Little Constructions

by Anna Burns

  Chapter Five

  John Doe had known that Jetty was coming after him with a weapon of some sort. He wasn’t taking it seriously, although naturally he was flattered when rumour reached him of this affair. He and the gang were at Ouija, so all their valuable solemnity and concentration had to be saved for consulting. They were trying to discover who was the informer of the Community Centre Shack Action Team. It wasn’t that he didn’t rank her. I don’t mean as informer. I mean as important. It was just that she was starting to take upon herself too much of the wooing in their love affair. He was annoyed by this, although naturally, whenever he pictured her holding all those male weapons, he’d forget his annoyance and a braggy boastfulness would come upon him and burst inside his heart.

  That’s my girl, he thought. ‘That’s my woman,’ he’d say to people. ‘That’s my Jet. She takes no prisoners and, God, isn’t she sexy? And look – even though she falls down by not taking an interest in the type and model of the piece she’s currently handling, see how she’s not afraid anyway to click one up the spout like that?’ She had told him it had been her long-dead father who had started her in the bang-bang-you’re-dead business. This was a lie, of course, based on the ‘My Father Taught Me’ premise, and John Doe should have known this, based on the ‘I Know My Father-In-Law’ – if yer man who was supposed to be Doe’s father-in-law was his father-in-law – ‘And He Isn’t Dead And That Doesn’t Sound Like The Dozy Auld Bastard’ premise – but he did believe her, though not without the addition that it had been himself, and not Daddy, who’d got her into finishing school and finished her off. It was just this ballcrushing part of her that he was uncomfortable with. How could a daughter of such a dead, apparently noble, honourable man’s man be so determinedly emasculating? It seemed these days one of his balls was continuously being grasped by her, whilst he was scrabbling to protect his dick and other ball with both hands. Unless you grow more hands here you don’t have any hands left for manoeuvring. And also, you can become witless – what with guarding your privates, keeping an eye on the woman, being a husband to a wife, and a father to two offspring, as well as heading up and keeping a tight rein on a serious Community Centre Shack Team.

  It was always the same. And contrary to what she was implying, it wasn’t his promise of ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five or fifty more times of sex before he finished with her that had annoyed her and started her off into that rowing. It was this giving and receiving business – for what on earth was wrong with Jetty there? In the bar, and just like his wife, she’d properly say, ‘Yes, I want a drink, John.’ But unlike his wife, she’d then say, ‘But I’m not helpless. I’m perfectly capable of going up to the bar and getting it.’ ‘But I’ll get it, Jet,’ he’d say. ‘No. I’ll get it, Johnny, and while I’m about it, what would you like to drink yourself?’ ‘I’ll get for both of us,’ he’d say. ‘And, Jet, let’s not always be doing this. I’ll get us taty-crips, and scampi-champ if you’re hungry, but how about you drop this and we call it a male thing for today?’ ‘No,’ she’d say. ‘I said I’ll get them. You stay here and hold your dick and ball and I’ll be back in a minute. So. Drinks, taty-crips, cigarettes, scampi-champ, chewing gum. Anything else and any flavours in particular you fancy having there?’

  See. See.

  She was taking on the wooing. And although she wouldn’t have actually said that ball and dick part, he knew she would be saying it really, behind the scenes of her utterances. And he’d feel that ball – the one she still had, up there at the bar with her – becoming more and more shrivelled, and he would sense he was handing over some elusive but enormous victory to herself. The strange thing was, he knew instinctively that if he were to stop the dance and cross his arms and lean back in his chair and smirk and say, ‘Thanks very much, Jet,’ and let her pay for everything hereafter, she’d soon stop all that crap and get properly femalely upset. But then it would be out in the open and did he really want to have it out in the open? He wasn’t sure what ‘it’ was, but it seemed to involve him losing perhaps more of his anatomy, and her refusing to sew feminine sparkles on to pretty dresses to wear on dates with him any more.

