The Wrong Story

by James Ellis

  I didn’t have to ask where Billy had been. He wouldn’t remember in the same way that he wouldn’t know how he’d got from wherever he had been. He had merely shown up as I had; as Plenty had; as we all had. I looked more closely at Billy and saw that there were missing quills on his back and down near the roots some kind of fungus was spreading. That reminded me, I had a question for the Pelican. It was one I’d been meaning to ask for some time now.

  ‘Hey Pelican, I have a question.’

  The Pelican shifted its position and pointed its massive beak in my direction.

  ‘What do you see when you’re up there?’ I said.

  ‘Up where?’

  ‘Up in the air. What do you see?’

  ‘What do I see?’

  With its wings outstretched the Pelican was the biggest creature amongst us, but it only had a tiny bit of brain trapped inside its skull.

  ‘He means, when you’re flying around doing your pelican-thing, looking for fish or whatever, and you look down, down towards the ground, what do you see?’ Billy said. He had always been better at talking to the others than I had.

  The Pelican’s eyes crossed and uncrossed. ‘What do I see?’

  ‘Yes, what do you see?’ hissed Plenty.

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Billy. ‘Breathe deeply. There’s no wrong answer. You fly, you look down, what do you see?’

  ‘I see our home. I see the alleyway,’ the Pelican said. ‘Do I see the alleyway? Yes, I do. I see the alleyway. And the restaurant.’

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ said Billy.

  ‘But you see other stuff, right?’ I said. ‘Towns and houses and woods and fields? You saw this place, didn’t you?’

  There was a long, long pause. We waited.

  ‘I see what’s not this,’ the Pelican said at last.

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Plenty.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s going blind,’ Billy said. ‘Anyway, talking of alleyways and restaurants, where’s our buddy, the always-angry restaurant owner? Shouldn’t she be here, chasing us with her rolling pin? My day is not complete without some rolling pin action.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Plenty. ‘Let’s go to the restaurant and she can chase us and we’ll hide and then slip into her kitchen and eat all her food with napkins tied around our necks, and she can jump up and down outside the window because we’ve locked her out. And Scraps will say something funny and everything will be funny. Except her.’

  ‘It’s early,’ I said. ‘Let’s wait. It’s not too bad here.’

  ‘I feel strange,’ the Pelican said returning to life, its head rising up from the mess that was its body. ‘I feel like we should be doing something. Or nothing. Or something.’ It sank back into its feathers, now seemingly perplexed by its own words.

  I was going to say that I felt the same way but a shout interrupted me.

  ‘What was that?’ said Billy. ‘Somebody’s calling.’

  It was a loud and urgent shout and it seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. I watched Plenty’s whiskers twitch and her ears make minute adjustments as they assessed the sounds and vibrations around them.

  ‘What?’ said the Pelican, shifting into a more compact, defined shape. ‘What can you hear? What can I hear? Nothing.’

  I listened for the sounds that the Pelican couldn’t hear; sniffed the air for scents it couldn’t smell.

  ‘Something,’ I said.

  ‘Running,’ Plenty said. ‘Over there.’

  In the distance a dog was bounding across the concrete.

  ‘It’s chasing a ball,’ said Billy.

  ‘My ball?’

  ‘No, not your ball.’

  The dog was big and sand-coloured. A yellow Labrador. Its tongue was hanging out and its heavy head was lifting up and down as it ran. It looked clumsy and excited. It caught up with the ball, fell over itself and started running back, turning in a wide semi-circle and galloping away from us.

  ‘That is one big dumb dog,’ said Billy. ‘All meat and muscle. Let’s go. Dogs don’t play nicely with us urban types.’

  ‘No,’ said Plenty. ‘I’m not going because of a stupid dog.’

  ‘I don’t want the dog to come back,’ the Pelican said. ‘Do I? No, I don’t.’

  It released a pungent fishy smell as it stood up and extended its huge wingspan. The Pelican was getting out of there. It pushed with its feet and flapped its wings, and against all probability it lifted into the air like a galleon rising from the waves. Lice and feathers and bits of other birds’ shit fell off as it ascended with its legs dangling beneath it.

