Stories We Tell Ourselves Read online

  ‘Jesus, what is it? Now you’re scaring me.’

  ‘Your dad’s been having an emotional affair.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lois. Her mother’s use of the word ‘emotional’ both reassured and irritated her.

  ‘He doesn’t know I know.’

  ‘Then... How do you know?’

  Joan left the question hanging.

  ‘The weird thing is, I’m not sure how much I care,’ said Joan. ‘I mean, it makes me livid, but not for the reasons you’d think.’

  If Frank didn’t know Joan knew, then all the extraordinary tension must be coming from Joan. She imagined her mother giving Frank all kinds of passive-aggressive hell. She pictured her father, disengaged, buckling under the weight of secrets that, at the end of the day, were smaller than hers. She’d never told her parents about the Historian, because she’d fallen short on so much already – career, parenthood, and now marriage.

  There used to be a joke about a sleepwalking uncle. He’d often wake Lois and the others up at night, the sleepwalking uncle, slamming the front door open and giving loud soliloquies to the mirror. Lois would sometimes get up and spy on him from the staircase. He’d say funny things about there being eighteen AAA batteries in the cupboard, but no mayonnaise. And then there was that one time when he held the Christmas cactus up to his face and asked if those were tears in its eyes, or if it was only the onions.

  He’d sleep-drink too, and make himself enormous sandwiches that wobbled too much, and looked like they’d end up splat on the carpet. And sometimes he’d see Lois spying on him, and he’d bellow out something vulgar and it made her laugh, because it was all in his sleep, and she’d run back to her bed and hide under the covers, and pretty soon all would be quiet downstairs. The next morning her aunt would say, ‘Oh, that silly uncle, sleepwalking again,’ and she’d add mayonnaise to the shopping list.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ asked Lois.

  ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ said Joan.

  Lois didn’t know what to say. If one of them should have an admirer, surely it was Joan. She was the one who made new friends and stayed current with the old ones, who saw their social engagements as a diversion, not a demand. Up until this point, Lois had always thought of herself as being more like her mother, and less like Frank. Her father had just gone and changed that, simply by being himself.

  ‘I just wanted to warn you. If things are tense, you’ll know why. But don’t worry, everything else about Christmas will be normal.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ said Lois. ‘I mean, not about Christmas.’

  ‘Well, I’ll let you get to work. Safe travels. Your dad and I can’t wait to see you.’

  The snow stopped falling vertically and, instead, started whipping at a diagonal. Somewhere in Corona, a squirrel’s neck snapped.

  *

  Dearest Heide,

  My essay on Caspar David Friedrich is coming on leaps and bounds. Or should I say, it is staring cautiously and with considerable support from an oak over the abyss of completion. For completion is an abyss, since it is getting to the bottom of things, which leaves you with nowhere else to go. I suppose it could be a wall, but then there would be no view, and what are we doing if not looking out further, trying to convince ourselves that there is something beyond ourselves, beyond our daily problems, beyond the instruments of our lives, and the boiler that breaks down, and the shower nozzle that is all stopped up with calcium deposits, and will need to be soaked in vinegar again? I think that is why I love the mountains so – all possibility and no persons.

  Joan came into the living room with the vacuum cleaner. She had done the floors earlier, but was now going around with the special nozzles: the long skinny one that fitted under the sofa, the bendy one that went inside the anglepoise, and the one with the plastic whiskers that floated over the books and kept them cobweb-free.

  Frank stood up and tightened the belt of his old threadbare bathrobe. The robe was a Christmas present from Lois, when Lois was two. Joan had done this; she’d picked out gifts for him from each of the children, until they were old enough to forget to do it themselves. There was a picture of him wearing the robe that Christmas, holding Lois on his lap. Lois – her trademark red helmet bob a mess – was tiny in the picture, and sucking on the straw of a CANDY chocolate-milk box. Frank had pinned the picture to the wall of his home office, and whenever he looked at it he tried to avoid himself, because he didn’t care to remember that he would never be that blithe or young again.

