by Anna Burns
An academic question, I’m afraid. We won’t know what her therapist would have to say about it, because in well over a year since she’d started going to therapy, Jotty hadn’t spoken to her therapist even once.
She was going three times a week. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t know that. Three times a week, mind – ‘Psychoanalysis Divided by Five and Multiplied by Three’ officially was what it was called. She’d rush there every time. ‘Oh, hurry-hurry, puff-pant, pant-puff, can’t-be-late, can’t-be-late,’ and so she was always early. That meant she’d have to pace up and down for a while on the street. Not the therapist’s street, of course. I hope by now you’d know that she’d be thinking her therapist might be spying out on her. Another street. She’d rush round to it and do all this pacing up and down. She’d count the seconds, count her alarm clock, wait for the big hand to go to the hour then, seconds before the dot of nine, she’d push clock away, run round to the right street, rush up the garden path and, dot reached, press the therapist’s bell. She’d get buzzed in. She’d go in, sit down, fold her arms and refuse to speak for the whole of the session. I mean she refused to speak. I mean she did not talk.
At nine fifty, end of session, her therapist would tap her watch and say, ‘Time to let you out of jail now, Jotty Doe.’ Jotty wouldn’t laugh, even though she knew that was meant as a joke. When first she’d made the momentous decision to get herself into therapy, she wanted to, longed to, but wouldn’t let herself speak to her therapist. She couldn’t – not until her therapist had said sorry until Jotty was satisfied and told her she could stop. Jotty wasn’t sure what the therapist was to be sorry for, or even when this ‘wanting an apology’ business had crept up on her. All she knew was that it ran in the family. Apparently all her siblings, all the Mothers, all the Fathers, all of them, wanted all of these ‘sorries’ too. She hadn’t briefed her therapist about this because, as I say, Jotty Doe wasn’t speaking to her therapist. Funny little thing, therapy, isn’t it now?
Anyway, Jotty would leave therapy after all this angry non-speaking, and head somewhere, usually her kitchen-cushion floor bed. She wouldn’t remember getting home, wouldn’t remember undressing, would wake up hours later in the night, thankfully back in her repressions. Jotty liked her repressions. She loved them, for it was only when she was in them that she could manage to get anything else done. When she was out of them, I mean like now, when they were breaking down, frightening her with their fragmentations and unmistakable disintegrations, it was like she was going mad and watching herself go mad at the same time. The repressions had been in this state of ‘collapse-and-cobble-back-together-quick’ ever since that last sexual encounter she’d had with Tom Spaders. So it was anger at him – for interfering with her repression, for that Achilles’ Heel business, for that photograph that no longer looked like him, and for issues in her childhood and young adulthood for which she knew he couldn’t possibly be responsible – that drove her eventually to her therapist’s door. But in this day of therapy, with all her broken reality returning in jigsaw pieces to reassemble itself painfully inside her, whenever moments of repression returned, when once more she was unable feel anything – not madness, not murderousness, not terror, not violated – they were, to her, blessings ever to be thankful for.
But back to the Sisters and their ostensible reason for calling.
‘You’ve got to make an effort,’ urged Unity. ‘We make efforts. You’re part of society, Jotty. You simply have to join.’
Excuse me? thought Jotty. Was she hearing right? Might this be the moment to bring up blackings-out, comings-to and you-know-what on the hands?
She tried.
‘Don’t you care you could have killed someone?’
That was one effort she came out with, after explaining a few of the blood, police, bulldozer and coming-to examples.
‘Or been killed?’ she went on.
‘Or gone to jail?
‘Or lost your mind?
‘One day, girls, if you don’t get help with this problem, you’ll freak – just like poor Mamma and Aunty and all those others in the asylum and jailhouse we’re related to, and you might not come back from blacking-out by that time at all.’
So, she tried. The Sisters didn’t believe her. The Sisters stared at her. What was she talking about? They looked at their hands. There was no blood on their hands.
