Stories We Tell Ourselves

by Sarah Françoise

  Simon had enjoyed such moments with Frank. And, to a lesser extent, with Joan.

  With Lois, everything was different.

  For starters, she did nothing for him. Or rather, she did nothing for him with a purpose. The last time she was here, Frank and Joan drove to Italy for the weekend. Joan left a list of instructions that read like a dog manual. Lois used the back of the list to scribble something down and never looked at it again. She forgot to put out biscuits for him, but fed him scraps off her plate. Eventually she took the lid off the biscuits, and let Simon determine his own mealtimes. She slept in late and didn’t walk him first thing in the morning as instructed. Instead, she slept with the French windows open all night.

  It was on the night of the storm that he fell for her. That day, Frank and Joan left a message on the answerphone saying they were staying in Turin a second night. First the rain came. It tripped off the roof and onto the copper ledge, keeping them both awake. Then came the thunder, making the mountain behind them groan. At one point, lightning struck a tree and she yelled his name.

  She hadn’t parcelled out his meals, or anticipated when he might need to piss or take a shit. In fact, she’d done nothing for him all day. And now she needed him. Screamed her need for him in a house with no parents. She closed all the doors on them that night, and Simon did not leave the side of her bed until morning.

  He liked that she was a slob. She had short hair which she seldom washed. She wore anyone’s socks – whatever was lying around. She stole clothing from the others. Underwear from Maya. Socks from Gitsy. Sweaters from everyone. She seemed to be lacking that notion of ownership that they all had. With her, he felt safe. Expropriated.

  He noticed that she touched him more than she touched her husband. She used Simon to get away from Nick. ‘Dog needs a walk,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll take him.’ He liked being used this way.

  Last night, when he was sitting at her feet, the idea came into his head again to bite her. Not hard, not to draw blood, but to see the shape of his teeth on her ankle. To know he’d moved her flesh around, put a him-shaped dent in it. He didn’t know what else to do to her.

  He said this to her. Simon said, ‘I want to eat your heart right out of you, I want to cock my head so I can lick the side of your foot from heel to toe.’ When he opened his mouth to feel her foot, she extended her toe right into it. She didn’t seem to find him either adorable or repulsive. Was this what it was like to be a man? Or was this what it felt like to be a happy dog? Either way, he couldn’t get enough of it.

  *

  Nick had just finished loading the dishwasher when he remembered it hadn’t worked in years. He filled the sink with hot water and squirted some washing-up liquid into it. He plunged the glasses in. It felt good to drown his hands like this. From the sink he could see the house without its occupants. There were parts that were Joan, like the collection of antique green-glass vases on the windowsill, the oversized cookbooks with attractive spines and ribbon bookmarks, and the photos of the kids. There were parts that were Frank, like the sticking-out wires and sudden concrete edge, or the lack of a handrail on the stairs.

  He wondered what Frank was really doing in his office. When he was shucking the oysters, Cole had advanced that Frank might be writing a memoir. ‘Who cares?’ Wim had said.

  The automatic light came on outside, casting a limp white glow on the wall. Nick heard footsteps coming up the stairs and the front door open. Simon trotted into the kitchen and went straight to his food bowl. Wim’s girlfriend Tara was on his heels.

  ‘He was in our garden,’ she said, in her perfect English, with her perfect fuck-you French accent. ‘My parents get cross because of that.’

  ‘And about the bamboos.’

  ‘You heard about the petition.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nick. ‘Those bamboos are a force of God. Your parents are either very powerful or very naive.’

  Simon walked out of the kitchen and went to sit in the patch where Lois had polished off the dregs of her whisky collection several hours earlier. He licked an invisible spot where she had sat on the marble tiles.

  ‘I was going to make tea,’ said Nick. ‘Do you want some?’

  ‘No. But I’ll take a cigarette.’

  Nick took the pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Tara.

  ‘Wim went to bed a bit ago,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if he’s asleep.’

  Tara grabbed the matches by the stove and walked out onto the balcony. Nick followed her and put a cigarette in his mouth. The garden table still smelled briny from the oyster-shucking. The smell was so intense it made him feel self-conscious.

