Mostly Hero

by Anna Burns

  So the short version - that of hero’s brilliant shiny heritage being ridden with befouled villainous maculations - was the only one hero heard. He knew already, of course, of the existence of this relationship between Great Aunt and his grandfather, and of the Great Day of Massacre during which Great Aunt had killed everybody, but now he had to re-assemble his early version to take account of how erroneously he had thought events had played out then. There had been no superhero grandfather - hypnotised, entranced, temporarily weakened from superhero status by an alluring, seductive Great Aunt siren. Just villains and more villains, hypnotising, entrancing and feuding amongst themselves. His grudge to kill Great Aunt evaporated also, during the time it took for her to reveal to him the truth of his ancestry. That noble bloodline he’d felt compelled to avenge had never existed, and it was far too early to tabulate a new begrudgement for the death of corrupt relatives he hadn’t begun to gauge a sense of yet. Meantime, during this ‘bad blood versus good blood’ denouement, Great Aunt exuded no guilt, though equally, there was no sense of gloating about her either. What an indifferent fish, he thought, even in death, this old woman was. At the end of her life, the very end, the old woman struggled to get a last trickle of words out. ‘I regret him,’ she whispered, and this might have been a reference to the loss of her lover, or to ever having met her lover; hero, of course, wrongly assumed it to mean the killing of her lover, especially when she added, ‘For you know, he really really really was a swell great guy.’ At this she turned to femme, and returned too, to the dying words she had uttered to her niece earlier. ‘Tiny little button, I think I’m dead.’ Then she was, for real this time.

  Freddie was almost dead too, but first, like Great Aunt, he had a speech to get out. As femme shrieked, ‘Oh, horrible! horrible!’ on the death of her aunt, Freddie began urgently to motion to her from the other side of the foyer, clutching the hem of her dress the moment she came across. He struggled with words. ‘Tell Monique,’ he began, which was pretty much how he continued. ‘Tell– tell– tell her– tell her– tell–’ ‘Oh be quiet, Freddie,’ cried femme. ‘You killed Great Aunt!’ Here she pulled her dress away but Freddie’s tone pleaded with her to heed him. ‘It was for Monique. I did it for Monique. Monique said that if I took over the world, if I killed her husband that she’d marry me - she promised!’ ‘Oh you poor sap - not again!’ Femme’s heart softened in spite of herself. She reached down to take her dying cousin in her arms but then remembered the enormity of the situation and pulled away again. ‘Freddie, you beast! You killed Great Aunt!’ ‘Well, yes, I did find that odd myself,’ Freddie agreed, ‘but Monique said I had to do it also.’ ‘So you just did it!’ ‘Well yes, femme. Didn’t want my fiancée to think I had no faith or trust in her.’ ‘But Freddie,’ moaned femme, ‘Great Aunt! Our dear little, sweet little–’ - even femme here though, could not go on. Given the revelations that had been pouring in upon her over the last hour concerning Great Aunt, as well as the sheer character transformation she herself had witnessed in her elderly relative, ‘dear little, sweet little’ hardly fitted the bill now. Instead, femme reeled, stricken, unsure of everything, of how to continue. Sweet - and yet a murderer! And yet sweet! And yet a murderer! Femme was indeed conflicted. Freddie meanwhile, still dying, carried on.

  ‘Technically speaking, femme,’ he said, taking his hands from his mortal wounds in order to gesticulate, ‘Aunty Daisy was never my great aunt. She was your great aunt. I’m from your mother’s hapless sucker, male side of the family. Great Aunt was from your father’s baffling, space cadet, female side of the family. So it was okay for me to kill her - not incest or anything like that.’ Femme continued to experience difficulty, for there was Great Aunt, mass murderer extraordinaire, lying dead across the hall from her. Here was Freddie, her twatter-twit cousin, about to be lying dead right here in front of her. And in the middle was her usually imperturbable hero, experiencing serious mental difficulty himself. Certainly, she’d wanted him to have his emotions, but did he have to have them right at this minute? Ideally, she’d meant for him to have them only when she herself wasn’t in need of rescuing. ‘So will you, femme?’ begged Freddie. ‘Will you tell Monique I love her?’ But before femme could answer, Freddie died. This might have been a blessing, to spare him the realisation that yet again he’d been playing his old records, because at that moment Monique Frostique burst into the foyer in all her true inglorious form. This was brilliant form, over-claiming form, sexy, ruthless, deliquescent form. Dear God, she’s gorgeous, I’m jealous, thought femme. Femme thought this even before she’d assimilated Monique Frostique had a gun in her hand. When she did see the gun, that just made her more jealous. Such cool advanced flirting. Such selfish lack of inhibition. It’s not fair - that gun goes with her hair! Why can’t I be like that?

