by Anna Burns
‘I told you not to leave Hesit!’ shrieked his mother. Hesit, if you remember, was the youngest sister of Doe, the one who initiated that tragic shooting incident that involved many people at a séance when she was in her twenties. Well, she wasn’t in her twenties yet. Turned out mother was spitting feathers because son hadn’t babysat his sister as he’d been instructed to. Hesit had been left alone and God knows what would have become of her if nice Mr McCotter – the neighbour with the crotch and the scary hair and the moving fingers – hadn’t shown up and taken her over to his place to look after her there. ‘Anything could have happened!’ screeched Mrs Doe. ‘Any pervert could have taken her!’ Apparently, according to Mrs Doe, any pervert wouldn’t do.
But I won’t elaborate on that, in case I get into legal difficulties, but I will say that daring to grow up and break away from Mamma was the real reason mother was dragging son home. He kept trying to go adult, and she kept trying to child him. She had sat up till four in the morning with a baseball bat and had laid in with it, to great shoutings of ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ when Benedict, her eldest, her softest, her most treasured, had started withdrawing from her as a teenager. He had begun to say less, go out more, come home late until, in the end, she couldn’t take it any more. She’d thrown him out that Morning of the Baseball Bat before he’d even entered. Best get it over, to stop him leaving first. After he’d gone, she got all her other sons out of bed, except John, who was already out of bed and on the stairs crying, and she set them everyday arduous tasks to do from that moment on. These were never-ending, designed to be never-ending. Babysitting Hesit had been only one in a host of instructions given to Doe that day.
Hesit had been the presenting reason. She’d never been the real reason. Besides, nice Uncle McCotter had often babysat Hesit when she’d needed babysitting, had often babysat Hale when she’d needed babysitting, had often babysat the twins when they’d needed babysitting but, excuse me, there were many children in this Doe family, and Mr McCotter, he’d babysat all of them. Can we just take the others, and what happened to them, as read?
By the way, where were the fathers here? Is it that John Doe was right in his fulsome praise of these mothers being sinless virgins? And were these children, in fact, genuine virginal conceptions? What of the fathers? What of Doe Senior? Where did he hang out for a start?
Peninsula asylum. No. That is the wrong answer, although I can patently see why your instinct led you to it. What happened was that Doe Senior had a lover. This lover turned out to be his wife’s sister – yeah, so very ‘John and Jetty and Janet’ of the succeeding generation. Doe Senior’s lover too, was the mother of Jetty and Janet – Jetty of the Kalashnikov, Janet of the Almost Chemist of the Year.
With all this loving then, Doe Senior had no time to get directly involved in the rearing of his children, although when required, he did attend defence meetings in the town. ‘How many clumsily concealed vehicles can you spot in this picture,’ went a lecture, ‘compared with how many expertly camouflaged vehicles you might strive fruitlessly to discern in this other picture over here?’ That sort of thing. Enemies existed, and as to who they were, or how to recognise them, unfortunately you couldn’t. Vigilance was called for, unauthorised persons were vetted, and codewords like ‘This tape will self-destruct in five seconds’ were thought up then changed a week later into something else.
It was busy busy busy for Doe’s da all those years ago but what about all those years forward? What about her? I mean the foreigner? The one on the wasteground? Will her hair fall out, for example? Is she going to get fat from eating butter? Or bony-skinny from eating nothing? Are her periods going to stop, not because she got pregnant from the beating but because she’s so powerful she’s going to stop them with her mind? Is she going to wear the same clothes, back to front, day in, day out, baggy baggy, never never never never never never washing them? Is she going to patch them when they go threadbare, and what about when they eventually fall apart? Will she patch and repatch the patches then, spend meticulous hours in artificial light in a particular spot of the same room, in a corner of the same room, with the curtains closed doing all that mending, pretending to herself this is normal activity she’s engaging in? Grimy. Dirty. Totally disgusting. That’s the way her patches will go, but she’ll scrub her body six times a day every day for two years. She won’t care, by the way, if her hair does fall out. It’ll be on the pillow, perhaps, in the mornings. It’ll be in the plughole by the millions. And in the hairbrush. So what? She’ll stop wearing brassières too and this brings me to the teeshirt. I’d forgotten to mention the teeshirt. This person, she bought a teeshirt, as practice, that day.