  ‘So what do your people do at Christmas?’

  ‘We eat a goose, and my parents watch television.’

  ‘Is there a reason we didn’t see you here tonight?’

  Tara made a smoke ring in the air and tried to shoot another ring through the first one. When she failed, she giggled.

  ‘He broke up with me.’

  ‘That boy is a young, young idiot,’ said Nick.

  Nick had always wondered about their relationship. Tara seemed so worldly. William was a lamb. It wouldn’t have surprised him to hear Tara had broken it off. She was the kind of girl who would have a certain world at her feet in the foreseeable future. The last thing she needed was a twenty-one-year-old senior-school sweetheart who lived in London with room-mates.

  Simon pushed open the door with his nose, and came to sit on the floor between them. Nick was surprised at how warm the dog felt against his calf.

  ‘Do you think if you are in love when you’re eighteen, you are doomed?’ asked Tara.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But it is inconceivable you will stay together.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Tara’s hair smelled of incense and gravy. On the other side of the lake, someone let off a couple of red and blue fireworks. Simon barked quietly, out of duty.

  Just then, Tara leaned in and kissed him. Nick was about to tell Simon to shut up, and the kiss suffocated the first syllable of the dog’s name, which came to die on her lips. It was a diminutive kiss that barely registered on a tactile level.

  Tara pulled away and threw her legs out in front of her. The heels of her boots went thump on the cold concrete floor. Nick lifted the cigarette back to his mouth and said, ‘Well, shit.’

  ‘Well, shit,’ echoed Tara.

  Lazy drops of snow started to fall on the table. Simon made his way to the door and wagged his tail to be let in.

  ‘I should go,’ she said.

  ‘All right.’

  Tara got up and walked back inside with Simon. Nick heard the front door close behind her. The house was silent. Even Frank was asleep.

  9. Christmas Day

  THE NIGHT BEFORE Christmas was like a spell. The wait for Christmas morning lasted only a few hours of sleep, but the night’s enchantment stretched out those few hours like the rolling pin her grandma used to roll out the shortcake lids for the mince pies. Gitsy knew this to be true because she had more dreams on Christmas Eve than on any other night of the year. An average of five dreams, each with their own plot and back story.

  This year again, Gitsy had gone to bed on the 24th feigning obedience. She didn’t protest when her grandma tucked her in and kissed her goodnight. She closed her eyes and stayed very still for a few minutes after her mum turned out the lights, in case Maya was waiting by the door for proof of sleep. She listened for the grown-ups’ footsteps to disappear down the stairs, counted up to one-hundred-Mississippi, and got out of bed in the dark. With her hand she followed the wall all the way to the window and found the light switch. Earlier, she’d stashed the Jolly Postman book and some clementines under the bed to keep her alert until the Great Man showed up. This year, she vowed to stay awake.

  The Christmas spell was powerful. You could try to outsmart it and stay awake, but eventually the charm knocked you out. At 11.22 p.m., Gitsy’s eyelids would no longer stay open.
She allowed herself a catnap. She would rest her eyes ever so briefly, and still wake up in time to catch Santa coming down the chimney – the one that hovered over nothing, over an absent fireplace that contained the possibility of future memories. Perhaps this year Santa would bring a fireplace.

  Dream number one kicked in. Something about reindeers and clementines. Followed by dream number two, which involved Finn being naughty. On its heels, dream number three. In one of the dreams her parents had a raging fight. Her mum threw something at the painting in the living room, which tore a hole in the canvas. She made it to a record six before something told her it was morning, and that the spell had weakened enough that she could drag herself out of slumber if she tried hard enough.

  Gitsy sat up in bed. She was the only one with any willpower in this house. The others were still under the spell, and would be so for an interminable amount of time – probably until 8 a.m. There was clementine peel on the pillow and a few squished segments on the sheet. She swept the sticky pieces under the pillow. She got out of bed, put on her slippers and opened the bedroom door.

  On the landing she heard Frank snoring in Grandma’s bedroom.

