by Anna Burns
After this came the lighter side of the evening, the indulgent item at the end of the news. We had reached for our drinks and sipped, then sat back, with friend, apropos of just throwing it out, telling me it had been my first brother-in-law who had started the rumours about me. ‘Shouldn’t concern yourself with him though,’ she said. ‘He’s currently being intervened on and soon is to have his own reality check.’ First brother-in-law’s reality check, unsurprisingly, was to stem from his latest sexual obsession. This latest had him visiting nuns – the community’s full-on holy women – with masturbating questions disguised as harmless cultural queries about art. ‘He brought up that sculpture,’ said friend, ‘you know, that statue, the one of the nun, Teresa of Avila, who had her own private levitation sessions?’ I knew the statue she meant. Age twelve, flicking through a book in the art room at school I’d turned a page and seen a picture of that statue, jumping away with an actual cry when I realised what it was I was looking at. It had been unexpected. All of a sudden. A realisation I’d no premonition that day was coming to me. Those billowing clothes, nun’s clothes, on her body, her inside them, suffocating inside them, them outside her, alive, maybe inside-out, swallowing her up. Those folds, those coils, those windings and volumes and living, moving layers, well, of course they frightened me. The picture itself repulsed me – yet it had held me. My thinking at the time, when I recovered from being repulsed and had gone back for a second, then a third, then a fourth, then a fifth look – and only on the fifth look did I take in that angel with the stick thing – my thinking was perhaps it would have been better, less scary, if the clothes had not been on her body. But what if they hadn’t and she was in that contorted condition – bare arms, bare legs, bare bits all over – and that face, looking the way it was looking – helpless, abandoning, enjoying itself – or the opposite of enjoying itself – and her naked and praying – but that didn’t look like praying unless – oh God – that was what praying was? On second thoughts, my twelve-year-old self decided, maybe it was better that the clothes, unsettling and voracious as they were, had been on her body all along.
‘So, sisters,’ had begun first brother-in-law, for he had gone to the convent with the intention of taking out his own magazine picture of that very same statue. Apparently this lover of art had been carrying it around for some time. ‘About this emotive picture about a devotional statue. What do you make of the ecstasy, of the meditative, mystical, voluptuous – sweetly moaning as it seems to me – and yet excessively intrusive, jarringly orgiastic portrayal of the situation? Is this really’ – and here he looked pensive, earnest, saying the next bit supposedly artistically and not at all sexually pervertedly – ‘that this woman, in perfect union with God, this nun – such as you are yourselves – was perhaps rapturously aroused and self-pleasuring via the metaphor of levitation? And as for this seraph thrusting and thrusting and given your own experience—’
That was as far as he got.
He was seen through immediately of course, said friend, for the nuns weren’t stupid, nor were they ignorant of art and even less so of his wink-wink, sexual dislocation-compulsion reputation. They had been praying for him. Indeed, he had almost reached number one at the apex of names of us people urgently to be prayed for locally on their long list. But now they threw him out. This was way past the stage of civilisation, way past quietly asking him to leave, of having courtesy shown him owing to his being a spiritual soul on life’s path such as they themselves were spiritual souls on life’s path. No. They threw him out – or rather, Sister Mary Pius, the big nun, she threw him out – after the rest of the nuns had had a slap at him first. After that, the head nun paid a visit to the sanctities – our pious women of the area who constituted intermediaries between the holy women and the renouncers-of-the-state in our area. When the pious women heard the indecent news they paid a visit to the renouncers. That was when it was decided, said friend, that first brother-in-law’s behaviour had better, for the first time, be put in check.
