The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (17 page)

“I made Mister Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat’s acquaintance through the internet,” Fortesque says, imbuing the word ‘internet’ with almost W. C. Fields-like pomposity. “In a chat room,” he adds.

Jack Fedogan places two beers on the counter in front of Edgar and looks over at the two strangers. Picking up the slack, Edgar says, “Buy you a beer?”

“Certainly, that’s most kind of you,” Fortesque trills.

Then, to Jack, “Do you have imported beers?”

Jack nods as he presses the eject button on the CD player behind him. As he consigns the
West Coast Jazz
CD into its case and removes one of the disks from
Time Signatures,
the four-CD Dave Brubeck retrospective, he says over his shoulder, “What did you have in mind?”

“Something English,” Peter Lorre chirps up, the phrase hissed out rather than actually spoken, and then, correcting himself, “Something British, I mean.”

“I spent some time in England,” Jim Leafman says, reaching for his beer.

“I got Tetley’s on tap,” Jack says, “plus in bottles I got Old Peculier, Black Sheep, Marston Moor, Landlord, Cropton’s Two —”

“Landlord,” says Lorre, drooling.

“Tetleys is fine for me,” Fortesque says and then, turning to face Jim, “Whereabouts?”

“Pardon me?”

“In England. Whereabouts did you stay?”

“Oh,” Jim says, taking a deep sup of his beer as he casts his mind back to the days before he worked at the Refuse Department (“Sanitation”, he tells most folks) . . . the time he now regards as BC — Before Clarice — before he parked up his ‘74 Olds that, at the time, was two parts yellow and eight parts rust (the rust is now winning the battle), parked it up outside the travelling salesman’s apartment building with the .38 sitting in his lap . . . and then seeing the guy walking along the street, the guy who was sticking it to Clarice behind Jim’s back, seeing him in his fancy shoes and his fancy pants, fancy shirt and fancy sports jacket, knowing that he smelled of expensive cologne and not sewage the way Jim smelled . . . maybe even, down behind the zipper, smelled a little of Clar —

“It was a long time ago,” Jim says, emerging from the beer and the memories, licking his top lip at the residue of the former and blinking his eyes hard three times at the latter.

“I said
where,”
Fortesque says, with just a hint of irritation in his tone.

“York shire,” Jim says, splitting the word into two, the second part sounding like the areas where the little folks lived in those
Lord of the Rings
movies. “Leeds,” he adds.

“How long were you there?” asks Fortesque.

In
your eyes,
sings Carmen McRae, Brubeck tickling the ivories, Eugene Wright on bass and the indefatigable Joe Morello handling the drums. They sound so close they could be right here in the bar and, just for a second, both Jack Fedogan — who knows the song well, and the original album it comes from
(Tonight Only!) —
and Fortesque turn around momentarily before settling back to what appears to be a genesis of conversation.

“Oh, around six maybe eight months I guess.” Jim looks down at his beer and, without looking back up, he says softly, “I was twenty years old.”

“Quite a journey for a young man to make,” Horatio Fortesque says, reaching for his pint glass of Tetleys and nodding first to Jack, then to Edgar, and finally to Jim Leafman, unsure as to whom he owes the gratitude.

“Yeah, I guess,” says Jim.

The Lorre-lookalike snakes out a hand and grasps the bottle of Landlord, pours it into the glass alongside it. “You want to sit down?” Edgar asks.

Fortesque and Lorre nod and the quartet move over to where Edgar and Jim were sitting just a few minutes earlier.

“But it was nothing like a journey I saw a man take night after night,” Jim says, sliding his beer around on one of Jack’s Working Day coasters. “Every night,” he says, “right up until —” And his voice trails off.

4 What the hell’s `tipsey’?

“I’d been up in Leeds maybe around a week, maybe a little less,” Jim Leafman says, glancing around just in time to see Jack move his counter polishing a little closer to their table. Edgar settles back on his chair and glances at the two strangers, who seem relaxed about Jim’s story. He looks across at the tall black man, smoking — always seems to have a cigarette on the go — and back at Jim.”Got a little job at a newsagent store — little more than a newsstand — in the city and rented a small apartment. They call them flats,” Jim explains to his audience and receives nods and blinks to let him know they all understand.

