by Anna Burns
Fortunately for Tom, the Interfering Policeman was already suspicious of this Town Hall register. To prove the truth against it, he had had top Anti-Rumour Advisers flown in to dissect it minutely. So Tom’s sentencing would, in the end, reflect that his Psycho-Spatial had not generally been out and about, doing damage, hatching and plotting, murdering and kidnapping, unaccompanied or not by the rest of his dimensional bodies, which was more than could be said for many Psycho-Spatials currently operating in the town.
I passed by the museum then, and came to Tom’s gunshop. The door had been busted, courtesy of Johnjoe, with makeshift planks now nailed hurriedly over the top. Tom had intended fixing it properly, after he’d taken what turned out to be that fateful walk in order to have his head showered. That meant, of course, it would be Jotty, and not Tom, dealing with the door now.
‘But, my love,’ I heard her say, for most certainly, and most importantly, she and Tom would help each other also, ‘don’t be thinking it has to be just women’s underwear. I wouldn’t be averse to selling …’ and I looked, and there they were, outside the shop, her squeezing his arm, and it was now five years later. The gunshop, as you know, had been transformed into the bra shop and they were now in their forties, with Tom just released from prison. He seemed acquiescent, or at least not resistant, but what was he going to do, I wondered, to express his side of his own enterprise now?
And now there was everybody – Tom and Jot, and the Cusacks, and a few of the Cusack brothers, and a couple of Jotty’s nieces and nephews, I mean the denied children of her poor sisters. One of them, a teenage boy, was trying to change the ‘ding!’ on the door to something a bit catchy, and a teenage girl, an apprentice to her Aunt Jotty, was learning rapidly that a job is never just about the job, ‘And when it is, Lisa darling, you must leave’. There were also a few Well-Meanings, and even that taxi man. Do you remember that taxi man? He had a lot of money now because of Napoleon. ‘Napoleon’s balls would be worth a lot of money,’ some antique ammunitions man had gone up to him not long after his ‘witness who didn’t know guns’ court appearance and said. JimmyJesus had turned up too, and what a cheek, and at his age, for he had done so in order to extort money. John Doe hadn’t killed him, as you see, and besides, the Angel of Death hadn’t left with three babies. She’d left with two babies, leaving him lying wounded over his suitcase in the hall.
So now, all these years on, he had turned up unexpectedly. He had heard Tom and the others were planning to conjoin and expand their businesses together, so he reckoned there might be a little packet of pickings in it for him. When he appeared, though, and started threatening, he sounded silly and embarrassing and terribly old-fashioned that the others didn’t know whether to laugh at him or feel sorry for him. In the end, the Almost Chemist of the Year man, who was now a Tool-Shed-First-Aid-Shop man, offered him a job.
And that’s the thing, see. The tables had turned. It was a new social order and no longer about that old aberration ‘Give me all your money’ – for people always think it’s about money when they don’t know what it’s about. The Interfering Foreign Policeman had done his neutralising work and, by now, had left Tiptoe Floorboard. Even the Fifth Faction, which had made up the six war factions as you know, had now dispersed and disbanded all their units. They had jumped on to the media spokespeople bandwagon and were often to be seen giving syndicated history interviews on the TV.
Julie was there too, though now it was twenty-five years later. She was passing a baby she had been holding over to Jotty and Tom. But no. This was not her baby. And it was not Tom and Jotty’s baby. It was the baby of her brother Judas and the mascot. Judas had married the mascot of the Community Centre in spite of neither of them being in love with the other, and also in spite of officially being warned against doing so by that list at the Town Hall. Judas still lived in the family home, which had been diagnosed long ago with Sick Building Syndrome. He had also started following in a few of his father’s footsteps, inasmuch as he would take his little dogs, with his gun, for walks of an evening, coming back down the mountain later, all alone. When confronted, which his father had never been, he’d say that each of these pets, one after the other, had run away or met with some fatal accident. So when this baby arrived, everybody – instantly and unofficially – became her mother or her father. ‘Another little thing,’ they murmured. ‘But we’d better, we think, keep our eye on this one.’
I left them. I carried on out to the Tiptoe Floorboard Fourth Dimension Boundary, and stepped over to the sound of them discussing – through various shifting time eras – their future plans. They threw themselves into these meetings – on strategy, on returns, on investments and on one hundred per cent projections then, full of enthusiasm, they began to knock down walls. Some shops naturally slipped into other shops, whilst others, like Jotty’s Bra Shop and Tom’s Toolmaster-Chuck-Key-Precision-Laser-Oiler Shop preferred a slight adjacency. But guess what. You could have knocked me down with a feather, had I not already been dematerialising, at the rush of ‘New Free Trial!’ Emotional Word Centres, unashamedly popping up amidst all these multiplications overground.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to friends Clare Dimond and James Smith for their support, kindness and generosity. Please know, you two, I couldn’t have done this without you.
Thanks to Magdalen Jebb, the best example of grace I know. It meant a lot to me, Magdalen, that you listened to me speak about issues, initially peripheral or even outside my book, which later came deeply to infuse it. Your gentle support and comments – always insightful, always kind – were very much appreciated by me.
Thanks to Sue Gee for letting me finish my book in her beautiful, tranquil house. Putting that last full stop in your little office, Sue, with your books surrounding, and with the tree and the daffodils and even the little washing-line outside, was very satisfying. Thank you for the peacefulness of that.
For their invaluable support I also thank Philip Gwyn Jones, Drue Heinz and all her staff at Hawthornden Castle, the Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust, the British Arts Council (South West), Ian Whitfield at the Scottish Arts Council, Jon Butler, Jyl Fountain, Laetitia Kelly, Jenny and Ron Swash, Deborah White, Margaret Buckley, Dr Georgia Lepper, Dr Sarah North, Astrid Fuhrmeister, Pixie and Richard Greathead, Barbie Lyon, Rachel Hazell. Thanks, everybody. Everything offered was of tremendous help to me.
ANNA BURNS was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author of three novels, including Milkman and No Bones, and of the novella Mostly Hero. She has won the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Orange Prize. She lives in East Sussex, England.
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