by Anna Burns
Wallpapers. I don’t want to get into the Wallpaper Story and, anyway, given all the Recovery books that now exist most definitively covering it, where have you been if you don’t already know? Nowadays, you don’t even have to have been sexually abused to know off by heart the Wallpaper Story. So, taking it as looked at, this brings us to an already touched-upon subject: Going Sideways or Going Under. Which would you prefer?
Disappearing into wallpaper is Going Sideways. That’s cutting-out and slipping-out – I mean out of your body – until it’s done and over with. Just count your numbers, recite your alphabet, examine that leaf on that tree beside that waterfall inside that wallpaper, until Daddy or Daddy Substitute falls asleep or crawls off. Going Under, therefore, can be very confusing, I mean for an adult who has, since childhood, always been used to Going Sideways. Going Under is slipping into your body, it’s giving it up to your body, it’s acknowledging that your body knows more about everything – most especially sexual – than anything your little head of super-intellectual control believes it can think up.
First time Jotty went under, first time, mind, was with Tom Spaders. First time ever. So Going Under was good. Definitely it was progress. It was also why she had her breakdown, by the way.
And until those Achilles’ Heels, and until the Fathers came with the penis, she had experienced Going Under brilliantly. With Going Under, you sort of lose it. Just before that, though, you’ve got your head keeping control as usual, monitoring, caution, caution, careful now, caution, mapping out how this sexual encounter, no – this procedure, this clinical procedure – was going to proceed. Therefore, clinical and more clinical for, remember, what’s required from you is to be as objective as possible. You don’t want some emotional factor coming in and jeopardising everything you could well do without. Under no circumstances must you lose your head so, with these instructions reverberating, you keep forgetting that you’re going to go under, and that when you do go under, all head control goes. Then? Why, he could do anything. Then? Why, you, too, you could do anything. It’s like reaching your hands out while you’re dreaming and wondering why …? Why …? Is this abuse legacy or is this the body doing what it’s wired to do? You want, theoretically, to ask yourself that question, but you can’t think that question, even though you’ll wonder why later you couldn’t get your teeth into that question, why there was no point to it, why it would have been ridiculous even to think it, but it’s because, you see, you’ve already been swept away. Another thing. This Going Under takes place without any substance ingested so, of course, you’ve nothing but your body, your desires, and him to pin it to. Sounds scary. I mean why wouldn’t it sound scary? I mean to someone who’d only ever gone numb and sideways. Yet Jotty liked it. She was amazed by it. She felt she’d read three hundred and ten Recovery books to make up for the equivalent of it. And more good news! She still hadn’t killed anybody. And I mean a man.
I mean in mistaking him for the Fathers. He’d surfaced in her haze to say something to her and she heard them saying, ‘Fuck you’, ‘When we fuck you’, as she was lying in her ‘out-of-the-head’ experience in his arms. And that was when her head control whizzed back and her body snapped and she recoiled from him. And that was when he got angry with ‘Just an expression. It’s just an expression. I’m just … I’m just …’ It was no wonder the fight after. How could I? she thought. How could I have let him make me – lose control like that?
What had he given her? That feeling of play. Incredible. New. Even at her age. The experience of Going Under. Incredible. New. Okay, definitely she’d liked that. Her body had trusted him for that. But also shame. And, of course, her new femininity complex. ‘Here, darlin”, he said. ‘Here’s two presents’ – one was the childishness of her ‘fuck you’ reaction. The other, the backlash to a very masculine snore.
No way, though, would she let him go through the computer. She might blame him. She was in the mood to blame him. Certainly, with the Mothers inside her, she was going to blame him. But those Mothers inside her sisters were not going to blame him as well. She shrugged as they asked the ‘man’ question, then she looked at her watch and wondered when they would go.
So Jotty had had it once – the true, authentic Going Under experience. The Sisters had had it never. They thought they were safe not having it, not knowing about it, and instead holding fast to wallpaper patterns and to the love story with their shadow husbands going, in formulistic grooves, in their heads. But do you remember when I told you about the Noises and how they returned to John Doe and caused all his bafflement as to why they were returning to him? It was similar with the Sisters and their fantasy husbands. Life’s like that. Little connecting patterns. Here was the pattern of how the Sisters went mad.
They couldn’t keep it up. The faceless adoring men in their minds became not so faceless. That was within a year of this visit to Jotty, and I know you know whose faces they became. With the Fathers now starting to appear regularly – both through fantasy husbands and real husbands – the Sisters’ defences started to break down. As they experienced more consciously the blood on the hands, the ratcheting of the Noises, the police, the denials, the comings-to, the blackings-out then, finally, the wallpaper collapsing, one by one each sister did her vanishing act. Soon there was only Jotty and half of Janine left. But before the moment when Jotty and Janine burst into the bar to confront their brother, who was getting drunk with his new pal, Tom Spaders, we’re back in Jotty’s kitchen, with her sisters issuing the definitive Death Threat.
It was that suicide thing.
I’m sure at least some of you must have experienced this.
