by Anna Burns
As for the house, it became one of those ‘men live here’ establishments, with the brothers dossing down at random in it, living the way boys left to devices do. Often their friends, increasingly also girls for the night, or girlfriends for the week, or girlfriends for a while, would come and go, dossing also. Then times moved on and individually the three elder moved out. They drifted off to whatever life was to hold for them, then the house gravitated into being that of maybe-boyfriend. Then, because of cars and bits of cars, it gravitated further into a three-quarter working garage. Then he asked me to live with him which was when I intimated my three objections and he said, regarding one of them, ‘I don’t mean here. I mean we can rent a place in the red-light street.’
The red-light street was in a district that was just up the road from my area and just down the road from his area and it was called the red-light street not because red-light things went on in it but because it was where young couples went to live together who didn’t want to get married or conventionally to settle down. It was not wanting to be wed at sixteen, babies from seventeen, to settle on the settee in front of the television to die like most parents by twenty. They wanted to try out – weren’t sure – but something else. So, unmarried couples lived there. It was even rumoured two men lived there, I mean together. Then another two men went to live in another house there – also together. There weren’t any women living together, though one woman was famously said to live in number twenty-three with two men. Mostly, it was unmarried males and unmarried females and although it was just one street, it had been on the news recently as threatening to spill over into the next street and that street itself was already famous because it had been housing mixed-religion married couples before that. Meanwhile, in that area, not just in the red-light street, normal people, meaning married couples, were moving out. Some weren’t against the red-light aspect, they said. It was just they didn’t want to hurt older relatives’ feelings, such as those of their parents, their grandparents, their deceased forebears, their long-deceased fragile ancestors possibly set in ways easily to be affronted, especially by what the tenor of the media was calling ‘depravity, decadence, demoralisation, dissemination of pessimism, outrages to propriety and illicit immoral affairs’. Next big question, said the news, was whether or not the unmarried couples now fornicating were of mixed religion also? So the normal couples moving out, anxious for the sensibilities of the ancient generation, made TV appearances as well. ‘I’m doing it for me mammy,’ said one young wife, ‘for I don’t think mammy would be happy with me living without integrity which I would be doing if I stayed in a street where people didn’t take the marriage vows.’ ‘I don’t want to judge,’ said another, ‘but holding no wedlock has to be judged and judged harshly, then condemned, for is this what we’re coming to? Whoredom? Animal passions? Lack of chastity? Is this what we’re fostering?’ Again, there was more on depravity, decadence, demoralisation, dissemination of pessimism, outrages to propriety and illicit immoral affairs. ‘Next,’ said another couple, loading up their removal van, ‘there’ll be one-and-a-half red-light streets, then there’ll be two red-light streets, then the whole district will be red lights with ménagesa-trio popping up everywhere.’ ‘Doing it for me mammy,’ said another wife, though a few said, ‘Ach sure, what’s wrong with it? There’s tribalism and there’s bigotry and for those you need history, but with these sexual issues there’s a faster turnover which means simply you have to go with modern times.’ And on it went, mainly, ‘We cannot allow this’ and ‘People don’t sleep with people’ and ‘Marriage, after territorial boundaries, is the foundation of the state’. Especially it was, ‘If I don’t move out it will kill me mammy’. That was television. Numerous possible future deaths of many mothers were also reported extensively in voxpop radio interviews and in the written press.
So that street, in that area, which was not a big area and which was really called something or other in my native language which I didn’t speak and also called ‘The Groove of the Neck’ or ‘The Crook of the Neck’ or ‘The Soft of the Neck’ in the translated language which I did speak, was just down the road. I had never been in it although now maybe-boyfriend was proposing I go live in it with him. I said no because apart from the reason of ma and wee sisters, also of his hoarding which conceivably could continue and increase in the red-light residence just as easily as it was progressing in this current residence, there was that other reason of reservation, of us having perhaps as much intimacy and fragility of relationship as either of us could bear. And this was what happened. Always it happened. I would suggest closeness as a way of forwarding on our relationship and it would backfire and I’d forget I’d suggested closeness and he’d have to remind me when next I suggested closeness. Then the boot would be on the other foot and he’d suffer a misfiring of neurons and go and suggest closeness himself. Constantly we were having memory lapses, episodes of a kind of jamais vu. We wouldn’t remember that we’d remembered, and would have to remind each other of our forgetfulness and of how closeness didn’t work for us given the state of delicacy our maybe-relationship was in. And now it was his turn to forget and to say that he thought I should consider us living together, because we’d been nearly a year now into our ‘maybe’ capacity, so feasibly we could forward on proper coupledom by cohabiting. It wasn’t as if either, he said, we’ve previously discussed closeness or moving in together – which, when he finished speaking, I’d have to remind him that we had. Meanwhile, during this era of asking me to live with him, he suggested we go for a drive the following Tuesday to see the sun go down. So then I thought, how come he has thoughts of seeing a sun go down when nobody I know – especially boys, also girls, women too, men too, certainly me – has ever had a thought of seeing a sun go down? This was new, then again, maybe-boyfriend always had new things about him, things I hadn’t noticed in others, not just in boys before. Like chef, he liked cooking which was not usually done by boys and I’m not sure I liked him liking cooking. Also like chef, he didn’t like football, or it was he did like it but didn’t go on about liking it in the way required of boys and for that reason became known in his area as one of those males who wasn’t a fruit but who didn’t like football all the same. Secretly I had a worry that maybe-boyfriend might not be a proper man. This thought came in the darker moments, in my complex, unbidden moments, swiftly coming, swiftly going and which I wouldn’t admit – especially to myself – to having had. If I did, I sensed further contraries would come in its wake because already I’d feel them gathering – to confront me, to throw off-kilter my certainties. Along with everybody, I dealt with these inner contradictions by turning from them whenever they appeared on the horizon. Maybe-boyfriend though, I noticed, brought them onto the horizon, especially the longer I was in that ‘maybe, don’t know, perhaps’ dating situation with him. I liked his food even though I thought I oughtn’t to like it and oughtn’t to encourage him by liking it. And I liked being in bed with him because sleeping with maybe-boyfriend was as if always I’d slept with maybe-boyfriend, and I liked going anywhere with him, so I said yes, that I’d go with him on Tuesday, which was that coming Tuesday – that evening after my run with third brother-in-law in the parks & reservoirs – to see this sun go down. I wouldn’t, of course, mention this to anybody because I wasn’t confident that a sunset was acceptable as a topic to mention to anybody. Then again, rarely did I mention anything to anybody. Not mentioning was my way to keep safe.
