Little Constructions

by Anna Burns

  Later, nobody wanted to fill in a report about the psychic phenomena in case they were discreetly put forward for ‘mentally deficient dismissal’. Nobody, not even the most anal-retentive, wanted to go by the book. Even the Commander himself, though cross at the reluctance shown by his Gold ‘A’ Team Swat Team, decided, for the sake of clarity, to leave irrelevant minor details, such as the ghosts, out. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of changing the facts,’ he explained, ‘but I can tell you now, it was a successful operation.’ He told this to a press conference with TV cameras and those little Dictaphone things being thrust up at his fury for him to smile upon. ‘We took into account not only the entire street but every street in the Tenterhook district. Every possible tunnel exit of every possible makeshift tunnel was covered, including everybody’s house and their coal shed as well. We used the reconstituted box formation method,’ he told the world helpfully, ‘with Plan A through to Plan G back-ups. The conductions of my Swat Team were highly commendable. I can assure residents of Tippy-Toe-Under-Tippy-Toe-Ette that we can all now sleep roundly and soundly in our beds.’

  So down they went, this police. They were heading for the inner sanctum – the most customised of the gang’s spy-proof gloryholes, deep under the very wombs of the bellies of the buildings – ‘Sleechy Sleech’ Johnjoe had informed them, a plaque upon the door of this torture chamber would say it was called. But the police went haphazardly. They were a dreadful pack of crasher-walkers, and this was because their Combined Spatial Fragmentation Hallucination Syndrome had taken off. They stumbled, tumbled, ducked from real and unreal projectiles and flappy things speeding at them. Luckily for them, though, the Doe gang also suffered from Combined Spatial Fragmentation Hallucination Syndrome so, far from the condition proving a hindrance, the disadvantage of it was cancelled out for both sides.

  That didn’t stop the Doe gang resisting. Scuffles, to put it ladylikely, broke out and so did some shooting. Everybody in the gang reached for their Plan D ankle holsters because their Plan A Kalashnikovs, Plan B Russian RPG rocket launchers and Plan C Heckler & Koch & Sons & Sons were not that moment to hand. John Doe, the main target, was floored physically by several policemen jumping on top of him, and this, just as he took a shot at his own son. Son was standing, stupefied by the sugarjug, and he ended up still standing, stupefied by the sugarjug, long after everyone – bar him and the mascot – was gone. They left him. ‘Leave him,’ they mumbled, drawing back. ‘He’s scary. If we need him, we’ll send a stupid beginner for him.’ The mascot also wasn’t arrested, although they took her rattle-resonators, her rituals, her symbols, scrapes, shakes and battalier status, leaving her crying for her uncle – this abandoned, traumatised, fancy trim of a murder gang. As for the ghost experience, in efforts not to be sent out of their wits by the invisible marching, disembodied singing and clapping, both police and gang threw themselves into a proper third-dimensional brawl.

  ‘Don’t believe the police,’ said the gang years later, during the series of interviews taking place to mark the twenty-first anniversary of Tiptoe’s most famous arrest. ‘Them’s all lies. All mud in the head they’re talking when they say there was nothing supernatural. They didn’t want to let on. “Don’t be letting on,” they even said to us.’

  But that day, ‘black swirly things’, according to the gang, fought other ‘black swirly things’, at the same time as the police fought with the gang members. Both the real and the unreal were having a go at each other on the dancefloor.

  ‘The ghosts were copying us,’ said one gang member. ‘They would punch each other when we punched each other, and shoot each other when we shot each other, and stop when we stopped and start again when we started. Us and the police noticed this going on.’

  ‘Could they have been your own shadows?’ the interviewer asked, and this may have been a tongue-in-cheek question but I don’t think so. In her career, this woman sometimes felt uneasy around certain individuals she was required to interview. That was why, beforehand, at home, she’d carry out aura-protection exercises, using citrine crystals and other spiritual stones. Something about this lot, though, had been so disorienting from the moment she’d met them that already her morning’s protection was wearing off. She felt queasy. She felt dizzy. It seemed to her there was something too much of the child about them. As for them, considering her, they were astonished. This was because of her questions – ‘Sorry, are you sorry?’, ‘Do you condemn your actions?’, ‘Excuse me, but have you any idea yet of what it is you have done?’

