Little Constructions

by Anna Burns

  From his first words about the bus and ‘Oh dear, where is it?’ she recognised something that hinted of a distant person, that hinted of a memory. She knew violence, and especially she knew the preliminaries of violence – Edgy. Safe. Edgy. Safe. No, edgy again. No, safe again. No, edgy edgy! Get the hell out! Then she’d think, oh for goodness sake, he’s just a kid. You’re old enough to be his mother. Then came the revelation – maybe being old enough to be his mother was the very thing about her that had drawn him forth.

  Behave, she then chided herself for reading too much into situations and for giving herself a hard time always. Fact was she had to be sensible for she had all this shopping and she had to get home. So she answered his maybe harmless questions about the bus – when it should be due, what was keeping it – unlikely topics for a youth to get so worked up about, but when the Chit-Chat started, she felt herself fall into a tailspin. The molecules changed. She felt drained of energy. He had moved up closer. The questions came faster. Any moment now he’d be bringing up the vagina or calling her ‘amazing and pretty, and oh, but wasn’t she pretty’ one minute, only to follow minutes later with ‘ugly whore and cunt’.

  There was so much she knew already, see. And she really had to get that sorted. I mean the sex and violence. Wasn’t it a disgrace to get to her age and not know the difference between both of them yet? Oh, and that he’d hit, and then deny he’d hit, or else start crying, and saying he was a mad man, but that he was sorry for hitting, that he didn’t mean to hurt, that he was her father and had only wanted to nap with her, that he loves her, and that he’ll give her all his money, he’ll give her all the money in his pockets, and his cough-mixture sweets as well. He’ll make her chips then, he promises, loads of chips, and he’ll give her anything she wants, just so long as she stops that crying. If she doesn’t stop that crying, he’ll take back the chips and the sweets and his money, and when he’d retrieved everything he’d given her by way of apology, he’d retrieve her from herself and smash her up again as well.

  Because Papa was standing beside her at this bus-stop, on the cusp of going one way or the other, she couldn’t break out of freeze-mode to lean over and pick her bags up. She couldn’t move off, go to a café perhaps, and catch another bus later. Meanwhile, whilst she was in her motionless struggle, he’d moved on to the Mother of God. As you know, the Mother of God is the greatest of all mothers, but by the Mother of God, John Doe didn’t mean the mamma of that man Jesus. He didn’t mean the mamma of any of those other Masters. He didn’t mean Jesus’ da’s ma or the mother of the oldest god that had ever existed. He meant, of course, his own.

  He was telling her he loved his ma, that there was no mamma like his mamma. ‘Look at these,’ he said, to forestall her, as well as to show off.

  He meant tattoos. And there they were – ‘Mother of All Virgins’, ‘Mamma Most Chaste’, ‘Mamma, Happy Christmas’ and so on – all devotion, all running the length of his young upper and lower arms.

  Now, you know how, if a man starts going on about his mother in words of virginal, divine, most pure, most undefiled, most inviolate, most singular vessel of vessels, sole conceived without original sin, that perhaps he’s got some problems? ‘Bats! He’s bloody bats!’ is what you’d probably cry. I’d say you’re right, and further, that this man has just started. He’s going to continue with big guns out in fulsome praise of the mother and, what’s more bizarre, he’s gonna tell himself you’re thinking exactly the same about his mother as him. It doesn’t occur to him that you’re developing an urge to stick pins in this woman and to shout, ‘For God’s sake! Enough of the mother! We’ve all had mothers! What age are you? You’re not three. Can’t you move on to another topic by now?’ To help you in this situation, I can say that all you need to know is that this man hates his mother. Unknown to him, he longs to burst and deflate the swollenness of this woman inside him, and of those other female relatives also squashed inside him – all so he can make room for whom he does want in there.

  John Doe loved his mother. And guess what – she was dead.

