by Anna Burns
They turned up, this Fifth Faction, to have a chat with Doe. Unlike their attitude towards the other town gangs, they had let him carry on his Empire without any interference or taking of it off him. This was unusual, but it was because Doe’s four brothers had been committed members of the Fifth Faction, up until the point they’d been caught in an ambush and slain. So, out of respect for the dead martyrs, they were leaving Doe alone and were only coming now to pay him a visit. A problem had arisen and they had to check him out, along with everybody else. So these steely, detached, emotionally unmovable insusceptibles – if you believe that – were going to put a few words to him. These words were, ‘Do you have our stuff?’ Further words were, ‘If you have our stuff, Doe, regardless of Benedict and Samuel and Abel and Abel – God rest their souls, your brothers, for they were great soldiers – we’re going to kill you.’ All of the factionists’ bombing stuff, you see, had disappeared.
But back to the house and the Ordinary Decent Folk, and don’t get the Ordinary Decent Folk wrong. Nobody wanted the house to be set fire to, except perhaps the children. Children of the town tended to like things like that. They were not insensate, these young ones. They had picked up the adrenaline that was spinning round the area, and naturally they wanted their little crumble of something too. So there they were, six-, seven-, eight-year-olds, with their high and tight GI haircuts, strapped up, kitted out, made to look like armed men and armed women any postage stamp would be proud to carry a picture of but, instead of guns, they were carrying bundles of sticks and matches whilst trying to conceal what were obviously petrol cans in their hands. But no. The house would not be set fire to. The Fifth Faction had no opinion on it. The ghost hunters, however, needed it intact because they had to carry out their paranormal investigations. The dealers wanted it intact because of all the art objects in there they were planning future fests with. The Pro-Gang supporters wanted it intact because it had to be made into a Miss Havisham Museum in honour of their beloved Community Centre members, and the Anti-Gang wanted it intact because the more evidence gathered from within the bowels of that evil building, the more chance those perpetrators would get sentenced for far more than their already estimated five hundred years each.
Similar to when the police had led the gang out during their arrests earlier, again we craned our necks to get a good ghoul. It was definitely exciting but in that rather nauseous, stomach-heaving way. I mean the way you might feel if you were a three-year-old and hadn’t yet got addicted to horse-racing or to boxing. It’s on the telly, this boxing, this horse-racing, and although you want to, because you feel sick, you simply cannot pull your little three-year-old self away. I guess this is where parents could come in handy.
Anyway, due to the excitement, I was on the verge of throwing up over the person standing in front of me when all exigencies of vomit vanished because it was Tom Cusack standing in front. He was intact too – not a single gunshot wound was available on him. We recognised each other immediately and greeted each other more heartily – given we were practically strangers – than was meet. But you know how it is. When communal energy is heightened owing to something unbelievable, you’d take a hold of anybody. You’d take a hold of some bellboy from some hotel on the other side of the world, who just so happened to be rushing by on an errand at that moment, and you’d splurge your whole incest history to him, regardless of whether he wanted to hear it or not.
‘What’s going on?’ Cusack said, for he had just arrived and hadn’t realised the current Doe versus Police situation. I couldn’t answer initially because ‘Didn’t Tom Spaders shoot you?’ I was trying my best to be polite not to ask.
Turns out he wasn’t a ghost, for I know you’re tutting and thinking, oh, move on, move on! for that must be the plausible explanation. No. Turns out that, despite the sound of that lone gunshot we all heard in Spaders’s place that morning, Spaders hadn’t shot him. They had had one of those partings that hadn’t ended in a shooting instead.
‘Ach, he’s a hard man to talk to,’ said Tom suddenly of the other Tom. ‘And he’s getting harder every time I meet him. I’ve exhausted advice and even Anti-Blueprinting as ways of getting through to him. I myself am exhausted, and now I won’t be able to reconsult the dictionary, because Angelus has decided to bring it back to the library because she doesn’t like the way I’m being affected by it any more.’
I nodded and clucked sympathetically.