  ‘I’ll see you back at the alleyway. Will I?’

  ‘You will,’ I said.

  The Pelican continued to rise, the slow flapping of its flea-ridden wings somehow carrying it upwards until it seemed to shrink into a small, distant object that floated away towards the horizon and then disappeared entirely.

  ‘Hey,’ I called out after it. ‘What can you see?’

  I see what’s not this.

  ‘Here comes Goofy again,’ said Billy. ‘Or is it Pluto? I always get those two confused. How can a dog own a dog? Actually, let’s talk about that another time.’

  The ball bounced past us on the far side of the concrete and landed near the wire fence on the grassy slope. Again the yellow dog came into view, running from somewhere beyond our line of sight. It was closer than before and I could hear its rapid panting and sense the heat of its breath. There was saliva dripping from its teeth.

  Plenty stood up and watched it, her tail big, the guide-hairs in her fur fully extended. I saw that her claws were out. I put my finger to my lips and caught her eye.

  ‘Shhh,’ I said.

  ‘You shhh,’ she said.

  The dog caught up with the ball. It paused for a moment, breathing heavily, and then trotted down the slope, waiting for whoever had thrown it to catch up. It was about 20 yards away. It was a very big dog.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  ‘I want to stay,’ said Plenty.

  ‘Hey,’ said Billy, distracting her. ‘Forget the dog, where’s your ball? We’ll play catch in the alleyway.’

  ‘Someone’s stolen it.’

  ‘No, it’s here, look.’ Billy picked it up and handed it to Plenty, who took it and seemed to forget all about the dog. ‘What is all that stuff on it?’ he said. ‘Have you been sick again?’

  ‘It’s Pelican juice.’

  ‘The Pelican has juice? You’re joking with me. That’s disgusting.’

  ‘It’s seen us,’ I said.

  The dog wasn’t moving, it was simply looking at us, its legs set wide apart, its tongue hanging from its mouth, its eyes glowing like embers buried deep inside a coal fire.

  ‘I’m going to rip off its face and scoop out the jelly behind its skin and make little balls out of it, and then suck out its brains and eat them and then sick it all up, and then make little balls out of that too,’ said Plenty.

  ‘That’s a comprehensive itinerary,’ Billy said. ‘But I suggest we evacuate.’

  ‘It’s not like us,’ I said. And it wasn’t. I could sense it. ‘It’s not like us at all. Look at it.’

  ‘I’m looking at it. But let’s go.’

  I walked along the side of the wall and Billy followed, so close that he was inhaling my tail. Behind us I heard Plenty say, ‘I’m going to rip its face off.’ She had become bored with her ball.

  The dog barked. Or perhaps it roared. Whichever, a considerable proportion of my insides turned to water and I had to resist a strong urge to roll over and play dead.

  ‘That’s a big bark,’ said Billy.

  The dog ran at us, head down, ears flying, paws slipping and clattering on the concrete, gathering momentum like a runaway train. I saw in its eyes the desire to chase, catch and destroy. I knew that desire. In our alleyway we lived amongst dustbins overflowing with cardboard boxes and torn plastic bags and the rich smell of rotting food and the sour, bitter smell of personal wast
e – mostly mine, admittedly. Those smells both excited and repelled me and recently I’d been having a crazy desire to tear the bags and boxes apart, bury my face in the mushy mess and force the slime and grease into my mouth until my belly bloated.

  ‘Time to leave,’ Billy said, and he did, streaking along the wall with his quills trailing behind him and his sunglasses bouncing up and down on top of his head.

  ‘I always forget how fast he can run,’ Plenty said.

  The dog was close.

  I looked into my tobacco tin and saw that I had two cigarettes left. In some other place and time, I thought, there was a Scraps who lived a quiet and contented life with his feet up, a newspaper on his lap, pondering life and meeting up with old friends for a meal every now and then. A Scraps with a past to look back on and a future to contemplate.

  ‘You go one way, I’ll go another,’ I said. ‘He can’t chase us both.’

