Stories We Tell Ourselves

by Sarah Françoise

  By February, they figured out that he would eat most of their food waste, which suited them all. He did have to whine for several nights to lose the crate, though, which was humiliating.

  He came to them via a breeder who lived in the mountains behind La Clusaz. He was a mountain dog for one whole year before Joan brought him home in the back seat of her car one evening. She was giggling like a child all the way home. She kept looking at him in the rear-view mirror and saying, ‘Oh my God what have I done.’

  It was painful to remember how, in the early days, they had him wearing a dog seatbelt.

  The first one Simon met was Wim, the youngest. Wim lived in London. He came home from university every couple of months for the holidays or for reading week, or when he’d run out of money. When he was home, Simon’s walks tripled in length and frequency. With him, he didn’t have to submit to so many arbitrary restrictions either. Wim didn’t seem to care when Simon jumped into the lake to swim in the reeds, and he let him chase the horse behind the supermarket. Simon had never understood why the other two took umbrage at either of those things.

  He’d never met the middle one, the one with the children, although much had been said about him meeting the children. He was not to jump/he won’t jump. He was not to bark/he never barks. And he was not to go bounding up the stairs if a little one was going up or down/he obeys commands very well.

  Lois called in March to say she’d be home for their birthdays later that month. Joan and Frank were born one day apart. This year they had a party for Joan’s birthday, but skipped Frank’s. Joan said after the phone call that she was worried that something was up between Lois and Nick. Frank said that it was hardly unusual for Lois to make a last-minute plan to visit. Joan said, ‘Maybe, but it’s the first time I’ve thought the opposite of she’s-too-good-for-him.’

  ‘What’s that, then? That he’s too good for her?’ Frank said.

  ‘No, that they’re perfect for each other.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s the opposite,’ said Frank.

  Joan was convinced that Simon was good for Frank. He could be good for them, but only if they decided as much. The goodness was quite out of his hands. ‘What if Lois decides I am good for her?’ thought Simon. ‘What then?’

  He’d never met Nick.

  He could tell Joan was concerned, but she was also excited that Lois was coming home, because this was the daughter who looked like her. Simon had noticed that there was often something ineluctable between a woman and the daughter who looked like her. It was the same with bitches.

  They had him groomed for the occasion, and paid extra to have his teeth cleaned. Joan vacuumed his coat with the pet nozzle, and rotated the covers on his dog bed. The only other time they had him groomed was after he bred. Not before, mind – after.

  On the day Joan went to pick up Lois from the airport, Frank and Simon walked down to the cheese co-operative. They took the shortcut across the field, Simon ruining his blow dry in the tall grass. Frank, whose heart sometimes went racy on these walks, spent a fortune on his daughter’s three favourite cheeses: Beaufort, Tomme de Savoie and Saint-Félicien. When they got home, he tasted each one of them and gave the rinds to Simon. Then he sat down in front of the news. Simon thought about what he should do when she arrived, how to make the best first impression.

  Whenever he thought he heard the car he got up, and Frank said, ‘Down.’

  They said ‘Down, Simon,’ in a way that betrayed their eagerness for an overabundance of energy. When they said ‘Down’ what they meant was, ‘Why aren’t you bounding more, you mountain dog? Show off that fabled agility of yours, won’t you? Disprove the long-held belief that pedigree dogs have terrible joints, because some of the people we respect the most will judge us for not getting a mongrel.’ And so he performed. Usually, he’d prance about a couple of times and look interested. He let them say, ‘Down, Simon,’ so that they could show off how well he listened and obeyed. That was one of the ways in which they made each other happy.

  Simon heard the car pull into the garage. He got up and followed Frank out of the TV room. Frank said ‘Sit’ and went down to fetch his daughter’s bags.

  It was the smell that got to Simon first. He could smell her from the kitchen. She smelled like salt on a rock after the ocean has licked it, like the burnt bits at the bottom of a frying pan, like an older woman’s cologne with butter, like wet human hair after the rain, and old leather boots ankle-deep in berries. Any berries.

