Little Constructions

by Anna Burns

  Tom’s gunshop was like that.

  The team didn’t want it. Not really. But not because they saw it as rubbish. It was more that being shopowners and totting accounts and smiling at customers was hardly their inclination. ‘Don’t open a shop if you can’t crack a smile’ is a saying the Irish-Chinese have. Besides, the Does knew they could saunter in any time they fancied, take whatever they cared for, and ‘See you right about this later, Spaders,’ they’d shout, as they waltzed with it back out of his shop. Legally it was Tom’s shop. His was the name on the deeds and his was the money that had paid for it. But in real terms – in terms of who can kidnap you and torture you and kill you just for the why-not of it – there was no doubt about it. It was the Doe Family Community Centre shop. They didn’t insist on laying claim, just as they didn’t insist on laying claim to their other businesses in the town also. As for Spaders, why not let him continue doing the good job for them that up until then he always had?

  Because up till then was over. Tom Spaders had lost his nerve. It was said he had drawn into himself and was now tiny in his charisma, so the Does knew that to keep on top of their rivals they’d have to assert themselves and go for the very thing everybody else wanted to have.

  For the time being, though, and as instructed, Johnjoe put John Doe’s personal life before the Doe Group’s business interests. He continued to hold the teapot which, by now, was swinging a lullaby in his arms.

  Gunshop Tom saw the sway, then watched it gathering into a momentum. A few momentums on and he fell back against his gunshelves with a cry. His arms flung themselves out, his legs buckled and he knocked off all his handguns. They fell on top of him as he crash-landed on to the ground. Strange thing was, though, even before he hit the ground, Tom knew that neither teapot nor anything else had come anywhere near his body. Oh flip, he thought. It’s that Spatial Fragmentation Hallucination Syndrome he’d been reading about at the hospital. It had been in a magazine belonging to the last patient who’d left it behind him because he’d died. Idly, Tom had picked it up and then couldn’t set it down again. His eyes boggled. His nerves raced. He one hundred per cent identified with the case study on display.

  Do you know this syndrome? Do you have it? I’ll tell you. You’re having a hard time, say, because something not very nice once happened to you. It was a big thing, and although it’s supposed to be over, in your body and in your head and from the way you now look out on the world, it’s not bloody over, it’s still bloody going on. Or maybe it wasn’t a big thing. Maybe it was a series of little things, most of them below the level of police CAD reference number material, but if you add them together, plus feather in the timescale, they amount to one hell of a cumulative assault.

  But poor you. It’s too late. By now you’re infantilised. By now you’ve lost your language. By now you’re no longer capable of speaking about what happened, for didn’t you try and try and nobody could hear? You’re left swinging to one extreme therefore, which is clutching on to reluctant people, babbling incoherencies, or else sitting alone at your kitchen table, driven into silence, unable to tune in to anything at all.

  That’s because of evil. That’s what evil does.

  And it’s during this state of stuckness that syndromes like the spatial fragmentation whatjimacallit enter. The main thing to know about the Spatial is that it’s the real reason behind people who walk into doors.

  To jump sideways for a moment. You can’t say you don’t know the expression ‘I walked into a door’ that someone says to you and your mates because they meet you and they’ve got this big bruise on their face. And you don’t believe them and you say, ‘Yeah, sure, very sorry to hear it,’ and you exchange glances with your mates. ‘Liar,’ the glances say. ‘Yer man, what’s-his-name? That man she won’t leave? It was him. He hit her. Does she think we’re stupid? Our sweet fannies she walked into a door.’ Well, you see, this is where you should just shush your mind and tell it not to be so intransigent. Turns out you don’t know everything. Scientific analysis of the Spatial Fragmentation Hallucination Syndrome proves that poor woman was telling the truth. She really did walk into a door.

  Which is not to say the husband didn’t hit her – poor bastard, I mean him – although he does deserve a good kicking, although don’t quote me as I don’t like to present myself as vengeful. It’s to say that being beaten by the husband is nothing but secondary. How could they not have come into each other’s orbit when each other’s blueprint called the other forth?

