Mostly Hero

by Anna Burns

  Well, mad. He was completely mad.

  ‘This is not funny,’ she said, after hero had disclosed on the Great Aunt identity. ‘You’ve gone too far, hero. Can you hear yourself? You’re talking about a dear little, sweet little, fragile old lady, one who wouldn’t hurt a fly, who hasn’t further for this world, who spends all her time crying over sad movies or else is down in the basement, tinkering about with old-time ballroom dancing equipment–’ ‘That’s not ballroom dancing equipment, femme,’ interrupted hero, adding, ‘the only thing your aunt isn’t responsible for, is putting that spell on you to kill me.’ Femme though, had had enough. She shook her head. ‘How could you, hero - after that jumper too, Aunty knitted you for Christmas.’ Hero couldn’t recall any jumper but he was determined to stick to his revelation of Great Aunt being a ruthless, amoral, world-dominating mastermind, and to put femme into the picture about that. He maintained his earlier stance though, of not putting her into the picture about his own motives for wooing her, nor of the possibility of Great Aunt being his grandmother, nor of the murderous grudge he harboured against Great Aunt for killing his family for yes, women could be funny. Best to keep quiet on some disclosures for now.

  As femme continued to insist he was suffering from everything, that he was dangeralising all over the place, that he needed help immediately, hero continued to insist they leave the cliff and go to the skyscraper at once. He wasn’t sure what he’d do when he got there, other than kill Great Aunt should she attempt his life. It would be self-defence and femme here could hardly blame him, though he knew, of course, she would. All the same, this business needed attention, so they gathered themselves up and, in silence, gathered up also what remained of femme’s shopping. This happened to be only her haberdashery plus all the pretty and beautiful things. Most murder items had fallen over the cliff by now, apart from a few stray hammers, a sledgehammer, a drill, and one lone tomahawk. Femme had no idea all these belonged to her. Assuming this debris to be the natural appurtenances of cliffs, she felt quite indifferent to it. Her only concern, apart from hero being insane, was that she’d lost her hat whilst upside down and that her new dress was torn to bits. She had the thought of slipping out of it and of slipping into yet another brand new one, but as she and hero were still too dos-à-dos for her to be intimate in front of him, she remained in the tattered dress and instead reached across into a large lemon octagonal box for a second hat. With all shopping then in the car, and with hero complaining that his interiorville had been built for utility and matters of solemnity and not for shopping and especially not for the ridiculous exaggeration of the packaging of shopping, the couple got in also. As femme adjusted her hatpin, and as hero started up the engine, an almighty cracking reverberated around them. Hero looked in his windshield mirror and immediately stepped on the accelerator. Femme turned in her seat and glanced behind. There, all the land, all of it, which seconds earlier had supported both of them - and the henchmen, and the trees, rocks, bushes, good shopping, bad shopping and all that intense post-cliff revelation - was disintegrating. Within seconds, the entire cliff had fallen over the rest of itself.

  From the perspective of supervillainy, it was apparent that with the latest usurper deposed and incarcerated, there was now an opening for the taking over of the world. The downtown eastside villains wanted to do it. Great Aunt wanted to do it. Monique Frostique, the latest love interest of femme’s cousin, Freddie Ditchlingtonne’ly, also wanted to do it. And now for Poor Sap Section Two.

  When great nephew Freddie turned up to visit Great Aunt it hadn’t been by prior arrangement. He had not asked to be invited and instead, like femme, had turned up unexpectedly at her door. Unlike femme, he hadn’t pressed the buzzer to announce his arrival because a betrayer called Boris the Super Grand Total in Great Aunt’s household had agreed, for an undisclosed sum - and for a horse - and a yacht - all of which Freddie promised but hadn’t as yet coughed up with, to open up the skyscraper and secretly to let him in. Boris the Super Grand Total, Great Aunt’s majordomo and a most trusted half-human half-something, had a perfectly good command of the English language whenever he wanted to, speaking in crisp clear tones. Mostly he didn’t want to though, so didn’t speak, or else spoke little from the minimalist aspect, but he sold her, sold his boss, and he didn’t have to betray Great Aunt’s identity to Freddie in order to do so because Freddie, her nephew, already knew who she was. Monique Frostique had said, ‘I love you, Freddie, you know I love you, and really really really more than anything I wish I could marry you, but can’t you see it’s not possible’ - and here she dabbed her eyes and continued in a voice breaking with emotion - ‘not unless you kill your great aunt, that is.’ Freddie was puzzled, definitely surprised at the request, for he couldn’t see how killing his aunt bore any relation to getting married, but with his head lost to love, and with Monique so very beautiful, and where he knew he would never again in his whole life find another like her, was convinced in the sentiment of the moment that he had no recourse but to murder his aunt. Like femme, he didn’t know Great Aunt was a master-villain, and of course, it goes without saying, he didn’t know Monique Frostique was ne plus ultra of femme fatale villains. He just wanted to marry this wonderfully refreshing, totally unpretentious, modest, terribly sweet girl. So Boris the Super Grand Total pocketed his IOU for the things promised, and let Freddie in by leaving one of the jib doors on the latch. Freddie entered, then bumped into femme in the foyer, which is where they had that cousinly exchange with femme giving Freddie the correction he was not to cheat their aunt out of money. Then she left by the main door and he got in the service elevator, pressing the button to take him to the penthouse where femme had just revealed Great Aunt was.

