by Anna Burns
Then there was Doe himself. She tried flattery. As you know, the man was pathologically susceptible to those who took an interest. His dicky stomach was your passport to anything you desired. Efforts had to be oblique, however. Patience had to be relied upon. ‘Heard you were feeling poorly, John. I’ve got all day, so tell me about your bowel movements.’ That was the tack utterly required here.
But it ended up as a disturbed state of conversation. Jotty, in going to the edge of obliquity – which was taking a risk of coming full circle and falling into directness – asked her brother in a sharp tone if it was stress he was feeling at all. John didn’t notice she had just walked into his house when she hadn’t walked into his house for many years previously. But he was delighted, most appreciative of her question. Yes, absolutely yes. Stress, Jotty, was what it was.
And off he went. Ramblings. You know ramblings. So did Jotty. Even before he started, she felt Early Onset Compassion Fatigue Syndrome set in. At great cost to her already not very integrated person, she listened as he launched into his neck being stiff with an incredible stiffness from a Dark Age cemetery – ‘one of them stiffnesses, Jotty’ – with Jotty thinking, who cares? Everybody hates you. Even your gang hates you. Rub my belly with a lump of jelly, Mickey Mouse is dead!
Her revulsion at his self-indulgence was threatening to prevent her keeping up the solicitude, which was why she had to slip into her childhood Mickey Mouse mantra. In the end, no matter how much she padded with incurable diseases and terminal illnesses, she didn’t know how to broach Jane with John except by doing so full-on. The first few times of trying she went away, dizzy, without managing to get him to admit even to having an elder daughter. When she did confront directly, that had been in the bar, as you know, and if it hadn’t been for Spaders rushing between them with ‘I’ll look after your sisters. I’ll take your sisters home for you, Johnny,’ she might have had it confirmed definitively – if at cost. So, something else to blame Tom Spaders for.
Since then, over the next five years, there had been her official attempts to get help from the authorities. Going through the proper channels – the hospitals, the hostels, the missing persons, the ‘have there been accidents, have there been blackouts, has there been amnesia?’, the circumstantial evidence and the anecdotal rumours, the listening at doors, the police, Citizens Advice, solicitors, Town Hall, the International Community, then back to Citizens Advice, back to solicitors, back to police, back to listening at doors – was undoubtedly taking its toll on her. Then there were the letters – ‘Dear Your Township, ‘Dear Your Lordshipnesses’, ‘Dear Your Ostensible Figures of Sanity’. These were the ones she was sending. The red-taped, nicely packaged, vacuous ‘Dear Madam, At the present time’ letters she received in response were knocking her, by the end, to the floor.
It was only after she’d exhausted all the proper channels, with her mental state now impressing upon her how someone could easily be hidden behind a cushion, squashed into a teapot, put in ridiculously small boxes, spaces getting tighter and tighter, that her head felt about to explode with all the hypotheticals she was doing on herself. It got to the point of her lying in bed at night, feeling there was nothing for it but that she herself should go and dig up that coffin. And that was when the idea came to be seen as a viable option. That was when, too, she decided to see me.
At first I tried to reason. If she goes and digs up a coffin, I said, it would only put her down in history as the last of the Great Mad Does. By now her sisters, and indeed all her brothers and even her parents, were in jail, in graves, or in that mental asylum. She had turned into a half-portion, and soon, similarly to poor Janine, would be going to Greystone Cliff for top-ups herself. That was slightly in the future and I felt it best not to frighten her, on top of her already fear, by revealing such a truth to her. But to try to prevent the half-portion from developing into a full portion – I mean in the wrong direction – I suggested she send another strictly worded letter to the Town Hall. She looked tired, unconvinced, like maybe I was being tactless. Ignoring my advice, she harped on again about me coming that evening to help dig it up.
Now, we all like to think we’d have done it differently. We’d have done it morally. We’d have done it sensibly. We are the people who say, ‘It’s simple, really. All you need to do is this, this, this, this and this.’ Well, that’s your call. That’s entirely your life you’re living. I did help her. So I suppose that means you’ll be sitting in your armchairs passing judgement upon me now.
