Little Constructions

by Anna Burns

  ‘Unity,’ you interject but, as usual, you do this softly. You are patient with your sister, with all of your sisters, even though you’ve heard variations on this story from all of them, many times before.

  ‘I know this happens to you,’ you say. ‘And I know it happens to our JanineJoshuatine, and to our Hale, and to our Gussie, and to our Hesit, and probably it happens to some or all of our brothers but—’

  ‘You’re right,’ says Unity, thinking you’ve said something other. ‘I agree. Sometimes the police don’t come right away. That’s best, isn’t it? That gives you time to get out of the armchair, to get washed and changed, do your hair, put on lipstick, then to sit down and think a good story up.’

  You are silent. Unity doesn’t know she has interrupted you. Unity hasn’t yet come to the awareness that you are in the room. She doesn’t know she’s in your house. This happens. She thinks she’s in her own house, in her own armchair, having come to and now in the process of pulling herself together. She begins this process by practising telling everything to an imaginary you. When she’s calmed down and recovered, she thinks, she’ll get washed and change her clothes, do her hair and put on lipstick. Then she’ll come round and really visit you. You’re her baby sister, and while she’s visiting, she might, as usual, tease you about your appearance, taunt you about your seriousness. ‘How do you expect ever to get a man, Jotty love, if you keep going about looking like that?’ All jests at your expense will be done in light-heart, however, and at the end she’ll offer, as often she does, sisterly advice on how you could groom yourself up. Thing is, all your sisters do this. In their bloodied state, they feel comforted by you in a way they don’t feel comforted by anybody. They feel soothed by you when they have no idea they are in need of soothing. They can be remonstrated with by you when ordinarily they’d be outraged at any interfering remonstrator. It’s just that they patronise you. Can’t help it – for look at you. Your hair used to be thick but now it’s thin and you’re not even bothered. Further, you stopped going to work and then you got the sack. Worst of all, you are odd in your appearance. Patched clothes is your appearance. Rumours are spreading about some sort of mental breakdown and, they’re horrified to say, they’re spreading about you.

  But they are you sisters. They would not accuse you. They are your sisters. They would not harm you. They are your sisters. For now, they’ll be light-heart. Today, it’s Unity’s turn. Still she thinks she’s at home practising. I don’t think she’s come to yet. Do you?

  ‘Yes,’ she says, as you, now dizzy yourself, ease her head towards one side to start cleaning out that head wound, ‘it’s better to tidy up and remember first, in order to do preparation. That way, when the police bang the door and I open it, they’re shocked and that gives me the edge. They’ve just spoken to the big bulldozer down the road, you see, that woman who thought that just because I was beautiful I wouldn’t know how to kill her. Well, after speaking with her, the police were expecting to find another bulldozer, but when I open the door, Jot, instead they find me. Know what I mean?’

  Yes. You know what she means.

  You’re not as beautiful as your sisters. In fact, you’re not beautiful. You’re okay, I’m not saying you’re ugly. It’s just that compared to them – in the stakes of astounding beauty – I’d advise you to keep the day job and not to get your hopes up.

  One good thing, though, in your favour – they’re insane and you’re not.

  One bad thing, though. If a line-up were held and you and your sisters were in it and people were told, ‘Fifty pounds if you pick out the mad one’, they’d look along this row of beauties, then point urgently when they got to you.

  ‘So I deny it,’ said Unity, ‘and they have to believe me, because look at me – I don’t mean now,’ she dismissed her present been-in-a-fight condition. ‘I mean when I don’t have this blood on me. So I give them a denial on the doorstep and of course they’re embarrassed and apologise, not just on behalf of themselves and of the entire Tiptoe Floorboard police force, but also on behalf of the bulldozer and do I want to press charges for jealousy? they ask. “That’s okay, I won’t,” I say. But if that doesn’t happen and I have to admit, because of the blood, I get upset and say, “It was awful. I don’t know how such a thing – to me – could have come to pass.” The police don’t know either, and they are soothing. They go away, saying some befuddlement must have occurred and that they would unfuddle it. I say goodbye and go up to the bathroom to deal with my memory and with the blood. But you see, Jotty,’ she leaned forward, ‘the police coming to the door must have been proof, mustn’t it, that I had been fighting with somebody? And I know this is silly, but if they don’t tell me who it was, somehow I don’t feel I can ask.’