‘Yeah. Poor Tom,’ he said. ‘But don’t be telling anybody I told you …’ He paused and looked at me and that was when I gave my word that I was as the grave and that I wouldn’t tell anybody, but it’s okay – he didn’t say anything about not dropping big hints.
Supposing you have this torn-out page from a stolen medical dictionary and you want someone to read about a mental condition in it that you think that person’s suffering from. What do you do? You take it out of your pocket in a gunshop and you spread it right out between you and yer man over the counter, pushing the loaded guns a bit out of the way. You point to the relevant section. But him, the unstable one, who might have this syndrome you’re indicating, is not listening and instead is picking up these guns and starting to try them, to see how they handle. He’s adopting his firing position. And in every one of these positions, he’s aiming these guns at you.
‘So I said … then he said … then I said …’ went on Cusack. And apparently, whilst he had been pointing to the torn page from the book in order to educate Spaders, that shot was fired that we ourselves heard. Turns out, though, it wasn’t the third-dimensional Spaders who’d pulled the trigger. Instead it was his psycho-spatial part. I mean the part that was annoyed because Spaders hadn’t gone out yet and killed anybody. It had got itself into such a temper that, in the end, its only recourse was to go and get an immaterial essence gun and fire it off itself.
So it did.
It shot that little human being construction, Tom Cusack, shot him in the solar plexus. What a dirty bastard Psycho-Spatial! And it was over in a jiffy, and there was the poor plexus – disrupted, shocked, gaping and ever so creepily silent. A huge hole was visible in poor Cusack’s non-third-dimensional front.
So you see, all easy of understanding, if only one goes back and unravels from the beginning. The annoyed Psycho-Spatial Spaders was able to shoot the Psycho-Spatial Cusack, with the physical Cusack feeling not so much that something had winded him but that something, out of nowhere, had busted him apart. That was why he was unable to continue reasoning with Spaders and had to give up on the Anti-Blueprinting. That was why, slightly staggering, feeling ill, mumbling something about having to get home, to get to his wife, he had left the shop.
I must say, he was looking bad, and no wonder, given what had happened to him. And don’t you realise that if Spaders had been a bit more ratcheted-on in his psycho-spatial condition, that murderous part might have stepped outside its psychic dimension and picked up one of those loaded guns for real? So luckily for both Toms, one wasn’t killed and the other didn’t do the killing of him. ‘He keeps mixing people up,’ Cusack concluded. ‘I honestly think he thought I was somebody else.’
He said goodbye then, for he wasn’t interested in what was happening at the Doe house, and this completely astounded me. ‘Maybe later,’ he said. For now, his digestion wanted him to go home. So off he went, and I watched as he walked along the pavement, under the grey-darkness of the shop canopies, with the sun blazing beyond him just a little upfront.
Now the thing to tell which I should have told earlier when we were talking about rumours is that a rumour is ‘a type of fish’. That’s according to one dictionary. It is ‘the shifting five minutes before dusk’, according to another. It is ‘false words on the air’, according to a third. It is a ‘calumniator for pouring treacle’ according to a fourth. The main thing a rumour is, though, according to the one true source of definition, is a world people enter after they’ve fallen into, and can’t be bothered climbing out of, some really big, man-made
hole.
Gravediggers, two of them, had initiated a rumour a while back about the gunshop man, Tom Spaders. They hinted he was a child molester. Well, Ordinary Decent Folk only have to get a whiff of the word ‘molester’ to be entitled to open up their china cabinets and to get their lynch ropes out. Molesting is different from incest. Incest is a subject, as I’ve intimated, that automatically closes Tiptoe’s mental curtains. Molester, on the other hand, is a subject that opens them wide up. It’s somebody out there, see. Not you, for you’re my friend. And not me, for I’m your friend. Nor is it our spouses – for they’re upstairs babysitting whilst we’re down here, reading and writing to each other. The thing is, though, you don’t actually have to have a molester. Context is everything. The gravediggers’ hint was the context here.