  Frank had been pushed out of his real office in the centre of town by a cumulation of hindering circumstances such as the breakdown of the photocopy machine, the shutting-off of the electricity due to unpaid bills, the loss of a parking space due to unpaid charges, and the uncontrollable expansion of the archive, which had grown like Maya’s kindergarten pet tea mushroom.

  When Frank bought the office he had a partner, a secretary, a draughtsman and two apprentices. For a while there were even office Christmas parties. These were always held at the height of summer, in a family restaurant called La Frite that had a mini-golf course out front. Lois and Maya believed the place to be crazy posh, with its deep baskets of fried whitebait that came with moist towelettes, and lemon sherbet served in real, hollowed-out lemons.

  In the end, the secretary lasted the longest, but possibly saw Frank as a slow-sinking ship, and had the foresight to jump. Joan offered that there were surely other secretaries looking for work in town. But Frank saw all the office-related issues as linked, and solving them one by one felt about as vain as swimming in one of those counter-current pools his Swiss clients seemed to like. Lois and Maya continued to clamour for the real lemon sherbet long after the dog-days Christmas parties ceased, long after La Frite was bulldozed over to accommodate a new car park.

  Working from home started off as an indulgence, but before long Frank came to dread the twenty-minute commute to his cold, unclean office, which, in any case, ceased to be a viable workspace at sundown. He weaned himself off the office completely, taking over the guest bedroom with his inky razor blades, toppling piles of binders and tubes of blueprints. He built himself a desk, which was supported by breeze blocks and two sections from the trunk of the old cherry tree the neighbours had lobbied to have him chop down, on the wretched charge that it rained cherries onto their property.

  He made a plan to organise the archive, get a storage space, and rent out the old office. They would use the extra money to finish off the house. The plans to empty the office started dying before they were even hatched. Started dying when Frank was but a boy and things around him – father figures included – changed fast and often. By the time December came round, he hadn’t set foot in the old office for months.

  Joan sucked dust up off the table, circling his laptop and his letter to Heide, which lay hidden behind the landing page of his blog – a home for his musings on German Romanticism and French place names. Frank picked up the computer, walked out of the office and went over to the landing.

  I told you last week about my client from Dubai. Well, it looks like the project might go ahead. The client wants to fly me over in the new year to meet his associates. They expect me to bring my wife, I think. The associates want to meet her. But – no, what are you making me say? We must never be in an airport together.

  The sound of the vacuum cleaner was accumulating in a corner of Frank’s brain, like snow around dust particles. Frank remembered he’d promised to bring the decorations down from the attic. He liked the fact that they still had the straw ones he and Joan bought in the Black Forest, on the honeymoon that killed their first VW.

  These days, it was the car that killed the marriage. For some reason, Joan objected to the shit he kept in there – more of the office archive, the occasional McDonald’s burger wrapper, items that had been en route to the dump since 2007, the sand and dirt of fifteen years of ownership.

  At home he tapped his right foot constantly. The foot was frenetic under the tab
le, the desk, in front of the news at night. In the car the foot had dug a madness-trench under the driver’s seat which exposed the metal of the chassis. Joan nagged that the car – like the house – was unsafe, but you didn’t catch diseases from Alpine dirt or the stale smell of a Big Mac, and dust in carpet was not a leading cause of traffic accidents, argued Frank.

  Last night, I dreamed you had curated a show made entirely of paintings of me. In each portrait I was wearing a different outfit. I was upset because, in some of them, I looked a little old and overweight. One outfit was a white T-shirt with the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics logo on it, and these pyjama pants J keeps threatening to throw out. The other was a soldier’s uniform – the old khaki wool ones. The last outfit was one of your dresses. A dress I remember you wearing that time we drove to Amsterdam. I recall it was pink, or the colour they call salmon, and it had a square cut-out neckline. In the dream you also asked me to proof-read your memoir. I said I couldn’t see the writing, only blank pages. You said, have you never heard of invisible ink? It’s made with lemon juice. It becomes visible with salt. Frank paused. In the dream you blended into your surroundings. Like Friedrich’s Madonna blends into the mountain.

