by Anna Burns
Anyway, this ‘to be or not to be’ a bra shop is something me and you will have to get into before we part company. For now, just know that Jotty had taken on the invaluable Superdeluxe Director-Facilitator role. This was a job somebody with the right spirit simply has to take on during women’s vulnerable bra-transition shocks in the Recovery business. I’m talking about when a client tries on a bra and finds she is wearing something where, for the first time, the physical fit is perfect but the emotional discomfort and grief engendered by the physical fit is terrifying. Jotty, now fifty-five years old, a golden, groomed, womanly woman, who read her clientele expertly and who was unafraid of any colour, of any texture, of any design, of any line, was eminently qualified to implement the feminine. She would soothe, reassure and encourage these women not to give up. She herself had had lots of practice and the town knew she’d had lots of practice. She used to coax herself – then later her sister – down from ceilings, prise herself and her sister out of trauma clothes, many times over, many years before.
Not an easy thing to do. Look how touchy you got just now when I suggested – merely as an experiment – that those clothes you’re wearing might, oh, just might, be trauma. You hated me as an emotional terrorist. How much harder, then, to approach someone unmistakably deep in the wearing of trauma, and to persuade that person into the changing room to take that trauma off.
That’s what Jotty did. She was really terrifically good at this. Not only did she get Julie as well as many other women out of the numerous ranges of super-ultra-masculine bras and into ultra-feminine bras for the first time in their female existence. She also, through personal example, got them to do homework. The homework centred on what to do in order to welcome your beautiful new feminine bra home.
Basically, to break this down, know there are three things to remember. First, don’t disrespect yourself by undercutting and attacking yourself if you can’t manage to do your homework. Second, if you do disrespect yourself by attacking yourself, then simply remember that, automatically when you do this, you will also be disrespecting and feeling hostility towards everybody else as well. Can’t explain the science. Don’t ask me for the science. Third, there are some nasty cruel bastards in the world, but hold to the thought that there are many less nasty cruel bastards than currently you think there are. And that knowledge I’ve just given you – via Jotty and her homework – is Step One in getting the lovely new bra home.
Step Two is running the gauntlet. This happens automatically and it’s as if the Devil himself has been keeping an eye from the Leprechaun corner to plant little bomblets to happen to you as soon as you’ve left that bra shop. The gauntlet, in contradiction to what you think, could be just one negative or hostile person, who keeps appearing and reappearing, with you simply unable to get rid of her, or it could be one person after another person, or it could be whole groups of people. It’s extremely unpredictable and again, don’t ask for the science. All I can say is, it has something to do with Post-Purchase Trauma Syndrome, and with you thinking you’re the only person in the world who can get excited about something and not know what to do about it, when truth is, in reality, you are not.
After you’ve run the gauntlet, chances are, when you get in through your door, you might want to kill yourself. That’s perfectly normal. At this stage you take out the envelope with the instructions that the Superdeluxe Director had the foresight previously to write down and slip into your luxury bra bag. These instructions make up Step Three. They consist of an easy bit and a hard bit. Do the hard bit first. Are you ready? It’s to make up your bed, in your bedroom, as if you were going to sleep in it. Yes – I mean spend the night in it. Then do spend the night in it. Jotty glosses over this bit in her instructions as she doesn’t want to give you time to protest. Next day – easy. All you’ve got to do is get rid of something, or even just to entertain the thought of getting rid of something. It could be from your person, it could be from your house and Jotty suggests the scraggliest of one of your numerous masculine bras. If you can’t manage that, how about closing a few drawers properly or, if you’re really up to it, go for that suit of armour. Why have you got such an ugly disturbing stolen heirloom in your house in the first place? As for that feminine bra, you’ll be relieved to know you don’t have to, for now, put it on your body. I know you’re dreading this and so have slipped on a few ‘somebody’s got to do it’, ‘masculine managerial brio’ bras all at the same time instead. That’s fine. Do that, but hold to the thought that the feminine is now on your premises – infusing the place from deep within its luxury wrappings – and that it will be on your body, believe me, before long.
