The Wrong Story

by James Ellis

  At one end there was a high street lit with bright lights and busy with cars and people; an area filled with noises and smells. There was too much to see and too much to hear on the high street – and that meant too much danger. I had never walked on that road and nor had any of the others as far as I knew, because such places could fill our minds with confusion, and the feeling inside was always to stop and wait for the confusion to pass. But some instinctive fear warned me that it would never pass and if the bright lights did fill our minds then it would be the last thing we ever knew. Or so I thought. As I said, I had never been there. It was part of the world of which I knew but couldn’t remember. At the other end of the alleyway was a quiet road – dark and empty. Here there were houses and gardens: the black silhouettes without lights where I had been standing.

  As I walked down it, I thought the alleyway looked a tip. There was litter and rubbish and graffiti on the walls. New graffiti too, a word I didn’t recognise – Tash – was written over and over again, painted in different colours and in different signature styles. Seeing that word had an extraordinary effect on me: I wanted to urinate all over it, to leave my own mark and spray Scraps across the walls instead. Interesting.

  About halfway along the alleyway, on the left-hand side, was a metal door with barred windows on either side and a large ventilation duct above it. Bright yellow light spilled out into the darkness from the windows and the gaps around the door. It was the side entrance to the restaurant that led into the kitchen. I had often been in there, but I had never seen who made all of the shouts and clattering. A long time ago, I had glimpsed the shadowy shape of some cook, a dopey-looking youth whose eyes were hidden by his chef’s hat – but I hadn’t seen him recently. And now that I came to think of it, I hadn’t seen any creature other than the five of us for a very long time. Apart from the yellow dog.

  I put out my cigarette and squeezed my ear. The bleeding had stopped. I licked my lip and felt the swollen bruise but I didn’t taste blood anymore. That was good. I walked down the alleyway towards the restaurant door and as I did so I saw that they were all out there: Plenty, Billy, the Pelican and the always-angry restaurant owner; all sitting outside on the steps lit by the kitchen lights within. Wherever we went and whatever adventures we had, we always ended up outside the restaurant. But at this time they should all be asleep. Plenty, usually the sleepiest of them all, was already standing up as I approached.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘You’ve been gone days.’

  ‘Days?’

  ‘I thought the dog had eaten you.’

  ‘No, the dog didn’t eat me.’

  ‘If it had I would have found it and sliced its skin off with my claws.’ Plenty made small, vicious, raking movements and her eyes glowed.

  I sat down. ‘Why aren’t you all asleep?’

  ‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ said Billy.

  ‘For days?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m fine. You’re fine. Everything is fine.’ Now that I’d sat down I felt very tired.

  ‘No,’ said the always-angry restaurant owner, and her voice was flat and hard. ‘Everything is not fine.’

  I sensed an atmosphere. An expectant, we-have-big-news atmosphere. I could see Plenty keeping still, holding her breath, watching each of us in turn. Billy’s hands were stuck deep in his pockets and the Pelican shifted uneasily, a few grubs dropping to the ground as it did so.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  They all looked at the always-angry restaurant owner. She remained sitting on the steps, uncharacteristically quiet after her outburst. She was balancing a rolled-up newspaper between the palms of her hands.

  ‘Tell him,’ said Plenty. ‘Tell him about the thing.’

  ‘Yes, tell me about the thing,’ I said.

  ‘It is very weird shit,’ Billy said.

  ‘Tell me about the very weird shit.’ As if to emphasise the weird shittiness of it all, more detritus dropped to the ground as the Pelican shivered and shifted position again.

  ‘Well? Is anybody going to tell me?’ The fur was beginning to rise on the back of my neck.

  ‘I’ll tell you. In fact, I’ll show you,’ the always-angry restaurant owner said, and I thought she didn’t look so good either. She handed me the newspaper and the others watched. A few other newspapers littered the alleyway, lifting in the breeze, but this was one I didn’t recognise. It felt different, too: heavier, denser, organic. It was a Sunday tabloid, open and folded over at the horoscope page. I looked at it.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘I’m going to meet a tall, dark vixen.’

