The Wrong Story

by James Ellis

  ‘I see the dark,’ it said.

  Billy leaned over the parapet and looked down. ‘And I see the dog,’ he said. ‘It’s still down there.’

  The dog, which still seemed to consist mostly of a head with a small, barrel-like body attached, was ripping the alleyway apart. Boxes, cartons, dustbins, litter, restaurant rubbish, it was all being strewn across the ground.

  Plenty said to the always-angry restaurant owner, ‘Can I see your bedroom?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I see another room, then? Can I see your little sitting room or your bathroom or your –’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you can’t.’

  ‘That’s not a reason.’

  ‘It is when you’re in my restaurant. Tell her, Scraps, tell her to shut up.’

  I looked at them both, one tired and careworn in her stained chef’s jacket; the other small and torn. I looked at Billy, composed and yet fading, quills dropping, worry lines around his eyes; and at the Pelican, a loosely coupled collection of bone, beak and feathers held together by maggots and decay. And what, I wondered, did they see when they looked at me? A scrawny, skinny and wasted animal with the glow of desperation lighting his eyes? Or merely another fox?

  ‘You can’t look in them because there’s nothing to look at,’ I said to Plenty while watching the always-angry restaurant owner. ‘There’s nothing in the rooms because she never leaves the restaurant. She never goes upstairs.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

  ‘It’s true and it doesn’t matter. We’re all the same. We all use the same bits of this’ – I gestured around – ‘this place. It’s half-formed, like we are. We know stuff but we can’t remember how we came to know it.’ I looked at Plenty. ‘Tell me, what did Nanny actually look like?’

  Plenty shrugged. ‘Like a nanny.’

  ‘Yes, but what exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know. Stop asking me questions.’

  ‘I see the dark,’ the Pelican said again.

  ‘Stop saying that,’ said the always-angry restaurant owner. ‘Of course it’s dark. It’s night-time.’

  I looked at the Pelican more closely. When its eyes were crossing and uncrossing like knitting needles, it usually meant it was thinking, or it had swallowed something large and acidic.

  ‘You asked me,’ it said. ‘You asked me, “What do I see when I’m up there and you’re down here?” That’s what you asked me. Didn’t you? I’m sure you did.’

  ‘That was ages ago,’ said Plenty.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So you see the dark. But what do you see during the day?’

  ‘Dark. I see the dark. I see the nothing. Although sometimes I see other things.’

  ‘The nothing? During the day? What do you mean? Where?’

  ‘Down there.’

  The Pelican pointed its beak at the silhouetted horizon and its words hung in the air like the smoke from a firework, until the always-angry restaurant owner said, ‘Do we have time for this? Of course there’s something there. The Pelican doesn’t know what it’s talking about.’

  I took a deep breath. The Pelican had subsided back into whatever passed for thought. ‘I think we have to leave the alleyway,’ I said.

  They looked at me. I waited. Braced. I expected dissent. I expected argument, refusals, huffs, and a long and painful process of talking them round. But it had to be done. I didn’t know why but I felt that it was imperative to our well-being that we left as soon as possible. And no matter what they said, or how stubborn and intractable they were…

  ‘Okay,’ said Billy.

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘If we have to go, we have to go.’

  The always-angry restaurant owner nodded too. ‘It won’t be forever, though, will it?’ she said.

  ‘Can I take my ball?’ said Plenty.

  ‘I’ll pack. No, I won’t. I haven’t got anything to pack,’ said the Pelican, fluttering its feathers up and down, releasing waves of noxious, opaque gas that drifted up into the air and changed the colour of the stars.

  I was shocked. ‘Really? No argument?’

  Billy came over to me. ‘Look at this.’ He plucked a quill from his back and then snapped it in half like a dry twig. ‘Do you know what happens when a hedgehog loses its quills?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither do I, but it can’t be good. We are dying here. The Pelican would look better if it was inside out, Plenty’s got more patches then fur, you look like shit and the almost-angry restaurant owner smells worse than one of her fish stews.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘I think we have to find the hairy man,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why, but I do.’

