by Anna Burns
So that was how the police turned up. Only too late for Jetty. And for Betty. Betty will have to swallow her indignation at having been bested by Jetty – even a Jetty who was no longer living. She’ll have to speak to a counsellor if things get too psychological for her, bury her pique, go on a few dates, send a few Valentines, then get back to work and emotionally move on.
Incidentally, are men more visually influenced than women? Does this matter? Do we need to talk about this now? Or ever? I don’t think so. Let us also walk on.
Judas was back. Spying again, I suppose. I’m telling you, that boy can be so silent unless having bouts of his magical mutterings – ‘habitable’, ‘uninhabitable’, that sort of thing. He’s oiled castors. You open a door, he’s there. You close the door, turn round, there he is again. You open a wall cupboard, he’s squashed into the top shelf of it. In the name of God! And look – there he is again. He was back in the house from wherever he’d disappeared to out of it, and he wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t declare himself. He was still in that armour and had sidled in, inch by inch, little movement by little movement, pretending he was part of the chaos of the ornaments. And all so the police wouldn’t notice he was there.
He had had another fantasy. At least, I’m assuming it was a fantasy. It was that it wasn’t his father but he who had killed Jetty Doe. According to the brain of Judas, Doe Senior thought he’d killed her, but hadn’t because, before closure, he’d looked up and seen his daughter hovering by that Versailles thing. So he’d run to get at her and that was when Judas, who’d gone down to the parlour to save his sister as usual, realised that, despite the bloodstains about the nose and mouth, his Aunty Jetty wasn’t dead after all. Now, if this really was a fantasy, at least Judas was getting closer to some sort of true desire in it. Here, instead of fantasising he had come in to be saviour, this time he clanked over, lifted a cushion and held it over Aunty Jetty’s un-forgiven face.
She’d laughed at him, you see. She’d tormented him. All those years he’d kept watch on that mouth because she made those ‘crack-crack’, ‘clack-clack’ Noises. Then bubbles. Big bubbles. Smack! All over her face. As a child, he’d covered his ears, closed his eyes, and every so often peeped through them to see if she’d stopped yet. Whenever he’d peep, she’d be covering her eyes, and her ears, and would continue to crack the bubble gum bubbles whilst peeping back over at him. Now, it’s entirely open to interpretation as to whether or not this woman thought she’d been imitating the child in order to amuse him. Some children perhaps like to play in patently distressed states like that. But we don’t need to interpret because it went down in history that Doe, not his son, had murdered his sister-in-law. I can say with assurance, though, that regardless of what went on in that room during that little window of opportunity, in Judas’s opinion, nobody possessed a forked tongue like his Aunty Jetty in the whole, wide, psychologically conflicted world.
So you wouldn’t have thought the boy had it in him, would you? As for Julie, his sister, I think we should talk about therapy again now.
Chapter Thirteen
I like therapy, but I mean good therapy. Crap therapy? Hell, you can send your ambassador for a cardboard cut-out of that for you at the corner shop. Don’t be thinking you go along and therapist says, ‘Ah, guten morgen, analysand. Please to come in and to lie down and to make comfortable. Gut? Ja? Gut. Today’s suggestion, which I sense through intuitive transference, is that we progress immediately to “Archetype” unless you have strong utility preference – owing to nightmare of previous evening – for “Transpersonal Imago”, “Insane Projection” or something else?’ ‘Sure thing, whatever you say, Doc,’ you say. No. Even bad therapy doesn’t happen as badly as that. What it is, is you – yes, you – rushing to be there on time even though you know you’re ridiculously early, and even then you’re not going to speak until that fucker says sorry first. Or else it’s you arriving minutes before the end of the session so you won’t have time to get into anything difficult, or else it’s some ornament on the bookcase freaking you, because it’s been moved a fraction since the last time you were there. The rest of us watching could hardly credit that this therapy business you’ve engaged in is, in fact, voluntary, what with all the apparent self-sabotage that’s involved.