It’s when your loved ones unexpectedly say to you, ‘If you commit suicide, Jotty – and very soon – do you mind if we don’t do the sorting? We don’t wanna do the sorting. Is it okay if someone else, some stranger, comes in and does it instead of us?’ And, either because you really do understand the not wanting to do the sorting, or else, in the moment of them springing this upon you – for, after all, you’re not suicidal – you’re startled into replying, ‘Yeah, okay, that’s okay. Just leave it to the authorities. The police or whoever will come and sort it out.’
However this may hit you, soon you start to feel pinpricks of upset and annoyance. What a thing to come out with. So what if you understand? How weak of them, you’re now thinking. What cowards. Why – even on a standard, basic, societal level – anyone would agree they were being discourteous female bastards. Aren’t they supposed to be your loved ones? Who but your loved ones should come and do the sorting? No wonder you’re suicidal if that’s the best of love you can get.
So the Sisters harped on a bit more about Jotty being suicidal and about them not wanting to do the sorting. But hey, to make up for it, they said, they’d be perfectly willing to make sure she got the third grave.
‘Third grave?’ Jotty asked, now not sure she wanted the answer. That was when the second part of this Death Threat came up.
It was that Third Grave thing.
Years earlier Doe Father had been killed by accident by a big cooking pot of cast iron coming down on top of him. His wife killed him but she had changed her mind about killing him in the split-second before doing so and that was what made it an accident – gravity and momentum, no longer will and despair – had brought that pot down. But it was too late. He was dead. However, regardless of how many mother funerals John Doe, full of grief, went to, Mamma Doe was not dead. She was very much alive. Of course she was in the mental hospital, but after Father’s death, a particular grave plot had been purchased with spaces for three coffins. Papa was in one. Mamma, naturally at some point, would go in another. But look, there’s an extra space, and Jotty, according to the Sisters – given she was the only unmarried daughter with no family of her own to speak of – should legitimately be awarded the eternal place of that. If she committed suicide any day now – they paused but got no confirmation – she’d go on top of Papa. Or, they continued, for they had it wor
ked out so Jotty wouldn’t have to worry her suicidal head about it, if Mamma died before her, she’d go on top of both.
Jotty was freaked. Freaked even more than she had been by the sorting. This was a bullseye counterattack to her freaking them by going to therapy. ‘Okay, then. If you’re going to keep up this therapy,’ implied the Sisters, ‘we’re going to bury you smack bang in between.’ The Sisters, on a deluded level, believed Jotty would be reassured by this, just as they had been reassured by her not blaming them for not wanting to do the sorting. Passive aggressively – unusual for them – they carried on.
‘Besides,’ they said, ‘you know Mamma would be furious at the thought of Aunty Jacky going in it.’ This was a direct reference to you-know-what which took place years ago in these older women’s pasts.
But hold on. You don’t know what. I don’t think anyone’s told you. I know you know that Papa Doe had been having a long-standing affair with Aunty Jacky, who, as I say, was Mamma’s sister. But as for the next bit, I’ll put you in the know right away.
There was a fight and this is tricky – Aunty Jacky had got into it with their mother, who turned out years later to be their aunt and not their mother. This fight was ostensibly over teenager Jetty, Aunty Jacky’s daughter, who was dating her cousin, the Sisters’ teenage brother, John. You know Jetty and John. Well, John’s mother – I mean impostor mother for, as I say, she turned out years later to be his aunt – told her son that she had had enough of this impossible dating. On two counts. One was that this son, like all her other sons, ought not to be going down the route of getting married while she was still living. It was bad manners. Out of respect for his mother, he could at least wait until she was dead. The second count was that Jetty was his cousin, possibly his sister, and that information, out of temper, burst forth from her that day.
Now, if you want to get married in Tiptoe Floorboard, you have to go to the Town Hall and consult a big list that’s hanging there to see if your name’s on it. If it is, then you look to see if the name of the person you’re wanting to marry is on this list as well. If it is, then you’re not allowed to marry that person. This is because you’re in some close blood familial relationship already with that person. For example, you and that person had given birth to each other at some point long ago in the past. It’s an inconvenience but you have to do this checking. If you don’t, and get married when you shouldn’t have, you have to pay a fine which stands currently at three pounds.
Mamma Doe mentioned this to John, who told Jetty, who told her sister Janet and that’s how Aunty Jacky got to hear. She was furious. If anyone was going to forbid this marriage, most certainly it would be her. She had told Jetty and Janet anyway, time and again, not to play with their cousins, not to use their toothbrushes, not to use their hairbrushes, not to sleep in their beds, wear any of their underwear, try on their socks, try on their shoes, mix their spittle with their cousins’ spittle or even touch them if they could avoid it. ‘Keep out of that house,’ she warned. ‘The Devil, full of tricks, lies awaiting in there.’
Jetty and John had not been thinking of getting married, and Jetty still wasn’t, but now John was musing that such an occurrence might strengthen the kudos he’d already gained from beating up that bus-stop woman. Being married might increase his irreversible adult standing even more. It was just that he was in a terrible muddle. He had heard his mother crying, her heart breaking, after her temper tantrum that day long ago when she’d thrown out Benedict. As a boy, John too, had cried for the loss of his brother, whilst down on his hunkers at the top of the stairs. So you can see his predicament. John Doe loved his mother. He loved her even more than he loved his brothers. And Mamma Doe wasn’t dead. She was very much angry and very much alive.