  ‘We don’t have shadows,’ they said, in answer to her earlier question. And instead of ‘Pardon? What did you say?’ she had a look, and it was true. They didn’t have shadows. She did and they didn’t. She looked again. And again, she did and they didn’t. They seemed proud, just as you might be proud if you were one of those people who had the famous six fingers, or the third nipple, or an extra set of eyes that really did exist in the back of your head. They didn’t seem fazed by this lack of shadow and neither did the shadowless, depressed police wardens, she noticed, as she glanced at them when they opened the airlocks to lead her out after the interview. Indeed, she seemed to be the only one with a visible shadow in the whole place.

  Now this interviewer was not some giggle out of an expensive ‘for-you-to-cut-out-and-keep’ journalist comic-book factory, but at first when the gang swanked into the prison gym for this, their fifty-fifth famous international interview, they saw her, a woman, and they were upset and annoyed. ‘No harm to her or anything,’ they complained to the governor, ‘but she’s only a woman, so she can’t be a big cheese and we’re only giving interviews to big cheeses nowadays.’ The governor assured them that not only was she a cheese but times had changed so much that often women now were cheeses. This was news to them, although it was still not of their era to have a female supposedly on the same level, especially one who couldn’t grasp the rudiments of wee white women and of chisels going into walls by themselves.

  ‘Honestly,’ they said to me later. ‘You heard us. We tried, but there’s just so much you can do if you don’t have the material. There’s something wrong with her. Did you notice as well?’

  They looked anxious, so I nodded, and that seemed to calm them. A temporary lull descended, and I mean over the few who had followed me out of the gym into the prison yard. They approached as I was playing with the raven – that same one Doe had brought back all those years earlier as a souvenir from the Tower in the Big London. It had, over the years, grown very attached. When he had been arrested, it drooped, trailed its wings, then had thrown itself wholeheartedly into missing him. After that, it gave up and had been dying of a broken heart over the next twenty-one years. So Doe had broken hearts. But sure, hadn’t all the gang been heartbreakers? ‘What’s that one minute’s silence thing?’ they interrupted my thoughts to ask.

  When the disciples were charged with all their counts of kidnapping and murder, they got variations on four hundred and ten years each. So off they went to jail, on a squally day, a portentous day – for they were aware, every one of them, that it was the start of a new era, and that they had been instrumental in bringing this new era about. ‘You could smell the transition,’ they said. And not just for them – but for the whole of the community. They felt responsible, they said, even for the weather. ‘Weird!’ said one, and ‘I know what you mean and fuck me!’ said another. They had no words, it seemed, with which to describe the atmosphere that had surrounded them, and ‘With poor expectations of being forgiven, I am sorry,’ was something else they had no words, or any understanding, from any part of themselves, to say.

  They joined me and already the little cushion of peacefulness I had bestowed upon them by agreeing with them was evaporating. Yer woman hadn’t passed her exams for nothing. It seems in spite of their much-cultivated Working Memory Deficit, she had rattled their unconscious registers to the core.

  ‘Don’t know really,’ they said, as if I’d asked them something. ‘Maybe it was b
ecause of the government. Don’t know otherwise, why we killed them men.’

  ‘So-and-So,’ went on one, speaking now of their first victim. ‘That one going home from work by himself in the dark. Well, he used to let me park my motor in his drive. I didn’t have a drive. He had a drive. I didn’t have a garden. He had a garden. I forgot I used to sit in the bar with him sometimes. I forgot I used to play handball with him. He lived in his own house with his wife and a baby. He acted kingly. I lived with my ma. She acted kingly. Sometimes he’d let me borrow his motorbike. I don’t know why I killed him really. He was all right really. In fact, I think he was dead on.’