  But to jump back to after that thing that wasn’t nice that happened to you, or after that huge cumulated assault. You’re sitting in silence at your kitchen table because you’ve no speech left and there’s a glass of water in front of you. You pick it up to have a sip. You go to set it down after you’ve had your sip and you misjudge the height of the table. You bang it down and crash it, thinking the table’s lower, or else you let go too soon and again, bang and splash it, thinking the table’s higher up than it is. Or you go to walk out a door and you can see clearly the space between the doorframes. How could you miss it? But you walk towards it and you do. You bang one shoulder against one doorframe, step to the side and bang your head against the other and it takes ten whole seconds to get into the next room. Or you’re reading a book and from the corner of your eye you see the tail end of an imaginary insect running across the carpet. But not one insect, the tail end of a herd of insects, rustling together as they go vanishing by. Or say you do manage sometimes to walk through the space between the doorframes without banging your body – as you do, someone in black flappy clothes is crashing in from the other side. You jump and yelp and do a double-take, for who is that person, where did that flappy flash come from? It came from nowhere and, seconds from colliding, veers to the side and disappears. You glance around and catch other dark flaps speeding about you also so, to get away from the doorframes and the rapid apparitions, you go outside and walk along the street. You walk along the pavement and, as you’re walking, a big bus honks because you’re too close to the kerbside. ‘One more inch out,’ he shouts, ‘and I’d’ve carried your shoulder off’ ‘What’s wrong with you?’ shouts another. ‘Are you trying to get yourself killed?’ So you move back to the inside of the kerb, which is where you thought you were in the first place. You bump into things that aren’t there, then get back home and knock over things that are. Shaken, you decide to go to bed, to get your spatial bearings back during sleeptime. So you turn round to head upstairs but take a step and fall down them instead. When you pick yourself up you find you’re in the kitchen when it should have been the hallway and you’ve got your hand accidentally on the stove. Well, thank goodness it wasn’t on, but you hold your hand anyway, just as if you’ve burned it. And sometimes welts come up that you know shouldn’t be there. But you’re resilient. You go once more with purpose into the hall. This time you succeed as you head upstairs but, as you turn round on the landing to step safely into your bedroom, you walk slap-bang into a closed door you’d never noticed was there before.

  That’s what Tom had. The Spatial Fragmentation Hallucination Syndrome. In his hypervigilant state, he didn’t see the teapot coming, but he thought he saw something – a big bird, a crow, a rook – and it made a stoop towards him, wings closing, claws opening, lots of flapping. Naturally he jumped back and crashed himself on to the floor. And there he was, still on it. He scrabbled amidst the spilt guns and split bullet boxes whilst Johnjoe, who had been pre-empted from hitting him by this unexpected development, stopped swinging the teapot and looked from it to Spaders in surprise.

  ‘It was an AK47, wasn’t it, Tom?’ shouted over Customer Tom from the corner. Customer Tom had sensed that his friend – judging from those sudden physical jerks – was going to splurge into ‘Did I ever tell you, Johnjoe, I was mugged and stabbed by a bunch of teenagers?’ and, fearing the impact upon his friend of any impact upon Johnjoe of being earbashed about the effects of violence, Customer Tom wisely was trying to move the subjec
t on. ‘She came in,’ he shouted, ‘reached over, didn’t want any information. We heard her shout “Taxi!” and that’s it – except she grabbed up some pellets before she was gone.’

  Johnjoe, still holding the teapot, seemed confused at this point.

  ‘A ’74 it was,’ corrected Gunshop Tom, who was now off the floor and brushing down his trousers. He was pretending nothing had happened, for it would be impossible to explain the likes of ravens to the likes of Johnjoe Doe. He used to be good at imparting gun information, he told himself. So why not pull himself together, do his job and impart gun information? He joined the conversation, kicking bullets from under him, sending them skidding out on to the shop floor.

  Johnjoe hardly listened. First he came to the conclusion that yes, absolutely yes, he hadn’t struck yer man here with the teapot, for here it was, still being held gently, undented, in his hand. Second, there was something fishy in what those two clowns were telling him. His face hackled as he struggled to comprehend the wrongfulness of their comments, then it de-hackled upon comprehension, then rehackled as he grasped further the implications of what, apparently, had gone on.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said.

  And that was when it came out. Not only had Jetty Doe bought a Kalashnikov when it was patently obvious a thirty-eight snubnose would have been far better suited to her situation, she also hadn’t been given the proper ammunition with which to carry her personal vendetta out. Johnjoe was on a life-and-death mission to stop his Master and Commander’s wife’s sister shooting his Master and Commander, but it seemed he had an even more desperate compulsion to make sure she had the correct weaponry with which to be prevented from doing just that. That’s what I mean about looking at the thing men laterally. You can’t understand it by dictionary.

