Stories We Tell Ourselves

by Sarah Françoise

  ‘You’re right. I wouldn’t want people to think I was the obsessive sort,’ retorted Joan.

  In the hallway, Maya and Lois were play-squabbling over a missing hairbrush.

  ‘Do me a favour, will you?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want you to make a sacrifice tonight.’

  ‘Which one of them do you want me to get rid of?’

  Joan walked over to their bathroom. Frank watched in the mirror as his wife dabbed perfume behind her ears with the glass stopper from the bottle. These rituals still fascinated him. For example: how did a woman know to dab it behind her ears? Was it a gesture she’d learned from her mother? Or was there a moment in a woman’s life when she was taught the physics behind it – why it was more potent dabbed there and not, say, on the collarbone.

  In the mirror and in her black dress, surrounded by the gauzy steam of an earlier shower, Joan looked like a bit like The Wanderer Above A Sea Of Fog. She slapped something white and creamy on her hands and ran them through her short blonde hair. Frank looked at Joan’s face in the mirror, and caught her in the act of not looking back at him. She frowned to apply her lipstick – another enigma to Frank.

  Joan walked back into the bedroom and put on her black patent slippers with the small gold buckle. It reassured him to see that her black slippers were still around, that the varnish on them wasn’t scuffed, that they lived in a box and came out now and again. As long as the black slippers came out, things couldn’t be that bad.

  Frank went up to Joan and tried to put his arms around her. She moved towards the mirror and put on some earrings he thought might have been a gift from him.

  ‘I want you not to write to your girlfriend until after Christmas.’

  Frank felt the useless words follow the exit sign in his brain. Felt as they opened a trapdoor in the palate, endured the slow passage of the useless words into his buccal cavity. They moved slowly, like a fishbone falling in slow motion down the throat, bouncing from wall to wall before finding a fleshy part to anchor itself into. The useless words piled up at the door of his mouth, and the jam in his throat made him gag. It was obvious the useless words would go no further, would remain useless only to him, which was perhaps just as well.

  Joan looked at him and knew exactly how uncomfortable she’d made him feel. She imagined the pathetic excuses he was sifting through in his mind, searching for the most credible one. How tedious to know this man so well, and be working at this alone. And – how risible to be worrying about his heart rate at a time like this.

  Frank could see what she was thinking and was on her side. For two people who had stopped fulfilling each other’s needs a while back, they were uncannily attuned to one another. Joan swept away an invisible speck on Frank’s shoulder and walked out in front of him.

  So she knew. Of course, he knew she knew. She had accepted his withdrawal, this was only the name of the withdrawal. Frank felt the tremendous urge to run after Joan and tell her that it meant nothing, that he loved her, that writing to H was pure buffoonery and that he would stop immediately.

  He longed for her to walk back in the room and explain the next steps to him. Give him one of her month-by-month planners, with relationship goals and goals around the house. By the end of January, I want you to have made an appointment with that therapist you were seeing. By mid-February, you are to empty the pool. By March, the bamboos have to be trimmed. I want new tenants in the office by mid-March, and at least 80 per cent of the archive shredded. He wanted to hear that she’d given this a lot of thought, and needed no convincing: she was cross with him, yes, but she’d give him another chance.

  The words ‘back-up plan’ invaded his mind.

  Frank turned out the light in their bedroom, closed the door and walked out into the corridor, the noise and warmth of his family rising up from the kitchen.

  *

  Lois spiked a tray of espressos with the dregs of the mystery Calvados and relegated the empty bottle to the box of recycling, where it stood among the corpses of the other, unmysterious bottles the family had consumed this Christmas. Earlier, Nick told her she drank too much. ‘I’m not drunk, I’m sleepwalking,’ she replied, smiling her flirtiest tipsy smile.

  Lois took one of the cups up to the study, where Frank was sitting at his desk.

  ‘It’s Christmas Eve. You can’t write your blog.’

  ‘Everyone else here gets to do what they want.’

