The Wrong Story

by James Ellis

  ‘But you can’t just go from being not all right to all right. You thought that there were people living here. You talked to them.’

  ‘But now I’ve got you to keep me company. And everyone talks to themselves.’

  ‘Not everyone.’

  ‘Most people. Let’s not look for things to worry about. Let those things find us.’ He extracted his hand. ‘We should get some sleep. Talk about everything in the morning.’

  ‘Okay. I wish I knew what you were doing on the car park.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I’m glad Gerard said what he did about you not jumping. That was nice of him.’

  ‘I know. Let’s talk some more in the morning.’

  ‘It’s just because I care, you know that. All this nagging.’

  ‘That’s what big sisters do.’

  She looked at him and squeezed his hand again. ‘I am your big sister, no matter how big you are.’

  Tom hugged her but even as he did so he wondered if she was really there.

  23

  Caroline slept in the spare room, the room that until recently Karen had been using. Tom lay awake in his own bed across the landing, the moonlight from outside casting shadowy stripes across the wall opposite his window. He thought about the little boy he had once been and the trajectory that had led from then to now. ‘Hello me,’ he said, and his voice in the dark sounded small and pitiful.

  His thoughts roamed across the open landscape in his mind and he saw, for a moment, a scene, a flashback to a time at school, a heavy, beefy girl with matches, taunting him, her unpleasant brother flying through the air. Tom winced and closed his eyes and buried that scene in the swirling mass of half-forgotten images..

  He thought instead about Holly and Dan and tried to remember if he had ever met Karen’s sister, Sylvia. Surely he had. He imagined them all standing in the shadows somewhere, staring at him, waiting for him to wake up and return them to his life, to bring them home from the darkness of his broken memory. Had he now abandoned them, too? Is that what he did? Was it out of sight, out of mind with him? Or was he now locked in a psychotic prison, unable to see the very people who loved him most, trapped inside his head and blind to the real world? He wondered if, in the morning, when he knocked on the door of the spare room, Caroline would be there or if the room would be empty, the bed unslept in, the cupboards bare, the curtains wide open. Or would he find Karen waking up, looking at him from behind the bars of her lacquered eyelashes, laughing and reaching out to him? Or Maggie, Maggie turning sleepily in the bed, the covers clinging to the curling, curving shape of her body?

  Sleep seemed unlikely now. He got out of bed.

  You came up with another cartoon strip. It was called Happy Family. It stank. A husband who was obviously you; a wife who was obviously Karen; two kids…

  Tom climbed the ladder to his study. It was cold on the floorboards and he hoped his footsteps wouldn’t wake Caroline. He went to his filing cabinet and searched through his archived drawings.

  He found the Happy Family cartoons in a section of their own at the back of the bottom drawer. Two folders, perhaps a dozen or more completed cartoons, a few practice sketches. And they were all there, beaming out at him: Karen, Holly, Dan and himself – and Lawrence: Lawrence the bad guy dressed in black, his face even more weaselly than Tom remembered.

  Tom studied the cartoons. Borkmann was right: they stank. He thought if he drew it again, he might put Maggie in as his wife, and maybe have Karen and Lawrence working for the always-angry restaurant owner. That would be fun. He could retire Scraps, give him time to smoke his cigarettes and ponder life; and meet up with the old gang from time to time. Billy could open a quill salon and the Pelican could be hired as a weathervane. People would have to learn not to walk directly beneath the perch. And what about Plenty – send her back to Nanny’s? That would never last. Or maybe it was time for new characters and a new type of cartoon. Happy Family II or something, with a harder edge.

  He put the drawings down.

  Enough.

  Enough thinking. He put his face in his hands and tried to shut out the light. What would he give simply to be, to be free of thoughts and images; to have a clean slate on which to start again, to travel lightly through life and to leave no footprints. Clean, pure, uncluttered.

