Little Constructions

by Anna Burns

  And that was why Tom knew he needed to tell his friend – tell another human being – the truth and the whole truth about the number, the age and the how long ago. He knew it would appear trivial, especially after how he’d been presenting it, but he sensed also there was a horror and a darkness underneath the triviality, and that this horror and darkness, so far, he’d been unable to haul up and put out. The versions he’d told so far were his way of trying, and they had helped him initially, but he sensed that if the truth didn’t start emerging, those lies he told would turn against him and eat him up.

  So, standing in his damaged shop, to which he appeared oblivious, Tom attempted something along the lines of telling the other Tom that he had read something in some paper once.

  ‘Eh?’ said Customer Tom, looking round.

  ‘It was about a group of children in a different country from ours, and ridiculous that it should be children, Tom. Not the sort of thing you’d imagine anyone ever being frightened of’

  ‘Eh?’ said Tom again. He was staring at Spaders, truly puzzled and lost.

  ‘Well, these children, see, these children – let’s say, for instance, there were six of them. No, let’s be truthful. Let’s say five. No, three, and they’re young, remember, Tom, about twelve, twelve and twelve.

  ‘Wait! Hear me out! They go on the rampage, see, and they have no sense of social order. They have been shown by no example from adults the meaning of the expression, “ Just a moment, I don’t think morally we should be doing that.”

  ‘Between bricking cars and bricking buses, what they like to do, these children, is to attack adults, and the adults they attack, Tom – say, one adult – well, he, no, she ends up running away and not talking about it to anyone. She tried to talk to the police at the start of her terrorisation, but the police, you see, Tom, the police, oh God, the police, she discovered, were nothing but bigger versions of the small children themselves. These police children in their adult bodies said the right words that they had been taught to say at the police factory, but looking in their eyes, she knew they didn’t have a clue as to what any of those words they’d learnt by heart meant.

  ‘At first when she’d go to see them they’d present themselves in their uniforms, with their shiny guns and holsters and say not to worry, oh, not to worry, that they were on the case. They promised to do something about it, they said, and they said they would help her, but when she kept going back to find out what they’d done to help her, these gatherers of information would say they didn’t know who she was. They wouldn’t remember anything, either, of what she said she reported to them. There was no record, they said, of her complaint. Or of any dead body. Did she say she filed a complaint about a dead body? No, she said, I wasn’t complaining about that. Besides, they said, interrupting, no one else had complained about a dead body, and then they’d pause and take a look at her. They’d take a long, hard look at her. And that was when she realised that if she kept going back she’d end up being arrested and made the enemy herself.

  ‘So that adult who was terrorised, Tom, she lost her speech, see, through writing the official reports for years for those huge child police officers. And she lost her wits also, through reading the police’s official responding reports. Those reports, Tom. Oh, Tom. They were unsigned and undated, and before they became threatening, all they ever said was, “Thank you for your instant letter. After examination. You need to appreciate. At the present time. Allowances for holidays, time off and reallocation plus National Response Times and the odd sickness paper getting lost” – then finally, and always, “If there’s any problem please don’t worry about hesitating to call.”

  ‘So this woman, Tom, the children got, she got away from the children, and he, no, she, got away from the police also. But she stayed afraid even though she got away because she hadn’t been able to expel her experience from deep inside herself yet. She learned, too, that her wits can be taken away from her, in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of speaking to anybody – whoosh! – speech, wits, energy, taken away from her, all in a second, just like that. When she tries to say anything now, absolutely anything, she remembers that people interrupt, ask questions, then interrupt the answering of these questions to ask more questions, and so she stops herself with “Best, most safest, not to bother speaking. They mean well, in that ignorant way they mean well, but they’ll grab it off me and – laughing or commiserating – turn it into some light, cheery, forgettable coffee-table talk.”

  ‘So that’s my point,’ concluded Tom. ‘And do you get it, Tom? That the children don’t come only in child packages, and that I know it’s been five years—’

  Five years! Did he say five years? Not four then?

  ‘—but five years, Tom, is the tiniest of getting betters. I hope you get this? Do you get it? Don’t you get it, Tom?’

  Well, of course Tom didn’t get it. He gave a smallish laugh at the delivery of this nonsense, and made a joke along the lines of ‘Doesn’t she know she can get a prescription from her doctor’s for the likes of that?’ It wasn’t a real joke or a genuine laugh of connection either, but it was a response that hid Customer Tom’s confirmation of the real reason he thought his friend was talking rubbish to him like that.

  And here I need to tell you what Customer Tom gets up to in bed before he goes to sleep at night. He reads his wife’s dictionary. And it was the consequences of the reading of this dictionary that brought about the Tomses’ falling-out.