  One day you have all your sisters round at the same time. I don’t mean they’ve all got into fights and simultaneously turned up on your doorstep. I mean they’ve turned up, en masse, for the first time ever on your doorstep. And guess what. Not a single one has blood on her hands.

  But to take a jump back for a minute to when Unity said she sometimes says, ‘I don’t know how such a thing – to me – could have come to pass’, she wasn’t completely lying. In one respect this was more truth than not.

  When your sisters are not having the headstaggers, they really are the loveliest of people. They try and try and try and try. To all intents and purposes they look like they have succeeded. They’ve done all the normal, conforming things of growing up. They have proper jobs. They are all married. They are all spectacularly groomed and spectacularly beautiful. They have houses, children, cars, good credit references, departmentstore bonus points awarded for outstanding good-buyer behaviour. Undoubtedly, they are of the community. There appears to be nothing rough or odd-angled about how they fit in.

  Every so often, though, the psychic cracks they put their makeup over crack a bit more and out come these seepages. Strange rage attacks burst from them and that’s how come they get that blood on their hands. Someone does something – sucks on takeaway bones in a public waiting room, for example, drinking the marrow, gnawing their fingers after, all in a manner of suggesting they would devour everything and anything that got in their path. Or someone flosses her teeth, using the edge of a plastic bag, looking at her bared-teeth reflection in a dark night window, not caring where the bits of the flossed get flung to, and a Sister, watching and hating, feels a bout of retaliatory violence coming on. Or else someone fiddles with her hair – twists it, eats it, twirls it out with sinewy, snoop-like fingers a whole rope’s length and again, just inches from a Sister, and again, huge overwhelming revenge attacks come on. Or perhaps someone sniffs, hoiks catarrh, swallows mucus, or extracts her finger out of her nose with a slurp just as that nose is passing the ear of a Sister. Well, that finger may as well have been in Sister, given the entire sexual disturbance repertoire that has now been set off. Any general sort of tapping therefore, or drumming, or scratching, or clicking, or fiddling would also count as examples. All are standard for what – sexually abusively speaking – could set the Sisters off.

  So much for torture – I mean the Noises. And so much for torment – I mean the fighting. These are issues that are delicate points. After they get into their fights, believing ‘I was perfectly within my rights – that person was attacking me’, the Sisters find them impossible, initially, to shrug off. When they come to later, alone, scrabbling for breath, trying to regain their memory whilst sitting bloody in their armchairs, these women dread the secret, uncontrollable side of their nature that once again took possession of them, and know that somewhere, sometime in their past, something unspeakable must have gone on.

  But this would be temporary. They’d do a fantasy of visiting their sister. They’d rehearse offloading this rubbish on to their sister and thus feel better all over again. After that, they’d decide to go round and really visit Jotty. God help her, they’d think. If only she’d make an effort. It wasn’t as if she was ugly – though if there were
a competition for ‘Doing Your Best To Look Ugly’, let’s face it, she’d be up there with the greats. The Sisters could help her. She could be like them. Get her hair done, get a funky wig – a few wigs – wear proper sensual classy gear or even gear that just fitted her. The Sisters would help her. There was hope. They would help her. She could still, if she tried, get a man and kids before long.

  And this is what I don’t understand. Although they were keen for Jotty to come and join the party, they themselves, in spite of appearances, weren’t really at this party themselves. They had husbands. That is correct. But guess what? They didn’t accept they really had these husbands. Their husbands merely helped them present to the world how perfectly these Sisters had joined. They had children too. Also correct. But guess what? They didn’t accept they really had these children. And they were women of the community – nine-to-five jobs, school-runs, communal committees for the benefit of the parish, ‘Hello. Good morning. Good night. Congratulations. Well done. Happy birthday,’ they’d say to people – but yes, that’s right. They didn’t consider they were really of the community. They wouldn’t touch this community – not from their essence, not from their true spirit-soul connection – but in case there is any misunderstanding, these women had no conscious awareness of the true state of their unbelonging. This is hard to imagine too, given how long they’ve been wives and mothers and human beings in this world.