  ‘Fair enough. I don’t know why we do either, but if you think we do, then that’s good enough for me. You’re Scraps, right? Our fearless leader. What happens when we find him?’

  I looked at Billy and at the others, at the night sky and the silhouettes of the buildings and at the dog down below trying to eat through the walls. I thought about the blood in my saliva and the bright light at the end of the alleyway and the dark that the Pelican saw when it flew in the sky. I remembered my smouldering face in the newspaper and the word Tash that now seemed to swirl around and around inside my head. I tried hard to think beyond those things because I knew that it was all important. But all I could do was shake my head and say, ‘I don’t know.’

  13

  weekendingnews.com/lifestyle/jean_hannah/111009/

  Dancing on Tables: An Interview with Barbara Hannah

  By Germaine Kiecke – 8 May 2013

  As part of our series of occasional interviews with parents of creative artists, our Arts Editor Germaine Kiecke was lucky enough to catch up with Barbara Hannah QC, widow of Joseph Hannah, the award-winning architect, and mother of cartoonist Tom Hannah. How did these two indomitable females hit it off? Read on…

  The Regency Palace Retirement Village has all the trappings of a first-class hotel. It’s large, friendly and, I suspect, very discreet. The taxi-driver confides, in the way that taxi-drivers do, that more than one A-List celebrity from the 1960s is a resident, as well as a number of notables from the worlds of art, commerce and science.

  I’m met in reception by an efficient young lady who assures me that I am expected and shows me to the communal lounge: a large and sunny area that leads onto a terrace and the rolling lawns beyond. This is a place to take tea, read the papers and reminisce, but the people I see around me look too busy to dwell on the past. Most are talking on their mobile phones or bustling past on their way to meet friends, relatives and, for one resident at least, a journalist.

  There is a tangible aura of accomplishment in the air and I suspect that behind the sensible cardigans and floral dresses, the smart ties and polished shoes, there are people who know exactly what to do in an emergency, and would do so with an understated efficiency.

  While I wait I run through my notes on my intended interviewee, Barbara Hannah: human rights barrister, eco-campaigner and now, since her retirement from public affairs, a self-confessed thorn in the side of all things unfair, unjust or plain daft.

  I can’t wait to meet her.

  Exactly on the hour, the door on the far side of the lounge opens and a tall, rangy woman appears. She is dressed in fur-lined slippers, a tartan skirt, a blue cardigan and a white shirt buttoned up to her neck. She walks slowly and with the aid of a stick.

  ‘It’s the inconvenience of old age,’ she tells me as she sits down. ‘But better than falling down all the time. My husband used to say that the secret of a long life is to stay vertical for as long as possible.’

  She is concerned that I may have found it difficult to park – apparently, the visitors’ car park is being used for a fête which may account for the profusion of the floral dresses – but the fact that I came by train and taxi meets with approval. Railways, it seems, are a fond memory.

  ‘We always used to travel by train to visit my
parents who retired to the coast. Joseph and I would cycle to the railway station, catch two trains, and walk a mile. This was before the children were born, of course. It was the rituals of the journeys that we loved – buying a coffee at the same café while we waited for our connection, sitting on the bench at the furthest end of the station, choosing a forward-facing seat at the front of the first carriage. It was all part of the fun. Fun is so important, don’t you think?’

  I nod and wonder if I am having enough fun in my life. I can see why Barbara was such a formidable lawyer. Her certainties make others doubt their own.

  We go back to her apartment, which is neat and tidy, light and airy. There are flowers in vases and the walls are covered with family photographs, framed newspaper articles, Scraps cartoons and postcards from abroad. In the centre is an aerial photograph of the so-called Peanut Building, the construction that won her husband the RIBA Stirling Award in the late nineties. Barbara has her own terrace that overlooks the side of the house, and her table is laid with plates, cutlery and a bottle of white wine with glasses.

