Things We Nearly Knew Read online

  It was different this time around. In any relationship, there’s someone who kisses and someone who allows themselves to be kissed. That’s not original. Someone else said it first. I don’t know who. A Frenchman, from the sound of it.

  At the beginning, Arlene allowed herself to be kissed. Others disagree with that statement. They think that no one with so much attitude allows things to happen to them. I think they’re wrong. They’re wrong in the way that men are frequently wrong, if I may slander my gender. They think it’s to do with sex. Sometimes it is to do with sex, often maybe, but not always. Men think that attractive women like Arlene, who make the most of themselves, must be up for it. That’s one mistake. They also assume that the plain and mousy ones aren’t up for it. That’s another mistake.

  I don’t think Arlene was much interested in sex. That’s my opinion. No one agrees with me on that, not even Marcie. I think Arlene accepted that sex was something that happened from time to time, like a winter cold or a bee sting, so there wasn’t much point complaining, as long as it didn’t happen too often. That suggests that Arlene must have been interested in love. I don’t believe that either. She didn’t think it existed, is my guess.

  The first time around, it was Davy who had done the kissing and Arlene who’d allowed herself to be kissed. The second time around it was the opposite. It was Arlene who did the coming back, Arlene who sought out Davy, and Arlene who suggested they got back together. Aha, people said, why would she do that if she didn’t want sex or love or both?

  Because she was lonely, if you ask me. That’s at the heart of this. Arlene was lonely, forever lonely, desperately lonely. Loneliness filled her being. She came to the bar because she wanted companionship. She may have been looking for Jack, but that’s not a full-time occupation, and she must have known by now she wouldn’t find him here. She split up with Davy because he wasn’t making her happy. She came back to him because splitting up had reminded her she was lonely.

  Perhaps she did go to Indiana, and hadn’t expected to come back.

  Still doesn’t explain why she didn’t take up with Franky at that point. Maybe he wasn’t ready for her yet. Of course, she might already have taken up with Franky. If so, they both kept it well hid.

  7

  ‘A rock star,’ said Mike. ‘What did you want to be?’

  ‘A professor,’ I said.

  ‘The President,’ said Nelson.

  ‘Beggar man, thief,’ said Steve. Marcie cuffed him gently on the head. ‘Just kidding,’ he said.

  ‘Myself,’ said Marcie. We looked at Franky.

  ‘Somebody,’ he said.

  ‘Looks like I’m the only one who made it,’ said Marcie.

  ‘Not so difficult if you aim low.’ That was Franky speaking. He was in one of his truculent moods. ‘Besides, there’s a distance to go. You’ll know all about me one day. The train hasn’t called at my platform yet.’

  ‘That’s because it doesn’t stop there,’ said Marcie.

  ‘I’ll derail the bastard then.’

  ‘Then you won’t be going anywhere,’ said Marcie. ‘Just like now.’ Mike laughed.

  ‘What are you laughing at, you jerk?’ said Franky. ‘What do you know about anything? Wanted to be a rock star and ended up a bank clerk.’

  ‘The story of our time,’ said Mike.

  ‘You can’t blame anyone for not winning the lottery,’ said Nelson. ‘Which is what it amounts to, if you ask me. I go on buying the tickets.’

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ said Franky. ‘I get frustrated, that’s all. I don’t like the odds. When Andy Warhol said everyone would have fifteen minutes of fame, that was bullshit. Fame isn’t democratic. It’s a lifetime of fame or nothing. I want to shift the odds. Of course, there are ways of shifting the odds that bring you a few minutes of fame straight off.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Mike.

  ‘Like if I happened to have a gun on me,’ said Franky. He put his hand in his coat pocket. ‘And if I happened to point it at Marcie.’ He raised his fingers toward her through the coat. ‘And if it happened to go bang bang. Then I’d be famous, right? I’d be on the local news. In fact, I’d be on the national news.’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ said Marcie, cool as you like, hands on hips. The rest of us stared, mouths open.