Yes. Practice. It wasn’t a trauma teeshirt for that would have been easy. It was a snug-fitting teeshirt and now it was down at the bus-stop, still in its plastic bag. She had bought it that morning, for she’d felt different that morning. And not only did she buy it, she’d been reading certain books as well. Books about pleasure, about nourishment – of the type that wasn’t food – and books about trying to get connected, and one of those books, pink with a laughing woman on the cover, had told her to go and get that teeshirt. ‘Go buy it, girl,’ the book had said. ‘Buy some lipstick too,’ it added and it told her not to come back with butter, or with something black, or with anything resembling rosary beads. But it was a liar. Perhaps she hates that book as much as she hates that teeshirt and busstops and little old ladies in general now too.
It’s so much bad memory anyway so she’ll get under her duvet and give up grooming completely. She’ll stop going to work and then she’ll get the sack. ‘Tell her not to come back,’ her boss will instruct, and she won’t care because she’ll be at home sleeping. She’ll stay in bed and stop talking. ‘Oh, she’s hard work. Get rid of her,’ pretty soon afterwards will say everybody else.
Eventually, a few years, perhaps a hundred years later, she’ll wake up and do versions of what happened to her. This she’ll do as a way of resurfacing to the top. ‘I met this boy once,’ she’ll say, ‘and he was a tiny bit young and very, very rude to me.’ Then she’ll deny she said this, not that anybody was listening to her mumbles and secret codewords in the first place. Later, she’ll also deny her next statement, something about something disgraceful having happened to someone in some country that she’d heard about. Then it’ll be,
‘This cheeky boy – he spat and flicked water at me’ – that’ll come out after two hundred years.
‘This teenager cursed and grabbed at me’ – let’s say after three hundred years.
‘People rushed to help me. The wonderful town I was living in at the time rushed immediately to help me’ – on her deathbed, an old woman, with no years left, perhaps?
Or she could go the other way. And the other is immaculate grooming. It’s total spectacular dressed-up perfection. It’s haute couture and haute everything. It’s where every single hair is impeccably in place.
And so, to suffering, for what about this thing, suffering? Some people would kill themselves over that hair being out of place because that hair being in place has to stand for everything. Others might find this funny and laugh, then be amazed to find yer woman really had gone and killed herself. ‘What? But she only had a hair out of place, for God’s sake!’ they’d cry. They don’t believe it. They’re baffled. They try to laugh still, but something has frightened them. They think there must have been something other, that only something other could have called for a solution so drastic as suicide. Well, of course there was something other. What’s wrong with these people? But no, they don’t believe that either. ‘Look,’ they point. ‘It can’t have been something other. Her note states clearly, “Can’t take it any more. One hair fell out of place.” ’
But this is Johnny’s story. So we don’t have to bother with this woman Johnny did a bit of growing-up with. Within days, his wasteground initiation had taken off. This meant that, by the Law of Rite of Passage, even his mother knew better than to continue
to drag him by the hair about the area. He became his own property and, two decades later, in his back parlour, here he was with two other of his properties – daughter Julie by the wall, son Judas at the door.
Chapter Seven
‘Ah, come in, son,’ said Daddy. ‘Let me tell you something, Judas, about us men.’
Apart from that Martini fridge, another thing Doe did, along the lines of those men in the bar and how men have to be men because men are men, was to talk about the bookcase. He had this notion about a bookcase that he’d trot out at moments of great insight to his son.
‘Us men have to be bookcases,’ Father would say. ‘I’m a bookcase. You’ll be a bookcase too, one day, son.’
Poor Judas. The boy would nod. He’d heard this bookcase talk so many times since childhood that it was almost beginning to make sense, which was mad. What Doe meant by ‘bookcase’ was ‘bookending’. Men were bookendings, the things at the end of shelves to prop books up. Also mad. This belief was based on a TV documentary drama that had been blasting away one day in his house on the difference between the sexes. Through the earplugs and the mechanical raucous, Doe managed to pick bits of it up.