That explains the suit of armour and how it might end up in a charity shop. On leaving the bra shop Julie, with a marked softening of her features, had been confident of being able to do all of her homework but now, standing beside Mary, who was continuing to detail her therapist’s onslaught into the ‘upset and annoyed’ position, Julie was less confident, less sure of herself.
Mary always went late to therapy, very late – five minutes before the end of each session she’d turn up. She did this as a way of putting her fingers up at her therapist and also as a way of controlling the therapy session itself.
‘So I went in the door and went over to sit in the chair as usual,’ said Ann, ‘because as you know, Julie, I won’t lie on that couch thing.’ Julie nodded. There was a couch thing in Julie’s therapist’s also, and she too, would never lie on it lest, her therapist – taking advantage of a moment of trust which would never happen anyway – leant a over and tried to strangle her for sure. So far, so understandable. Everything was making normal therapy sense to Julie. ‘But then,’ said Ann, ‘it happened. I saw.’
‘What? What did you see?’
‘Oh, Julie!’ cried Ann. ‘The chair! The therapy chair – my chair! – it had been moved! It had been moved three to four centimetres! I know, because I always measure it on entering by the lines on the floorboard.’
The women were clutching each other, Mary unwittingly holding tight to the cord handles of Julie’s new luxury lingerie bag and Julie, in the build-up of tension, reverting to the comfort of clinging to Mary’s shabby trauma clothes.
‘My God,’ Julie whispered. ‘What did you do?’
‘ “Too close! You’re too close! You moved your chair closer since the last session!” That’s what I shouted at first,’ said Ann, ‘for, in my upset, I made a mistake in thinking the moved chair to be hers and not mine. And she said, “I haven’t moved my chair, Mary.” And I said, “You have moved your chair” And she said, “No. I haven’t moved my chair.” And I said, “Moved the chair and being dishonest! Disgraceful in a therapist! Did move the chair! Did move the chair!” And that’s when I realised my mistake and that she hadn’t moved the chair. Meanwhile she said nothing but just sat there observing me. I know she hates me. All those therapists all those times, they’ve hated me.’
‘I agree,’ said Julie. ‘So what happened then?’
‘So I said to her, “You misunderstand me, therapist. This is what’s been moved. This chair! This chair here’s been moved,” and I stood by the door, pointing over to my chair, and I pretended I’d meant that one all along.’
Apparently, though, according to Mary, her therapist didn’t stop there.
‘ “Okay,” she said. “So you think the chair’s been—” “Has been! Three to four centimetres!” “Well, what does it mean, Ann? What have you lost, that this chair’s been moved from the position you normally find it in? We’ve got thirty seconds left of the session. Do you feel strong enough to begin to explore that?” ’
Totally horrific. No wonder Ann or Mary or whoever she was crashed through other people’s boundaries. If something like that had been said to me, I’d be crashing through everybody’s boundaries as well.
Mary couldn’t let the matter drop, but also she could hardly say, ‘Someone’s been sitting in my chair.’ She didn’t want to give her therapist the
power to say, ‘Yes, Mary. Other people come to see me. Many, many other people. You’re not special. It’s not you I love.’
So Mary was still stirred up, and Julie, grasping her predicament, was unable to stop herself transferring it to a potential one of her own. As she did so, all her happiness and sense of achievement at having bought that bra dwindled. All sense of good transformation, of anything lovely ever being possible, all the firing up of excitement, instantly was gone.
‘Mary!’ she interrupted, now very panicked. ‘I think this is bad therapy. Very bad therapy. Bad psychobabble, bab-bab-I mean bad—’
‘Exactly,’ interrupted Mary. ‘Only she’s not a bad therapist, Julie, don’t be saying that about my therapist. How would you like it if I said your therapist was a bad therapist?’ Mary was allowed to slag off her therapist, in fact slagging off her therapist was a requirement, was part of her healing process, the thing to remember though, was this was her therapist, Mary’s therapist, just like the chair was her chair, Mary’s chair, and that meant it wasn’t the ticket for anybody else to go having a sit-down or a slag-off as well. ‘So I said, “Stop!” ’ said Mary. ‘I said, “Stop! You’re not helping me. You’re making me upset—” ’ ‘Oh, so you’re upset?’ interrupted this therapist. And here, the therapist raised her right eyebrow, the way Ann said she always did when she wanted to indicate she could say more than she was choosing. What this eyebrow said, according to Mary, was ‘No, poppet. No, my dear. No, my middle-aged helpling. It’s not merely that you’re upset and annoyed. The reality is, for years, for your whole life maybe, you’ve been much, much more than that.’
