by Anna Burns
She blamed Tom Spaders now for that.
Hence the photo. She must look at it. It was proof he really was someone. She meant someone other than the Fathers. She must separate the right man from the wrong men. ‘Once Again Tiptoe’s Best Gunshop Owner,’ said the caption. As further evidence, his name was printed underneath.
‘Tom Spaders,’ she said. ‘Tom Spaders,’ she repeated. ‘Tom Spaders,’ she kept on, but let’s face it, even she knew she wasn’t fooling anybody. Before her was not the man she had originally cut from the newspaper. She turned the clipping face down and, as she did so, the Fathers in her womb began to laugh.
Now, this is where, had she not felt an aversion for them, she could have rung some Well-Meaning people. You wouldn’t class Jotty Doe, not really, as disgraceful. But sometimes, you know, she was.
She used to have these books, Self-Help books, Human Potential books, Recovery books, most of them borrowed. But she woke up one day and knew it was time to get rid of her own and to give the others back. They were on incest and sexuality and on recovering from child sexual abuse and on adult children of child sexual abuse and on love and lust and greed and grabbing and on giving and receiving and on trust and sharing and on co-operation not domination and on aggression during sex with or without consideration for the other person and on partners of rape victims and on ‘No, get back. Stay back. Don’t! Don’t! I said I’m not ready yet.’ Those sort of books. She decided to get rid of them because, in the years since acquiring them – and rather furtively acquiring them, if you ask me, and initially from far-flung distant Self-Help bookstores where nobody knew her, as if she were ashamed or something – Jotty hadn’t gotten round to reading even one of them, even once.
She had tried.
‘Must read them, oh, I must read them, simply must read them. I might get cured.’ So she’d pick the latest book up. But the moment of ‘is-ness’, of ripeness, of propitious occasion, never, ever, came upon her. An instant heaviness, a ponderous drugginess, a self-protective lassitude would come over Jotty whenever she tried to read one of them. ‘If only I would read them,’ she yawned, ‘I might find out stuff.’
She’d attempt. I mean she’d attempt to open one. But she’d get overwhelmed by the tyranny of having to do so and instead would set the book back down. Then she’d lie down herself and fall asleep. She’d do this on her kitchen cushions for, like most people in Tiptoe Floorboard, Jotty never slept in her bedroom. Forty years she reckoned the nap would be, but it would go on seventy, threatening another seventy should she, when she awoke, again try to pick that book up.
They were constantly being lent to her too – by people she didn’t like but to whom she couldn’t say, ‘You come too close, you talk too loud, you ask too many questions, you overstep, please go away and stand over there.’ These people would say, though not to her, ‘That’s Jotty Doe, poor thing, the sister of those beautiful Doe women. Well, there for the Grace of God most certainly goes us.’ They were terribly well-meaning, these people, self-appointed saints of the apparently inarticulate, people who banged the table on your behalf because they didn’t believe you knew how to bang the table on your behalf, people who – Holy Jesus save you – you could well do without.
So duty-bound, she’d look at the latest loan: Sex and Spirituality and Sex and Sexuality and Sex and the Ordinary and Sex Which is Supposed to be Love but Which Leaves You Feeling Shame and Pain and Lonely So That Means It’s Not Love It’s Just Bloody Awful Although That Might Be All Right If That’s the Sort of Thing You Want But Do Victims of Child Sexual Abuse Really Want That? God, she thought, even some of the titles took ages to read.
Jotty had about two hundred of these books that belonged to her outright, bought by herself for herself – for she really had tried to help her expansion on. She secreted these books around various parts of her house and that meant, of course, the bedroom. Best, she thought. That way, she’d never have to see them as she never went in there. The remaining hundred or so had been lent to her by all those indignant ‘nothing funny about incest’ people. Since having them thrust upon her, she’d tried, without success, to give all of them back.
‘Absolutely not!’ boomed a Well-Meaning. ‘I simply won’t hear of it. You need those books and remember, Jotty, you don’t need to be ashamed of being a victim, of not being normal, of never getting beyond the management of it, of knowing that for the rest of your—’ Oh! Loud confident stupid person! thought Jotty. Kill her for me, God. Kill her. Will you kill her? Failing that, at least turn her into a tree.