Apparently it had been about that difference, which turned out not to be guns, as I’d thought, but about books and small furniture. Women were the books and men were the bookends, according to this documentary. They were also the shelves and the little delft rabbits at the end of the shelves that physically held the books up.
Complicated. Dodgy. That was why Doe was sure it must have been thought up by someone qualified like Freud or something – someone so deep into his armchair that he got stuck in it and so, through circumstance, was forced to stay in it and psychoanalyse himself.
But Doe got it muddled. What he hadn’t done was pay attention, and of course how could he, what with vacuum cleaners, extractor fans, stereos, washing machines, his own manic humming, the volume of the fridge high, plus a session of earplugs going on? The person who looked like Doe’s idea of what Freud looked like – some sort of brain surgery Alfred Hitchcock – had made some throwaway comment without realising it was going to be picked up by everybody. It was along the lines of women productively not being very strong. ‘They were books,’ he said. ‘No. Not even books. They were attractive ideas for books,’ he said. ‘But very weakly constructed in terms of three-dimensional manifestation. They can’t get themselves into the world without some strong container to transform and develop them. And that’s where men come in.’ So you see, men were the pages, perhaps even the text, as well as the varied book covers. They were closures. Turns out he hadn’t said they were bunny rabbits after all.
More than this. Some men didn’t like the analogy. And some women didn’t like it either. The thing degenerated into confusion, and then into fights. First the men complained that they wanted to be the ideas as well as the pages and the texts and the covers. ‘No,’ said the man. ‘Out of the question. You have to be the action and the production side of things. But why be upset?’ he went on. ‘The production and action and result are not nothing, you know. And besides,’ he smiled, ‘I’m not talking about males and females as in actual men and—’ ‘Mister,’ interrupted the women. ‘What do you mean we’re not very strong?’ They had bunched around his armchair and were bunching up even closer. They knocked his table lamp over. His smoking pipe fell to the ground. ‘Perhaps that was the wrong word,’ he began. ‘Bloody right it was the wrong word,’ said the women. ‘Well, you know, everybody,’ said the man, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender, ‘I’m trying to tell you, if only you’d listen. What I’m really referring to are psychological constructs. Male in the female, female in the—’ ‘Why can’t we be both?’ said the men again.
Next, there was a press conference with the men pointing and saying, ‘He says we can’t be both.’ And the women smirking and, like smirkers everywhere, who pretend they’re amused rather than fearful and impotently angry, saying, ‘Who digests a bookend? Who walks around quoting and remembering bookends? Whose life is transformed by a rabbit?’ So the women reduced the men into being lightweight fixtures and ornamental fittings. Then outsiders, who weren’t even present during the initial nineteenth-century disquieting – like John Doe here – unconsciously demoted them into wieldy cumbersome bookcases even more. I think, by the end, yer man in the armchair was backtracking and changing his story. I bet he was sorry he ever opened his mouth.
So,
‘I’m a bookcase,’ said Doe. ‘We, son, are bookcases. We two are the bookcases. Women can’t do without us.’
‘I know, Da. We are the bookcases. You’re dead right there. But listen, do you wanna let go?’
This was a reference to John Doe’s grip on his daughter’s neck with his right hand. I don’t want to tell you where his left hand was. The thing was, Judas tried to keep panic out of his voice, for he knew his father had disappeared into ‘I’m Misunderstood and Nobody Understands Me’, which meant he wouldn’t be fully aware he was strangling anybody at all. Which didn’t mean he’d stop doing it or that he wasn’t responsible. If startled, which meant accused, he’d strangle even more. So, agreeing with his father, or enquiring after his father’s health – which his father loved and which Judas was about to do in a minute – or showing great interest in what an amazing, wondrous ‘Your Majesty’ his father was, would be the only ways in which Judas could get Papa to relax and relinquish – equally without awareness – those two very deadly holds.
‘Never hit any of you,’ went on Doe. ‘I’ve never been violent. Never hit any of you.’ Gosh, what a whopper. But I think, given the circumstances, Judas was wise to let that one go.
