by Jim Powell
‘We heard these shrieks outside, from the riverbank. The lady picked up her purse . . .’
‘. . . her purse? The police said they hadn’t found a purse.’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m telling you what I know. She had a purse with her. She must have taken it with her to the river. If so, the cops likely wouldn’t have found it. Water flows swiftly under that bridge. Anyhow, she picked up her purse and rushed out. You know the rest. I would have gone myself, but . . . Well, you know how it is.’
I felt that this stone had yielded all the blood it had to offer. I settled up and contemplated whether to leave a decent tip. I decided in favour of no tip. I was mad at the guy for not going to Arlene’s assistance.
‘Thanks for your help,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, don’t come asking for more.’
It was now lunchtime, but I didn’t feel like eating. There was an hour to the service, so I strolled around town in the April sunshine, thinking of Arlene, making sure I had it straight in my head, or as straight as it could be.
I wondered what Arlene had done in those few months since she left us; where she had gone. They hadn’t been happy times, for sure. Arlene had never looked less than immaculate when I saw her. What she discovered that last day in our town, what was in that newspaper, what she told Franky in my parking lot, had knocked her sideways. Maybe it knocked Franky the same way.
If it was what I now suspected, it would knock anyone sideways.
In the end, Arlene had gone back to doing the one thing she knew how to do: looking for Jack. She’d spent so much time looking for Jack, wondering about Jack, asking about Jack. And though she now knew who he was, and some of what he’d done, he was as opaque to her as he had been in the beginning. And dead, of course. But that hadn’t stopped the quest. A new day. A new town. One more barman to ask questions of. Once again, the answers had failed to satisfy: even the parts that turned out to be true could not be trusted to be true. No matter. There would be another day. Another town. Except there wasn’t.
The saddest thing was that I think she and Franky could have been happy together. She’d have had a lot to put up with, and so would he. There would have been a large part of Arlene he could never reach, but that elusiveness would have kept him interested. One thing you couldn’t do with Arlene was to chew her up and spit her out, at least not without chewing up and spitting out a large part of yourself. That might have come as a novelty for Franky.
You spend your life searching for something, for someone, and when you find it, you wish you hadn’t.
It was a small church, hidden away, property of the First Presbyterians. A police officer stood outside the door, respectful and alert at the same time, eyes alternately cast down and scanning new arrivals for who they might be and what they might know. She approached me as I came to the door, enquired whether I’d been personally acquainted with the deceased. I didn’t want to get into that. I said I lived locally and had come to pay my respects. That was about as true as anything in life. She took my name and address all the same. We weren’t the only ones piecing things together.
The service was about to start as I walked inside. The coffin was there: a plain wooden box on a trestle. There was a single bunch of flowers upon it. Perhaps a bouquet of gratitude from the town for an anonymous saviour, or from the family whose integrity was thereby preserved.
There were a handful of people in the church: a dozen at the most. In the old days, families paid professional mourners to attend, extravagant in their grief, trying to trick God into believing that the deceased was popular, beloved of all, deserving of a place in heaven. If I believed in God, I don’t think I’d believe in one that was so easily taken in. Here was someone who deserved tears. Few came to shed them. Arlene had been a local heroine, but just for one day, and that day was last week. Time had been called on her fifteen minutes of fame. No one much turned up from town to remember the stranger who had saved the life of a child.
Before finding a pew, I looked around to see if I recognized anyone in the congregation. It didn’t seem likely. I half wondered whether Franky might have come. There was no sign of him. There was no one that I knew.
In the front pew was a woman of about thirty-five, soberly dressed, unremarkable. With her was a girl of five or so, no doubt her daughter. I made the obvious assumption. I expect it was correct, although it might not have been. They turned their heads to look at me, and turned them again as soon as their eyes met mine. I sat at the back, next to the aisle, prepared for an exit.
