by Anna Burns
TWO
The morning after that run session, and earlier than usual, and without telling myself why, I walked out of my way to the other side of the district to catch a different bus into town. Also I got that same bus home. For the first time ever I did not do my reading-while-walking. I did not do my walking. Again I did not tell myself why. Another thing was I missed my next run session. Had to, in case he reappeared in the parks & reservoirs. If you’re a serious runner though, and a distance runner, and of a certain persuasion from a certain part of the city, you pretty much had to incorporate that whole stretch of territory into your schedule. If you didn’t, you were left with a curtailed route owing to religious geography, which meant repeatedly going round a much smaller area in order to get a comparable effect. Although I loved running, the monotony of the wheelrun told me I didn’t love it that much, so no running went on for seven whole days. Seemed too, no running ever again was to go on until my compulsion to do so got the better of me. On the evening of the seventh day of no running, I decided to return to the parks & reservoirs, this time in the company of third brother-in-law.
Third brother-in-law was not first brother-in-law. He was a year older than me and someone I’d known since childhood: a mad exerciser, a mad street fighter, a basic all-round mad person. I liked him. Other people liked him. Once they got used to him they liked him. Other things about him were that he never gossiped, never came out with lewd remarks or sexual sneers or sneers about anything. Nor did he ask manipulative, nosey questions. Rarely, in fact, did he ask questions. As for his fighting, this man fought men. Never did he fight women. Indeed, his mental aberration, as diagnosed by the community, was that he expected women to be doughty, inspirational, even mythical, supernatural figures. We were supposed also to altercate with him, more or less too, to overrule him, which was all very unusual but part of his unshakeable women rules. If a woman wasn’t being mythical and so on, he’d try to nudge things in that direction by himself becoming slightly dictatorial towards her. By this he was discomfited but had faith that once she came to with the help of his improvised despotism, she would remember who she was and indignantly reclaim her something beyond the physical once again. ‘Not particularly balanced then,’ said some men of the area, probably all men of the area. ‘But if he has to have an imbalance,’ said all women of the area, ‘we think it best he proceed in it this way.’ So with his atypical high regard for all things female, he proved himself popular with the females without any awareness he was popular with them – which made him more popular. Of beneficial significance also – I mean for me with my current problem with the milkman – was that all the women of the area viewed brother-in-law this way. So not just one woman, or two women, or three or even four women. Small-numbered women, unless married to, mother of, groupie of, or in some way connected with the men of power in our area – meaning the paramilitaries in our area – would have gotten nowhere in directing communal action, in influencing to their advantage public opinion here. Local women en masse, however, did so command, and on the rare occasions when they rose up against some civic, social or local circumstance, they presented a surprising formidable force of which other forces, usually considered more formidable, had no choice but to take note. Together then, these women were appreciative of their champion which meant they’d be protective of this champion. That was him and the women. As for him and the men of the area – and perhaps to their astonishment – most men liked and respected third brother-in-law too. Given his superb physicality and instinctive understanding of the combative male code of the district he had the proper credentials, even if his behoving to women, in the eyes of the men, had reached extreme bananas stage. In the area therefore, he was all-roundly accepted, as by me too, he was accepted, and in the past I did used to run with him but then one day I stopped. His tyrannous approach to physical exercise overtook my own tyrannous approach to physical exercise. His way proved too intense, too straitened, too offensive of reality. I decided though, to resume running with him, not because the milkman would be intimidated physically by him, harbouring fears of brother-in-law fighting with him. Certainly he wasn’t as young or as fit as brother-in-law, but youth and fitness don’t count for everything, often not even for anything. You don’t need to be young and able to run to fire a gun for example, and I was pretty sure the milkman could do that all right. It was his fanbase – that cross-gender esteem third brother-in-law was held in – that I thought might prove a deterrent to the milkman. Should he take exception to brother-in-law accompanying me, he’d encounter not only the opprobrium of the entire local community, but his reputation in it as one of our highranking, prestigious dissidents would plummet to the point where he’d be put outside any and all safe houses, into the path of any and all passing military patrol vehicles, exactly as if he wasn’t one of our major influential heroes but instead just some enemy state policeman, some enemy soldier from across the water or even one of the enemy state-defending paramilitaries from over the way. As a renouncer heavily reliant upon the local community, my guess was he wouldn’t alienate himself for me. That was the plan then, and it was a good plan, and I took confidence from it, regretting only that it hadn’t occurred to me seven days and six nights earlier. But it had occurred now so next thing was to launch it into action. I put on my running gear and set off for third brother-in-law’s house.