  Of course she was the only little old lady in there, in the Contemplation Room, in her slippers and dressing gown, crying her heart out over The Third Man. Her great nephew shot her in the back while she was re-watching the sad part at the beginning of that film where the woman is grieving in Vienna because she thinks her lover, the villain, is dead. He’s not dead really but at that point the good guy - that paperback writer - comes to visit and makes her laugh and so she laughs but then remembers her sorrow and stops laughing and, ‘Just right! No laughing!’ shouted Great Aunt, who decried the least diversion from perpetrators and villains. Before she could reprove further, however, Freddie entered and gunned her down in cold blood. He shot her. Shot her and shot her and shot her. Two times bang. Then a pause. Then another bang. He had his reasons, as anyone called Monique, observing with a telescope from a skyscraper across the way, would have surmised. After the shooting, he pocketed his gun plus two bundles of banknotes from Great Aunt’s green cloth office which was very wrong of him, given auntricide, not theft, was the qualification for marrying Monique at this point. Without rifling through bureaux or private papers, for Freddie had never been a reader, he then slipped out of the Contemplation Room and spirited his way across the hallway. There, he pressed the lift button to get himself out of that building as fast as he could.

  There is a reference somewhere to being alive in spite of death, of going into resurrection, of a comic book death with a returning to life, as if to be killed once was not enough. One has to be killed at least nine times if one is a hero or a villain, more generous in the number of times if one is a superhero or a supervillain, with the rare gold star individual always required to be brought to life again. If not life, then it is to be death that is protracted, allowing time for drama, intervention and for speeches. Such was to be the case with Great Aunt that day. She had been killed one hundred and sixty times so far, but this death was to be her final one. She had known herself it was coming, had felt the end of the cycle of life and the beginning of the eternity of death creeping up on her; in a psychic sense so had others - hence the ‘not further for this world’ that everyone had started to preface her with. After she was shot, she staggered about the room in quite the required fashion, knocking things off shelves, everything off tabl
es, flinging arms, splattering blood. This proceeded for two full minutes, with aunt clutching everyday items as if realising these were treasures dearer to her than anything, before dropping them and staggering with equal intensity to another piece of bric-a-brac somewhere else. Yes, a good two minutes, which shows that just because the last death must occur, doesn’t mean it can’t be a long, drawn-out Shakespearean one. She had been set in motion, Great Aunt, and she did fall eventually. Even then though, it wasn’t death yet. Next came momentary grace time, a time-sensitive blip time, which was to be short of duration and which existed in theory for a dying person to put their house in order. Dying persons though, at this stage, rarely did.

  With fifty-seven bullets in her - fifty-four from previous deaths - she tried to gain her feet, but each time fell over again. Realising her calls for help were futile, though not realising her domestic staff were missing because Boris the Super Grand Total had given them the day off to go visit the fairground, Great Aunt abandoned all attempts at upright and began to crawl the carpets, the parquet, the mosaic flooring - it was a big room - until she got into the hallway where she then made her way to her camouflaged liftmobile. At the lift door there was further attention to detail as inch by inch, shaky finger by shaky finger, bloodstain by bloodstain, she attempted to reach her private Apollo’s call button. Once she did, she pressed it and the lift was immediately there. It had been the attaining to it therefore, and not the lift itself, that had been using up her blip time - and all the while doing this attaining Great Aunt had kept her fingers crossed. Still eighty-two, still with fifty-seven bullets in her, still dying, and with a blood-trail resembling a post-structuralist anti-principle of a traditional abstracted countercomposition, she was softly cursing and willing herself not to die. Least not before she reached the ground floor and had shot that pestilence Freddie; her prayers perhaps being attended to because she did get to the ground while Freddie, in his lift experience, was still way up on floor two hundred and twenty-nine. Once on the ground, the lift doors sprang open and Great Aunt inched her way out into the foyer. There, she propped herself just outside her lift, directly opposite the service lift. Thus positioned, thus coughing, thus spluttering, thus catching a glimpse of her dying self in the foyer mirror and reiterating one of her great niece’s overheard modern-day affirmations, ‘I love and approve of myself unconditionally’, she reached inside her dressing gown for her gun.