  Two things: Schizophrenia and Blueprint. First, Schizophrenia. I think some people should leave well alone – I myself would and I bet you would – but Customer Tom considered himself not one of us people. He had read in his wife’s favourite medical dictionary, which she had stolen from a library accidentally and had meant to, but so far had been too tired ever to bring back, about the type of schizophrenia – the other type, not the one where you hear voices and they start off friendly and sing to you and quote you poetry, then take you hostage, urging you to ransack your house for bugging devices and hidden surveillance equipment, then to write advisory letters on the use of shadows, artificial foliage and disguised local garnish to Heads of State at the Town Hall. Oh boy, no. Not that one. That one has you fragmented and terrified and talking about something or nothing to somebody or to nobody, and if there really is somebody, they’ve become nervous or aggressive around you and have no idea either what you’re on about. Tom apparently meant some other schizophrenia, one where you don’t hear voices and you don’t become fragmented, but you find anyway that you start to distrust your nearest and your dearest, those who were your friends, those you thought you loved. You shut off intimacies, and you go away and isolate, and that’s the condition Cusack on the whole tended to think Spaders was suffering from. Every so often though, like now – with Tom muttering those ‘kiddie on the rampage’ stories – Tom would wonder if perhaps it was the first schizophrenia that his friend had after all. Of course he wasn’t qualified to diagnose, but most nights now he had been going systematically through the mental part of the medical dictionary, pulling out different conditions and complexes, wondering if it could be ‘this’ or ‘this’ that poor Tom had. For a second opinion he ran possibles by his wife, who was in bed beside him and, as Tom’s condition had been going on for ‘a year’ now, they were one hundred and fourteenth time round to the ‘esses’, which was what brought up this schizophrenic talk.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, Tom,’ said the wife, who was called Angelus. She put on her reading glasses and took the heavy dictionary plus notepad off his lap. ‘You’ve an awful lot of sensation perceptions on the jotter here already. Are you still walking on eggshells, or have you got up the courage to speak to the man himself about it yet?

  ‘Also,’ she went on, ‘I see once again you’re misreading that definition of schizophrenia. There aren’t two types. It’s just that the symptoms of the one type have been divided up.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t mumble, Tom,’ she then said, for To
m had reached over and mumbled what was supposed to be ‘Where? Let me reread that definition!’ and it was true, Tom did have a mumble problem. It manifested mainly when he was in a prolonged state of being upset or annoyed. A difficulty in enunciating would come upon him and he would start eliding and ellipsing, leaving vowels, then syllables, then words, then whole necessary sentences out. If he didn’t leave them out, he condensed them, abridged them, according to some highly private, regulated system, trusting to the listener to be on the same wavelength as himself. The listener rarely was. Sometimes this listener understood intuitively and sometimes he didn’t and sometimes he cried, ‘Stop, Tom! For the love of God, stop!’ Tom, feeling hurt, would then feel obliged to muster huge amounts of energy in order to re-mumble his initial condensed statements, but he could never do the second mumble as clearly as he did the first. If the listener chose to be polite at this point rather than honest, he could pretend to have understood and hopefully that would be the end of it. But if this person was having a day of authenticity – and Angelus was always having days of authenticity – they could be at the same point in the exchange for well over an hour. When Tom was especially upset or annoyed, which he had been of late because of this mental breaking-down process of his old pal Tom Spaders, he could hardly regulate any thought patterns, and this might account for why the mistaken definition of schizophrenia had come about.

  By the way, I must talk about this ‘upset and annoyed’ business. You may have noticed that people in Tiptoe Floorboard only ever spoke about being ‘upset’ or ‘annoyed’. It seemed that all emotions, even positive ones, had to be couched in terms of whether a person was in a state of annoyance or not. And if not, why not? What about upset? Was it that they were upset then, instead? If not upset either, which could imply that they were perhaps happy, that would have to be expressed in terms of them not being upset or annoyed as well. They might be ‘Not too bad, thanks’. Or even better, ‘Not too bad but I was annoyed and upset earlier, and I’m due to be upset and annoyed again later on’. Best of all, they might say, ‘I’m warm I’m hot I’m cold I’m tired I’m hungry’ – in response to a question as to how they were feeling emotionally – ‘I’m warm I’m hot I’m cold I’m tired I’m hungry.’ That was allowed. That could be said in this town. If someone was in grief – owing to some murder or to some disappearance of some loved one – that still shouldn’t call for any spilling out of the ‘upset and annoyed’ position. They couldn’t say, ‘Distraught, distressed, maddened raw – what else do you think I’m feeling?’ in response to a question as to how they were bearing up emotionally. ‘How do you think I’m feeling,’ they can’t cry, ‘when “Regretfully informs you …” the policeman has just called to say?’ All that ‘Want to make him alive. Can’t believe he’s dead. Can’t make him alive and I want to make him alive!’ talk would be an intense, embarrassing thing to come out with in Tiptoe Floorboard, but you know, sometimes those words actually managed to break through. Such have been used by a few eccentrically suffering people, but in those cases, it’s really up to the town’s discretion whether to overlook them or not. But hey, I don’t want to make a big thing out of a small thing, for every town has its idiosyncrasies. It’s not as if nobody could express anything. It’s simply that, in this town, regarding emotions, two words were enough.

