Mostly Hero

by Anna Burns

  Finally all corpses were taken out. Then all dead bodies were taken out. Then all wounded were taken out. Then Boris the Super Grand Total was taken out with his IOU taken off him. Then femme, she was led out as well. This was to waiting ambulances, to stationwagons and to various police vehicles, the last quarter of officers remaining in the building to sift through Great Aunt’s belongings before they too, left, after confiscating all that ballroom dancing equipment downstairs. The others, meantime, set off for the hospital, for the police station and for the town mortuary and, six hours later, ‘Okay then, shall we go?’ femme approached hero in his hospital bed and said. She was speaking to him after he’d regained consciousness, which was after she’d accompanied him to the hospital, after she’d waited at the hospital for him to have his bullet out, after she’d gone to fetch his car and a change of clothes to bring him home because she knew that once he came to, he’d kick up a fuss about not wanting to be there. So she’d be there, with vehicle, the very moment he came awake.

  When he did come awake, she hadn’t quite made it and, horrified, hero found himself not in his own territory but in the territory of a love-obsessed group of hospital staff, all of whom were gazing down upon him longingly from around his hospital bed. Intuiting an onrush of marriage proposals - for this had happened before - hero thanked the staff quickly for the bullet out and everything, adding he could now take over. This had all staff bursting into tears. They had hoped, prayed, begged God, that hero would be so ill, so gravely on the point of dying, he’d have to stay at least overnight - maybe two nights - maybe a few nights. Was that really so very much to ask? So especial was their concern that while he’d been in surgery, already they’d drawn lots to see which of them would be first to administer him his medicine but hero was adamant, reiterating he was fine, that his was a minor gunshot wound, a wound which no doubt, owing to his rapid-mending superheroic status, was well on the way to recovery. So he was leaving. Again all staff burst into tears. This was how femme found them - sexually, romantically and socially rejected - with hero at their centre, relieved to see her and announcing firmly they were to go. ‘Okay then, shall we go?’ she said, and she turned to thank the staff who didn’t care for her thanks because they hated her. This startled her, but there was nothing for it so she turned from them and helped hero, first out of the hospital, then to the carpark and his car. Here they had their own squabble because he said he was driving and she said he was unconscious so of course he wasn’t driving and he said it was his car and she wasn’t driving because, being under a spell to kill him, she would crash the car and she said she wouldn’t crash because she wasn’t under a spell to kill herself as well. This had him exclaiming, ‘Ah, so you admit to the spell!’ but before she could concede that yes, possibly there might be a spell upon her, he decided to close his eyes for just one second. When he opened them, he was in the passenger seat of his compact military tightmobile vehicle, with femme in the driver’s seat beside him. Already they were halfway en route to his place. ‘Yes,’ femme was saying. ‘The police came through on your transmitter radio while you were flirting at the hospital. They said the good wizards are hard at it, seeking an antidote to the spell.’

  So far, according to these chaps of the light, there didn’t seem to be one, but these wizards, they were conscientious and upstanding and doing their very best. Contrary to rumour, it wasn’t that they were useless, that their magic was less advanced than that of the bad wizards. It was that the whole spirit of them was contrary to the TV evening news. Nobody wanted to watch news that was all about a lovely day culminating in a lovely evening, packed with fulfilling stories of little row boats rowing home. ’Course not. ‘Shock! Death! Sex! Scandal!’ - these were very much the edifying items, so the good wizards, with all their sense of salubrity, tended not to get good press. They didn’t get bad press. They just didn’t get any press. But their modus operandi was to work selflessly behind the scenes to find healthy solutions to ongoing problematic things. The bad wizards, on the other hand, viewed as notorious, glamorous, enthralling and who were always in the gossip columns, had been arrested that day and put into Interview Room Number One. They said their modus operandi was to commit evil deeds and not to be absolved from them, so they’d continue to be immoral, obdurate and undisclosing about the spell. The henchmen, in Interview Room Number Two, shrugged and expressed a lack of interest in the whole spell issue, saying it was nonsense, that they didn’t believe in the supernatural and that what did these good guys in their kirtles take these hard-bitten, cynical henchmen for? The good guys then approached Monique Frostique’s corpse in Interview Room Number Three, though more from a sense of methodicalness than from any belief they’d receive co-operation from that quarter. Monique Frostique had herself been, and probably always would be, pure alpha villain material. Presumably also then, would be her loyally-abiding corpse. To their surprise, however, the corpse did a turnaround and announced it would spill the antidotal beans even if in the end it did so either in a piss-taking fashion or in an obscure, metaphorical, figures-of-speech fashion. Whichever way, the good wizards, the police, and the Alarming Breaking News Network Exclamation Marks!!!!!! Channel got very excited. They leaned forward eagerly. ‘The antidote to the spell is,’ the corpse opened its mouth and began.