It was a lost battle anyway because, you see, there was this thing of your father having done it. And your mother having done it. And your brothers having done it. And your sisters having done it and, who knows, maybe at some point you yourself having done it, not to mention the generations way back, and the not-so-way-back generations too – they probably all did it as well. So we’re stuck in that sequence. ‘Who smashed those windows?’ said Father. ‘What happened to that wall?’ ‘You took a sledgehammer to it, Daddy. You knocked that wall down yesterday when you were in a temper.’ ‘For God’s sake! Listen to those children! Stop that lying, you children,’ said Mammy. ‘We hate liars. We never want it to get to the point where it’s a case of “What’s going on? What’s that?” and the answer is “Oh nothing. Just a little liar” – meaning you. If it gets to that point, children, we’ll be very cross. So. You’re being asked one more time. Who broke those windows? Who owns that blood? Who spilt that blood? That’s the last time of asking. Tell the truth or Daddy’ll take his belt off.’
The Sisters didn’t know what to say to their poor Jotty. It was becoming apparent she might indeed be in need of therapy. And yes. Maybe you’ve guessed. Therapy was the real reason the girls had come to the door.
Before I get on to the Death Threat, I’ll just say the Sisters had all been accompanied to Jotty’s by their loving fantasy husbands. Not exactly accompanied. As usual, each wife had her husband not quite alongside her. He was positioned at a distance, admiring her, mostly from against Jotty’s farthest kitchen walls.
Now, the Sisters didn’t split off their fantasies. They were not conditions from Tom Cusack’s wife’s stolen medical dictionary. These women literally didn’t see or hear imaginary people conversing and interacting with them. What they did, though, was mentally play out their super-intense, highly enclosed daydreams from the moment they awoke in the morning until they were placing their knives back under their pillows in whatever nook or cranny they happened to be sleeping in that night. They were so skilled at this formidable fantasising that, even though they had come round to tackle Jotty about this therapy business, they could use a small percentage of mental energy for doing so, whilst keeping ninety-eight per cent bulk time for having their dream husbands on the go.
At present, and as usual, these husbands were observing their beloveds, commenting favourably on every single thing their wives did. Hesit would gracefully open a drawer to take out a teaspoon. Janine would elegantly pick up her cup to take a sip from it even if – spatial fragmentationally speaking – she didn’t quite so elegantly set it back down. Hale would approach one of the cupboards – not the psychopath one we’re all desperate to get rid of – and she’d do this as if indeed she were a supermodel on the catwalk. And so on. The husbands watched all this, saying, ‘Look at the superb manner in which my wife lifted that teaspoon,’ or ‘That cupboard was so lucky to have had my love’s fingers upon it.’ These men were speaking to their friends – also conjured up by the Sisters. Unity, meanwhile, was one hundred per cent somewhere else.
She was in the supermarket, going round the aisles, picking up baby food, nappies, feeding bottles, dummytits, compound solutions – for she was a brilliant mother – and putting them in her fantasy trolley, just as any normal mother would have done. Her imaginary husband, standing to the side, was overcome by the sweet perfection of the way in which his wife stretched for those nappies. ‘Hardly past being a child herself,’ he remarked. Unity was pleased. Like the others, bar Jotty, she welcomed reference to her woman-child status, but regarding the children who had worn those nappies their mother Unity had been so ad
mired for reaching for so childlikely, they knew their ma would be upset and annoyed to be reminded there had been days when, in reality, she had had to go nappy-shopping for them and, while we’re here – I mean at actuality – let’s carry on a bit more. The Sisters’ husbands were having affairs. I mean their real husbands. And I don’t mean they were having them with Ordnance Survey maps, or with conjured-up fantasy women. Hale, Unity and Gussie’s husbands had all taken up with real skin, bone, blood, muscle and private-parts women. JanineJoshuatine’s husband was at home at that moment, packing to leave her. He was taking their baby daughter with him, knowing it would be madness to leave Lisa – not because she wouldn’t be physically provided for, but because in every other respect she’d be ignored. Hesit’s husband was already suspicious about the marriage – and I don’t mean her first husband, who’d already gone away, not caring a damn whether or not the townsmen laughed at him, but the second husband she married immediately after, in order to keep the ‘being joined’ sequence up. Don’t you think this is creepy? I think this is creepy. Thanks for being here with me, by the way. I’d hate to be bystanding this on my own.