When I met her that evening by the plot of the three graves, I was still protesting that it was outside my jurisdiction. But then one of those situations took over where you say, ‘Oh, I can’t give up tea. I can’t give up coffee. I can’t give up alcohol. I can’t give up cigarettes. I can’t give up violence. I can’t give up delicious nasty gossip. I can’t give up making lists, saying prayers, short-handing the prayers so I can fit in more prayers. I can’t give up Noises. Can’t give up fantasy relationships. Can’t give up having no sex. Can’t give up sadomasochistic sex. Can’t give up torturing and killing little animals.’ It seems you think you can’t give up anything but – in paradox to all that knotted and tangled wool – guess what? Miraculously, one day you do. It’s that part of you again. I mean the part that does what it likes, that presumes to act on its own initiative without informing you of it, the bit that doesn’t believe in interactive goodwill or in mutual co-operation. Instead it goes unannounced into the Blueprint in the dead of night while you’re snoring, and it breaks open all the ‘Do Not Tamper’ boxes and changes all the rules around.
I thought I was immune to that.
I can’t understand why I’m not immune to that.
We didn’t do it, by the way – dig it up, I mean.
I used my powers instead.
Thing is, I didn’t have to use them because there’s this other shadow side to Jotty as I was saying but haven’t told you about yet. It’s that there is no Jane. Jotty Doe made Jane up.
I think you must have guessed that. And I mean in spite of Janet being charged with the murder of a daughter who had never existed, and of the Ordinary Decent Folk spreading rumours, first about a girl going to Australia, and then about a girl who had never left town at all. ‘Contrary to appearances …’ was what they whispered but, you see, there weren’t any appearances. As I’ve tried to impress from the beginning, rumours and only rumours were the lingua franca of this town. Julie and Judas crying at the graves you might muster as an attempt at proving the substantiality of the death of their elder sister. Well, for all we know, maybe those children were developing their own psychoses. After all, how do you think you’d start behaving if your daddy kept burying your granny, once a month, over and over, in different places, for years?
So it was all rumour. All conjecture. All anecdotal. There was no Jane Doe. That doesn’t mean, though, there hadn’t ever been anybody. Remember. Cast your mind back. Do you recall Jotty had that long menstruation once?
If that little visitor whom she’d conceived hadn’t been taken away, he – for it had been a ‘he’ – would have been nineteen now. Five years earlier he would have been the same age as fictitious Jane when it was put about that she had disappeared. More crucially, he’d also have been the same age as Jotty, I mean when she’d been taken up to that master bedroom – believing, as she had been taken, that Mamma and Aunty, just in the kitchen there, would never let this happen. Mamma and Aunty, however, had got into such an animated conversation all of a sudden about some very engrossing interesting thing that, still talking, one put on the teapot, while the other quickly crossed the kitchen and shut the kitchen door.
I looked in anyway, I mean the coffin, ’cos I was feeling, well, I’m not the one to be revealing this truth to her, so I humoured her, thinking that when she got to a certain level in the silence of her therapy, her unconscious would probably reveal the truth to her itself. That could be now – what with the domino effect of the Sisters, and with Janin
e being taken away, then the batches of nieces and nephews running about the area whom she didn’t feel adult enough to round up and take care of, then those murders being solved with her own brother being responsible for them, then with Tom Cusack suffering that lynch reaction, then John being dead, Jetty being dead, Tom Spaders being dead – so, yes, maybe the time had come when the truth would crack open upon her now.
Of course there would be nothing in it. The coffin. Just another mother fantasy. I closed my eyes, imaged the circle – and there was something in it. I was wrong.
‘Well?’ said Jotty. ‘Is she there or not?’
I was hoping it would be nothing. Or else some irrelevant thing. Or maybe, if it had to be relevant – as in painful – it would be one of those poor pet dogs or stolen turtles or giant Madagascar poodle beetles he’d dragged out of the house and up the hill with his rifle for their final walks. When I saw what it was, however, the expression came to me that you always come across in those gripping ‘Business Management Skills’ books – ‘Whenever possible,’ they state, ‘kill two birds with one stone.’
