by Anna Burns
You know how, when you’re ready for something, when time is ripe, something inside you finalises itself without even having the decency to consult you about it? It seems to take ownership completely – without ambivalence or ambiguity – into its own hands. Isn’t it further the case that when this happens, everything else is commanded to fall into place also? Could go either direction. Could be things lovely, things perfect, things most joyous and wonderful. Or could be things terrible, the most evil, things you’ll definitely have long-term Lady Macbeth sleepwalking episodes about.
The latter type was what happened here.
Tom slipped a dimension as he went for the Chief Harness and Bridle Maker and strangely, as he did so, he glanced around as if one hundred per cent expecting something to appear in the way of assisting him and, needless to say, given the hundred per cent, something did. A knife was handed to him. It came from out of nowhere, from no place earthbound. Believe me, though, this was definitely an earthbound knife. Tom took it and stuck it in Doe’s back.
Doe turned around. He pivoted. He looked at Spaders in surprise in the tiny space of meditation that now existed between them. Everything extraneous fell away that was not of that moment, then Doe fell backwards, with widening eyes, widening arms, into his own armchair. He fell on top of Jetty, as if she was not there.
But she was. Remember – she was.
So, who passed the knife? I can tell you it wasn’t Julie, for she was gagging on the floor, lying half on the hearth, half on the carpet. And it wasn’t Judas, who hadn’t yet slipped back, although he would slip back later in his armour around the time the police again showed, so he could take in the latest of what was happening. Tom himself didn’t come in with a knife, for he’d never been a knife-carrying person. And as for guns, he hadn’t been a gun-carrying person for quite a while now as well. So was it a ghost? Did a ghost hand over that weapon? Or did the knife materialise itself out of strong desire and an unshakeable conviction that it bloody well was going to? Or was it Janine who handed it? Or Jotty? For yes. Janine and Jotty appeared at this point.
All so fast. And all so incredible. One moment the room was empty, except for two dead people and two live people. Then the next moment it was full. Jotty was there first. She was before Tom, clinging, crying – as if it hadn’t been a whole seven and a half years since she’d last put her arms around him. Anyone would have thought by the way she was shouting, ‘Tom! Oh, Tom! Why him? Why throw everything for him?’, that they’d breakfasted together, read the daily paper’s ‘Comment and Analysis’ together, then temporarily parted from each other with their habitual pecks on the cheek that very day.
But there was something else happening, so much so that Tom couldn’t respond to Jotty. It seemed his heart was intervening, that it was trying to say something. Not to him. And not to her. Instead it was trying to appeal to something or someone approaching from behind. He tried to turn, to catch a glimpse of whoever could be this phenomenon, but a dullness, a heaviness, a feeling of a pile of furniture suddenly piled on top of him, anchored him rigidly to the spot. At that moment, the tip of a long sword appeared.
Then this happened. He looked down – and he himself was on the floor and hadn’t realised he was on it. From that position he saw his chest had completely opened itself out. Was this a heart attack? he wondered. Was this how heart attacks happened? There were sharp jerks, little darts, feeling sick, but there was no left arm stuff that you hear about, and no hands suddenly going tingly, though just as he was thinking this, pins and needles of a high gravity began to press upon him, pinning his chest to the floor.
A woman in a headscarf and a housecoat stepped through him at that moment. Just that. Straight through him. Then she stepped through Jotty, who was also down on the ground. Continuing over the room with her big sword out, this woman reached the armchair and in it were two babies. Here, she put her sword away, leaned over and picked the babies up.
Always babies. There are always babies. At first, though, all Tom could hear was heart. Distressed, inconsolable, he felt his heart was pleading silently with this person. Then, after a time lag, some of Jotty’s words, uttered earlier, came down a tunnel and broke upon him at last.
‘Janine! No! No, Janine!’