So eleven people were in that room and five of them were invisible – that’s not counting the husbands’ friends indistinct, variable and not that important. Nor was it counting the Mothers – vastly important but countless in their generational lineage – but before I get on to the Mothers, I’d better tell you about something else.
Jotty Doe was seeing a therapist.
Yes, I know you know, but the Sisters had only just got wind of it. Thing was, it was causing serious repercussion stigma on the street.
The five had been warned by some friendly reliabilities that their sibling had been seen pacing up and down the street that was next to Therapy Street. She had been consulting her clock in the manner of people who go to therapy, and did the Sisters know she’d also been buying, borrowing and giving away to charity ‘recovery from incest and rape’ books by the score? ‘Pacing up and down three times a week mind,’ concluded the reliabilities. ‘And for a considerably long time now. Just thought you girls might want to know about that.’
Well!
The physical appearance of Jotty, doubtless, had been offensive enough to the Sisters but add on this new therapy dimension and they’re sorry, they’re really sorry. Try as they might, the situation was now beyond a joke.
They couldn’t discuss it with each other, of course, for that would be acknowledging that something needed to be acknowledged. Instead they met up and combustibly began to talk Jotty’s hair. They decided unanimously, and subconsciously, to go round and see her, just in case this was going to go the way it had gone years before. The way it had gone years before was ‘Strict Emotional Policy’. That meant ‘Top Secret’. That meant you kept the lid on.
Years ago, oh, way before Jotty had had that sexual encounter with Tom Spaders, and way before the pound pound! jackrabbit encounters she’d had as an adult with various others, there had been another encounter. This one had been with the Fathers. It hadn’t been welcome. And it had been forced.
Afterwards, it was said Jotty Doe had started eating mounds of butter. She kept on eating butter until she got fat. Then she’d gotten fatter. She got so fat, so big, so swollen, to the point where the Sisters were afraid to look at her. Must be one of those big long endurances called periods, the young Doe girls nervously, dismayingly, thought. Eventually Jotty had to be taken to Tiptoe Hospital to have the period extracted. This was when the Mothers slapped a nurse, kicked another nurse and threatened some doctor with some glass instrument, all because something had been said, but it doesn’t matter, don’t worry, because after that, Jotty – young woman? teenager? child? – was taken home. As for the menstrual period, it stayed at the hospital. Everything went back to normal and everybody shut up.
As for Jotty, well, hard to remember. She stopped being fat and she developed a hankering for knitting. She knitted little Leprechaun things. This made no sense. She continued the tiny garment knitting, in a corner, not talking. I mean not talking. I mean not talking to anyone. In the end it all came happy, though. The titchy garments disappeared or were taken away and memory blanks ensued although, for some reason, Jotty, in the years after, wouldn’t follow her sisters down the path of grooming and of clothes-shopping. Instead of fitting into society, she refused to fit into society, remaining forever stubborn and stony-faced, on its rim.
As for clothes – oh, the precariousness, the paradox, of wearing something that’s baggy and so is supposed to hide you and yet, because of this threadbareness and bagginess, could fall off you at any time. It could fall down over your waist, could fall apart in its stitching, collapsing in a heap of unsightly patches and leaving you naked underneath. Like abuse again. Like concealing and revealing again. It’s like when people say, ‘I was on the toilet when you rang,’ and you think, why is it important for that person to tell me that? The thing is, clothes and clothes falling – is that trauma? Is that normal? Is it important for a person to recreate bad times over and over for themselves like that?
And now, all these years on, she was threatening again to do it. She was affronting them with her patent lack of groom. This time, though, she wasn’t eating butter. She wasn’t distorting herself on distended, extended nine-month cycles. She wasn’t knitting either. The Sisters suspected, perhaps rightly, that this new therapy was standing in for all that.