  The dog chased me.

  4

  Meadow Ward was for people with head injuries or, as in Tom’s case, possible head injuries. Porters and nurses passed by his bay with patients on trolleys and in wheelchairs. Some patients had skulls that were held together by metal vices and others had cables coming out of their heads. Tom didn’t want cables coming out of his head. He wanted to go home.

  The sweet, seductive, sickliness of the anaesthetic had worn off but Tom was still trying to connect with the knowledge that he had been on a car park roof, fallen off and almost died. The puzzle was, why a multi-storey car park? Apart from the minor detail that he didn’t drive, one of Tom’s most defining characteristics was his fear of heights. He never went anywhere high. He was acrophobic through and through. Cut him anywhere and you would see the message: low good; high bad.

  He looked at his damaged thumb and sucked his broken tooth and shifted his bruised buttocks. What was memory, he wondered – physically what was it? A jump between two neurons? A synaptic connection? An electrical crackle in that slab of meat that was his brain? He tried to imagine switching on the lights in his mind, lighting a crackling fuse that would illuminate the corridors, trying to remember anything about the previous day. But it was like turning on a black light in a black hole.

  He remembered once, as a child, he had awoken in the middle of the night and looked up at the ceiling and felt that something was wrong. It was only after several minutes that he realised the bedroom door beside his bedhead was open. The door was right beside his head and slowly he’d sat up and peered around it onto the landing. It had been utterly, utterly dark. An impenetrable blackness so deep that he might have been looking up or down instead of across. A blackness so deep that his retina had sent pictures of itself to his brain. What had happened? He must have been sleepwalking or his parents had looked in or a draught had opened the door. But the sense of darkness, of a chasm beside him, remained.

  He shook his head, careful of his dizziness. He could remember a childhood incident but he couldn’t picture the previous day. And the more he tried, the more he became aware that there were other large chunks of his life he couldn’t remember at all. But that was normal, wasn’t it? Who could remember everything? All those minutes and hours since Day One of his life. Were they gone forever, like evaporated dreams, or were they still there, locked away in a place he couldn’t find? Somewhere in his brain, was there a memory of being born, a memory of being in the womb?

  Sunday had vanished and the days leading up to it were not much better. His recent past was foggy with scattered showers. He would remember one thing and then it would disappear and he would be thinking of something else.

  ‘How are you doing, Tom?’ said Maggie. She stood at the foot of his bed with her blue folder. ‘Do you feel better than you did earlier, or worse?’

  ‘Better.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Although I have a lisp.’

  ‘You need a new tooth. How’s the memory? Have you remembered what happened?’

  ‘It’s getting better but there’s still a black hole where Sunday used to be.’

  ‘You mean a hole or one of those star-things?’

  ‘That’s a very good question.’ Tom imagined a black bullet hole in his head. ‘No, not an actual hole. I suppose I mean one of those star-things. A collapsed star-thing. It’s all in there but you can’t get to it.’

  ‘Does it come with a headache?’

  ‘No. It doesn’t come with anything. It’s there but not there.’ Tom lay back in his pillows and looked at Maggie. He was surprising himself. He was not someone who normally said very much to anyone, let alone someone who tried to express their thoughts.

  ‘I see,’ Maggie said.

  Tom sat up again. ‘So, now I’m wondering. Imagine, if yesterday is a black hole, then do you think that other nearby memories might disappear too? You know, like the day before and the day before that, and then weeks, months, even years; they will all be sucked into my missing memory until nothing is left?’

  ‘You mean will you lose more memory?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s possible, but I don’t think it would happen in the way you’re describing. It’s not like a spreading ink blot.’

  ‘I like that.’

  ‘But it’s not. Think of it as a gap. A temporary gap. Like a missing jigsaw piece or an advent calendar with a door that needs opening.’

  ‘An advent calendar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With chocolate?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Tom nodded. ‘Do you think any more of the cardboard doors will close?’

  Maggie laughed. ‘I don’t know. I hope not.’