  ‘Just dead,’ he says. ‘Just buried an hour ago,’ and he carried on, having her dead by pretending she was. But the woman he was talking to knew he was lying. She knew his mother was probably at home, eating jellies or lunchtime muesli and watching easy programmes on the TV. But this chewing gum business? she wondered. Why?

  ‘I notice you’re eating chewing gum,’ Doe had mentioned earlier, and that had surprised her. It had completely thrown her, because at that point she’d been expecting something along the lines of the vagina. ‘What?’ was all she could say. But it started her thinking, and now, with shame, she wondered if all that sense of threat, if all that sense of menace, was in truth nothing but her own transference of aggression. What does it say about her mental state, she now thought, that here she was – and not this innocent boy – imagining the words cunt and whore of herself?

  At that moment more old ladies, plus shopping, turned up.

  She saw them and thought, good, although I don’t know why she thought this – first, because of her history, where witnesses to violence suddenly go blind and deaf and completely insensate and never notice anything and, second, because in Tiptoe Floorboard the belief ‘If it’s happening to you then, thank God, it’s not happening to me’ is prevalent in its existence. But she did think, good, although after what happened I don’t think she’ll think, good, should ever she come across old ladies again.

  From John Doe’s perspective, this woman hadn’t been suitably friendly to his overtures of taking an interest and she had been unmoved, too, in responding to his newly bereaved son-of-a-dead-mother state. He had wanted to invite her. To something. He didn’t know what to. He had wanted to tell her she was amazing and pretty. He wanted to carry on being gentlemanly, the good guy noble, which was what you’re supposed to be whenever you’re with the females. But they’re not always grateful, the females, and when they’re not, you’re allowed to do whatever you want, for they don’t deserve to be nice to any more.

  So that was what he did.

  He stepped over and, boy, when he stepped over, did he allow himself fully to step over. And at this point – the point of his initiation into the adult ritual of the wasteground – he grabbed her, a giant grab, after a whack across the head with one hand, and a simultaneous grabbing of the hair and a pulling of her over to waist-height with the other, then a dragging, a pulling, a walking of her up to that wasteground. This hadn’t been deliberate. He hadn’t planned it. It had happened like magic. It was just that he’d reached a certain age, and with certain people when they reach that age in the town of Tiptoe Floorboard, hormones take over where you suddenly realise that everybody owes you everything and that handing over everything they owe is the very least they can do. This could be an apology, or their body, or all of their money. And you can take it, and those others, them auld dolls with their wrinkles and their white hair and their mad shopping, or this foreign woman herself, or that unfit, fat, middle-aged bus-driver who had just pulled up and who was looking at you horrified – he didn’t matter, none of them mattered. You were the one who mattered. They could go do whatever they liked.

  Instinctively Doe headed with her to where his body was propelling him to take her. A few minutes and he’d dragged her along the crowded, sunny High Street on to the wasteground. Sometimes this wasteground was chockful of couples, for it was a popular venue. So far, because it was early, no one but themselves had arrived upon it yet.

  He was now initiating his first beating of a proper adult woman. Historically, anthropologically and sociologically this was a valuable moment, a major turning point in his young romantic career. He forgot everyone, and that includes the main group of witnesses – those old ladies who, after the initial shock of witnessing that whack and grab, quickly cohesed into a tight huddle. They started talking. This was their automatic way of not having to admit to any horror going on.

  ‘Mary went a bit mad,’ sai
d one. The others latched at once on to this comment.

  ‘Oh, did you see Mary, then?’ they said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the first. ‘She went a bit mad.’ They were referring to someone called Mary, as you’ve probably gathered, but in reality they didn’t know who this Mary was. Completely improvised she was. And they were colluding, expertly, in this improvising of her. I suspect that although they’d never met each other until that moment, nevertheless these old ladies had gone through the Mary scenario many times before.

  And now, as the screams of the woman on the wasteground reached them, these female elders of Tiptoe Floorboard were growing indignantly heated. This was because the other woman, Mary, had apparently been foolish enough to go up some dark, narrow, isolated entry, after midnight, on her own.