“The place I lived was called Headingley — maybe three miles from the town centre — a big student area: the Leeds University campus is enormous. Anyway, because it was — still is, I guess — such a big student dormitory, Headingley was a really fun place: cheap supermarkets, charity stores filled with used books and record albums — this was before CDs,” he says.

More nods, more blinks.

“But best of all were the pubs. There were stacks of them — the Original Oak and the Skyrack, right across from each other next to St Michael’s Chur—”

“Just keep to the point, Jim,” Edgar says. He’s listened to Jim Leafman’s stories before, of course.

Nodding and contrite, Jim carries on. “Anyway, this one night I’m in the pub with this English guy —” Jim is about to attempt remembering the guy’s name (it’s Phil, a medical student, but he won’t remember that until two full weeks have passed and this evening in the Working Day has assumed legendary status) but he thinks better of it. “So, anyway,” he says, waving an arm dismissively, “this guy comes in and walks right up to the bar. He’s a little guy —” He turns to Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat and says, “No offence,” to which Greenblat leans over the table and nods sagely.

“He’s a little guy, balding, skin that looks like he’s just shaved, pant legs that could cut steak, shirt collar tight around his neck, buttoned up with a necktie, knot perfectly in place, sports jacket showing linked cuffs . . . the whole works. You notice that kind of get-up, plus the guy looks like one of the two brothers in the Tintin books . . .”

“The Thompson twins,” ventures Jack from over behind the bar.

“Seems you know a lot about all kinds of literature,” Fortesque says and Jack shrugs self-deprecatingly, polishes another spot.

“Yeah, right — the Thompson twins,” Jim Leafman says with a big grin. “Anyways, the guy doesn’t say anything but the bartender pulls him a half-pint and the guy passes him the money for it. Then the guy downs the drink — in maybe three or four swallows — wipes his mouth and strides right out “But he paid him, right?” Jack Fedogan asks from the counter.

Edgar says, “He paid for the drink, Jack — let’s just get on with the story here.”

Jack mutters something Nigel Bruce-style and returns to his polishing.

“Anyway,” Jim says after taking a sip of his beer, “I didn’t really think anything of it at the time. It was just, you know, a little unusual, right?”

Everyone seems to agree that such action was unusual and Jim continued.

“But it happened again.”

“The same night?” the little Lorre-lookalike whispers sibilantly.

Jim shakes his head.

“Another night — maybe the next one but certainly no more than two nights later. And it was a different pub.” He stops and shrugs at Edgar’s frown. “Okay, we drank most nights — twenty years old for crissakes.”

Edgar sits back in his chair and holds up a hand. “I didn’t say nothing.”

“You looked,” is what Jim says to that.

Edgar takes a deep drink of beer and Jack, leaning over the counter, says, “Will you get on with it?”

“Can we get more beers over here?” says Edgar, having drained his glass.

“Same?” Jack asks, straightening up.

Everyone appears to feel that’s a good idea. “They’re on me if I can join you,” Jack says.

Everyone seems to feel that’s an even better idea.

Minutes later, Jack sets fresh glasses on the table and pulls up a chair.

“And it didn’t end there,” is what Jim says then, and he lifts his glass to everyone’s health before taking a long sip. The others wait patiently as he drinks.

“The very next night, in a different pub again — this one another mile or so out of Headingly towards Leeds — the guy comes in and sidles up to the bar. Doesn’t say anything but the girl behind the bar pulls him a half-pint which the guy sees off in short order. Then he leaves the pub. And when he leaves, he’s weaving a little, you know what I mean?”

“He’s canned,” Edgar announces.

“Let’s just say he’s . . .”

“Tipsey?” Horatio Fortesque suggests.

“Tipsey?” says Jack. “What the hell’s `tipsey’?”

“Well,” comes the reply, “it’s what you get when you’ve had a few drinks but you’re not yet drunk.”

Everyone considers this — Jim included — while they sip their drinks.

“So,” says Jim Leafman, “I go up to the girl — who’s very nice, incidentally —”

“Ulterior motive, hmm,” says Lorre, making it sound like Jim had thrown the girl across the bar counter and torn her clothes off. Jim ignores this and continues.

“And I ask her about this guy. You know, I seen him in the first pub — the Oak, as I recall — and then another . . . which I think was the —”

“Too much information,” says Edgar.