The Ordinary Decent Folk were edgy. Apart from the ghost-hunting, the gallerist antique dealer and the Fifth Faction contingents – none of whom were interested in the topic of the molester – everybody else was feeling upset and annoyed. The Anti-Gang section, though, glad of the arrests, had already gone home to have their ‘justice has been served or better have been served’ dinners. The Pro-Gang, on the other hand, already cheated out of offensively slanging the police, which people naturally incline to out of some deep inherent constitutional hatred principle, hung around, for they felt there must be something else in the way of destructive protest they could do.
‘This is a warrior culture,’ one of them asserted to the press during a street interview. ‘And them!’ – meaning the police – ‘Those iconoclast busters! They’re trying to take away our Greek Myth Syndrome.’ ‘Yeah,’ said another. ‘And if they think we’re gonna hold some peaceful demonstration on some little grassy knoll …’ While that was going on, the journalists came over to me for the official spokesperson quote on the supernatural aspect. I must have one of those faces. ‘How should I know?’ I replied. I was astonished. ‘I don’t know any supernatural aspect.’ And I demonstrated my denial with a rather huffy shrug.
So here, right now, after the latest murders and arrests and ambulance transportings, the crowd was being told to disperse because everything was back to normal and there was nothing more to see. This made the Folk bristle. It certainly was not going to disperse, it muttered, just because it had been ordered to. ‘Oh, leave them then,’ said the police. ‘We’re understaffed and overstretched. They’ll go home soon enough when it rains.’
The police went away with all the things they had come for and, immediately, the antique dealers orgasmically ran back in to ransack the house. The thing to know, though, was that it wasn’t raining, and because it wasn’t, the last of the Ordinary Decent – for the Fifth had gone also, given Doe was dead and so wouldn’t be helping them with their enquiries – was at a loss as to what to do next. Normally they’d set fire to something but, as I said, the most obvious thing was sacrosanct. They could fight the gallerists, they supposed, to stop them taking out the Havisham furniture. But that was ordinary, rather predictable. There must be something. Something more dramatic. They cast around for a lead.
It was a case of bored-bored-bored, but not really bored. It was more like shock-shock-shock after all that excitement. That’s an extreme cocktail. It’s always hard to get emotionally grounded after any upheaval, and it would be even harder for this lot for, remember, they only had two words.
They found one. A lead, I mean. And it was Tom Cusack. It was a rampage and, yes, all right, I’ll admit it was a rampage. But from their point of view, it was akin to hanging out the bunting, to avenging their rights, to taking the law justifiably into their own hands.
‘Look!’ cried one. ‘He’s over there! Just passing the morgue confectionery. Quick! Quick! Let’s head him off at the sweetshop!’
So there you are. As far as the Ordinary Decent Folk and that lynch reaction were concerned, all it was really was that they had to get somebody. So they got Cusack. They got him as a child molester, even though they knew he wasn’t a child molester. And it wasn’t a lynch reaction either. That was the rumour played up about it later on. In reality, it was a tar and feathering and it took place against a lamp-post right outside the sweetshop. As usual, it happened like lightning. And it wasn’t fatal. Was that easier than a lynching? Should Tom Cusack be grateful for that?
Apparently, as I discovered later, the Folk had seen Tom talking to me over on the sidewalk, just up from the morgue confectionery. The morgue confectionery, as you know, was beside the confectionery morgue. They closed in on him just as he passed the last of the sweetshop’s gunshops, unaware anyone was bearing down on him. He was thinking how well his day had started, but then how it had gone astray and in the end had run away from him. He was glad he would soon be home, running things by his wife.
The Ordinary Decent Folk, for their part, were remembering how the gravediggers long ago had said they’d seen Tom messing about with some children in the graveyard. Even though they knew it had been the other Tom, and even though, anyway, the other Tom hadn’t been molesting either, one Tom was as good as another. So they rushed over to get this one instead.
