by Anna Burns
As I said, when she went into the dinge of the drinking club to deal with her mad brother, Jotty was thrown by Tom being there. By now, given that two and a half years had passed since she’d last seen his penis, he was back to being Tom and was no longer the Fathers, though that didn’t stop her jumping from suspicion to suspicion that he was a secret member of the Doe Community Centre Gang. Even now, though, in spite of herself, she still found him attractive, which just goes to show, she thought bitterly, how sick she still was. She was also still in therapy, still not speaking to her therapist. After two and a half years, though, the apology thing didn’t seem to matter much any more. Now the sessions had less of the quality of ‘I’m not speaking to her! Why should I speak to her?’ ‘Here’s my bill,’ she said, ‘for October.’ ‘Thanks,’ said Jotty – for those words were allowed. Those words weren’t caving-in. They were words that didn’t lord it over Jotty. They were civilisation, administration, as when she delivered her holiday dates. ‘Here are my dates,’ she’d say, and Jotty would say, ‘Okay,’ and that had been the state of affairs when Jotty had first gone along to have her head examined. Now there was more a quality to the sessions of ‘I don’t quite hate her, though I hate her a bit, so perhaps I can just sit quiet for more years and make up my mind as to whether or not I do hate her’. All the same, because of the not-talking, she hadn’t been able to tell her therapist about not wanting to be a gangster girlfriend and, also, about her heart.
In psychotherapeutic terms this heart business would translate as ‘unforgiving qualities’, but I think her therapist had already guessed about that. It seems Jotty felt unforgiving in spite of not wanting to feel unforgiving and, because she wasn’t into half-measures, she didn’t just feel unforgiving – as the ordinary man in the omnibus might – towards the odd psychopathic serial murderer, but instead she felt unforgiving towards everybody in the whole world. But how do you forgive? The spiritual leaders of the world snack on their halva and say, ‘You gotta forgive, baby. Listen, honey, if you don’t forgive …’ but they never finish that sentence. They leave it hanging, implying, obviously, that if you don’t forgive, then you go to Hell. But how do you forgive? How, mechanically speaking, do you do it? It seems to me – though I can’t speak for Jotty – that if you forgive before the quality of really being able to forgive has come and settled itself powerfully about you, you’ll only end up having to go back and hating the forgiven all over again.
Puzzling. And the heart. Another puzzle. Jotty’s was sore, particularly whenever she caught sight of Tom Spaders. This annoyed her. In fact it annoyed her multiplied by a million. How dare he stir up particles when she’d been trying, forever, to keep them covered up.
So you open your heart and it hurt. You stand up straight and hold your shoulders back to let your heart out, and it hurt. You take big breaths to get those breaths into your heart to make it feel something for it was time it felt something. And it hurt. No wonder – most rigorously, most violently, most murderously – none of your married, mothering sisters had wanted anything to do with that. ‘Practise!’ say the books and I don’t mean the books Jotty had gotten rid off. I mean new books, books she’d recently bought – this time about abundance, about expansion, about letting yourself have the knowledge of your desires whether or not you can ever fulfil them, about going through the ‘middle’ to reap the fruits of the other side. ‘Practise!’ they say. ‘That’ll help the hurt heart situation.’ But when you’re in the hurt heart situation, you don’t want to practise. You want to take those books, get on the floor with those books, and rip those books up.
Most definitely, therefore, she was thrown by Tom being there, and another thing she was thrown by was the sorry state of her sister. Although JanineJoshuatine had a reputation for going around stabbing people, in actuality she’d never stabbed anybody at all. Ever since she’d fallen apart physically, she no longer even did the elementary ‘My God! Whose blood is this I have on my hands?’ scenario. Following on from her husband and child leaving, her perfect sisters collapsing, her fantasy husband transforming himself into Papa, she herself had dwindled so rapidly that she almost now never crossed her threshold. Soon, Jotty felt – next holiday perhaps, or maybe the holiday after – her sister, given her deterioration, was going to go away and, like the others, never come back at all.