Jim nods. “Sorry. So, it turns out that this guy, his wife died on him years earlier. She was only young, the girl told me, maybe in her mid-forties — keeled right over while they were eating their meal one evening, head-first on to the plate. So what he did, as soon as the funeral was over and done, was he went out every night to all the pubs in the area that he and his wife had visited and he had a half-pint in each one. The girl tells me this: he walked from his house — the whole round-trip would be around four miles — and he went to all the pubs on the left side of the road as he walked in and all the pubs on the right side as he walked back home. Needless to say, when he got home each night he was a little . . .” Jim looks questioningly at Fortesque.

“Tipsey,” the stranger offers.

“Right, tipsey. And he had done this seven nights a week, fifty two weeks a year for —” Jim shrugs. “— three, four years?”

“God,” is all Jack Fedogan can think of to say, Jack too busy casting his mind back to his beloved Phyllis, gone on ahead on Valentine’s Day 1990 and Jack alone these past fifteen years. Alone apart from the Working Day. He takes a drink and glances around at the others.

“And then he stopped,” Jim says, basking in the dramatic revelation.

“He stopped?”

Jim nods.

Joe Morello’s laugh of relief at the end of “Unsquare Dance” signals the trio’s (Paul Desmond playing only handclap in the sessions for this particular tune) “Why Phyllis” written by Eugene Wright — whose wife, like Jack’s, was named Phyllis — and taken from Brubeck’s 1961 album
Countdown Time In Outer Space.

“Well, go on,” Edgar says.

“I’d gotten to watching out for him each pub we went into — and, like I said, we went into a lot of pubs in those days — and I saw him a good few times. Then, one night, I was suddenly aware I hadn’t seen him inside a pub for a good few nights. You know how that kind of thing creeps up on you? You kind of take something for granted and then, one day, you realize that that something has stopped?”

The consensus was that everyone knew how that kind of thing crept up on you, and Jim continued.

“I’d seen him a couple of times walking out on the street or — and I thought this was strange right off — standing outside the pub.”

“Standing outside?” Fortesque asks. “Doing what?”

Jim shrugs. “Just standing there — couple of times I thought he looked kind of wistful.” Jim stops and looks around the faces. “We’re talking here maybe three, four weeks during which I guess I’d seen him a half-dozen times — we were always out and about at the same times so it wasn’t too unusual.

“So, this one night — we’d only just gone out and we were up near West Park at the pub there — and I asked the guy behind the bar if the little guy — the Thompson twin — had been in recently. ‘He died,’ the guy behind the bar tells me. I was shocked but, most of all, I felt —”, Jim searches the faces around him, looking for the right word or phrase. “— I felt sad. No idea why. It just seemed such a desperately sad life he’d had.

“And then, just casual, I asked the guy behind the bar when it had happened — when the Thompson twin guy had died. And he says, matter-of-factly — because why would he be otherwise — ‘Last month.’ So I say to him that can’t be. I tell him I just saw the guy, three maybe four times just this past week—week and a half, out on the street. And the barkeeper looks at me like I just fell off of a tree. Says I must have seen someone who looks just like him. And then he goes off to pull somebody a beer.”

You could cut the atmosphere with a knife.

Edgar looks nervously at Jack Fedogan, Jack looks at the little Lorre fella, Lorre looks up at Fortesque who is watching Jim Leafman. Every few seconds, one or more of them gives a little shake of their head. Even the usually confident Dave Brubeck sounds a little phased as he drifts into “It’s A Raggy Waltz”.

Then Jim says, “There’s more,” before draining his glass. “But we need refills and I need the restroom.”

5 Enter Cliff Rhodes

As Jack goes to the bar, moving faster than he has done all day, the tall black man shouts, “How about another Manhattan,” to which Jack nods enthusiastically. Then the black guy gets up and walks across to the table, pack of Camels and ashtray in hand, says, “Mind if I join you? I always liked story-telling.”

“Sure,” says Edgar.

Jim nods Hi as he stands up.

Lorre says, “Don’t be long,” and there’s something in there — in those three words — that sounds unpleasant and menacing.

“Pull up a chair,” says Fortesque to the black man, leaning over with his hand outstretched and adding, “Horatio Fortesque.”

The new arrival nods, shakes hands, and says, “Cliff Rhodes.”

Introductions are then made and Jack returns with fresh beers, forgetting to charge anyone for them. Scant seconds later, Jim gets back and introductory sips are made from the replenished glasses before Jack says, “So, go on.”