Stories We Tell Ourselves

by Sarah Françoise

  ‘I didn’t think beyond just writing,’ said Frank.

  ‘No, you idiot. What did you think would happen if you kept eating meat and salt?’

  ‘Oh.’

  She had come looking for him. When she opened the door to the study, he was lying on the dog’s bed with his eyes closed. She said his name, several times, and asked him a question. He couldn’t remember what the question was, only that he was unable to answer, busy as he was breathing through the pain in his chest. He had known with great certainty, in that moment, that if he should open his mouth to answer Joan, all the breaths left in his body would come flying out and escape through that five-inch gap under the cellar door.

  Everything after that was vague. He remembered the ambulance, and the ambulance man, who reminded him of his client in Dubai. Perhaps they were driving him to a site meeting, or to pick out some tiles. There was more shifting of his body through unknown spaces, and then sleep. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been lying in this hospital bed. The clock on the wall said 1.40 p.m. He’d woken up earlier and a doctor with a clipboard had spoken to him. He’d woken up again some hours later when the nurse brought his lunch on a plastic tray. Everything on the plate was the same wheat-paste shade: mashed potato, cauliflower, chicken in a white sauce. He hadn’t touched it.

  He’d promised to go look at that wet room. It seemed unlikely he would get round to it today. He would give the client a call, later. He thought of Simon, at home, standing by his box of biscuits. Would Lois remember to feed him? Walk him? He wondered what the dog had done when they’d taken him off in the ambulance. Had he barked? Had he followed him to the ambulance, whimpering, and did he howl as it disappeared down the driveway? You heard of some dogs that never got over their master’s death. Would Simon curl up in the bamboos and die if he didn’t make it out of hospital? Isn’t that what dogs were wired to do?

  Frank uncurled his fingers in Joan’s direction. She took his hand and rested it on his chest, hers on top of it. He could feel something thumping through the closed knot of their two hands.

  ‘Have you spoken to the cardiologist yet?’ asked Joan.

  ‘I think it was him I saw this morning.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That it was only a mild heart attack,’ said Frank.

  ‘So they found a heart.’

  Earlier she had moved the letter to Frank from the starry cupboard to her sock drawer.

  To be lying in a hospital bed with Joan at his side was all right, thought Frank. It would be awful to be debilitated around someone like H. Someone you only knew from when you were young, when your body was still a firm ally, one that didn’t need to be factored into everything. Joan had nursed their children back to health through tummy aches, ear infections, broken toes and arms, the flu. She was a steady hand. She couldn’t help but be devoted. Wired that way.

  ‘What would you do,’ Frank asked Joan, ‘if you found out you had only one year left to live?’

  ‘The bigger question is, what would I do if I had many more years left to live?’

  She thought she might want to run her own business. That was one of them. She didn’t know what kind of business she wanted to run, just that she, too, wanted to make decisions every day that were of minor consequence to people she knew less well than her relatives. She wanted to be told she was stunning. Wanted to extract a few more gasps, even if it was from her husband. She wanted, twenty-two years too late, to rest her head on a shoulder and cry about the miscarriage, about her mother. She wanted to move to where her daughters were. She wanted to move to Brittany, where her daughters weren’t. She never said any of those things out loud because, with time, Frank had become a kind of a receptacle where information came to be abandoned – like foreign coins in the key bowl.

  As she got ready to leave for the hospital earlier that day, Joan’s eyes stopped on the picture of Frank on the fridge door. The memory came flooding back. It was she who had taken the picture. It didn’t predate her. Didn’t belong to a history that was only hers by proxy. It wouldn’t need to be carbon-dated after all. The clue was the wine bottle in the bottom-left corner of the picture, on the picnic blanket. They’d bought a case of them from a winery in the Piedmont. Weeks after the trip, they’d carried one of the bottles up the sleeping lady, for a picnic. Later that day they’d come upon a tiny lake – a shallow, chalky turquoise puddle that hovered over grey stones.

  Joan took her hand out of Frank’s useless clasp and went to fetch the day’s paper from her handbag. It was rolled around one of the gigantic bars of Toblerone they sold in the hospital gift shop.

  ‘Lois said she’d come over in a bit.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And one of our daughters is pregnant.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There was strictly no point in trying to keep up with those kids, thought Frank. Things changed so quickly.

  Joan had spotted the test while emptying the rubbish bin in the upstairs bathroom. The test had been slipped back into its foil pouch. At first, she hesitated over whether to look or not. The line was faint. It could have been an evaporation line – like a salt lick on a seaside rock.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked Joan.

  ‘About the baby?’ said Frank.

  ‘No. About the rest of our lives?’

  That was the thing about Joan, you could never tell if she was being fatalistic or utterly adventurous.

  ‘You hold me back,’ thought Frank.

  Joan looked out of the window to the other side of the lake, with its shrubbed-in lawns, Michelin-star restaurant and privatised waterfront.