  ‘And at her age!’ they cried, as if this was meant to convey something. It did convey something but it seemed contradictory, so I’m not sure what it was. Was it that Mary was too young and so should have waited to go up the dark, narrow, isolated entry on her own after midnight when she was older? Or was it that she was now old and so, at her age, should have known better than to go up the entry after what happened to her when she’d gone up it years ago when she’d been young?

  She got attacked, you see, Mary. A savage, bloody attack. It had ended in her hospitalisation. Hit over the back of the head and didn’t remember, stabbed repeatedly in the body, intensive care unit in a cot and wondering what she was doing there, all her hair shaved off, with flashes going through her mind of wondering why he’d kept hitting her and why she couldn’t get up.

  ‘Well, for goodness sake!’ said one of the ladies in a loud voice, and the others anxiously egged her on in it. Already they were nodding their agreement even though they didn’t know what else this person was going to say. In a sense they did, though, and anyway, the nodding was compulsory. None of them wanted to acknowledge that godawful screeching reaching down to them from up the road.

  They carried on, louder and louder, with clucks of disapproval and intensifying persistence. As you know, the expression ‘Pigs before swine’ applies to someone who throws rubbish in the path in front of you, with you not noticing and throwing more rubbish down on top of it. Those Tiptoe Ladies with their elaborate Mary story – I think maybe they were an example of that.

  As he assaulted her, suddenly there was a memory. She remembered someone had told her that once, years ago, when they were young, twenty or twenty-one, they fought with the person they called their beloved in a car in a foreign country, and the beloved stopped the car and said, ‘Get out.’ And she got out. She walked along in the dust, this person, and a car drew up after having gone to a funeral. The man driving it was with his elderly stepmamma. They had been to Stepmamma’s sister’s funeral and had left after the lowering of the coffin. Stepmamma hadn’t wanted to see the filling-in of the grave. Turned out this dead stepmamma’s sister had, in reality, been this man’s blood mother, and that he hadn’t known about this for thirty-seven years. Until that day. That was the day of the funeral, his mother’s funeral. And that was the day this person walking in the pink dust fought with her lover. And that was the day the car slowed down and stopped.

  ‘You can give this girl a lift and drop me here.’

  Stepmamma-Aunty said this in that country’s language, and she got out of the car, as if in a drama, as if on cue, in the middle of nowhere, in the centre of this pink dustiness. And she was full of anger, this woman, which was why she’d given this information. ‘Her,’ she’d said, pointing to the coffin. ‘Her there. She’s your mother.’ Sudden and sharp. And this someone told this woman, who was now being kicked by John Doe on the wasteground, this story. She said she got into the car because the older woman who got out told her that that was what she was to do. The man drove away, and drove, and drove, and then stopped, and forced himself upon this girl he was giving a lift to. ‘There was something,’ the girl said. ‘Some sort of something,’ and that was as specific about rape as she was ever going to be. But this someone, this person the woman knew later, who then was just a girl, she stayed a girl, and she told this story years later with a little girly laugh in between bits of it. She always told everything afterwards with little girly laughs whether or not anything was funny, and he did this to her just after the funeral of his mamma, she said. She said that he’d said that he didn’t know what he’d do as a way of processing this new information just given him. What should he do as a way of moving on? Well, he’d found a way, it seemed, and this someone hadn’t been the same since his finding. She just laughed at the end of sentences an awful lot more now. So this woman who had been standing at the bus-stop and who was now lying curled up on her front in the dust of the wasteground, covering her head with her arms, with her torso being hit with something, was remembering all this in the flash of time that John Doe was dealing with her. And isn’t that amazing? Imagine remembering someone else’s rape memory in the middle of your own battering. It wasn’t as if her historical records were empty and she had to grab at anything. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t a portfolio of memories to call upon of her own.

