Mostly Hero

by Anna Burns

  ‘Stop!’ commanded Great Aunt, again clicking her fingers. She had heard enough and it was worse, far worse, than she had thought. The child was besotted. Clearly now, she couldn’t just obliterate hero - not with little chocolate here being so in love with him. Of course, there can’t be any future in it, but when had that ever stopped anybody before? As regards herself and superhero, perhaps she could look at this another way. If she were to view it pragmatically, it would be in her favour that hero was eliminating all her rivals for her. That only meant, of course, that sooner or later he’d get around to her. Question was, would he spare her because of little niece, as she would spare him because of little niece, or would he put his job first, plus any grudge he might hold against her should he have discovered it was she, and not the eastside gang as rumoured, who had killed all his relatives? If it came to a showdown between them she’d have no choice but to destroy him. It would be self-defence and little beautiful here could hardly blame her - and what was it anyway with young people and love affairs these days? In Great Aunt’s day you laughed, you cried, you fell in love, you made love, you quarrelled, you used your superpowers, your overbearance, your weapons of mass destruction to wipe each other out with. Then you made up and laughed and cried and fell in love all over again. That was the way of it. So what was this ‘analysing’? What was this ‘displacement activity’? What of ‘dysfunction’ and ‘essence’ and ‘commenting on essence’? All to end too, so it seemed to Great Aunt, in exactly the same heartbroken, excruciating way.

  While Great Aunt continued to compare and contrast the spontaneity and non-arbitration of ancient love affairs with the self-conscious, heavily policed constructs of today, femme came out from under her aunt’s spell. She was sure she wasn’t really speaking these words, yet strongly thought she was speaking them: ‘Don’t be telling anybody I told you, this is in confidence, mine is a complex reticence, I’m relying on your discretion, swear, promise, cross your heart, say me on your grave you won’t–’ No, she couldn’t have said this for there was no reason to have said it. She had revealed nothing of her heart to Great Aunt. Even now, the old dear was sitting across from her - placid, smiling, harmless, looking for the world as though she were knitting. Great Aunt always gave femme the impression she was knitting, or of rambling on about knitting - needle sizes, baby wool, stitch tension, garter stitch, pearl stitch, spiral stitch, knotted stitch, her twice-weekly drop-in circle - which was remarkable as Great Aunt knew no knitters, nor babies, and didn’t ever knit. Happily for femme, it seemed Aunt had accepted her cautious non-committal answers regarding her love affair with superhero. And now, questions at an end, the young woman suggested - given Aunt’s staff that day mysteriously appeared to be missing - that she slip to the kitchen to make them both tea.

  Great Aunt was delighted. ‘Yes! Tea! Tea!’ She clapped her hands excitedly and femme smiled and patted the old lady, then set off for the kitchen to prepare biscuits and tea selections. As soon as she was out of the room, the old lady sprang out of her armchair and in a flash was in Mission Control downstairs. This speed of movement was enabled by the skyscraper’s proper lift which indeed had not gone missing but instead had been converted by Great Aunt’s techies into a turbo-charged, Apollo-engined, aircraft rocket elevator. It was a clever lift, a super-fast lift, and it proved the adage that just because a person doesn’t leave a building in seven thousand, three hundred and five days doesn’t mean they can no longer have warped speed and reckless propulsion about them. This was the best liftmobile ever - faster even than the speed of light. Great Aunt jumped in and whizzed downstairs where, after operating sophisticated instrumentation, she put in an order countering her previous suggestion which was if anybody felt like killing superhero that that would be okay with her. Now she said it wouldn’t be okay and that nobody was to kill him. Everybody, in fact, was to protect him - unless receiving new instructions to kill him all over again. This done, she issued further commands to exterminate the eastside gang and their associates plus all their women and children then, business over, she nipped in her Apollo back to her old lady armchair, which is where femme, coming through the swing doors with a tray-load of refreshments, found her, again as always she found her - in her dressing gown, in front of her TV screen, in tears. So they had tea together, watched some of The Third Man together, received further developments from the Alarming Breaking News Network Exclamation Marks!!!!!! Channel together, then it was time for femme to leave. She hugged and kissed her dear little, sweet little aunt then gathered her numerous shoppings about her. Blowing further kisses from the doorway, she promised her relative to come visit again soon.

  On her way out of the building proper to meet superhero on the cliff, femme bumped into her cousin Freddie who had just entered the lobby and was waiting downstairs for the service lift. Freddie was from the poor sap side of the family which meant every so often he fell in love with inappropriate females. These affairs ended in death, double-cross, robbery, court appearances, ruined reputations, jail sentences, fines, community service or, at least - though not in Freddie’s opinion - heartbreak owing to brutal rejection by the ice-cold lover he had loved. She had not loved him back apparently, and instead had only pretended to. That was just one of the inappropriate parts.