I wondered what had become of the young girl’s father. Separated or divorced, hundreds of miles away, unaware of one tragedy, or the closeness of another? Perhaps not knowing that he had a daughter. Or none of those things. Maybe at work that day, like every day, bringing home the bacon. ‘I ain’t got the time, Betsy. You go. You go with Loosie. That’ll work fine. You can tell me about it after.’
Stumbling forward into what passes for a future, blindfold tight around the eyes, hands upon the shoulders of someone who feels like they know where they’re going, but blindfolded also and walking around in figures of eight.
One summer’s day, fourth of July, if Mrs Riessen was right, if that’s when it really was, Jack Nightingale stepped out into the streets of one of his home towns, goodness knows which, or how many he had, careless of the possession of life, unencumbered by a sure identity. The flags would have been flying, the bunting stretched across the storefronts. Perhaps he thought he’d buy a bottle from the liquor store, to celebrate later, when the Indiana wife wasn’t around. Or perhaps he didn’t die in a liquor store. That could have been a lawyer’s joke. If lawyers have jokes. Perhaps he did die in a brothel in Akron.
Wherever it was, a heart attack took Jack Nightingale out, along with Riessen, Dulap and Hammond, along with chunks of other people’s lives, leaving question marks and stray children behind him.
When I had trod the dust in Mr Hammond’s house and disturbed the rest of the years, I was not trampling on people, I thought. I was intrigued by a mystery, not by a misery. I was trampling just the same. Despite everything I’d learned, I still had no idea where Arlene had lived, how near our town, how far. She must have lived somewhere. In three, five, ten years’ time, will someone else like me explore another abandoned domain, invent other explanations for the unknowable, while the locals say how the woman who lived there hadn’t been seen for a while and kept herself to herself?
I like the idea of Arlene being with all those aliases for eternity. I think they belong together.
My mind drifted. I thought of the trees that guarded Mr Hammond’s property. That guarded Mr Franky’s property. The trees were trying to talk to me, but they had nothing to say. One of them looked like Arlene. She was one of the guardians of Mr Hammond’s property.
Someone in the church whispered. The sound was the world, the entire world, reduced to a billionth billionth of its volume. The sound was everything that was being said or sung in the world at that moment, distilled to a fraction of a whisper. If my hearing had been good enough, my command of languages complete, I could have discriminated between each sound and known what the world was saying. Perhaps this is the sound that God hears. If he exists.
I didn’t pay close attention to the pastor’s words. He would know less about the woman he was burying than I did. He would know what she had done; could talk heroically of that. But he didn’t know the woman who had done it, which came close to rendering his words meaningless, making impersonal the most personal of sacrifices. Without listening much, I knew his homily must be banal, because it could be nothing else. My thoughts had the movement of a cloud of hornets, but Arlene was always there amongst the stinging. I wondered if she had come from Pittsburgh. A strange thing to invent, if not, but no stranger than many other things about Arlene. Or maybe it was us that invented it.
I sensed the pastor was coming to the end of his oration, and I couldn’t think what would come after, except goodbye and amen. It
was time for me to go. I wanted to leave silently, but there’s always a shiver of something to say we are here. At the noise of dust breaking, two heads turned and two pairs of eyes requested that I should stay. I was a stranger in the church. There were questions to be asked of me, responses to be given, and these were the essential intercessions of the day.
I couldn’t stay. I’m sorry, but I could not stay. I had no answers for them, nor for anyone. I walked out of the door into the bleached sunlight, blinded by the glare of a great obscurity.
Jim Powell was born in London in 1949. He is the author of The Breaking of Eggs and Trading Futures, and was named by BBC2’s The Culture Show among ‘12 of The Best New Novelists’ in 2011. He is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Liverpool and, with his wife Kay, divides his time between Cambridgeshire, England, and the Tarn, France.
Also by Jim Powell
THE BREAKING OF EGGS
TRADING FUTURES
First published 2018 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2018 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-4244-5
Copyright © Jim Powell 2018
Cover Design by Neil Lang, Picador Art Department
Jacket image © Tony Worobiec / Arcangel
Author photograph © Brian Dunstone
The right of Jim Powell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Visit www.picador.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.