  As for the husband situation, instead of their real ones, they preferred their imaginary ones. They’d married these perfect men from their imaginings long before any real husbands had come along. All these years on, the Sisters still persisted in involved daydreams about themselves and these ideal partners. Their fantasy husbands adored their wives, constantly observed their wives, spoke admiringly of their wives, were always on the point of crossing the room to come and join their wives but crucially, at the last moment, Sisters would press ‘Rewind’ and husbands would have to return to admiring wives from way across the room once more. Most important of all, these husbands never had any bodily problems and do you know those bodily problems? One only, really. What the Sisters meant was that their fantasy men never, ever, ever wanted to have sex. Understand, please, the men of their imaginings were happy not to have sex. Don’t be thinking that, treacherously, they said to Gussie, or to Hale, or to Hesit, or to Unity, or to JanineJoshuatine, ‘Bye-bye, darling. See you later. I’m just off up the road to peruse a good map or something’, and then went off and had sex with somebody else. No! Gosh! Dreadful! Please! Don’t be thinking that. The Sisters wouldn’t have brooked any such bodily problems taking place in any of their made-up husbands. No imaginary women were ever going to sneak off with their steadfast, adoring, imaginary men.

  As for the real husbands, well, first thing, they’ve got to be felt sorry for. Really, though, you’d have thought they could have researched this better before they got involved. ‘Just like Hollywood,’ they boasted, and they did this to other men to make the other men jealous, although the other men were already jealous for they could see for themselves how just like Hollywood these amazing-looking Doe women were. ‘Very filmstar, very glamorous, very supermodel,’ cried the husbands, ‘and guess what, we’re getting married to them!’ And they did, believing themselves to be getting stunners of the ‘I do! I do! I do! I do!’ category, whereas later – when they were stuck in the mud and too afraid to get out of it in case those other fellows jeered at them – it dawned on them that what they’d really conjoined with were women of the ‘Don’t! Don’t! I’m warning you! Get off!’ type instead.

  Baffled. A bit unhappy. A bit emotionally shaken. Not much articulate. Maybe about half of articulate. That was the husbands. What about the children?

  Little visitors. That’s what the Sisters called them.

  Absolutely extraordinary but I don’t know how to explain this. The children did exist, as I said, but the question was, were they virginal conceptions? And as well as the matter of the actual conceiving of them, did any physical births, even Caesareans – I’d settle for Caesareans – ever take place? The Doe women shrugged. This was not a question that interested them. As far as they were concerned, it had been a case of some really really really really, really really really really, really really really really bad period happening to them, and at the end of it, yeah, well, okay, a baby had appeared. Then there’d been another really really really really, really really really really, really really really really bad period again happening to them and, yeah, okay, once more some other baby had appeared. And so on. These particular bouts of menstruation that kept happening to these women were of a duration that no period in the world had ever enjoyed previously. Nine-month sessions. That, ladies and gentlemen, should have been a Guinness Book of Records Number One Hit for the town of Tiptoe Floorboard. But it wasn’t. Quirky legacies, sinister bequests, diabolical hand-me-downs – they were all pretty much the normal practice here.

  And now these five impeccably groomed females were calling to visit their mess of a sister. As I say, Jotty opened the door and first thing was, God Almighty! All of them! Second thing was, is this a Spatial Fragmentation moment I’m experiencing, or is it a fact there really is no blood on the hands?

  Now this blood thing. That should have been a clue to Jotty. I mean a warning. To call with no blood meant something was wrong. I won’t get into the theme of ironic dangerous unconscious collusion at this point – and I mean on Jotty’s part – until I tell you what she was doing at the moment of them knocking. She was alone at her kitchen table, looking at an old newspaper photograph.