For example, one day Julie Doe – to get her off that hearthrug and away from that strangulation scene and to jump her forward twenty years for a moment – in the thirty-sixth year of her life, left Tiptoe Floorboard’s only feminine bra shop feeling happy and tremendously female. She was on her way to the bus-stop with a magnificent luxury carrier bag over her arm. Just as she got to this bus-stop she was clutched on to by a woman. This was an acquaintance, rushing over from the other side of the road.
‘Julie!’ acquaintance cried. ‘Can I speak to you for a moment? It’s urgent. Sorry too—’ This was said to someone else, who had also magnetically appeared and simultaneously had grabbed hold of Julie. This person was jealous – I mean that was her name. Character-wise, she was possessed of no great sense of propriety, tended on salivation as a way of facial expression, wasn’t – unlike Julie and acquaintance – in any sort of Recovery and, to top everything, had never even heard of a Self-Help recovery book.
‘I know I’m being inappropriate in barging up like this,’ went on acquaintance, ‘and, believe me,’ she said to jealous, ‘it’s not like me to crash – in an immature, irresponsible fashion – through other people’s boundaries. But this is of the utmost. I must speak to Julie. Do you mind? Do you understand?’
Of course jealous minded. Of course she didn’t understand. She herself had rushed over specifically because she wanted to know what was in that fancy carrier bag Julie Doe was holding. What was she doin’ – this maid of all work, this necessary woman, this emptier of chamberpots – coming out of the ultrafeminine brassière shop, when the rest of us are happy to get by on the basics of underwear? After all, if black or white – with full-on functional cups and proper woolly long-john knickers to match – were good enough for our grannies then, jealous thought, they ought to be good enough for us as well.
Now, however, it was ‘Forget grannies. Grannies are dead.’ Jealous wanted to know who was this other person, what was all her personal business, how did Julie Doe know her, was she happy, was she married, how much money did she have? Did she live in a detached house also, and did she have children, and were they Opposition Defiant Disordered children, and what were her problems generally – and specifically – and did her partner ever cheat on her if she had one – did she have one? Did she have tragedies? Did she have illnesses? Were they mental illnesses? And certainly, certainly, jealous didn’t want to feel left out of any of this urgent talk. Julie, however, was relieved at the opportunity of de-latching jealous, so she de-latched with ‘Goodbye, see you again some other time.’ She shouldn’t have said that last bit, for it was surely bringing the ‘next time’ upon her, but it couldn’t be helped. It had been said in haste and out of habit, the way people part from each other with ‘I’ll say a prayer for you’, when both parties know they won’t bother their arse doing anything of the kind. Julie and this new person walked many good and quick steps away from jealous and away from the bus-stop, but by the time they’d reached the junction that used to be near that old wasteground which now had an excellent two-storey Giving-Birth Hospital built on top of it, the acquaintance couldn’t keep the delay in talking up.
‘Julie,’ she said, and by now she was beside herself. ‘I’ve just come from therapy. Just found out at therapy. My therapist says that even though I say I’m upset and annoyed – she says that in reality I’m much, much more than that!’
Julie started. Her acquaintance nodded and hurried on.
‘ “Merely upset and annoyed?” she said, and she seemed to be gloating as she said it. “No, my dear. No, my poppet. No, my ignorant, forty-year-old childling” – and I’m not forty! Do I look forty, Julie? – “Upset and annoyed?” she said. “Oh no no no. It’s ti
me you knew – you’re so much more than that.” ’
Julie was stunned. Both of them were stunned. By this time they had stopped walking and were staring fixedly into each other’s eyes on the High Street.
‘How’d you mean?’ said Julie. ‘I don’t understand. Where is the evidence for your therapist to be saying this? How is it possible anyway, to be more than upset and annoyed?’
‘I walked right into it,’ said acquaintance. She was shaking, her whole body was quaking. ‘And I believe, Julie,’ she continued, ‘my therapist set a trap for me. You’re lucky to be in Not Speaking Therapy. I wish I’d done Not Speaking. Mine tricked me into talking before I realised I had a choice.’