Although, as you know, he didn’t make bombs, John Doe had buried a coffin full of bomb material. And not only that coffin. As far as I could gauge, other flamboyantly buried fantasy funerals had things warlike stuffed in every nook and cranny as well. We’re talking booster charges, fuses, gun cotton, plastic bottles, nails, bolts, brass nuts, control knobs, empty fire extinguishers, magnets, watch primers, Co-op mixes, receivers, transmitters, carbon fibre aerials, Superglue, easy-take-apart two-wheeler shopping trolleys, timers, detonators, remotecontrolled devices, cluster bomblets, pieces of paper with ‘Go’, ‘Stop’ and ‘Get Ready, Get Steady’ written on in pen, old rags, milkbottles, beerbottles, consignments of empty coffee jars, sugar hooks, salt hooks, black tape, bell wire, pink rubber gloves, something primed in a glove compartment, other spare glove compartments, nylon masks, black leather gloves, stacks of beautifully ironed black trousers and stacks of pretty trimmed black skirts, well-shiny shoes, six-inch stilettos, black berets, lipstick, wigs, dark glasses, makeup compacts, red nail polish – looking good, oh, looking good! – baseball bats when nobody ever played baseball, a few rounds of ammunition and – why ever not? – a handgun in each and every coffin as well.
What had been going on?
For the simple reason of wanting to make an impression – something we might all like – Doe had taken a very high-handed route to fulfilling this desire. He had intercepted all those covert deliveries, not because he wanted them. ’Course not. Hardly art. Load of junk, he thought. Best to take them, though, he decided, so the Fifth Faction, the war faction, couldn’t have them, and he did, straight to his own house. He disseminated them in and around various cabinets, cupboards, settees, armchairs, under dressing tables, inside suits of armour, and when he ran out of space in his house, naturally they went into the tunnels underneath. After the tunnels were packed, he took to burying them elsewhere. First place that occurred was the graveyard east of the town. It was more or less his anyway for, after all, his father and countless of his mothers were buried in it. That’s how come the materials were in a fair majority of the graves. Of course, he didn’t actually reveal to Group Faction Number Five that he was the one lording it over them. He was undoubtedly compulsive, delusional and self-sabotaging but, so far, he hadn’t been as suicidal as all that. After a while it occurred to him that, to save time and to make sure he remained centre stage – even if clandestinely – why didn’t he combine his grief days with burying all the coveted material in the coffins at the same time?
Poor Doe. He had been throwing a spanner in his own works, into his own empire, one that he had set up and been lovingly cultivating for years. He had started to destroy it, and all on account of his growing manic obsessive uncontrollable behaviour. Could he not have got a simple prescription from the doctor to stem the likes of that? Pointless, too, the whole exercise. So what if he out-bested the Fifth by getting himself killed before any of them were able to kill him? There’s no doubt about it. The man had been possessed of the hugest capacity for cutting off his nose to spite his face that ever was.
‘You’re not lying to me, are you?’ said Jotty. This was after I told her there was nobody in it. ‘Tell me you’re not lying to me.’
‘I’m not lying to you,’ I said, and Jotty exhaled her relief.
‘She isn’t there!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Jane’s run away! She really isn’t there!’
She let herself have that respite, before the other, the usual, the one where he had killed her, came back.
‘You must go to the Interfering Outside Foreign Policeman,’ I urged.
‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘Those other police won’t let me. Besides, I don’t think he exists.’
‘’Course he exists.’ I was shocked. ‘He’s here – straightening rumours, arresting groupings, ordering police officer suspensions and calling for deep-seated enquiries. He’s instigated – haven’t you noticed? – those dedicated teams of community gang specialists, experts on gang strategy, eminences on gang idolatry. He has Behaviour Support Teams on every corner. The man’s so into precision, Jotty, you could cut cookies with him. Go to him. He’s the only show in town.
‘As a tip,’ I then said, ‘you might find it easier to approach him via the Salsa Dancing Policeman, who is more the human, as opposed to the guffawing, side of the police in this town.
