by Anna Burns
And that was why the dogs were necessary. They were important, a balancing act, an interface, a safety buffer against instant, face-to-face, mortal clashes of loathsome and self-loathsome emotions, the very type that erupt in seconds between individuals, between clans, between nations, between sexes, doing irreversible damage all around. To stay it, to evade it, to push away those bad memories, all that pain and history and deterioration of character, you hear the barking, the onset of that savage, tribal barking, and you know then to wait indoors – quarter of an hour thereabouts – to let that soldiery go its way. In that manner you don’t come into contact, you don’t have to feel the powerlessness, the injustice, or worst of all, how you – a normal, ordinary, very nice human being – could want to kill or take relief at a killing. And, if you’re already out there on the street which is the battlefield which is the street when you hear that sudden barking, well, simply you listen and determine by its direction which way those soldiers are heading and, should they be heading your way, easily then, to nip down a sideway into another, less-exposing street. But they killed the dogs, taking out the middlemen, and so, until such times as new dogs were to be born and bred and schooled in partisanship in our area, it appeared we were back to that close-up, face-to-face, early ancient hatred. First though, on the morning after the night of the dog-slaying, and confronting the reality of that enormity of corpses, came the equally face-to-face local response.
Mostly it was silence. Or at first silence, with one dog – initially considered the last surviving dog in the district – looking on along with the rest of us, whimpering periodically, its tail drawn deeply in between its legs. As for myself, it seemed to me, at nine years old, that there were so many of these dogs that the district could never have contained the overrun of them, that the soldiers must have bussed in extra, but once the locals started to identify and to claim them, they claimed all of them, every single one. Also to my child eyes, and to those of third brother who was standing beside me, it seemed the heads of all these dogs, amidst this huge stack of dogs, were missing. We thought they’d been beheaded. ‘Mammy! The heads! They took the heads! Where are the heads?’ we cried. ‘Where’s Lassie, mammy? Where’s daddy? Have the brothers found Lassie? Where’s daddy? Where’s Lassie?’ And we tugged at her coat, then third brother began to cry. His crying set me off, then the both of us set off all the other children. Then the last surviving dog began to howl as well. There were many of us that day, many children, and we huddled and clung to our adults. So at first there was the silence, then there was our crying, then, at the sound of our crying, the adults galvanised themselves into action and set their shock aside. They began to deal with the massacre, with the males – young men, older men, renouncers, non-renouncers – beginning to wade through the slimy, pelty mass. They disentangled the heavy sogginess and the swampiness to differentiate one body from another body, passing each through and along the chain to whoever had come to claim it, was waiting for it, to bring it home on go-carts, in prams, in wheelbarrows, in supermarket trolleys or, more often, bundled up as something that used to be alive in their arms. As for da, I remember third brother’s urgency and my own in asking for him, in pleading for him to be there, to be a man among men, doing normal men things, as he did manage to do years later when searching with the others for Somebody McSomebody’s brother’s head. Perhaps the day of the dogs though, had been a bad day, one of his bed days, hospital days, a Holocaust or an ancient, yellowed, boxing-magazine day. Whichever it had been, he wasn’t there. But the brothers were there and, along with the others, they were digging and it seemed right through to the earth. They were in the middle of the earth, gone below, and still they were digging. I added shovels to them and in my head they were digging with these shovels, the ground now sodden, with the brothers and the men up to their waists. Clots, clumps, streaks, getting redder, browner, darker, stickier – getting black – as they dug down deep to get those dogs out. I remember the sight of the brothers, of all our dogs, of us, the surrounding people. I remember not a thing though, of any death smell. At one point third brother cried, ‘The dogs are moving! MAMMY! THE DOGS ARE MOVING!’ and I looked and they were moving, tiny heavings up and down. Our mother too, I remember – her stoniness, her lack of response to our tugging, to our ‘LASSIE, MAMMY!’, ‘WHERE’S DADDY, MAMMY?’, ‘THE DOGS ARE MOVING, MAMMY!’ Eventually, someone, second sister, explained. She said the heads were still there, that they were bent back, meaning, I realised later, that the throats were cut so deeply towards the bone that it looked to our eyes as if the heads were missing. This explanation seemed easier on the mind, I think too, on third brother’s mind, that the heads should still be there than that they should be missing, than that the soldiers had taken them to make fun of them, to kick them, to prolong the dishonouring of them; or maybe it was relief at being given any explanation at all. We carried on crying, however, as did other children, especially when a particular dog was brought out or as panic heightened in anticipation of a particular dog. There were waves of hope too, that maybe they weren’t dead because yes, they were moving. ‘They are not moving,’ said the adults, then finally, we became too much in our hopeful despair that some older siblings were instructed to take us younger ones home.