  As she came up the stairs, he could tell from her footsteps that this one wouldn’t objectify him – that if they ever stepped out together, it might well be him walking her. He could hear her talking to Frank, and her voice was unmelodic but thrilling, and tired, and agitated, and warm but difficult at the same time.

  He walked from the kitchen into the hallway and stood under the light, on the black marble compass rose that Frank had lugged back from Carrara like an expensive joke at Joan’s expense. (‘So what if the bathroom window is a sheet of plastic, I gave you the floor of a palacio!’)

  The brass door handle went down with that awful grinding click it was prone to when it was damp outside, and as she came through the door, which swung shut behind her in the wind, she looked at him and said: ‘What the fuck are you staring at?’

  *

  They had always loved a challenge, and liked to think of themselves as a family that existed outside the time allotted. Waking the three kids at 3 a.m. to climb a mountain with sleeping bags to meet the sunrise, heaping three tired children into the back of the car at 11 p.m. to be rained on by some exceptional shooting stars, chasing sunsets like zombies after a long day of swimming in the ocean – these were the kinds of things they did to themselves as a family.

  They did these things in a scrappy way, in a spirit of over-compensation. Joan packed picnics that became charted in the collective memory and were given epic, delicious names. That-time-mum-made-apple-and-apricot-turnovers-at-2 a.m. The-one-where-we-had-champagne-and-that-salmon-tart-in-the-shape-of-a-sun-in-the-middle-of-the-night.

  Frank’s job was to get the kids to the bathroom and into the car. Once upon a time, Joan relied on him to help get them dressed in the morning, but that stopped after he sent Maya to school one day with a hanger still in her sweater. In those years, Joan and Frank bickered about everything that was easy. Money, which they had enough of. Holidays, which they had plenty of. Each other, which they most definitely had. But during these feats of familial rallying they held hands on the gear shift, made out in sleeping bags under meteorites, smiled when the other spilled coffee in the sand or forgot to bring cups for the cider. And the children complained, and Maya cried, and Lois asked why they couldn’t be like normal parents, who let their children sleep at night, and Wim was living proof that you shouldn’t disturb a sleeping baby, and still Joan studied the tide timetables, and read any report that had something vaguely astronomical about it, and Frank loved that she did.

  One night Frank promised his family the whole of the Milky Way. Joan, who had been more or less ignoring him for three days over the latest late tax payment missive, snapped out of her resentment. By the time all five of them were in the car she was curling his coarse black hair behind his ear, and telling the kids a story from before they had them. Frank leaned his head into her hand, like a dog leans into his master.

  When they were halfway up the mountain Lois asked her dad to stop the car and vomited in the woods, which were dark and terrifying. It felt like vomiting over the edge of the world, she said, when she got back into the car. Frank asked her to expand on this thought, which only made her want to vomit again.

  They arrived at the Col de la Forclaz just after eleven. Joan and the children stayed in the car listening to the Milly Molly Mandy storybook cassette tape while Frank set up their family camp: a tarp and all the duvets that had been ripped off the beds and stuffed in the boot. By the time he was done the kids had fallen asleep again, and had to be carried one by one up the
hill. Frank and Joan buried their brood deep into the nest of quilts and pillows, to where their warmth could bounce off the covers and off each other and keep them cosy.

  A hundred yards to the left of them was the wooden jump that hang gliders used to launch off over the lake. Higher up in the pasture was the square brown chalet that opened as a snack bar in the summer. Below them was the mini-golf and the shed that sold postcards and souvenirs. The landscape was familiar, even in the dark.

  They were warm together under the Galactic Centre. The girls whittled off the names of stars and constellations they remembered, and made up new ones. Joan flexed her fingers through Frank’s, and squeezed them tight with every baptism. The sky was like a second lake. In the valley below, the real lake beckoned like a firmament with no end. Frank explained again what a black hole was. They all rolled their eyes, and even though it was pitch-black Frank said, ‘I can sense all my women rolling their eyes at me. Do you all think I’m a boring old man?’ And his women giggled and said, ‘No,’ and piled onto him, and crushed him down into the blankets, in the grass, probably in some cow shit, because they’d stared at the stars long enough now, and it was time to fall asleep like other families, those whose parents didn’t rouse them in the middle of the night to chase a phenomenal sky.