  ‘Just saying,’ said Franky. ‘Hey, lighten up, you lot.’ When that didn’t improve the atmosphere, he drained his glass and headed for the door. ‘See you around, guys.’

  ‘What the hell was that about?’ asked Mike.

  Ever since Franky had come back to town, whenever he and Marcie had been in the same room, there’d been this sizzle between them. I don’t mean a romantic sizzle: if anything, it was the opposite. I mean an electric surge of the sort that might fry you if you weren’t careful. Marcie and I had discussed Franky from time to time during the years he’d been absent. We never said anything different, but we said it often, because he was the sort of guy who refused to be forgotten. So I knew that Marcie didn’t trust Franky and she didn’t like him. And Marcie knew that I didn’t trust Franky either, but that I did like him. She could never figure that out. I stick by it. If all my friends wore halos, I’d be bored as hell.

  Since Franky’s return, there’d been this charge between them. Marcie was good at putting people down. It was a skill she used sparingly and only with people she didn’t like. Her put-downs of Franky had been venomous at times. Remarks she might have made to others with half a laugh were made to him unsmilingly. And Franky’s response had been defensive every time, which was peculiar, because Franky and defensiveness didn’t go together. Until now, that is, when it had become aggressive. This made me more convinced that Marcie had some hold over him. I’d wanted to ask her, yet I hadn’t. I don’t think I wanted to know the answer. Now Marcie supplied it herself, or appeared to.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it was about, Mike. Franky thinks I know something that he doesn’t want anyone else to know.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Search me. I know nothing that several dozen other people in town don’t know. But Franky thinks I do.’

  ‘Have the two of you discussed it since he came back?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure. Franky talked to me soon after he arrived. He said he’d appreciate it if I didn’t mention what I knew. I said I didn’t know anything. The more times I said that, the more Franky was convinced I must know. So we play this game.’

  ‘Threatening to shoot you isn’t a game,’ said Mike.

  ‘He wasn’t threatening that,’ said Marcie. ‘And it is a game, although Franky’s serious about not wanting something to be known. He’s a coward, anyhow. If it’s only a crime that will bring him fame, it won’t be murder, you can be sure of that.’

  I wished I could be sure of it. I wished I could be sure of anything where Franky was concerned. I felt uncomfortable with the way Marcie behaved toward Franky. It had the authenticity of a melodrama. Look at me, she seemed to be saying, see how I taunt him, see how I despise him. It’s a well-known fact that opposites attract. Like most well-known facts, it’s not a fact at all, but it’s sometimes true and I’d been wondering for a while if it was true with Marcie and Franky. Both ways round. If Franky thought Marcie had information he didn’t want publicized, you’d think he wouldn’t spend much time hanging out in our bar. So why did he? And Marcie was definitely spending fewer evenings watching TV these days.

  Marcie and I have no secrets from one another. We tell that to each other constantly, so it must be true. Yet she’d never told me what she told the group in the bar that night, which you’d think she might have done the moment she’d had that first conversation with Franky. Assuming she did have it. I’m not saying I suspected the two of them of having an affair. The lives we led would have made that difficult, not to say impossible. However, I was darned sure there was more to the situation than they were letting on. I reckoned that Marcie’s public explanation for Franky’s threat was made, not because it was true, but be
cause some explanation was required to put a stop to further debate.

  From that evening, the thing was on my mind. It became a fixed idea with me that there was some history between them, some secret that was not shared with me. I had no notion what it was, but I didn’t believe the explanation Marcie had given that evening. It became a challenge to find the true answer. As things turned out, this mystery had to give way to another mystery for a while. An old mystery that came back to haunt us.

  As you drive west out of town, the bar is nearly the last building before you reach the crossroads where E. A. Stuart’s bench used to stand. After that, you leave the limits. To be precise, the bar’s the last building except for one. That one doesn’t really count. It doesn’t belong to the town, or doesn’t seem to. It’s a substantial house, not far short of mansion size, but it’s as invisible as its occupant. The place is surrounded by trees, the ones Franky was climbing: not in the sense of a pleasant landscaping, but of a deliberate envelopment. The trees are tall and dark and evergreen, acting as a perimeter fence to the property. I was going to say like a prison wall, but prison walls are there to keep insiders in, and those trees were there to keep outsiders out.