  ‘Not the horoscope, idiot. Look at the bottom.’

  The horoscopes took up half the page. Below them were puzzles: a word game, a number game, and some sort of maze game. I looked at the bottom of the page. There was a cartoon strip; three frames; clean lines; economical.

  It was called Scraps.

  9

  Borkmann was waiting in his car by the hospital entrance. Tom didn’t notice him at first because he was adjusting to being outside. He’d only been in hospital for two days and yet he felt as if he were coming out to a new world, a different world – a world similar but not the same as the one he’d known before. It seemed a brighter, sunnier, noisier place, with clouds moving swiftly across the sky and a light breeze that tugged his moustache, and he imagined the hairs twirling at each end like miniature propellers.

  There was a smell of fuel and distant fried food but also the smell of the outdoors, of wind that had travelled long distances journeying to and from places far away, across treetops and tall chimneys and hills and mountains and seas and vast oceans.

  He lifted his head and let the air rush past, cool and smooth. It was a soothing feeling but it tickled his memory, like a feather caught inside his skull. He closed his eyes and tried to reach it, to pluck it out and examine it. Had there been a cool wind rushing past and buffeting his face when he fell, he wondered, as if he were passing through a stream of pillow-sized air bubbles? Whatever it was, it remained out of his reach, persistent yet inaccessible. He let it go and closed his eyes, feeling the warmth from above soak into his skin and heat his battered and bruised bones – until a car hooted and Borkmann shouted, ‘Come on.’

  Borkmann was in a small, two-seater sports car. The passenger door had been pushed open, presumably so that Tom wouldn’t have to waste time with the door handle. Tom viewed the silent invitation to get in as if he were assessing a potential trap. It looked a very low vehicle. Tom bent down and peered into the interior.

  ‘Do I sit in this or do I wear it?’ he said.

  ‘Get in. I’m not meant to park here.’

  Tom eased himself into the passenger seat. It was a tight squeeze. His buttocks were still tender and his thumb caught against the door, sending a bolt of pain and flashing lights into the centre of his head. He knocked the rear-view mirror with his bruised eye and then couldn’t reach the seat belt because his coat had caught on the headrest.

  ‘I don’t fit.’

  ‘Stop thrashing about.’

  ‘I’m stuck.’

  ‘Do you want me to help you?’

  ‘Just drive. I’ll sort myself out.’

  Borkmann drove. Tom put on the seat belt but somehow both he and the seat were now wearing his coat, which had rucked up around his neck. He was not comfortable. He was too big for the car and every bump in the road pushed his head against the canvas roof, sanding his skin.

  ‘Thank you for the lift,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Tom held on to the dashboard and looked out of the window at the passing streets, at the signposts and traffic lights and lampposts, at the shuttered shops with cardboard boxes piled outside, and at a man sitting on the ground in a doorway, watching a woman walk unhurriedly past him. It was Tom’s scenery: the landscape of pavements and parks and railings and pubs, a landscape set to the music of sirens and hooting taxis and r
attling buses.

  Borkmann opened his window and the car filled with noise and petrol fumes. He drove along the road in a series of sweeping, swooping curves as if he were unable, or unwilling, to maintain a straight line. In doing so he managed to strike every pothole, drain, lump and bump in his path, and each jolt rubbed Tom’s head further into the canvas roof. He thought that perhaps it would become a type of Turin Shroud with the image of his forehead imprinted on it. He should have released the clips and let the roof down so that he could sit high above the windscreen with his moustache and hair streaming behind like a returning god.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted. ‘Why are you driving like this?’

  ‘I’m looming,’ Borkmann said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m looming into view.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m increasing my profile. This car is very low and people pulling out from side roads might not see me. So I’m making myself more visible with these controlled and precise changes of direction.’

