by Anna Burns
‘… had a wee pup there. Did you see that wee pup? Blasted wee pup. Had it in my hand a minute ago.
‘Yeah, my finger, son. It’s nipped bad. I might have to go to the doctor’s or even the hospital with it. Do you wanna see it? It’s really sore.
‘Want her to be quiet. Murmuring. Next there’ll be screaming. I know what I’m talking about – that daughter won’t retain its integrity for long.’
During this, the predictable ramble stage, brother quickly propped sister against wall just outside back living room. Then he nipped back into room, closed the door and just in time. Father was coming to the end of ‘I said to them, “Guess who’s in and guess who’s out. Guess who’s playin’ and guess who’s not playin’,” ’ and, looking up, he was already frowning, for the soothing background sympathy of his son had faltered. In spite of ‘I know, Da, yeah, Da, gosh, Da, that must have been awful for ye’, the poor boy was torn. Time was of the essence and he couldn’t get everything done at once.
Rambles were over. Father sat down.
It was a case of ‘Phew!’ It was a case of ‘Whoosh!’ It was a case of a look on his face of sheer unadulterated trauma. It was as if it had been him and not her being percentagely raped and strangled against a wall. He plumped, dazedly, tragically, self-sorrowfully, into his armchair, and squashed his wife who was sitting underneath. Yes, I don’t think I mentioned. Janet had come in during her son and daughter’s débâcle with their father and, because of the headaches she was prone to, once again she had one of her husband’s trouser belts buckled tightly round her forehead.
When first she’d come in, Janet had sat down in the armchair and, despite the dreadful headache, had tried to acclimatise herself to just one bit of media. She turned to the TV. Now, what was this? A Jesus programme! Well, she wasn’t going to watch that. She flicked over and Somebody’s Got To Do It was on the other side. Sometimes she liked these episodes and sometimes she didn’t. Tense Isolated Ambition: the helpful caption in the corner told her what that day’s subject matter was.
‘And what about their wives?’ a young man was saying. He was shouting. He was shaking. He appeared to be beside himself. ‘Does the wife care that her mad crumpled obsessive laboratory husband’s been eating flies and fly larva as a way of trying to identify with them? Does she eat them also? Or does she eat something else – cockroaches? – which at least would put the flies into perspective if nothing else. “Is it about purity or perversion?” you ask me. “Is this a case of great brains and self-sacrifice?” you ask me. “Fanatics to their cause. Martyrs to their mission. We need these people! The world needs these people! Inventors. Discoverers. Innovators. Pioneers. Somebody’s got to do it!” That’s what you say. Well, I say, “Rubbish!” What’s the point in having all that knowledge, having all that expertise, being the best in your year, the best in the country, the best in the world, if you don’t know how to say hello to somebody? If you don’t know what a human being is, you may as well keep it simple and be a thug in a murder gang.’
A gasp went up.
‘I say, steady on,’ said the man in the middle. ‘This is, after all, a live television programme. Politesse please! We don’t want—’
Janet decided to concentrate on the radios or the washing machines or the hairdryers or the vacuum cleaners. Goodness, she thought. Wasn’t there anything but Jesus and strange people on today?
What? What’s that you’re saying? You’ll have to speak up. I can’t hear you. I’m trying to identify with these Doe people by trying out some earplugs. I’ve a pair of the Flakjacket 200 Strength stuck currently in my ears. Could it be you’re asking how come Mrs Janet Doe was in the same room and yet didn’t notice her husband was assaulting and attempting possibly to kill their daughter, while their son gently, coaxingly, was trying to intervene? This was not unusual. Janet often was busy doing something in one corner of the room while her husband was busy doing something in another. Usually she’d be watching TV, or eating blancmange, or reading one of her True Detective magazines. This was in complete contrast to what the behaviour of her sister would have been. Jetty, who never read anything, or listened to radio, or watched TV, except for the great ‘Cathy and Heathcliff’ film, would have interjected occasionally with ‘Don’t hit her on the head, John,’ or ‘That’s better. Keep it to his torso,’ or ‘Not so much now, Johnny, or they’ll hate you for sure, when they grow up.’
