The Wrong Story

by James Ellis

  Karen was standing in the doorway looking down at him. She still wore her coat and it was still belted and buttoned up. How long had she been standing there? A long time, perhaps, because she didn’t move when he looked at her, as if she too had fallen into a trance.

  ‘Hello,’ Tom said, squinting up at her.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘You’re back. I wasn’t sure if you were staying at Sylvia’s or not.’

  ‘I can if you want.’

  ‘I wasn’t saying that. How was it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Work.’

  ‘The same as usual. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘I had a sandwich. How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m tired, too.’

  ‘I’ll sleep in the spare room.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  But she had already gone.

  Tom switched off the lights and went to the front door to lock up, but instead he stepped into the night. It was cool and still, and the street lights gave the pavements and hedges and parked cars an artificial effect, as if they were all props on a film set.

  When he heard the barking again he wondered if it had ever stopped. He wondered if the dog had been barking ever since he had first awoken in the hospital. He wondered if it was outside or if it were in his head, nestled deep within his ear like a parasite laying its eggs; a plaintive howling that was becoming louder, becoming bigger; a sound that might one day fill up his brain and send him into madness.

  12

  ‘Read it,’ the always-angry restaurant owner said. ‘Read the cartoon.’

  I read it.

  In the first frame a fox, a cat and a hedgehog were hiding behind a dustbin while an angry-looking woman in a chef’s jacket and an apron approached carrying a large cake on a tray. Behind her was an open door with the sign Restaurant Kitchen above it. I glanced up at the sign above our door. It read the same but whereas the words in the cartoon were single lines, our sign had neon lighting and cast a shadow.

  In the second frame, the animals seemed intent on snatching the cake, but the angry-looking woman had pressed a button and the tray elevated high above her on an extendible device. She looked happy as the three animals clutched at thin air instead of the cake.

  In the final frame, a pelican flew over the angry-looking woman and took the cake from the extendible device and hid it in its beak, apparently without her noticing as she seemed to be unconcerned and was whistling, as shown by a tiny quaver hanging in the air by her pursed lips.

  I put the newspaper on the ground. The others waited while I lit a cigarette. For once I didn’t offer any around. I took several deep drags before saying, ‘I’m hungry. Is there any food around?’

  ‘Hungry?’ said the always-angry restaurant owner.

  ‘Starving. Have you guys eaten?’

  ‘Are you being serious? What about the newspaper? What about the cartoon strip?’

  ‘What do you want me to say about it?’

  ‘I’m going to hit you,’ she shouted. ‘It’s us. We’re in the newspaper.’

  ‘Why are we in a newspaper?’ said Plenty. ‘Am I famous?’

  I blew a long stream of smoke into the air. ‘You’re right: it is very weird shit. But I’m still hungry.’ I knew I was being dumb but I was tired and I wanted to think about it.

  ‘Is that all you can say?’

  I leaned back and looked at them all hovering above me, waiting for instructions, for some wisdom, an action plan, an explanation of our depiction as a cartoon strip in a national newspaper.

  ‘Well, I like the title,’ I said. ‘I think that should stay. That’s about all I can think of.’

  ‘Well, that’s not good enough,’ said the always-angry restaurant owner. ‘You’re meant to be the one with all the ideas. What are we going to do about it?’

  ‘I’d like to eat before I do anything.’

  Some inner heat seemed to pulse behind the always-angry restaurant owner’s face. ‘You know that actually happened,’ she said. ‘That thing in the cartoon actually happened. I had that extendible whatsit. Remember? I was making a big cake for some reason and I needed some fruit, some cherries or something, and I promised you all some of the cake if you got me the fruit and then when you did, I laughed and said you couldn’t have any? And then when I was delivering it somewhere, the Pelican snatched it and I chased you and it ended like it always ends, with me jumping up and down and you having all the fun. Don’t you remember? It’s got everything right.’ She pursed her lips and blew a long whistle. ‘See? It even got my whistle.’ She looked as if she might be sick. ‘Don’t you get it? Somebody’s been watching us.’