  ‘You’re all over the road.’

  ‘I am all over the road in a controlled and precise way.’

  They loomed along roads that Tom had known since childhood, past alleyways that he had used as short cuts to school; past the road where a giant root ball had been turned into a fortress before it had been burned; past streets that led to long-ago friends’ houses; past tarmac play areas that brought back cloying memories of cold, damp November mornings and scraped knees.

  ‘I grew up around here,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ Borkmann shouted, swerving towards a brick.

  Halfway to his house, Tom saw the wishing-well where he had first kissed and been kissed by Sarah Marsden – a girl with velvet skin and hot breath. Where was she now, he wondered, and did she ever think about the moment she had shared with the clumsy, eager, teenage Tom? He could remember the smell of her face, her skin cold from being outside, and the taste of her lips and the touch of her tongue. He could remember opening his eyes while they kissed and seeing that her eyes were closed. He could remember his hand trying to slip between the buttons of her shirt.

  ‘Whoa,’ he muttered. He had to stop remembering those things so vividly.

  A hundred yards farther on they stopped for a red traffic light by a junction where a boy from his class called Bailey – who had long, floppy hair that concealed his face, and who Tom had never liked – had been thrown into the air by a car, flying from bonnet to boot to road and changing from pedestrian to paraplegic as he did so. A cartoon moment with real-life consequences, his hair spreading outwards like a fan as he turned upside down. Tom had never forgotten his shock at how loud it had been. Who would have thought that such small bones and young skin could offer so much resistance?

  Occasionally, at unexpected moments, Tom heard the sound that Bailey’s body had made when the car hit him. It came as a sudden explosion behind his inner ear, a definite bang. Perhaps Borkmann was right. Perhaps a looming driver would have saved Bailey’s agony. But then, Bailey had been a nasty piece of work, a bully, and secretly Tom had been glad.

  ‘Do you think about the past much?’ he shouted at Borkmann. ‘You know, about being young? How you used to be, how you used to think?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Borkmann grinned, exposing his teeth like a rhesus monkey. ‘Of course not. Do I look like I was ever young?’

  ‘You should. It’s good to keep connected with the past, to see the world in the way we did when we were young.’

  It was difficult to talk with all the looming and swerving and the open window and the petrol fumes and the relentless battering of his head against the canvas roof, but Tom persisted.

  ‘We plan too much. We should take each moment as it comes. But a moment is so short. We need longer moments… maybe not longer driving moments, though. Remember summer holidays? They lasted forever. That’s because we only thought about that moment, that endless moment. When we get older we have calendars and diaries and the whole year is plotted out. We don’t think about the “now” at all. You need to connect to your younger self, Gerard. What do you think Tiny Borkmann would think of Big Borkmann?’

  ‘He would want big Tom Hannah to shut up and let him concentrate on driving.’

  Tom’s home was at the far right-hand corner of a cul-de-sac. It was a big townhouse protected from the street by black railings with tips like spears. It was where Tom and his sister, Caroline, had lived as children. It was the Hannah family home.

  The front garden was taken up entirely by a tall cherry tree which, over the years, had risen upwards, lifting the ground with it, its roots exposed above the surface. On the short driveway was a car that had belonged to Tom’s father. Its battery was also dead and the car sagged on its deflating tyres like a mortally wounded animal.

  ‘You ought to put that machine out of its misery,’ Borkmann said, double-parking outside the house.

  ‘That was my dad’s car. It’s a tribute to a fallen hero.’

  ‘It’s a wreck.’

  ‘It’s not moved for five years. What do you expect?’

  They sat in Borkmann’s car, both staring through the windscreen, perhaps both enjoying the sudden cessation of noise. Tom said, ‘I saw him die. You know? Caroline and I were visiting for Sunday lunch. Dad died halfway through the apple and blackberry crumble. He fell forwards so hard he upended the table. It was very scary.’