  It was true Monique’s corpse hadn’t concocted the spell, or placed it upon femme, but that didn’t mean it would be incapable of providing a solution. This is similar to when people are dying and unexpectedly develop psychic powers, such as precognisance, retrocognisance, communications with the dead and other extra-sensory things. This unexpected and uncanny spiritualist behaviour can produce an unnerving effect upon onlookers, especially if these onlookers knew the dying person to be a sheer mocker and scoffer of the spirit world all his or her life. All scorn put to one side, the oracle now begins to point the finger. It knows things: who is pregnant, for example, but doesn’t want to be because the father of the child is not the husband; who is never to be married, no matter the bribery, hostage-taking, tears or desperation; who will lose all their identity, which for them means all their money, but without finding God to inform them they never wanted it in the first place. There’s also the murderer of twenty years standing who still thinks he’s got away with it and always there’s next to die - difficultly, friendless and alone. These are never chirpy cheery prognostications but instead predictions of despair and loneliness. They can be extraordinary, however, especially when witnessed in the non-wizard, non-esoterical, non-airy-fairy world. So it was in that spirit perhaps, the spirit of just knowing, that Monique Frostique’s corpse began to speak the antidote, all the more authentic too, coming through the instrumentality of a corpse than through some living, breathing, fallible human being medium, given the corpse itself was dead, or semi-dead, or temporarily dead or undead at this point.

  ‘The great sign of love and friendship between us,’ pronounced the corpse, ‘is that I don’t point my gun at you and you don’t point your gun at me and the designated site of the non-pointing of guns will be the cemetery, marked by a famous unfilled-in grave. This grave with nobody in it will be the symbol of the mutual care and respect in which we hold each other and, as long as we each keep to our own end of the bargain, it will never have to be filled in with any of your, or my, dead.’ Here the corpse stopped speaking. Also it paled considerably, as seen via the early evening sunlight slanting through the window blinds. Certainly it looked more dead at that moment than it had looked moments earlier. That was because it was dead. Any second now supervillain Monique Frostique the Ninth would be birthed spectacularly to the world.

  ‘Is that it!’ cried the police. ‘Some waffling last words of a dying corpse who, if you ask us, was in league with Frostique all the time and so probably was just laughing and putting its fingers up.’

  ‘Two sets of fingers,’ added the media.

  ‘No, gentlemen, no!’ cried the wizards. ‘You don’t understand. We consider the words of the
corpse to be cryptical, universal and wise.’ As police and media looked to them for explanation, the good men continued by saying that perhaps this was a case of hero and femme, having distorted, then escalated, what should have been a simple, harmonious love relationship into some critical, extreme, ‘heroes and villains’, disaster-upon-disaster, blanket take on the world.

  ‘You mean implying distrust is all there is?’ asked the media.

  ‘–and treachery is all there is?’ asked the police.

  ‘–and hyper-defence is all there is?’

  ‘–and threatened response is all there is?’

  ‘–and that that is what love is?’

  ‘–so we’d better get used to it?’

  ‘–by laying down rules?’

  ‘–and treaties?’

  ‘–and clauses within treaties?’

  ‘–which must be obeyed?’

  ‘–in order for us to love each other?’