  I hadn’t seen the house for thirty years or more, despite having lived next to it for half of them. When we were kids, we used to slip through the wire into the garden to take a look around. On one occasion we got right to the back door, but we’d triggered some form of alarm system, and had to run like hell when the klaxon sounded. Franky was with us on that occasion, if I remember rightly.

  You couldn’t see the house from the road. There were big iron gates, bolted but not padlocked. I hadn’t seen a car go in or out for years but, if it happened seldom, there’s no reason I would have done. Beyond the gates, the drive bent, hemmed in by laurel bushes, so the house was obscured. About the only view you could get of it, without entering the grounds, was from up one of the pine trees, as Franky must have figured.

  We called it Mr Hammond’s house because it was supposed to be occupied by a Mr Hammond. We had no proof because no one had ever seen him. He was said to be tended by a series of housekeepers. I don’t know how many there had been over time – at least a dozen, I should think. They seemed to stay a few years, then move on. Whether Mr Hammond got dissatisfied with them, or whether they went gradually insane with their strange life, I couldn’t say. People had seen them, because they went to the shops to buy things for the household. People had said ‘good morning’ to them and had usually got a ‘good morning’ back, though not accompanied by a smile or any small talk. It seemed unlikely that their employer had coincidentally acquired upwards of a dozen women whose vocabulary didn’t extend beyond ‘good morning’. This had to be a deliberate policy on Mr Hammond’s part, we assumed.

  I can’t remember the last reported sighting of a housekeeper. Perhaps about five years ago, at a guess, but it could have been more or less. Doesn’t mean they weren’t still there, getting their groceries in some other town. Even if they weren’t, Mr Hammond might still have been in the house himself. As a corpse, possibly.

  There were a number of theories as to who this man was, and what his tale was. I was as fond as the next guy of encouraging them. I used to run a ‘Mr Hammond Night’ in the bar once a year, with a prize for the customer who made up the best account of his past. These stories got repeated around town, and sometimes I would be retold one a few years later by someone who swore it was the truth. The fact was we knew nothing except his name, and I now forget how we knew that, so perhaps someone had invented that too. We didn’t know how old he was. He was already here when my parents came to town, soon before I was born, so he must have been a young man when he arrived, and he must have been an old man now, if he was still alive.

  Which made his choice of life the more remarkable. I’m not the reclusive type myself, but I can see that a guy of around my age or older, who has made some money and had some bad experiences, might want to shut himself off from the world. I can’t imagine why a young man should want to do that, or how it would be possible to live that way for so many years without going nuts. Perhaps Mr Hammond was nuts.

  In the absence of facts, theories flourish. The ‘Mr Hammond Nights’ might have become a thing of the past, but that didn’t stop us discussing him from time to time, and everyone had their point of view. There was no consensus, even on the fundamentals. Nelson used to pronounce as a certainty that Mr Hammond must be a multimillionaire. He said you couldn’t live for decades, not working, without a big stash of dough behind you. Marcie didn’t agree. She reckoned that, if Mr Hammond owned the house, which we didn’t know, he could live the way he did without spending much at all, so – while he must have some money behind him – he might not have a lot. Nelson pointed out that the housekeepers wouldn’t come cheap. Steve said that they could have been relatives. I thought no one could have that many female relatives prepared to spend a chunk of their lives that way. Mike said his grandfather had been the sibling of no fewer than ten sisters. Besides, Marcie said, we never took much notice of the housekeepers, so who was to say the eleventh hadn’t also been the eighth, and perhaps the first and the fourth as well. She was right. When we each tried to describe the housekeepers, it turned out that no one could recall any of them clearly.