  Femme’s jealousy was instant. That was bad enough, but it got worse when she moved on to the next bit. On top of her other distress, she was now sure hero was going to fancy that fatale. Monique Frostique was looking fabulous and deadly, and it was the kind of deadly where the men who fall for it think it’s only pretend-deadly. All men fall for it. That’s why so many of them, after meeting Monique, ended up soon after in the graveyard. Femme, of course, was not reassured by this. It wasn’t as if word got out from the graveyard and other men learned the lesson from the dead men’s experience. No. They were idiots, pitching themselves at her, around her, into her, each one thinking he, and only he, would be the one who’d make the difference, the one she’d remember a second after having, the one she’d renounce all her femme fatality for. And now here Monique was, ignoring the small fry girlfriend and facing up to the one opponent of any calibre left still standing. Even he looked exhausted. This was, of course, hero, femme’s man. Damn! damn! damn! cursed femme. Why can’t I be the smooth operator? Why can’t I be the long length of woman? Why can’t I have heavy slinky black hair down to my waist swaying about like a pendulum? At once she felt herself to be eighty years old. But she was twenty-six years old, but as the eighty-year-old, she imagined Monique looking at her and thinking, what’s he doing with that wee auld woman when he could have me, a beautiful, bedazzling, enigmatic, twilight zone woman? Oh! The aridity! The secondariness! The pedestrianism! Well, if he casts a fancy to her, thought femme, if he dawdles with her, if he looks at those legs while overcoming her, I’ll say ‘Well, hero, I saw you looking at those legs when she was trying to kill you, so you can hardly go on at me for trying to kill you when women trying to kill you seems to be what you want.’ Monique Frostique, femme was sure too, would threaten hero’s life in a more erotically torrid, sleazily perverse, antagonistically arousing way than ever she could manage. Why, she herself probably only threatened in bland, taupe, filing cabinet ways. Femme became dejected and certainly could have done with reassurance as to the sexual allure of her own murder methods. But there was no one to give it - hero being transfixed by the appearance of Monique, and the other two in the foyer, besides femme and Monique - no longer living at this point. So femme continued to stay low in confidence, berating herself and tormenting herself, which was a pity. Her perception of the situation was not the true perception of the situation. Monique Frostique had not - least not in the sexual sense - come to steal her man away at all.

  Half an hour earlier Monique had spied through her telescope that that tit, Ditchlingtonne’ly, had killed Great Aunt just as she had instructed him, so the greedy old bat was out of running at last. Also, the downtown eastside gang plus all their females and offspring had been murdered by Great Aunt’s henchmen, so they too, were out of the running at last. Then the henchmen themselves got arrested for loitering on, for littering, for vandalising, then finally for pushing the town cliff over itself. This proved a minor setback, given Monique, poised to become next world dominator, had toyed with the idea of hiring them as henchmen for herself. Never mind, she thought, she supposed she could advertise - for now though, it was crucial to move on with her plan. The police were sure to
arrive at the skyscraper any moment now so, standing in the disarray that was the foyer of Great Aunt’s fortress - corpses everywhere, red and green blood everywhere, upturned pot plants everywhere, spilt vases, flowers and soil everywhere, pictures hanging from walls but not in the way they were intended, then finally, that tiresome fatale girlfriend who even now was staring at her in what could only be described as utter despair and anguish - Monique scanned all to pick out the one person who stood between her and everything. Well, I won, she thought, even though she’d had so many dreams of winning that in her opinion it was a foregone conclusion. ‘Freeze, you good guy! Don’t move!’ she cried and adopted her dramatic firing position, taking aim at hero’s face with her gun.

  Hero, owing to a sense of anomie, of dragging anchor, indeed of a new sensation called depression, only imperfectly took in what was happening. He was struggling with the incomprehensible idea of things systematically being taken away from him, as well as of himself no longer being himself. Also, of not yet having turned into any other person. Also, of himself not being good guy, or perhaps never having wanted to be good guy, because under the not wanting to be bad guy seemed to have lurked a discrepant seed demanding he be bad guy but with him thinking he wasn’t allowed to be because of fealty to dead heroes who, it now transpired, had been villains all along. Did that make him a hypocrite, he wondered, a deluder, a deceiver, a maker of all crooked places straight when genetically, he should have been a maker all straight places crooked? Underneath this, however, was something else. It was a big thing, a darker thing, something on the limen to which hero could barely allow himself access. What if he was neither ‘super-this’ nor ‘super-that’ but instead just average and ordinary? To be average and ordinary equated in hero’s mind with being sub-average and less than ordinary, which itself equated with not being acceptable, not being respectable, not being lovable - though of course he himself would never think in such New Age, self-absorbed terms. Those terms were fine for femme, who was allowed to think in them because she wasn’t required to be superhero. This brought hero back to the beginning of his loop, to that of himself perhaps never having meant to be superhero, and it was while thus engaged and thus unhappy that he was thrown further off kilter by the appearance of Monique Frostique, leaping into the foyer in a staggering bad girl dress with sharp blades of midnight hair swishing back and forth behind her. Dumbfounded, he watched as she aimed her gun and cried ‘Out of the way, sonny!’ or something, giving him no time either, but to throw an involuntary glance over that body of hers, a less involuntary glance over those legs of hers, inwardly to declare, Lordie really! marry by Mary! come thy ways! no politics please!, for, after that, two shots rang out.