  After she’d left, Tom lay there thinking about his memory being like chocolate shapes in an advent calendar. Then he thought about a Christmas scene with Maggie wearing a Santa Claus hat and a red Christmas jumper, taking chocolate figures off a Christmas tree. He liked that image.

  He investigated his bedside locker. On the shelf was his wallet, a set of keys, some coins and a bag of sticky liquorice sweets. No phone.

  I don ’ t want this. I don ’ t need this.

  He wondered where those words had come from. They were in his voice but had he said them?

  Hanging beneath the shelf were his clothes: a heavy-knit blue cardigan, a white T-shirt with a cartoon on it and a pair of blue cords. A pair of worn brown zip-up boots were underneath on the floor, and folded up on top of those was a woollen overcoat, socks and a pair of boxer shorts.

  The cartoon on the front of the T-shirt was a coloured print of the Scraps characters that had also been printed on a thousand mugs, posters and keyrings. Tom had drawn it in perspective: animals in the foreground and the always-angry restaurant owner in the background, smaller, running and shouting while shaking her rolling pin. A cloud of dust had been raised by her running feet. The Pelican’s wings were open like a protective shield. It looked good: clean and compact, like a picture of superheroes.

  Tom held up his bandaged thumb.

  ‘Hi,’ he said to the characters on his T-shirt. ‘Don’t expect too much from me for a while.’

  It occurred to him that his brain was damaged. He put his hand against the bandage on his head. It didn’t feel too bad; a bit tender; but nothing broken. How did he get that bruise? On the crates? After the bananas? The paramedics said he’d landed bottom first and then fallen onto his face. Did he hit his head on the way down? Did a bird fly into him?

  How fast had he been travelling? If he hit a flying insect at speed would it leave a bruise like those tiny fragments of dust in outer space that can rip through a spacecraft? Maybe somewhere there was an insect hospital in which a traumatised bug was struggling to remember what had happened.

  I don’t know, I was just flying along, buzzing, and then… pow. Some kind of massive cartoonist hit me.

  And then he wondered if a blow to the head had caused his fall.

  Shortly before lunch a man came to see him who looked as if he’d recently rolled down a hill. His spar
se hair stood up in wispy strands and his crumpled shirt was untucked at the front, allowing his heavy stomach to droop below like a billowing tumour.

  ‘I’m the senior consultant, Brian Wiley,’ he said. He shook Tom’s hand. He sat on the plastic chair beside Tom’s bed and slipped into a horizontal position while he leafed through the blue folder. His chin rested on his chest and his glasses rested on the end of his nose. From a distance he might have been asleep if it wasn’t for the turning of pages. He looked at Tom over his glasses and said, ‘Here, we like to talk about losses, deficits we call them, and you seem to have none other than some localised amnesia. Of course, that may have a psychological cause. You have suffered a trauma, after all. To be honest, we weren’t sure whether to bring you here or the Fracture Ward. Physically- and neurologically-speaking, there is very little damage. Your blood pressure is normal. We gave you a CT scan and that was clear. There is nothing to indicate that you have a heart condition or suffered any kind of stroke or aneurism. I don’t suppose you can remember if you fainted?’

  Tom shook his head.

  ‘No? Well, people faint for all sorts of reasons: anxiety, dehydration, hunger, alcohol. I know people who have sneezed and fainted.’

  He sucked his pen and flicked through the remaining pages.

  ‘Physically, you have a broken front tooth, a dislocated thumb, a bump on the head and two tenderised buttocks. Not surprising: dropping through a canvas roof at forty miles an hour is going to leave a mark. And we had to remove some of the flower-bed from your mouth. No sign of the other part of your tooth, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tom felt sad that there was a bit of him out there somewhere alone. He wondered where it was. He felt sorry for it. Had someone picked it up? Or was it lying in the earth surrounded by puzzled ants who wondered what it meant, in the same way that he had once stared at Stonehenge and scratched his head. Perhaps his missing tooth would become the basis of a religion or be the catalyst for scientific development amongst insects.

  ‘Forty miles an hour. Is that how fast I was going?’