Third brother-in-law’s house was en route to the parks & reservoirs and as I approached everything was as expected: brother-in-law on his garden path, in his gear, warming up. He was muttering curses and I didn’t think he knew himself he was muttering them. ‘Fuckin’ fuckin’’ issued softly from him as he stretched his right gastrocnemius muscle then his left gastrocnemius muscle, then more ‘fuckin’s’ during the right and left soleus muscles, then he said from profile, because stretching was a focused business, also without indication that here I was, returning to run with him after a considerable breach since last running with him, ‘We’re doing eight miles today.’ ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Eight miles it is.’ This shocked him. I knew I’d been expected to frown, to assert that eight miles certainly was what we were not doing, then in one of those imperialistic, goddess fashions, to assert how many miles we were doing. My mind though, was on the milkman so I didn’t care how many miles we did. He straightened up and looked at me. ‘Did you hear me, sister-in-law? I said nine miles. Ten. Twelve miles is what we’re doing.’ Again this was my cue to take issue and pick bone. Normally I’d have obliged but at that moment I didn’t care if we ran the length and breadth of the country till we reached the point where the littlest cough – even someone else’s – should cause our legs to fall off. But I tried. ‘Ach no, brother-in-law,’ I said. ‘Not twelve miles.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘fourteen miles.’ Clearly then, I hadn’t tried hard enough. Worse, my throwaway attitude, given the nature of my sex, now had him properly agitated. He looked intensely at me, maybe as he wondered was I sick or something. I didn’t ever know what brother-in-law wondered but I did know it wasn’t that he didn’t want to do fourteen miles or wasn’t capable of fourteen miles. To him – in his need to be gainsaid – as to me – in my preoccupation with the milkman – the mileage was the most irrelevant thing in the world. It was that I hadn’t browbeaten him and, ‘I’m no browbeater,’ he began, which meant we were in for a prolonged bout of one-sided haggling, but then his wife, my third sister, stepped out onto their path.
‘Runnin’!’ she grunted, and this sister was standing in her drainpipes and flip-flops with every toenail painted a different colour. This was before the years when people except in Ancient Egypt painted toenails different colours. She had a glass of Bushmills in one hand and a glass of Bacardi in the other because she was still at that stage of working out what to have for her first drink. ‘You two are fuckers,’ she said. ‘Uptight control freaks. Obsessive, anally retentive nutcases of— Anyway, what class of bastard goes runnin’?’ Then she left off because five of her friends turned up at their door. Two u
sed their feet to shove open the tiny house’s little gate, for their arms couldn’t do the shoving because their arms were piled with alcohol. The others went through the hedge which meant yet again that hedge was made a mess of. This was a miniature hedge, a foot high, ‘a feature’ as my sister called it, but it hadn’t been able to feature because of people forgetting it was there and pushing through it or falling over it, which was what three of the friends now did. As a verdure therefore, it was distressed again, pulled out of shape again as these women made their way through it out onto the grass. Before they squashed into the tiny house, as usual they mocked the two of us as runners. This they did in passing, nudging us out of our stretches – the tradition whenever they came across us in any solemn, warming-up stance. Finally, before they closed the front door and we two had jumped the hedge to set off on our running, already I could smell the cigarettes and hear the laughter and bad language from the living room; could hear too, the glug of a long liquid being poured into a long glass.