  ‘I thought we might have fish and chips,’ she tells me. ‘They do a delivery. It’s very good. And I’ve got some nice bread. Do you like wine?’ I say I do, which meets with more approval.

  Barbara Hannah is 80 years old and going strong. Born in London in 1933, she was an only child and evacuated during the Second World War to Dorset, where she fell in love with the sea.

  ‘It was wonderful. We weren’t allowed on the beach because of the mines being washed ashore, but of course we used to sneak down there anyway. And then a patrol caught us. Goodness, one of the soldiers gave us such a dressing down. All I can remember are his boots – great, shiny lumps of leather. I didn’t dare look at his face. I was scared stiff because I thought he was going to arrest us and tell my mother. I don’t think we went within a mile of the sea after that, but I still loved being beside the seaside. Such a change to London. Although I adore London, too.’

  She was relocated to an arable farm, growing vegetables for the war effort.

  ‘And they were all cricket-mad. Grandfather, mother, father, aunt, uncle and four little boys – all built like Shire-horses. We’d play cricket in the lanes in the evenings with an old swede that was rock-hard and a hockey stick. I could throw the swede further than any of them and it stung like a wasp if it caught you.’

  I sense that if given the chance she would still like to throw the odd vegetable around.

  ‘I would love to but I don’t think my eyesight is up to it. It’s all part of becoming old. They gave me glasses that turn dark when I go outside and light when I come inside. I told them I didn’t need glasses at all, I mean I can see, but she told me to go outside with her and I did see the difference. Mind you, I caught sight of myself in a window: an old, grey-haired woman with a stick and dark glasses. I told her I didn’t want glasses if that’s what I’m going to see.’

  I ask her how she met her husband.

  ‘My parents wanted me to settle down and marry a “nice young man”. A nice young man? I didn’t want a nice young man. I wanted to have some fun. Joseph was fun and he made me laugh. We met at a charity function. Joseph tripped over me when I was demonstrating a wicket-keeper’s crouch. He burst through a door and he was so tall he didn’t see me down there. We both ended up on the floor talking about the quality of waxing on the floorboards. He was a very funny man, but different to me in every way. He was a ditherer and would take forever to come to a decision. I’d say, what do you want to do, Joseph? And he’d say, I want to do this, no I don’t, I want to do that. Goodness knows how he ever got his buildings built. Not like me. I’m straight to the point.’

  They had two children, Tom and Caroline. Caroline is the eldest by almost ten years and I ask if Barbara felt that such an age difference meant she had had two only children.

  ‘I suppose so. But we were always a close family emotionally. Joseph was away on building projects a lot of the time, and I travelled too, but we were close. I suppose we weren’t a stereotypical family unit but, well, they turned out all right.’

  The fish and chips arrive and we squeeze into tight, old-fashioned and solid dining chairs. Barbara cuts the bread and arranges the slices in a circle on a plate while I open the wine.

  Barbara is a forthright person and she freely admits that her directness can come across as abrasive, but she makes no apology for that and her zest for life remains undiminished, and she is clearly at ease with herself and her surroundings. She seems to prize having fun over most things.

  ‘It’s an attitude,’ she says. ‘It brings out the best in people: generosity, kindness, laughter. It’s not about having fun for the sake of it, or having fun at the expense of others, it’s about a willingness to do new things and enjoy them, to be with people, to not be so solemn about life.’

  After her legal career ended, Barbara chose to campaign on behalf of No Waste No Want – an environmental pressure group for which she became its most vociferous spokesperson.

  ‘I spent a year at home while Joseph worked and then I thought, right, enough loafing. Time to get out there and do something. I saw a homeless man taking food from a bin at the back of a restaurant. I went and had a look and there were piles and piles of discarded food – perfectly edible. And the same is true in countless other alleyways in countless other towns and cities. Yet elsewhere people are going without. It’s wrong.’

  Barbara retired from public campaigning when Joseph died of a heart attack in 2010. They had been married for 52 years.