  ‘I did do that, didn’t I? I did. I took the cake.’ The Pelican clapped its enormous wings, showering us with fishy offal.

  I picked up the newspaper again. What was the correct procedure on discovering that someone had been drawing you in a cartoon strip; that your life had been recorded by an unknown hand? Call the police? Burn the newspaper?

  ‘Do we know any cartoonists?’ I said.

  ‘Come off it. We don’t know anybody,’ said Billy. ‘Seriously. We don’t know anybody, do we? Outside of us?’

  I put my cigarette end against my cartoon face in the newspaper and watched it smoulder. I took the cigarette away and there was my charred head on top of my body running across the frame from left to right. I felt my own face. It was fine.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said the always-angry restaurant owner.

  ‘I just wondered… you know.’

  ‘What? If you burn the paper you burn your face? Don’t be stupid. It’s not black magic. Somebody’s drawing us and I think we should find out who that person is and tell them to stop.’

  ‘And then kill them,’ said Plenty.

  Tell them to stop?

  And then the always-angry restaurant owner covered her face with her massive beefy hands and her shoulders began to shake. She was crying. Such a thing had never happened before. I had never seen the always-angry restaurant owner be anything other than always-angry. I stood up, unsure of what to do, acutely aware that any attempt to console her might result in me getting hurt. Billy danced an agitated jig as he too looked on helplessly, and the Pelican opened and closed its beak foolishly. Such was our conditioning to her anger.

  It was Plenty, the fearless cat, who stepped in.

  ‘Are you crying?’ she said, walking up to the always-angry restaurant owner and pulling her hands away from her face so that she could see more clearly. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’

  ‘No, I didn’t hurt myself. Get off.’

  But Plenty put her furry forehead against the always-angry restaurant owner’s teary face and held on to her hands.

  ‘If anybody has hurt you,’ she whispered, ‘I will hunt them down and rip out their throats and climb inside them and eat their bodies from the inside until only their skin is left, and then I will put them on a stick and leave them out all night for the ants to eat and to take back to their anthill in lots of little, tiny pieces.’

  The always-angry restaurant owner sniffed and wiped her eyes. I saw that they were blue and she had make-up on, which was now smeared down her face. I had never noticed that before. It was as if I were looking at her for the first time and seeing her as completely different to how I had imagined. Not only because she had been crying but also because she looked like she was ripening – but ripening in a bad way; bloating and opening up. They all did. I did. We all looked like we were stuffed toys with our stitching coming loose.

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said to Plenty. ‘But no one has hurt me and if they did then, well, you know.’ She patted her rolling pin, which was in her apron pocket. ‘They would only do it once.’

  Plenty seemed to have lost interest in being kind. ‘I think I am the most famous,’ she murmured, picking up the newspaper.

  ‘If you were,’ Billy said, ‘then the cartoon strip would
be called Plenty, wouldn’t it?’

  The always-angry restaurant owner stared at Billy and I knew that he’d added to her distress and I didn’t know why. She sat down on the steps and shook her head, staring at the ground.

  ‘I have a question,’ Billy said. ‘Are there more of these? More cartoons? I mean different ones. Like every week? Or every day? Going back in time? Or even some, you know, already drawn but not…’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I suppose somebody must be drawing this stuff and it would be nice to know who.’ I looked around as if I would see an artist in the corner with an easel, painstakingly capturing the moment, an artist wearing a smock and a beret.

  ‘It was drawn by someone called Tash,’ the always-angry restaurant owner muttered.

  ‘Who is Tash?’ said Billy.

  ‘The person who drew the cartoon,’ said Plenty patiently.

  ‘I mean, who is Tash?’

  ‘Look at the walls,’ I said. ‘It’s sprayed everywhere.’