  This was of Tom Spaders. You remember Tom? The one from the gunshop? The one she had visited? The one who had undressed her? The one who had started kissing her? The one who’d asked her, as he leaned her back on his bed during the kissing of her, ‘Can I do this? Do you want me to do that?’ He loved her arching, he said. He wondered if she’d mind screaming, he said. He was astonished by her white nun skin. He kissed it. Then he kissed her hipbone. Said he loved her hipbone. Kissed it again. Then again. To her surprise, at the continuance of this bone-kissing, she raised her head from the bed to have a look on. Then it was he, too, after their row, who’d got out of bed, saying, ‘Okay, does this mean you want me to sleep on the settee or something?’ She hadn’t wanted him to sleep on the settee. And he was the one – even though he’d wonderfully touched her – to whom she hadn’t been able to give a single touch back. So she was in confusion, I mean about him. But I think we’ve established him. Yeah, Tom Spaders. The one from the gunshop. He was also the one in the photograph.

  She was looking, scrutinising, staring fixedly at this photo, urging every so often, ‘Back. Turn back. Please, please – change!’ Mysterious. Puzzling. To what do we owe this behaviour? As to the glass she was sipping water from – bangs, splashes, a very bad arm-to-mouth-to-furniture co-ordination – there was no puzzlement. We can safely say the old Spatial was up and running here.

  So what about that urging? Thing was, Jotty Doe had sex hardly ever because she had to be careful. I mean extra-special-super-careful. If she wasn’t, the man she was with would turn into her da. He turned into the Fathers, not just the one father. I mean the Fathers, as in ‘We’re here! We’re here! No room for any other person! We told you, daughter. We warned you, daughter. We are many, many, many and you will never make us leave.’ Bit nasty. Bit spooky. Good news, though. This father business only happened whenever it came to the penis. Bad news, though. You kinda want the penis. That means, at least for Jotty, Conflict Impasse Syndrome always gets started up.

  Now this is not dramatic. Don’t be thinking this is sudden. It is not like it is on ‘Get Your High Melodrama Television Here!’ Nor is it conscious. At least, not while sex is happening. She’s not in bed with one man, then post-penis – clash of cymbals! – suddenly she’s in bed with another. No, no. Maybe so with some women, but with Jotty it never happens like that. The transformation takes place quietly, sneakily, even rather unpleasantly o
rdinarily. It’s as if it’s minding its own business. Very clever. And it’s always after sex too. Not right after, later after, after they’d got up, got washed, got dressed, kissed goodbye and both gone out on their separate businesses. She’d be off on hers, remembering with a smile the wonderful ‘this’ and ‘this’ that Tom Spaders had done for her. Then that face, that other face, would slide over without her awareness. Next time she’d think of Tom, his features would be gone, with the other’s imposed in their place.

  At first she’d continue to think it was Tom and not make a big deal of it. Then she’d start to feel she wasn’t enjoying thinking about him any more. Then there’d be a sensation of being followed and she’d look behind, and always at first, she couldn’t understand why. Must be Tom, she’d continue to think, but by now did she mean the face in her mind, or the sense that it was he who was following her? Some sort of danger? Some sort of panic? Some sort of terrible ‘Can-I-borrow-you-for-a-moment?’ sneaking-up?

  Well, no one was following her. I’m sure you’ve already guessed that. And as for the face in her mind – both you and I know Tom Spaders looks nothing like that. She herself still wasn’t questioning, still wasn’t registering, but she continued to get more and more uneasy until –

  Sudden Reality Shock.

  And now for the melodrama. It’s not very melodramatic. She falters in her walking. She halts dead in the street and people tut and cry, ‘Hey!’ and ‘Watch out!’ as they manoeuvre around her. She’s no longer happy. Something is mocking and it is very close by. Now, she doesn’t like that he undressed her, doesn’t like that he kissed her, that he’d looked up the bed towards her when he was down on her and said, ‘You keep trying to say sentences,’ which, at the time, had made both of them laugh.

  She wasn’t laughing now. She wasn’t screaming either. He said he’d love her to scream, ‘to make as much scream as possible’. No screaming, the Fathers said. ‘If you scream … If you scream …’