As for the police, her latest interaction with them over the niece situation had also thrown Jotty. When she had entered the Police House earlier, a group of them, in their shiny uniforms with their shiny holsters and shiny guns, was at the front desk swinging a pendulum over some big pieces of white paper. They were trying to divine whether the food in the canteen fridge had gone off. It was swinging maniacally, this pendulum. First it pulled one way on its cord, then changed direction and pulled the other. Then it circled furiously and that meant ‘Yes, of course the food has gone off!’ They asked another question. Was it off to the point they’d be sick if they ate it, or could it possibly be a case of mild diarrhoea or, even better, slight stomach discomfort that would wear away within, say, twenty minutes to an hour? Jotty went up to the desk and waited timidly, waited politely. She felt a gentle scream working up inside her. Being ignored, finally she banged the desk and shouted, ‘Hallo! Where’s my lipstick? Am I invisible standing here?’
They looked at her. The vibration of the bang had shocked them but, worse, it had shocked the pendulum also. The latter withdrew into psychic petulance, refusing to be drawn further, leaving the degree of the fridge’s bad food unclear.
‘We can’t speculate,’ they said when, ignoring their sulks, she told them of her suspicions. ‘Yes you can,’ she answered. ‘You’re detectives. That’s what you’re supposed to do. To say you can’t speculate is like saying, “We can’t solve who killed the body because we don’t know who killed the body.” There’s a time to get out of people’s heads’ – she banged the desk again – ‘and a time to get in there.’ They told her she was to stop banging the desk and that she was not to talk to them like that.
She asked then to speak to the new Interfering Outside Police Officer. This new officer was known generally as the Interfering Outside Police Officer because that was easier to say than his correct name, Derwent Ligge. ‘Deer With Twixt Legs’ or ‘Dear Wift Twixt Legg’ was not a mock as some might suspect, given few people liked this officer. Rather, it was a variable offshoot of the town’s combined Spatial Fragmentation Syndrome, expressing itself this time in words. Mr Ligge was a high-ranker of the law from abroad, who had been sent recently by the International Community to investigate the new Tiptoe murders. In the course of his interfering, it had become apparent – and the police didn’t like this – that he had been sent to investigate them too. They wouldn’t let her see him.
‘He’s busy,’ they said. ‘Extremely busy – going to the toilet. If you want, you can write a letter and we’ll see he gets it instead.’
They guffawed at this, like animals that guffaw, if you know of any. And speaking of toilets – given that little interaction she’d just witnessed with this particular batch of policemen, if she were to write that letter, she knew exactly where it would end up.
‘Just address it,’ they sneered, ‘to “The Man Who Takes No Shit’”. That was it. They were off guffawing again and I was shocked, not just at the dreadful sound – much worse than seeing the word printed – but at their open partiality. Jotty leaned over to me, saying, ‘That’s peanuts. You’ve seen nothing of partiality yet.’
She tried to get them to help. They hindered all her trying. Constantly, they were attempting to be funny at her expense. In the past, when Jotty had experienced this with others, she had learned to respond by pretending not to understand them. ‘Pardon?’ she’d say, looking puzzled, taking them literally. Also looking politely interested, looking as if she truly wanted to comprehend this person’s meaning, if only he or she could coherently get their point across. So she would force them to repeat their butts, their puns, their derisive jok
es and, during the repeating, they’d lose, of course, the impetus. Wilfully misunderstand. Don’t understand. And don’t let them know you’re doing it. Do it so well, the worst they can say is ‘Oh, her? She’s dim,’ or ‘Oh, her? She’s no sense of humour.’ And tell me – not being thought to have a sense of humour – who but a stand-up would lose sleep over that?