  ‘Anyways,’ went on Angelus, her right big toe now unconsciously tickling the left calf of her husband, ‘if the bruises are there but have come about by supernatural forces, what’s the point in consulting a scientific medical dictionary about them? And – don’t interrupt, Tom, let me finish, I said let me finish – if they’re visual hallucinations and you and Johnjoe are the only ones seeing them, wouldn’t that mean you two were having the problem and not poor Tom after all?’

  At this point Tom thought that sometimes there was too much criticism, speculation and too many intellectual games in the world and not enough focus on what was working. Angelus had a semi-point, he would concede that, but what she wasn’t reflective enough to realise was that this could be a case of Tom Spaders having an Inverse Hallucination and not he and Johnjoe having Standard Hallucinations Grade One. He didn’t point this out, however, for she would only comment on his comment, the way she seemed to be addicted to commenting on everything that was commented. She might not interrupt people the way he interrupted people but hey, this constant commenting was to him just as bad. Why couldn’t she just listen? he thought. Why couldn’t she be quiet and just listen and remain quiet even after she’d listened? Why did she have to jump in, question, sum up and pass judgement all the time? That was why, every so often, Tom defended himself by not running things by his beloved wife but instead would suggest they retook the self-help stress test they took together periodically, to see whether they’d regressed or progressed in their mental health since taking it last time.

  But here, right now, in the gunshop, thinking this might be the ideal time to run various mental illnesses by his friend Tom Spaders, Tom Cusack was wondering how to broach the subject, given Tom had become touchy in the matter of advice these days.

  That’s unasked-for advice, by the way. And you know how it is with unasked-for advice.

  The great thing since the discovery of Recovery is not to be seen to be giving it. It’s no longer appropriate to interrupt people while they’re listing their problems and say, ‘You should’ or ‘If I were you’ or ‘If I was you’. Apparently if you do this, you show yourself up as ignorant, anxious, controlling and old- fashioned. Only in the long ago did people behave like that. However, none of us likes to be told we can’t interfere and organise another person’s life for them, no matter how evolved into psychological modernity we are. Even whilst standing back with our calm bodies and our meditative breaths during, let’s say, Tom Spaders’s little spews of messiness, we always want to burst out and let him know what we would’ve done had we been involved in a mugging and stabbing affair.

  What’s required now, in order to get in there and manage people without them wising up to it, is to use language in such a way as to make it appear we are not the ones running the show. Now we have to listen to them – yes, that means without once interrupting – but as soon as they’ve finished, we nip in quick with our alternatives to ‘you should’ and ‘you must’. There are many variations. You could say, for example, ‘Some people say, Tom …’ or ‘Have you considered such and such, Tom?’ or ‘Can I make a suggestion?’ or ‘Shouldn’t we …?’ or ‘Tom, I remember someone once …’. In this way we manage to let Tom know what we would have done if it had been us instead of him in that mugging and stabbing incident, and if we do it properly, Tom will never know his mind has been fucked with or that, although he hasn’t been interrupted, he hasn’t been listened to as well.

  Customer Tom, though. What a mess. Of all the people I know, he’s the one who’s just too messily human. Just too human. Didn’t manage, couldn’t manage, to stick to the ‘you should’ variations, which are a must for thrusting advice on to people these days. For his part too, Tom Spaders wasn’t proving to be all that compliant and complaisant, which shows I suppose, that just because you’re having a breakdown doesn’t mean you’ve become stupid, or that you’re not vigilant of others’ reactions, or that, through fear, you’re now socially and ineptly unaware. Clearly, Spaders was annoyed and upset that Cusack here had given that little laugh and made that insensitive ‘prescription’ joke after he himself had tried his best to tell the truth about what had happened to him, even if he didn’t get round to admitting that the woman he was referring to was himself. Second, there was something so primevally annoying and upsetting anyway about the Ordinary Decent Folk trying to delude you into thinking you are being heard by them, whilst all the time it’s obvious they can’t stand what you’re saying and are waiting for you to draw breath so they can shut you up. They think they’ve fooled you, he thought. Might even think they’ve helped you. Well, he wasn’t going to stand around listening to ‘transparent and go
od-natured’ – which in Tiptoe meant ‘stupid’ – Tom trying out a disguised advice number on him. Instead he wished he could take and shake Tom and make him into quality audience – which meant ‘Sit down, Tom.’ ‘Listen, Tom.’ ‘Tom, shut up.’

  But he didn’t take and shake Tom into quality audience and Tom didn’t try some new-fangled advice number on him. Instead what Tom Cusack did was much worse.

  Before I go into what Cusack did and start a discussion on the Blueprint and the Anti-Blueprint, I have to go first with Spaders. He had opened some door and stepped back through seven years of time. We’re going too. So now here he was, having forgotten Cusack, having forgotten the state of his shop also. Instead he was muttering, ‘Didn’t think she was right but seems she was right. Maybe I should have done what she said years ago and chucked this bloody shop.’

  Him and her. And too long ago. But he had wanted her. Then he hadn’t wanted her. But even when he had wanted her, it was that too much seemed to be getting called forth from him to be able to keep up with wanting her. Then he couldn’t believe he’d wanted her. Then he didn’t think of her. But now, strangely, unpredictably, since the mugging, she just kept coming up.