  John’s mate Johnjoe appeared. He looked at the scene before him in astonishment.

  ‘What are you doin’, Johnny?’ he managed to shout.

  He was incredulous. He was dismayed. ‘Are you serious?’ he said, but he said that because he could see, even if John couldn’t, that of all the girls his own age Johnny could have picked for his first great wasteground beating, Doe had to go and do it with someone his ma’s age. It seemed weird. It seemed disgusting. It was definitely embarrassing. Johnjoe glanced around, relieved nobody else had arrived to see this shameful act taking place upon the wasteground.

  ‘Come on, John,’ he shouted. ‘We have to get goin’.’

  Doe was finished and he felt justified and he felt better. He couldn’t stand that screaming, so if it was worse for her, then she made it worse for her herself. He broke away and was already walking off, with Johnjoe throwing back to the woman, ‘Don’t mind him. He’s okay really, wouldn’t hit you really.’ And that was when he noticed she wasn’t an auld doll after all. In her twenties, he now reckoned, and she had a little waist, a little curve, and she was wearing a fancy lacy bra underneath her red and pink thing. ‘What’s your name anyway?’ he stalled and couldn’t help asking in the end.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he persisted. He leaned over. He touched her shoulder. ‘Where are you going? Do you live here? Is it that you’re on holiday? Are you with anybody, I mean a boyfriend? Have you got a boyfriend?’ But she wasn’t answering. A bit rude, and John was now shouting for him to hurry up. ‘If ever you’re in a pinch or anything,’ Johnjoe said, generously too, given her rudeness, ‘you’ll find me or him at one of the Community Centres. Just come and ask. Remember now.’ And he walked off.

  And she remembered.

  He’d grabbed her and hugged her, and sobbing and crying, he’d kissed her. ‘Your auld da wouldn’t hurt you,’ he said over and over. He loved her. She must always remember that he loved her, and he reached for her, and don’t forget, he winked, ‘when we’re finished’, the pancake pan will be put on. And it was that grabbing. It was that crying. His slobbery waterfall crying, the wet tears of remorse coming out of him and on to her, that in the end had her again breaking down and sobbing. ‘Oh, Daddy!’ she cried, and that ‘Oh, Daddy!’ was her defeat, it was her undoing. It again had her trapped and again unable to escape the sequence. She could never get away from that sequence. It was always worse than the rape – the enforced making-up.

  By the time they left the dancefloor, it had four couples on it already. Men in their twenties, men in their thirties. Women in their twenties, women in their thirties. Proper men, proper women. All proper grown up.

  And that was that. The teenagers had just walked away and were about to go about their money business, Johnny’s sense of outrage now soothed by a sympathetic exhilaration, when there she was, rushing over from the othe
r side of the road. This was Mamma, Mrs Doe I mean, John Doe’s mother I mean. Now have a look, please. Does this woman look dead and horrifically mutilated to you? I’m not speaking metaphorically. I’m speaking literally and, yes, of course we can see she’s not dead and further we can see that here before us is a stunner of a woman. A beauty, still a beauty, even after eleven children, though don’t forget – maternity in this town is very difficult to prove. So here she was, late thirties, early forties, and one other thing – she was Pissed-Off Angry Woman. She had been Pissed-Off Angry Woman for so long that she was now no longer aware of it. There was no doubt about it, though. This beauty was in a rage.

  She grabbed her son, that good-for-nothing, fucking lazy bastard. Ask him to do a thing, and he can’t even do that. She whacked him hard, about the head, about the body, and then she regrabbed him and pulled him over by the hair and dragged him down the High Street. ‘I’ll show you,’ she said, but she was already showing for, continuing in Vein of Curse, she went on dragging him, passing many old ladies at many bus-stops. Immediately they launched into Reprehensible Adolescent – Sore Trial to His Poor Mother. Mary’s brother? Her cousin? Her mother’s bad, undutiful son perhaps?

  And so it went.