  Being in the dark on a mountain with his family silent, Frank felt the elements of his happiness come together. He forgot to think about foremen and plasterers, and unsolved problems of an etymological nature. On nights like these his ambitions for the family did not cause stress to Joan. On nights like these they respected him as much for his intellectual fibre as they did for his paternal abilities. And all this in the shadow of the mountains he’d scaled and been tamed by as a young man.

  In the morning, when the girls woke up, Wim was in his mother’s lap, a big quilted cocoon with only his amazed little eyes peeping out and that balky hair whorl slap bang on his forehead. ‘We were looking in the wrong place, girls,’ said Joan. ‘That’s the centre of the universe right there, on your brother’s head.’

  Frank lit the small gas stove and prepared an astronomical quantity of hot chocolate, which he traditionally made from a whole bar of chocolate. They dipped buttered bread in it, and watched the last of the night’s shadow slink across the lake and vanish into a crack on a rock face. They were all alone on top of the mountain, soldered together by experience. They had just created one more discreet memory – to add to the eleven sunsets, two Perseids and four sunrises they’d already watched, clan-like – and in so doing had touched the future.

  On the drive back down to the house the kids yelped in every hairpin bend, and already, the challenge accomplished, the mood was on its way back to normal. Like the part where you undecorate the Christmas tree. Now it was the adults who were tired. The two producers in the front seat had done their job. There was no hand-touching on the gear shift. The car was no longer a magical vessel. In fact, when it had refused to start in the fuzzy-damp dawn, there had been a brief argument.

  They were approaching the line where the mountain officially becomes the valley when Frank slammed his foot down on the brakes. ‘Did you see it?’ he yelled. The kids looked out of the back window, hoping for a deer, or a bunny, or something out of a fairy tale. Joan looked anxious. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Hang on, I’m going to get it.’ And with that, Frank jumped out of the car and ran back up the road like a madman.

  The kids watched in the rear-view mirror as their father jumped over the ditch and climbed up the ridge to the treeline. They watched him scratch at the ground, like a dog looking for a bone. ‘What the hell is Your Father doing?’ asked Joan. Lois knew to interpret the difference between your father and Your Father.

  ‘I think he found a mushroom,’ said Lois. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ said Joan. Presently, Frank came walking back to the car with a long green stalk that was budding flowers the colour of buttercups. The clump of soil around its roots rained dirt over the car seats. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Even more beautiful than my children.’ Lois giggled. Maya decided her father was joking, and joined in. Wim reached out for the alien plant with his fat little baby hands. Joan asked if he could pleasenotgetdirteverywhereinthecar, and didn’t talk much for the rest of the drive.

  When they got home, Frank and Lois looked up the plant in Frank’s mountain flora encyclopaedia. It was a weed. A majestic weed called a Verbascum. Its leaves were soft like Lambs’ Ears, and the flowers shone like buds of yellow crêpe paper. Frank planted the Verbascum in the back garden of the rental house, two feet away from the salmon-pink bone-shaped paving stones. They had just moved into their temporary home in the suburbs. The one they agreed not to unpack for.

  By the time Frank’s new house was ready to move into, three years later, the adored Verbascum had spawned a mighty weed army that tore up a quarter of the terrace and staged a hostile invasion of the neighbour’s garden.

  *

  You’re too good to be true.

  Maya was walking through the departure lounge with Gitsy at her side and Finn strapped to her chest, looking for a toilet. Gitsy ran off ahead, but before Maya had time to yell at her to stop, she got sidetracked by a display of sweets.

  ‘Can I get a lollipop?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You just had breakfast. You don’t need a lollipop.’