First and second sister brought third brother and me home, and at this time we were the youngest in the family. We two continued to look back, to cast back, taking long last backward glances, our minds full of Lassie as we went from that entry where still the brothers and the other males were. These were our dogs, and they were street dogs, meaning every day you put your dog out onto the street to have adventures just as you put your children out to have adventures. At night-time the dogs and children would return except that night the children returned but the dogs did not. So brother and I were led home, away from that entry, with our older sisters’ arms about us. Still we glanced back until nearing the house when new hope sprang within us again. Although the other dogs had died, bar one, and although she’d stayed out all night just as the dead dogs had stayed out all night, maybe Lassie had returned and was even now in the house. So we picked up speed and rushed in the door and there was Lassie. She was lying by the hearth and she lifted her head and growled at us – opening doors on her perhaps? Letting in draughts and disturbing her perhaps? Lassie was no pedigree, as none of these dogs had been pedigree. She had no qualifications, no certificates, wasn’t playful, wasn’t vocational, not one to fetch help for those in danger or to save children from drowning. Lassie had no time for children, for the young of the family, but for us it was the happiest day to see her and to hear her, to know she had a throat still to growl and be petulant with. We didn’t fall on her of course, because Lassie wouldn’t have liked that. But it was a very bad morning until she reappeared. After that, I forgot. I forgot the dogs, their death, the district grief, the shock, the undoubted triumph of the soldiers. That evening after dinner, still nine years old, I set out on my latest adventures, passing that same entry which was now stacked as usual with petrol bombs for the next district riot. There was no hint of dead dogs although I did get a whiff of that powerful cleaner, Jeyes Fluid. That I would remember, given that up until that moment always I’d loved that particular household smell.
So the soldiers killed the dogs, and the locals killed the cats, and now cats were also being killed by the Luftwaffe. I glanced at the little head lying in the detritus and I felt jolted as I hadn’t remembered ever feeling jolted, not understanding why either, in this instance I was having this strong response. I dealt with it by averting my eyes, by walking firmly on, yet it stayed with me. It carried on accompanying me until I found myself stopping and turning round. I retraced my steps and was again beside the head and this time I looked closely and saw that it was wet, a bit black, blood-black, soggier at the neck, or where the neck had used to be. I got down on my hunkers and with a bit of rubble, edged the head around. Its face now fully upwards, I saw it was recognisable still as a cat, bigger eyes perha
ps, or bigger sockets because one of the eyes was missing. The empty socket was huge and the head itself had something going on inside. Insect activity was what I thought, and as proof I saw clumps, bulges – at the nose, the ears, the mouth, and the remaining eye had a bulge also. There were a few sluggish maggots visible, though as yet, and apart from something sweetish and yeast-like, there wasn’t much of a smell. As for the rest of the body, I glanced around but I couldn’t see it. The head by itself though, was enough for now. Then it was too much. I stood and walked away again because that French class had been nice. I’d enjoyed it, as always I enjoyed it – the eccentricity of teacher, her talk of that ‘still, small voice’, of ‘living in the moment’, of ‘abandoning what you think should happen for what then might happen’. There was too, her ‘Change one thing, class, just one thing, and I assure you, everything else will change also’ – and to say that to us, to people who were not only not into metaphors, but not into admitting to what patently was there. But it had felt valuable. She felt valuable, and I didn’t want to lose that feeling. It seemed though, that with this head in the dirt – and before that, the van, the ten-minute area, the war-time bomb which had brought up dead da and his depressions with ma attacking him for his depressions – already all that ‘What’s the point? There’s no use in having any point?’ had started to reappear. ‘Attempts and repeated attempts,’ teacher had said. ‘That’s the way to do it.’ But what if she was wrong about attempts and repeated attempts, about moving on to next chapters? What if the next chapter was the same as this chapter, as had been the last chapter? What if all chapters stayed the same or even, as time went on, got worse? Again, during my thoughts, I had physically brought myself back to the cat, retracing my steps as if having no choice in the matter. Don’t be daft, I said. What are you going to do – stand forever and just stare at it? I’ll pick it up, I answered. I’ll take it to some green. Now, this surprised me. It astonished me. Then I astonished me with hedges, bushes, the root of a tree. I could cover it, not leave it in this open awful place. But why? I argued. In less than one minute you could be out of here. You could have reached the graveyard, your second landmark. Then it’ll be the police barracks, then the soothing smell of cinnamon from that house with the bakery, then— Of course! I interrupted. The usual place!
