Little Constructions

by Anna Burns

  He had thought she was just being woman – ‘Wash your own dishes.’ ‘Iron your own shirts.’ ‘Sew your own trousers.’ ‘Pack your own lunch.’ ‘Get rid of the guns. Stop having dealings with that Doe gang’ – that sort of woman, that type of thing. And it wasn’t even that they were together, never mind living together. And it wasn’t dealings either. ‘Not criminal dealings,’ was what he had protested. All he was doing was running a shop. ‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘you’re a Doe yourself’ ‘Ah no,’ she said. ‘That’s different. That’s blood.’

  ‘But it’s legit!’

  He tried to reason. He tried to persuade. He tried to apply his intellect into intellectualising her into a corner. He tried to get her round to his sensible way of thinking on that dark early morning of that particular day. Turned out to be their last.

  ‘I’m doing nothing wrong,’ he said. ‘And I’m not blaming my guns just because you don’t like them. This is what I do and it’s legal, and it’s entirely because you’re a woman you’re thinking this. I could walk into any police factory in any city and show my papers without an eye being batted any day.’

  Cough. Splutter. Sneeze sneeze. Attention attention.

  I had to cough and splutter there to indicate these two people weren’t telling the truth about the subject of their bickering. They were pretending the whole subject was whether guns were good or not. As if that mattered. As if, in the name of God, such a thing as that mattered. I think by now you must know what it is I’m really talking about.

  That’s right. This was the morning after the night before, and it had been a difficult night before and it was her fault and he couldn’t leave because they were in his bedroom. She had invited herself to his bedroom, to his home, and there they were, still in it, in his bed. They were on their backs, side by side in that early-morning darkness, both definitely not touching, hardly speaking. So, do they think we’re stupid? As if guns could ever be the point here. Like murder and torture and victims and cold-blooded killers and cold-blooded justice-seekers, guns, too, are incredibly easy of facilitation during an emergency. We dive upon them as subjects earnestly to argue about – all so we don’t have to venture into that other, most tender, most delicate, most volatile of areas knowing that, once the guard was down, one of us, at any moment, might be invaded and taken over by the other or, at any moment, one of us, by the other, might be annihilated and destroyed.

  So Tom had no idea he was on the defensive – I mean against desire, I mean against vulnerability. He really and truly thought the subject was guns. That was why he said,

  ‘You snore. I can tell you now, so you know, you definitely, most definitely, snore.’

  What a shitty thing to say. And I would say, had it not been for rejection and threat, and by threat I mean from that vulnerability, I mean from that desire – desire that had the power to take him and shake him, and open him up like he was a caught rat by the neck that was about to have its spine squished up and out of it, before being let go and dropped quivering on to the flagstones, only to be picked up just when it thought it could at last get back to theorising, and instead, being shook by the neck, this time by vulnerability, all over again – well, if it hadn’t been for that, it wouldn’t have been in Tom’s character, consciously or unconsciously, to shame in the accoutrements of being female to any woman. But what can one do? Such things as women exist. I know you’re thinking, oh, if only we could get our erections and total sexual, emotional, spiritual and intellectual satisfactions from guns, bullets, postage stamps and suchlike controllable essences. Wouldn’t that be easy? Why can’t we? After all, some men do. Why can’t women be gunshops? That would be even easier. How much safer, how much simpler, how much more predictable going into them then, might be.

  But life isn’t and we can’t and women aren’t, so Tom made that remark and it was out in one of those bursts of retaliation before he could stop himself. We’re at the sexual level of him saying this and it was that basic because what else in that moment could it be? Angry, because she hadn’t wanted him. Angry, because of rejection when he’d exposed his desire for her body. Angry, because she made it clear, after them starting, that he was to stop, that that was that, that he was to ‘Stop’, that he was to ‘Don’t’, that he was to ‘No, don’t. Stop, Tom!’ – that he was to get the message she no longer wanted him to proceed.