So Tom had fallen. This was because of Jotty’s sister. Janine-Joshuatine had followed Jotty in. Turns out Jotty had also been on her way to the house because she wanted to check out the kitchen cupboard situation. In her deteriorating state of paranoia about what might have happened to her niece who had gone missing, she was battling her conviction that this cupboard held the key. She didn’t know it had been turned into an earplug cupboard. She had only known it when it had been an eggcup cupboard. And who puts padlocks on eggcup cupboards? That was suspicious in itself. We know already, of course – grotesque and impossible as it sounded – that Jane, the niece, couldn’t have been squashed, disseminated, distributed either into the cupboard or into the eggcups that were supposed to be in that cupboard. The cupboard had been robbed of all its contents before the recent era of the padlock and at that moment was empty of anything at all.
Jotty didn’t know that. So she was on her way, like the gallerists, taking advantage of the fact that everybody had been arrested. That was when she saw Tom and a suit of armour on the grass. Why are they rolling on the grass? she wondered. With growing alarm, she rushed over and reached the house from one direction just as her nephew got up and clanked off in another. Tom was up too, and was stepping over the threshold when Jotty, full of dread, shouted to him, in vain, to stop.
Ah, thought Tom, now noticing Janine hovering behind Jotty. Still up and running, that JanineJoshuatine. He could see, though, that as with her other sisters, she was now no beauty and had turned into some sort of mad biscuit. Probably harmless, though, he continued, not realising that Janine had taken another knife – for certainly they were being handed out that evening – and had stuck it, with a great grunt, into his side. She had made two mistakes – I mean apart from the one of actually stabbing anybody. One was, she mistook Tom for John Doe, her brother, and two was, she mistook her brother – as usual – for somebody else.
That’s why Tom had been downed, and he was currently instructing himself not to breathe, for normal breathing hurt, whereas little sips of breath were much, much better. And he needed silence. He needed stillness. He needed Jotty not to clutch or fuss over him. As long as nobody fussed or touched or clutched or tried to get him to interact by screaming, ‘Hello! Tom! Tom! Tom! Can you hear me?’ at him – as long as none of that happened, he’d gather himself together in a second and be fine.
Jotty, not a Florence Nightingale at the best of times, was weeping and screaming. She was definitely down, clutching, fussing and shouting, ‘Tom! Tom! Speak to me, Tom!’ with the woman with the sword and the babies in the housecoat continuing, in total dispassion, to walk through them on her way – ironically – out the material world door.
I said to her, ‘Are you taking him?’
Now, you know me. You’ve been with me a while and you can see that nothing gets me angry. You can vouch for that, can’t you? Have you seen me angry? Well, I’m sorry to say yer woman, Sworden, she gets me angry. Only you’re not allowed to say ‘gets me angry’. Nowadays you have to say, ‘I feel angry when Sworden does this.’
That’s her name. Sworden. Though she has other names. I mean her with the sword, her with the babies, her of the sang froid and very sniffy attitude – very clear, very sharp, very delineated she was. I said again,
‘Are you taking him?’ – meaning Spaders. For look – he was stabbed, he was on the floor there, dying. It seemed a clear case of taking him to me. But do you know something? What she does is ignore me. Although, to be easier on myself, she ignores everybody. She even ignored a whole stack of police who, for the second time that day, turned up at the door.
They were back. And they were thinking they were apprehending everybody, but most of the everybody in the room by this
time wasn’t in the material world at all. Tom Spaders was also gone. He had been worrying about his heart. And Jotty had been unnerving him also. She was stopping his breath and preventing him from attaining the ‘dying-down-from-hurting’ sensation he was longing for. He tried to tell her this, but rather than ‘Jotty’, the name ‘John’ came out instead.
Then Cusack appeared.
‘John!’ cried Spaders. ‘Thank God, John! Do us a favour. Help me get up here.’
Cusack didn’t answer and Spaders realised that that was because his friend was unconscious and lying in a hospital. He still had feathers, crumbs, spiders’ webs, long threads stuck all over him. Spaders appeared to be the one in the visitor’s chair, visiting him.
Why?
Then he wondered why he’d called his friend ‘John’.
Oh! he thought. Oh no! he then thought. Is it that I shot him? Is it that I did something to him? He began to think he had done something. Then he was certain he had done something. Was it that he’d killed his friend, John?
‘John!’ he shouted again, and then he shook Tom and continued to hold him by the shoulders. Getting no response, and now thoroughly frightened, he cast around the hospital ward.