  ‘You hold me back from the cliff face.’

  *

  Nick made a pile of his books on the coffee table. The ones from Lois had inscriptions inside them, and dates that bound them to the unrelated story of a moment in time. Above the fireplace was a framed plate of a dodo that had once hung in his childhood bedroom. He took it down and put it with the books. There was nothing else he wanted. The ashtray in the shape of a starfish, perhaps. The pen in the shape of a crab claw. The paperweight fossil. The things masquerading as others, he would take. And from the kitchen, the wooden spice rack his father had made for his mother.

  All of his things fitted into two suitcases and four moving-boxes. After he loaded the Jeep with his stuff, Nick went to the hardware store and bought a new tilt latch for the bathroom window. It took him five minutes to fit it. The window slid up like it ought to, letting new air into the bathroom for the first time in two years.

  Nick thought of all the little mends waiting to be performed in Frank’s house. He wondered if Frank’s reluctance to finish the house was perhaps deliberate. After all, once a thing was done, it could no longer be promising. And what was a relationship if not a to-do list? It was the room for amelioration that kept it (like the bathroom) airtight.

  What was left to do with Lois. They’d built and obliterated, tried and failed, made and lost, come and gone. Perhaps fixing the bathroom window was the last remaining thing on their list.

  Nick stood in the open window and called his mother. A giant rat scampered across the neighbours’ concrete yard and disappeared under the shed. When no one picked up, he left a message to say he was driving home for New Year’s.

  He pulled the window down, leaving a one-inch crack to keep the apartment oxygenated for when Lois got back.

  The last thing he did was tear the warning sign off the window.

  *

  The taxidermy blowfish was still in the window of the fishing-gear and tackle shop across from Frank’s office. Its brown spikes had paled in two decades of sunlight. It had lost one of its glass eyes, but still had its bloated, whistling lips the kids imitated when they walked to Frank’s office after school. William unlocked the door and let himself in.

  On the left was the reception desk cubicle, with its sliding door and supply closet. William opened all the drawers, as he had as a child, to steal paperclips and still-packaged
highlighters, and the staples he pushed into the wall. The drawers were empty, but the secretary’s old brown Rolodex was still on the desk. He turned the knob on the Rolodex and the index cards spun round, fanning thirty years of partnerships and service.

  The reception desk had been unoccupied long before Frank abandoned the office. The old photocopier, once the new robot, lay unplugged in the corner, dead and covered in a quarter-inch of dust. Inside the closet hung one of Frank’s raincoats, with a tie slung over the shoulder.

  He’d found Frank’s office key in the study. He hadn’t told anyone back home that he was going to the office. His phone buzzed in his coat pocket. It was Tara. ‘Nowhere to park. Going to keep circling until I find something near.’

  William opened the door to Frank’s office, which looked as if it had been left in a hurry. Frank’s drafting table stood by the window. On the ledge were some pens and the razor blades Frank used to scratch off the ink of his errors. The sticky patches left by old masking tape had gone black with dust. The black square angles on the white surface charted a chronology of all the blueprints Frank had worked on since he’d last cleaned the table with rubbing alcohol. William took a picture of the table with his phone, and pocketed the pens.

  He closed the door behind him and went down the spiral staircase to the basement using his phone as a torch. In the basement was a door that led to the underground garage Frank had converted into his archive in the very early nineties. William tried the door. It was locked. He found the key on top of the ledge and unlocked it. The door opened a couple of inches, but stayed stuck. He threw his weight against the door and managed to shift some of the boxes that were blocking it from the inside.

  He took out his phone and texted Tara. ‘I forgot. My dad has a garage in the underground car park. Meet down there.’

  The floor of the garage was covered in boxes and paper, and boxes of paper. William climbed over the mountain of paper to the garage door. It opened with no difficulty and the neons outside brightened the inside of the room. There were towering piles of boxes along the walls. Some had toppled long ago, spewing out their contents on top of other boxes. Some boxes had been eviscerated, perhaps to search for some vital document that had not reached its statute of limitations. He wondered how many trips it would take to get rid of all this shit. He picked up a tile catalogue advertising the new 1992 terrazzo collection.

  Tara pulled up outside the garage with her car and opened the boot.

  ‘Help me push the back seat down, will you?’

  William walked over to the car to help.

  ‘You’re sure you wanna do this?’

  William nodded.

  ‘He’s not going to be furious?’

  He shrugged.

  They started loading paper into Tara’s car. William wasn’t sure what it meant, to be here, with Tara, doing this – annihilating Frank’s archive while Frank was in the hospital. He didn’t know if this was helping. He didn’t know for sure, but he thought it might be. He thought of his father, lost in the mountain at dusk. Lost in mountains of paper, with no electricity. Trying to find his way back home, back to the family, by the stars alone.

