Little Constructions

by Anna Burns

  Chapter Four

  At last. At long last. We can get back to Jetty in the taxi. I didn’t want to alarm you but I was becoming worried we wouldn’t get back to her at all. First, let’s discuss what she was doing with that non-birding piece, and while we’re about it, let’s have a discussion also as to what sort of person she was.

  Jetty was the older sister of Janet Doe, and Janet was married to John Doe. John Doe, as well as being other things, most of them not legal, was also very fond of women. Oh, and of girls. His girls. This means you’re probably thinking Jetty – God love her – in devoted loyalty to her sister, as well as out of a sense of protectiveness towards her niece, had discovered that John was cheating on his wife and interfering with his daughter and so was on her way to the garden shed to shoot and sort him out.

  You can think that if you like.

  Here’s what happened after she hailed her taxi. ‘Taxi!’ you’ll remember she rushed out with her purchase and yelled. A taxi stopped and she got in. At this point I have to own up and admit that I was wrong, for I thought she was going to two places. I thought she was going to John Doe first, to shoot him at his headquarters, then was going to the Almost Chemist of the Year to shoot Janet, the sister, the wife. The Almost Chemist of the Year was at the top of the road, and Janet worked there, and Jetty worked there also. It was Jetty’s day off that day, though. The reason I thought she was going to shoot Janet was because Janet was sleeping with Jetty’s lover, and it was that way round, yes, that way round, as Jetty saw it, and not Jetty who had come in and grabbed the husband from without. I’m reporting this faithfully and that’s why it’s complicated, but I know you wouldn’t want me to be making these things up. As far as the daughter and incest were concerned, Jetty wasn’t capable of incorporating child sexual carnage. ‘Child what what?’ she’d say, if you were to put it to her for, you see, she could incorporate the strife of Two Women wanting the One Man, and she could incorporate the strife of Two Men after the One Woman. She could even incorporate murder, torture and social mayhem if she had to. But sorry. I said sorry. Jetty, along with everyone in Tiptoe Floorboard, was incapable of grasping inside sex. ‘Why?’ they’d ask. ‘What for?’, but they wouldn’t really want the answer. Instead they’d retreat into incomprehension, thinking, how can anybody get their head around something like that? If further proof of this lack of grasp were needed, you’d only have to look at the later court proceedings. At many points during Janet Doe’s trial, the gallery was seen to nod in complete accordance with the defendant who, when knowledge of her husband’s perpetration of incest had been put to her, shrugged and declared in bewilderment that she didn’t understand the question, that she worked at the Almost Chemist of the Year, and that shouldn’t that answer questions enough?

  So Jetty left the daughter, forgot her, and hurried back to Mary of the House Slippers, to the Girl Who Couldn’t Wait To Get Married. In fact, ‘The Girl Who Couldn’t Wait To Get Married’, thought Jetty, could be the exact thing they could put on her sister’s grave. As far as Jetty was concerned she, and not Janet, ought to be coming first. She was the original, the legitimate, the first one and only, she’d been the girlfriend way before the wife had been the girlfriend, but John had told her the night before that he was never, not ever, going to leave Janet – ‘Sorry, Jet, old mate. I sort of love her, she’s the wife and the mother of my children’ – but if it was any consolation he was not going to leave Janet for anybody, and not just not for her.

  Jetty couldn’t believe it. She tried to pull the curtains over in her brain to stop the harshness of the reality, but sometimes there aren’t enough curtains – what with them being used up on incest, child molestation and suchlike.

  Bastard.

  John Doe, I mean.

  That’s what Jetty was thinking as he said those words to her. He went on explaining and excusing and still she couldn’t take in that he was saying that, after another three or four or five or six or seven or eight or nine or ten more times of sex, they’d have to part and not be lovers any more.

  She would not accept it. She could not take a back seat and hand the true husband of her heart over to that sister. That’s why she was in the back seat of a taxi holding the Kalashnikov, with Bob Marley being played on a cassette tape up front.

  Men.

  That’s what went through her head.