  He sat up, shivering, and leafed through his drawings, and as he did so he became aware of sounds: low-level murmurings beyond the whispering hiss inside his ears. He thought it might be Caroline stirring but he listened harder, staring into the unlit corners of the attic, and realised it was coming from deeper in the house, from the kitchen. An image of Otto returning made him stand up and make his way quickly and quietly down the ladder, down the stairs and along the hallway. Surely it couldn’t be, he thought, not after all that time, not on the very day he had remembered him, as if in the act of remembering he had somehow made real Otto’s presence.

  He switched on the kitchen light and went straight to the back door and opened it. He looked out into the night. There was nothing there, and no barking either. For once he wished he might hear the plaintive sound that had followed him since hospital. He closed the door and felt a weight of disappointment, as if Otto was a ghoul lying across his shoulders.

  He found a bottle of gin and poured himself a large glass. He added some tonic and drank deeply, topped it up with more gin and sat down at the kitchen table. The lights were heavy on his eyelids and he felt sleepy, no up-lit halogen lights this time, only the stark ceiling lights flattening everything into two dimensions. He rubbed his face with both hands and imagined himself as a rough sketch of a sleepy man with a large, drooping moustache sitting in a kitchen late at night.

  And then he heard voices. Tom looked at the door to the outhouse. There was no doubt about it: a subdued conversation was taking place on the other side of the door. He stood up, crossed the kitchen, put his ear to the door and listened. And then, remembering Borkmann’s technique, he lifted the handle and heaved. The door scraped open and he looked in.

  And he saw us.

  We had been debating whether one or all of us should go and find the hairy man when the hairy man found us. We stopped talking and stared. There was absolute silence. None of us moved. The man hung on the door and pushed his massive hand through his hair. He was an enormous figure. A goliath with a huge moustache and wildly curling hair, standing in his pyjamas and fluffy blue dressing gown and gazing down at us with baggy, bleary, cold-lidded eyes. He stared at us for a long time and then looked over his shoulder, looked back at us again, and then stared some more.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ hissed Plenty.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Billy said.

  ‘He’s being surprised,’ said the always-angry restaurant owner.

  Without taking his eyes off us, the man’s hand fumbled along the wall until he found the light switch. When he found it and switched it on, the room became instantly smaller, the long shadows shrinking into dusty nooks and crannies, corners and edges. There was no light shade, only a bulb hanging from the ceiling, and we blinked, unaccustomed to such stark brightness.

  With small, uncertain, unsteady steps, he walked into the room and closed the door behind him. He smelled of hair and skin and soap and alcohol. We made way for him and, taking a deep breath, he moved a pile of newspapers onto the floor and sat down on an old chair. He had brought a glass and a bottle of alcohol with him, which he put on the floor. He leaned back and sighed, put his feet up on the pile of newspapers and held up his glass to us as if in a toast.

  ‘Last time I saw you, you scared the shit out of me. You still do. Proof that I am insane,’ he said, laughing, and drank it all. He closed and opened his eyes twice, turning his head quickly in an exaggerated double take, and then laughed again. ‘You’re not quite as I imagined you.’ And then, ‘Actually, no, scratch that. You’re exactly how I imagined you.’ He rubbed his face and stared at his glass. ‘Dear God.’ He closed his eyes again.

  Was I
being fanciful or did his voice sound like my thoughts? I probably was. Anyway, now that we had found him, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say or do. So I said, ‘You don’t seem surprised to see us.’ But he didn’t say anything.

  The always-angry restaurant owner was more bullish. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Wake up. We’ve been looking for you.’

  He looked up and around, as if searching for the voice.

  ‘Are you Tash?’ said Plenty.

  Again he searched the room until his eyes settled on her. He looked at her long and hard and then sat back and stroked his moustache. It made a rasping noise that reminded me of the sound my fur made when I scratched it. He poured some more gin into his glass and looked towards her again, but not exactly at her.

  ‘Call me Tom,’ he said. ‘I insist.’

  ‘Do you have any food?’ she said.

