The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (19 page)

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.”

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.”

“You hear any of this?”
Edgar asks Cliff Rhodes as Cliff swirls the olive around the Manhattan.

“I’m afraid so,” Rhodes
confesses. “It’s not my habit to listen in on other folks’ conversations but,
like I said, I’m a sucker for stories.”

Edgar waves never mind
and slaps Rhodes on his shoulder.

“Well,” Jim says, “I
tried not to give it any more thought but then, that weekend — I remember: it
was a Saturday evening — I saw the guy again, and this time I was sure it was
him. No question. He was standing outside the Oak just as I walked across the
street, standing right there outside the pub, his coat collar up, hands in pockets,
still looking as smart as ever, staring through the big window they have — or
used to have — in that pub.

“So, I took the bull by
the horns and I called out to him. ‘Hey!’ I shouts to him, waving a hand in the
air —” Jim demonstrates. “— like this. And he turns around, sees me and . . .”
He shakes his head, checking each face individually. “And then he just kind of
fizzles up into wispy smoke, smoke that’s kind of man-shaped and then isn’t,
and that’s solid for a few seconds, then less solid and then just see-through
smoke. And then there’s only the big window and the sidewalk, people passing by
going this way and that, not one of them appearing to have seen him or seen him
disappear.”

“What then?” is what
Cliff Rhodes decides to say to break Jim’s pause.

“Well, then, I guess I
just stood there looking at where the guy had been, looking at the other
people, people either walking or standing — outside the Oak was a popular
meeting place — and then I looked through the window into the pub. And that’s when
I figured out what was going on.”

Sips all round followed
that. Then:

“I figured that I was
the only one seen him because I was the one expected to put things right.”

Edgar harrumphs and
takes a sip of beer, seeming agitated.

“Put things right?”
hisses Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat.

“Well, way I figured it,
there had to be a reason why I’d seen him and seen him disappear while the
other people all around him hadn’t. And that reason was to put him out of his
misery.

“See, when I looked
through that window, I saw what it was that was making the guy so morose:
people drinking. And it came to me that ghosts probably can’t drink.” Jim
shrugs. “Maybe he wasn’t fully aware he’d died, only that he couldn’t go into
the pubs and have his customary half-pint in every one. The routine had sunk
its claws into him and he’d become so fixated with what he did every night that
he wasn’t about to let a little thing like death keep him from it. But death
was keeping him from drinking.”

Jim swirls the beer
around in his glass and watches it make patters of froth around the rim. “And I
got to thinking that `someone’, whoever or whatever keeps these things in
check, had looked around for a likely candidate to put things straight again.”
Jabbing a thumb into his own chest, Jim Legman says, somewhat proudly, “And I
figured that person was me.”

“You knew what to do?”
Jack says, leaning closer over the table.

Jim shakes his head. “I
didn’t
know,”
he says, “but I figured someone had to get it through to
him that he was dead and that he should let go . . . go off to re-join his
wife.”

At that, Jack Fedogan
grimaces, shuffling in his chair and fighting back a sudden urge to blubber.
Without his letting anyone else notice, Edgar places a big ham-hock sized hand
on Jack’s knee and gives it a squeeze.

Cliff Rhodes, Jim and
even Fortesque and the Lorre fella all see the gesture and don’t let on, though
Jim sees that Greenblat has seen it, has seen the little guy’s soft smile
tugging at the corners of his mouth, and he reconsiders his opinion of the man.

“So, I went in and
ordered a pint. Didn’t go to the upstairs room where my regular crowd were, and
I didn’t stay more than just a few minutes. I just drank the pint and moved on.

“From there, I did the
Hyde Park, the Rose and Crown, the Skyrack, the Drum and Monkey, the Travellers’
Rest, the Lawnswood Arms, the New Inn and, finally, the Tap and Spile . . .
plus maybe a couple of others that I’ve forgotten about down the years.”

Now Jack’s grimace isn’t
about his missing Phyllis, it’s from thinking about all that beer — eight pints
at least and probably well into double figures.

Edgar looks at his
friend with newfound respect.

“As you can probably
guess, I wasn’t too good at the end of it all . . . but we won’t go into that.”
He takes a deep sip and rests his glass back on his coaster, pulling himself
tall in the chair — maybe even almost as tall as Cliff Rhodes, sitting across
from him, who wasn’t trying hard at all — and he continues with his story.

“I didn’t see the guy
again after that, and we were out and about just as frequently as before. The
way I figure it,” Jim Leafman says, lifting his glass once more, “is that the
guy needed to be freed. He’d gotten himself into some kind of loop, going out
every night to drink in the various bars that he drank in with his wife, and
then —” Jim waves a hand. “- He went and died. And, as we know, dead men don’t
drink too good.”

He is, of course,
referring to Front-Page McGuffin and both Jack and Edgar nod knowingly.

“So,” Jim goes on, his
voice sounding tired and kind of resigned, “he just stood outside each of the
pubs waiting for some kind of release.”

Edgar snorted. “And that
release was you going out and getting hammered?”

Jim shrugged. “Well, I didn’t see him again.”

“You ever stop to think
that maybe you’d imagined you’d seen him?” Cliff Rhodes ventures.

“Absolutely!” says Edgar, loudly.

“And that maybe he wasn’t
there at all,” Rhodes continues. “That he was just either a figment of your
imagination or someone who looked a lot like him.”

“It comes down to faith,”
Jack offers, sitting back in his chair a mite. “Either you believe in what you
saw and what you did, or you don’t. Simple as that.”