The Wrong Story

by James Ellis

  ‘You drank,’ Borkmann said. ‘Afterwards. Much too much.’

  ‘I know it was hard for you to accept,’ Caroline said. ‘I just wanted you to find happiness again. We all did. And of course it wasn’t just you and Karen,’ she said. ‘Mum died that July, about a month after you went home. It was an awful time for you, for us all.’

  Tom closed his eyes. He hadn’t thought about his mother’s death since he’d left hospital. Was that wrong? He studied the carpet and in its contours he saw images of the hearse, of him sitting in a car staring out through the window as the roads and people passed by, standing at a lectern, people watching him, a terrible, terrible feeling of unhappiness throughout.

  ‘Do you not remember any of this?’ said Borkmann. ‘Do you remember burying yourself in this house? You threw away your mobile phone, cut all contact with the outside world, and stopped drawing Scraps. Did you know, you are officially a recluse? The newspapers say it, so it must be true.’

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

  ‘We’ve been keeping the syndication going but, as I told you last month, the stockpile of Scraps cartoons is almost exhausted. Unless you draw more we’ll have to come out of contract with all of our markets. We’re at the crossroads, Tom. The press have been all over it, of course. Even that Kiecke woman, and I always thought she was very straight. Gave me a tough time about your so-called disappearance. I walked out. Wouldn’t discuss it with her. I think she’s stalking us on social media, by the way. Calls herself Harrock or Padlock or something.’

  ‘I don’t remember you mentioning anything about a crossroads.’

  ‘Well, I did. God, if I’d known you were in this state I would never have left you alone. You seemed perfectly fine in the hospital. How could they let you leave?’

  ‘I am perfectly fine.’

  ‘I went home to the Gambia after the funeral,’ said Caroline, as if speaking to herself. ‘What else could I do? But I kept in touch. Gerard kept in touch. We owe Gerard a lot, Tom.’

  ‘It’s all itemised,’ Borkmann said. ‘I’ll send you the bill. And then you came up with another cartoon strip. It was called Happy Family. Want me to tell you about that too? It stank. Reeked to high heaven. Awful. Too cutesy, no punch, no edge. Ghastly. A husband who was obviously you; a wife who was obviously Karen; two kids…’ Borkmann trailed off. ‘Ah.’

  Her face was made-up and her hair was tied back in a businesslike fashion. Beside her was Holly, a heavy 15-year-old, looking beefier than she might with her hands in her pockets and her hips pushed forwards. And Dan, two years younger than Holly and b uilt like his mother: slim and cat-like.

  Tom wanted them to go now.

  Borkmann said, ‘I told you, get it out of your system and then get back to Scraps. And don’t hawk that stuff around under your own name or you will be dead in the market. Sorry Tom, but there it is. Caroline’s right. We need to get you back to hospital –’

  ‘Do you think I jumped?’ Tom blurted it out and for a moment Caroline and Borkmann could do nothing but look at him.

  ‘Tom,’ said Caroline, finding her voice. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why not? According to you I am abandoned, bereaved and drunk.’

  ‘Nobody mentioned jumping, Tom,’ Borkmann said. ‘And anyway, it doesn’t matter what we think. The point is, you’ve had a traumatic accident and you’re still in recovery, and here you are rattling around in this house with just you and Otto. No wonder you’re on edge.’

  Tom looked up. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said, you’ve suffered a trauma. I think that you need –’

  ‘Otto.’

  ‘Yes. Where is he, by the way?’ Borkmann looked around, letting his hand trail over the side of the chair as if he were expecting something to come to it.

  The phrase ‘an icy hand gripping your heart’ is very accurate. An image of his heart as a cold ball of ice isolated from the rest of the meat in which it sat overrode every other thought in Tom’s head. It was a physical sensation, enough to make him gasp. Tom lurched forwards. If earlier his body had tried to turn him inside out, now it sought to move him through space and time away from that moment, to move him away faster than the awful, burgeoning memory could emerge. His head tingled from neck to scalp and part of him wished more than anything that he was dreaming or in a coma, or possibly even dead. Again the planet was spinning too fast and he put out his hands to steady himself. He wanted the ground to give way beneath him and the floor to reveal a bottomless chasm into which he could fall. He wanted a meteorite to strike; a bomb to go off; a collision of planets; anything, anything that would be bigger than the awfulness that was now engulfing him. Because inside his head, a small but significant landslide was taking place. A section of his mind was falling away to reveal a clean and shiny memory, a nugget of gold from the motherlode. He stared with horror at Caroline and Borkmann.