Poor Judas. Poor only son. Poor, brave, misjudged little human being person. Here was me, thinking he did nothing but climb into suits of armour and snoop about murmuring ‘habitable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ and ‘inhabitable’ all day. And look, here he was, going through angst and fear and confrontation with his very forbidding father, all to save poor sister Julie. How protective. How potential. How fictional. How made-up.
Yes. I’m sorry to give a negation of Judas’s version but I have to, in order to give the honest and authentic version. I’ll also give a little mitigating analysis, though, as to why Judas might be fibbing at such a phenomenal rate as that. The only bit that was true was the bit where he was spying out upon Julie and JayJay to make sure they weren’t kissing, although he was in the suit of armour, for that was the only place he could hide whenever his father was looking for him, where it hadn’t occurred to his father to look for him yet. That bit about the bookcase might have been true, for Doe certainly did trot it out every opportunity he had a father-to-son confidential but, as Judas didn’t go down to the back room to confront Pops and save sister, that bit about the bookcase wasn’t true this time.
So there he was in the armour – that one in the parlour, mind, not the one in the master bedroom that was semi-affixed to the wall with a false back and a passage running through it, nor the trompe l’oeil one in the bathroom that was really a door, also leading to the tunnels, then the ante-chambers, then the chambers underneath. Both ran underground eventually, although the trompe took in the scenic route, going round all the myriad intestines of the town of Tiptoe Floorboard. Judas was in the downstairs armour – the one that had been stolen from the Kremlin that time.
Inside this armour, he was having a little muse on the sounds he liked best to hear. One was telephone boxes. He liked going into them, picking up the receiver and hearing the little ‘burr-burr’ in his ear. He also liked the sound of cats cleaning their feet. And the clipclop of horses, he liked, except in film music when battles were about to happen and, like his father, he liked the sound of washing machines, fridges, vacuum cleaners, dryers, buzz saws, pneumatic drills and the echoing sound of any type of mechanical bit. Old buildings left for birds he liked the sound of, and yachts rattling their sails against sailpoles. And that wee girl mascot in the miniskirt’s giggle as she said, ‘Your daddy! Your greatest daddy! Oh, I love your daddy my uncle. Oh, you’re such a lucky duck, Judas, to live in the same house as your daddy! I wish I could marry my uncle your daddy, for he really, really, really makes me laugh.’
And here was Daddy now, coming into the parlour. He was naked and had all his mementos about him. He spread them over the settee and was just about to get going when the sound of murmuring from outside the window intervened.
Murmuring wasn’t a Noise for Judas. He could take murmuring or he could leave murmuring. Not so his father. Judas watched through the visor as Doe, now hyper-aroused before he was ready even to be ordinarily aroused, peeped out the window then reached in reaction for his Glock No 5.
Then he put Glock down. Then he left the parlour. Julie and JesseJudges then appeared to leave the windowsill. Judas heard them going. Then all murmuring stopped.
Father came back, this time with his clothes on. He had another spy out, cursed, then was away again, down to the back parlour. Judas could hear him humming in his urgent way as he put TVs and many other noisy mechanicals on. He knew his father was going to wait for Julie, and that meant danger. That meant too, that he, Judas, was staying where he was.
Aunt Jetty went out and Mamma came in. Judas recogni
sed the latter by her footstep. It was a tread of plonk-plank, clack-clunk, clop-clunk-plonk, plonk-plank-flop, platt-splatt, heavy-right, clumsy-left, head-bang, head-bang, doorframe doorframe. Then over the threshold. That sort of tread. As she opened the back room out came the sound of media: ‘… One Hundred Favourite Clichés as voted on by the nation!’ Then the clichés returned to mumbles as the door was reclosed.
This brings me to my confusion. Was Judas, at the last minute, going to change his mind and rush down and save his sister? Or even position himself in his armour outside the front of the house and warn her as she arrived? No, no and no. Later, when he did all that false delineation in court on what he said had happened, that set me thinking. Could it be that, rather than the boy having noble, honourable thoughts of placating father to save sister, and maybe also mother, that perhaps he had a little anger towards the whole three of them instead?