  But on a non-genital level it was all very annoying too because this had snuck up on him just when he hadn’t time for it. It was distracting him from meditation upon the occult powers needed for the job at hand. A few of his policemen relatives had tipped him off, saying that ever since the arrival of that Interfering Outside Policeman, the town’s police themselves had been shaken thoroughly as well as officially divided up. They were now operating from within secret inner circles within other, smaller, even more secret inner circles, each issued with new camouflage cryptography symbolism, and that they were being forced, the cousins said, because of all the extra murders, to step up investigative activity into the Community Centre Action Team. So Doe brought his attention back to the round table, for obviously there was an informer amongst them. And look, already the Ouija was spelling out some words.

  They all leaned forward. It was saying the betrayer was the one putting his fingers into the sugarbowl right now. ‘N-O-W,’ it finished spelling and then it whipped out ‘KNIFE IN BACK! HE’S BEHIND YOU! OH LOOK BEHIND YOU!’ and he looked round quickly. They all whizzed round and guess what? There was the son, John Doe’s son, his own bloody son, unaware they were looking at him, muttering ‘habitable- uninhabitable-inhabitable’ in the corner, whilst absently dipping his shovel into the sugarjug.

  ‘J! J! J!’ screeched the Ouija, now hysterical and all of a stutter, but no one was paying any more attention. Everybody had got the message and, God! the gang was thinking. Who would have thought it would have been Judas, that it would have been John Doe’s own son? What was John going to do? they wondered. And what about JesseJudges? Would he finish JayJay off because he’d started and therefore wouldn’t want any testifying witnesses, or would he bestow forgiveness upon the boy and take him back as a reinstated member of the Doe Garden Shed Shack?

  JayJay, or more formally, JesseJudges – a half-solemn name for such a seventeen-year-old youngster – was the latest to be half-dead and tied to the torture chair. ’Cept he’d fallen over, this one, along with the chair, and was now lying on his side breathing hoarsely. He had some doubled-over brown thick postal paper sewn into a hood over his head. That teenage mascot was on the floor beside him, and I don’t understand but she seemed to be giggling. She was biting her nails and tittering, splayed on her bottom, splat on the floor. Her legs were sprawled out one minute from under her miniskirt. Seconds later they were drawn in primly. Then, after another giggle, out they’d be, sprawled over the floor once more. She kept touching, ever so lightly, this boy’s hood-bag, leaning her ear, so slowly, so rhythmically, towards him but I think it must be that JesseJudges was the latest to get the blame for betraying Doe to the authorities. It had only been days since his Uncle Joe had been secretly tortured, tried and executed for the same offence.

  So yer man Johnny was going a bit J Edgar Hoover. He got it fixed into his head that somebody was doing the betraying, so he postponed business as usual to carry out interrogations on various members of the team. With JesseJudges, though, it had been different.

  If we’re going to be mentally healthy, you and me, and have days of authenticity going on between us, you’ll need to know ‘The Great Betrayer’ was just one of those herrings – one of the red kind. It was an issue certainly, and the team did need to deal with it, but the real reason JesseJudges was being murdered was because of John Doe and his woman code. He had this code that was all to do with him and his dating of the females. When it came to enforcing it, he took no prisoners himself.

  He had these romances, Doe, and after he’d had them, the women he had them with, they became his ladies. That meant there was no way he’d let anybody put a finger on any of his girls. His ladies included not only his wife, his daughter, and most certainly Jetty, but also anybody he currently happened to be having, or who
m he hadn’t had, but who was in his savings account and waiting for him there. His ladies were his ladies, said his code. That meant you kept your hands off. Apparently, you kept your eyes off as well.

  So that was why he was upset when he came down the stairs one lunchtime, during a pause with Jetty, and heard a low sound of murmuring coming from the porch. He was in the front parlour, having come in to fetch his souvenirs, which he kept in a box beside the museum suit of sixteenth-century Flemish body armour, next to the broken Versailles clock that held the three samurai swords and the Glock No 9. He wanted to go through these mementos in their transparent pouches in order to gear himself before returning to Jetty – just a little idiosyncratic thing he did now and then. The pouches were full of men things, and I mean things that had belonged to certain men who were no longer living. These personal effects appeared to belong exclusively to Mr John Doe now.