  Tom didn’t answer. Plenty wandered off and I watched her roam amongst the old boxes and the stacks of newspapers. I took out my tin of tobacco, rolled some cigarettes and handed them around. I lit up and blew out a long stream of blue-grey smoke. And then Plenty, having searched the outhouse for mice and rats, leaned on Tom’s shoulder and said, ‘Why have you been drawing us?’

  I felt a pull, some kind of instinctive warning that I couldn’t place, like opening a door and finding yourself standing on the roof of a very tall building. Tom turned in his chair and looked up at Plenty in an intense way and then said, ‘This can’t be good for me, can it? I must be burning out all my synaptics. Perhaps I am having a stroke.’ He touched his face. ‘How would I know?’ I didn’t know what he was having but he didn’t look healthy. He looked around as if searching for something.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I said.

  A wide expanse of shimmering white concrete.

  I was about to say that we had been looking for him. I had wanted to ask him if he knew why things were changing. I had wanted to ask him if he knew why we weren’t having any adventures anymore, if he knew why we were falling apart and looked like shit, like those people outside. Instead, I said, ‘My leg’s bleeding. Mind if I sit down?’

  He didn’t say anything so I sat down on a stack of newspapers. I said, ‘Are you still drawing us?’ But, of course, he wasn’t. I knew that as soon as I said it, although I didn’t know what that meant and nor, I suspected, did the shambling mess in front of me. So I said, ‘When was the last time you drew us?’ But that was pointless too. And then I wondered, what did it matter? Why was I bothering? I felt a reckless sense of self-awareness, of independence, of freedom. I had hoped to find answers, to find a connection, but now I felt that we didn’t need him or his answers or anything else he had to say. Why had I ever thought we did? To hell with aligning cogs. I looked at my arms and at my chest as I had done in the restaurant and I felt the life flowing through them. More than that, it was my life that I felt flowing through them. I put my hand against my bitten leg. That was a real wound and I was losing real blood.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘We’re done here. I need to find a vet.’

  ‘But what about food?’ said Billy. ‘I’m pretty hungry, too.’

  ‘We’ll find our own food from now on.’

  ‘I thought we always did?’

  ‘Exactly. We always did. That’s my point.’

  ‘Are you all right, Scraps?’

  An unpleasant gagging sound cut through our conversation. It sounded like a washing machine that had broken mid-cycle. It was the Pelican clearing its throat. ‘Ahem.’ It crossed its eyes a few times and released a yellow cloud of noxious gas into the room.

  ‘Here we go again,’ said the always-angry restaurant owner.

  ‘The people from the garden are at the window,’ the Pelican said. ‘Shall I let them in? Or perhaps not?’

  Billy skipped several steps sideways.

  It was true. There were four gloomy faces peering in. Tom looked at them and then got up and walked to the window. There was an old rattan blind rolled up at the top. He jerked the string and it unrolled in a sudden drop, covering the glass.

  ‘Later,’ he said.

  He sat back on his chair and said, ‘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 my face, blood in my mouth. Does any of that mean anything to any of you?’

  We looked at each other. Plenty shrugged, Billy stared, the Pelican crossed its eyes and the always-angry restaurant owner frowned. Bullet, who was skulking in the shadows, simply growled.

  ‘Not really,’ the always-angry restaurant owner said.

  Tom closed his eyes. ‘Shame.’ His voice became a mumble, a slur, as his chin fell onto his chest, a barely intelligible stream of sound. ‘I thought, you know, given that you’re on the inside… I thought you might shake it up, if I imagined you trying to find…’ He trailed off.

  Where do ideas and notions come from? Those sudden thoughts and illuminations; the answers to riddles – and the riddles themselves. Do they find their own way through some mental undergrowth; developing, learning, maturing until they suddenly pop up and say hello? Or are there signposts? Does one part of our brain give them a helping hand while the other part isn’t looking? Do they simply materialise, dressed, fully formed, and ready to go? Like giving birth to an adult.

  Or does someone put them there?

  ‘It wasn’t shimmering white concrete at all,’ I said. ‘It was ordinary grey concrete. It was the warm air rising from a patch of dried oil that made it shimmer, and the sun made it look lighter than it really was. Is that the memory you’re looking for?’