  Borkmann said nothing. He looked through the windscreen and listened. He had known both Tom and Caroline at the time and had been on hand to help, albeit in his gruff, Borkmannian way.

  ‘Caroline and I were useless. Mum did everything: got him on the floor, cleared his throat of crumble, worked on his chest. He was a big man, bigger than me. He would never have got into this car. The doctor said all that work would have made no difference, as he was probably dead before his face hit his plate.’

  ‘Do you want me to come in?’

  ‘Do you have the time?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Tom laughed. ‘In that case, no.’

  He levered himself from the car and unfolded to his normal size. He seemed to have gained more aches and pains from the short trip in Borkmann’s car than he had by falling 60 feet from a car park roof.

  ‘Do you need anything? Prescriptions? Medicine?’ Borkmann said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What about food? Do you have food?’

  ‘We have food.’

  A car behind hooted loudly before Borkmann could say any more. He turned in his seat to see who had dared interrupt his flow. ‘Who is that bastard? One of your wretched neighbours?’

  ‘Quite possibly.’ Tom nodded and waved at the driver. ‘Better go, Gerard. I’ll catch you soon.’ He watched Borkmann drive away and then walked up the path to his door. He unlocked it and went inside. ‘I’m home,’ he said.

  But nobody else was. There was no note and no evidence of where they might be, so Tom presumed that Karen had gone to the hospital not knowing he’d been discharged and Dan and Holly were either with her or still at school and college respectively. He went to his study and waited, thinking about smoking a cigarette. He thought about smoking a cigarette a lot even though he’d given up 20 years previously. He lived in hope that, before he died, someone would discover that smoking was good for him.

  His study was in the attic. It was a large, open space, an airy eyrie as he liked to call it, uncarpeted with white floorboards and two high, sloping ceilings. A large skylight in each slope framed the passing of the days and nights like the sun and moon windows on a mantel clock. The walls and ceiling were also white. In the centre of the room was a chair, in which Tom now sat, and a workbench with an adjustable sloping easel and a 200-watt desk-lamp that was so bright it flattened everything into two dimensions whenever Tom switched it on. On a separate, adjacent desk was a laptop, mouse and keyboard. Tom looked at it but left it unopened. Time e
nough for that later.

  The entrance to his eyrie was a square opening in the attic’s floor, which was made safe by white, wooden handrails on three sides and a gate on the fourth, like a child’s stair-guard. Below that was a retractable ladder, which led down to the landing on the first floor. Against one wall in the attic were three large filing cabinets that contained Tom’s drawings, sketches, doodles, business documents and the original Scraps cartoons he’d accumulated over the years and kept under lock and key. Pens, ink and paper were stored in a free-standing set of drawers beside the desk.

  Tom sat in his chair until it became dark outside. There was still no sign of Karen, Holly or Dan. He switched off the light and climbed down the ladder. A headache was building and his thumb was hurting and his tooth was throbbing. He went to the bathroom looking for painkillers but ended up staring into the bathroom mirror.

  He stared for a long time because what was looking back was not his face. It was a male fox. He was smoking a cigarette and it was as if they were separated by a wall and looking at each other through a communal window.

  Say hello to Scraps for me.

  Tom forgot about his headache and the painkillers, and his thumb and his tooth. He stood motionless, slack-jawed, vacant, scarcely moving, scarcely breathing. Each time the fox took a drag on his cigarette, the glow lit up his face. He blew smoke at the mirror-window, spat on the ground and paced backwards and forwards, clearly troubled by something. After a minute or two he turned back, peered in and said something that Tom couldn’t hear.

  The fox became agitated. He put both hands to his mouth and shouted as if through a foghorn, the mirror-window steaming up. After a while he gave up and shook his head in disgust. Then he urinated on the ground. He washed his hands with an antibacterial gel and then he leaned right up to the mirror-window and pulled a long hair from his nostril. Tom realised at that point that the fox couldn’t see him, and that whatever he had been shouting, he had been shouting to himself.