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Caroline. She was scrambling away from his expression. ‘What is it? You’re frightening me.’

  He stood up and swayed on shaky legs.

  He had forgotten he owned a dog.

  ‘Otto.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I forgot all about Otto. The whole time. All this time. I forgot Otto.’

  Tom, you need a companion. Get a dog. You used to have a dog didn ’ t you? It will take your mind off things. Give you reason to get out.

  He ran out of the room with his dressing gown flying behind him. He ran into the kitchen and rattled the outhouse doorknob. ‘It’s locked,’ he said. ‘Karen’s put the key somewhere.’ He called through the woodwork. ‘Otto!’

  Caroline and Borkmann were behind him and she put her arms around him to pull him gently away.

  ‘Are you sure it’s locked,’ said Borkmann. ‘When I’ve been here in the past it’s just been stiff. You need to lift the handle up and give it a good thump with your shoulder.’

  ‘Do it. Break it down. Smash it to pieces.’

  Tom was beyond action. He was back in mission control, an observer of unfolding events, back in the vast metropolis in which teeming thoughts and sensations buzzed endlessly backwards and forwards, attending to their own business, independent of him. All sights and sounds, tastes, touches and smells were now welcome at his borders. He would receive them all – unvetted, unchecked, real or bogus. He would be the fixed point in a moving universe; he would succumb to the cosmic merry-go-round. He would do his penance; be good; do anything.

  ‘Just open the door.’

  Borkmann put both hands around the outhouse’s doorknob and with a grunt gave it a heave and a push – and the door swung inwards, scraping against the floor. Piles of papers and miscellaneous bric-a-brac that should have been thrown away years ago were stacked up on the floor. The smell was musty, stale and biscuity. Beside the door was a dog bowl and a water bowl; a dog basket and blanket; bags of dog food and old, half-chewed soft toys; and a ball and a couple of old, chewed leads. All the paraphernalia of a dog without the dog itself. Tom looked at Borkmann and Caroline.

  ‘Gone,’ he said.

  21

  I climbed out through the window and stood on the grass. It was a beautiful night: a clear sky, moonlight, stars, a cool breeze, the scent of gardens going to sleep, flowers hauling in their petals and, perhaps, night creatures coming out to play. At least that was how I suppose it was meant to look. But the only night creature coming out to play in that garden was me, and I was a six-foot fox smoking a cigarette. And now that I was becoming accustomed to questioning everything around me, those stars didn’t look too convincing, either. They were up there but I wasn’t sure they formed any known constellations. As for flowers hauling in their petals, well perhaps, but I would have bet that they would turn out to be strange and enormous multi-coloured plants. Like drawings on a sketchpad.

  Have you ever had that moment when you believed something to be true for your whole life and then it turns out to be wrong? I don’t mea
n when you’ve been deceived or lied to. I mean when you’ve worked something out for yourself but the whole premise was wrong. Like a song lyric. For years I thought the words ‘find me someone to love bite’ made up the closing line to a song that really ended ‘finally someone I can love right’. Even though I liked my words better, the actual lyrics made a lot more sense and the world fitted together a bit better. That’s a minor example. Here’s another: when I was young I always thought that dogs were male and cats were female. It didn’t make sense but it sort of worked for me. When I found out the truth I couldn’t believe how wrong I’d been and I marvelled that I’d actually thought that. My world changed. The cogs fitted the grooves.

  That’s how I was feeling when I walked into the garden. I had a strong intuition that my premise was all wrong. I didn’t know what that meant but I had the feeling that the cogs were realigning. I suppose all along I had been wondering about things – big and elusive things. But when you’re stuck in a box it’s hard to tell what’s outside. It’s hard to believe that there is an outside.