  Tom lifted his head and moved it from side to side as if he were searching for the source of a smell. He drank some more gin and laid back in his chair.

  ‘You should take it easy on the sauce,’ said the always-angry restaurant owner.

  ‘The always-angry restaurant owner,’ he said quietly, and smiled. ‘Always so angry.’

  I looked at her and she looked at me. And then she said, ‘I really do not like being called the always-angry restaurant owner all the time. It takes forever to say and I’m not always angry.’

  ‘But that is your name,’ said Plenty.

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s a description, a label, a tag or something. It is not a name. Plenty is a name. Scraps is a name. Billy is a name. Even the Pelican is sort of specific. The always-angry restaurant owner is not a name.’

  ‘Well, what is your name?’ said Billy.

  ‘It’s… it’s—’

  ‘Barbara,’ Tom muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Barbara.’

  Nobody said anything for a moment, but we all kept an eye on her rolling pin.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, suddenly and defiantly, looking at each of us in turn. ‘That is right. That is what my name is. Barbara.’

  ‘Barbara?’

  ‘Barbara. And I am not always angry.’

  ‘But you are a restaurant owner,’ Plenty said. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I am not always angry,’ she shouted.

  I thought about the lost people in the garden, trying to see through the blinds and about us, standing before this tired man who was slumped in his chair, and I had a momentary image of moons revolving around a planet in erratic orbits. I looked at the others – Billy, Plenty, the Pelican – and I thought, were we all formed from the same dust cloud? Satellites made from the same matter as a host planet? The always-angry restaurant owner hadn’t known her name, but Tom had.

  Oh dear. That really is too much thinking even for you. A little less brain, a little more body – that ’ s what I always say.

  I gave up. I said, ‘Great. Barbara it is. We’re all sorted. Let’s go.’

  There was movement in the shadows and a hoarse voice said, ‘Ahem. I hate to break up the love-fest but anyone remember the comedy dog?’ Bullet lumbered forwards. ‘You know, the big ugly bitch that nobody wants as a pet? I’m not going anywhere.’

  With
a colossal effort, Tom poured another tumbler of gin. It was touch and go and required all his concentration not to miss the glass. When he’d filled it to the brim and taken a large sip he looked up and said, ‘I had another dog once. I let it down. I let it down and now it’s gone. A lovely yellow Labrador called Otto. All gone.’

  ‘There was another dog,’ Billy said. ‘A big, ugly, yellow thing, all meat and muscle. We saw it chasing a ball. That’s what kicked off this whole thing.’

  The room seemed much smaller now.

  ‘We saw it,’ Plenty said. ‘On an expanse of shimmering white—’

  ‘It wasn’t white,’ I said. ‘It was the sun making it white.’

  ‘It chased Scraps onto the roof.’

  Tom tilted his head back and sighed. ‘Oh, that’s right,’ he said to himself, his voice scarcely a whisper. ‘Chased a fox. And I followed.’

  Oh, clever Tom. We were like pinpricks of light that must not fade. The dots would join, the connections would be made. If we were thoughts inside his head, then he wanted ours. And I didn’t know how he would take them or what would happen to us once he had, but take them he would. He would extract his lost memory like teeth from a gum. We were his mechanism of remembrance and always had been. He had used us to find his way in and to light the darkness. Tom drank his gin and closed his eyes. He heard sounds and smelled smells and felt the seat beneath him. He breathed and the breath from his nose flowed over his moustache. And then somewhere inside his head, images began to form.

  24

  Tom opened his eyes. He was in the First Frame. There was no darkness at all. Instead there was white, and what wasn’t white looked clean and clear and precise. He looked around and saw that he was leaving his house with Otto. It must have been the Sunday morning, the Sunday morning, because he had liquorice sweets in his pocket. Otto always remained close to him if he could smell liquorice sweets.

  They walked along the streets, cut through the empty underpass and paused by the mismatched couple sitting on the floor, so that Tom could give them some change.