  ‘–otherwise we’ll kill each other?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the wizards. ‘Though it’s not much of an antidote, which is why we wizards think we can come up with a better one ourselves.’ This they decided to do. Before leaving the station, and while manoeuvring round the media who were spot-checking their recording equipment before the imminence of Monique the supervillain, they handed a message to the police to hand on to hero and femme, to the effect that they were retiring to their situation rooms to continue working round the clock trialling processes and antidotes, but that hero and femme should prepare themselves for what might prove the inevitable: they might find they were an ordinary couple like most couples everywhere else. What did they expect too, the good wizards ventured a criticism, when they should know by now that preparation for love, and to love, was impossible? You don’t bring your love to your distrust and to your doubt and to your fear and to your shame, thinking to make love succeed from such premises. That will contribute nothing to your love, they said, except more distrust and more doubt and more fear and more shame. Instead, you bring the latter to the former - and you do so too, with assurance and conviction or at least a sense of goodwill so strong you avoid the qualified entente situation. ‘Mayhap the answer to the spell,’ the wizards concluded, ‘is simply to decide you’re not under it after all.’

  So the antidote to the spell seemed not to be one; or not to be one that wasn’t a natural, ordinary, non-magic one. Just people making effort to work out how to be with each other, especially when one of them was being a person in a way the other person had decided was wrong. ‘Do you hear that, hero?’ said femme, slowing down the car on the approach to hero’s building. ‘Seems there’s a little coda to my being under that spell, which is that if I am then maybe - with all your straitened structure - you’re under one as well.’ Hero didn’t answer because it was difficult for him to answer because not only had the entire hospital staff been fixated upon him and on the point of proposing marriage to him, but also because when they drew lots to see which would be first to administer him his medicine, none had been able to bear not to be first to administer him his medicine, so secretly they’d all administered it which meant hero was rather more out of it than he should have been at this point.

  Though awake, he had his eyes closed, telling himself, ‘all the better to hear with’. This might indeed have been the case, as sometimes - when exhausted, overdosed, shot, drained of ideas - open eyelids can become that one last thing too many to have to deal with. As femme parked the car in the underground carpark, he heard her concluding, probably too, as she would have thought, reasonably and sensibly, ‘...so if you want me to stop attempting your life, hero, you have to make efforts also. You could do something about that unnatural aversion to making reference to yourself for a start.’ Femme’s killing of hero therefore, and the effect it would have upon him - which would be death - appeared in her eyes to equate with the effect upon her of his state of autophobia. She would try not to be controlling, she said, as in kill him, as long as he tried not to be peripheral, excluding and twilight about everything. This seemed fair, according to her, though had he not become preoccupied, hero might have pointed out that it wasn’t fair and that her killing him was now also becoming his fault. She would have agreed that certainly it was his fault, for what was he thinking, inviting her to lunch on a cliff when he knew all the time she had a spell on her to kill him? She didn’t say this either, because femme too, became preoccupied. Following on from hero’s agitation to get out of the hospital, a large number of his stitches had opened, with now only a smattering holding his innards in place.

  He struggled out of the car, saying no, absolutely not, he was not, under any circumstances, going back to that hospital. He didn’t need help - not the hospital’s help, not her help. He needed nobody’s help. He’d have her know he was perfectly capable of stitching up himself. Femme decided to go along with this, given that the hatred she herself had encountered at the hospital hadn’t endeared her much into going back either. As this was a day when the inconceivable seemed to be happening, it was feasible that if they were to return, she thought, she might fall foul of some ‘oops, sorry, girlfriend accidentally dead’ situation, and he might be admitted, never to be seen again. When she entered the kitchen after putting his car away, she found hero sitting on a chair, doing nothing. He’d got as far as adjusting the lighting from his favourite low-key, shadowy light, to a bright light, suitable for mending. Also he’d taken off his shirt and balled it up against his bleeding torso. Then he was motionless, sitting on the chair, again eyes closed. Femme went over to him, touched him, held his shoulders, spoke his name, called to him and it was then she noticed that not only was he drugged - which after surgery was only to be expected - but that he was ponderously drugged. What was it they gave him? she wondered. Then she straightened up and glanced around.

