by James Ellis
About the Author
James Ellis lives in Bath and writes fiction.
He has published a number of flash fiction and short stories including The Fire Diver’s Assistant, The Therapist and A Rare Bird.
The Wrong Story is his first novel.
The Wrong Story
James Ellis
This edition first published in 2017
Unbound
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All rights reserved
© James Ellis, 2017
The right of James Ellis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN (eBook):978-1-911586-18-0
ISBN (Paperback):978-1-911586-11-1
Design by Mark Ecob
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© iStockphoto.com
This book was produced using Pressbooks.com.
To Sally, without whom I would not have written this book, to my father, who didn’t live to see me write it, and to my mother, who never once doubted that I would write it.
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound.
Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type SCRAPS17 in the promo code box when you check out.
Thank you for your support,
Dan, Justin and John
Founders, Unbound
Super Patrons
Sue & Colin Allan
Hazel Barkworth
Victoria Bennett
Miguel Blasco
Vivien Boast
Angharad Brown
Susie Campbell
Paul Campy
Louise Casey
Pauline Casey
Jason Cass
Amal Chatterjee
Charlotte Clifford
Hannah Collins
Benny Collins
Dan Coomansingh
Alexandra Coulton
Mungo Coyne
Rachel Darling
Mark Davis
Laura Deutsch
Yvonne Dewing
Harminder Dhillon
Barry Dodd
Sylvia Ellis
Michael Ellis
Lauren Ellis
Dan Ellis
Joe Ellis
Andrew Ellis
Linda Ellis
Brian James Ellis
Giana Elyea
Oli Gill
Rory Gleeson
Heidi Godfrey-Jones
Mark Goody
Roger Gray
Sam Guglani
Manish Gupta
Shahla Haque
Kiran Hargrave
Katie Hawksworth
David Hetherington
Mary Hopcroft
Maggie Hunt
Alice Jolly
Elena Kaufman
Dan Kieran
Ollie Landerer
Declan Logue
Simon Lovell-Smith
Julie Mansfield
Ruth Marks
Kate McCombe
Sally McGuire
Barry McGuire
Patricia McGuire
Charlie McIntosh
Moira McKendry
Gordon McMann
Dale Melita
John Mitchinson
Leonard Montgomery
Patrick Neil
Adrian Pasciuta
Dominic Perry
Roy Plummer
Justin Pollard
Gordon Porter
Sue Ransom
Becky Ravenscroft
Tom Ravenscroft
Bill Rees Lewis
Amelia Rowe
Phillipa Ryan
Graham Slater
Christiane Travers
Oliver Tuhey
Nicola Turnbull
Dorothy Turner
Christian Uta
Kevin Venus
Rachel Louise Venus
Neil Ward
Gemma Warriner
Darla Warriner
Lois Warriner
Chaz Warriner
Fiona Wiltshire
Keith Woodgate
Anthony Woodgate
With grateful thanks to
Sally McGuire
‘Don’t you ever wonder what happens in between the frames? What happens in that dark line that separates one frozen moment from the next?’
Tom Hannah
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Dear Reader Letter
Super Patrons
[Frontispiece]
[Epigraph]
Prologue
Part One
The Feint
Part Two
The Draw
Part Three
Bang
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Patrons List
Prologue
i
Later, he would remember this: there was no cushion of air to carry him safely to the ground and, if there had been, it would have been too thin to take his weight. Instead, he saw the concrete cap above him recede at speed and felt the warm wind push past him in an upward rush. There were no thoughts and no past life flashing before him; only a tumbling and a reaching out for what wasn’t there.
ii
weekendingnews.com/news/cart_survives/280223/
Cartoonist Falls Off Car Park Roof
By Robert de Moor – Monday, 13 April 2015
SOUTH LONDON – An accident closed off a South London street yesterday morning. Tom Hannah, best known by his professional name, Tash, the creator of the cartoon strip Scraps, fell 60 feet from the top of a five-storey car park and landed on a market stall. Despite the drop, Hannah survived.
Witnesses described the cartoonist as being in the air for a few seconds, seeming to hover for a moment before falling backwards towards the ground. Paramedics said that the combination of the market stall’s canvas roof and the collapsing effect of several crates of bananas slowed his fall sufficiently to prevent serious injury.