By then there were only six-five-four, oh God, three seconds left of the therapy and the session ended by running over. Mary hated running over because she knew it was her therapist’s way of putting her fingers back up at her. Also, she didn’t like to meet the next patient coming in, for who’s this? she’d think. How dare this person be here and how dysfunctional was he in comparison with her own dysfunction? How long had he been coming? Who, between them, had more right to be coming, because they’d been coming first?
‘Hold on,’ said Julie. ‘Are you saying that your therapist didn’t actually say “more than” upset and annoyed, and didn’t say either, all that “poppet” business? That it was just the look on her eyebrow that told you she said that?’
Julie was relieved – greatly and selfishly – for while Ann had been splurging, she had automatically begun her own process of imagining what her own therapist might one day spring on her.
‘Well, Julie,’ she’d say, ‘what about that rape? Those rapes? And what about your mother – or is it your aunt – still up there in that madhouse? What about all those relatives up there also? How come you don’t visit, and as for the Doe gang – what do you feel about their imminent early release?
‘As for Tom Spaders’ – and here the therapist would put her finger on it – ‘why do you still believe the rumours? Why won’t you acknowledge that your Aunt Jotty’s husband killed your father probably in order to save you from being strangled? Why do you still pretend twenty years on that Tom Spaders is either still in hospital, recovering from some long ago mugging and stabbing, or else that he’s a mass murderer, or else that he never existed at all?’
The hearsay that had been circulating at the time of the arrests and which for a long time afterwards had gone down in ‘Births, Deaths and Rumours That Are Probably True’ was that Tom Spaders who, on the whole, except for the odd time, hadn’t killed anybody, was in fact a serial murderer. It was he, they said, who had been the leader of the gang. Julie, on the whole, accepted this, simply because she couldn’t bear the direct chaos of knowing it was her father. That meant she had to believe – through a huge manipulation of her brain – that someone else, not Spaders, was married to her Aunt Jotty instead. She ignored this person, either by not going where he was, or by instantly removing herself from wherever he was if she turned up and found him there, or by instructing him, by the use of powerful telepathy, not to approach her, or by having her aunt never refer to him, on pain of shunning and never seeing her aunt again.
Other rumours that had circulated at the time also were that John Doe, Julie’s father, had in truth been Tiptoe Floorboard’s Great Messiah, thus totally innocent of killing anybody – except Jetty Doe. He was still viewed as having killed Jetty. Indeed, the Ordinary Decent Folk had always known he would kill her. Some said he killed her over chewing gum, some said he killed her over a cough, and some said he killed her over a sneeze. As for Jotty Doe, his sister, the woman went mad, they said. Just like the other sisters, she had broken down and had had to go into the mental hospital. When they let her out, however, she was even madder than before. She closed down the town’s best gunshop, for example, then reopened it as something unrecognisable and, although it did sell masculines, you had to plead a strong case if you were a woman and wanted one of those. As for the First Daughter, Jane, there had never been any First Daughter. The daughters had started with the Second Daughter. That daughter had been called Julie and, went the rumour, Julie Doe was dead.
Well, that should’ve given the game away for Julie knew she wasn’t dead, but here we have an example of the strength of denial in the face of absolutely anything. However, just as Mary or Ann, in her therapy, was currently being brought to the realisation about her skeletal wardrobe of two words business, Julie was being brought to the realisation that she couldn’t buy a bangle or a bra or close drawers in her house or take a suit of armour to a recycling centre – all in the context of going to therapy – without expecting other parameters to shift inwardly and outwardly as well. So, it’s no wonder – when faced with the ‘Fingers on the buzzer: “Who was the real perpetrator?” ’ – people prefer to focus on chairs being moved, people cracking chewing gum or the hidden meaning of eyebrows moving up and down instead.
