The Wrong Story

by James Ellis

Tom closed his eyes and took a deep breath. And then another, and another until he felt he had breathed deeply enough times. Then he stopped breathing for as long as he could and listened. At first he heard nothing except the hiss in his ears and the sound of his own blood pumping, but then possibly, just possibly, he thought he could detect… something. A sound that seemed to be sitting in the blue mists of a distant horizon. He shook his head to clear it of such fancies and opened his eyes again.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘That was odd.’

  His words hung in the air and he looked around, wondering if he had said them aloud. There was a hole in the silence that made him think he had, and at the same time wish he hadn’t. He put his hand against the mirror. It was solid. He turned around and listened some more. Still there were no sounds other than his own. The house was empty. He looked back at the mirror and at the wall on which it hung, and then at the ceiling and the floor and the sink and the taps, and at all the things that ought to be in a bathroom and were.

  What are you supposed to do when you’re alone in a house and you look in a mirror and see a fox standing on two legs urinating onto the floor and shaking off the drips? What do you do when that fox is a three-dimensional, living, breathing, large-as-life incarnation of your best-selling cartoon character? And what do you do after all the deep breathing and listening, when afterwards the fox is not there anymore and the mirror is just a mirror and time ticks by and it doesn’t happen again and cars drive past and birds tweet and everything is perfectly normal everywhere else in the whole world?

  ‘You go to bed,’ Tom said to his reflection. ‘That’s what you do. You go to bed and get some sleep. Because it didn’t happen.’

  He turned off the light and went to bed, leaving the bathroom and the rest of the house in darkness.

  The Pelican looked up and saw that the day w as done and that the sky was as dark as the ground. Above and below, it thought, if thinking was indeed what it did, above and below. It extended its massive wings as if they were a cape beneath which smaller creatures could shelter. It looked around at th e rooftops and through instinct assessed the shapes and substance of each brick component, comparing and contrasting and weighing the worth of each as a place to perch, a place in which it might blend in and pass a peaceful night.

  Below, it could see the o thers in the restaurant settling down for the night, bickering and teasing, taunting and planning and plotting and preparing for whatever was to come. And elsewhere it saw Tom, his head on the pillow, a shaft of light from outside illuminating his face, hi s wide moustache lying like a short, rough cord across his face, his eyes open and staring at the ceiling. The Pelican shifted its wings slightly and their shadow fell across Tom’s face, and soon he was asleep.

  10

  The following morning Tom woke up and didn’t know where he was. It was as if somebody had scooped out the middle of his brain. He stared at the ceiling and groped in his mind for a thread on which to pull, for a nugget of knowledge from which he could rebuild his world.

  He thought he might be in the hospital and looked to his right where a window with a view of a multi-storey car park might be, and to his left where the nurses’ station could be located. Neither were there. The walls and ceiling were white – not grey – and blue curtains – not blinds – covered a window that was on his left, with a bedroom door beyond the foot of his bed instead of another hospital bed.

  His mind was adrift and he held on to the bedclothes tightly, wondering whether he would have to call out for help. And then he remembered. He was in his bedroom, in his house. It was morning and he was at home. He was Tom Hannah, he was a cartoonist, he was married with children, he had fallen off a roof.

  He sat up and saw that he was alone in his bed. On the pillow next to him there was a note. It read: Didn’t want to disturb you. Staying at my sister’s. Back tomorrow afternoon. See you then. K. He read the note several times and then lay back on his pillow. Was tomorrow today?

  ‘Come on, Thomas. Engage.’

  He threw back the bedcovers. He was naked. His clothes from the day before were piled up on the floor – next to an empty bottle of wine. He looked at them and he looked down at himself and he couldn’t remember going to bed. Oops. The doctors had recommended no alcohol.

  ‘Idiot.’

  He picked up the clothes, folded them, and put them neatly on a chair. He went into the spare bedroom and found that the bed was made and there was no sign of Karen. He walked up and down on the carpeted floor and then opened and closed the door several times – he supposed it was possible she had got up and left the house without him hearing.

  He went to the bathroom and looked into the mirror. No sign of any fox. It was his face and his face alone looking back. The same cold-lidded eyes, wide-spread nose, stubbled chin and outrageous moustache that he had expected to see. He grinned. He had good teeth. It was a shame one was now missing. He cleaned them but couldn’t floss the broken gum and when he spat the mouthwash into the sink it left a reddish stain.

  He showered and – taking care of his thumb – he raked his fingers through his hair, which was long and hung like a thick, greying flannel against his neck. He pushed it back from his forehead and then let it drop again – there were too many lines on his forehead, too many shadows under his eyes. He tried a smile and then pulled back his lips into a grimace. He thought his nose looked bent. He looked more closely at his damaged mouth and could see a thin line of jagged tooth poking out from the gum.

  ‘Grrr.’

  He towelled his face vigorously, which left his moustache carrying a static charge. It was thicker than the brush on a broom. He stroked it and it felt bushier than he’d ever known it. How big could it grow, he wondered?