Julie felt a cold fear – a grabbing, clutching, ‘got-you!’ fear. She’d always suspected there was trickery in therapy. Whatever trick this woman’s therapist had played upon her – no matter different therapies, different streets, different fifty-minute hours, different patients, and even though Julie and her therapist were definitely on the Not Speaking agenda – would Julie’s one day break frame, jump agendas, and try that same trick on her? She shuddered and urged her fellow therapee on.
‘I was late as usual,’ said this woman – and I’m afraid I can’t give her name because I don’t know it. I think it was Mary, or Ann, something spectacular like that. All I know is that she and Julie used to meet and speak the programme of Recovery in the Self-Help bookshop until one day, unaccountably, Julie didn’t want to talk ‘Recovery’ any more. She started wanting. That was it. Just wanting. Then she went further and started buying things as well. First she bought toiletries when she never used to buy toiletries. Then she bought a bangle. Then a lipstick. Then she went to the beauty salon and came out an hour later with a list of treatments in her hand. Before we know where we are, she’ll have gone and done that homework she received just now on leaving the bra shop. I mean she’ll be bringing that suit of armour to a charity shop before long.
I’d better explain. As I said, Julie – like her Aunt Jotty years before her – was in this Not Speaking Therapy. In this type of therapy, over time, someone possessed of the rare experience in the art of keeping quiet would facilitate Julie in moving from the silence of ‘Fuck you, I hate you!’ to the more subtle silence of no words being necessary because ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of – we are all one’. Her Aunt Jotty assured her that, even if she didn’t make it to the gold medal of ‘We are all one’ and thus got head-hunted into Heaven because of super-fast-track-enlightenment, Julie wasn’t to get downhearted. Jotty, even after her three-times-a-week sessions for twelve years during which nothing was said except the civilisations, never managed to attain ‘We Are All One’ herself. ‘But things improved,’ she said. ‘The fact of going into the room, Julie. Just the fact of getting to the point where you can sit down and face, then hate, then stop hating, then feel rather okay in the presence of another person will change a lot internally. Then, of course, externally. Most certainly, you will have started to come in from that awful, terrible, freezing, damaging cold.’
So, there wasn’t much to report, really, about what went on in those early sessions of Julie’s, apart from – as with Jotty – ‘Time’s up’, ‘Here’s my bill for October’ and ‘I’ll be going on holiday during these dates’. Gradually after most sessions, though, Julie would feel better without realising why she was feeling better. She hadn’t grasped the concept that her therapist might be holding all her hatred for her, thus enabling her, meantime, to venture out into new territory and to be half-decent – at least some of the time – to everybody else.
Hence the bra shop.
During one of those, now more frequent, lulls in the radius of her negativity and suicidal tendencies, Julie surprised herself one day by going straight to Tiptoe Floorboard’s only feminine bra shop. Of course, as often happened in the town, years ago it had been trebled up with a tool shed shop, a motor maintenance shop, and with a ‘man with van’ business begging to be allowed to tag on also. But even then, more businesses soon wanted to join as well. In the end, meetings were held, deals were struck, percentages worked out, shareholders invited and an arcade of shops was opened all along that side of the High Street. The bra shop was now part of it. In it, Julie bought herself this totally beautiful bra. I’d love to tell you about the bra because of everybody I know, you, personally, deserve to be the one told about it, but I can’t because it would be notches down from undergoing the consequences of looking into the very face of God. It was awesome. It was super-incredible elegant. Perhaps I’d better tell you about the packaging instead.
It had been tastefully packaged, in layers upon layers of pastel-coloured wrapping paper. After that, it had been placed, along with flower petals, a few fat chocolates, a tiny bottle of special aura ruby red magic protection Fourth Dimension potion, into a pink and black, King and Queen, luxury carrier bag. This bag had long satin-shiny cord handles for slipping over one shoulder and, I’m telling you, if there was any way you could swing this, you’d wear that carrier bag as well. It had black satin slips of tiny ties also, I mean on the inside, to hold both edges of the top tantalisingly together. And the whole of the inside was wallpapered in strips of pink and cream. The inside rim of the bag had little gleaming black polka dots on a soft pink background and the outside rim had little pink polkas rearranged on cream.