  I walked round to the front of the house and, as I had thought she would be, Bullet was back. The echoes of her barking were still bouncing around the houses. She was standing in the middle of the road, her legs wide apart, her head down, snarling and barking and dribbling, her eyes burning like coals in her superheated head. She was a caricature of a dog: her teeth were tusks pushing out from her cavernous mouth; her head was as big as a beach ball but her body was a tiny bundle of muscle and energy – a bantam body driving a bulldozer of a skull. She looked like a ferocious dog should look. I wasn’t surprised at that either. Isn’t it funny how everything is always as it should be?

  On my side of the road, ranged against her were Plenty, Billy and the always-angry restaurant owner, their backs to the garden wall, spread out so as not to create a single target. Bullet’s head moved from side to side as she regarded them and she made me think of those car ornaments I’d seen, a nodding dog in a rear window.

  I remember I was driving home one night and the car in front was going slowly and kept braking, and I thought they had a dog on the back seat, and I don ’ t know why but I started waving, and I poked my tongue out and waggled my fingers and did everything I could to make it do something.

  I waggled my fingers at Bullet and she turned her massive, angry face towards me. The road was lit like a play: street-lamps cut through the gloom, creating bright oases of light, a mist drifted through the air, and the calmness of the back garden had given way to a more dramatic atmosphere now that battle seemed inevitable. Huge shadows fell across the pavements and gardens as if a crowd of giants had gathered to watch from the sidelines.

  I looked up and saw the Pelican, hovering above like a vast, unstable dirigible, drifting occasionally into the reach of the street-lamps’ glow and showering the road with lice and fleas and feathers and bits of horrible goo, its legs dangling beneath it, its mighty beak pointing downwards, its wings so outstretched that they seemed to reach from rooftop to rooftop, although that couldn’t be possible.

  I looked at my friends: peaceful creatures forced into this unnatural situation by a turn of events that had little to do with them and everything, or so I was beginning to believe, to do with the dog and this place – and me.

  Billy, the least aggressive of us all, had slicked back his depleted stock of quills and taken two which he now held loosely, one in each hand, like two short, stubby stiletto daggers. The always-angry restaurant owner had produced her heavy rolling pin from her apron pocket, its ability to stun something I could vouch for, and between the two stood Plenty, perfectly balanced, leaning forwards slightly, utterly still, unblinking, her eyes fixed on the dog, possibly the only one of us anticipating the fight with any kind of pleasure. And I joined them, a threadbare bag of bones, meat and gristle; a scabby, skinny, scrawny eco-friendly urban fox with coked-up lungs and dreams of a quiet life.

  There is no joy to be had in describing a fight, nor in fighting. There is nothing noble or worthy or good. It demeans us all. But fight we did, for a short time, and when it was over I was the only one who was injured, and Bullet was no longer our enemy, although she was a long way from being our friend.

  It went like this. Bullet attacked first because that was the way of dogs. Bereft of a pack and left to fight alone, they have no strategic outlook, no patience. Chase it away or shake it to death is their natural approach. And as I thought she might, Bullet pawed the ground and bellowed like a bull before she charged, running straight at Plenty with steam blasting from her nose.

  From a participant’s perspective, it’s difficult to take in all that happens around you. Things move fast. Sounds are mostly your own: ragged breathing and blood pounding in your ears. The cries of others are secondary, spurs to adrenalin rather than meaningful communication – no one expects to join a discussion group during a fight. It is enough to make sounds, to expel air, to turn fear and aggression into cries that drive you forwards.

  And so began the strange, hesitant dance of lunge and withdraw, lunge and withdraw, until the awful moment of engagement when you grapple with your opponent and feel their strength, feel their desperation to do to you what you want to do to them, and it becomes a matter of determination, a desire to survive and the strength and composure to do so, and luck. Luck more than anything. Luck and strength and determination. And speed. And teeth. Especially teeth. And claws. Luck and strength and speed and determination and teeth and claws. And rolling pins.