  ‘It was simply the most dreadful thing. He died at the dining table. One minute he was alive, the next he wasn’t. It’s impossible to describe the effect that the sudden absence of someone you love can have. Nothing else matters. Whatever other issues or concerns you may have, they simply vanish in the face of death. Joseph was a big man and he left a big gap in life – for me and for Tom and Caroline. It’s the finality as much as anything. We live our lives planning ahead, dreaming of tomorrow and when there is no tomorrow it’s… well, it’s difficult to reconcile. We lay them in a coffin and there it is: the beginning, middle and end of their story, of their life. It’s terribly sad.’

  Finding herself suddenly living alone, Barbara took the remarkable step of selling everything and moving into the Regency Palace. Was it an escape from reality, I wonder, or simply a pragmatic decision made by a practical woman?

  ‘I had a friend who lived here and I always thought she was having the most marvellous time. I wasn’t going to get any younger and the children had their own lives, so why not? I didn’t want to rattle around in that big old house on my own. Besides, I’d rather make the decision myself than be put away when I’m too old to argue.’

  I can’t imagine Barbara ever being too old to argue. She devotes her time now to letter-writing and emailing people and institutions that annoy her. An innocuous occupation for most but a potent pastime in her hands.

  ‘I am unashamedly left-wing. It is the absolute duty of the strong to look after the weak – economically, militarily, socially, domestically. I can’t bear this jingoistic nationalism that people call patriotism. It’s not patriotism, it’s xenophobia, plain and simple. I can’t abide bigots.’

  After lunch, we clear the table and Barbara folds the tablecloth neatly along the seams. She is, I notice, very precise. We go for a walk around the gardens and Barbara’s glasses do indeed turn dark when exposed to light. I ask her about her children’s success and how that has informed her own life.

  ‘I learn from them all the time. It’s always a wrench when you realise that you are not the only influence in their lives, and that they listen to other people: teachers, friends and so on, and start forming their own opinions. But it’s thrilling at the same time. It’s the essence of life, I suppose, the accession to one’s own individuality, to one’s own liberation. At least it is for me.’

  Caroline is an aid worker based in the Gambia.

  ‘She has a wonder
ful and fulfilling life. She lives in a compound and keeps dogs – lots of dogs. We had a family Labrador years ago. Joseph bought him from a rescue centre and Caroline went mad for the thing. She learned to walk by dragging herself up on his ears. But he was completely untrainable. We’d take him for a walk and he would zoom off into the distance until he was just a dot, and then zoom off in another direction. There was never any fetching of sticks; he was just a ball of yellow fur zooming backwards and forwards in the distance. Whenever we had visitors he got excited and urinated all over them. Have you ever been extensively urinated on by a large dog?’

  I confess that I haven’t.

  ‘It’s not something you readily forget. But the poor thing got tetchy as he got older. We had to have him put down after he turned on Tom and bit him.’

  For a time, Barbara had travelled to Banjul each year to visit Caroline, but has been unable to do so since her balance has deteriorated. Does she miss the travel?

  ‘When Caroline used to collect me from the airport we’d drive back to her compound, bouncing wildly up and down in her car, and I’d stay for two weeks each year. I’d sleep under a mosquito net at night and sit on the verandah during the day, sipping gin and tonics and watching toucans in the trees. Of course I miss the travel. Wouldn’t you?’

  We sit on a bench beneath an apple tree and look back at the house. It seems so calm and serene. There’s not a cloud in the sky and it’s still warm. I can imagine that these comfortable and capable people create their own world of endless summer days. I mention this and Barbara laughs. She is no stranger to surreal imaginings.

  ‘Tom was an imaginative little boy, a real daydreamer. Of course, he was Tommy then. I still call him that sometimes. He hates it. I used to worry that he was spending too much time on his own but I suppose it was his choice. We weren’t the sort of parents to set any rules in that respect. He was quite a large child and one always assumes that big equals strong.’