Already I had my handkerchiefs out, and these were real hankies, fabric, not paper, and not that long ago they used only to be male ones, those big white linen ones, because pretty as the female ones were, they weren’t much for blowing your nose. I grew to appreciate them, however, after being presented with a boxed set by wee sisters one Christmastime. Since then, I’d carry a female one for cultural, aesthetic purposes and a male one for practical purposes and that evening I intended putting both to practical and symbolic use. First, I opened out onto the ground the small, dainty, female one, then with the big, plain, male one, gently I nudged the head over onto it. As I did so, I could feel the cat’s front fangs pricking through the fabric and the skin on its head begin to slide. Some hair loosened and here I panicked, thinking the skull was going to slip from its covering. But then, mission accomplished, and with the head in the middle of the female, I wrapped the fancy embroidered cotton all around. After that I placed the female hankie containing the head onto the now spread-out big male hankie, wrapping that one around as well. Proof of madness, I continued. You’re actually going to walk up the road with a head, knowing full well that no matter how deserted a place seems, at least one person somewhere is watching? This means more gossip, more fabrication, more elaboration on the deterioration of your character. In that moment though, I didn’t care. Besides, I couldn’t stop myself. It would be only a moment, I estimated, because quickly I’d find the right spot – a place of privacy, of quietness, by the far wall perhaps, where the ancient plots were, where the ground was tangled and clumpy with unmown grass that the gravetenders never bothered their arses with. By now I had tied the ends of the big hankie together and was all for fulfilling on my intention when I stood up and almost collided with the milkman. So silent had he been, and so engrossed had I been, that I hadn’t sensed his presence. Now he was inches from me, and I from him, with only those hankies, with their dark, dead contents, acting as buffer in between.
*
First thing that happened was again I got those spine shivers, those scrabblings, the scuttlings, all that shiddery-shudderiness inside me, from the bottom of my backbone right into my legs. Instinctively everything in me then stopped. Just stopped. All my mechanism. I did not move and he did not move. Standing there, neither of us moved, nor spoke, then he spoke, saying, ‘At your Greek and Roman class, were you?’ and this was the only thing, ever, in his profiling of me that the milkman got wrong. Not that I hadn’t considered Greek and Roman, as in Greek and Roman Classical Studies instead of French for my night class. I’d been attracted by those ancient peoples – their uncontained emotions, their unprincipled characters, their myths, rituals, all that macabre, outlandish, paranoiac scheming and purging. Then there were their capricious gods and the curses the common people supplicated from these gods to have put on all their enemies, these enemies turning out to be the very people next door. It was all very alice in wonderland, as were those immodest Caesars marrying apple trees and making consuls out of their horses. Something there interesting, something psychological, something not normal that a normal person with only acceptable aberrations could get their head around. This was why I got as far as perusing the prospectus to see if I could enrol in this night class, but Greek and Roman was on Tuesday nights and maybe-boyfriend was my Tuesday nights, so French being Wednesday became my choice instead. That meant the milkman got it wrong and I didn’t correct him for getting it wrong because it gave me hope that in the middle of his knowing everything he didn’t know everything. Not real hope though, as I was to realise when I got home and did a deconstruction on this later on. He’d read my thoughts about the class, yes, and they’d been top-level thoughts, thoughts from the topsoil, meaning unimportant, not secret, not vulnerable enough to be encrypted. Any of those Toms, Dicks and Harrys therefore, had they been inclined, easily, very easily, could have walked in. All the same, he’d read them when he hadn’t even been near me during the time I’d been thinking them. This struck me as eerie, indicative too, of a thorough research carried out by a man who gleaned, docketed and filed each and every bit of information, even if on this occasion he mistook the outcome in the end.
As on the last two occasions of our meeting, that is, of his orchestrating of our meeting, this time too, mostly he asked questions, though without appearing anxious for any response. This was because his questions weren’t real questions. Not sincere requests for information or for confirmation of his surmises. These were statements of assertion, rhetorical power comments, hints, warnings, to let me know he was in the business of knowing already, with those tag-on ‘weren’t you?’, ‘didn’t you?’, ‘isn’t that right?’, ‘is not that so?’ appended for pretence of query at the end. So he made his remark about the Greek and Roman and as he was doing so, I thought of that van, that white van, and of how it must have been his all along up that entry. Was he following me then? Had he been sitting in that van all the time I’d been in my French lesson, watching me, watching the others, noting our anxiety as we underwent our sunset? And again he was talking as if he knew me, as if previously in some appropriate manner we’d been introduced to each other. This time too, as in the parks & reservoirs, he was looking aslant and not directly at me; more of a gaze to the side of me. Then it was another question, this one about maybe-boyfriend, someone he hadn’t made reference to until this point.