  It is unusual but not impossible to have a corpse do a killing, any type of killing, just as long as it is done within a certain timeframe. ‘Corpses don’t live long,’ was the explanation offered by top scientific experts in the town’s evening newspaper. This was after the sensational ‘Uptown Skyscraper Shootings!!!!!’ which had taken place that day. ‘Five minutes is what they live,’ said an expert. ‘That’s on average. Difficult to be surgically precise or to force literality on these matters, but could be forty seconds minimum to three days maximum. Any killing corpses are going to do therefore, they have to do it within that time.’

  Great Aunt was dead, definitively dead, so it had been her corpse that had taken the initiative. It shot Monique Frostique just at the moment Monique fired off her gun. The corpse, from its prone position, aimed at the forehead of its rival, then thought, ah no, can’t do that, that’s too good a face ever to put a bullet in. Instead, it blasted to smithereens Monique’s freezing cold heart. Not to worry, Monique’s corpse then told itself, for it was confident that on reconfiguring, the heart of Monique would seal itself up into even more impenetrable coldness. As for killing superhero, Monique had managed to get off one shot. She had been knocked off target by the oversight of her own death, thereby missing the head of her opponent. Instead, hero took the bullet mid-centre underbelly, and thereupon fell over next to the expiring Great Aunt corpse. ‘Are you sure you’re not my grandmother?’ he found himself asking, feeling all the while successfully shot at. ‘You simply cannot be listening,’ responded the corpse. ‘You have a remarkable, alarmist obsession, hero,’ it continued, ‘with putting on life as if it were a six by six hole in the ground that you must make tidy and senseful. Did not Great Aunt say you were to let that go, to set it down, to move on from it? But no. Corpse to superhero: “Celebration of Doomed Self” - is that what you’re going to do now?’ At this, hero fell into unconsciousness, passing out of a day that had been proving rather slippery for him anyway. It should have been a day, as were all his days, purely on the theme of heroes and villains. On the surface it did seem to be about heroes and villains, and anyone reading the papers later would agree that all parties concerned did seem to be heroes and villains. Underneath, however, hero had the impression that this day was marking a departure, that it was not, and neither would any day following it ever be, purely on the theme of heroes and villains again.

  So now hero was on the ground and a sobbing femme was again on top of him, which was what always happened whenever he ended up down before her. At the same time as this, the police burst through the door, replete with riot gear, arsenal, bullhorns, and the Alarming Breaking News Network Exclamation Marks!!!!!! Channel, the officers immediately dividing into quarters as per correct procedural, with one quarter surrounding hero, femme and the Great Aunt corpse. ‘Don’t be thinking you’ll get away with this!’ they chided the corpse, which was incomprehensible. Great Aunt - having gone through several decades of crime, during which she’d rolled dice either at, or next to, top level and now, with this, her final corpse scene - quite clearly had got away with it. The only remaining bit was her corpse’s last words. These were a feverish, ‘Money! Men! Cocaine! Men, money, more cocaine! More cocaine! - and more men! - and more money!’ - but there was so much commotion that not a soul heard them. Then the corpse stopped speaking and that was forever that. Another quarter of police surrounded Freddie, whose post-death words were, ‘Not gonna be a poor sap all my–’ before his voice too, left the body. ‘Poor sap,’ said a compassionate constable, touching the now forever still body gently with his toe. Another quarter of police surrounded Monique Frostique’s corpse, though all other quarters found themselves gravitating helplessly towards it. ‘Oh, but that’s just supergorgeous!’ cried a female police officer, as all officers - men and women - gazed reverently down upon the dead beauty, some sighing, some holding their breath, some trying to look away whilst crying out, ‘Don’t look at her! Don’t behold her! She’ll bend us to her will if we look at her!’ - but what nonsense. Of course they were going to look at her. It wasn’t often you saw beauty, dead or alive, like that anywhere in the world. ‘How many lives has she had?’ the chief inspector then said, and he said it brusquely in an attempt to regain self-control and mastery. One of the constables, himself in bits at attesting to the fact that even in death someone could look five hundred trillion dollars, pulled away from the magnetism of the corpse to contemplate his little black book. ‘It’s our reckoning, Sir, Monique Frostique is on death number eight and therefore will resurrect in exactly–’ this time he consulted his watch, ‘thirty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds.’ ‘Arrest the corpse then!’ ordered the chief inspector. ‘Get it to the station before she reconstitutes with all her days, life and superpowers intact.’

  The media meanwhile, were overjoyed. It had been the silly season, the quiet season, the weeks of the year when most villains went on holiday. During this time all newspapers, radio and TV channels were forced to content themselves with deadening headlines such as ‘Little Row Boat Rows Home!’ Now, however - with a dead veteran master-villain; a dead glamorous supervillain; a dead poor sap; an unconscious, wounded, perhaps dying, superhero with a femme fatale crying over this superhero - the moguls of the media could resume their ‘Money! Sex! Murder! G
lamour!’ headlines a whole month earlier than normally they would. Reporters, photographers and cameramen fell to work, eagerly snapping, flashing, interviewing and recording, before begging the police to be allowed to accompany them to the station to capture for posterity the reincarnation of the most beautiful, wicked woman in the world.