by Anna Burns
It didn’t come out truthfully. First Janet said it was probably nothing, then she apologised for being silly, then she began to cry. ‘Oh, that’s okay, that’s okay,’ said Betty. She handed Janet a hankie. It was just that she was worrying, said Janet, because she’d come home one day and John – ‘that’s my husband, Betty’ – was naked with his secret box out. He had his things from his secret box and they were spread around him—’
‘Secret box?’ interrupted Betty, and that was remiss of her. Didn’t she learn that at moments like this you never interrupt people? ‘What sort of secrets – if you don’t mind me wanting to know?’
‘Oh, just secrets,’ replied Janet, pulling back a little. ‘Normal ones, the type everybody has.’
And here Janet paused and looked at Betty and Betty paused too, thinking, where’s she’s going with this? But Janet then seemed to realise she couldn’t cope with an integration of a ‘knowing and a not-knowing’ situation, so she veered off and told Betty something else instead. She knew, really, that her husband was sleeping with her sister and that at that particular moment when she’d walked in on him, with him doing whatever he did with those little private packets of his, that Jetty was most likely upstairs waiting for him in his and Janet’s marital bed. Janet herself would often be ordered to wait there while he went downstairs to do his little business, but instead of admitting this to herself, she said that John was naked because that was a standard precaution to take whilst making bombs. This time it was Betty’s turn to fall off her pouffe and to break her cup on the furniture and to bang her breast accidentally against the table. Betty, in fact, was so prone to table-banging, door-framing and walking into walls that, along with many of the enemy, she now had permanent bruises all down her right side. A spark from your clothing, Janet was explaining, was all it would take to set off the explosives. This she had heard on TV during a programme about international dynamites, so it felt legitimate to relay it to Betty here now. It wasn’t as if she was lying. It was just that she preferred dynamite as an explanation than to have Betty think less of John for being a rat for cheating on her – and with her sister too, whom they’d just been praising lavishly for working at the brilliant Almost Chemist of the Year.
Eager beaver Betty, perhaps not being as clever as she thought she was, or else suffering herself from a ‘knowing and a not-knowing’, foolishly was keen to believe this unlikely bit of information, unlikely because everybody knew John Doe’s interests had never lain in making bombs. Perhaps the murders might, she fantasised – now seeing herself elevated to High Commanderdom of All Commanderdoms – be tied in with some bigger transatlantic or international picture. After all, there’s no separation. Even God said that.
But as to Janet, when she left the policewoman, her mind was so full of flusterations, and of what she knew and yet didn’t know, and about Betty and their new unexpected friendship, that she forgot to bring home the earplugs, leaving them in the gunshop instead. The consequence of this was that John Doe was now going bananas with twenty phantom dead men ‘tweak-tweaking, slit-slitting, scream-screaming, fine-tuning’ at him; phantom Jetty was glocking big bubble gum bubbles at him; his daughter and her beau were unceasingly murmuring and moving more left hands than either possessed between them, and he had his own hands squashed tightly into his own ears. Continually he kept going back to check and recheck that kitchen cupboard saying, ‘Where? Why? Where?’ Then he’d pace back to the living room thinking, and where is she? Where is that dirty girl?
He meant Julie, and as I said, this teenager did have the Noises but what she didn’t have was money, and by money, I’m not talking massive ching-ching. I mean a few bits of coin in her pocket, clicking up and down. Money didn’t happen to Julie. She didn’t have a speck of it wrapped up in a handkerchief. That was why, when JesseJudges asked her if she wanted to have a coffee, immediately she said no, then yes, then no, then yes again. Confusion. What would it mean to get off the windowsill and have coffee with this boy when she herself didn’t own anything? Would she owe anything? And what would her father say if he ever got to hear? She berated herself for panicking herself and for not knowing how to be if someone, especially a non-female someone, asks you for a coffee, and she continued to walk up the street with JayJay whilst giving the impression on every step of stopping and turning around.