  14. Epilogue

  (or The World’s Most Romantic Flashback)

  LOIS HAD LEFT Joan alone with Frank at the hospital. This was one of those moments that could change the course of a history. Better to leave them to it. Tomorrow she would smuggle in something that Frank was not allowed to have. Maybe some salt.

  Nick still hadn’t called. She’d left a message earlier, about Frank. She wondered if he was out for New Year’s Eve. The three of them had spent New Year’s Eve at the hospital, drinking styrofoam cups of hot aspartame lemon from the vending machine. At one point Joan had sent William out for a bottle of wine. He’d come back with a bottle of cider, purchased from a crêpe restaurant behind the hospital. They toasted with polystyrene, to Frank’s good health.

  Lois brought her laptop to Frank’s desk and opened it up. Her deadline for the war movie was in two days. The museum had sent a transcript of what needed translating. The title cards sounded like a history book. Like something the Historian might have written, if he’d been narrating the war in real time, and not in hindsight. They summarised key battles and introduced historical figures. Chronicled months of waiting in haunted, muddy trenches. Described the landscape of war, with its ghostly villages and towns, its pockmarked belfries and wildflower meadows that still bloomed under the bombs. Lois worked through them quickly, stopping and starting the film as she progressed with the titles.

  Forty-seven minutes into the film, a woman walks onscreen pushing a wheelbarrow. A small child with blonde curls tags along beside her. The unwieldy wheelbarrow is piled high with sacks and a bucket of white laundry. The road is unpaved, which makes the task all the more difficult. Her husband is at war, which makes every task all the more difficult. He is at war, like the other husbands. But unlike the other husbands, he has given no news in a while.

  She stops for a moment and leans against the wall of an old stone house. Her face pans up slowly, like a camera. She stares ahead, and the lens zooms in on her eye, until it is no longer recognisable as an eye but looks like a chalky puddle on a mountain, or the stomach of a ravine. Cut to a black screen with the word ‘Vacherauville’ flashing in white letters. Time, which is damage, has made the letters soft like a heartbeat. The name of the village flashes away, giving way to flashes of the villages. A square with chickens. A noticeboard. Barns that will one day be renovated and whose shutters will be painted royal blue. Like Brittany. Like the modernised barns Joan searches for online.

  The woman looks beyond the dirt road, beyond the town, beyond her own child. She looks beyond, and sees the past.

  And then: the world’s most romantic flashback.

  The village, poor and deserted, but at peace. Images of her husband fill the screen, one after another. Her husband smiling, being a man. Forking up hay. Bringing a glass of wine to his lips. Pulling on a pipe. Straddling a fence. Digging up the kitchen garden. All the things that make him happy.

  The things that make one happy. A close-up of a blinking eye. A baby ignored for the memory of a man. Poor and deserted, but at peace. Before the insurrection, before the Jeep, before the J’Heap, before the man from Talahassee. The village like a heartbeat, pushing the fabric up and down, up and down.

  Unlike the other husbands, Nick had given no news in a while.

  To look back, you had to look beyond. Perhaps the opposite was true too. Perhaps to look beyond, you had to look past. A close-up of her blinking eye. The world’s most romantic flashback. And having to go on, which is not the same as going beyond, and a kid tugging at your sleeve. Or no kid. But something tugging, because there was still a future to be experienced, with or without a husband. With or without a father. Without a baby or with one.

  A close-up of a twitching eye. A close-up of a twitching heart.

  The woman looks beyond the giraffe, beyond the edge of the bed and the shapes that lay there, back into the past. Beyond the white throw, which, together with the white sofa, looks like a lying woman covered in snow. With or without a husband. With or without a dog. With or without a father.

  Everything doused in tears, real and not.

  Meanwhile, a war is won. Depending on where you’re standing.

  The screen fades to black.

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  For more information, click the following links

  Acknowledgements

  About Sarah Françoise

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, Holly, Ursula and Ivy.

  Thank you, Emily, Michael, Pamela and Patrice. Abel, Susan, Bill, Clare and Jamie. Marjorie and Ina.

  Thank you, Emma Finn, Helen Francis, Jake Smith-Bosanquet, Alexander Cochran, Dorcas Rogers and Tracy England.

  About Sarah Françoise

  SARAH FRANÇOISE is a French-Briti
sh writer and translator currently living in Brooklyn, NYC. This is her first novel.

  Visit my website

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Apollo is an imprint of Head of Zeus.

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  This is an Apollo book, first published in the UK by Head of Zeus in 2018

  Copyright © Sarah Françoise, 2018

  The moral right of Sarah Françoise to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN (HB): 9781786697325

  ISBN (TPB): 9781786697332

  ISBN (E): 9781786697318

  Design: Ben Anslow

  Illustrations: Ben Anslow; wood: Maksim Mazur, 123RF; concrete: Roman Tsubin, 123RF