The Wrong Story

by James Ellis

  ‘Hello?’ His voice sounded distant and tinny. ‘Is that me? Can you hear me, me?’

  ‘Who’s me?’ said Plenty. And then after a moment’s reflection, ‘I’m me. He’s talking to me.’

  ‘We’re all me, you idiot,’ said the always-angry restaurant owner.

  The face on the box said, ‘Don’t forget to invent a pill that will keep Mum and Dad and Caroline and me alive forever. You won’t forget to do that, will you?’

  ‘Say something,’ Billy hissed from the distance.

  ‘We won’t forget,’ I shouted.

  The screen faded and Plenty kicked the box off the path, and we carried on with our walking. The sky remained blue and clear, the sun remained high and warm, and then we saw the underpass. The path dipped and what crossed above was merely a section of road, suspended in the air. We could hear the sound of cars but none could be seen, and as we approached, the smell of urine became stronger.

  ‘Home from home,’ Billy said.

  ‘I am not going under that thing,’ said the always-angry restaurant owner.

  ‘It’s just an underpass,’ I said. ‘And you’ve got your rolling pin.’

  ‘There might be mice in there,’ said Plenty. ‘I like little mice.’

  Billy rolled her ball into the tunnel. The bell sounded very small echoing back off the walls.

  ‘Let’s go and see,’ he said.

  ‘Keep together.’

  We walked in. The place stank but I found the coolness and the solidity of the concrete walls and ceiling comforting, and although it couldn’t be possible, there was definitely the sound of cars passing overhead. I liked that too.

  ‘Look,’ Plenty whispered. ‘People.’

  Sitting on a blanket halfway along the underpass were an old man and a young girl. Keeping close to the wall on the far side, we walked towards them.

  ‘How about a cigarette?’ said the girl as we approached.

  ‘Sure.’ I rolled two and handed them over.

  ‘We’re looking for a hairy man,’ said Plenty.

  The girl nodded. ‘Aren’t we all? Got any change?’

  I shook my head. ‘No pockets.’

  ‘What about her?’ she said. ‘The cook.’

  We looked at the always-angry restaurant owner.

  ‘Me? I haven’t got any money,’ she said. She patted her apron pocket. ‘Nothing.’

  The old man peered more closely at her. ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘She’s the always-angry restaurant owner,’ said Plenty. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  The old man nodded, rocking backwards and forwards as he did so. ‘But that’s not a name, is it?’

  The always-angry restaurant owner ignored him and walked on. We hurried after her and when we emerged from the underpass things were different.

  A world similar but not the same as the one he ’ d known before.

  That feeling of my life being stretched over something much bigger was back. Across the road was a hospital. It was a busy road and I had to shout to make myself heard above the traffic that was now visible. I tried to see inside the cars, to see the people’s faces, but they were moving too fast.

  ‘Is this it? Is this where you were?’

  The always-angry restaurant owner nodded but I could see that her mind was elsewhere. Was she still thinking about those people in the underpass, I wondered? What was her name? And then I remembered how upset she’d been the night she showed me the cartoon strip in the newspaper. I put my hand on her arm.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?’

  ‘I was just thinking about what they asked you. In the underpass just now.’

  ‘Well, don’t.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I mean it, Scraps. Don’t.’

  We crossed the road and entered the hospital. We walked through the reception area, past the shop and the cafeteria and into a long corridor. A woman’s face projected onto a plastic head asked us to use the wall-mounted alcoholic gel dispensers situated to her left. We all stopped and gelled up. Clean, lean and green.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ said Billy. ‘I don’t like this at all. Look at all these people, and the colours and the sounds. Everything is so vivid.’

  ‘I like it,’ said Plenty. ‘I can smell food…’

  ‘And the rest. Everything smells. Even the air smells.’

  ‘I’ve noticed something else too,’ I said. ‘Nobody is taking any notice of us.’

  ‘Is that bad?’ said the always-angry restaurant owner. ‘Surely that’s good? I think that is good. Is that good? God, I sound like the Pelican.’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s odd that nobody is taking any notice of us?’