*
We ran along the top reservoir, which was seven days after I’d last run along it with the milkman, with third brother-in-law continuing quietly to curse to himself. I myself was keeping a look-out for the disturbance even though I did not want that person in my head. I wanted maybe-boyfriend in my head, for there he’d been, all cosy, until uneasiness about the milkman had pushed him out of it. This was Tuesday and I was meeting him later that evening after I’d finished this run and he’d finished tinkering on his latest beat-up car. I called the present one grey and he called it a silver zero-x-something and he’d set aside his fixed-up white one to get in this beat-up grey one to start resuscitation immediately, but when I walked into his living room last Tuesday he had a completely different bit of car on the floor. I said, ‘You got car on the carpet,’ and he said, ‘Yeah I know, isn’t it brilliant?’ Then he explained that all of them – meaning the guys at work – had been overcome with orgasms because some super-special motor vehicle, built by some high-dream carmaker, was dumped – ‘For fuck all! For nothin’! They wanted nothin’ for it!’ he cried – into the middle of their garage, into the middle of their laps. ‘Can you imagine?’ he said. ‘No beans! No sausages!’ meaning money, meaning the owners not wanting any. He seemed in shock so I was unclear if this encounter with the dream car had been a good thing or a bad thing. I was about to ask but still he hadn’t finished. ‘The people who brought it in,’ he said, ‘also said, “You fellas can have our broken cooker, our bit of fridge, our mangle, some ratty carpet that’s okay really just a bit smelly so give it a wash then put it in your toilet, plus you can have all our broken glass and breezeblocks and bags of rubble for to make a conservatory hardcore foundation with as well.” So then we thought,’ said maybe-boyfriend, ‘that these poor auld people think we’re a boneyard and not a car mechanics and so maybe it wouldn’t be right to take the Blower off them because they’re mentally confused and don’t know what they’re doing, don’t know either maybe, what that car – even in the state it’s in – is worth. Some of us though, nudged others of us and hissed, “Don’t be sayin’ anything. They want rid of it, so we’ll just take it,” but some of us did say something – rephrasing the mental bit so as not to hurt feelings of course.’ He said the couple then rounded and said, ‘Are you saying we’re stupid or something? Are you saying we’re poor or something? What is it you’re saying? What something?’ Then they got insulting. ‘If you fuckers think we’re mad, then we’ll leave and take our white furnitures, our rubbles, our lumbers, our Blower Bentley, our carpet, all our excellent material that we brought for you with goodwill with us. So take it or leave it, see if we care.’ ‘Of course we took it,’ said maybe-boyfriend. At this point I opened my mouth to ask what was a— but he pre-empted by saying ‘racing car’, supposedly to make it easier for me. Normally he didn’t make it easier – not deliberately, but because he’d get carried away even though once again he was ill-judging his audience whenever he talked car and I was his audience. He’d talk on, giving technical exposition to the last hyphen and punctuation mark which was more than needful, indeed helpful, but I understood he had to make use of me because he was excited by the car and I was the only one in the room. Of course he wouldn’t intend me to remember, just as I wouldn’t intend him to remember The Brothers Karamazov, Tristram Shandy, Vanity Fair or Madame Bovary just because once, in a state of high excitement, I told him of them. Even though ours was a maybe-relationship, not a proper committed, going-somewhere relationship, each was allowed in heightened moments to give full coverage, with the other making an effort to take in at least a part. Besides, I wasn’t completely ignorant. I could see now he was happy about what had happened at the garage. I knew too, that a Bentley was a car.