  I closed my eyes and tried to think. I felt that something very big and very important was in the vicinity. I felt that behind the air that we were breathing, something was pressing towards us, like a face pressing into a balloon, stretching the atmosphere so thin that it might tear and rip, and everything around us would dissolve.

  I was ill-equipped for this sort of thinking. I was a creature that lived in an alleyway. I was an eco-fox who was meant to lead my compatriots in a crusade against waste, the waste created by the always-angry restaurant owner in her pursuit of profit. Except it wasn’t like that. Nothing ever changed. The waste kept coming and in the end all I wanted was a clean corner somewhere that I could call my own. We were grubbing a living, that was all, scoring points off something we didn’t understand. My intellectual capacity extended only to imagining my life as a pile of bin-bags. I was the sum of my experiences and any question I might conceive to ask would be similarly rooted. I knew I could never breach the bubble in which I lived. I was like a plant that knew only sun, soil and rain and would never be able to imagine that a plastic pot bought from a garden centre might be constraining its growth.

  ‘Where did you get the newspaper?’ I said. ‘Was it here, in the alleyway?’

  The always-angry restaurant owner looked up at me and said, ‘I found it in the hospital.’

  ‘What hospital?’

  ‘I don’t know. A hospital.’

  ‘What were you doing in a hospital? Why were you there?’

  ‘I don’t know why I was there, but I was. I just found myself there – while you were away and these idiots were out looking for you.’

  ‘I’m not an idiot,’ Plenty said. She was sitting on a wheelie bin swinging her legs, rolling her ball backwards and forwards on the lid, irritating us all with its tinkling sound. Which I’m sure was her aim.

  ‘You were out looking for me?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Billy.

  ‘It wasn’t like our alleyway,’ the always-angry restaurant owner continued, her voice less emotional now. ‘There was so much detail. So many little things. So much sound and different colours and smells and touches. Even the air felt like it was made of things.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I was pushing a trolley. A food trolley. I was like a mobile always-angry restaurant owner.’ She glanced at me and again I was conscious of a hurt I couldn’t name. ‘Then I found this newspaper and I started reading it and then… then I saw the cartoon. There we all were. I couldn’t believe it. And then a dog started barking.’

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘A dog.’

  ‘Not the dog that attacked us?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see the dog that attacked you. But this one was loud. I couldn’t see it and I didn’t know if it was in my mind or what. It sounded so… all around. And then there was a man. A huge man with a horrible, hairy face. And he shouted at me and his voice was loud too. It wasn’t like our voices. It moved all the air around me. I couldn’t bear it. I had my rolling pin…’

  ‘Did you hit him?’ said Plenty, her eyes glowing again.

  ‘No, I asked him if he could hear the dog too but he walked away. And then I was back here and I thought perhaps I had been dreaming but I still had the newspaper in my hand.’

  ‘I don’t understand it. Do you understand it? No, I don’t,’ said the Pelican helpfully.

  ‘This man,’ I said. ‘What sort of hairy face? Hairy like mine?’

  ‘Not like yours. Like a man’s hairy face.’

  ‘A beard? Eyebrows?’

  ‘A moustache. A huge moustache like a broom.’

  ‘A moustache.’

  I looked again at the graffiti on the walls.

  Tash.

  I knew this man.

  I took the newspaper from Plenty and looked at the strip again. An oblong box divided into three frames; three panels. Buildings in the background drawn merely as an uneven line of roof tops. The characters were all in silhouette. Clean, uncluttered, minimalist. I looked around at the three-dimensional disorder in which I stood and then back at the cartoon. On the right-hand side of the final frame I could see the far end of the alleyway – the dangerous place with cars and buses and motorbikes and people and shops and hustle and bustle. It had been drawn simply as a vertical line, a half-formed outline of a woman and the back of a car, its wheels off the ground and a cloud of smoke shooting from its exhaust pipe.

  Things aren ’ t always what they seem. Like those optical illusions. One moment it ’ s an old woman ’ s face, and the next it ’ s a young woman looking away.

  ‘Hang on, I want to try something.’