  Halfway down the stairs, Gitsy sat on a step to wake up properly. It occurred to her she had better check that she was, in fact, awake, and that this wasn’t simply dream number seven. She pinched herself, but she couldn’t tell if it hurt or not. Someone was asleep on the brown pinstripe sofa and had covered themselves with the itchy white blanket that Simon sometimes slept on. There was a fricative snore coming from the person, which closer inspection revealed to be Uncle Nick.

  Simon appeared out of nowhere and nudged Gitsy for his feed. Gitsy went over to the big box of dog biscuits and prized the lid off with both hands. Simon put his head inside the box and ate.

  The Christmas tree with its blinking lights was a shocking sight. There was a wide moat of presents under the tree, and the stacks also grew vertically. Gitsy looked for her name on all the tags, and then for Finn’s. The mince pie was gone from the plate she’d left out for Santa, as was the letter she’d written him, asking him those practical questions about his existence that still bothered her. He’d also downed the brandy.

  ‘Uncle Nick.’

  Uncle Nick didn’t move, but she knew he was awake because the snoring had stopped.

  ‘I know you’re awake.’

  ‘I’m not awake yet,’ said the itchy white blanket.

  ‘Can I have cereal?’

  ‘Ask your parents.’

  ‘They’re sleeping. They’ll be cross if I wake them up.’

  Nick sat up on the sofa.

  ‘Why did you go to sleep in your clothes?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t find my PJs.’

  ‘Why didn’t you look in your room?’

  Nick walked over to the kitchen and poured some Cheerios into a bowl. He placed the bowl on the table.

  ‘Can I have a spoon?’

  He grabbed a spoon from the dish rack and handed it to Gitsy.

  ‘Milk?’

  ‘You know, when I was your age,’ said Nick, ‘I had to make dinner for my whole family.’

  ‘That’s what Mum says. But I checked with Grandma and it’s not true.’

  Gitsy took her cereal to the tree and Nick walked out onto the balcony. The door closed behind him, locking him out. He picked up the cigarette butts from last night and a champagne flute that had neatly broken in two. He remembered Tara’s face next to his, just before she turned it, and flinched. Inside, Joan was leading Gitsy and her cereal back to the kitchen table. He knocked at the window to be let in.

  ‘You’re up early’ said Joan.

  ‘He couldn’t find his pyjamas,’ said Gitsy.

  Joan took off her wedding ring and put it on the windowsill. She rubbed cream into her hands and up to her elbows. Nick turned on the kettle for coffee.

  ‘Can I open a present?’ asked Gitsy.

  ‘I think we should wait for the others to wake up,’ said Joan.

  ‘How about you open just one?’ said Nick. ‘You can open mine.’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Like a spherical night light that projects constellations onto the ceiling,’ he said.

  Joan looked for some dirty dishes to wash from last night, but couldn’t find any. She wondered whether Heide had sent Frank Christmas wishes, and what they might sound like. She wondered if he’d checked his email. They had barely spoken since their conversation in the bedroom, but Frank had been unusually present all night. Not attentive, just in the way.

  ‘Grandma, come and see!’

  Gitsy’s nose was pressed against the living-room window. The garden was white and getting whiter. The trenches, the jutting bamboo hedge, the piles of rubble – it had all vanished under an invisibility cloak of snow.

  Nick plugged Gitsy’s new night-sky projector in. The globe spun round in silence, casting invisible stars onto the snow-white ceiling.

  *

  The branch that had once looked like a pokey witch finger had grown, and now poked right past the window, pointing to something in the distance that couldn’t be seen from the bed. The cotton-boll-grey sky through the window suggested it was snowing lightly. In the cot, Finn’s little chest went up and down like it ought to.

  Maya grabbed the cup of water next to the bed, but it was empty. Cole inched closer to her under the quilts and wrapped his leg around hers. Liz knew nothing about this kind of living – this having children to wake up for in the morning, and all decisions split down the middle. Liz and her lovely, ignorant freedom. Perhaps Liz was exercising her freedom right now, in Turkey, with her co-worker. Maybe Liz’s legs were wrapped around her colleague’s legs, in a bed that would be remade while they sat on the patio in robes, eating their complimentary Continental breakfast.