Then she did stop. It had become too much. JesseJudges stopped also. He, too, was nervous, for all along he had felt something like reluctance coming from this girl. Then he dropped his nervousness, for it was easier to be aggressive. Then a whole lot aggressive. On the edge of being rejected, hostility rushed to his aid.
‘If you’re just gonna stand there …’ he said. Then he shrugged. Then finally, fully, he insulted. ‘Who are you holding out for? You’re not that big you know, Julie. Not that important. Who are you holding out for?’ And so he rejected first and walked away.
His words travelled across the tiny bit of air between them and entered her mind and stung her. Further confused, she now felt how bad a person, how disgusting a person, how trashy a person, she was.
And this is where I’m glad I didn’t get a summons to go to court to testify, like all those others who got summonses to go to court to testify. How can you piece anything together when everybody remembers everything differently from everybody else?
According to Judas, who did give evidence, his sister Julie came back down the road and, unsuspecting that she and JayJay had been spied upon whilst doing nothing on the windowsill, she went into the living room and her father got her against the wall by the throat.
Judas himself hadn’t gone out of the house. He had been quietly spying upon his father in the parlour whilst his father had been spying upon Julie out the window. Indeed Judas himself had been spying upon Julie out the window up until the point he’d heard his father coming down the stairs. He’d then jumped behind that suit of armour, the one that had been stolen from that museum in Moscow after Moscow had stolen it from Venice who had stolen it from those Flemish people, and he jumped behind it because there’s a time for climbing into things and a time when there just isn’t time. He waited, breathless, shadowless, as insubstantial as he could muster, while his father did his own noseying out the window upon Julie himself.
Now don’t be thinking Judas had been spying on JayJay and Julie because he was a teenage pervert. It was just that he was checking there were no kissing Noises going on. The brain of Judas discriminated kissing Noises as the worst Noise in his repertoire. According to the Judas brain, kissing wasn’t linked pleasurably to what most brains would consider kissing was for. Here it was the opposite. It was as if someone had tied Judas up, and had left him a while, then come back, then gone away, then come back, then gone away, then come back, when by now Judas would be screaming, and this time they’d stay and do some kissing of him when he didn’t have full words because he hadn’t reached the age of even being child yet. He was infant. He was infant of infants. And they played with him, this infant, exploring him, tongues forking as they persisted in him, and this, even after he’d struggled and wailed and eventually gone dead and given up. This perhaps was what the kissing would feel like to Judas in his later years of teenage-hood, but that wasn’t the point of what was going on in the parlour now. What he did know was not the infant and the forked tongue and the lips of that adult, for how could he remember a supposing? It was that the sound of kissing caused sensations to erupt in a network of torture inside his body, and that was why the situation on the windowsill had to be monitored non-stop. ‘Oh for goodness sake!’ you might cry. ‘Why didn’t he just leave the room if he didn’t want to feel kissing Noises?’ Well, I forgot to mention – a Noises person will be driven constantly to reassure himself that the sound which his body can’t bear more than anything isn’t, and still isn’t, and still isn’t, going on.
So, Judas was in the parlour. He was exhausted from vigilance and from the emotional impact upon his lower body of the sound of a kissing
that wasn’t happening, and from the horror he experienced whilst standing inches from his father, whose naked back bristled as it watched his daughter having a raucous time. And now that he was alone, the boy unwittingly picked up his father’s Glock as he tried to work out what next step should be taken in this scenario, knowing all the time really, as he later told the court, he’d have to go down to the back to placate his papa, in order to get those hands away from his sister’s throat.
‘Ready steady,’ he commanded himself. Then ‘Ready steady,’ again he commanded himself. After a few breaths, he was preparing himself once more. He had set the ornament down, and had tiptoed to the back living room. After a last count-in, he opened the door and there, inches from himself again, was his father.
‘Ah, come in, son,’ said Daddy. ‘Let me tell you something, Judas, about us men.’
Chapter Six
What’s a potentially dangerous situation? That’s one thing. And the other thing is – I forgot to tell you how John Doe goes on dates.