  ‘Everyone else wants to do family stuff,’ said Lois. ‘Besides, we need your computer for karaoke.’

  ‘I need to log out of my email.’

  Lois stood in the doorway, watching her father.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Waiting for you to log out of your email.’

  ‘I’ll bring it down in five minutes.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What is your email? How involved is the logging-out process?’

  ‘Why can’t you use your own computer?’

  ‘Because mine doesn’t play DVDs,’ said Lois.

  ‘I’ll bring it down.’

  Lois left him to it.

  Frank continued to delete emails from Heide. Some of them he opened up one last time, highlighting in his mind the bits he might want to recall in the future, one day when he felt like a lost cause. Some of them he knew almost by heart – lines that had made him flush, admissions that made him feel like he had something, anything to offer. Nothing, not one thing, had been asked of him, which suggested to him that what he gave covered all bases. It had been a good feeling while it lasted.

  When the emails were all gone, he emptied the trash. Then he blocked her. Then he suspended his Facebook account. Then he deleted his history. ‘From the beginning of time?’ From the beginning of time. Then he logged out of his email and carried the computer down to the basement, where the kids had made a clearing in a nook that was piled high with one-day tiles and punctured bicycle tyres no one had ever bothered to patch.

  William plugged his speaker into the laptop.

  ‘Wait, we have to enshrine it,’ said Lois.

  She unpacked the props she had brought down – Joan’s blue velvet scarf, a string of leftover fairy lights, two plastic pomegranates, a tarot deck. Maya, who was sitting on a dusty brown bean bag in the corner of the room, felt feverish. She thought of Liz’s cold fingers on the back of her neck.

  After visiting Liz’s farmhouse for the first time, Maya had an almost irresistible desire to rip out the white carpets in her own house. Take a box-cutter to the green upholstery on the new sofa. Drag the laminated white bookcases into the yard and bring a heavy axe down on them. She felt silly for surrounding herself with these things in the first place. For submitting to the notion that a home could be furnished in such a way as to make it seem complete, permanent. The farm had earned its features through the years, its orchard had matured over generations. She longed to bring Liz to Brittany, to show her the house that no one ever touched. How well it would reflect on her that this was also part of who she was.

  She wondered whether her phone had died yet, or if it was still throbbing with incoming messages from Liz – a tiny blue beacon in a field of frozen cow manure. It always hit her once the kids were tucked in, just how much she missed Liz. If only she could split herself in two according to the hours of the day. A 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Maya for the kids and Cole, and a night Maya. Night Maya wanted to tell Lois that no one actually wanted to sing along to Kate Bush in the basement. That it was just another indulgence that benefited her insular vision.

  It was of course Lois who decided years back that singing along to Hounds of Love from beginning to end would make it onto the list of yuletide family lore. It was the album Joan liked to listen to at full volume when she was vacuuming the house, back when they still had a record player. The record player was somewhere in the promised wine cellar, broken and smothered by the other debris of their advancing lives.

  William and Lois started to murder ‘Runnin
g Up That Hill’, reading the lyrics that scrolled across the lower third of a YouTube video. Frank, who was sitting on the bottom step, tapped his foot in time to his tic and, to a lesser extent, in time to the music. He made a mental note to speak to William tomorrow. A one on one. He’d ask him about school, and if he was managing financially. He’d suggest William get in touch with his client in Dubai. Maybe he could get an internship in his firm’s Swiss office.

  When the song ended, Lois grabbed Frank’s hand and tried to pull him up from his seat.

  ‘You sing one,’ she ordered.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You really should try and get out of your comfort zone.’

  Living is out of my comfort zone, thought Frank. Where would you have me go?

  William searched for ‘Hounds of Love’, and muted the computer through an ad for a family SUV. ‘Isn’t that your car?’ Lois asked Maya. The dig made Maya think about sex with Liz – how, after she parked her car, with its twin car seats and juice-carton graveyard, she and Liz fell into an immaterialism Lois could only dream about. She too could make selfish decisions that could later be deemed inevitable.

