by Anna Burns
It helped to copy, to imitate, to have a bit of power, in order to cancel out the ghostly mental repetition of the Noises. Otherwise these Noises would reverberate, sometimes for hours, inside the children’s delicate little heads. But now and then Mamma or Papa would realise and say, ‘Are you copying us? Are you fucking copying Mr McCotter over there, sucking his teeth and scratching his head and swinging his leg and playing with his crotch in that armchair?’ And John Doe and his siblings would be hit hard and thrown in a heap-of-puppies movement up to bed. Sometimes it didn’t stop there, for through blocked-up ears, through pillows they’d pile on top of their own heads, through their crying, they’d continue to hear Mamma, and the echo of Mamma, who was addicted to eight-in-a-packet penny gums beechnut bubble gum, cracking away hard and triumphantly, as many bubbles as she could on one breath. ‘Cheeky bastards,’ she’d say to Papa. ‘A bloody good hiding.’ And she’d glock and clack and crack, doing it for badness, knowing that they knew that she wanted them to know that she’d forgotten them, that she hoped they didn’t seriously think a pack of kids could interrupt her in her life.
Soon the Noises spread and it wasn’t just adults who tortured them. They’d punch a child at school who had sniffed and sneezed and blown into her handkerchief, or they’d get punched at school themselves for copying some other happy child playing his imaginary guitar. ‘He started it!’ they’d wail to the bewildered teachers, and they’d believe this, and they’d try to explain and convince the teachers that he’d attacked them with the sight of his moving fingers. He assaulted their bodies between their legs by the sight of those spidery fingers moving in the air by themselves. So, you see, after their eating success, the Noises gained power and eminence and spread forth their kingdom. They had introduced sniffing and sneezing and coughing and fingers and found localised body parts inside the children in which to experiment as well. Fingers did damage. Tiny movements. Little movements. They twirled, they tapped, they pointed, they picked, they pressed, they placed themselves in mouths and touched tongues and pulled at loose cuticles. They even employed other fingers to crack knuckles and prise at thick and thin finger- and toenail ends.
The siblings made their own Noises too, of course, and they bothered each other with them but, knowing it was to their mutual benefit not to torment, they formed a pact against accidental slippage by allowing any of them to shove any other any time a Noise was made by one that might set the other nine off. So they did. They shoved and hit and thumped and shouted, ‘Stop that! Stop that! If you do that again! Say you’re sorry till I tell you to stop!’ This had worked and had kept an empathic peace amongst the children until one day something new happened. The Noises, for some reason, for some of the children, stopped.
Through natural immaturity, the apparently cured Doe children had in reality unconsciously swapped their Noises for something more manageable. Violence – and by the bucket-load – kept the Noises away. The more they learned to put it out in any situation or circumstance, the more their particular brand of Noises disappeared.
John Doe was the luckiest of these lucky chappies. As a boy, he started doing as much damage to others any time he got the opportunity, and within a day of his new addiction to violence being set up and running, he forgot he’d ever had the Noises. He even forgot the term ‘Noises’, and as an added bonus he found there was something else. If he was to breathe loudly, or rub his hands, or pick a knot on his face, even if it was imaginary, or whistle, or pretend to be kissing, all in sight or sound of most of his siblings, they would writhe and contort as if they were his puppets and he their puppet master. They’d go berserk as he increased the pressure and drove them in torment up the wall.
So Doe was cured. Only now he wasn’t. The Noises had returned – ‘Hello! Guess what! Guess who! Guess what!’ – to make his life a misery. But why, after almost thirty years? It wasn’t as if he’d tailed off in the doing of his violence. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t at his top-notch capacity for the infliction of his violence. Could it be that the amount of violence needed to control such a phenomenon was no longer proving adequate, was no longer enough?