It was high in height, and long, and narrow. And there seemed to be an immense level of activity going on in it. High-level energy. Couldn’t have got higher. A large number of babies and adults were making themselves heard. These adults were saying, ‘Hi there. Hi, mate. Awright?’ – with lots of questions, mainly ‘Did you see John?’ Everybody seemed to be calling to somebody or asking for somebody and everybody seemed to be called John. Even the women, he noticed. They were John as well. He felt himself grow more anxious as to why there was this commotion and mystery. The main thing, though, was how could he find out whether or not he’d killed John?
‘Oh, that’s just a phase, that John thing,’ said someone. It was a woman’s voice and she was talking close to him. ‘That’s the name that always gets used here. Trust me,’ she said, and he did, for he felt at that moment that that was the easiest option. I mean, what were his choices? What else was he gonna do at this point?
‘Don’t!’ said the woman. ‘Oh, don’t! Don’t!’ And she laughed. ‘Don’t call me that,’ for he had suddenly called her ‘Mother’. She laughed again. ‘I’m not your mother now.’
Then she reassured him. She said she’d stay for a bit and that he wasn’t to be afraid when she was there, and then when she wasn’t there. So that was it. He was the one in the hospital now. He wished she’d speak of this place for it didn’t have a floor. Or walls. Or ceiling. But because of the confidence, which seemed to consist of colour, everyone seemed buoyed up all the same. It had boundaries of some sort too, but they weren’t of any recognised substance. They weren’t even properly visible. It was then, as he was looking around, that nurses, a whole phalanx, marched in.
‘Oh, excuse me,’ said one, stepping right up to him. ‘You certainly can be discharged, right away this minute.’ In spite of his anxiety, he didn’t want to be discharged. He tried to tell her he’d only just arrived.
‘She didn’t take him on,’ said another nurse. She was referring to the emergency room intake person. She herself, a learnernurse, was reading from his chart and ticking something off.
‘That decides it then,’ said the first. ‘You can have sustenance, a bit of nourishment, but after that, Angel of Beginnings instructs you’re to be off.’
He wanted to protest and put in a complaint about Angel of Beginnings but then Cusack was there, visiting him. ‘Hi, Tom,’ Cusack said. Tom Spaders registered he hadn’t called him ‘John’. He didn’t have time to feel sad that that might have something to do with him soon leaving, because a buzzing, one he’d heard earlier, was sounding again in his ears.
It was Life – a woman, not unlike Sworden in her formidable dispassion, but without the sword – and she was coming to get him. He looked at her fearfully for he didn’t want to go. He held on. First to a pillow but that didn’t work. Life just took him and the pillow also. So he held on to the bottom bedpost, but Life took him and the pillow and the bed with a trolley attached to it. So he dropped the bed and all that clatter and grabbed on to some people instead. His hands went through them. They went on chatting, never realising they’d been clutched on to. Then the nurses chided, ‘Now, behave. Behave. You’re acting like a baby when really you’re an outpatient’ – so he knew it would be fruitless to grab on to them. Soon, though, he grew less afraid, for he had forgotten until that moment that everything was sheer colour. It was a spirit colour and it was blue. He tried again.
‘Everything’s blue,’ he said. ‘Heaven’s blue,’ he said, as if this were a password. Then he grabbed on to a jacket, felt bones under this jacket.
‘This isn’t Heaven, mate,’ said a voice. Then it shouted, ‘We don’t need that extra bag, Raphael. Call another ambulance’ – and from that point a policeman took over and hauled Tom back into the room.
‘Hmmm. Two new knife-ins,’ said the police. ‘This sure is some family.’
So the police were in and yet no one had called them. What I want to know is, how come they came? An incident between Betty and Jetty – which ended with Betty’s decision that Jetty would have to be re-arrested, was the disguised personal grudge reason the police came back that day.
You remember Betty, the great policewoman soulmate buddy of Janet? She tried a similar move on Jetty, not realising that just because two women were sisters, and had names that began with the same letter, and worked together at the same chemist, and lived together in the same house, and had sex with the same gang leader, didn’t mean their minds were exactly the same as well.
I think Betty knows that now.