‘Go see him first,’ I persisted. ‘How about this morning, at a quarter past six on the dot?’
I recommended she do this because he was so contemporary, this Salsa, so ‘of-the-minute’, that he liked to try out new things and at present was into breakfasting alfresco at one or other of the town’s eating places. This morning, I told her, he’d be having croissants and espressos on the patio of that new café – solely a café – opposite the Leprechaun Museum.
‘So, Jot,’ I said, ‘go home. Get washed, get changed and, if you can, do your hair and put on lipstick.’ I held up my hand for I could see the bristles coming out on her at once.
‘There’s such a thing as having the form without having the substance, Jot,’ I continued. ‘And then there’s the form along with the substance. All I’m doing is suggesting you honour your body while you’re in it. It doesn’t mean you’re betraying it. It means, in fact, the opposite, so don’t shout at me when I tell you that your body knows: When you get it right down there’ – I pointed to her groin – ‘it’ll come right’ – I pointed to her head – ‘up there’.
I left her then, in bristling mode because of the hair suggestion and the lipstick suggestion and the putting on of fresh clothes suggestion and, most especially, her ‘all you need is a good fuck’ misinterpretation of my ‘fixing it down there’ remark.
That’s because she can’t remember. She doesn’t know any of it, doesn’t remember any of it. I mean about the baby. All she knows is that she’s having these mounting anxieties about this girl – oh, very important, but why won’t anyone listen to her? – about this girl having gone missing, and about herself feeling desire when she doesn’t, in all truth, actually know what desire is. How could he love her and want her? How could she let him, any of them, love her and want her? How could she imagine that he could desire her, that she could be his person, that he could be her person, with all those ravenous Fathers getting in the way? That was why she was in the Blueprint, stuck in that Blueprint – worried, so worried, terribly worried, that Jane, poor niece, had been raped and battered, brutally murdered, with nobody giving a damn or caring as to her whereabouts. Further distress was that she herself was remembering less of what this girl looked like. Oh, suddenly thought Jotty. Might Jane – because of the genes in the family – have looked something like Jotty herself?
‘Besides,’ I remembered, calling back to her, ‘it’s not just yourself you’ll be helping.’ And that was when I told her Tom Spaders was still alive.
And that was it. I could hardly get out my final ‘Goodbye, I’
m going now – look, I’m really going now’, for there she was, rushing off herself. She was going to groom up – in a hurried, panicked, falling-over-her-feet fashion as usual – to go and see the Salsa Dancing Policemen, all on the tail of this resurrection of Tom. I said, ‘Goodbye,’ to the air and the surrounding molecules anyway, and headed towards the town’s pedestrian exit. Almost immediately, I passed the new café where, in an hour and a bit, Jotty would be treated to breakfast by the Salsa. He would be standing on the steps telepathically waiting for her. And they would help her, those two, and they’d help with two things. One was that they were not going to find Jane Doe, as in the dead or alive niece of Jotty Doe, and reunite her with her family. But they would help in the removal of the sequence, for Jotty would have it brought to her consciousness after they had instigated enquiries that there was not, and never had been, any Jane Doe. Further, they’d let her know that the girl she was yearning to mourn was an ethereal construction made up of at least two people. One was herself and the other was her son.
The doubt would be removed then, and that was the big thing – whether or not she ever met this son – for it’s the knowing and the not-knowing that really prolongs the damage. Along with her acceptance that there was no niece, and greatly helped, of course, by the silence of her therapy, these two policemen, via their many conversations with her, were going to lift her out of her half-portion state.
Then they’d help with Tom. As you know, poor Tom Spaders, because of the cast-iron rumours in the town, had already been labelled as the worst of the world’s mass murderers. This ‘fact’ had been entered in the Town Hall register of ‘Births, Deaths and Rumours That Are Probably True’. Once something like that gets a hold, the person on the receiving end is in a lot of trouble. In Tom’s case – unless someone of the right power challenged all this falsity – he was going to be charged with the rumour versions and not with reality at all.