  ‘I do need it, for my ears. They’re going to pop otherwise.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s why they’re called that.’

  When I saw your neck in that last photo, I got all achy and thought of the word succulent. When are you coming back again?

  ‘Do you want me to have no ears?’ asked Gitsy.

  The 30th, typed Maya.

  ‘Can I?’ insisted Gitsy.

  ‘No,’ said Maya. ‘I already said no twice.’

  That long? I think I need a cold shower.

  I’ll send you more pictures from France.

  Maya grabbed hold of Gitsy’s hand and marched her to the toilet.

  Do it now.

  What category?

  Finn swatted at the phone with his fat little hand, and when Maya pulled it away he thought she was playing a game with him.

  More jugular.

  Hang on, I have to change Finn’s nappy.

  Maya unlatched the plastic grey changing table, which came down with a familiar thud and one of those dependable, scratched-out koala face stickers. She put Finn down on the table and held him with one hand while she pulled a nappy out of her bag. Gitsy was opening the doors to all the cubicles and slamming them shut.

  ‘Gitsy, stop that.’

  ‘But I want to find a nice one.’

  ‘They’re all the same. Just go to the toilet.’

  Finn turned his head to look at his sister.

  ‘Now, Gitsy!’

  Gitsy stamped her foot, stepped into a cubicle and locked the door.

  ‘You don’t need to lock the door.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Yes, I do. What if someone comes in and sees me?’

  ‘No one’s going to come in.’

  ‘How come you always get to have privacy and I don’t?’

  Maya changed Finn and stood in front of the mirror with the baby resting on her hip. She pulled her shirt down over the collarbone, and angled Finn so he wouldn’t be in the frame. Click went the camera.

  ‘Why are you taking a picture?’ asked Gitsy, from inside the cubicle.

  ‘I’m not. Hurry up.’

  ‘Are you taking a picture of the toilet?’

  Three of Finn’s tiny pink sausage fingers were visible in the left corner of the picture. She put the phone on silent, and sent the picture to Liz anyway.

  ‘Are you nearly done, Gitsy?’

  ‘No.’

  Maya looked at her face in the mirror. The neons made the blue bags under h
er eyes bulge, and revealed tiny lines that made her lips seem pursed even though they weren’t. Her arm looked distended and a bit too flabby from this angle. Finn pulled at her hair, and started crying when she pulled his hand away.

  ‘Hurry up, Gitsy. Your brother’s hungry.’

  ‘I’m done. You can wipe my bottom now.’

  Maya tried to open the door, but it was locked.

  I miss you already. Don’t go. Come to Turkey with me instead.

  ‘Unlock the door, Gitsy.’

  ‘I can’t stand up. You have to wipe my bottom first.’

  ‘Yes, Gitsy, I need to come in for that.’

  ‘Can’t you do it?’

  ‘GITSY OPEN THE DAMN DOOR.’

  Gitsy opened the door. ‘Why are you always yelling at me?’

  Maya moved into the cubicle, Finn bawling his eyes out on her hip. His little body continued to resist her as she wiped Gitsy, who went to push the flush.

  ‘Don’t touch it, Gitsy, it’s dirty.’

  ‘But I’m going to wash my hands.’

  Gitsy tried to push down the lever and Maya yanked her back.

  ‘What did I tell you? I can do it with my foot.’

  She pushed the flush down with her boot and followed Gitsy to the sink. Resting her knee against the sink, she balanced Gitsy on it so her daughter could reach the tap. She lathered up all six of their hands and held them together in the warm water.

  ‘Now my sleeves are all wet.’

  ‘It’s just a bit of water, Gitsy, it’ll dry.’

  ‘No it won’t. It’ll never be dry for France now.’

  She went to find Cole, who had picked up two coffees and was reading the paper at their gate. It occurred to her that reading the paper was the very last thing you did, a reward activity to crown those times when every other task was completed. Maya put a now-screaming Finn on her lap and unbuttoned her shirt to feed him. Her phone vibrated.