But God wouldn’t. That meant yer woman was able to force another two or three volumes deftly over on to Jotty, with Jotty going, ‘No-yes-no-yes-no-oh, all right then, yes. How long am I to have them before you want them back?’ Of course she wouldn’t read these either. They’d go among the things that she didn’t want and that didn’t belong to her and that were piling up in her house and smothering her. In truth, Jotty didn’t know how many of these borrowed books there now were.
She gave them to charity. She made sure first her name wasn’t on hers. Well, of course it wasn’t. Tough titties for the Well-Meanings. Names or no names, they should have taken them back. Before leaving the house, Jotty dispersed the books amongst many different carrier bags. Outside the house, she dispersed them amongst many different charity shops, disguising them first with hats, scarves, socks and a few innocent Shakespeares. Before long, all of them were gone.
Except one.
This book she had bought by mistake but had then kept back deliberately. She had thought on buying it that it was another of the usual, but when she’d taken it out of the wardrobe to get rid of it, she found that it was not. It had been written for teenagers – normal teenagers – awakening to the joy of their budding adult sexuality. It had only a short mention – plus tiny list of helpful addresses – for those condemned teenagers who were not. Jotty wouldn’t have bought this book had she known of its exclusive trajectory. Instead she would have been enraged, for it would have reminded her of all the grief of all the loss of everything she’d never had. But now, a bit on from the purchase, years on, too, from when she’d been a teenager, she stood in her bedroom with it, finding it a light, blessed, joyful thing to hold.
And so she had gotten rid of them. How did that feel? Did she really feel okay at not having read even one of them? Jotty had a think and said she felt fine. She was definitely not too bad, she told herself. Not annoyed or upset or anything. It was just that every so often there was this little niggle. There was this little something. It said, ‘Pity you didn’t manage to read even one.
‘It might have revealed something to you.
‘It might have unlocked something for you.
‘You could have tried, Jotty girl, that waterfall exercise even once.’
Ah, yes. The waterfall. That had featured in one of the chapters from one of the very early books Jotty had attempted fragmentedly to get cured by. In it, the author, an expert in her field, had been interviewing women about their sexual fantasies. She wanted to know how they got aroused, especially to orgasm, given their child histories of incest and sexual abuse.
‘Are you stupid?’ they shouted. ‘It’s obvious. Torture fantasies! Something on TV, or a word let drop, an innocent word, a deliberate word, or an expression that conjures up a whole range of torment. Case histories of abuse, written by experts of abuse. You should know this. Are you an expert or what?
‘Well, of course we’re ashamed,’ they then cried, believing this woman had the cheek to be accusing them. ‘But hey! Have you tricked us? You said you were giving us pseudonyms. Are you still giving us pseudonyms? If you’re not giving us pseudonyms, we’ll be abused as we were as children, only by you in the guise of Recovery this time.’
‘Of course I’m keeping my promise,’ said the expert. ‘Of course I’m giving you pseudonyms. What I’d like to suggest—’ But they wouldn’t let her suggest. They were distraught. Her insinuations had touched into their sham
e core.
‘It’s what we learned!’ they shouted. ‘It’s our theme tune, our song, our story, our something we haven’t been able to get out of us. These are our triggers. So don’t you dare, specialist, to look at us like that!’
‘You think I’m judging you. I’m not judging you. It’s just that I want to make a suggestion,’ the expert tried again. ‘Instead of torture fantasies, how about practising getting turned on by the cycles of nature? Getting aroused by the pink and the red and the orange and the peach and the apricot of sunsets? By the rhythms of life and natural green leafy things and then, when it’s time – having orgasms to the thought of waterfalls?’
There was silence on the page, a palpable silence, a silence you could have fallen or been pushed to your death from – five or six whole paragraphs of astonished bated breath. Who is this specialist? scrabbled the thoughts. Who sent her? What are her credentials? Is this an idjit, a child sexual abuse virgin, a day-release intellect, sent by some older armchair intellectual specialist, to advise and patronise us?