‘The man is inexpugnable,’ said friend. ‘Yeah he is,’ I said. ‘Just what I was thinking. Only seems now he isn’t. What’ll happen to him? What’ll they do to him?’ – and it wasn’t out of concern for him that I had asked. It was for first sister, his wife, my sister, though when third sister got to hear, she said absolutely she was glad he was to have his comeuppance, not glad either, in any compassionate ‘may God have mercy on his soul’ way. Because he was so into his wild torment, his strivings-through-sensation, his lack of modest thought, his insatiable addiction where everything and anyone – as long as it was female – had to be approached, had to be appropriated, he just couldn’t stop himself. This would be too, us, his sisters-in-law, beginning as twelve-year-olds, or else other females in the area, or nuns as now it turned out to be. It was all about the sexual arena; the man knew not how to engage in any other arena. That was why third sister and I had tried to speak to the girls. Wee sisters, however, said they didn’t need us to warn them to be on the alert as to something feverish, driven and greedyguts about first brother-in-law. That he had some sickly compulsion neurosis, they said, was very plain for all eyes to see. ‘Only, what’s that to us?’ they added. ‘Why are you coming to us, telling this us, warning of first brother-in-law us?’ ‘If he tries anything,’ said third sister. ‘Tries what?’ they said. ‘Even if he speaks to you in a seemingly innocent way on the subject, say, of the French Revolution—’ ‘What aspect of the French Revolution?’ ‘Any aspect,’ said third sister. ‘Or,’ she went on, ‘if he tries to get a discussion going on that marginalised scientific theory you three are keen on, the one about hydrothermal multi-turbulent—’ ‘You’re outlining that incorrectly, third sister,’ wee sisters began. ‘What third sister means,’ I interrupted, ‘is that if he should sidle up with Demosthenes’s disapproval of Alcibiades, or if he should appear suddenly and try to expound on the thesis of Francis Bacon really being William Shakespeare, which means—’ ‘We know what expounding theses means!’ ‘What middle sister is saying,’ said third sister, ‘is that if he gets into a summary exposition on Guy Fawkes’s ordinary signature before he was tortured and Guy Fawkes’s confession signature after he was tortured which means—’ ‘We know what summary exposition means!’ ‘Look, wee sisters, the point is,’ I said, ‘if he tries to lure you in on the pretext of anything – science, art, literature, linguistics, social anthropology, mathematics, politics, chemistry, the intestinal tract, unusual euphemisms, double-entry bookkeeping, the three divisions of the psyche, the Hebrew alphabet, Russian Nihilism, Asian cattle, twelfth-century Chinese porcelain, the Japanese unit—’ ‘We don’t understand,’ cried wee sisters. ‘What’s wrong with talking about them things?’ ‘What’s wrong is that don’t be fooled,’ said third sister. ‘None of that will be the business, won’t be what he’s really after.’ ‘But what’s the business? What will he really be after? What is it you both mean?’ We could see, third sister and me, that far from reassuring and protecting the children, we had alarmed and frightened the children. Third sister then said, ‘It’ll be something abusive, sexually invasive, a violating, creepy thing, always a verbal thing, but on second thoughts, never you mind. You three are too young to know of that yet.’
‘He’s to be had up,’ friend said, and she meant at one of the ’courts, for the ’courts, they happened. ‘It’s his first warning,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t be his first,’ I said. ‘He started in on me when I was twelve.’ ‘He might get a beating,’ she said, ‘which is skipping the warning, because of his propositioning of holy women.’ ‘The women with the issues,’ I said, ‘won’t like that.’ At this longest friend frowned and I thought at first it was because of this take on female hierarchy, that women all for God and having visions in billowing clothes should take precedence over other women, for who then came next – wives? mothers? virgins? The frown though, turned out not to be over the issue women’s insistence on everything being fair which meant not patriarchal, but over my making re
ference to her business when we had that unspoken agreement that never was I to do that. She though, had been the one to start in on her business. This whole meeting in the lounge in the first place had been her on her business. Sending round that emissary, that spotter boy, to arrange between us had been her and her business. ‘You started it,’ I said. ‘Had to,’ she said. ‘Because of your mental deterioration and because I reckoned that after all the harshness about your defects, you might want some cheering – hence your brother-in-law. But you’re right. Let’s leave this and stick to non-political issues from now on.’
After this our meeting in the lounge ended, and after that I had three further encounters with longest friend from primary school. One was at her wedding in the countryside four months on where I was the only one – bar the holy man officiating – not wearing dark glasses. Even the groom, and longest friend in her simple white gown, each had a pair on. Then I met her a year after her wedding, this time at the funeral of her husband. Three months on from that I went to her own funeral when they buried her with her husband. This was in the renouncers’ plot of the graveyard just up from the ten-minute area, also known as ‘the no-town cemetery’, ‘the no-time cemetery’, ‘the busy cemetery’ or just simply, the usual place.