‘See those crates? He blew them apart like a bomb,’ said Par
ks & Open Spaces gardener Peter Hobbes, 27, who was one of the first to go to Hannah’s aid. ‘The roof vanished and bananas flew up in the air and people were running all over the place. Lucky the earth had been dug over and was soft – otherwise he would have broken every bone in his body.’
A spokesman for the council said that market stallholders were strictly prohibited from setting up on the municipal flower-beds and there would be an investigation into why this rule had been flouted. A spokesman for the Market Stallholders’ Association said that compensation would be sought for the loss of produce.
The cause of the accident is currently unknown.
iii
#tashfalls
Charles & Hermione @charleshermione
Who is this idiot anyway? weekendingnews.com/news/cart_survives/280223/ #tashfalls
Loosey Lucy @FootballPuller
Is it a stunt? #tashfalls #PlausibleImpossible
Brant Hart @DoodlingGeek
@charleshermione Thomas Arthur Stevenson Hannah – moustache man who draws a cartoon about a fox #moustache #tashfalls
Captain Padlock @captainpadlock
Anyone know which hospital he ’ s in? #tashfalls #hermit
Gerard Borkmann @BorkmannCreativeAgency
@charleshermione Tom Hannah created the #scraps comic strip. Speedy recovery, Tom. #tashfalls
Brant Hart @DoodlingGeek
@BorkmannCreativeAgency Is he still drawing? Haven ’ t seen anything in a while #tashfalls
Loosey Lucy @Football Puller
@BorkmannCreativeAgency Zoicks! Is that the one with the cat and the pelican? I love animal art #tashfalls
Gerard Borkmann @BorkmannCreativeAgency
@FootballPuller Yes & a hedgehog & an always-angry restaurant owner. Terrific work by a modern master #tashfalls #scraps
Charles & Hermione @charleshermione
@FootballPuller Some say dots and lines ain ’ t art, baby #tashfalls
Loosey Lucy @FootballPuller
@charleshermione Some say some people should wind their necks in #windyourneckin #tashfalls
Captain Pa dlock @captainpadlock
@charleshermione Did he jump or was he pushed – any witnesses? #tashfalls
Gerard Borkmann @BorkmannCreativeAgency
@captainpadlock Can I refer you to the official channels? Speculation on social media is #nothelpful #tashfalls
Captain Padlock @captainpadlock
#officialchannels #nothelpful #tashfalls #WhyDidTashFall
Gerard Borkmann @BorkmannCreativeAgency
@captainpadlock Is that you Germaine? #tashfalls
Part One
The Feint
1
He was woken by a dog barking. With his eyes closed he thought he could be buried in a box or in a morgue or in a womb about to be born, although when he moved he felt sick. So not dead, then; but not ready to be awake either. He listened for the dog, waiting for it to bark again, but it was quiet now and he could hear nothing except the hiss in his ears and the sound of blood pumping from somewhere deep inside him. Perhaps it had been a dream dog or a cough or a door banging, but it had sounded real so that’s what he chose to believe. He had been woken by a dog barking: a dog barking in the distance, a real dog with a real bark. It became a fact, a truth, a recorded memory.
It was warm and quiet and comfortable and he was already drifting off again, sinking back through his pillows into a darker place where more disturbing memories waited: a shape moving across an expanse of shimmering white concrete, a bird flying over the edge of a wall, a cold punch of something hard hitting his face, blood in his mouth. Faces looking down on him; a pressure inside his head. And voices.
Are you all right?
Stay still.
Are you in pain?
What’ s your name?
*
The next time he awoke there was light from fluorescent strips on the ceiling and light from outside, too: daylight, wide and bright. Also noises: rattling trolleys and people talking and telephones ringing. He lifted his head and saw that he was in a bed that had padded side rails that kept him in bed rather than on the floor. There was a man pushing a trolley with drinks and newspapers and magazines on it, and there were nurses in a group by a desk.
He tried to say, ‘Hello?’ but nothing came out other than a hiss and a crackle. He moved his tongue backwards and forwards, exploring and lubricating his mouth, and found he had a broken tooth at the front. The gum surrounding it felt raw and red, and a warm liquid oozed from it. It tasted sweet. He felt pressure against his eardrums as if he were under water and there was a noise inside his head, a rise and fall of something deep like an engine switching on and off.
He wriggled his toes and fingers and found that everything moved except the thumb on his left hand, which was bandaged and stuck out at an angle – like the hand of a mummified hitchhiker. On his wrist was a white plastic band. He held it up to his eyes and squinted at the words printed on it.
