Mostly Hero

by Anna Burns

  Now you can’t just stop love. Once it’s been started, you can’t just stop it. Indeed you can’t just start it. It stops and starts of itself. Of course, you can encourage it or discourage it. You can frown upon it and lie to it and let it be known you’re unmoved by and indifferent to it. You can get on with life and turn - in the face of this threat level - to what you consider are more optimal, less security risk, defence improvements for yourself. You can say ‘fuck you’ to him and mean it and resolve never again, ever, to see him - and to abide by it. You can - you really can - all your life abide by it. You can be strong in these matters. That doesn’t mean, however, love will go away. You don’t get far in your years with love without learning love won’t be fucked over. You can be fucked over. He can be fucked over. But this thing with zero warning will come and go as it likes. These were femme’s thoughts, and they were new, cynical, bad language, bitterness-of-life thoughts, but in the very physical, very messy, very urgent reality she now found herself in, it could be said hardly she knew what she was thinking. What are you feeling, femme? some gentle but confronting inner therapist then asked of herself.

  Well, that was easy. She was angry and wanted to leave. And she would have left had he not been lying on the floor there, bleeding, maybe dying. So she couldn’t leave in case he died before having the wit to get help for himself. She felt angry at herself too, for caring that he should have this consciousness, and angry at him for being drugged and not having it, as if that too, were deliberate policy and a power-play over herself. She could get help for him, she supposed, then leave - in an angry, unforgiving fashion. This would prove she didn’t care but again she was angry because she did care, and furious at him for this as well. Then she’d worry. She knew she’d worry. She’d pretend not to worry, but she’d worry about what was happening to him at that hospital. Had he survived? Had he not survived? What were those obsessive-possessives in their good-guy caring uniforms doing to him? Were they aiding him or were they further - for their own ends - incapacitating him? And how would she ever find out unless she let it be known he mattered to her still? But not happy. Not her - she wanted to be happy. It was that she didn’t want him to be happy. She wanted him to be physically recovering but to be very, very sad at losing her. More than sad, desolated. What grieved her more was not so much the ‘Trojan Horse’ part of the graphs, but the bit about dismay at finding himself in love with her. So of course she wanted him unhappy. Why shouldn’t he have a comeuppance that hurt even more than she was hurting herself? So femme told herself all that she was feeling - and shame too, she was feeling. Was it that the love she had to give was wrong? Was it that her love was wrong? That it had been wrong or made wrong? Or was it that his way of loving had poisoned and distorted her way of loving? Or was it that her way of loving had been poisoned and distorted all along?

  ‘Not going back. Gimme a needle and thread, femme. I’ll mend me. I’ve done this before. They drugged me, they stifled me and you yourself must take precautions. I now believe the entire hospital staff to be in league with Great Aunt herself.’

  This was hero, and he was yet on the floor, now semi-conscious, but still not choosing words carefully. These words, however, brought femme back to herself. She realised she too, was on the floor, examining his wound which wasn’t quite the innards-out situation that first it had appeared to be. It wasn’t a contained situation either but, ‘People do this,’ she then said aloud to herself. ‘Yes, they do. People do this.’ By ‘people’ she meant her people and by ‘this’ she meant surgery, minor surgery, a few stitches. She had many childhood memories of members of her family - indeed all her family members - because of their lifestyles - forever having to repair and sew up themselves. Also each other. Practically a pastime sewing jugulars had been, had had to be, owing to the illegality of their actions which had led to their injuries which had then led to ‘hospital and the filling-out of forms with police involved’ out of the question. If only she’d paid more attention though, to the makeshift vulnerary and surgical side of these things. One thing though: she could sew. Such were femme’s thoughts as she flew about hero’s kitchen, and it was the rapidity, the speed of movement, as she pulled open drawers, yanked open cupboards, banged, crashed, whizzed in, whizzed out, that made it seem as if she was pushing herself - in her sense of priority - out of her own way. She had set out his brandy, his whiskey, his vinegars, his salt, her honey and her sugars. And, as he didn’t possess scissors, she got out his knives. Then she went to her haberdashery shopping - a different animal altogether from all that murderous DIY shopping - and from it she extracted her very own button, chenille and gossamer silk threads. After that, out came her new thimble and sewing needles, then she rechecked the pots and pans heating the water on the stove. Pausing, she looked at herself and she was dirty, sweaty and bloody. She looked at him - not so dirty since surgery but once again sweaty and bloody. Hero, meantime, had opened his eyes and was looking straight at her.