Finally, after explaining and deconstructing all their jokes at her expense a thousand times and her still being too dim and humourless to get even one of them, they were exhausted and so pulled the authority card. They said she was in danger of wasting police time and precious police resources. The undertakers from the confectionery morgue would not have buried a coffin, they said, either empty or with the wrongly identified body inside. She knew this to be rubbish and knew further that the police themselves knew it to be rubbish. Everybody knew the morguers, notorious for cutting corners and doing favours for Doe because they had to, often buried bodies either with no names or with the wrong names on top. The confectionery morgue, by the way, was familiar-speak for one of Tiptoe’s joint morgue and funeral parlours. It was situated abundantly close to the town’s famous three-storey sweetshop. This was the sweetshop that had four gunshops, a tanning shop, a betting shop, a booking-your-holidays – I mean real holidays – shop, all inside. Of course Jotty knew her brother had complete control of the morgue confectionery, the confectionery morgue and almost all commercial properties. Indeed, of all the town’s businesses, only the Almost Chemist of the Year was still defiantly and valiantly holding out.
When she refused to leave and instead tried to coerce the police into declaring who they thought, then, was in the coffin, without a blush they announced they were sorry, but that she had to face facts. It was her ma. So quickly had the rumour spread of one of the women being dead and of the dead one not having been the aunt but the mother, that it had already been entered officially in Births, Deaths and Rumours That Are Probably True at the Town Hall. So ingrained by now, too, was this belief in the heads of the policemen that it took Jotty a while to get them to understand that it was the niece she was referring to, and that her worry was that her brother had taken his daughter and done something to her, and so – given it would be a feasible search in a good disposal point – why didn’t they dig it up and have a look? They shook their heads and refused to accept this. For starters, they said, even if both those poor women were alive – for now they had them both dead – it didn’t alter the situation. Everybody knew her brother had been doing harmless dead-mother funerals ever since puberty. So why didn’t she run along and have a chat with him instead?
Later, when they did manage to get rid of her and were back to being cosy by themselves, toasting the fridge’s food over the police hearthside, they got involved in a detection-provoking discussion. It was entirely about her.
‘Isn’t she the repressed one?’
‘You mean is her repression the reason she’s having these passive-aggressive morbid fantasies about an attractive, younger female being dead – who, by the way, I’ve never heard of? Have you heard of? Could she be in a syndrome from Snow White, or from Cinderella, or Rose Red, or Annushka Petrovna, with her playing the part of the wicked stepmother from the ‘Scary Older Woman’ side of such fairytales?’
‘Yes. That’s exactly what I mean. Do you think there could be something there?’
‘Could be. But not married, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Never been married.’ ‘What? You mean never?’
‘’Course not. Why else do you think she’s on our Spinster List in the hall?’
‘I thought she was married at least once.’
‘No, no. That was the Sisters – before they had their crackups. She wouldn’t marry. Not even to make a point of it. Not even if she had to divorce the guy straight after the ceremony because she didn’t love him. At least she could have waved the certificate. “Look, everybody. I’m all right. I’ve joined.” ’
‘Good Bats and Holy Godfathers! That puts a different slant on it.’
‘How so? Are you thinking we should be harbouring suspicions about her, then, within the next three days?’
The more they pooled their hearsay, the more it looked that way.
Next, given they were thorough, they looked up a reference book to check the word ‘repression’. It said – no, wait a minute, that was something else. Here it is – it said ‘repress, to constrain, to put down, to banish to the unconscious, to have a tendency to repress unacceptable thoughts and feelings etc’. It doesn’t explain the ‘etc’ but there was ‘repressor – a protein which binds to an operator site and prevents transcription of the associated gene’. Well, okay, we don’t need that one, not unless we’re determined to get into some extended, metaphysical conceit here. And I’m not particularly determined. Are you?
Next, for they were following through, they had a wee mock at her. Couldn’t help it. Come on, they said, this was probably all because she hasn’t had sex in yonks. Sure, everybody has to do something with their sexual energy if they don’t have sex with it. Yeah, like sending anonymous letters to distress law-abiding, sex-having ordinary decent people. Yeah, or like making sweets and putting poison in them to give to children and unsuspecting vulnerable adults at religious fairs. Yeah, or like doing your citizen duty and sending people to the guillotine to have their heads cut off. ‘Yeah, so let’s face it,’ they said, ‘all she’s doing is her sexual anorectic version of that.’
So, as objective law enforcers, they concluded that this was her problem, not their problem, although they did agree that, coming from a family of jails, graves and mental asylums, there was no question but that she would have to have suspicions harboured against her within the next three days.