FIVE
The girl who was really a woman who went around putting poison in drinks poisoned me and I didn’t know she’d done it, not even when I woke up with the most unbelievable stomach pains two hours after I went to bed. At first I thought it was more of those shudders, those tingles, the horrible sensations coming upon me since Milkman. But no. Tablets girl had slipped something into my drink. This had been in the club when I was with longest friend and we were finishing our discussion which I thought was to be on Milkman but which turned out to be on my beyond-the-pale status. Friend had then gone to the toilet and the moment I was alone at the table that girl who was really a woman snuck up. She accused me immediately of crimes against humanity, also of being selfish; also she poisoned me, managing to do all before I could tell her to fuck off. ‘You should be ashamed,’ she said, but she was not referring to my love affair with Milkman, which I assumed she was referring to because that was all anybody – whose business still it wasn’t – referred to. Instead she was talking about my colluding with Milkman to kill her in some other life. As well as her death, apparently I was responsible for the deaths of twenty-three other women – ‘some of whom were definitely doing herbs,’ she said, ‘just their innocent white medicine, and some of whom weren’t doing anything’ – and I did all these crimes during the time we – the whole twenty-six of us – were in this other life. She meant a past incarnation sometime during the seventeenth century and she gave dates and times and said he had been a doctor, but one of those quack doctors. Here she looked revolted that I would align myself with, would become the cat-familiar of, such a counterfeit man. She said there was no point in my denying I’d known of his impostorship. I had abetted him, done black magic for him, cut up dead animals for him, been a female accessory to his murders of those twenty-three women, plus her, in our picturesque village. ‘We all died, sister,’ she said, ‘because of you.’ Because of this, she said I deserved exactly what was coming to me. It was at that point I pulled myself out of her mesmerising fragmentations and said, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, fuck off.’ When longest friend came back she asked what had gone on and I shook my head and said, ‘Ach, it’s that tablets girl.’ Longest friend warned me to watch myself with tablets girl because, she said, ‘that poor girl who’s really a woman is getting worse’.
And that was the thing. Our most notorious beyond-the-pale was this girl who was really a woman, a small, slight, wiry girl, nearing thirty who put poison in people’s drinks. For a long time nobody could draw any explanation from her on this matter. What was surmised about it had to be surmised by the community’s embellishment on her initial lack of information, with most deciding she was doing what she was doing because of some feminist complaint. They didn’t elaborate on the complaint but given, they said, the issue women from our district – another beyond-the-pale grouping – had been seen talking with tablets girl, priming her perhaps, brain-washing her into their movement, meant that obvious issues such as militant feminist ones could be the only reason for her continual attempts to kill us all. At the time the issue women denied this accusation, saying it was a misunderstanding of their objectives, also that the community hadn’t a shred of evidence to bear it out. They added that tablets girl had already been poisoning people well before they’d decided to have a word with her and that they’d only approached anyway to try to understand and intervene. Impossible it was therefore, they said, to gauge in some offhand, irresponsible manner what this tiny person purposed by her poisonings. So back then interpretations continued, as did riffs and contentions on these interpretations. So too, did the poisonings continue, and mostly where they continued, where it was crucial to be on the look-out for her, was at the Friday night dance in the district’s most popular drinking-club.
Especially crucial to keep an eye would be if you were on the dancefloor with your boyfriend or your mates, with drinks unattended at the table whenever she’d decide to come in. As it was, before she’d make her entrance, two other groupings always had to make their entrance. The renouncers-of-the-state would come in, in their black gear, their balaclavas and with their guns, to inspect for undesirables and underage drinkers. There would be many undesirables and underage drinkers but never once would anyone be hauled out and made to leave. It was a pretence. Everyone knew it was a pretence, a show of strength, one of those dresscode presentations that weekly had to be gone through. They would stride in, be determined, look around, flash hardware, finish their inspection then leave, and moments later, another grouping would enter and another pretence would take place. This would be the foreign soldiers, the occupying army from the country ‘over the water’. They too, would be in their gear, their khaki, their helmets, with their guns and on the look-out for renouncers, those very same renouncers they’d missed just seconds before. Only occasionally would it cross our minds the extent of bloodbath that would ensue should these two groupings ever make it in together. Not once though, in all the years of Friday nights did that encounter take place. Hard to imagine it not happening, we’d say, therefore unconscious synchrony, some connected happenstance must unconsciously be taking place between them. ‘It’s Friday night,’ one subliminal might have intimated to the other subliminal, ‘so why not keep this simple? How about you go in first, then you leave, then we’ll go in? Then next week we’ll go in first, then leave, then you go in.’ That must have been what happened because inconceivable they should miss each other by hairbreadths, not once, not twice, but easily a couple of hundred times. So these respective armies would enter, do their bit, scrutinise, show off, throw weight around, with everybody else, meaning us – young people on the dancefloor, young people at the drinking-tables, young people at the bar, kissing and canoodling in the shadows – ignoring them. As soon as tablets girl came in though, well, that was something else.