What Julie now had in her possession, if not yet on her body, was in contrast to what usually she had on her body, and by ‘usually’ I don’t mean something from the average ‘plain bread and butter’, ‘middle of the road’, objective masculine bra territory. I mean one of her ‘Actionman’, ‘Ruthless Aggression Assortment’, ‘Pesticide Application’ ultra-masculine bras. She hadn’t bought any silk thong, cami, shortie, string, brief or any other kind of ethereal delicate knicker to match the total feminine she had just purchased. They were still too much of the lower territory for Julie’s fragile Recovery to be able to engage with yet. But she had bought this ultra-feminine, and that can only mean inroads were being made into Julie Doe’s relinquishment of trauma clothes. And I know you know trauma clothes.
‘Ach, these auld things?’ you say.
‘Don’t make me laugh,’ you continue. But you know you’re not going to laugh because you don’t think this is funny. Too close to the bone. I’ve gone too close to your bone and what a cheek, for you don’t even know me. ‘Not trauma clothes!’ or ‘What are you talking about, trauma clothes?’ or ‘Trauma clothes! My clothes aren’t trauma! I’m not in trauma! This is a case of One Size Fits All!’
You give a terse smile and you brush off my remark and you make a rude gesture of dismissing me also, along with my preposterous trauma clothes claim. These are just clothes you put on when you’re cleaning, you say. These are just clothes you wear about the house. These are just clothes you pop to the garage in at midnight to pick up your icecream and fags before the garage closes for the evening. These are just clothes you wear to hold and comfort yourself.
‘Yes, but why do you need comforted?’ I persist. ‘And are you sure, friend, they’re not trauma clothes you’re wearing?’
‘Yes. Am sure! Not trauma clothes!’ And now, thoroughly cross, you turn and walk away.
Did you know it was Jotty Doe’s sister, JanineJoshuatine who, indirectly, twenty years earlier, had got Jotty interested in taking over the management of Tom Spaders’s old gunshop? He had been imprisoned and she said she’d look after it for him and she did. She turned it into a bra shop. This happened by accident. One day she found herself down on the floor scrubbing out the old energy. Then it turned into a bra shop magically by itself. Full of guilt – for she could see how this looked – she had been working up to coming clean and telling Tom about this slight swap-over in merchandise. She meant to do so during every single time she visited him over the next five years he was inside. He had been sentenced to eight for ‘Slaughter of Man’ but had been released early. Even so, right up until the day she met him and they were walking
back into town where he could see for himself the extent of her ‘renovations’, Jotty still hadn’t been able to own up even then.
For his part, though, whilst in prison, and once over his bitternesses, Tom had begun to suspect something like this was happening – not that he knew it was a bra shop. His powers of intuition had not become as fine-honed as all that. It was that his rather enforced period of reflection and reassessment upon himself and of his values during the time he was in prison had detached him somewhat from the need for his shop to be Tiptoe’s Best Gunshop. In fact, it no longer seemed to matter that it should be a gunshop – though don’t be thinking that meant he was okay with it being a bra shop instead. ‘But, my love,’ Jotty would say, taking his arm and squeezing it, ‘don’t be thinking it has to be just women’s underwear. I wouldn’t be averse to selling men’s underwear too.’ But that wouldn’t work. Let’s face it. Heterosexual men are strange. Apart from the town’s gay-men percentage catchment coming in and having fully fledged happy discussions with each other about the material, the style, the texture, the colour and should they buy it?, or else coming in singly and having fully fledged happy discussions in their heads with somebody about the material, the style, the texture, the colour and should they buy it?, you’d only have the wives, or the mothers, or the odd monosyllabic hetero-orphan bachelor hurrying in, with no interest, to buy the average, sensible, practical stuff instead.
It was not that sort of bra shop. It was the opposite to that sort of bra shop. You had to take an interest in the merchandise or face the consequences of being barred from the place.