  Cole buried his head into Maya’s neck so he could kiss it. She stretched her fingers around his knee, holding it like an apple. How round and steady his knee was, she thought. Nothing like her father’s febrile knee and febrile everything, drawing all the attention to itself but not giving anything back. She stroked Cole’s thigh. She thought of how much more difficult things would be if Cole wasn’t like Cole – if he didn’t make things as comfortable and reassuring as Cole made them. It was one thing to escape hardship, another to question your enviable reality.

  Now Cole was hard, and lying on top of her. Now he was moving his head to kiss the other side of her neck. She kissed him too, when his skin presented itself to her mouth. Now he was undoing the buttons on her nightshirt. It was one of those masculine nightshirts that were meant to make you feel sexy without even trying. Maya tried to think of Liz, who made her feel sexy without trying. She tried to imagine the semi-familiar body of Liz, but couldn’t conjure up a precise image of her. Instead she saw the absence of Liz, in Cole’s presence, and felt it, and felt him, like the dull beat of a battering ram against a castle door.

  Afterwards, Cole got up to fill the empty water glass in the upstairs bathroom. Maya got up and opened the window, and buried herself under the covers once more. Joan would do this, in the middle of winter – open their bedroom windows all the way even if it was Baltic outside. It woke up your face and your brain, even as your body stayed sleep-mummified under the blankets. Maya sometimes rolled the covers down, inch by inch, to awaken the other lazy parts of her. First the neck, then the shoulders, then the heart.

  ‘You were talking in your sleep last night,’ said Cole.

  ‘Was I?’ said Maya.

  Another Lois trait. She’d better watch herself.

  Cole put the glass down by the bed and went to get Finn, who was cooing through his pacifier.

  ‘It was sort of entertaining once I started paying attention to what you were saying.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘It didn’t make much sense. You mentioned Gitsy, and water. Stuff about an apron? And then you got really pissed off.’

  ‘At who?’

  ‘Not
sure. But whatever it was, it was making you really angry, like someone was doing you a tremendous injustice.’

  Cole handed Finn to Maya. He immediately went burrowing in her effortlessly sexy nightshirt, which was still open from earlier.

  ‘Here, take him for one sec,’ she said to Cole. ‘I’m going to make him a bottle.’

  Finn started crying when Cole took him away. Maya sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled on her woolly white socks.

  Over the years, whenever she felt Cole slipping away, she conjured up that one time he’d saved her life. It was impossible to know for sure whether he had saved her life that day, since the only thing that could prove a deadly risk was death itself. But everyone seemed to agree that he had, that summer in Brittany when she forgot to count the waves in sevens and got sucked into the undertow. Cole was too good, much too good to imagine he’d ever profited from that debt.

  ‘You were also mumbling about Liz.’

  ‘Liz?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Maya fished last night’s bottle out of the cot and walked out of the bedroom, followed by Cole and Finn.

  ‘Maybe it was a swimming dream,’ he said. ‘I used to get those when I was in therapy.’

  Downstairs, Gitsy was yapping away to Joan.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Maya.

  *

  If Simon marked his territory by pissing, Nick was marking his by not letting him piss. He’d been standing by the door for ten minutes, and still Nick refused to open it. Simon knew that if he pissed on the floor it would reflect poorly on Nick, not him. Still, it would underline his impotence and it would be he who suffered the embarrassment. There are few things as off-putting in life as an incontinent dog on Christmas morning.

  Simon assumed that Nick was angry because he had slept in his bedroom, next to his wife, while Nick slept on the couch. Of course, it wasn’t Simon’s fault that Nick had slept on the couch. There was nothing for him to usurp. You didn’t cross over into another physical world just because your heart did. In many ways, Nick’s jealousy was the highest validation Simon’s feelings would ever get. The rest – it just felt like locked-in love syndrome. There was no future for a lovesick dog.