A Judasian creation pure and simple. And now, back in the shack, just after the Ouija had accused him, he was muttering his usual ‘habitable-uninhabitable-inhabitable’ mantra, putting ten circles and triangles of sugar into his tea. He stirred and tasted it and was just thinking one more sugar really ought to do it when he became aware of the silence, and the hearth shovel he’d been manoeuvring in lieu of a teaspoon fell from his arm as he glanced up.
Mr J, and Mr J, and Mr J – I’m sorry, but I have to do those ‘Js’ for legal reasons as those particular ‘Js’ weren’t later charged with murder – and Mr J and Mr J and Justin and Jude and Jameson and Joel and Jake and Johnny and Johnny were all looking at him. And then his father, also Johnny, was intensely looking at him as he approached him sinuously via the circumference of the room. The boy JesseJudges, nicknamed JayJay by his parents and siblings for, you know, he had had parents and siblings, was now lying dead on the dancefloor with the mascot down beside him. She was rattling her rattle, shaking her resonator and her face was up close and smelling him. Don’t get me wrong, but I honestly think there was something wrong with that girl.
They had killed JayJay. Twenty-one years later they admitted that, yes, he hadn’t been the informer, but what else were they to do when Messire had given the word? ‘It didn’t matter, though,’ they went on to explain, ‘for by then he was near a building for the birds anyway’ – clothing in a heap on a space on a dancefloor, semi-clumped semi-slumped semi-arched, a real good battering, and going blue underneath all that stitched-up postal cloth. Although it wasn’t cloth. It was paper. It looked like cloth because it was thick and sodden – something left rotting to take on a smell. I’m telling you, you get to a certain age and it’s an age when your hormones go a bit mad on you. You’ll join anything, get sucked into anything. ‘Hey, I’ll join! I’m willing!’ and you thrust up your hand. ‘Good lad,’ says the older man. ‘That’s a good lad. Sign him up – that one, down there, near the exit, the one that’s waving.’ And so you do get signed up, and you do get into anything, and later, although you find the exit’s open and they’re shrugging and turning their backs and saying you can leave if you want to, your mind’s saying, too late. You made your decision. You can never leave now.
Unanswered questions. Like, for instance, that famous ‘Why?’ But the why, and its answer, or lack of answer, will have to wait twenty-one years until the interview on ‘Guilt and Remorse’, which the gang, in a bemused fashion, all agreed from their prison cells to take part in. But for now, they killed him halfheartedly. No, it was that they killed him absent-heartedly. They said that it was as if they knew that the ending of the teenager, JayJay, spelt the ending for them too.
So Judas was at an impasse and the Ouija was ‘SHOUTING OUT THE ANSWERS’. That’s what it was actually spelling as the police broke into the room.
Chapter Eight
From early morning these police had been spying on the shack from round the corner of the popular Leprechaun Museum. ‘Right, boys,’ said the Deputy Commander. ‘It’s time. Get ready. Get steady—’ Johnjoe took off. In the opposite direction. After recovering from his double bout of ‘Grandma Getting Nasty’, Johnjoe was now peeping down on the police from on top of the roof of an adjacent building. What I don’t understand, though, is why did he then clamber down the fire escape at the back and disappear? Why not dash immediately to the garden shed – totally heroically – to warn all his buddies? Or take out his walkie-talkie and warn them from where he was? Because Johnjoe had just made a big stack of money, that was why. Think of what happened that time between those two men in the Garden of Gethsemane and – as long as you don’t mix John-joe’s boss up with that other, rather earnest fellow – I think you’ll get an impression of what I’m talking about here. And speaking of kisses, someone had run up to Doe earlier to tell him to ‘Watch out, Johnny – your Jetty’s after you with a big hammer or something!’ And guess who that someone was? Right again. Left-hand man, Johnjoe Doe.
‘Ach, is she, Johnjoe?’ said Doe. ‘Well, I’m a bit pushed. Would you mind dealing with it for me? But don’t be killing her because I like her. I’ve got to go to the shack now and deal with that Romeo, JerryJudges Doe.’