  She began to search the kitchen, then the bathroom, then went into the other rooms. She was looking everywhere and anywhere for signs of First Aid. Gradually it dawned on her that probably there wasn’t any. What would it have cost him, she thought, to have popped to the shop and stocked up on medical supplies? Four minutes? Three shekels? Two kopecks? One farthing? But no. Too busy. Too superhero. Too saving the world. Too typical. Just because he was a man of more than one life and one death didn’t mean he had to be boastful and profligate about it. So she was on the verge of giving up and resorting to First Aid without First Aid when at last she spied a survival kit. It had been all but buried in the back room, sticking up slightly from under a loose floorboard.

  She grabbed it up and ran back to the kitchen. Sitting down beside hero she opened it and looked inside. Inside was baffling. The contents had nothing to do with First Aid and everything to do with graph papers. Two thick sheets unfurled in her hands. She was puzzled - not at the appearance of graphs in themselves for femme knew well hero was a devotee of them. They made him happy - if anything could be said to make brooding heroes happy - and most Sunday afternoons, while she was busy with her challenging and complicated day and evening, three-to-five-part, ensemble costume patterns, he’d be at his desk muttering ‘least squares fit, polynomial fit, line of best fit’ as, ensconced, he threw himself into his latest ones. He did them too, not only on issues of a professional nature, but also on day-to-day, even incongruous issues. In her time, femme had glimpsed graphs on civic duties and public speeches, on responsibility and frivolity, on creativity and evaluating creativity, on temperature and the weather, on sun rising and sun setting, even on the diet he followed that time he fretted after putting on some weight. What was disconcerting about these graphs was that they had been hidden. Usually hero’s graphs were not hidden - indeed they appeared the sole things about him required not to be hidden. So why hide these? Then she saw why. One loosely pertained to Great Aunt and the other, less loosely, pertained to herself. The graph on Great Aunt covered the length of time, in relation to the intensity of wooing, hero would have to put in in order to get Great Aunt’s favoured great
niece - his Trojan Horse - to fall in love with him, thus enabling him to get at Great Aunt to destroy her for having killed his clan. The graph on femme covered the quantity of his dismay at finding himself in love with her against the quantity of his wonder, even occasional joy, at finding himself in love with her. Femme looked at these offending graphs and felt shocked and shamed and tricked and confused - then she felt angry. Then she felt very angry. The dastard. The total bastard-dastard! What a faithless, destitute thing, she thought.

  She looked up from the graphs which then fell from her hands, and stared over at hero. Immediately the murderer within her arose. This wasn’t the ‘spell put on’ murderer, however, just the murderer inside that everybody has. ‘Femme,’ hero then said. ‘Are you still there?’ He was speaking fitfully and was unaware - owing to closed eyes, owing to drugs, owing to his superpower-defects still not working - of any graph situation - also of any angry woman situation. ‘Femme?’ he said again, then there came a dripping sound. Looking down, she saw his bloodied shirt had fallen from his hands and that his graphs had fallen on top of it. His blood was dripping onto them. ‘I don’t trust you, femme,’ was rashly what he said next. What a fool I’ve been, she thought. But I could leave now, go home, forget this purist, this deceiver, this inhibitor of growth, this over-precise calculation, and he can stay here and tabulate his own blood and compass his own guts and deal himself with his never-ending grid-references. Or he could die here today, exactly as he’s been living - friendless, with difficulty, and alone. ‘I’m not going to let you hurt me,’ was what hero next said and really, it did seem, would have seemed to the most objective of bystanders, as if hero were on a mission to coat-trail her. In response, femme grabbed up one of the graphs and pushed it into his chest. ‘You’re hurtful!’ she cried. ‘This is hurtful! What did I do to you? I liked you. Then I loved you. Is that what I did to you? It’s not me who’s the North Pole, hero. You’re the North Pole, hero.’ With that, she threw the graph down, far away from herself. As she stood up hero reached out towards her but then he fell over. After that, he passed out on top of his own graphs.