So what were the girls up against? Were we talking Dirty Linen in public? Were we talking Noises? Were we talking families of origin? Were we talking Mamma Doe and Papa Doe and Mamma and Papa’s friends and other relatives? Were we talking Mr McCotter? Or impacts, consequences, earplugs, rolling legacies, headstaggers, four brothers in war factions, another brother not in war factions but hardly normal given his Community Centre leanings? Were we talking mental asylums, sex, no sex, or sex where you concentrate on the wallpaper? If she’s saying she wants to sleep in her bedroom, would that be casting aspersions on them because none of them slept in their bedrooms? If she’s saying, ‘There’s something wrong and I’m going to the doctor’, would that mean she’s implying there’s something wrong and that they should be going to the doctor too?
Of course we know that Jotty, so far in therapy, hadn’t been saying anything. But I think that information would have freaked the Sisters even more. To sit in a room, facing a person, a few feet from a real person, and not open your mouth for hours and hours, over days and days, weeks and weeks, over a year and still not opening it – the Sisters would not be able to comprehend the ultimate in being listened to so completely like that.
‘A greedy and superficial practice,’ said Hale.
‘Selfish,’ said Hesit. ‘It’s self-indulgent, Jotty. Empty-headed, anti-social.’
‘It’s spending the state’s money. After all, you’re on sickness benefit,’ said JanineJoshuatine, ‘and you’re buying therapy, when you should just get another job and credit cards and not get sacked this time and get on with life and have kids and husbands just like us.’
And, of course, there was always the unspoken: Who – and where – was the man?
And that was it. It was about him. Where was he? Why hadn’t he appeared and why hadn’t she gotten married to him? Being married to him would have stopped all this ‘being-on-the-rim’ long ago. As far as Jotty was concerned, this was Total Exclusion and Explosion Territory. Being carefully non-committal, she applied brush-off crumbs absentmindedness to it. She had to stay defended with her sisters, keeping all openings – when it came to her and men – closed.
She hadn’t told, most especially she hadn’t told about the last one, Tom Spaders – that she’d had that brief involvement with him, that she’d had that night of Going Under and losing control with him, instead of keeping alert or else moving sideways into the wallpaper, which had always been her child-woman experience with sex before. The reason she didn’t tell was because she’d learnt from the past that any man attracted to was go
ing to be put through the computer. That would be the Mother Computer. Like Jotty, the Sisters had ingested the Mothers, and so questions would be asked – who, what, where, when, how?
Yes. Those Mothers.
There had been a famous lecture at the Leprechaun Museum one day in Tiptoe Floorboard. The museum held fortnightly lectures, not all of them on the Little People. Some were community action-based and to do with humans too. This one had been entitled ‘If You’re a Woman and Your Mother was Mentally Ill – You’re Fucked’, and the reason I’m mentioning it is because of those women, I mean the Mothers, I mean the ones who were mentally ill and who had managed to get themselves inside their daughters. It was different for the Sisters than it was for Jotty. Different because, first, the Sisters’ actual husbands were men none of them wanted. That meant the Mothers didn’t deconstruct them for, as I said, they only deconstructed at any spark of attraction. Luckily for the Sisters, so far, this didn’t include attraction to fantasy men. Second difference was that, because the Sisters could have their fantasy husbands without the Mothers dissecting and shredding them with: ‘Hmmm, bit of a devouring baby, isn’t he?’, ‘Hmmm, rather a sex addict, isn’t he?’ – this meant the Sisters could super-heighten the fantasy of themselves being adored and admired in the supermarket, whilst blocking out any real sexual contact that was going on at that moment between them and their actual men. Hence the real husbands tending to feel not quite satisfied, as if they’d just made love to an apparition, to a ghostling, to something bordering on a straightforward occultation of the sinister. Hence also a poor little infant, who transpired not to be a virgin birth, coming into the world every now and then. The Fathers never put in an appearance either with the Sisters, as they did with Jotty and the penis. This was again because of the non-attraction aspect, and also because the Sisters didn’t appear themselves. They were off in that supermarket, I mean the wallpaper supermarket. They were intensely interested in the types, textures and superabundance of foliage right inside those wallpapers. They had developed this escape route to expert level way back in their little girlhood pasts.