  She shot him at journey’s end - Freddie’s journey’s end - and he too, was on the last death allotted him. Being merely a sap, it ought not to have been possible for Freddie to have had more than one life and one death in him, but he did have, owing to some birth abnormality thing. He hadn’t had as many lives as Great Aunt, and he hadn’t looked after the ones he had had either, so now it was his turn to stagger and roll about the foyer, knocking over plants, flower arrangements and most of the pictures hanging from its walls. He went in an anti-clockwise direction, rolling the length of one wall before rolling onto another and continuing round the hallway, with Great Aunt taking another shot as he died his way past her. With his blood spatter, he created a depersonalised, yet curiously shared visual, post-ironic, inter-intellectual moment, before dropping down the wall, back at the service lift, dead. As with Great Aunt, it wasn’t quite dead for again, here was momentary blip time to enable Freddie to get his house in order. Freddie though, didn’t believe that all his time was up. He thought he would lie doggo-dead then, after a bit, resume life again. After countless fatales, however, countless double-crosses, and with no sensible spreadsheet to help keep an eye on these matters, Freddie had seriously over-estimated the amount of time he had left. Having come full circle, he was back at the service lift, directly opposite Great Aunt’s lift, with both protagonists now facing each other. Even at the end of their grace time, and each with their life-force all but ebbed from them, still they were trying to aim their weapons. This was how femme and superhero - entering the skyscraper via the door on the latch - found them, with femme screaming and running first to Great Aunt.

  ‘Tiny little button, I think I’m dead.’ This was Great Aunt, but she wasn’t dead yet for still she had a speech in her. ‘I’ve had a good life,’ she said, ‘or at least an action-adventure one. I’ve taken over the world, little poet, four times.’ ‘She’s delirious!’ cried femme. ‘Do something, hero. Help her!’ ‘Hear her out, femme,’ said hero, speaking gently and getting down beside the two women. He had retrieved Freddie’s weapon and was now trying to do the same with Great Aunt’s weapon. Great Aunt though, was having none of it and hero, who had his own quest of grandparentage urgently to sort out with her, decided to let the whole thing about the gun go. Femme noticed none of this, so horrified was she at discovering her aunt in mid-death rattle. ‘Yes, little horseradish. Back in the day, I lived, I died, I lived again - even after the death of my beloved Mr Grand Villain Extreme Omni-Imperious–’ ‘Great Aunt!’ cried femme. ‘Your blood’s gone green!’ ‘’Course it has, gentle. I’m a camoufleur, a deceiver, a doubler. I specialise in “counterfeiting the voice and the demeanour of” - but to continue, I would have been Mrs Grand Villain Extreme Omni-Imperious Arch-Grand-Arch–’ ‘Are you my mother?’ hero suddenly burst forth. This was uncommonly emotional of him and both women turned to stare. ‘What!’ cried Great Aunt. ‘What!’ cried femme. ‘I mean grandmother,’ hero hurriedly corrected himself. ‘What!’ cried Great Aunt. ‘What!’ cried femme and yes, when they put it like that, even he could hear how silly it sounded once the idea had got loose of his mouth.

  ‘Mary, Queen of Scots!’ exclaimed Great Aunt. ‘Are you out of your mind! Of course I’m not your mother. Of course I’m not your grandmother. I killed your mother. I killed your grandmother. I killed everybody - nearly everybody. Have not you been listening? The only reason I didn’t kill you was because you weren’t there.’ She continued to die another bit then said, this time gently, ‘Let that go now, hero. Put it to bed. Think no more on it.’ ‘You’re right,’ she then whispered to femme. ‘He does do emergency stories on himself.’