  Back in the bedroom he pulled out some clothes: jeans and a shirt and a ruined pair of leather boots, and then caught sight of himself in the mirror. Again there was no sign of any fox, just Tom and his amazing electrified moustache. He decided that there was no point in getting dressed and put on his fluffy blue dressing gown instead.

  He went downstairs and immediately felt that something was missing. There was a muscle-memory that wanted him to do something but he couldn’t remember what. It was another tickle in the back of his mind. He looked around seeking inspiration but found none. Dan would be at school, Holly at college and Karen somewhere, at work now or still at her sister’s. He was alone in the house. What else was there to do? Have a drink? But that wasn’t allowed.

  ‘Trust yourself,’ he said. ‘Always trust yourself.’

  It was a large kitchen with work-surfaces on all sides and a pedestal in the middle. There was a cooker with six hobs and two ovens, a giant American refrigerator and a long, marble-effect counter with stools that separated the cooking part of the kitchen from the sitting-around-and-eating part. There were three doors: one led to the hallway, one led to the garden and one led to the outhouse attached to the kitchen.

  Tom looked at the outhouse door. There was something about that door. He got up and tried it but it wouldn’t open. It was old and solid, the type that came with a big key. He looked around for the key but he couldn’t find it.

  ‘Why are you locked?’ he said.

  The door didn’t answer and Tom leaned with his head against its wood, picturing what lay beyond. It was a musty-smelling room with white-washed brick walls hung with long strands of thick cobwebs like threads of candy-floss that had escaped their stick. There were shelves filled with cleaning equipment, dusters and mopheads, aerosol sprays long-forgotten and never used, and drawers full of nails and screws and bulbs. There was a rusting, sit-up-and-beg bicycle that once belonged to his mother and was now used for its large wicker basket as a place to store potatoes and carrots and onions. Nothing to keep under lock and key. And where was the key? Tom made a mental note to ask Karen about it.

  He made coffee and sat at the kitchen table and looked out through the window and thought about nothing except a leafy branch on a nearby tree that swayed bac
kwards and forwards in the wind.

  When the house phone rang, Tom was still lost in thoughts of nothing. He picked it up and said, ‘Hello?’

  It was Borkmann.

  ‘Tom.’

  Tom thought about hanging up and returning to his leaf but Borkmann’s voice was like a blade stabbing out from the receiver.

  ‘Tom. Are you there? Tom, it’s Gerard.’

  ‘Hello, Gerard.’

  ‘Tom. How are you today?’

  ‘I’m well.’

  ‘The thumb.’

  ‘It’s well too. Still bandaged. It says hello.’

  ‘Have you tried drawing with it?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Don’t leave it too long.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Do you need anything?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Good. Right then.’

  ‘Right then.’

  ‘I’ll call again tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay. Thank you.’

  Borkmann’s voice had been like a gunshot on a sunny day and the house seemed quieter after his call. The tree and its branch and its leaves no longer held Tom’s attention and instead he looked at his reflection in the window.

  ‘Crazy man,’ he said.

  He finished his coffee and noticed that when he drank there were muscles in his cheeks that pulled his face forwards as if he were whistling a tune. He found a notebook in a kitchen drawer and a black felt-tipped pen, and tried to draw a picture of a man with his face pulled forwards. It wasn’t a bad effort given his damaged thumb.

  ‘Crazy man,’ he said again, but this time it sounded genuinely odd, so he stopped saying it. The silence inside the house seemed even louder now. His ears hissed and whined, and outside cars drove by and the wind rustled through trees, shushing the cars.

  Tom put his drawing to one side. He thought about going up to his study and logging on to his laptop, but the call of the internet and contact with the outside world didn’t interest him. Instead he wrote Tash on the notebook. He sat back and studied the word. He had heard that people’s expressions changed when they wrote their own names. He wondered if a dog’s face would change when it marked its territory. Or a fox’s face when it pissed on the other side of a mirror.

  He wrote Tash on every page in the notebook using different styles of writing. He stood up and walked around the kitchen and found a bottle of gin in a cupboard and poured some of it into a plastic tumbler. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

  ‘What?’ he said, looking at his reflection in the kitchen window. ‘What? I’m trusting myself.’

  He added some tonic and drank the gin and poured another, collected a packet of crisps and sat back in his chair at the kitchen table. He thought about the past few days: about being in hospital and about not being able to remember things, about Maggie’s laugh. And about Maggie. Then he thought about the note that Karen had left on his pillow and the uneven writing as if she’d written it in a rush or at an angle or on some flexible surface such as her hand. Then he tried to remember what he’d been doing on the car park roof and why he’d been up there in the first place. He wondered what it had felt like to fall. He imagined he was falling backwards into his mind, creating a big splash and displacing his subconscious, letting all the detritus in his head float to the surface.

  He closed his eyes and imagined he was his own metropolis, buzzing with activity, teeming with thoughts and memories and feelings, with new sounds and sensations arriving at the borders of his body every second. Blood circulated, nerves tingled, warmth was generated, internal units switched on and off like central heating systems. Then he imagined that he was floating upwards until the ground beneath him was a mosaic of greens and browns and the horizon curved and the sky turned to night. He imagined rising until the world was a tiny revolving disc far below and he was floating in space.