  ‘But why would they?’ said Billy. ‘We’re just ordinary…’ he trailed off. ‘Things.’

  That was my point. I hadn’t seen any other talking bipedal animals at all, not even a singing goldfish. So why wasn’t anybody taking any notice of us?

  ‘I’ll make them take notice,’ said Plenty.

  A man in blue operating scrubs walked along the corridor. He was young, had dark hair and an expressionless face. Plenty stepped out in front of him and put her paw on his chest.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  He stopped and looked at her. She was a five-foot seven-inch white pedigree cat, standing on two legs, with a tail, fangs and claws like scalpels. She was by any measure an aggressive piece of work. He didn’t bat an eyelid. He simply stopped. I walked over and joined them – a six-foot skanky fox with a furtive air, probably smelling of tobacco and urine. He was okay with that as well.

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ said Plenty.

  Still no reply.

  I took a closer look at him. There was something indefinite about his features. He reminded me of the carpets and the spare rooms in the upstairs sections of the restaurant. They had given the impression of substance, of something solid and real, but if you looked too hard the patterns would begin to shift as if unwilling to be studied. I looked at his badge. The writing was indecipherable, as if it had been smudged. He looked like a memory of someone; the basics were there but none of the detail, and that thought troubled me.

  I said, ‘Well, you have a good day. Go save some lives.’

  We stepped out of the way and he walked on. Plenty and I went back to the others.

  ‘See?’ she said. ‘They like us.’

  ‘In the same way that the wind blowing in our face likes us,’ I said.

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  We carried on, along more corridors, until we turned a corner and met another stream of people who passed us by without pause.

  ‘Hey,’ said Billy. ‘There’s your doctor friend again.’ A man in blue operating scrubs walked along the corridor towards us. ‘Hi, buddy,’ said Billy. The man looked at us without expression and walked on.

  ‘Rude,’ said Plenty.

  ‘You know, half of these people look the same,’ said Billy.

  ‘And how do you know where you’re going?’ the always-angry restaurant owner said to me.

  ‘I just do.’

  I didn’t want to tell them that I was simply following the most defined path. Because one other thing I had noticed was that a lot of the corridors we walked past simply petered out to nothing. It was like seeing a pathway that had never been used. I pushed that thought away, too.

  We turned a corner and the corridor opened out into a wide waiting area. Seats were laid out in rows in front of a reception area… and there he was.

  As simple as that.

  What had I expected? Dramatic music? A fade to the credits?

  He was about 20 feet away, a large, bulky man squeezed into a blue suit, with an unkempt beard and a substantially wide moustache. I saw him and I knew him. More than that, I knew him. We stopped and for a moment none of us said anything. We might have stood there for a long time,
but our inaction was broken by the always-angry restaurant owner, who shouted, ‘There he is.’

  She pointed at him and he turned and stared at us. He had been talking to two women, two nurses, and one put her hand on his arm and I heard her say, Are you allright, Tom?

  We all looked at each other. Tom.

  ‘Tash,’ breathed Plenty. I lit a cigarette and my paws were shaking.

  That ’ s not allowed.

  The nurses turned and looked in our direction.

  Tom? And then we heard another voice calling, Thomas Hannah? Is Thomas Hannah here?

  Thomas Hannah. I was convinced then. This was Tash. This was our cartoonist. He ignored the voice and continued to stare at us, fiddling with his hand. I puffed on my cigarette and Billy chewed his gum. Plenty picked up her ball, weighed it in her hands and then batted it down the corridor. It landed on the floor and rolled up to the feet of the nurses. One of them still had her hand on his arm. I wondered if they were trying to restrain him.

  ‘He can’t take his eyes off us,’ the always-angry restaurant owner said out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘But I wouldn’t say he was overjoyed with the view,’ said Billy.

  Is Thomas Hannah here? Are you Thomas Hannah?

  Tom, come and sit down.

  But he didn’t sit down. Instead he picked up Plenty’s ball. I thought he looked stiff and tired and I felt sorry for him. I felt stiff and tired too. He shook the ball and the bell tinkled and then he let it fall to the ground.