Now, the thing about tar and featherings is, if you’re not there when they begin, but say you stroll up just after, I’m telling you, you won’t know at first what you’ve come upon. That happened to some passers-by. Strangers. Two girls. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. They strolled into the tail end of this almighty tar and feathering and they were chatting – on whether to buy tights or stockings or those new hosieries called hold-ups which, apparently, were the latest beauty things in the shops. The girls were taking into account that these new lovely items might be better than the usual, because tights can pull at the groin and suspender belts for stockings can be uncomfortable at the waist sometimes but, on the other hand, what if they were to buy those hold-ups and they didn’t stay up but fell down? This was what the poor girls were discussing when they came to the realisation that they were in the middle of a silence. No sound at all was suddenly coming their way. Until that moment, they could have sworn there had been some sort of noisy commotion going on just around the corner from them. Yet, now they were round this corner, there was only silence, with a huge group of people at the bottom looking up their way.
Why were they looking? Why were they staring? The teenagers nervously moved closer, one to the other. Then they looked at the conglomeration of rubbish all around them on the ground. There were sweet packets, cigarette packets, cigarette butts, dirty sticky stuff and tufts of hair that had been shaved or cut off and black stringy tufty things. Pieces of bread and pieces of dead pigeon. Just the odd fluffy feather – and that’s because, you see, you can always get tar, but feathers aren’t always easy to come by. Would you hand over your pillow? Why should you hand over your pillow when them others taking part aren’t rushing to their houses to donate their pillows? Don’t be a fool. Hold on. Like everybody else, just stick on rubbish and whatever else comes to hand instead. So, what a mess, the girls were thinking. Has some party just happened in this spot where they were standing? Was someone getting married? And that was when they registered the lamp-post. And that was when they let out those two big screams.
Well, I was about to sidle away myself but Jotty appeared, eyes red, face a mess, every hair out of place – I mean every hair – and all from that earlier crying. Blind to everything, she headed straight over and took a hold of my arm.
‘Ow! That hurt!’ I said.
‘Want you to do me something. Need a big favour.’ Didn’t sound like a favour. Sounded like an order. And my arm was getting nipped terrible, she was gripping it that hard.
‘Don’t do favours,’ I said. ‘Can’t.’ I made things up on the spot as to why I couldn’t do favours. I even took topics from her own favourite filing system – Fourth Dimension, spirit realms, Upper, Lower and Middle Earth territory examples – then finally, ‘Let me go, you’re hurting me and, anyway, I’m leaving town about now.’
I knew what she was after, see, and I wante
d none of it.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re gonna do it. You’re gonna help me dig up that coffin. Maybe even all his fantasy coffins.’ Then her mouth fell open and she forgot about me and the digging up of the coffins. The grip on my arm got tighter, though. I noticed that.
‘Who?’ she whispered. ‘Who’s that? Tied to the lamp-post?’
Through her own disturbed urgent perceptions, the screaming of the girls had at last penetrated. Puzzled, she looked over their way. What was the matter? Then she, too, noticed the silence. She saw the crowd, which had pulled back to the sidelines. Some appeared nervous, some with arms crossed, still defiant, all of them looking up our way. She looked back towards the girls, and that’s when she, too, noticed the lamp-post. She squinted at the lamp-post.
‘Tom Cusack,’ I said.
She let go. No more nipping. No more demanding. Over the road she was running, bolting, falling over herself – and that meant, of course, I had to continue bystanding. All the same, I was dreadfully shaken. Do her something! And to me – when I don’t do things! Help her dig up coffins! Was she out of her mind?
She had taken charge. I mean sort of. In some kind of hysterical fashion, she yelled to a group of children to go and get Mrs Cusack, or any of the Mr Cusacks – that was Angelus and Tom’s four brothers. I hadn’t met any of the brothers and was just thinking this was the time I was going to meet them when I realised it wasn’t the children she was yelling instructions to. With another frisson of horror, I realised it was myself.
‘Me?’ I squeaked. ‘You want me to do something?’
‘Do it!’ she yelled. ‘Go and get them now!’
Well, of course I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. What was she thinking, to involve me in these matters? Hurriedly – for I could see she was worked up and might explode at any moment – I whispered to nearby children, possibly foot soldiers, possibly baby-faced street robbers, possibly innocent kiddies who might run errands in exchange for instant pots of money. I gave them instant pots of money and they dropped their petrol cans and, straightaway, ran off.