  At some point during all this thinking and imagining he fell asleep, and when he awoke it was two o’clock in the afternoon.

  You know those moments when you ’ re falling asleep while you ’ re driving and you don ’ t know it?

  Everything ached and his mouth tasted odd. Something was hanging down from inside his broken tooth. It felt like a red tadpole and he wondered if it was the nerve. He sucked on it and it popped back into the tooth again.

  ‘You need to see a dentist,’ he said, and then heard sounds in the hallway and realised he had been awoken by the front door banging – not a dog barking this time, or a cough, but a door closing. His front door. The daylight coming in through the kitchen windows seemed heavy and over-bright and he rubbed his eyes, not feeling good at all. He sat up just as Karen came into the kitchen.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hello.’ She was with a man.

  It made for an uncomfortable tableau. Tom, huge and dishevelled, sat at the kitchen table in his fluffy blue dressing gown, staring at them with bleary eyes above his wide, sticky moustache, a half-empty bottle of gin, a plastic tumbler and an empty packet of crisps scattered across the table in front of him. Karen, still belted, buttoned and buckled up in her coat, hovered midway between the kitchen door and the table. And the man, a man who appeared older than both Tom and Karen, the interloper, with sandy hair and almost white eyelashes, slim and skinny-hipped and wearing a narrow grey suit, hung back looking with amused eyes from Tom to Karen as if he were watching actors on a stage.

  ‘That’s good. I hoped you’d be up,’ Karen said. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Tired,’ Tom said. He looked at the sandy-haired man. ‘Hello.’

  The man nodded and looked at Karen with raised eyebrows, as if making the point that it was her turn to speak.

  ‘You remember Lawrence?’ she said to Tom.

  Tom took a closer look. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Lawrence and Karen exchanged glances, which irritated Tom.

  ‘Okay. Well, this is Lawrence from work,’ she said. ‘Lawrence, this is Tom. Lawrence, why don’t you wait in the living room?’ She spoke each word as if it was unconnected to the others, like laying down a trail of stepping stones on which to walk.

  Lawrence smiled and said, ‘Of course,’ and went to the living room without asking where it was. Karen turned back to Tom.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘You’re home.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘You weren’t in hospital for long. That’s good.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very good. It could have been worse.’

  ‘Gerard brought me home. So I was all right.’

  She nodded as if imagining the scene. ‘That was nice of him.’

  ‘Weren’t you going to visit me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  Karen frowned. ‘Don’t get funny. I was at work. I had to work late. I phoned the ward and they said you’d been discharged and that you’d gone home. So I phoned the house phone but there was no answer.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you come in last night.’

  ‘I just popped in. You were asleep. I thought it better if you rested.’

  ‘You could have woken me. I wouldn’t have minded. Where were you?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘After you just popped in.’

  ‘Tom, we stayed at my sister’s. I left you a note.’ She looked at the bottle. ‘You’ve been drinking?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s an open bottle in front of you.’

  Tom looked at it. ‘I meant not just now. I had a drink at lunchtime. Yes.’ He wondered if it mattered that he could lie so easily, or if Karen could tell, or if she cared. Her expression remained calm and she spoke in a quiet, measured tone as if not wanting to excite any emotion.

  ‘You’ve just got out of hospital,’ she said. ‘You’re not meant to drink at all.’

  Behind her was a large, stainless steel coffee pot. In it, Tom saw his reflection bending round the sides, making his nose extend towards him. His hair was stiff and rising upwards like the g
rey-black smoke from a forest fire, flat on one side where he had lain on his arms for almost four hours.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What about medication?’ she said. ‘They can’t just let you out without any… I don’t know, supervision, can they?’

  ‘I am being supervised. You’re here. And I’ve got painkillers and a prescription and an out-patient’s appointment in a couple of weeks. That’s ample supervision.’

  Karen stared at him and shook her head. ‘You shouldn’t drink,’ she said. ‘And we should go and see Lawrence.’ She continued to stare and when Tom said nothing she said, ‘He’s come out of work to see you. We can’t stay too long. Then you should get some rest.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’ve just come out of hospital after falling off a roof.’

  ‘I mean why has Lawrence come to see me?’

  She sat down on the other side of the kitchen table and rested her chin on her hands. Tom was reminded of the moment Maggie had sat down on his hospital bed and told him that he had fallen off a roof. He wondered how many times he had seen Karen sit in that very spot: brush in hand, applying the final touches to her make-up, putting up the barriers, locking in her thoughts. Each small, careful, delicate upward movement of the tiny brush creating another layer of control between the Karen inside and the world outside. He wished it was Maggie sitting there instead of Karen.

  ‘I don’t understand this memory business,’ she said. ‘Is it just the Sunday you fell that you can’t remember or other times as well? Is it all going to come back?’

  Tom leaned forwards until their heads were level across the table, face to face. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The Sunday has definitely gone. There might be other gaps but how would I know? It’s only when somebody says something that I ought to know, that I know.’

  ‘But it could all come back, or some of it? At any time?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You definitely don’t remember Lawrence? You don’t remember him at all?’

  Tom rubbed his face. Why, he wondered, was life so hard? He looked at the bottle.