So the two sisters got into a fight over the slandering of each other’s family – perhaps the one family. But don’t be thinking this was a case of the women having to get down and go dirty, and the men going off to plot important secretive plottings underground.
Doe Senior, when he announced he was leaving his wife, Jessie, experienced one of those milkbottle moments, I mean similar to the one his son escaped experiencing all those years later in the Community Centre. Here, though, milkbottles were more cast iron than that.
He was so trusting. What was wrong with him that he was so trusting? Was he stupid? After telling his wife in the kitchen that he was sorry but that he was leaving her, he looked away and bent over and got down on his hunkers to search in the cupboard for some inessential thing. And he was so trusting. It was as if he was asking for it. Why be so trusting to turn his back on her like that? It hurt her to see it. She could easily run a knife into him from this position, using one of the knives from the stack over there. She could hit him over the head with the white enamel waterbottle, or the grey and white marble pastry-roller. Or she could very easily lift that cast-iron pot from the stove. And then kill him. Just kill him. She wasn’t frightened thinking these thoughts for it was human to have thoughts, all sorts of thoughts, and so she was human having them. But the thing is, can someone really be trusted when they’re standing over you with a funny look on their face, having thoughts about you like that? And so, because nothing was happening – as in third-dimensionally happening – yer man continued to stay bent over, rootling away in the cupboard for that ridiculous inessential, and she continued to stand over him, her mind making imaginative little story pictures like that.
Before they came to take her away, Mamma, already heightened by what had just taken place in the kitchen, went out to have a terrific long-term roiling love-affair fight with her sister. During this fight, teenage Jetty produced a twig of a stick from her pocket. But if it was any consolation, and she should have said this in court as defence against stabbing her mamma, she thought – and how could she have known otherwise? – that she was stabbing her Aunty Jessie instead. Both women, Jessie and Jacky, and for the usual Tiptoe Floorboard unfathomable reasons, had switched mamma and aunty roles and we, as outsiders, will just have to accept this. I myself cannot explain it. I can only proffer that one man’s surrealism is another man’s reality here.
The Doe girls, however, never accepted it. They insisted their mother was who their mother had always been, and that their Aunty Jacky, when they jumped her, couldn’t possibly be their actual mamma. As for their brothers, the males in the family, their braincells never deigned to compute the maternal question. They were busy in their Factions, busy in their Junior Scout Factions, busy in their Community Centres, being stoical and so on, with no personal lives to speak of at all.
Years later, back in Jotty’s house, she had just been delivered of the sisterly Death Threat. ‘Thanks for understanding the not-sorting,’ said her sisters. ‘And don’t worry, we’ll keep an eye on that bugger John, to make sure he doesn’t steal your grave.’
‘’Bye,’ they then said, this time hyper-cheerfully, with Jotty thinking, boy, they’re so angry they can’t even get violent. She walked out to the hall with them where, in the mirror, they were adding last preening touches before rejoining society – a touch of powder, a reapplication of lipstick, then a pat-pat, tweak-tweak, as they made sure every single hair was magnificently in place.
Chapter Eleven
And now, a year later, here was Jotty and a much transformed JanineJoshuatine in the bar, with Janine heading straight towards her brother. At this point Doe was telling Spaders, and us, that he’d just found out that his Aunty Jacky was his mother and that she was dead. Another surprise for Doe was when this information about his Aunty Jacky penetrated. First thing was it confused him, for he’d already decided it was the first mother who was going in the grave. When I say ‘decided’, I really mean that. He thought he’d been doing another ‘beloved mother just dead’ fantasy, I mean with the first mother, the usual mother, whereas in reality – which normally he didn’t much bother with – he could have sworn on all his mammas’ graves that neither of those women was actually dead at all. Nobody had told h
im they were dead, and it would be a disgrace and a laxity of the authorities, he reckoned, if they were dead and no official word had reached him of it, especially as official word had reached him of the true maternal identity affair. Well, as you know, both women were not dead. And that was why Jotty, who had just seen them at the asylum after going there to pick up Janine, was now wanting to gauge whether her brother had flipped completely and was this time orchestrating an over-the-top singing and dancing funeral – with costumes, setting, speeches, mourners plus, as usual, a corpse that was imaginary – or whether some real person, her niece who had gone missing, for example, was in the coffin that had gone so ceremoniously into the ground.
Yes. I completely agree with you. It was childish of Doe still to be doing that construct, and at an age of thirtysomething-adult-almost-responsibility, but to be fair, perhaps we all reach for the aspirin when things get a bit tough. Don’t forget, he was under stress. Vengeance – and I mean of the type of the Lord – was on its way to get him, there was a traitor in his midst whom he still hadn’t been able to murder, his domestic, sexual, romantic and business lives were all reaching total crisis and his compartmentalised mind was busting all its boxes because he was still trying to compartmentalise it, even though clearly there was no room for any further divisions to take place.