  And she wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t look at his body, wouldn’t see him. He gave to her and, although he said it was all right, that he wanted to give to her, it wasn’t all right. He wanted something more than the pleasure of giving to her back. Even appreciation. She could at least have appreciated. But she didn’t and all the time she wouldn’t look at him, except for that once she looked at his face. She touched his face. Would she get on top of him? ‘Will you get on top of me?’ And she did, and then, after a second, all wooden, she slid off. Then the row – started by her – over something he couldn’t remember. Well, he could remember, but he didn’t want to remember, and anyway, it was her fault, that row, as well. Twisted it. Twisted his words. In the domain of sex – ‘fuck’, and just ‘fuck’, and ‘When I fuck you …’ – was an acceptable turn-on and she’d been childish in being the opposite of being turned on by it. Indeed, he had told her she was childish. Inexperienced. My God, he thought. Definitely inexperienced. Not sophisticated. She got dressed, damn her, partly dressed, then she disappeared into the bathroom. Then she came back, got into bed, then out of bed, then into bed, then back out of bed, rustling bags in her bag at the bottom of the bed, over and over – all during the goddamn hours of the night.

  So, not surprisingly, he got her in the belly – intuitively rather than calculatedly. And he did it with that snore remark. I’ll tell you now, though more of her later, she was got by that snore remark more than she was got by the ‘Fuck you’ remark, though not as much as she was got by the ‘Have you any idea how childish you are?’ So now it was next morning, and there she was, and it seemed as if an unexpected slap had come out of the darkness and landed itself upon her. It wasn’t so much she did snore that it hurt her. It was that she understood – even if he didn’t – the exact meaning back of his words.

  Undermining bastard! was what she thought she should have said. At the time, though, given she was still in his bed, still in his teeshirt, still in confusion, still in his territory, still attracted to him, still fighting her past, still holding her face as if that slap really had happened to her,

  ‘You snore too,’ was what, ineffectually, she did say.

  Ineffectual, of course, because men are allowed to snore. It’s part of the psychological mechanicals of being male. Women won’t be astonished and think, God, how shameful! How ungenderlike! How destructive of his masculinity! A snoring man! I must ring up and dissect this with my friends.

  So he got in there, to her vulnerable area, because she got in, the night previously, to his vulnerable area. In both their opinions they couldn’t help but feel justified in reaching out and kicking as many vulnerable areas as they could.

  Neither of them was admitting it. Hence the guns. Good auld guns. What a standby. ‘Get rid of them,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Get rid of them,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I mean it. Get rid of them, Tom,’ she said.

  ‘I mean it too and I won’t,’ he said. Then she said,

  ‘Tom, why is it you’ve never said my name, not once?’

  And it was true. He had never said her name. Indeed, he couldn’t say it. Not because he’d forgotten it. Most certainly he hadn’t forgotten it. It was the dread of the capitulation of it, of the handing over to her of himself in it, of what it might take from him to pay her the compliment of letting her know he really knew her name.

  You know how it is. Once you’ve said the name you’ve stepped over. And I mean the name of someone you want, someone you really want. I don’t mean someone you don’t want but are deciding to marry an
yway to teach the person you do want a lesson. Someone you don’t want, you think, doesn’t take from you. So you say that name over and over, but not so the desired one’s. To say her name means you’re acknowledging, means you’re at the mercy – for might she not kill you, just when you’ve decided you’re happy, you’re safe, you’re totally at peace with this person? That’s why you won’t concede. That’s why you’ll say a version of it. That’s why you’ll say a nickname instead of it. You won’t ever, consciously or unconsciously, get that name right.

  Tom didn’t have to answer the name question because Jotty Doe – not her Cousin Jetty, if you remember, with the Kalashnikov – now completely horrified at weakening her own defences by asking it, quickly rushed them on to their definitive falling-out. It was over the Fourth Dimension. Oh no, thought Tom. Not that Fourth Dimension. Yes. Fourth Dimension. Like the guns, Jotty brought it up.