He goes to a bus-stop. At least, that’s what he did first time. I mean first time he had a proper adult date. And there was a woman at it. At the bus-stop. She was a bit older than himself. What he didn’t realise was that this woman was more than a bit older. She was one year older than double his own age. He was seventeen. She was thirty-five. Some might say, ‘Tut, old enough to be his mother.’ Coincidentally, his mother was practically the first thing he spoke about when he started chatting to this woman at this bus-stop. Recently, he’d been to his mother’s funeral, for Mamma – tragically, horrifyingly – had been found up some entry after being mutilated by person or persons unknown and was dead.
This woman at the bus-stop didn’t believe this boy when he did tell about the mother – but we don’t need to get really deep into her having come across many liars in her life before. And I mean best of liars, worst of liars, those who told obvious lies, convoluted lies, stupendous lies, stupid lies, baffling lies, lies with seemingly no rhyme or reason to them. She’d been hoping that, with all the therapeutic help she was now receiving, she’d be cured of her past and wouldn’t keep attracting that shit into her life any more. But we’re not going to go deep because, you see, we don’t need to bother with this woman. She wasn’t anybody. I mean she was nobody. Don’t be thinking this person was somebody and so we’ll have to go back and uncover things and do a detective story on her. No, no and no. Rest yourselves. She wasn’t important and, after this current jaunt with her, we won’t be needing her again forevermore. I think she may even have been a foreigner – someone from some town other than the splendid Tiptoe Floorboard. Indeed, she responded so unforthcomingly to John Doe’s lovely overtures of friendship that in the end – when he had to drag her along the street and up on to the wasteground to give her that beating – a foreigner was the only conclusion he could arrive at to explain her to himself.
So his mother dying was sad. It was very sad. As I said, it was almost the initial thing he spoke about but first, there were the preliminaries to be gotten through. I mean the breakingthe-ice stuff, the ‘Where’s the bus? Is the bus due? What one are you waiting on?’ – all that business, all to be said in a concerned, friendly, nice-guy tone of voice. He had that voice. Indeed, he’d meant that voice. So don’t be thinking he’d started out with the aim of doing what he’d been provoked into doing later. He had just come out of the drinking club, into the bright May lunchtime sunlight and he saw her and he liked what he saw. She was wearing red and pink and, unknown to him – but why would it be known to him? – these were her favourite colours. She hadn’t worn them in a very long time. So here she was, giving the appearance of feminine, of floaty, of having a body, of liking this body, of winter now being over. That was the top of her. Below, winter was still a bit going on. She had on heavier green material there, flared trousers, and to tell the truth, they could have been less loose and fitted her better. All the same, she did have contours. There was some flirty definition. From the looks of things, for example, she had a great ass.
Even she liked her ass but, as I say, this wasn’t her story. He took her to be early or mid-twenties and, yeah, she did seem young. This was because she suffered from Emotionally Arrested Development. Years ago, due to her family of origin, she had got stuck at the emotional age of five. If you were to come upon this woman you’d think, something too little-girllike in this person’s demeanour. You might decide this was cute. You might decide this was irritating. She found it irritating. That was why she sought out a therapist. ‘Listen,’ she said to this therapist, ‘I’m sick and tired of being five. Do something. Can’t you help me? Isn’t there some fast-track way you can bloody grow me up?’
So she looked about twenty-four to Doe, but if he’d known she was really thirty-five he would have fallen over horrified and dead. ‘God, that old? Get off! Get off! I said get off!’ But no. He was spared having to have such a reaction – because he was eager, because he was a liar, and because she was close, so close he could have put his hands out and laid them on her. And don’t forget – his poor mamma was dead. ‘Dead,’ he told her. ‘Just come from the funeral.’ And he nodded to indicate that up the road was where the funeral had taken place. By now, of course, he had walked over and was beside her and was pretending to be waiting for the Number Six also. But no, he wasn’t. He wasn’t drunk either, in spite of the afternoon drinking club. Not even tipsy. He hadn’t been drinking. He’d been collecting money for he was an apprentice extortionist – I mean apprenticed to himself. When he’d come out, it had been with the intention of meeting up with his mate, Johnjoe Harrison. Together, they were going to do the weekly rounds and collect all cash from every available source.