Ridiculous, thought Jotty, setting the book down at this point. She had been so in sympathy with the abused child-women, and astonished at the naïveté of the expert’s suggestion, that in her annoyance she forgot she was actually reading instead of nodding off. Those books, she thought. Oh, those books, those books. They go too far sometimes. They start off saying it’s easy, promising you things, saying if only you do all the written exercises. Then they spring the impossible – to move from darkness and torture and repetition and stuckness to having orgasms to leaves falling off trees beside pretty waterfalls!
Someone from rape couldn’t do that.
She couldn’t imagine someone from rape doing that.
Could someone from rape do that?
Well, said her mind, you’ll never know. You didn’t read on.
After her initial relief about the books being gone – with all their ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds’ and ‘better-hads’ which she couldn’t prevent herself seeing in them – Jotty now felt scared, guilty, and alone. Oh, not to be alone, she thought. But she was wrong. I mean – she was wrong. I mean, always she felt such a dreadfully wrong person. Could it be, she thought, that someone could start something off, and so long ago that you, who experienced it, couldn’t remember the starting of it? Yet you carry on the legacy – the self-rubbishing, the negating, the sabotaging, the breaking of your own heart with your thoughts?
Obviously, given that the borrowed-book situation was now ‘Thank you very much, how lovely, I’ll return them soon, goodbye’ and then straight off to the charity shop with them, approaching the Well-Meanings – had she been inclined – to find out how normal was this waterfall business, would be well out of the question now. The books were gone. She couldn’t look up any index. She couldn’t consult any paragraph. So, when the Fathers started up after her encounter with Tom Spaders, she did the unthinkable and sought psychotherapeutic help for herself.
I’ll tell you about Jotty and her therapy when I get on to the Death Threat but, for now, the newspaper cutting was still face down on the table. Afraid to look at it, Jotty slumped over the table and covered her eyes with her hands. In her mind she was still trying to separate Tom’s features from the Fathers’ features but definitely she was not succeeding. And it was during one of these failed attempts and repeated attempts that the five Sisters, currently bloodless, came knocking on her door.
She let them in. They came in. They went into the kitchen. Two sat at her table whilst three leaned gracefully against various worktops and walls. Jotty, puzzled by the absence of the blood-sequence-blueprint, went over and put the kettle on.
It started as usual.
‘You could get your hair done.’
‘We could help you get your hair dyed.’
‘We could help you get your hair styled.’
‘Or a wig – it would look better, Jot, thicker, not thin, not so as if it’s falling out all the time.’
There was an edge. Not the usual cajoling, controlled banter each of the Sisters would come out with after Jotty had cleaned up the blood for them. Perhaps the only true question to have asked at this point would have been ‘Come on, girls. What’s the reason you’ve really come to see me?’ but Jotty didn’t ask it, and I think it’s time we had our talk about collusion now.
Collusion’s tricky. It’s a bit like those gangster wives and girlfriends – and just for the record, none of these Sisters was a gangster wife or girlfriend, although I can’t speak as to the professions of their fantasy husbands, of course. Well, we look at these gangster wives and girlfriends and we say, ‘Oh, those gangster wives and girlfriends! They’re crazy. How can they reconcile to themselves all those violent things they must know their men go out and do or have done?’ Is this a case of memory loss? we wonder. Is this a case of amorality or immorality? Is this a case of certain men coming home at night and certain women forgetting propriety and going, ‘Hot damn! Warrior undressing!’ – thus overlooking in their excitement that they ought to be frowning and disapproving, just as we ourselves would have been?
Who’d be them? we think. ‘Not us,’ we say, but hold on a minute. I’ve just heard a rumour that would make the way of the gangsters seem as babies. It’s a spooky rumour and, I’m sorry to say, it’s circulating about you.
You people, you women there, who were just this minute running down the wives and girlfriends to me, what sort of men do you get mixed up with yourselves?
Women who pooh-pooh the gangster girlfriends, believing themselves vastly above the morals and intellects of somesuch-likes, who would never dream of getting into such obvious dysfunctional relationships – they get into not so obvious ones themselves. Their men might not swagger about being boss, being self-appointed judges and juries, jabbing guns into people, setting up illegal enterprises, hanging people by their ankles out of top-storey buildings or having their girlfriends tailed whether their girlfriends got highly sexually charged by being tailed or not.