At first tiny irritating sounds had started to creep in and prod at him, and again, at first without him being fully aware. Jetty would be eating her chewing gum and he’d want her to stop eating that chewing gum. If he looked at her in annoyance, she’d laugh and chew and crack it even more. His wife would be examining her bitten fingers to see if there were any other ragged stumpy bits she could chew off and spit away from her, and he’d want to lift his arm and whack her in one hard whack right out of and across the room from that chair. His son would brush at his nose as if he were doing drugs when he wasn’t doing drugs but instead wiping at a blackhead. ‘Fuck-sake!’ Doe would shove him and say. And it went on – daughter pulling at earlobes, daughter fiddling with hair – then, of course, fingers, fingers, more fingers and murmuring. Then neighbours with their TVs, their radios, their chatting, their laughter. Even his gang’s juddering footsteps as they walked or dragged things back and forth across the shack’s floorboards. Those men in the chair too. Those men. Every single one of them seemed now to exert power over Doe and that shouldn’t be, given he was the one killing them. It wasn’t so much either, the sounds they made as they were dying. It was the ones they made well after they were dead. He used to eat these men – small symbolic bits, understand – just to make a point of who had gained possession. Now he no longer ate them. They reverberated inside him when he knew they didn’t reverberate inside any of the others who were also eating them. Last time he’d eaten one, he had to leave the shack, tiptoe round the back, and vomit the man back out.
I hope that rationally explains to you why so many TVs, radios, extractor fans, vacuum cleaners and spinners of washing machines were all sounding concurrently in the Doe household. According to Doe, because he had to block out the Noises of his neighbours, his own place was cracking up. All windows, all doors had to be closed and all light coming in from outside covered with dark hangings. Hence it was chaos. At any moment now, there might be a Doe-house-collapse.
As for Janet, Doe’s wife, she had to be included. Doe was affected by Noises. That meant she had to be affected as well. But she wasn’t. That particular madness didn’t run in her family of origin. So her way of being affected was to buy earplugs for her husband every time she went out. She had to scour Tiptoe Floorboard’s chemist shops for every box of earplugs, even if she herself couldn’t grasp why it was that John had to play music, washing machines, fridges, hairdryers and everything mechanical so loud. The Doe children, Julie and Judas, had inherited the Noises, and in their desperation, they’d steal and stock up on the very earplugs Janet would be procuring. Neither husband nor wife knew about this siphoning-off.
So Doe went to the cupboard in the kitchen and you know that cupboard in the kitchen? It’s the cupboard that everybody has that they don’t know what to do with. What should they put into it? they wonder, we all wonder. We don’t know. But how come we don’t know when all other cupboards in the house have got sorted? Are we mentally deficient that we can’t deal with this one as well? So, in confusion, it becomes a mixture-of-everything-in-the-house cupboard. First it’s First Aid, but all that gets put in there is something smelly and old and of the colour brown in a bottle. So then the First Aid gets taken out and chucked through the window to be gotten rid of, and cleaning stuff gets put in, but that confuses, for the cleaning stuff officially is kept under the sink. So then it’s eggcups. Eggcups get put in to make it an eggcup cupboard. But hold on. You’ve only got three eggcups, maybe two, which doesn’t warrant giving a whole cupboard to them. So then it becomes a pending haphazard cupboard holding all sorts of things instead. Back comes some new First Aid, or maybe the old First Aid that hadn’t been thrown out the window, but instead had been placed on top of the TV to be thrown out some time in the future, then scraps of paper, three eggcups, chipped ornamental plates, a few oranges made of plastic, the odd hammer
of varying sizes and an accidental bit of bread. Nothing in there is mentally sorted. That cupboard at the end is left stamped with ‘No Definition’. It craves an identity and because you won’t give it, it becomes – and it serves you right – the enemy within.
It seeps discontent.
And neglect.
And depression.
And, finally, murderousness every time you enter the kitchen. You begin to feel queasy and unwell. A teacher psychologist might say, ‘The problem here, students, is that the cupboard is carrying the shadow. It is the bad child, whom the rest of the furniture, at its peril, ignores.’ That’s not the point I’m making, though, about the Doe Family Cupboard. This Doe cupboard had long been tagged and sorted. It was for earplugs. So thank goodness – no shadows or hidden trauma there.
