Michael Marshall - The Intruders

I hadn’t rehearsed any of this, but when I’d said it I felt proud. It meant something profound, or sounded like it might – which is plenty good enough when you’re eighteen.

Fisher looked at the ground for a minute, and then seemed to nod faintly. ‘Thanks.’

I nodded back, all out of words, and went thudding down the track to hurl my spear. Maybe I was showing off, hoping to impress the Gary Fisher of eight months before. Either way I pulled my arm over far too fast, reopened an old split on the tip of my middle finger, and wound up not making the last meet after all.

The end of school came and went. Like everyone else I was too busy rushing through celebrated rites of passage to pay much attention to people I didn’t really know. Tests, dances, everything hurried as our childhoods started to run out of gas. Then – bang: out into the real world, which has a way of feeling like that super-test you never got around to studying for. It still feels that way to me sometimes. I don’t think I heard Fisher’s name mentioned once during the summer, and then I left town to go to college. I thought about him every now and then over the next couple years, but eventually he dropped out of my head along with all the other things that had no relevance to my life.

And so I was not really prepared for the experience of meeting him again, nearly twenty years later, when he turned up at the door of my house and started talking as if no time had passed at all.

I was at my desk. I was trying to work, though a time management study would probably have suggested my job consisted of staring out the window, with only occasional and apparently random glances at a computer screen. The house was very quiet, and when the phone rang it jerked me back in my chair.

I reached out, surprised Amy was calling the land line rather than my cell, but not thinking much more about it than that. Being on the phone to my wife meant a break from work. Then I could make more coffee. Go have a cigarette on the deck. Time would pass. Tomorrow would come.

‘Hey, babe,’ I said. ‘How stands the corporate struggle?’

‘Is this Jack? Jack Whalen?’

It was a man’s voice. ‘Yes,’ I said, sitting up and paying more attention. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Hang onto your hat, my friend. It’s Gary Fisher.’

The name sent up a flag straight away, but it took another second to haul it up through the years. Names from the past are like streets you haven’t driven in a while. You have to remember where they go.

‘You still there?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just surprised. Gary Fisher? Really?’

‘It’s my name,’ the guy said, and laughed. ‘I wouldn’t lie about something like that.’

‘I guess not,’ I said. I had question marks right across the dial. ‘How did you get my number?’

‘A contact in LA. I tried calling last night.’

‘Right,’ I said, remembering a couple of blank calls on the machine. ‘You didn’t leave a message.’

‘Thought it might come across kind of weird, getting in touch after nearly twenty years.’

‘A little,’ I admitted. I found it hard to imagine Fisher and I had anything to discuss unless he was running the class reunion, which seemed unlikely in the extreme. ‘So, what can I do for you, Gary?’

‘It’s more what I might be able to do for you,’ he said. ‘Or maybe both of us. Look – where is it you live, exactly? I’m in Seattle for a few days. Thought it might be cool to meet up, talk about old times.’

‘Place called Birch Crossing. Hour and a half inland. Plus my wife’s got the car,’ I added. Amy has claimed that if you could get enough unsociable people together in a room to vote, they’d make me their king. She’s probably right. Since my book came out I’d been contacted by a few other people from the past, though none as far back as Fisher. I hadn’t bothered to reply to their emails, forwarded via the publisher. Okay, so we used to know each other. What’s your point?

‘I’ve got a day to kill,’ Fisher persisted. ‘Had a string of meetings cancelled.’

‘You don’t want to just tell me on the phone?’

‘Would be a long call. Seriously, you’d be doing me a favour, Jack. I’m going nuts in this hotel and if I walk round Pike Place Market one more time I’m going to wind up with a big dead fish I don’t need.’

I thought about it. Curiosity struck a deal with the desire not to work, the terms brokered by a small part of my soul for which – absurdly – Gary Fisher’s name evidently still held something of a charge.

‘Well, okay,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

He arrived a little after two. I’d achieved nothing in the meantime. Even a call to Amy’s cell phone for a hey-how are-you had dead-ended in her answering service. I was becalmed in the kitchen thinking vaguely about lunch when I heard someone pulling around in the drive.

I walked up the polished wood steps and opened the front door to see a black Lexus where our SUV usually sat – a vehicle that was currently in Seattle, with my wife. The car door opened and some late-thirties guy got out. He crunched over the gravel.

‘Jack Whalen,’ he said, breath clouding up around his face. ‘So you grew up. How did that happen?’

‘Beats me,’ I said. ‘Did everything I could to avoid it.’

I made coffee and we took it down into the living room. He looked around for a few moments, checking out the view of the wooded valley through the big plate glass windows, then turned to me.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Still got that good throwing arm?’

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Don’t get much occasion to throw stuff these days.’

‘You should. It’s very liberating. I try to throw something at least once a week.’

He grinned, and for a moment he looked pretty much how I remembered him, albeit better dressed. He reached a hand across the coffee table. I shook it.

‘Looking good, Jack.’

‘You too.’

He was. You can tell men in good condition just from how they use a chair. There’s a confidence in their poise, a sense that sitting is not a relief but merely one of the many positions in which their body is at ease. Gary looked trim and fit. His hair was well cut and not-grey, and he had the skin that healthy eating and non-smoking delivers to those with the patience to endure that type of lifestyle. His face had matured into that of a youthful senator from somewhere unimportant, the kind who might have a shot at Vice President some day, and his eyes were clear and blue. The only thing I had over him was that the lines around my mouth and eyes were less pronounced, which surprised me.

He was silent for a few moments, doubtless making a similar assessment. Meeting a contemporary after a long time personifies the passage of time in a serious and irrevocable way.

‘I read your book,’ he said, confirming what I’d suspected.

‘So you’re the one.’

‘Really? Didn’t do so well? I’m surprised.’

‘It did okay,’ I admitted. ‘Better than. Problem is, I’m not sure there’s another.’

He shrugged. ‘Everyone thinks you’ve got to do things over and over. Nail your colours to the mast, make it who you are. Maybe one was all you had.’

‘Could be.’

‘You couldn’t go back to the police force?’ He saw the way I looked at him. ‘You thank the LAPD in the acknowledgements, Jack.’

Slightly against my will, I smiled back. Fisher still had that effect. ‘No. I’m done there. So how do you earn a buck these days?’

‘Corporate law. I’m a partner in a firm back east.’

Him being an attorney figured, but didn’t give me a lot to work with. We knocked sentences back and forth for a little while, mentioning people and places we’d once known, but it didn’t catch alight. It’s one thing if you’ve kept in touch over the years, lit beacons to steer you across the seas of time. Otherwise it seems strange, being confronted with this impostor who happens to have the same name as a kid you once knew. Though Fisher had referred to old times we didn’t really have any, unless pounding around the same sports track counted, or a shared ability to remember the menu at Radical Bob’s. A lot had happened to me since then, probably to him too. It was evident that neither of us counted classmates as friends or retained ties to the town where we’d grown up. The kids we’d once been now seemed imaginary, a genesis myth to explain how we’d used up our first twenty years.