  Plenty was lucky. She waited until the last moment before jumping to one side, turning as she did and raking her claws across Bullet’s ear, shredding it and sending a fine line of blood droplets into the air. Billy jabbed with his quills and the always-angry restaurant owner swung with her rolling pin. I ran forwards with no plan other than to cling on until one of us died. I was utterly useless in these situations.

  Bullet turned on me and, lacking Plenty’s agility to avoid contact, Bullet sank her teeth into my thigh. The pavement rose up and hit me and then I was dragged down and under, with Bullet’s massive presence on top of me; her smell, her sweat, her short-cropped fur devouring me.

  The others tried to pull her away while the always-angry restaurant owner’s arm rose and fell as she beat Bullet’s body with her rolling pin – short grunts escaping her mouth as she bent to her work. Bullet released me and turned on her, trying to bite through her blows, but as she did so, something vast and awful fell from the sky: a huge, oily blanket riddled with stench and sickness landed on us, and an unyielding beak struck Bullet on the side.

  The Pelican had entered the fray.

  Bullet was being overwhelmed, but somehow with a wriggle and a roll she broke free, running back across the road and turning to face us, snorting heavily, a dull expression of pain in her eyes. The Pelican flapped its wings and with great effort rose shakily into the air. Bullet watched its rising with little expression. What were her thoughts, I wondered? Did she hate us? Did she wish she was far away in front of a fire, or on a blanket in her basket? I know I did.

  I tried to stand up but when I did my left leg gave way. I was bleeding and I could smell the redness of it. I knew that Bullet would too and she would be drawn to me, drawn to my blood and my weariness and my weakness, and my general air of foxiness. I limped to a low garden wall and sat down.

  The others regrouped, spreading out in a semi-circle, ready for the next instalment. Bullet faced us and we faced her. I caught a glimpse of Plenty circling around until she was beside me, her claws extended, while the always-angry restaurant owner stood close by, her rolling pin held behind her head like a baseball bat. Billy had lost both of his stilettos and was kneeling down in front of me, ready to ball up.

  And then the Pelican dropped out of the air again and landed in a clump of feathers and scum in the middle of the road, unable to maintain a flightless hover any longer, and we all instinctively shielded our faces in case we were covered in anything glutinous. The unexpecte
d expansion and contraction of feathers released an odour that rose into the night air like a malign living organism. It spread out and then descended on Bullet.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ she said, and hurried across to our side of the road. ‘There are rules, you know.’

  I tensed, ready for any new onslaught, but the madness had left Bullet’s eyes and the violence was gone from her body and I sensed, and I hoped, that the fight was over. I held out a spindly cigarette from my tin, the last of the batch I had rolled earlier.

  ‘Smoke?’

  Bullet looked at it, looked at me, looked at the others and then took it. She remained on the pavement, still breathing hard, watching us while the others joined me on the wall, the Pelican trailing a noxious smear in its wake. I looked at my wound. A flap of skin and fur hung down from the side of my thigh. I peeled it back. It was deep and dirty. I spat on my hand and rubbed saliva into the gash, wincing when it stung, and then pulled the skin back up and held it in position while I lit the cigarette for Bullet.

  ‘Poor Scraps,’ Plenty said. ‘Always fighting with dogs.’

  The always-angry restaurant owner took off her apron and wrapped it around my leg. It was starting to throb.

  ‘I’m sorry about your leg,’ Bullet said.

  I nodded. ‘That’s all right.’

  There was a general shuffling of feet.

  ‘You’re Bullet, aren’t you?’ said Plenty.

  Bullet contemplated the road for a moment or two. ‘Yes.’ Her voice was hoarse, presumably from all the barking and howling and baying she’d been doing recently. ‘Surprised to see me?’

  ‘You’ve been away a long time,’ I said.

  ‘Away. That’s a nice way of putting it.’ She looked at the always-angry restaurant owner. ‘Remember me? You abandoned me. Left me on my own. Out there.’

  ‘That’s not true. You slipped your lead. You ran away.’

  ‘You know it wasn’t like that. You let it happen. You all did. You wanted me gone. I wasn’t part of the gang. So you all let me go and were glad, and never thought about me again, or looked for me, or cared at all.’