‘Ach, no bother, John. You go ahead and I’ll take care of it. So will the entire executive be at the shack then, or what?’
Get the picture? I think you do.
I had circumstantial inklings it was him who was the traitor, which were borne out by later circumstantial material circumstances. And these days, of course, now that he’s rich and living in that big house in the country, with the security gates and the jewellery dripping off him and that chauffeur-bodyguard chap he pays a fortune to to drive him about, he’s giving interviews saying he’ll sue the gang if any of them in their jail interviews said it wasn’t fair that they got arrested when he didn’t get arrested and that when they got out they were going to sue him. I was reluctant to tell you of my suspicions about Johnjoe in case any of you men or women out there were starting to fall in love with him. It’s always dispiriting when idols get dashed to the ground.
So he ran away, eventually to get married to that beautiful woman whom he hadn’t met yet and who would be after him solely for his money and, in the meantime, right here, the police did a swoop on the shack. They broke in, this police, and eventually – for at first they were nervous – they dove on top of everybody. At that point a high scruff broke out and so did a psychic one as well.
Under normal Community Centre rules, when you visit the shack, unless you’re being taken in there to be murdered, first thing you have to do is give the password at the door. The latest password was long-winded: ‘I said yer woman said yer man was talking about me and she said that yer other man was also talking about me but to not let on she told me but I don’t think he was although I’m not sure, but anyway, I don’t think yer woman out of sheer spite perhaps? – was telling the truth about the second man at all’ That was the password. You get your money’s worth in this town. But guess what. The police didn’t use it. They just swung their sledgehammers. But then, after this impressive start, they hesitated at the threshold on tippy-toes. In the name of God, us in the crowd looked at each other. What sort of police were they? Were they not going to move down into the tunnels and do their official duty? So me and the Ordinary Decent Folk – a mixture of Pro-Shed, Anti-Shed, and the average Abstention-Shed ghost-hunter who hadn’t time to care about the shed or take a stance either way on it – became more and more puzzled at the way the police were carrying on. Instead of rushing in and banging heads and breaking bones and being totally legally violent, after banging and breaking themselves ten or eleven times each on the fortified doorframes, they stopped and looked at their deputy appealingly and we could have sworn some of them started to cry. ‘Please don’t make us go down there!’ some mocking Pro-Gang, anti-arrest newspapers later said the police were blubbering. The Sovereign Commander, the big chief of chiefs, the deputy’s boss, got out of his car at this point to deal with the insurgents. With his loud-hailer and purple angry alcoholic face we heard him shout,
‘You fuckers!’ he bawled. ‘Giddy-up! Giddy-up! Go down there and get those bastards! Go down there and get them! Are you hearing me? You’ll be sorry if I have to order this three times.’
Golly. So it was serious, then. But who did he mean by the bastards? Tiptoe Floorboard is situated, you see, in quaintly subjective territory. Was it the Doe gang he meant, or the ghosts, or anybody perhaps half-tortured but not yet fully dead down there?
Do you know that mocking expression – ‘Oh, she jumps at her own shadow, ha ha, ha ha ha’ – that certain irritating stupid people come out with who aren’t funny and with whom you find yourself getting exhausted just having your ears in the same room as themselves? Well, sometimes, in certain places, people should jump at their own shadows, and not just at their own, at other shadows as well. Take a place such as this. Even after a helpful ‘One two three go!’ that that nice Deputy Commander – the one who does salsa in the evenings, with all that bracing and exact and primed elegant movement – well, even after he’d counted down for them and they’d swung their sledgehammers, his boys were startled by the number of shadows running about the place. There appeared to be too many of these ghostly things for the live bodies scientifically to be able to account for them, and that was with being generous and giving every human being – as sometimes happens – three whole shadows each. As soon as natural light fell in, all these shapes at the entrance seemed to go haywire. They screamed and shrieked and that was at the top of the steps that led to the tunnels. What would they find, these police wondered, these police feared, when they got down underneath?