  ‘It’s just that sometimes it’s time,’ said another. ‘You find that things on the radio, and things on the TV, and things you think, and things you hear other people saying, and things that come in signs and symbols and opportunities and in drink are all clues that maybe you ought to do it. You take a stick out of your pocket, and it’s so sturdy, that stick, that it’s like a knife. And so it is a knife. It doesn’t matter how such thoughts get put into your head or that, before them, you hadn’t thought of killing anybody. They’re a sort of permission. They say, “It’s okay. Don’t you be worrying. Go ahead and kill him. That’ll teach him not to be a show-off.” ’

  Ah, I thought. It was a case of ‘Knock the Nose Off’ and do you know ‘Knock the Nose’? It’s the opposite to being really excited and civilised and good-sportsman-like when you hear about people who have brought about great inventions, or who even have had some modest success and are feeling really good about themselves. ‘What a chap! Good for him!’ you say. But that’s only if you don’t know the person. If it’s someone you do know, I mean someone who went to the same school as you, someone who lived in the same street as you, well then, it’s not ‘Genius! Marvellous! What a fellow!’ Instead, it’s ‘What? You mean yer man? – who went to the same school as us, who lived in the same street as us? Well, who the fuck does he think he is?’

  Naturally, in this case, what you must do is knock the nose off. When you experience envy, knocking the nose is the only thing you can do. So get in there and have a good bash at it. There are no witnesses. All witnesses are bashing also. Nobody’s going to believe him. The police won’t believe him. If he lives, the police will believe you.

  ‘Ach, not really,’ said a few of the gang at this point, thinking perhaps again I’d asked them another question. ‘Who’d be jealous of a funeral?’

  Ah, I thought, knowing what was coming next.

  ‘Those flowers,’ they said. ‘And the salutes,’ they said. ‘And the prayers. And people coming. And people crying. A whole fence of observers paying respect and holding that one minute’s silence. So, what is that one minute’s silence? Because of that, we stopped dumping them. Because of that, we kept them. That’s why we ate them. But they carried on having funerals for them anyhow.’

  She never got any of that. I mean the interviewer. She did try. She really did try. I mean not to be hypnotised. She did try not to be nibbled at, not to have blood taken from her. But they bewitched her. In the end she was in slivers when the police were carrying her out.

  She’d been sitting at the long table, positioned especially in the gym for these iconic interviews. The men were sitting there too: arms folded, seemingly straitjacketed folded, all wearing zippered-up padded bodywarmers, all in favourite colours of black, brown, green-brown or mud. She didn’t know how it happened for, although her questions of grief, guilt, remorse, forgiveness and ‘Did they condemn?’ caused much fidgeting, scraping, attempts to swivel on chairs that were never meant for swivelling, pretence at pulling each other’s bra straps for a laugh when none of these men had ever worn bras, not a single one moved or touched her even once.

  She felt teeth on her neck, going into her neck, a gentle tugging, a gentle sucking. Very creamy, very floaty. She liked it. She felt she ought not to like it. She closed her eyes and leaned her head to one side to experience the seeping teeth some more.

  Apparently the interview had taken place. It really had happened. Afterwards, when she woke – perniciously anaemic, listless, strangely tearful as if some death had occurred to her – she couldn’t remember what any of this interview had been about. Time had elapsed too. The men were gone. They were out in the yard, and I was out there also, shaking my head as I looked back in the window at her. They came to lead her out, those stealthy silent shadowless police wardens. Her own shadow too, by the way, was fainter than it had ever been in its life before.

  She was not permitted to re-interview. Besides, she had no energy, and now no inclination. Therefore, with no way of being able to account for it – the Dictaphone having gone blank, the white pages written upon having erased themselves of writing – she left the place with no idea of what it was they’d been talking about at all.

  How it destroyed her. In the end, she had to crawl home feeling the worst she’d ever felt. She got into bed, then couldn’t or wouldn’t get out of it. She didn’t file her copy and her boss, now of the opinion that brinkmanship of cheese and supercheese was nothing but a sham and a lottery, told her in short terms that she was never to come back.

  So Gunshop Tom Spaders, ‘The True Story’, never became public knowledge. He was to have been the topic of this interviewer’s ‘thinking-out-of-the-box’ original lead-in. After she’d got them settled, ‘That man Spaders?’ she’d been going to ask.

  Chapter Nine

  Tom Spaders. In the gang’s eyes, yer man, who had gone mad since being set upon by the babies, had always been of the calibre of the Guardian of the Filing Cabinet. Therefore they ignored him on the inside just as they had ignored him on the outside, which didn’t seem to bother him, keeping himself to himself as he was.