  But this bloody murmuring! He glanced up from his trophies. Who the hell was making it? Murmur-murmur. What was it? Murmur-murmur. Oh, stop it, stop that murmuring! But was it murmuring? Where was it coming from?

  He moved to the bay window and juked out from behind the curtains. His daughter Julie and JesseJudges were sitting on the windowsill. They were side by side, their shoulders almost touching, their backs turned towards him and the awful cheek, for they were only inches from himself behind the glass.

  First thing he did was check out their hands.

  This took manoeuvring, but he managed to get his body into a pose of imaginative detecting, and could see clearly JesseJudges’s left hand on his own left thigh. The boy was gesticulating with his right and good, that was good, just as well he wasn’t touching my daughter, thought Doe. Though I’m still going to get him. Concerning daughter Julie, Concerned Father could see clearly that she had her right hand up, pulling nervously on her right earlobe. As to what that left hand was doing – damn and blast – he simply could not see.

  He tried to listen. He really tried to listen. Mostly it was drones and murmurs, except for the odd unrevealing phrase. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ he heard Julie say. She laughed a little nervously, a little panicked, tugged her ear again, and now twirled a twine of hair as well. JesseJudges laughed quietly and went on murmuring – God, that murmuring! – and their shoulders touched and Doe flinched as if he’d been manhandled himself. With great reflex he jumped over and grabbed up the Glock No 5. This Glock was loaded, as were the other Glocks, but he kept Five balanced precariously on top of his wife’s empty pincushion. This was for emergencies. Male and female was the emergency now. He knew males and females only murmured together after they’d done lots of interacting previously. And what about that shoulder-to-shoulder? And what about that left hand?

  ‘Well,’ said someone. Jesus himself said, “These things that I do, you can do also” ’ – ‘Ach, yeah,’ said someone else. ‘But that was just Jesus. He didn’t mean that. He was only saying that to be nice.’ I thought you might want to know that that’s what was on the TV in the back room when John Doe had his fit. He didn’t have the fit in the front parlour and he didn’t have it because of this mention of Jesus. He didn’t hear Jesus and, also, there was no bursting out on to porch naked and shooting Glock at JayJay and perhaps at Daughter Julie also. Instead, he withdrew from the window and replaced his weapon slantingly. Quietly, he went back upstairs and got dressed.

  ‘Yeah, see ya, Jetty,’ he said, though distractedly. His lover, now also dressed, was going back to her afternoon shift at the chemist. His wife was out somewhere, and Julie too and JesseJudges too were no longer on the porch when he came back down. Brooding, and now plotting, he went into the rear living room and, along with the TV, switched on radios on competing channels. He had these radios and TVs blasting and it didn’t matter what was on for, given his mental state, nothing was going to get through.

  So we had doubters and believers on that faith programme on the TV in one corner, and we had a radio book programme – ‘It’s always best to reread a second time in order to be more critical and in that way we can really train ourselves not to like it’ – in another corner, and we had a social commentary radio drama – ‘ “Put more fuckin’ curry in it!” snapped the lowlife to the Indian. So the Indian in the takeaway – did’ in a third and still that wasn’t enough. Doe had a fit of the headstaggers, but before we go further – where I describe Judas, the son, describing John Doe, the father, trying to kill Julie, the daughter – we’d better go back for me to give the whole contextual picture as to why.

  It wasn’t just JesseJudges, you see.

  It wasn’t just other boys who might appear or who might have already appeared upon the horizon.

  It wasn’t just that cunning over-active left hand.

  It was also ‘Noises’ – a condition that used to afflict Doe as a child and that he’d forgotten he used to be afflicted by. It had made a return – ‘Hello! Guess what! Guess who! Guess what!’ – to torment him again, mysteriously, after all this time.

  Here’s the thing.