And now he was doting on it, on the bit that was currently on the living-room carpet. He stood beside it, gazing down, a big smile on his face, beaming away. And that was what he did – the way I’d get turned on, the way he’d turn me on, when he was engrossed, unstudied, unself-conscious, working on the old heaps, his face full of love and concentration, telling himself these were serious dilemmas from which the poor auld car mightn’t recover if he didn’t tinker conscientiously, also when some people might shrug and say in life, about life, ‘Oh well, there’s no point in trying, probably it won’t work so we must just not try and instead prepare ourselves for bitterness and disappointment’ but maybe-boyfriend would say, ‘Well, it might work, I think it will work, so how about we try?’ and even if it didn’t work at least he didn’t downgrade himself to misery before having a go. After he’d weathered his disappointment if it hadn’t worked, once again, with renewed vigour, with that mindset of ‘can’ even when he couldn’t, he’d be straight on to the next thing. Curious and engaged and eager – because of passion, because of plans, because of hope, because of me. And that was it. With me too, he was uncalculated, transparent, free from deception, always was what he was, with none of that coolness, that withholding, that design, those hurtful, sometimes clever, always mean, manipulations. No conniving. No games-playing. He didn’t do it, didn’t care for it, had no interest in it. ‘Those are crazy things,’ he’d say, brushing aside flank movements as protections for his heart. Strong therefore. Chaste too. Uncorrupted in the little things, which held fast for the bigger things. That was singular. That was why I was attracted to him. That was why standing there, looking at him looking at his car, doing his out-loud wondering and pondering, I was getting wet and—
‘Are you listening?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Heard everything. You were talking of inside-car.’
I meant the bit on the carpet but he said he’d tell again because it seemed I hadn’t grasped the fundamentals. This was when I learned that this inside bit was an outside bit, that it went at the front of the vehicle. He said too, that the car it had come from had been a complete wreck when it turned up at the garage. ‘Guess what! It was a write-off, a total terrible, due to some idjit blowing up the engine by not putting enough oil in. Vital bits missing, differential missing, pistons through the tappet cover, almost all of it, maybe-girlfriend, a tragedy.’ From what I could gather – because the bit on the floor looked nothing special, just more of the usual – this car had been some coveted, early twentieth-century, cheery, brutish, speedy, noisy, not-good-at-stopping car. ‘Beyond redemption,’ said maybe-boyfriend, meaning beyond repair, yet still he was smiling down at it. He said he and the others, after much arguing, dissension and finally, a casting-of-votes, had decided to disassemble what was left. So they split it up, then they drew lots with maybe-boyfriend ending up with this bit on the carpet, a bit too, that was presently causing him transportations of pure joy.
‘Supercharger,’ he said and I said, ‘Uh-huh,’ and he said, ‘No, you don’t understand, maybe-girlfriend. Few cars were supercharged then so this was advanced technology. It decimated the competition – all because of this’ – he indicated the bit on the floor. ‘Uh-huh,’ I said again, then I had a thought. �
�Who got the car seats?’ which made him laugh and say, ‘That’s not a proper question, darlin’. C’mere’ – and he brought his fingers – oh God – over to the nape of my neck. This was dangerous, always dangerous. Any time the fingers were there – between my neck and my skull – I’d forget everything – not just things that happened moments before the fingers, but everything – who I was, what I was doing, all my memories, everything about anything, except being there, in that moment, with him. Then, when he’d rub them in, into the groove, that crook, the soft bit above the bumpy bone, that was even more dangerous. At that point my mind would fall behind owing to deliciousness and to muddles with chronology. Belatedly I’d think, oh, but what if he begins to rub his fingers there! I’d go to jelly which meant he’d have to put his arms around me to stop me from falling which meant I’d have to let him. Even then though, within moments, we would be crashing to the ground.
‘Forget the seats,’ he murmured. ‘Seats important but not most important. This is what’s important.’ I was unclear if still he was on ‘car’ or had moved his attention now to me. I suspected it was car but at some moments you can’t stop to have an argument, so we kissed and he said he was getting turned on and was I not turned on and I said could he not look how I was looking, then he murmured what’s this and I murmured what’s what and he prodded something in my hand which I’d forgotten which turned out to be Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ so he said he’d just set it there, meaning the table, which he did which was okay and we were about maybe to go to the carpet or to the settee or somewhere when there were voices. They were coming up his path and were followed by raps on his door.