Naturally, any talk of the kitchen cupboard would lead one to talk about the space at the end of the space and to spaces chopped up into smaller disturbed abutting angled places and about the sort of people who need to abide in those split-off nook and cranny upside-down corners or in places of transit, like staircases, for some strange, fragmented, demented reasons of their own. I haven’t time to get into that now for I must tell you that John Doe had gone into the kitchen and down to the cupboard, thinking he was going to open it and extract one box from millions of boxes of earplugs he thought currently were in there. Thanks to his teenage children, though, and to his wife who had mislaid the latest shopping, he opened the cupboard and there were none.
And that’s what brought on the headstaggers. For her part, Mrs Doe had gone out a day earlier to replace the earplugs, for she’d noticed the numbers in the cupboard were getting thin. But she forgot to return with the new stock because she’d left them in a gunshop after being distracted by a plainclothes policewoman, who had been lying in wait to waylay her on the sly. This was the first time this undercover business had happened and it came about because the Top Echelons realised that the new spate of killings in Tiptoe Floorboard were different from the usual spates of killings in Tiptoe Floorboard, that the killers were putting their eyeteeth into their victims for a start. Given the number and the mystery and the news coverage they were engendering, everyone was in agreement that something had to be done. Hence this policewoman latching on to Janet, with Janet not cottoning to her identity or to her motivation. Indeed, Ms Detective Underplain had proved so good at her job that Janet thought she’d made a spontaneous friend she could go to bingo with from now on.
‘It’s usually easier with men,’ said this policewoman, when she was interviewed years later for the history programme Garden Shed Gang: Heroes or Villains?, being made for posterity by the TV. By then she had been promoted to Her Royalhighness-ship Local Authority Team Co-ordinating Area Flying Commander of the Gold and Silver Battalion Divisions, but nonetheless was good sport enough to speak of her days on the humble plainclothes detection beat.
‘Certain kinds of men ignore a certain kind of woman,’ she said. ‘No. I tell a lie. It’s not even that. It’s that they don’t credit them enough visibility even to see them standing there in order to ignore them. For example, I might be right beside them, or behind them, or in front of them, say at a bus-stop, and they wouldn’t see me – no lipstick, no makeup, hair a mess, generally a bit mousy, a bit scraggly – and I’d be holding my shopping bags and rocking my pram. In one bag would be my Glock Extra Sensory 47, which as you know in its day was of the best time-saving, up-to-the-minute brighter and richer colour treble-lamp technology version, and in the other would be my old trusty standby semi-automatic affair. In the pram would be my recording equipment disguised as a big baby, just in case they got suspicious and had a look in. But no. Practically they’d be shouting to each other – about the day, the time, the place and the victim for their next kill. I could have turned to them, shoved the plastic fake infant in their faces and said, “Excuse me. Would you mind repeating that? I think my special secret services law enforcement microphone disguised as this here giant baby didn’t quite pick it all up,” and you know, still they wouldn’t notice, still they’d continue detailing as before.
‘ “Who’s acting as judge this time?” would shout one to the other.
‘ “Johnjoe,” would shout the other back to the first.
‘ “Who’s acting as jury?”
‘ “Big Chief, John Doe.”
‘ “Who’s acting as executioner, and is Jetty still taking the minutes or is she on her break this time?” So you see, as long as you don’t look like Marilyn Monroe, as long as you haven’t put on lippy, as long as you haven’t done your hair or taken yourself out of your dowdy, part-of-the-damaged, can’t-be-bothered trauma costumes, then you’ll do fine, then you’ll do more than okay.
‘Not with women, though.’ And here she sighed. ‘With women, you have to be adaptably careful. With women you have to watch where you put every single one of your little Size Three Cinderella feet. Also, mostly it helps if you look slightly more on the groomed side with women, unless you’re dealing with an exceptionally untidy highly traumatised woman, otherwise they’ll feel freaked that something psychically contagious and disadvantageous might leap over from your aura and latch on to theirs.