  This condition was termed ‘Noises’ by the original Doe children, but I don’t know what an expert psychoperson writing a thesis on them would call them today. In John Doe’s generation, Benedict got them first. He was John’s brother and he was the eldest and he was thirteen. Then a day, or maybe even less than a day later, he infected JanineJoshuatine, who was his sister. Some of the younger children could structurally remember this happening, for it seemed as if an invasion of the Noises travelled across the very air. JanineJoshuatine, who was twelve, then passed them to their sister, Unity, or else Unity caught them, again like an infection, and again, which way round has never been clear. It took a week, or maybe five days, for Unity, who was ten, to get them but she got them, and she gave them to Jotty. Against her will, Jotty took them. It happened in twenty minutes. Jotty was nine. Two weeks later, Samuel, who was eight, got psychologically infected by Jotty. A month later he gave them to John. John Doe was seven. He was seven. The two twins, Abel and Abel, who were five and five, caught them simultaneously from John, then thrust them on to little Gussie. Gussie was four. Hale, who was two, had them from Gussie and eighteen years later – and isn’t that strange? – Hesit, who was a one-year-old when the Noises spread amongst her siblings, got them herself when she was nineteen. She killed herself and three other people during a séance when she was twenty-two. It is not known from which sibling she caught the Noises or why it took her so long. So, the Doe batch got the Noises, but nobody paid attention to batches. Their parents, when they thought of it, were of the opinion that ‘the kids’ were exhibiting some quaint, quirky, diverting little phenomenon – and before anyone realised that this was an affliction and not an amusement the Noises had multiplied and got a great hold.

  Off record, I can tell you that, bar John and one and a half of his sisters, those initial children were now dead, or in jail, or had been removed long ago to join older-generation mad relatives in the Tiptoe Under Greystone Cliff’s Peninsula Mental Asylum. Jotty was the one sister who was still up and running and JanineJoshuatine constituted the half. Janine was required to go into the mental hospital every so often to get some sort of top-up. Apparently, when they said she was going on holiday, she wasn’t going on holiday after all. In a nutshell, that was how the Noises began. As soon as you’ve taken in this information, let me know and I’ll have this evidence destroyed immediately. This is top secret. Don’t repeat what I’m about to tell you, or I’ll be in trouble with everyone for sure.

  There grew to be about eighty of these Noises, so I’m not going to list all of them. From the outside they do seem funny, but just from the outside. So remember that and please don’t laugh.

  First, eating and drinking. Those munching sloppy and slurpy sounds, with the food white and mushy in the mouth and going round and round like a washing machine because the eater doesn’t know how to eat with his or her mouth closed and doesn’t realise that a lot of people in the world can partake of meals without hug
e torrential splats and snorts. John Doe and his siblings got disturbed first by that. And by the blowing- on of food – even if it was cold, even if it was ice-cream – this blow-blow, spit-spit, blow-blow, lick-lick – ultimately to exert possession, ostensibly to test and cool the food down. It was their big parents doing it, their huge angry frightened distorted big mamma, and their even huger angry frightened distorted big papa. Then Mamma and Papa’s angry frightened friends did the smacking and sucking and blowing and licking, whenever they, too, came to call.

  The children, acting as one, would try to leave the room whenever these Noises started – upstairs, out the back, straight out into the street, on to the path of horses, stagecoaches, carriages, trams and oncoming locomotives – anything, just to get away from those adult menacing sounds. If they couldn’t get away, it would be rolling up into balls on armchairs and settees and behind pieces of furniture, fingers in ears, faces screwed up. It would be shoulders scrunched up to and including their very earlobes. It would be eyes closed tight, for the sight of those mouths and that relentless devouring jawing became, in no time, a visual Noise as well. And counting. They’d count, over and over, in their heads, ‘One Two Three Four’ and right up to the numbers they’d learnt at school that morning. They’d count and count because that was preferable to having an attack of the Noises coming on.

  Or they’d copy. But that was dangerous. But they couldn’t help it. The Noises urged them on. Papa would belch, a giant explosive unconscious ‘fuck-you-world’ belch, and they would all belch ‘fuck-you’ after him. They wouldn’t dare look at him as they did this. They wouldn’t dare look at each other. And when Mamma farted spectacularly into the living room, they’d all make their pretend farts as well.