  Freddie looked ill and that was because of how he looked normally - because of his lifestyle, because of his weak morals, because he was not a drifting ne’er-do-well who blossomed and became more handsome in direct proportion to the number of crimes he committed. That didn’t happen for saps. Only certain dashing villains had a propensity for exhibiting that. So Freddie was not The Picture of Dorian Gray, or rather, he was the picture of Dorian Gray. His skin could not be said to be pale - as in sanctified pale, blessed pale, the pale of someone meditating and praying through the night a lot. It was not a pure hue either, but jaded, tired, pallid, of a high-wired lethargy, of a man who lived on secrets, on trying to second guess, on living on his nerves and not eating because he couldn’t stop biting his nails. Femme was not pleased to see him - and on two counts. One count was that it had been her cousin who had started that bothersome truth she’d just had with Great Aunt concerning men, sex and relationships. True, she had managed to sidestep Aunty and thus prevent her essence from becoming a casual chat occasion, but should the story spread, how horrific to have to go through that with everybody else. Two was, what was he doing here? Femme had her own notions about that.

  ‘Freddie Ditchlingtonne’ly! Don’t you be taking advantage of our Great Aunty and her naïve trust in human nature to wangle cash out of her to finance the latest fur coat project for the latest ice cold project who’s currently ripping you off.’ ‘Got to stop you there, femme,’ said Freddie, pained. ‘Monique Frostique is not like that. Please stop denigrating the woman I love.’ On hearing the identity of the latest iceberg her cousin had taken up with, femme would have put her head in her hands had they not been busy with shopping. Instead she groaned in despair. Not only was Monique Frostique an out-and-out fatale, she had split multi-dissenting genes and was also a world-dominating villain. Would her cousin never learn? It was Frostique, the rumour went, who had killed ‘The Bat-Man’ after all.

  Freddie said it wasn’t her business but that he was visiting Great Aunty not for money but out of love and devotion. ‘The old dear’s all alone and frail and doddery and can’t have further for this world. By the way, is she alone? Is anyone with her? How is her health? Is she ailing? Does she seem as if she might fatally–’ ‘She’s fine,’ said femme. ‘Alone - watching film noir and periodic breaking news bulletins. But I mean to say, Freddie, I’ll make you sorry if you take poor Aunty for a ride.’

  They parted then with a cousinly kiss and Freddie entered the lift and femme headed in a taxi for the town cliffness in order to meet superhero. She arrived in time but he was not there. She set her bags down, paced about, tapped her foot, checked her watch and, look at that, she thought. He told me to be on time and he’s not on time.
She’d give him ten minutes - no! five minutes - and he’d better not have gone to save the world without the basic human decency of getting a message to her. Convinced this was the case even before five minutes were up, she said aloud, ‘Thoughtless. Inconsiderate. Discourteous. I’m leaving,’ and then she bent to retrieve her bags. At that moment a voice called to her and it was hero. He had heard her voice and on hearing his, femme dropped her bags and looked around but could not see where he was. She called to him, then he called again, and it sounded as if from over the cliff-face. She looked over and at first all she could see was the bottom of the cliff, which was far away and made of rubble, jagged rocks, burnt-out cars and other ugly, indistinct, disintegrating things. Hearing her name again, and again from within the vicinity, she squinted and looked closely. This time, halfway up or halfway down - depending on the dispositions - there was hero, clutching tree roots sticking out from the cliff.

  ‘Hero!’ cried femme. ‘What happened? Who did this or–’ and femme was alarmed certainly but it must be said also confused for it was always difficult to tell with hero. ‘When you said we’d meet at the cliff edge did you actually mean–’ ‘No!’ he cried. ‘I’ve been pushed over and my superpowers aren’t working and my support here’ - he indicated the roots - ‘is giving way.’

  ‘Darling! My hero! I’ll save you!’ cried femme and quickly she jumped about. She leapt around the cliff, cast around too, but there was nothing. How to save him? She had never had any instruction in this. She pounced upon her thousands of shopping, emptying all forty-eight luxury bags, all fifty-two hard-core DIY functional bags, even her haberdashery bags, out onto the earth. Something. There must be something. And there, right before her, tumbling out of its wrappings, was a rope. As luck would have it, she had bought this rope as an improvised murder weapon that very morning at the hardware store whilst under the spell to kill hero. The idea was to hang him after drugging him with chloroform, but femme had no recollection of this. She stared at the rope therefore, also at other improvised murder weapons - tyre iron, high gauge wrench, hatchet, mallet, pickaxe, crowbar, throw knife, switchblades, chloroform, wheelbrace, staple gun, strychnine, arsenic, cyanide, another loaded purse pistol - all items she could not recognise nor ever imagine she would own. But later. She’d ponder that later. For now - to business with this rope. Tying one end round a handy tree, that same tree whose roots hero was clutching at its bottom end, she threw the rest of the rope to her lover. Hero grabbed hold seconds before the roots loosened in his hands.