Ma, however, had got wind. It wasn’t of the sunset or of maybe-boyfriend she’d got wind, for he didn’t come from my district and I wouldn’t take him into my district, which meant we spent most of our time over in his district, or else downtown at the few inter-communal bars and clubs. Instead it was a rumour put into the air that had got her anxious. So the night before my run with third brother-in-law, also the night before my sunset with maybe-boyfriend, she came upstairs to see me. I heard her coming and, oh God, I thought, what now?
*
Since my sixteenth birthday two years earlier ma had tormented herself and me because I was not married. My two older sisters were married. Three of my brothers, including the one who had died and the one on the run, had got married. Probably too, my oldest brother gone errant, dropped off the face of the earth, and even though she’d no proof, was married. My other older sister – the unmentionable second sister – also married. So why wasn’t I married? This non-wedlock was selfish, disturbing of the God-given order and unsettling for the younger girls, she said. ‘Look at them!’ she continued, and there they were, standing behind ma, bright-eyed, perky, grinning. From the look of them, not one of these sisters seemed unsettled to me. ‘Sets a bad example,’ said ma. ‘If you don’t get married, they’ll think it’s all right for them not to get married.’ None of these sisters – age seven, eight and nine – was anywhere near the marrying teens yet. ‘What would happen too,’ went on ma, as often she would go on whenever we had this one-sided conversation, ‘when your looks are gone and then nobody wants you?’ I got fed up answering, as in ‘I’m not telling you, ma. Never will I tell you, ma. Leave me alone, ma,’ because the less I gave, the less she could get in. This was tiresome for her as well as for me but in her endeavours ma was not without back-up. In the district there existed a whole chivvy of mothers doing their damnedest to get their daughters wed. Their panic was real, visceral; certainly for them this was no cliché, no comedy, not to be dismissed, also not unusual. What would have been unusual would have been for a mother to have stepped forth from among them who was not of that scene. So it became a battle of wills between ma and me as to which of us would wear the other down first. Anytime she’d get whiff I might be dating (never through me), I couldn’t walk in the door but it would be, ‘Is he the right religion?’ followed by ‘Is he not already married?’ It was vital, after the right religion, that he be not already married. And because I continued to give nothing, this became proof he wasn’t the right religion, that he was married and, more than likely, not only a paramilitary, but an enemy defender-of-the-state paramilitary as well. She did horror stories on herself, filling in blanks where I refused to supply information. This meant she wrote the entire script herself. She began religious observances and visits to the holy men with the intention, my younger, gleeful sisters informed me, that I give up these godless bigamous terrorists I was falling in love with one after the other, and that instead I fall in love suitably this time. I let her do this, especially once I got involved with maybe-boyfriend did I let her do it. There was no way, ever, I was going to give her him. She’d have done a process, had him through the system, one assessment question after another assessment question – hurrying things, hurrying things, trying to complete on things, complete on things, end things (which meant dating), begin things (which meant marriage), tie things up (which meant babies), to make me, for the love of God, get a move on like the rest.
So the religious observances and the visits to the holy men – later also to the holy women – continued, along with her three o’clock prayers, her six o’clock prayers, her nine o’clock prayers and her twelve o’clock prayers. There were also extra petitions at half past five every afternoon for the souls in purgatory who were now no longer able to pray for themselves. None of this o’clock praying interfered with her staple morning and evening praying, in particular her advanced working of intercessions undertaken for me to abandon these trysts she was sure I was having with heretical defenders at ‘dot dot dot’ places about town. Ma always called locations she disapproved of, or was sure she would disapprove of, ‘dot dot dot’ places which occasionally had my older sisters and myself speculating as to what, in her youth, she might have got up to in them once herself. As for her praying, her decreeing, all that became more accentuated, more quick-fire in supplication until one day owing to recklessness it got inverted. It had to. Given the fictitious premise she was basing them on – to rid me of men who had not ever, except in her own head, existed – it now looked as if she’d manifested the very thing neither of us wanted into place.
After my second meeting in the parks & reservoirs with the milkman, nosey first brother-in-law, who of course had sniffed it out, told his wife, my first sister, to tell our mother to come and have a talk with me. This was especially recommended after eldest sister’s earlier chat with me hadn’t gone as planned. So she came round to see ma, and this was the sister who didn’t love her husband because still she was in grief over her ex-boyfriend. No longer was she in grief, however, because he’d cheated on her and taken up with a new woman. Now she was in grief because he was dead. He’d been killed in a carbomb at work because he’d been the wrong religion in the wrong place and that was another thing that happened. He was dead. And sister? My sister. She hadn’t been able to get over him when he was living, so I didn’t know how she’d do that now he was—