  The dream had touched Frank’s vanity, and made him feel older still.

  Dearest Heide, on the eve of my entire family showing up, I must confess that I have no enthusiasm for anything but you, Caspar David Friedrich and my dog.

  Downstairs the vacuum cleaner went dead, and Frank heard Joan walk from the living room into the kitchen. A minute later the electric kettle started the wheeze that sometimes made Frank think of murder. He couldn’t believe Joan pointed out the malfunction of his car, of his arterial pressure, of his method for remembering which pills to take by lining the tablets on the Flying Dutchman CD case, when her own tea kettle was such a lousy piece of equipment.

  ‘Did you get those decorations down, yet?’ shouted Joan, even though he could hear perfectly well now the hoover had stopped.

  Outside, the mountains were on their way to silhouettes.

  Frank saved the draft and closed the laptop. He thought of going to the fridge and eating something, but decided it wasn’t worth it. Joan would only make some comment. Why should he feel guilty about eating from his own fridge? In pure investment terms, he had much more of a stake in the fridge than she did. Frank knew how much harm such a thought might do if articulated out loud. It was never formally agreed between them that Frank would make the money and Joan would raise the children. Things just took that course. Joan often wondered what she might have become, if her becoming had been tethered to something other than the kids.

  But Frank did feel guilty. Not from writing to another woman, because that correspondence existed in the world of maps and image searches and Wordpress comments – a world they kept reminding him wasn’t real. He felt guilty because someone was making an effort this Christmas, and it wasn’t him. Someone had gone to the trouble of planning meals and doing headcounts for future feasts. Ingredients were spoken for. The fridge was no longer just a fridge, but a system. He knew that, and he found deference for Joan in the idea that, at least, no one expected him to be a good mother.

  *

  There is another house with veins of slate which sits in an always muddy berth. A salty rain falls on it nine months out of the year. The blue roof goes slick and black, and you get wettest coming in or out of the house. The walls of the barn – the one that lost its head to rotten tiles – are more brittle than Joan’s shortbread, and more crumbly than her crumble. Each summer they burst into butterflies that land on the dead power lines that are still tacked to the roof.

  The house is more time than place; an HQ for rock pool hunting, a starting point for the activity of chasing sunsets, a bunk bed for muckraking or whispering about the boys next door, who turned from little frogs into suntanned surfers with biceps and mobile numbers, an end point for nights in unlit churches on cliffs, co-sponsored by the tourism bureau and the local coffee-roasting plant.

  The house is at the other end of France, where the country throws itself at America and falls 4,400 miles short. Frank bought the house in 1990 for no money at all, from a woman who hated it because it reminded her of her ex-husband. It reminded them of nothing they had ever seen before. They had rented holiday homes like it in the area, but those had running water and brown tiles everywhere, and no German graffiti from the last summer squatters.

  The house came with its own well, but the water was no good for drinking, and therefore it was dedicated to wishing. The well had no roof, and the splashes of tossed francs got more promising after every rainstorm.

  Everything falls into place in that house, even the rain.

  Lois is seven, then eight, ten, fifteen with friends, eighteen with a boyfriend. She makes secret treasure maps with hologram stickers, slides snails up against each other to watch them mate, and gets addicted to chicory. Maya is two years behind and prettier. Lois is the one who names the cows and chickens and makes a game out of touching the electric fence. They all get shocked, and pretend it increases their brainpower. Maya is the one who makes friends with the other kids in the hamlet, and threatens to jump out of the bathroom window when she doesn’t get her way. Lois keeps vials of putrid flower water in the barn, which she later decants into her mother’s empty perfume bottles.

  Then comes William, quite a bit later. The favourite no one resents. He learns knitting with the grannies and woodwork with the sleepwalking uncle, who buys him a special box to cut perfect angles with a saw. He calls it a see-saw. He sets the table for lunch and dinner, and lets his sisters dress him up as a reindeer, even when it isn’t Christmas.