  She managed, they managed, he managed, to struggle, finger by painstaking finger, with total concentration on each finger and foot movement, up the face of the cliff. The extremity of the situation, the focus upon the present, the attention to the minuscule, took precedence over everything. Then there was success - all thanks to femme and her millions of shopping bags. Hero hauled himself to safety and for a moment lay flat on his back with femme sobbing on top of him. ‘Thanks, femme,’ he managed to say, though all this time sensing there was something, some danger, something paramount he had learned of late to be alert to. But hero was still so knocked out, shocked too, at his superpowers having deserted him, that femme under an intermittent spell to kill him completely escaped his mind at that point. And so it came to be. As he set her gently to the side and began to catch his breath and straighten, femme - now also getting to her feet, sobbing still, but rejoicing too, that she had arrived at the moment she had done so - then had a fit of spell come on her. At once she stopped sobbing, stopped giving thanks and with a shove, pushed hero back over the cliff.

  This time the roots were gone and hero was clutching the rope solely. But the tree this rope was tied to was a dead tree, rotten to its core. It was believed by the locals to be due to fall over the cliff any day now; indeed the whole cliff was believed due to fall over itself any day now. Unfortunately for hero, both phenomena chose that day of all days to take place. First the tree. As hero scrambled to clamber up the rope, the trunk of the tree creaked and began to split and give way on him. He tried to clamber faster but his progress was hindered by femme, determinedly attacking the rope with a saw. The rope gave just as the tree gave. So too, did part of the cliff give. And it was at that moment, that very moment, Great Aunt’s henchmen appeared on the scene.

  This was the second time the henchmen had turned up at the cliff that day. First had been a half hour earlier when they’d been hiding behind rocks and spying out upon hero, who had himself turned up to meet femme as pre-arranged. Hero had been pacing up and down, trying to get his mind back on thwarting local, national and international villains, but was finding things difficult because thoughts of her, of femme - mainly unwelcome - kept getting in the way. Thoughts of him too, taking a personal revenge upon her great aunt - rather than a noble, impartial, bringing to justice of all wrong-doers for the good of all humanity - also kept getting in the way. He did not bare grudges, he told himself. He was above grudges, superior to grudges. ‘The opponent without a grudge,’ often he’d lecture in his interviews in case impressionable young minds were listening, ‘always wins the battle in the end.’ Thing was though, he had borne a grudge ever since discovering it had been that psychotic, psychopathic, psychosocial Great Aunt - and not the eastside gang as once conjectured - who had been the true slayer of his relatives. The grudge didn’t get easier either, with the thought that these dead superheroes would be proud to know that he, the sole survivor, was carrying on the good work dispassionately and not tit-for-tatly. Because was he? Would he? The grudge was getting worse.

  That’s not all that was getting worse. At present hero existed on three levels. Top level - often considered by mental health professionals the world over to be the delusional level for most people - was, in hero’s version, ‘good guy defeating villains for the benefit of the world’. That was him, he told himself. He was that guy. Below this level was the ‘I’ll get you back, you bastard’ level. Hero wasn’t proud of this, but Great Aunt had wiped out his family, so yes, why shouldn’t he wipe out hers? Third level was the deepest level, the level currently playing havoc with hero’s nervous and digestive systems. This was his fear that, despite all his sense of duty, all his correctness, all his antecedents, his high-minded nobility of purpose - even underneath that grudge bit - what if, in truth, he was nothing but a big repressed villain himself?

  This level used not to exist, or else used not to exist in hero’s awareness. It had come about because of late he’d discovered that long ago his superhero grandfather and this supervillain Great Aunt had been lovers. What if, his thinking went, they’d been the true parentage of his own superhero father as well? After all, there’d been no grandmother, grandmother had been off-limits, a muted, touchy subject. What if, hero thought, she’d been none other than Great Aunt herself? What must have happened, he was sure, was Great Aunt - from devious, taking-over-the-world motivations - had set out to lure his grandfather into falling in love with her but then, to her horror, had gone and fallen in love with him herself. She fell pregnant too, and as hero’s grandfather wanted the child, and as Great Aunt wanted hero’s grandfather, and in spite of everybody knowing Great Aunt was hardly a child or an animal or even a plant person, she decided to give maternity a go. She couldn’t keep it up. Also, she couldn’t keep up no longer being a supervillain. She had reneged on her villainy out of deference to her hero lover, but now she reneged on reneging and went back to being one all over again. Things went from bad to worse until hero’s grandfather came to his senses, spurned Great Aunt and left, taking their baby son with him. This action rendered him an idol of pure gold in the eyes of the common people - not only a man superb in his conduct, standing up for old-fashioned values of black and white morality, but also he’d brought that baby up single-handedly by himself. He had instilled into the child - into hero’s own father - all proper principles of how to be a superhero, with hero’s father adhering to them, which naturally led years later to hero adhering to them himself.
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