Well, thought Julie, her therapist could try to shift her from the Not Talking position to the Talking position but it wouldn’t work, for Julie had her protection. This was her amnesia and her constant passings-out. I don’t mean faints. I mean disappearings into other dimensions. At that moment on the High Street, for example, a passing-out cut in to stop Julie receiving any more transmissions from deep-struggling Mary. She had a merciful split-off moment, during which she, deep-struggling Julie, disappeared. She came back quickly, only to be conscious of standing on the High Street, speaking with that woman she’d met a few times in the town’s Self-Help bookshop. Maryanne or Annemarie – she believed she was called.
At this point Annemarie realised she was clutching Julie’s luxury carrier bag and the effect upon her was as if she’d just realised her hands had been stuck in a rancid bag of dead blowflies, and she pulled them away shrieking, looking at Julie as if betrayed. On Julie’s part, she had just come to the realisation that she had been clutching Maryanne’s trauma clothes but, before she could wallow in them – for at that moment she was needy – Maryanne callously yanked the old familiars away. The two women parted then, with Maryanne thinking, she did say it, my therapist did say it, and with Julie thinking that as soon as she got home she’d take her practice clothes off and fall asleep in her kitchen with her trauma clothes on.
On the way home, however, the Superdeluxe Director note decided prematurely to jump out at her. It reminded her that she was never going to do it, that is, give up her old ways, except through the chaos, that only through the turmoil itself would she, in fact, change. She must resolve in small chunks, it said. She must develop a whole new lateral outlook. And why not? it added, given she had developed such a momentous fragmented outlook in order not to have to deal with it for so long? Yes, she was back in the old groove, in that old sequence, but that didn’t mean the sequence was all there’d ever be. Putting her key in the lock therefore, she entered her house and, instead of stuffing her luxury bag into the first cupboard she came to, she set it prominently on the table then, ignoring a midday-nap pull towards the safety of her
haphazard kitchen cushions, she went into her bedroom, crawled into her bed and fell asleep.
Chapter Fourteen
In the Doe house twenty years earlier, the police, after they had re-entered, bent over and picked Julie up from the hearth. Jotty, Julie’s aunt, still clutching Tom Spaders, was having her fingers prised off Tom by the police and by the ambulance crew also. She was holding on because she wanted to make him alive because she thought he was dead.
Of course, the Ordinary Decent Folk were back outside amassing. Now the point was, were they amassing out of approbation or out of disapprobation? One can never tell with amassments, not until someone starts the applause off or else throws that first stone.
This particular group of Ordinary Decent, this general public, this great curious commonality, was by now a big pushing shove. It was a whole pile of grabbing pulses that everyone was plugging into, one insatiable wave upon wave of mounting excitement. Folk were dashing over from everywhere, some carrying babies, some shouting, ‘Here’s half a coin. Mind this baby!’, some abandoning their positions in long-established queues outside phoneboxes, all because everybody wanted to know what was going on. ‘Were the Does being arrested?’ they asked. ‘You mean they’re actually being arrested? So, it was the case then that someone had tipped that Interfering Foreign Policeman off.’
The composition of the Folk too, had split further. Until this second, there had been the Pro-Gang, Anti-Gang, ghost-hunting and the art dealer contingents. Now there was a fifth faction. I call it the Fifth Faction because I don’t want to confuse you. It really consisted of members of the six war factions rolled into one. I contend, and hold my contention, that they weren’t part of this story because – in terms of logistics and the time component we’re dealing with, as in ‘We have to finish soon’ – I don’t know how to fit them all in. ‘Well, they must be fitted in,’ I hear you pipe up. ‘If they hail from this town, then they’re part of society. Society’s made up of everybody!’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘go change your trauma clothes and leave my methods alone.’