  Toward the end of July, I decided it was time to revive the ‘Mr Hammond Nights’. Perhaps I was subconsciously influenced by Franky’s adventure up the tree. I announced one for the last Monday of the month. It was the beginning of vacation time. People were going away; the bar was getting emptier in the evenings, and we were in need of a distraction. Nothing much happened on Monday evenings at the best of times. The regulars said they’d be there. That included Davy and Arlene, now back together. It was Steve’s night off. We forsook the bar area, me and Marcie included, and I put four tables together down the far end of the long bar room. There were twelve of us, as I recall, including some of the semi-regulars. I stood the first round of drinks, as had become the tradition, then everyone else pitched in. Quite a lot was drunk that night. Even Arlene bought a round.

  A few years earlier, I’d acquired the head and shoulders of a mannequin from an outfitter’s that was closing down. Marcie had embellished it with a pair of sunglasses, a trilby hat, tipped down over the eyes, and a muffler, wrapped round the neck and mouth. It looked as much alive as Howard Hughes. Maybe more so. The mannequin was passed solemnly round the table, anticlockwise. The deal was that everyone had to speak in turn and relate Mr Hammond’s backstory. No exceptions. If a stranger came in for a beer, he’d have to join in too. In fact, there was one exception. In other years, it had been Marcie: she fetched the drinks and acted as judge. This year, she decided to take part. I became judge and barman, which was as well because I was short on imagination for inventing new stories. We drew lots for the order of ceremonies and Davy went first.

  ‘Hammond H. Hammond,’ he began.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Nelson. ‘What’s the middle H. for?’

  ‘Hammond.’

  ‘So he’s Hammond Hammond Hammond?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Davy. ‘His grandfather was Hammond. His father was Hammond Hammond. He’s Hammond Hammond Hammond. He shortened it to Hammond H. Hammond for convenience.’

  ‘I pity his great-grandson,’ said Marcie.

  ‘He won’t have one. He doesn’t have kids. Will you let me tell my story, please?’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘Hammond the first was a religious entrepreneur,’ said Davy. ‘He built up a chain of churches in Arizona, then diversified into an evangelical TV station in Phoenix. His son merged it with another religion, then sold it to a gambling syndicate that was looking to expand. Hammond H. Hammond is a recluse who lives off the proceeds.’

  ‘What does he believe?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s an atheist. His grandfather’s core belief was that money was sacred.’

  ‘No wonder he did so well,’ said Marcie.


  ‘The women we see in town,’ said Davy, ‘indeed act as his housekeepers, but they’re acolytes of his grandpop’s religion. They worship H3, as he’s affectionately known.’

  ‘I think I’m going to found a religion,’ said Arlene. ‘Why were all religions set up by men? It’s about time a woman started one.’

  ‘I’ll be there every Sunday,’ said Franky, ‘kneeling in front of you.’

  ‘Your turn, dearest,’ I said.

  ‘The man’s name was Douglas Hammond,’ said Marcie. ‘He owned a farm machinery company that sold equipment to businesses across the Midwest. He made a fortune. He was a bigamist. By the end of his life, he had three wives and a house for each of them in a different town. That’s why we didn’t see him. When he’d had enough of the wives, he came here. He didn’t have a wife in this house. The women were his secretaries, or so he claimed. In fact, they were hookers, sent here to keep their hand in, or whatever. He died three years ago, in a brothel in Akron.’

  ‘Who owns the house next door now?’ asked Arlene.

  ‘No one. It’s empty. Has been for ages. Hammond didn’t use it for the last years of his life.’

  ‘Good try,’ I said. ‘But I saw someone there the other day.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Marcie. She seemed surprised. ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was peering through the shrubbery and it was a long way away. It looked like a woman. A housekeeper, I assumed.’

  ‘As I mentioned, they weren’t housekeepers,’ said Marcie. ‘One of the whores came back once or twice after he died, not recently. That’s not to say that strangers mightn’t have been nosing around the place. Mightn’t they, Franky?’