From Jotty’s disturbed but well-meaning perspective of trying to get someone to help her, I hope you can understand the police were pretty useless here. Worse than useless. They issued a written warning, stating that if she wanted to bring the matter up again, she’d have to keep a daily log with proper CAD reference numbers to back it. And she’d have to do that for at least four years. In the meantime, they thanked her for any future letter she might take the trouble to write, but what she had to appreciate was that this letter they were sending her was not to be considered in any way an idle threat. They didn’t sign the letter. They didn’t date it, and they ended with the usual ‘If there’s any problem, please don’t worry about hesitating to call.’
But look. I’ve gone too far from what it was Spaders thought linked him to the Doe clan. There he was, standing at the bar with Doe and a whole bunch of other murderers, with the gangster wives and girlfriends sitting with their drinks around the sides. Jotty and Janine came in. Doe sighed heavily when he saw his sisters, especially his half-portion sister. Mostly, he found her funny. Other times, like now, she just made him upset and annoyed.
‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘This is a sequence me and her can’t get out of, Tom.’ And Janine, cutting straight across the dancefloor to get at him, picked up speed, knocking against everybody en route. Halfway into her sprint, and just as Doe was setting down his glass to get himself ready for her, she lifted her arm as if there were a knife in it, then, moments before contact, threw herself over the last table and stabbed her brother through the heart.
He tutted.
‘For God’s sake!’ he shouted to Jotty, for Jotty had rushed up behind. ‘She’s only out,’ he cried, ‘and already she’s spilling the drinks again. I’m warning you, Jotty, if you don’t get a handle on that woman, I’ll have her committed for good next time.’
None of the gang made a move to intervene in this fantasy-stabbing of John by his eldest sister. First, it was embarrassing and people like to give wide berths to embarrassment whenever they could. Second, this was just another of those Family of Origin facts that outsiders of the family in question have to turn a blind eye to. Thing was, regardless of how many times her mistake had been pointed out to her – ‘He’s you
r brother, your brother, Janine! Your brother!’ – JanineJoshuatine kept thinking he was somebody else. Not long after her husband and baby had left, and following on from the dismantling of the Sister Orbit, Janine’s own fantasy husband had broken frame. He’d developed a laugh that felt like a finger, and unpleasant facial features that hinted of a distant memory and, in spite of how urgently she pressed ‘Rewind! Rewind!’, he would carry on, with impetus, in crossing the room to her. Naturally she had to cross the room herself to get him off before he got on her. So, even if Doe didn’t look like the Fathers – which he did – and even if he had never approached her from across the room – which he hadn’t – it was irrelevant. New settings in Janine’s mind had already been switched on.
After the stabbing, Janine was helped up from the ground by Jotty and Tom, with Jotty shouting, ‘Leave her alone! I can manage! I said I can manage!’ – even though clearly she could not. Janine’s head, just by itself, now weighed a complete ton. She had gone ‘flop’ and, as ‘the flop’ do, her body had added on extra thousands of psychic stone to her usual seven stone something. But even if Jotty could manage, how’s managing all the time supposed to be a good thing? All this managing by Jotty Doe, all this martyring, all this goodie-good, squeaky-clean, this trying to locate her missing niece when nobody else seemed to be giving a damn about her, all those ‘Psychoanalysis Divided by Five and Multiplied by Three’ sessions – I’m starting not to believe it. Forgive me for doubting her, but come with me. I think we should tiptoe into the shadow side of Jot now.
Total confusion around sex, I’m afraid. And I mean when all other adults in the world have got it all sorted. And also, it’s those books, I’m afraid – those recovery from incest books she’d earlier gotten rid off. I think – given her history, and the sexual confusion she’s still carrying around with her – she’s wishing she’d read at least some of them now. Specifically, it’s that waterfall business, and do you remember that waterfall? It had been recommended by the sex psychology expert to the Pseudonyms, as a way of helping them shift their ingrained historic sexual abuse patterns. In this case, however, I’m talking about the shadow side of the waterfall, I mean the sadomasochistic fantasies Jotty gets into now and then for swift, orgasmic release.