Thomas Hannah.
They were familiar words. He had seen them drawn in a childish hand in orange crayon, typed on labels, carved in wood, doodled on books, signed by him on documents, on drawings, on photographs.
What’ s your name?
Thomas Hannah.
It was his name and with that knowledge came a sense of being. He reoccupied himself. The little boy at school who had drawn a picture of a house and grass and sky was now a big man with a big moustache that tickled his nose, lying in a hospital bed; a behemoth; big bones, big hands, big feet. He looked down at his spreading stomach and the bedclothes that covered him and, although he still felt woozy, everything seemed to be in the right place: his face was correctly stretched across his skull, his neck was taking the weight of his head, his heart was beating, his lungs were breathing. He was intact. He was Tom Hannah.
‘What happened?’ he whispered.
There were needles in his left arm, one of which had a tube that ran to a bag on a pole. He found another tube, thick and greasy, emerging from beneath the bed covers. It was attached to a bag that hung from one of the side rails. There was a support collar around his neck, and a bandage around his head with a pad beneath it beside his right eye.
‘Hello?’ he said again.
He moved his head from left to right and his skull felt tight as if it had shrunk in the wash. Dormant aches and pains shifted deep inside his body like slumbering giants kept under lock and key, and his buttocks, which felt sore, were supported by a rubber ring.
‘Hello? Hello?’
A young woman with a round face came over from the nurses’ station and looked at him from behind thick glasses.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘My name is Maggie.’
He nodded. He tried to speak but it felt as if there were a blade in his throat. Maggie half-filled a plastic cup with water from a jug on the table by his bed.
‘Have some water.’
When he drank the cup bumped against his swollen lip and his moustache – his moustache was enormous. He could see it on the edge of his vision and he could feel it pushing up against his nose, his swollen lip extending it beyond its normal range. The water stuck in his throat and dribbled down his chin onto the sheets.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome.’ She wiped his mouth and called to another nurse. Her name was Bianca and she told him that he could call her Bee.
‘Everybody should have an animal name,’ he whispered and his voice sounded distant and weak.
‘You’re still waking up. You’ve been out all night. Do you know where you are?’
‘Hospital?’
‘Yes. You’re in Halverson Hospital. This is Meadow Ward and I’m the ward manager.’
He nodded and closed his eyes.
‘Try to stay awake,’ she said.
She took his blood pressure and measured his temperature and then they adjusted his rubber ring and hauled him up the bed until he was sitting upright.
‘We’ll
need a longer bed,’ Bee said.
Maggie lifted his hands and feet, let them drop and then wrote in a blue folder that was lying on his table while Bee rearranged the bed covers and the cotton gown he was wearing.
‘How do you feel?’ Maggie said.
‘Sick.’
‘Nauseous sick or going-to-be-sick sick?’
‘Sick sick.’
‘Tell me if you’re actually going to vomit.’ She held out her hand. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
He opened his eyes. ‘Three.’
‘Good. Can you tell me your name?’
He lifted his arm with the wristband and said, ‘Thomas Hannah.’
‘That’s cheating. Do you have a middle name?’
He lay back and closed his eyes. ‘A few. Which one?’
‘I’ll let you choose.’
‘Arthur. My full name is Thomas Arthur Stevenson Hannah.’
‘Very good. Open your eyes, please. I don’t want you to fall asleep again. Not yet.’
Tom opened his eyes.
‘Thank you. Hold my hand and grip it as hard as you can. That’s good. Not quite so hard. Do you know what day it is?’
He looked up at the ceiling. That was a good question. He tried to find a thread on which to pull, a point of reference from which to rebuild the time and place, but he couldn’t. His mind probed his broken memory as his tongue had probed his broken tooth.
‘Monday?’ he said.
‘Was that a guess?’
Tom rubbed his face with his bandaged hand and nodded. ‘I’ve got that Monday morning kind of feeling.’ He tried to laugh but it still hurt too much. ‘Ouch.’
Maggie gave him more water. ‘Well, you’re right. It is Monday. You came in yesterday. You had an accident. Do you remember much about that?’
Tom looked at her, at her neat blue tunic with its white piping, at her fob-watch that told him it was 8.10am, at her badge that said Ward Manager:Margarida Monroe, and at her round, clear, bespectacled face. Margarida, was that Spanish?