  Initially, whilst in prison, Spaders withdrew and had refused to interact with anybody. He refused also to see visitors, ie Jotty, who came expressly seven times a week, fighting her own demons, to see him. Why should I see her? he thought. This is like Samson and Delilah and women’s guiles and manipulations. Well, she can stop all that ‘Tell me your secret! Tell unto me the answer to the riddle! Put forth your riddle for I won’t tell it to the Philistines,’ for look – she’s got me with my eyes out! Got me with my strength gone! Got me where she wants me! So of course it stands to reason, from her point of view, she can afford to be nice to me now. Well, I know her game. I got her number. Sometimes Tom knew he wasn’t being dignified in his trauma, but it was early days. He hadn’t got through his bitternesses yet. To be precise, he had only started in on his bitternesses and, as you know, it’s not until you’ve been through that one really Big Bitterness that the other bitternesses people think are huge, and who feel sorry for you because you’ve got them, you know don’t count a hoot at all. Tom hadn’t got there yet. It was still the time of the Big One, so he was bitter and broken and angry at Jotty, and angry at everybody, and disbelieving in his horror that, actually, he had killed somebody. Jotty, for her part however, and encouraged by the Salsa Dancing Policeman, continued to come to the prison to try to meet with him, with him continuing to pretend, in his pain and grief, to be far too busy in executive meetings to grant any favour to her.

  To get it exact, though, when first he’d been arrested, on the same day the gang had been arrested, Tom had been sent to the hospital because of new physical injuries that had been done upon him. Then, when he was recovered, he left hospital and went to court to get sentenced and then was put immediately in jail. When he was in jail it was decided, fairly quickly, to transfer him – because of his bitternesses – to the mental asylum, but then they moved him back to the prison after deciding he was a bit on the bitter broken shocked side, but apparently wasn’t mad after all. This, by the way, was the opposite to what happened to Janet. They didn’t arrest her at first, so she was up at the chemist, giving herself some hefty staff discount. She was arrested later, around the same time her husband and sister were released. John Doe was released on a ‘technicality’, and ‘techn
icalities’, if you can get them, are worth shed-loads of money. Jetty was released not long before him, with a warning to pay proper legal tender for her guns next time. As for Janet, when finally they did get round to her, first they put her in jail, then decided, after some apparitional episodes followed by psychiatric testings and interpretations of watercolours, to remove her to the mental hospital. She’s still in the mental hospital. So is her sister, only, as you’ll see later, Jetty Doe being in hospital wasn’t really the case at all.

  As I said, Jetty got released on the same day she got arrested, and this happened just a few hours before John got released, also on the same day he got arrested but, because she didn’t know he was going to be released, she had to get herself another lover, the way you do. Yeah, ’cos life goes on like, doesn’t it? She took up with an ex-prisoner right away from another gang, and when Doe came back in the late afternoon, walking through the door, all thoughts on setting up a new Community Centre Team, she was in the hall and looking surprised to see him. She stopped what she was doing, twisted her torso round the banisters, called to yer man up the stairs to stop unpacking, and to start packing, and to get out.

  John was annoyed and upset. First, that she could forget him, wipe the slate clean of him, just like that, all in a jiffy, even though there existed the fact that, due to concern with his own furtherance, he hadn’t gotten round to giving a single thought to her yet. Also, he was annoyed and upset at her moving so rapidly into the Doe premises. I’m referring to her moving in in the energetic sense, understand, as the house’s new proprietor, and not in the literal sense, for you already know she was already living there. It was a case of spreading yourself out, having big breaths, kicking things out of the way, throwing things on the floor, breaking a window if you wanted to, moving all your stuff from the poky wee back room up to the front majestic front room, as well as holding most deliciously every key of every tunnel, of every secret passage, of every single backstairs intrigue chamber in your hand. And she did that because, you see, it wouldn’t occur to Jetty that the house didn’t belong to her. Who else would it belong to, given she was a grown woman who was related to Janet and John, who were now going to be gone for years and that might be an understatement? Not Cousins Jotty and Mad Janine, who were John’s sisters, because they had their own house and so it would be greedy of them to try to take another also. And not teenagers Julie and Judas, for they were kids, far too irresponsible to own any kind of property. So of course it was Jetty’s. What more was there to be said in the way of ownership than that?