was thinking.’

  ‘He could have been thinking of you. Staring at your window,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Arlene. ‘No, I don’t think so. He was looking down at the sidewalk, I’d say. It was funny. His cigarettes lasted six and a half minutes. I used to smoke myself. My cigarettes lasted different amounts of time. His lasted six and a half minutes. Every time.’