Instead, these men, these non-gangsters, these law-abiding civilised people, might walk out the door before you, with you pleading, ‘Don’t walk away from me, don’t shout at me, please don’t slam the door on me, don’t hurry me, don’t walk so much in front of me. We’ve been married twelve years so why do you still get my name wrong?’ Or it might be that they’re too important to take time to let you know that they cancelled any arrangements they made with you. Or they might say, ‘Don’t mind me if I snap at you and seem truly as if I hate you. It’s just me being me – nothing personal at all.’ They are not softies, these men. These are not the men who say, ‘Hiya love,’ or who put requests into the radio: ‘For my person, from her person. Tell her I’m busy in my office working, thinking of her in her office, also working. My heart desires the pleasure of having her name nationally called.’ No. Not softies. Not warm lovers. They won’t be kind, and I’m giving you the toned-down version here, which is that the man who belittles, reduces, downgrades, shames and envies his woman – ‘Yes, please! Oh yes, please!’ – that’s the sort of non-gangster men these women will have.
They’ll reconcile this by saying, ‘Oh, all men are like that! That’s the way all men are!’ Well, I’ve noticed that expression ‘all men’ and the women who say it. They’re the ones in the abandoning, uncelebrated relationships, who must, at all costs, have these abandoning, uncelebrated relationships, which is why they’ll shrug and say, ‘What can I do? You’re naive. All men are like this. That’s the way all men are.’ When they start, I want to shout, ‘Stop! Oh shut! Shut! Shut!’ which is not exactly cursing but also not exactly not-cursing. ‘Look around you,’ I want to say. ‘It isn’t all men. It’s your man does this. It’s your man does that.’
And in that vein – the vein of collusion – Jotty was well alert to the type of relationship between a man and a woman where violence, inside or outside the relationship, was the fulcrum. Most certainly, she kept away from that. She was also alert though, to that other
, non-violent, but elusively shaming, subtly discounting, joyless form of a relationship, where the man has to leave in the end anyway because, after bringing her down to the level where he believed he could now let himself have her, he has realised that, with her down there on the mat crying, he no longer wants such an unexpected inferiority to himself. Jotty, always the analytical technician, was also alert against taking up with someone she didn’t want as a way of preventing her desires for whom she might want overwhelming her, perhaps ending up in a relationship, even a marriage, hating the make-do, stand-in man.
Jotty had it mapped out. Everything was sussed. She hardly dated. On one level this was to keep her safe from the Mothers and the Fathers, and I’ll tell you of the Mothers later on. It was also to keep her safe from what she didn’t want in a relationship. As for what she did want – well, she’ll need another hundred years into Recovery before she can move on to that. So, she had all vulnerabilities guarded, thinking nothing in the way of danger was ever again going to get at her, but oops. I said oops. What’s this? I don’t mean Tom Spaders. I mean this thing called irony. The point I’m making is that one thing Jotty didn’t take into account as part of her vigilance against danger, were her sisters. Her sisters, at present, constituted her biggest threat.
If you were to be on the receiving end of one of these sibling visits you might – given their proneness to headstaggers – get a bit nervous and not let them in. Not Jotty. This was because the Sisters together made up her blind spot. Including this blind spot, Jotty had four Achilles’ Heels. Tom got her on three of them. One was with ‘When I fuck you’ which, no matter how much of a turn-on it might be to some people, just kept seeming to her like some shocking big slap. Another was his angry ‘You snore’, which stripped her, in her moment of near nakedness in the bed beside him, of any shaky sense of femininity she might have had. Third was the sexually crushing ‘Have you any idea how childish you are?’ Her fourth Achilles’ Heel was the blind spot, and here I mean her collusion with her sisters. These were women who, under threat, or perceived threat, could quite possibly kill anybody – their husbands, their children, all of the community, even themselves and their fantasy husbands if need be – to keep their defences from coming unstuck. So, given the situation, did Jotty honestly think that just because she was a Doe herself these other Does wouldn’t attack her? I wonder what her therapist would have to say about that.