‘Not too glamorous, though,’ she went on, ‘for that would be construed as inverse criticism which wouldn’t do either. So you see,’ she shrugged, ‘it’s a tightrope of constant adjustments whenever you’re dealing with women. It’s almost never clearcut or wee buttons with them.’
Fortunately for this policewoman, Janet Doe turned out to be from the wee buttons category.
‘Oh yes! What luck!’ she said. ‘I didn’t have to undergo months of stringent, prolonged “Disguised Authenticity Training” for her. All I had to do was stand outside the chemist on the High Street, look as if I were truly interested in a ridiculous plaque displayed in its window and then, as she struggled out with her enormous shopping, I’d turn, point to the plaque and exclaim, “Yes, but what does it mean – ‘Almost Winner of the Chemist of the Year’?” ’
I can’t tell you how much Janet Doe loved that question, though she doesn’t love it so much now, given all these years have passed, and she’s still in the jail section of the mental hospital as an accomplice to everything, whilst the men who did the everything are now famous and iconic and will certainly be hailed as heroes upon their early release. But in those days, at that point, she said proudly to the policewoman, ‘I can tell you what it means! It nearly won the award that’s awarded every year to the world’s best chemist. I actually have a sister who’s an employee in there!’
Well, of course this undercover person already knew that, as well as a lot of other things about Janet and her sister, but she said, ‘No! Do you really?’ plus further praiseworthy comments like ‘How great to be a finalist, and to be an employee of a finalist, and to be related to an employee of a finalist! With success like that, it’s only a matter of time.’ Janet was so pleased with this response that she no longer felt the stranger to be a stranger. Immediately a little friendship bond was struck up. They went for tea and profiteroles – Betty, for that was her name, insisting upon paying – and they had a good natter in one of the café-stationery-launderette-gunshops further along. Janet did most of the talking. She told Betty about how she’d been shopping for years at her sister’s employer’s and how there were some really good bargains to be had if you just knew what days and times to go in and how to pick the right person, as well as knowing what shelves to look for those best value-for-monies upon.
According to Betty, who reported to her superiors later, Janet also revealed some unexpected high-grade shit about the chief suspect, whilst all the time thinking she was chatting innocuously about bingo, being married, and naked men.
Janet told Betty about him being naked, although later she could hardly credit she’d done so, given the thought even of saying ‘naked’ would send her plumb blotchy red. But she and Betty had been getting along famously, developing rapidly in their exchanges of
soul business that her latest worry about John naturally had come out. She revealed what she did because Betty had said something uncanny that had made Janet think that she and Betty must be twin souls or something. Betty had said, ‘Do you know what I hate, Janet, and I hate my boyfriend doing it? I hate it when he puts his hand on my abdomen when we’re in bed together, then leaves it there, all heavy on top.’
Janet jumped as Betty had known she would. She opened her mouth and stared at this greatest friend in astonishment.
‘Guess what, Betty? I can’t believe you said that, because that’s exactly what I hate too!’
‘And something else I hate, Janet, is when my boyfriend looks over and watches me from the bed to see what my behind looks like as I’m walking with no clothes on out of the bedroom into the bathroom.’
‘Oh me too! Me too!’ Janet let go of her cup and broke it on the table because she could have sworn the table was higher up. ‘I walk out backwards but with my hands casually over the front of me, for I don’t like the way John’s eyes go when he looks over and down there as well!’
‘I also hate,’ confided Betty, ‘when we go out and he buys me a drink, saying “Back in a minute, love,” then goes away and sits with his mates, and doesn’t come back the rest of the night at all.’
Good God, thought Janet. And she nearly fell off the gun-shop’s profiterole pouffe. Bits of startled milles-feuilles fluttered to the floor. What identification! When John took her to the Cracked Cup Drinking Club it seemed he behaved just exactly as Betty’s boyfriend. Who would have thought to hear anybody else say things that Janet felt, but had never been able to think properly, never mind utter before? She and Betty were so close, she decided, that anyone would think there must have been a microphone or a video-camera planted secretly in the Doe bedroom. And so, because of the uncanniness of revelations, the bit about John being naked came out.