  The men got protracted at this point because they fell into a loop.

  ‘I didn’t give it, she took it!’

  ‘Were you making fun of her? Couldn’t kill a bird with that ammo, and I’m not talking goose here, I’m only talking duck…’

  ‘Trying to tell you! The door went ding! She shouted for a taxi—’

  ‘… common or garden loading long gun! Man, you need gravity to reload it. Guns follow fashion. Why didn’t you tell her that?’

  ‘I just wanted to wipe the counter. Just wipe the counter. That’s all I wanted to do, all day.’

  ‘So it was to be huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ without the huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ – is that what you’re saying? When the duck appears … that sort of thing?’

  ‘Look, I’ll start again – first of all the door went ding!—’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘She wasn’t specific. She wasn’t scientific. Her ears were blocked to reason. She had us under the table.’

  ‘That’s true, Johnjoe. She did have us under the table.’

  ‘Can’t get my head around giving that to a person, even to a woman. You’d think the logical, practical, sensible, reasonable, objective, intelligent—’

  ‘But it wasn’t done to her! It was all done to me!’

  ‘That’s true, Johnjoe. It was all done to us.’

  ‘… a handgun I could understand, but not an ordinary eighteenth-century muzzle-loading—’

  ‘It was a Kalashnikov!’

  ‘Large charge or small charge? Did you premeasure it out?’

  ‘I ended up saying to her, “If you scream at me you don’t get my attention.” That’s what I wanted to say I mean. “Ask me nicely, then you can come and join.” That sort of thing.’

  ‘I think you should shut up now,’ said Johnjoe. ‘I think you were taking the piss because she was a woman. Well, you’ll be pishing yourselves on the other side of your sexism when I tell you whose wife’s sister that woman who came in here was.’

  And that was when the loop ended. Nicely and firmly. No more discussion. If only all loops could end as handsomely as that.

  ‘What way’d she go?’ said Big Doe, after he’d imparted the news of the John Doe Community Centre connection. But the Toms were astonished for they already knew about that. What was wrong with Johnjoe? It wasn’t as if they didn’t live in the same small town as him, and as the Community Centre members. How could they not have noticed this connection? One good thing, though, was that at least with this news, which was supposed to be shocking, they weren’t any more shocked than they had been moments before.

  ‘She went east,’ they both said, even though they didn’t know she’d gone east. They had to give some answer and, luckily for them, Johnjoe accepted it, which didn’t mean he didn’t do violence to them. But before he did, something else took place in the shop.

  Towards the end of the loop session, and before Johnjoe hit them, Tom Spaders began to have a few more sense-perceptor-disturbance disorders. First there was the nosebleed, followed by the crown of thorns.

  Some people have it all.

  This nosebleed. Now what was that about? And generally speaking, what about that whole connection between physical things and mental things and supernatural things and God? What about them? How do you get the hierarchical order between biochemistry, saints, souls and those tricks to reason called emotions? Which comes first? I don’t know. Do you know? ’Cos I don’t know.

  Tom’s nose began to bleed but he didn’t accept this as reality. He thought it a simple hallucination complex, based upon his Former Personality Gone and Never Coming Back Disorder and he paid no attention either when four bruises appeared – bang! bang! bang! bang! – upon his forearm. Then his lower lip split, a small squeaky slit, which Johnjoe, who had been altercating over the long gun, even thought he heard happening. This guy’s weird, he stepped back and thought. Customer Tom noticed the stepping back and looked up and saw the blood, the cut and the bruises on his friend also, and both Johnjoe and Customer Tom stared, for neither had witnessed Spontaneous Visual Vessel Eruption Disorder before. They had read of such phenomena, of course, in best-selling psychological, psychophysiological, neuromythological, bioneurological and demonic possession books, and had even seen Hollywood movies and real-life documentaries of exorcisms, psychosomatic cures and the biotheological response on the TV. This touches slantingly into God and into the Devil, and into the supernatural, as well as into scientific speculation upon ‘the more the crime, the more the ghosts’, but we’ll have to go into that some time later on.