  Then,

  Fuckers! Then,

  Men. Then,

  Fuckers! Then,

  Never mind them. What about her?

  She switched to Janet. The total magpie of the woman was enormous. And you’d never think to look at her. You’d think she knitted baby charity cardigans and made chocolate donation cakes all day. And after all Jetty had done for her. After all that discount she’d given her at the chemist, before actually getting her a job at the chemist so she could then give extra-special staff discount to herself. After all those crisp twenty-pound notes from the till – the crisp ones, mind – she’d given her sister in the olden days as change in advance for the things Janet might one day purchase. It would break your heart, the grabbiness of blood.

  Bob Marley was being played loud for the taxi man had turned it up. He kept trying to turn it up every so often, but how could he, when it was already at the top? He tried anyway. He wouldn’t settle in his seat and be at peace and listen to the song at its present very loud volume. If only he could put it up, he thought. ‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ said the song. But, you see, the problem was it wasn’t sung loud enough. He wanted to hear it sung louder. He twisted the knob and twisted it but all that would happen in this situation was that after a certain amount of twisting the knob would come off. He stuck the knob back on and twisted it again, and again it came off. And loud. Very loud. It was really dreadfully loud. ‘Mammy!’ screamed children, pointing with their toes, because their fingers were in their ears, their eyes, in agony, scrunched up. Other people on the street stood and stared or expressed horror at this phenomenon, or else laughed at the rocking vibrating madness of the car and of the driver who, at that minute, was looking back at Jetty whilst driving forward, shouting, ‘That Bob Marley – is he annoying you? If you want, I can turn him up.’

  Jetty had dropped Janet and had gone back to men and fuckers and that’s why I was getting confused and even suspicious as to her plans. Was it to be the one, or was it to be the other of them? Who was to be shot with the Kalashnikov? It was starting to seem she had no clear idea of this herself. Her memory kept drifting back to a stern and solemn judge who had looked down upon her once from the court’s high altar. He had said something like ‘Taking the law into your own hands is …’ but after that she couldn’t remember any more. And when had that been? Twenty years ago? Twenty-five? Must have been a teenager. She remembered he’d addressed her constantly as ‘young lady’ and had said, ‘The worship concludes the defendant suffers from wrong-rootedness.’ What a thing to remember, but apart from it having something to do with her mother, or her aunt, and her cousins, and some mistaken-identity information, she couldn’t remember anything about it any more.

  Memory and selection. Those women pages always said don’t get into triangular relationships. And although she would have said that she agreed, absolutely, and that she hadn’t, that it was the wife who had interrupted into this one, a part of her suspected she had a bad track record when it came to her and men. She worked out once on a self-help chart why she’d chosen the men she had. First reason was because they were angry. That was thirty-two times. Second reason, unreliable – different men – also thirty-two times. Third, dishonest, dishonourable, vastly criminogenic, but seeing themselves as noble – Good Guy With Gun. That was twenty-eight times. Then weak. Oh, dreadfully weak. She went out with twenty-three weak men thinking they were strong but because they were weak. She went out with twenty-two men because they had boastful complexes when in public, which became self-hating complexes later on when it was them on their own. Does this seem a lot of men to you? It see
ms a lot of men to me. Then again, if you do the math – as those Americans say – and assume the dating had been taking place over a period of twenty-five years unless she’d started in childhood, Jetty so far would only have been with a man every 34.43 days. That’s not much. But that’s not all. There were twenty cruelly gorgeous men – who didn’t want her, the number of loners she couldn’t remember for in the end they were boring, and then there was a forgettable number of the depressed who went through the roof. The sex addicts, romance addicts and anorectic deprivers would each number about nineteen, she’d reckon. The ones intellectually beneath her – but wouldn’t that have been all of them? By now, the chart’s negative characteristics had put her seriously into the red. Finally she desisted from the exercise when it said, ‘Well done, very brave, first part over, and now I want you to be braver and draw up a list of the negative traits you yourself brought to these entangles.’ ‘Fuck off!’ she said, and ripped the chart up.