  It was still dark. I walked towards the busy high street.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere.’ And I think I meant that.

  I walked to the end of the alleyway and it was as if a long piece of elastic was attached to my back and was now at full stretch. I looked into the bright light beyond and braced myself to walk into the city street. But I didn’t. The light was too bright for my eyes, so bright that it might as well have been a physical barrier, and one that I simply could not pass. I stood there, trying to feel my way into the main road, and then when I couldn’t, I walked briskly back to the restaurant’s side-entrance.

  ‘Well?’ said the always-angry restaurant owner. ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘I don’t know. But the noises from that busy street are no louder at the end of the alleyway than they are here.’

  ‘Fascinating. So what?’

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ I said. ‘And talk.’

  ‘Inside?’

  We normally only went inside when we had somehow tricked the always-angry restaurant owner and ate her food at a table by the window while she fumed outside. We never went inside just on a whim. There always had to be a reason for it. We didn’t even sleep inside. We slept outside amongst the crates and cartons. Only the always-angry restaurant owner slept inside.

  ‘Why don’t we talk out here,’ she said.

  Not for the first time my answer was drowned out by a bark, although that little word doesn’t do justice to the sound that erupted from the dark end of the alleyway. If the earth opened up and an enormous hole that stretched all the way to the planet’s superheated iron core appeared, and it barked, it would have made a similar sound. It echoed around the alleyway, bouncing from wall to wall and back again.

  ‘That is a big bark,’ said Billy.

  ‘That’s like the barking I heard in the hospital,’ said the always-angry restaurant owner, standing up and peering into the darkness.

  ‘It’s a dog,’ said Plenty.

  ‘You don’t say.’

  It was a dog, although it seemed to be mostly head, jaw and teeth. And it was hurtling towards us, emerging as if from the wrong end of a telescope, with huge gobs of saliva streaming from its mouth and steam blowing from its nostrils.

  ‘Is that the dog from the other day?’

  ‘I don’t
think so,’ I said. ‘The dog that chased us was, well, it was like a dog; a real dog. But that thing, that thing is –’

  ‘Like us,’ said Plenty.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It looks familiar.’

  It was difficult to tell in the dark and we were also being showered by oily feather-ends and dollops of evil-smelling gristly jelly which hampered our vision. The Pelican was ascending. ‘I’m going to the window,’ it said. ‘No, the roof. No, the chimney.’

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ Billy said. ‘Before the dog eats us or the Pelican poisons us.’

  Adrenalin is a wonderful thing. We moved from one spot to another without any discernible motion. We were inside the restaurant following the always-angry restaurant owner through the kitchen and up the stairs. We stopped on a gloomy landing that was poorly lit by a low-watt bulb. The banister rail was old and scratched, and the carpet – as far as I could see in the dim light – was covered with a thick layer of dust that obscured a fading pattern of intertwined flowers. There was another staircase at the far side of the landing leading upwards, and two doors. I opened one door, thinking that we could hide in there in case the dog followed us, but it was an empty room; floorboards and plain walls and one window. It made me shiver and I closed the door. I felt as if I had looked in on some terribly sad and private scene.

  ‘Tell me you closed the kitchen door,’ I said, looking over the banister.

  ‘I shut it,’ said the always-angry restaurant owner. She seemed uneasy.

  A voice came from above. ‘Hello. Hello? Hello.’ The Pelican had found its way to the roof.

  We went up the second set of stairs and found a wooden door at the top. I opened it and we stepped out onto a small square area set amongst the tiles and chimney pots of other roofs. Below us on one side was a sheer drop to the alleyway. Above, laid out like a vast black blanket, was the night sky, lit on one horizon by the glow of the light I had seen at the bad end of the alleyway. From our new vantage point it looked more like the light from a fire. The Pelican was perched on a chimney pot, the fleshy sack below its beak hanging loose and blowing in the wind, its eyes crossing and uncrossing as it focused on each of us in turn.