  Frank, architect, does nothing to this house but give it running water. He lets it be. He gives it over to them, like someone gave over the garden to those sickly fuchsia roses. They fill it with driftwood and noise, and white and blue crockery from the Habitat in Lyon. Lois tells Joan it is like one of those magazine houses, only smaller. Joan beams. Unlike the other house, the ambitions for this house have nothing to do with the house itself, and no one resents its imperfections. The cracks in the wall hide the cigarettes Lois shoplifted on a school trip to Prague. The sleepwalking uncle builds a workbench for all the improvements no one will ever seek.

  Joan fills the linen cupboard with antique sheets and monogrammed pillowcases she buys at the flea market. She finds a farm that will sell her butter. She picks up the butter every week – big doorstops of it, wrapped in kitchen parchment and tied with parcel string. The butter smells like grass, and hides great big crystals of salt that go crunch under your teeth, like grit.

  It reminds her of Cornwall. Of dangling her legs over a stone wall, and stealing sips of her mother’s shandy. Of going to the cinema in someone else’s town. Of licking the dried salt off her forearm, long after a swim. Things don’t feel so French here, and when you’re up to your knees in ocean, it’s almost like you’ve left the country.

  They get used to the hornets, which come back year after year, and Lois decides this is where she’ll live when she grows up. She’ll be a famous poet and marry one of the surfer boys next door, and their children will learn the vanishing Breton language in the Diwan schools, and breed bunnies as pets.

  Frank likes it here. He can be here for ten whole days before he starts missing the vertiginous comfort of the mountains. He can drive to the beach and walk south or north, but eventually the beach stops. He likes the fishermen’s suppers, with their plates of steamed langoustines and the plastic boats of yellow mayonnaise that taste just like the mayonnaise his great-aunt used to make. He is happy he could give them this house to spend their summers in, and he is happy to join them there as and when he can.

  Maya gets married there in 2009. It’s Cole she marries, of course. Cole’s family come over from England on the ferry. They rent out the gîtes where Frank, Joan and the kids stayed before they had this house. Maya works on the priest for months to book the local church. It’s speci
al to them because once, Frank swept the entire church floor with a key in his mouth and was cured of his toothache. The priest softens when he hears of this miracle, and concedes when Maya raises enough money to restore one of the stained-glass windows. After the ceremony they have seafood platters and cider in the garden, and crêpes for the kids. Joan sits back and watches her middle child, who is now married. Maya is already pregnant with Gitsy. She is happy. Joan is happy. And if Joan and Maya are happy, then they are all happy. It is like chemistry.

  That is the holiday house, the one that charts the family like nicks and dates in a doorframe. Their only responsibility is to appreciate and share it.

  The other house, the one Joan is vacuuming now, is built on the fault line of Frank’s ego.

  3. Verbascum

  RODRIGUE DOES NOT want to keep on going. That much is clear. There is no sound, but he’s shaking his head like a man who knows danger. Like a man who has already lost something to danger.

  The mic starts again with a ‘Shit, man’ from the cameraman, his Southern drawl reverberating with static and gunshots. He points the camera back and forth, from Rodrigue to the driver, who are yelling at each other in Sango. ‘What the fuck, man?! Tell him to keep driving.’ The driver seems to weigh up whom to listen to; the thirty-something Americans who will pay him in cash tomorrow, or the man who knows his language, and has used the word for ‘kill’ five times already. ‘Don’t stop, man, just go. Go!’ The Jeep creeps forward a few feet and stops. Now the driver holds a mobile phone to his ear, but he’s not talking. At some distance there is a rain of gunfire.

  ‘What the fuck... Rodrigue: tell this motherfucker to start the car. Voiture. Commençer, voiture, you idiot. Tell him, Tim. We’re missing it.’ It takes Tim a second to get his mouth wet enough to speak. ‘Dude, I think we should turn back.’ Tim’s knuckles are stretched bone-white around the driver’s headrest. ‘What do you wanna do, Tim: go back to the fucking hotel, and film some Evian bottles? Wake up nice and early to catch a presser? Fuck, man. What’s wrong with you pussies?’ Rodrigue, the fixer, looks at the road ahead and then at the road behind to figure out if he’ll be shot in the face or in the back of the head.