  What Jetty had purposefully left out of this self-exploration, which turned out to be not that self-exploratory, was the murdering aspect. That was because a murderer who wasn’t murdering her didn’t count. Same with violence. And here I feel called upon to talk further about memory and selection, and especially as to how people think they don’t know a particular thing when, deep down, they do. They live in this not-knowing yet knowing land, the land of the unconscious register, and one day something occurs that makes the penny drop. Unless you come from a mad family and have had extensive therapy plus experienced this penny-dropping phenomenon, I can see you’ll have trouble understanding the concept. So let’s have a gentle little supposing to clear the matter up.

  Supposing you’re fifteen. You’ve just come home on your lunchbreak from the Almost Chemist of the Year. The Almost Chemist of the Year is up the road and you got this part-time job as a store detective because the owner had started to notice most of his stock had disappeared. Jetty Doe, a staff member, had helped. She advised him to employ one of her relatives. ‘My niece, Mr McSomebody. She’s never done any store-detecting, and she’s only fifteen, but at school our Julie is known as a bright button. She’ll find out, so she will, who’s doing all this knocking-off.’

  So, you’re on your lunchbreak from this, your first job, which you didn’t want and which you hate because you know it’s your own relatives – the Does by affinity and the Does by consanguinity – who are doing all the thieving, and say you walk in the door and you come across a dead body. Again. In your parents’ house, in the house you live in. Again. And the house is empty of perpetrators. It’s empty of everybody except you and him, and he’s sitting there dead on the other side of the room. Say you do that. You walk in, and you don’t want to drop dead yourself from the up-close reality of it, so either you play a ruse upon yourself and say the dead body’s not there really, or else you take an aspect of the dead body that strikes you as normal and pretend to yourself that, because of this normality, everything else is the same as before. ‘Uncle Joe always goes to sleep around this time in our house with his head resting on the cushion, with the cushion resting on the table,’ you tell yourself. ‘And look – cushion’s resting on table, Uncle Joe’s having his doze, head resting as usual on top.’

  Head resting. Head resting, your mind tells you to focus on – and not head crushed. Head crushed. What tells you he’s not dead, even though you know he is, is the resting of this head upon this cushion. And I don’t mean it’s decapitated. Don’t be silly. I mean Uncle Joe’s head is turned to the right, left cheek gently supported, arms below the table, limp and loose, relaxed, on his thighs, as always before. Uncle Joe’s sloping over from the kitchen chair too, in just that fashion he’s always sloping over in. He gets sick a lot now, because of his ulcers, you see.

  So Uncle Joe gets ulcers and, of course, he’s not really your uncle. He’s your father’s friend and a member of your father’s Community Centre Teamwork Executive. He’s the left-hand man as opposed to your Uncle Johnjoe Doe’s right-hand man status and he and Uncle Johnjoe don’t like each other much. Joe once said to JesseJudges, his seventeen-year-old nephew, ‘If anything ever happens to me JayJay, I’ll tell you what you do for reprisal. You hunt out yer man Johnjoe – for don’t be fooled by what they’ll say, it’ll have been him that’ll have killed me – so you kill him, that big fat ugly pig of a cunt.’

  Anyway, his ulcers are the reason he has his sleeps in the afternoons although he won’t go home to his own house to have them because he’s afraid he might miss something. So he always naps at the Chief’s kitchen table and little Julie – that’s you, by the way – is expected to make him tea at lunchtime, leaving it, along with the German seltzer water and the biscuits, on the table by his side. You’re expected to wake him before going back to work for your afternoon shift, for this is what you always do for your uncle on your store-detecting lunchbreak. Today shouldn’t be different, so why are you stalling this time?

  You decide you’ll leave Uncle Joe his tea and water and lemonpuffs as usual, but – unlike other times – this time you’ll leave him to wake up by himself. You take a tray, as usual, up the stairs to your bedroom, but when you’re finished, you leave your bedroom, wash your hands in the bathroom and shampoo the dishes in the bathroom sink. You leave them in the sink, clean and drippy, for you won’t be bringing them back down to the kitchen. You’ll fetch them and put them away when you come back from work later on. For now, you lean over the bathtub and again give your hands a good scrubbing, then you’re downstairs and ready to go out once more. You stay out of the kitchen and, closing the big door with a click, you head away from that house you live in. You go up the road quickly to the Almost Chemist of the Year. Your boss looks at you as you enter but you don’t acknowledge him. He’s a nice man and you know he’s thinking, things are still being stole and she hasn’t caught anybody yet.