But first, her.
After the indication of where the funeral had been, he performed ‘Funeral Upset That Just Might Be Consolable’, but he noticed yer woman wasn’t looking distressed for him. Neither was she looking even vaguely upset or annoyed at the way fate had dealt such a hand to him. On getting this unsatisfactory response, he frowned and put his second negative mark against her in his mental retaliatory book.
Yes, second mark. Before the dead mother chat-up line which fell flat, leading to that second mark against her, came the Chit-Chat. Chit-Chat comes after Preliminaries and Preliminaries, as you know, is the friendly talk of the bus and ‘Excuse me, hasn’t it turned up yet?’ Preliminaries could be acceptable as harmless to most people in bus-stop situations. There is a mild give-and-take, so it doesn’t seem abnormal, particularly to abnormal people, to slip easily then into the Chit-Chat phase. Chit-Chat consists of a bombardment of personal questions, asked inappropriately by strangers of other strangers. Hugely insulting. Horrifically tactless. In the main, they go like this:
‘What’s your name? Where are you from? Where are you going? Do you work? Are you a foreigner? Is it that you’re on holiday? Are you married? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you want a boyfriend? Are you going to meet somebody? Can I come with you? Can I see your vagina?’ – all said as the questioner moves strategically and very physically up close.
Now, a defending barrister person, if such Chit-Chat and rebuffing of Chit-Chat had led to a later court case, might have shrugged at this point and said, ‘Is this not simply an example of not very socially practised youth being clumpy and impertinent, but all the same harmless – even if he did go over the line slightly in making that unfortunate vagina remark?’
But the defence and court bit don’t matter because they didn’t happen, but if they had, don’t you think also that this woman should be forced to accept her part in encouraging the Chit-Chat along? After all, she did answer the friendly preliminary questions – ‘Yes. I am waiting for a bus,’ she said. ‘Yes. It is a nice day,’ she said. ‘No. I haven’t been waiting long,’ and she even continued by responding to the Chit-Chat initially. Quickly, though, she became reluctant and by the end, when they were just about to reach the questions of the vagina, she turned her back on John Doe and looked quick
ly down the road. Bus still wasn’t coming, so she looked at the bags at her feet as if she were going to reach for them, and that’s how she got the first bad mark against her. That was also when he brought up the mother, which, as you know, led to the second bad mark as well.
I use the term ‘rape’ loosely because, technically, he didn’t rape her. Someone else had raped her. But he did physically beat her after dragging her on to the wasteground. This put her very much into that old memory of invasion and annihilation and of grabbing and of despairing, and of the impossibility of connecting to anyone, except through violence, forevermore. By the time they got to the wasteground – and we’re talking a matter of minutes – she was no longer sure who she was, who he was, what year it was, what age she was, where she was and couldn’t tell if what appeared to be currently happening was happening, or if it was a ghostly re-enactment of one of the traumas from her past. It all became jumbled, just like that Jumbled Time Syndrome I was telling you about earlier. And at this point, before the Mothers, I myself was incapacitated from unravelling things further. This was because, temporarily and accidentally, I fell into her head.
What I could see from inside it was that she had her own take on age and identity. She had been standing at the busstop, unaware the boy was heading towards her from the drinking club across the way. She was feeling pleased at having gotten the bus into town alone that morning, at doing her errands, and at chatting quite a lot to people, mostly to men. One in the post office had said, ‘Oh, I’m getting old,’ and she’d laughed and said, ‘No, you’re not,’ and he was pleased and she was pleased to compliment him, and the man at the till heard and was delighted and made a joke with the two of them, to link in as well. The three of them enjoyed a banter and it was a tiny thing, but to her it was a big thing, that there she was – given the tip of the iceberg of her history – making peace, though they didn’t know it, with some men. And now she was ready to go home, waiting for her bus and chatting now with some elderly people. Elderly women. These elderly women kept appearing and disappearing with their weights of abundance called shopping. They’d chat and then get on various buses, which would pull up periodically to collect them. Happily, this woman continued to wait for hers.