  You know how it is when you can’t put your finger on something, I mean because it isn’t physical, because it isn’t material, isn’t tangible? Tom said he was running a legal gunshop. Jotty derided with ‘A concrete fact, Tom, that’s all.

  ‘And nothing’s ever just about the concrete facts of a situation,’ she continued. ‘There are spiritual unspokens, nonverbal communications, invisible energies and a sense world beyond the material. And, Tommy, they’re the bigger part of anything that happens to us here.’ Now, this is not rubbish, but in the context of cover-up, which this was, it was rubbish. The perfect plane of non-temporal phenomena, in this context, delivered by Jotty, was identical, absolutely identical, to guns.

  And here it started to get super-frustrating for Tom, a man who prided himself on his fairly good switch for picking up mentalness. He knew she was a Doe, of course – which meant a family of neuroses, psychoses and Edgar Allan Poe horror stories. So even if she seemed normal on the surface, there were probably enormous murderous tendencies underneath. Of course, when it came to dating, there was always that little problem Tom himself seemed to experience, but he didn’t much like to dwell upon that. They can’t all be mad, can they? he’d think instead, meaning women, and this would be whenever his switch for mentalness became heightened, which it would do any time an attraction to a woman threatened to go beyond the physical stage. She would start to appear not so attractive, not so safe, indeed rather startling and sinister – and, strangely, this would be whether she came from a psychopathic murderous family or not. So he’d ditch her, whoever she was, usually by forgetting she’d ever had an existence. Then he’d be free to look for the right one all over again. He’d wanted the right one, see – one he could click with, one he could be happy with, one he could acknowledge and recognise, for he’d really wanted to click and be happy and recognise, but with women it was as if you got to the top of the mountain thinking it was all over but instead it was ‘Oh no! There’s more mountain!’ All the women he’d met so far had been exactly like that.

  But in this case he could hardly believe that here was Jotty, sister to the Main Doe Man – a gang leader who, after all, was an unmistakable dangerous concrete fact if ever there was one – having the cheek to go on at him in a moral fashion about things you couldn’t see, hear, taste, touch or smell. If only she could be like her sisters, he thought. Indeed, he couldn’t help thinking, but I’ll tell you about Jotty’s five married, mothering, glamorous yardsticks of sisters by which Jotty – not married, mothering or glamorous – was constantly measured, when I get on to beautiful women with blood on their hands later on.

  So that was what he was thinking. If any women could be described as totally perfect, those Doe sisters, he thought, were it. But oops. Jotty could read minds. She was finely tuned, highly strung and her brain was never in neutral. She accused him of accusing her of not being like her sisters. This startled him. How in the name of God, he thought, did she know that?

  He denied it. He said she was being ridiculous. But she reminded him again of how things – ‘which include thoughts, Tom’ – could be transmitted without the conscious material expression of them. Then she told him to get rid of the guns – a last-ditch default sentence that automatically came out of her. As his automatic default sentence, he said no, he would not. Then he said,

  ‘I can’t take responsibility for the actions of other people. I sell guns, but I’ve no control over what goes on with them when people take them from my shop.’

  Spaders was glad he’d said that, for it sounded as if he could spout words of wisdom just as much as she could spout words of wisdom. But he looked at her and she was so into her authenticity, and he was so into wanting to be comfortable, and his guns made him comfortable. Jotty Doe rarely made him comfortable. So he ended up keeping them and giving her up instead.

  That was the short version. The long version involved him buying lots of new, expensive gun literature, which was okay because he could claim them as tax expenses, and going to gun conferences, also tax expendable, and to those week-long, intensely involved gun lectures in many different towns and cities, where every member was entitled, drunk or sober, to stand up and give an hour’s rambling speech-worth. He threw himself into these activities, and what with them, and dates – with women other than Jotty – interspersed between the gun adventures, his mind was taken off everything difficult, and that had been the procedure until those teenagers – he had reverted back to teenagers – happened to him six whole years ago.

  Six!

  Surely not.

  Did he say ‘six’?