  That ’ s odd. I didn ’ t think she put the ball in her mouth.

  I looked at Plenty and she looked at me. ‘I don’t,’ she said.

  I threw down my cigarette. ‘Let’s go and talk to him.’

  We set off along the corridor but Tom was stepping back, turning and walking away. He was picking up speed and by the time he reached the glass fire door that led to the stairs, he was running. I saw him push through a set of glass doors and disappear down the stairs. More than ever I knew we had to talk to him. I ran down the corridor after him with the others following, Billy scooping up Plenty’s ball as he passed it. We went through the glass doors and ran down the stairs, along the corridors, through the reception area and out into the fresh air. Our man had gone.

  ‘I can’t keep this up,’ puffed the always-angry restaurant owner. ‘You go on. I’ll catch up.’

  ‘No, we should stay together,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t run all the time,’ the always-angry restaurant owner said. ‘I’m not an animal. I’ll have to walk.’

  ‘No need,’ said Billy. ‘He’s gone. We’ve lost him.’

  We sat on the pavement by the hospital entrance. We could hardly follow his scent, whatever the always-angry restaurant owner might think of our animal abilities.

  ‘What do we do now?’ she said.

  I was about to repeat my phrase of the week, ‘I don’t know’, when we heard the beat of wings and smelled rotting fish. We looked up and there, descending like a vast, broken kite and accompanied by a fall of maggots, was the Pelican. It came in too fast and I glimpsed the panic in its eyes before it hit the pavement like a sack of rice, its feathers crackling and snapping, and all kinds of crap bouncing upwards. It looked all in. Its skinny ribcage blew in and out like paper-thin bellows. It was getting old. I felt a sudden surge of compassion and of regret, as if there were things unsaid and opportunities missed. I shook my head.

  ‘Want a cigarette?’

  The Pelican’s eyes seemed to swap places as it focused on the question. ‘No. Yes.’

  I handed out a few ready rolled. ‘So where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been to yesterday and the day before.’ The Pelican rolled smoke around its throat pouch and blew it out of both sides of its beak.

  The always-angry restaurant owner groaned. ‘Its brains have gone.’

  ‘We’ve been chasing the hairy man,’ Plenty said. ‘But he got away.’

  ‘So we’re stuck,’ said Billy.

  I was finding this place very complicated. There were too many variables, too many things to think about. It wasn’t only the physical things that were untidy, random and uncontrolled; it was everything: the atmosphere itself, my thoughts, time. Everything was jumbled up with possible outcomes all over the place.

  The Pelican raised its flaking, mottled, decaying head. ‘From above I can see below.’

  ‘Someone put it out of its misery.’

  ‘You mean from up there you’ll be able to find him?’ I said.

  ‘Do I? I saw the dog.’

  ‘The dog? We think the dog’s Bullet. Do you remember Bullet? But why would we want to follow the dog?’

  ‘Perhaps she’s going back to where she’s been all this time,’ said Plenty. ‘Perhaps that’s where the man lives.’

  I liked that idea. Why was everyone else having all the good ideas. ‘Okay, let’s follow the dog,’ I said. ‘Or rather, the Pelican can follow the dog and we’ll follow the Pelican.’

  But first we rested. The always-angry restaurant owner insisted – which was another good idea I hadn’t had. We waited an hour and set off with the light fading, walking through the darkening streets while the Pelican flapped around overhead. We didn’t need to see it, we followed the scent of decomposing marine life.

  We walked along empty streets with litter-strewn pavements, past parks surrounded by railings, past pubs with bright lights outside but no sounds coming from within. We passed by an alleyway and I thought I saw the vague shape of a lumpy young boy, dressed in his school clothes, being taunted and tormented by two other children as he hurried along on his way to somewhere. The always-angry restaurant owner shivered and drew her chef’s jacket closer around her. Finally, we turned into a cul-de-sac and saw a large house with a cherry tree in its garden, unlit and in darkness.