‘We know, Daddy. But, Daddy,’ said Judas, ‘I can see you’re holding, and someone like you doesn’t need to do that holding. Somebody else can do it. You have a rest and I’ll take over now.’
‘Bookcases. We’re bookcases.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And they – they …’ Doe’s grips tightened about his ragdoll daughter. Julie almost almost – did but then didn’t respond. Total stillness was the only response ever possible from her, especially at these times, when Papa got into his ‘I could strangle you if I want. It’s all up to me, you know.’
‘I always worked for my living!’ Doe’s mind suddenly shot off. Just to go with him for a minute – he didn’t always work for his living. When he was fourteen he was apprenticed to a bridle-cutter and harness-maker but, after going the first morning and expressing a desire to skin a horse alive to see what its blood was doing underneath the tiny film he’d leave on top of it, and then, in justified rage – for he’d only been daydreaming – trying to kill his employer for sacking him, he never again showed up. Since then, and apart from a brief stint as a carbonator lemonader in the drinks factory beside the haunted egg factory, he’d made all his money from other businesses – not his own. Although still known as a Master Bridler, Chief Cutter and Harness Maker, he knew nothing about horses or things to put on horses. He’ll never get the opportunity either, for horses, like ducks, have become extinct in this town now.
‘That’s right, Daddy,’ said Judas. ‘I want to ask you about your awful cold ailment and those possible flu symptoms to see if you’re feeling better yet.’ Doe frequently said he had flu, but it wasn’t real flu. It was the flu people say they have when they don’t have it. It’s a little cough, some sniffs, some spittings on to the carpet. That’s not flu. That’s annoying – and I mean for the listener. Sometimes when these people yawn and get sleepy at bedtime, they think that’s having the flu too. But Judas went on, ‘What about your stress levels, Daddy? And I was wondering, how’s that little finger, the one that got nipped the other day in the vice hold?’ It always worked. As long as you sounded soft, as long as you sounded non-critical, as long as you didn’t come out with witticisms such as ‘Ach, Da, don’t you be worrying. We’ll soon have you back on your four feet before long.’
Doe’s grip loosened with the l
ushness of the pampering and his headstaggers mellowed, enough to allow Judas to plead with him to rest and sit himself down. He offered to fetch his father a nice mug of Kaolin & Morphine and, whilst offering, he proceeded obliquely to extract his sister from the stranglehold. It took longer, more compliments and endless comforting of Papa for the boy to gain control over what that left hand was doing. And Julie was silent. She was silent. Her eyes were cast down and how could she be silent? Or was she counting? I think now she was counting. Brain going ‘One Two Three Four. One Two Three Four.’
Did you ever notice how people blend into wallpapers? And drainpipes? Or how they hang, in anticipation – usually horrified – from twelve-storey buildings by the tips of their fingers? And just to be on the safe side, they do this from sometime around midnight up until midday the next day or more? That’s the sort of thing I notice. That girl was amazing. It must be a skill of many years standing to be able to mix yourself into all sorts of immiscible substances. I’d like to go on about Julie and her powers of disappearance but I think we should return, for it seemed Judas had things relatively under control.
‘Thanks a million, Da,’ he was saying. ‘Now you sit down and relax and tell me about your dreams for you know we love to hear them. Hold on and I’ll get paper and pencil and write them down like before.’
Da was shattered. Judas knew he now had about one minute before making another huge fuss of Papa. If he didn’t, by the time Doe got to the end of his ramblings, the encore of encores of headstaggers would blast off.
Ramblings began.
‘Had a grand day the day before yesterday, Judas,’ said Doe, now crestfallen. ‘But I haven’t felt great, to tell the truth, since six o’clock on Sunday, although I did have a nice sleep, apart from that bat with the wings open, looking at my face when I woke up, sitting itself on my bedclothes.
‘And I want amends, Judas.’ He made a fist. ‘From them! Those bastards! They owe me amends. I want there to be phone calls. And it isn’t that they have to ring once and make the first move and say sorry. It’s that they have to ring and make the first move and say sorry as many times until I tell them they’re forgiven and can stop.