  Femme had no idea Great Aunt at that moment was referring to their earlier hypnosis session together, but even if she had, this was no time to be horrified at having a confidence - one drawn from her too, under coercion and even now bandied about in front of the very party she’d been criticising. Femme was already in shock over something else. Here was dear little, sweet little Aunt, declaring herself to be a mass-murdering supervillain, exactly to the letter what hero had just said she was. Not only that, Great Aunt had killed hero’s family and not only that, what did he mean about Great Aunt being his grandmother? Did he want Great Aunt to be his grandmother? Was that what this was about? Femme knew she’d got it badly wrong if, on the one hand, her criteria for a prepackaged healthy relationship had been for an honest man, an intelligent man, a man who made her laugh, an emotionally articulate, enthusiastic, kind man while, on the other hand, hero’s sole concern for a lover had been for the two of them to be blood-related all along. Of all the barriers to their relationship which she had envisaged - and which were his fault, stemming as they did from his inscrutable, computer-generated, poker position - she hadn’t bargained on any of this first cousin, second cousin or cousin-removed stuff. She didn’t believe anyway, not for one moment, that hero was her cousin. Great Aunt didn’t believe he was her cousin. But hero here? Well, clearly he’d harboured some such little thought.

  For hero’s part, he was still on the ground beside the two women, but now experiencing an unusual mind-altering interval. This was an interval of peace, of stillness, brought about by the realisation that he wasn’t, after all, of any supervillain blood. Even in spite of Great Aunt’s confirmation that she’d murdered his entire family, still he couldn’t help it. Relief at not being related to her simply cheered him up. So he was happy at not having bad heritage, even though there was the negative aspect of being in love with someone who did have bad heritage. A bright spot even there though, was that he
wouldn’t now have to deal with any of that awkward, unwholesome ‘falling in love with his cousin’ stuff. So yes, relief. This relief lasted only a moment, however, owing to a brand new emergency story starting up within him. Hold on, he now told himself. Just a minute. Who is this Mr Grand Villain person Great Aunt is talking about?

  Great Aunt coughed discreetly, even apologetically. ‘Yes, about that,’ she said. This was when it came out that the full name of hero’s grandfather had not been Mr Squeaky Clean Great Guy Top Ace Superhero, a name which nobody but Grandson had appended and about which nobody had corrected Grandson when, in childhood, then youth, then adulthood, Grandson had presupposed it was. Instead, hero’s grandfather had been called Mr Grand Villain Extreme Omni-Imperious Arch-Grand-Arch Emperor Supreme Baddie of the World. ‘Your family were all villains,’ said Great Aunt. ‘Going back in time, then into deep time, they had always been villains - ’cept maybe one or two heroes doing something useless somewhere useless out on some extra-galactic fringe. But why so glum, hero,’ she went on. ‘Your grandfather’ - and here she sighed and softened visibly - ‘why, your grandfather, he was of such essential villainy, of such dashing success too, that women everywhere couldn’t but fall in love with him. Even in the eyes of rival villains - right up until his final nine hundred and fiftieth death - he was the biggest mover and shaker of them all.’

  Because it had been so long ago, however, and because she was dying, Great Aunt didn’t bother going into detail. She left off about this world shaker being the love of her life, of herself reputed in some circles of having been the second biggest world shaker, of both of them about to marry and shake the world together only something went wrong which was he didn’t want her anymore. He threw her over for a femme fatale - for a mere femme fatale - and Great Aunt’s pride at the time, at age thirty, simply couldn’t take it. What she couldn’t take was not so much the rejection and heartbreak, as the thought of killing her lover for pathetic crime passionel reasons. She liked to think she was mature and restrained enough to kill people for more dignified, careerist reasons. Therefore, she battled her vengeful feelings and decided not to kill him, not least till she got her head to come right about this. During the time it took, the femme fatale her lover had thrown her over for turned supervillain herself while giving birth. Upon her accouchement, which resulted in hero’s mother, she arose from her squatting position and immediately killed her lover, hero’s grandfather. After that, she took over the world. This left Great Aunt and other villains out on a limb - shunted, dismissed, superseded - with no choice but to stay in the background and await opportunities. Three decades later, having surmounted her feelings of jealousy and rejection, having rebuilt her overweening world outlook which had been all but destroyed by a soppy ‘falling in love’ outlook, Great Aunt then had her own day of carnage, of which, by then, only a smidgeon had been dedicated to revenge. The revenge part had been a freebie for her murdered, now forgiven, ex-lover for the time they had been together. The rest had been a common-or-garden carnage, simply reflective of Great Aunt coming out of seclusion, joining the flow, and taking over the world herself.