  The Pelican circled the house like a gigantic bat and then landed on the roof.

  ‘Are we here?’ I said.

  We heard a loud bark from beyond the houses. ‘I guess so. She’s coming,’ Billy muttered. ‘So now what?’

  ‘We go in, of course,’ said Plenty. ‘But it has to be Scraps who goes in first. It’s always Scraps. We’ll come in afterwards and eat all of the food and kill all of the little mice and rats. We’ll go to sleep in front of the fire and always live here.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ I said.

  I walked up to the front of the house and then followed the walls round to the back.

  ‘Don’t eat all the little rats and mice,’ Plenty called after me.

  In the darkness I could see the outline of an outhouse attached to the kitchen, extending onto the lawn. I tried the windows as I went, but they were all tightly shut. The back door, too, was locked. But when I got to the outhouse I found that the windows were older, and one was cracked: a long line running from the top to the side. The putty was ancient and I dug into it with my claws, gently pushing at the top of the pane, working it loose until I could lift it out. I reached in and unlatched the window.

  I climbed into the outhouse and lit a cigarette to calm my nerves, and tried the inner door. It didn’t move. I pulled again and then hauled on the handle with all my meagre strength. Still nothing. I looked through the keyhole to see if there was a key on the other side but there wasn’t. I checked that it wasn’t a door to be pushed, and then tugged sharply on the handle, turning it hard. I felt it give. It wasn’t locked; it was stuck.

  I kept tugging and as I heaved the door upwards and inwards, it scraped open. Not much of a gap but enough that I could slip into the kitchen.

  I liked kitchens. I looked inside the fridge but it consisted mostly of bottles of beer and wine. I found a sliver of cheese and ate it and walked into the hallway. I saw a light beneath the living-room door and, looking up the stairs, a ladder leading to a trapdoor in the ceiling. I crept upwards in exaggerated steps, the carpeted stairs creaking beneath my feet, when a loud commotion kicked off outside. In my experience, loud commotions that include shouting, hissin
g and the sounds of running feet are best left alone. If only. I retraced my steps and left the house to see what was going on.

  18

  http ://www.tashfanz.com/borkmann%200715interview.htm

  A Belgian television interview with Gerard Borkmann from August 2014.

  On 26 August 2014, Gerard Borkmann was interviewed by Germaine Kiecke for her late night arts television show Kiecke In Conversation. The interview was never transmitted but the following transcript was made available to The Borkmann Creative Agency on request.

  Germaine Kiecke (to camera): The Borkmann Creative Agency is one of the largest cartoon syndication agencies in the world and the UK’s largest independent agency. It distributes cartoon strips, political illustrations, games and puzzles to over a thousand newspapers and magazines around the world. Its founder, Gerard Borkmann, began syndicating material from a back room in a London fish market in the 1960s. Now he presides over an international operation with offices in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo. Still working out of his original rooms in London’s East End, Borkmann himself is perhaps best known as one-time mentor of the cartoonist, Thomas Arthur Stevenson Hannah, or Tash as he is known publicly, and The Borkmann Creative Agency is the commercial force behind the formidable, and very lucrative, Scraps cartoon industry. A man renowned for his firm views and no-nonsense manner, this promises to be a lively interview. Gerard, welcome and thank you for coming in.

  Gerard Borkmann: Hello.

  Germaine: Gerard, what makes a successful cartoon?

  Gerard (pause): I think empathy. The public have to relate to the cartoon and so does the cartoonist.

  Germaine: To the characters you mean?

  Gerard: To the characters, yes, and to the situation and the storyline. The whole product.

  Germaine: I suppose that’s true for any fictional narrative. I was wondering if there was something more specific to the cartoon medium. For example, the drawing style.

  Gerard: All right. They have to relate to the drawing style too.

  Germaine: I can see that. I suppose I’m following a line, exploring, whether or not there is a style common to the more successful cartoons, or rather, is there an approach to cartooning that is more successful than others? I mean, why is Scraps successful and other cartoons are not? Do you see what I’m getting at?