  The song started, and William turned up the volume all the way. Cole walked over to the computer. ‘My turn,’ he said, taking Joan’s velvet scarf and wrapping it into a bow around his head. It was already the most un-Cole moment any of them had ever witnessed, and he hadn’t even sung a note yet. Maya stood up and gestured that she was going to check on the children.

  Cole was singing loudly, miming a telephone call, pretending the love hounds were on the line. Lois joined in, massaging Simon’s drooly cheeks with her hands. Frank looked at his son-in-law incredulously. William was in stitches. Nick looked around the room for an excuse, anything, to get up and do something. But there were no cups that needed refilling. No other people’s children for him to check up on. No window somewhere upstairs that could be closed to stop a draught they all pretended not to notice.

  *

  After karaoke, Simon followed Lois up the stairs and to her bedroom. Lois slumped down on the bed and hitched her dress up around her hips. She lifted up her ass like a table to pull down her tights. She had to contort quite a bit to get them off, tugging in the places where she found no slack. She threw her tights in the air, and they came to land by Simon. The tights on the floor looked like a map of see-through black vales, black crevasses and soft gauzy peaks. Simon looked at them as intently as Frank surveyed his maps for ‘bors’. Lois pulled her dress over her head and tossed that on the floor, too. The dress was like a puddle next to the tights. They were both still warm. It was incredible the way a woman could just separate herself from her warmth and her scent, thought Simon. Like shedding a coat, or losing a tail.

  Lois walked across the room in her knickers, to the skylight. She opened it mechanically, and slid her hand into the space between the roof and the tiles, looking for a joint from the past. She found nothing.

  As she walked back to the bed, she noticed Simon staring at her from the floor.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.

  ‘You,’ thought Simon.

  Lois got into bed and buried herself under the blanket like a marmot.

  ‘You can come and sleep on the bed if you want.’

  Simon walked out of the room and slumped down outside the open door like a guard dog.

  *

  Upstairs in his bedroom, William was watching the cloud-tank video he’d made in his last year of senior school. The tank once belonged to Tara’s older brother. Back then it was filled with sawdust, and housed a long white rat with pink eyes. When the rat died, Tara’s mother took over the tank for one of her terrariums. Eventually it ended up in the brother’s hands again, containing for a while his efforts to germinate cannabis seeds.

  William had walked up and down the stairs to the basement carrying pots of boiled saltwater – not unlike Joan during Boilergate. He’d used up Joan’s reserves of kosher salt, and switched the basement lightbulbs for black ones. As he emptied the saltwater into the tank, he might have heard Joan and Frank arguing upstairs. One of those silence-filling arguments about nothing at all. These had become more frequent since Maya moved out.

  Later that night, he cut open a bin bag and laid it over the saltwater. He poured fresh water over the bag, working to make the stream from the jug as thin as possible. Joan had gone to bed, and Frank was snoring in front of a rerun of NYPD Blue. Delicately, Wim removed the sheet of polyethylene. He squeezed a drop of blue food colouring into the water. The colour expanded like a bruise, turning the water into sky.

  He checked the camera and closed the basement door on Frank’s snoring. The curtain of untrimmed ivy that dripped down from the first-floor planters blotted out any light from the outside world. Funny how he’d claimed the basement, all those years ago. First for his Egyptological expeditions, then for his Matchbox cars, and later as a film studio. He realised he must have spent more time down here than all of them combined.

  He let rain a few drops of condensed milk into the tank, and they fluffed out into a perfect mammatus formation. He waited for the clouds to dissipate and added a few more. Next he sprinkled some glitter over the tank. The particles trickled through the sky, a slow-motion shower of cirrocumulus.

  One of his earliest memories was of looking into the night sky, his parents’ and his sisters’ faces up there among the stars staring back down at him. Whenever his sisters pointed to the stars, with that incredible control they had of their limbs and hands, it seemed as though they were touching them. He had other memories of their sky-chasing excursions – in the mountains, in Brittany, with gas stoves, with blankets... But those came later, and by then he knew it had been a trick of perception, that the stars were too far away to feel, and that the last sky chase was too far back in the past to truly remember.