  That’s what I was thinking and I was surprised at it being six – and I don’t think that could be true, you know, for if any more years get added on to this mugging and stabbing, we’ll be back to that early-teenage-angst breakdown he had in his twenties all those years ago.

  While we were with Tom and Jotty, in Tom’s past, with him dwelling on the impossibility of it ever having worked out between them, the Psycho Spatial part of him I had been telling you about earlier, that wanted him to go out and kill everybody, was fuming at just how easy a life, how settled and comfortable a life, yer man Cusack – who had never been mugged and stabbed and who had a wife – had. This part of Tom was still in the shop, with Cusack unwittingly preaching to it some rubbish called Blueprinting. ‘No, Tom. No, Tom,’ corrected Cusack, as he pointed to a section on a printed page torn out of a medical dictionary. He had spread it out on the counter between them. ‘Anti-Blueprinting! Anti-Blueprinting!’ – point! went the finger. Point! – ‘That’s what I’m talking about here.’

  Now, don’t you think that when something happens, when you have a new experience, a little electrical pulse gets wired up around you? Your psyche says, ‘Okay. New experience. Let’s cut out the pattern and put it in the pattern box.’

  That’s Blueprint. The psyche makes preparations, believing this new experience will reoccur some day. Anti-Blueprint’s different. Have you ever come across this:

  The Well-Meaning stand in front of you – perhaps with a superabundance of confidence. They might take a hold of your hand – without permission. They might touch your cheek – again without permission. They think you welcome their gentle, unattacking touch. With these hands upon you – and I have no sense of humour here – they say, ‘My dear So-and-So, believe me, it was terrible that thing that happened to you. But you know – here’s the good news – if it’s happened to you once, it won’t happen to you again.’

  That’s Anti-Blueprint. It died a death many years ago because of its sheer utter ridiculousness. So what was Cusack thinking to bring it up with his old friend Spaders now?

  Nervousness. Idjitness. A feeling of he’d torn the page out and therefore had to finish, but before he got going properly he had a clairvoyant moment which, believe me, was unusual for him.

  Spaders was pointing a gun at him. And now, you always get a foreshadow, don’t you, some little adumbration, when you’re in that position of ‘Watch out! Be careful! Don’t do it!’ because you’re in the mood when you just might kill somebody? Equall
y, you get a foreshadow, don’t you, when you’re on the receiving end of someone in that mood?

  Incredibly, Cusack refused to accept the message the universe, patiently, over time, had been handing him. First his friends had said, ‘Tom’s gone funny, Cusie. We’re keeping away. We think you should too.’ Even Spaders implied he was sick and tired of Cusack turning up and hanging around as if he were his nurse or something. And Angelus had said, ‘Invite him for dinner, Tom, but don’t go to his shop any more.’ Even Johnjoe wrecking the place and shooting at them that day could be taken as a premonition of some sort. So warnings were running out. But still Cusack was determined. He had to get himself back to Anti-Blueprinting. ‘Honestly, Tom,’ he’d say. ‘You’ve been mugged and stabbed already by hundreds of bunches of teenagers. That means you can never be mugged and stabbed by hundreds of bunches again.’ Spaders, though, with the gun still in his hand, actually fired at Cusack – and all the white feathers and pieces of rubbish that Cusack did indeed, at that moment, seem to be covered in, rose sky-high, along with the sound of the gunshot, into the air.

  But did that really happen? Looks like it, for the next thing I saw was that Spaders was back in the shop, coming to and, as he did so, finding himself behind one of his counters and apparently alone in the gloom of his premises. Where was Cusack? he wondered, setting a gun he happened to be holding down. Didn’t have the decency, he then thought, to offer to help clear up after what had happened with Johnjoe. ‘Well, that’s friends for you!’ And it was only later, when Spaders was in prison, that he began to appreciate the kind and quietly noble nature of his friend, Tom Cusack, but before we leave him to it, I’ll just say that that crown of thorns I mentioned earlier that had broken out upon the head of Tom Spaders after he’d had his nosebleed with Johnjoe – I was only joking. There was no crown of thorns.