  So that’s the knowing and the not-knowing, but without the penny-dropping incident. Unfortunately, I heard a rumour that poor Julie might not make it to the penny-dropping stage.

  Preposterous! you might cry at the end of this supposing. Absolutely far-fetched! Well, okay. Don’t boil your little blood. Don’t bust those little body vessels. How about another gentle supposing on an even more normal scale?

  You might prefer to be Julie’s mother whose sister, Jetty, works at the local chemist and you go up there to get things cheap. You pick up hairspray, bubblebath, bathcubes, salts, tooth stuff, creams for the body and creams for the face. Wet tissues also, and dry tissues, and soaps-on-ropes and shampoo – a big bottle of the cheap stuff because that’s what you’re used to, but hey!, a bottle too of the most expensive in the shop. A lot of other things you wouldn’t normally waste your money on you buy also, and you grab these things quickly – not because you’ve no intention of paying, for excuse me, you most certainly have. You’ll get discount too, because you’re related to a staff member. But that doesn’t mean you’re not righteous about your purchasing. You’re moral and intentional and very upfront.

  ‘Here you are,’ you say loudly, handing over your one-pound note to your sister and getting your fifty-pee coin back in exchange for it. You also get back a few lipstick samples, plus twenty boxes of French earplugs, and not having that same pound note coming out than when you went in proves you really did buy something in the shop. That fifty pee, you see, is called your change. Also, though, you’re handed two nice and new twenty-pound notes from the till, which is called an advance on changes that you would get in the future should you buy things regularly from this chemist. This is not stealing. It’s simply getting your changes, as I say, in advance. You get your purchases put in plastic bags, which further proves you couldn’t have stolen them, and you have the door held open for you by a distressed-looking store detective as you leave. You struggle through and you smile at everybody and your smile says, ‘Oh, me and my shopping!’ An excellent day’s chemistshopping, and you thank your sister who served you and you go to your house, which is j
ust down the road. You go into your kitchen and you shoo that raven off that block, the block that has the axe stuck in that your husband brought back as a souvenir that time he went to the Big London, and you wave to your husband through the back window for he’s out there in the garden with his mates. They’re in a huddle and there’s something lying between them in a hump on the ground. They’re looking down at this hump but you yourself don’t have time to look. You give John, your husband, a smile and he gives you a distracted handwave back. Then he shouts – as if he’s just remembered – that he’ll be in in a minute, that he wants to have a word with you. You’re not to go out till he speaks to you. So wait there. Do you understand?

  You turn round and this time you see one of the trapdoors is open that leads down to the tunnels. You didn’t see that when you came in first time. So now you’ve got a headache – an instant dreadfully rotten bad-luck headache – so you drop the shopping on a corner of the kitchen table, ignoring a stained cushion, a mug of cold tea, German water and some biscuits going air-ridden in their open packet by the side. Instead you go to your room to tie a belt round your head and to have a lie-down to help this rotten headache. On the way up you notice somebody’s left dishes in the bathroom sink again.

  And now you don’t care. Not just about your shopping, even though the whole happy business of it has been ruined for you. You don’t care for anything, because all you know is this headache, and this annoyance at your daughter. Why oh why does Julie keep leaving dishes like that? And at Jetty, too, you’re annoyed. So what if she gave you discount? Instead you’re of the opinion that Janet and John – that’s you and your husband – are the ones who have been more than generous to her. And for how long are you both meant to be so generous? She was thirty-seven. So why wasn’t she married? And if she wasn’t getting married, why wasn’t she one of them modern women getting a house of her own and a little car to bootle about in, instead of cadging lifts from your Johnny all the time?