  The clouds that piled up in the tank had nowhere to go. William poked the storm to life with the end of a feather. He threw in more glitter, which cut through the fog like clear rain. Then he sat down and waited. Waited for the tank to empty itself of atmosphere, to become still and dark again like the basement.

  Later he added a soundtrack mixed from some old tape recordings of Lois and Maya that dated back to the early 1990s. An eight-year-old Lois reciting Villon’s ‘Ballad of the Hanged Men’ in dribs and drabs for Frank’s amusement, Maya two years younger, arguing for her fair share of the Fisher Price mic. Odd to hear his sisters chatting away, back when he didn’t have words yet, was still just a lovable pudding that got passed around and goo-goo-gahed at.

  He’d been given an A+ for the film. Not that it counted towards much. Frank and Joan were impressed. So was Tara. The tank had also left its mark on the basement floor.

  Lying in bed tonight, William thought he could hear Nick talking to someone downstairs. He closed his eyes. He would go down to the basement tomorrow. See if the tank was still around. When he opened his eyes again, he was looking at Tara through condensed milk, his laser-beam eyes catching glimpses of her in the space between the milky atoms. His sisters were there too. They were all swimming in milk. He could see everything so clearly. The lake still. The sky placid. Everything as it should be.

  *

  Simon would have to play it carefully with Lois. He had to give Frank what he wanted, which was the illusion of his loyalty. Illusion because, while Simon liked Frank a lot, and could possibly even be loyal to him of his own accord, the circumstances of dependency he found himself in meant that he could never find out. Talk about holding something so close it suffocates.

  Humans act worse than gods. They act like parents. They see you and they decide you are theirs. An extension of their breed. They pick you out, they brand you with their instruction and then demand that you love them back.

  They put you in situations of need to stimulate this love. They keep you away from food that runs, and close to food that sits in tins and needs to be opened by machines operated by human hands. They
put you in places with doors that lock and can only be opened by keys held by human hands. They expect you to piss on schedule, and to extend the love you owe them to the people they love. They annihilate your discretion, even as they train you to be discreet.

  They subdue your nature. They take your desire to run and they contain it. Give it a timetable. They put your love of the outdoors on a leash. They purchase equipment for your needs that you must then create needs for. So they can feel good about the money they spent on you.

  They make your life comfortable in an old-person way, starting when you are a puppy. They get irritated when the mud that sets in between your claws on the walks they take you on shakes off onto the clean floor. They don’t like it that you shed hair, and they complain loudly and often about how much hair you shed. Meanwhile, they remind their children it is impolite to comment on others’ appearance.

  Your mutual arrangement is two contracts pretending to be one. Your crate is their power of attorney. Your loyalty is their demand for your loyalty. Their affection is real, but it comes with strings attached. Strings that lead to collars and vaccines and tin openers, and kennels where different hands will open the same brand of dog food if your owners decide to go on holiday.

  For the most part, how you will relate to them from now until you die is unnatural. And don’t forget – you will most probably die at the hour of their choosing. Your death will occur in full consideration of their work schedule, prior commitments, etc. You will die if and only if the car starts that day. If the car doesn’t start that day, your exit appointment will be postponed. If the vet is not too busy that day curing or dispatching some other creature with atrophied joints or other conditions with no room for improvement. The fuckers are fine with euthanasia when it comes to you, but still grapple with it for themselves.

  And yet there are days when your relationship will transcend its foundation of mutual – if weighted – servitude. Master and dog will run together into a cold mountain brook on a hot afternoon in August. Dog and master will snore in unison in front of the fireplace in a house in Brittany, and later eat snacks at an inappropriate hour. Both will enjoy a cut of ham from the same pig’s hindquarter. In these rare moments you are two creatures, two beings, playing out their independence side by side.