It was a case of ‘Success of Jetty’. My God, her brilliant success. But we don’t have an awful lot of time for this. I’ll go quick. They don’t beat about the bush, women. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ they say. ‘Are you that fucky police? You’re that fucky police! Police! Police! Hey, everybody! This is a fucky police I have here!’ Betty thought it best to call it a day. Before she did, though, she attempted to laugh at the idea of being mistaken for a fucky police person. But it didn’t work. Jetty didn’t believe the timbre, which is fair dues to Jetty. That timbre, you see, it was false. Luckily for Betty, there were no other women present. Just men. And you know what men are like. They didn’t believe Jetty because Betty had on lipstick.
It was red lipstick, you’ve got to know that, but know also that it was not just any red. It was that particular genius shade of red that, on rare skins during times of conflict, was definitely more to icy blue. It was blue. And I don’t mean Heaven blue. I mean the shadow side of Heaven blue. Ask anybody. I mean a woman. Blue-red, which is really blue, doesn’t promise but indefinably holds out something. And what it’s holding out is a little corpse in its little coffin – a dead nothing, back from the grave and waiting just for you. You’ll have mystery, followed by unattainable, followed by what is definitely never to be attainable, then a nice big long chill, without mercy, if that’s what you’re after, right through to your heart. Orange-red on the other hand, of the type that is really orange, promises warmth, and who the fuck wants that in these very cold, freeze your soul, ‘I’m going to kill you after I’ve had sex with you’ situations? Orange-red that is orange? I’m telling you. Sane-Girl-Next-Door – that’s what you’ll get.
So thingy, Betty, who had on blue-red, which was really blue, had a stroke of genius – what with her hair and that skin that would stop any man in his tracks of conviction. She was able to escape, thank you, with only that spectacular hair pulled and a kick where her balls would have been from Jetty, if Betty had been a man. She didn’t retaliate to this physical attack with all her training in arm-to-arm combat, because in some situations to have displayed her military prowess over a trifle would have given much bigger fish than sore feelings away. Luckily for Betty too, that day Jetty had been preoccupied with thoughts of John, her love
r, and which new twenty-year-old nubile, connubial, nuptial, nymph or nymphet he might now be bedding, or would have been bedding if – thank-God-to-sweet-Jesus – he hadn’t been arrested before he’d got his dick out that day. So she hadn’t time, or the temperament, for contemplation upon underground plainclothes policewomen detective agents, other than to kick Betty cursorily, as I said, in the balls. Bet, therefore, was able to get away with an acceptable level of intactness. Just a bit of humiliation and it was having the hair pulled in public that did it. The kick in the balls was nothing. That rolled off her back. But hey, what of the bafflement of the policewoman saying in her later famous interview that, ‘As long as you dress down, you can hoodwink even the most intelligent of locals’, yet what about Jetty’s assertion about ‘grooming-up to fool those shaggers, the police’? I’m confused. Betty had been dressed up. Jetty had been dressed down, so why weren’t they doing those things if that was their conviction about them? More and more I’m thinking humans, even to God, can’t make much sense.
I hope you followed that for I had to sweep along yet try to combine my rapidity with some sort of reason and succinctness. Generally speaking, the gang, and of course Janet, had long been under surveillance, so that was why they sent Betty to intercept Jetty, not realising, as I say, that Jetty wasn’t a clone of her sister, and so Betty’s manoeuvres through Operation Bus-Stop Chit-Chat had proved a big failure that day.
Betty went back to the barracks and the more she thought about it, the more that attack upon her balls did sting and did matter. It wasn’t nothing. Turns out it had penetrated the old sense of sexual humiliation after all. Jetty Doe had been arrested, she’d heard. Jetty Doe had then been released. Right then, she decided, I’m detective here and I say Jetty Doe must now be re-arrested. This time Bet intended giving Jet the worst grilling of her life. She’ll be sorry, thought Betty. She’ll be shamed too, because I’m going to shame her. Then I’ll make her cry, make her realise that I’m of top crucial cheese status in this police army, whereas all she does is take gang minutes and work at a shop that doesn’t even rate First Prize of the Year. Poor Betty. I feel sorry for her. As far as her understanding of certain women went, she really wasn’t much better than a flesh and blood man.