  So, this nosebleed. Some people enjoy nosebleeds although probably they’d never admit to that. As long as they weren’t going to lose all of it, they quite liked the idea of some of their blood dripping out. What they wouldn’t do, though, would be to deny a nosebleed was happening if, actually, it was happening, and this was something Spaders was doing at the present time. He did nothing about the blood, and this, along with the non-reaction to the split lip, the bruises and that earlier falling up against the gun cabinet, increasingly started to disturb Johnjoe Doe. Was this ghosts? he wondered, for he and the Doe Executive took their belief in ghosts and in demons and in other discarnate essences very deadly seriously. But if it weren’t ghosts, was Spaders taking the hand or was it that he was insane as everybody around here was now saying he was? Better be mad, thought Johnjoe, who had heard of the mugging and stabbing and, although he could hardly credit someone getting themselves mugged and stabbed instead of doing the mugging and stabbing, he preferred Tom to be losing it than for any mockery of himself or of his supernatural beliefs to be going on.

  So, what was it?

  Goodness?

  Badness?

  Or psychosomatic mad?

  This supernatural business, though. Seems I have to return to it immediately. Can’t fathom it, for they’re very superstitious, them Does. They’d stop for a break, for example, whilst in the middle of killing somebody, and over the boiling kettle and KitKats, they’d begin a round of the latest ghost-talk. They’d scare each other with their tales, to the point of forgetting they had a man tortured and three-quarters dead and
tied to a chair just across the room from them. They’d get so edged-out by their ghost mania, they’d even be afraid to go home by themselves. There’d be the wee white woman story of the wee white woman, who was two feet high and who appeared and disappeared and who latched on to the auras of people. She’d shake her head as she walked behind them, making clawing motions and muttering ‘No No No No’ all the time. She’d follow these people to their homes, and afterwards, those individuals she followed? Well, they’d completely disappear. There’d be no trace of them. Then there’d be the woman on the yard wall crying into her tortoiseshell and the rattling pots in the kitchen and the pictures falling off the walls by themselves. That’s not all. There was Lula, half-banshee, half-witch, who came to announce the deaths even before they’d been kidnapped, and also there was the haunted egg factory and don’t forget the Ouija. There was the Ouija, which they shouldn’t have played but, God forgive them, they did play, and it told them that one of them in that room would be dead before the night was out. That didn’t happen, though – unless you counted the tortured man. And isn’t it amazing – I mean that little glass tablette thing? It’s made in France and you rest the tips of your fingers upon it and do you know you can ask the board anything you want? It can be about the past, present or future and the Ouija has to tell the truth by the third time of asking. It’s only allowed to lie to you two times in a row.

  ‘Are you the Devil?’

  ‘No. I’m your Aunty Jacky.’

  ‘You are not. Are you the Devil?’

  ‘No. I’m your father, Senior John.’

  ‘Third time. Are you the Devil?’

  ‘No. I’m your Uncle Joe.’

  ‘Hey, everybody, it’s my Uncle Joe. It’s Nephew JerryJudges here, Uncle Joe. I’m seventeen now. Which of them was it? Which of them gangs killed you, Uncle Joe?’

  Then there’s the haunted house on the main road, the one that even made it on to the newstime lunchtime special. The workmen kept running out of it in the mornings for if they left their tools in it overnight, next day when they showed, every tool was buried to its hilt in the newly plastered walls. ‘There’s a baby voice on the stairway of that house,’ said one of the workmen to the TV journalist who was laughing as he interviewed him, and the workman said, ‘Fuck you, you weren’t there. I was there. It was a baby voice and sometimes it was two baby voices. They were on the stairs and they were shouting out the answers to the radio pop quiz.’ Apparently the situation got so bad that the workmen had to turn off the quiz when the voices persisted in shouting out the answers, and when they started singing along to the popsongs, the men had to turn off Radio One as well. It didn’t stop there, though. Keith’s plasterboard got snapped out of his hands and thrown across the room when he was still in the middle of using it, and Clem’s toolkit began to rattle, as then did every small and big thing in the room. In the end, tools were getting hurled and buried whether or not they were left overnight. A ceilingman up a ladders would set his screwdriver down on the top step of these ladders, then turn round to pick it up after only a second. He’d hear a whirr and a crack coming from an inch above him, followed by a flash, then there’d be a ‘thunk!’ with the screwdriver buried, with inhuman force, again in the wall.