  At least he appeared to be, but in his mind he had lifted his head and was scanning his surroundings in an effort to locate anything. What was happening? Why was he in his kitchen, lying on his floor? These thoughts, plus kitchen, then slipped away and he lapsed back to repudiations which were now emitted as mantras, as prayers, as pure talisman good luck charms - of how he didn’t trust her, of how he saw the trick on her, of how he had the measure of her, of how, as a couple, they were entirely unsuitable, that he didn’t love her and so it was over and would she mind closing the door on her way out? This was sheer desperation of revulsion talking, a problem which beset hero sooner or later with everyone. It was textbook too, this neurosis, in that the more the closeness, and the more the dependence - and that would be his dependence - the more he needed always to pull away. Ordinarily he’d manage his escape by rushing to save the world and on his return - again champion of this world and with his policy of wellbeing back to sustained and functioning - he’d regret having gone into that old familiar exaggerated revulsion mode. Still though, no matter the regret, always the revulsion resurfaced, and this particular situation wasn’t helped either by the drugs in his body which had him coming out with his rejection in a more unmannerly fashion than ordinarily he would. Then too, there was his other emotion and this was a new one, a recent one, one called dread, and it was of a more heightened, paranoiac, life-or-death mission than had been his revulsion. Until he met femme, hero was sure he hadn’t experienced this sense of dread before. Her fault therefore, he decided, then he thought - but where was she? Again he lifted his head to scan around. It was then, and with shock, he realised that it had been femme, his own femme, who had pulled a fast one on him. She had shot him, drugged him and now had abandoned him in what seemed to be a boat. He was rocking in a boat, on a lake, left there as sacrifice to the creatures. He couldn’t see the creatures but he sensed they were somewhere over there. ‘Over there’ meant the shore and on it, the creatures were biding their time and watching. So how could he have trusted her? What a fool he was to have trusted her. Then he remembered he hadn’t trusted her. Oh yes, that’s right. Didn’t trust her. The relief was short-lived, however, because not trusting her hadn’t saved him either. Those creatures, he knew, were watching and waiting still.

  With hero in the boat on the water, and femme in the kitchen with her substances, her instruments and with herself scrubbed up as much as she able, she got down on the floor beside him. She took a deep breath, then she plunged in. ‘People do this,’ she reminded herself. ‘People always do this. Why, this is done everyday by everybody.’ Having already washed out hero’s wound - which had had her cringing and him expleting with her responding, ‘Quiet, hero. After this, I’m never going to talk to you - in any dimension, or stage, or plane of life, of any mass or magnitude, simultaneous or otherwise, throughout all the universes and involving all channels, all contracts, all agreements and all negotiations made consciously or unconsciously between us, or between any part or parts of us, in all directions o
f space or time - ever again’ - she picked up her needle and her thimble. Edging the torn flesh together, she leaned over and began to sew. This was to be a row of continuous stitches in order to save time on that ‘whoa! feel sick! gonna faint!’ sensation she was already experiencing. So if he came to and cavilled that she should have done symmetrical criss-cross pedigree template interrupted sutures, then he could bloody well unpick himself and sew himself up again. At that moment for femme, life was a tough, dizzying, unaided, pushing through one side then pulling firmly out the other - then repeating. For hero, it was a murmuring of indistinctions in a camouflage language, which proved at least he had a pulse and that he could breathe.

  ‘I have visual confirmation,’ he said, ‘that this place has been compromised. Did you secure the perimeter?’ to which femme didn’t bother to respond. ‘I have doubts,’ he continued, ‘that we are alone, that some rogue entities have not snuck in under the radar. Have you considered the lone combatant? One must always consider the lone combatant, femme.’ From that, he continued with ‘target error’, ‘evasion techniques’, ‘counterfactual reconstruction’ and again femme paid no heed which wasn’t exactly rudeness as this was hardly a compos mentis conversation. Then, when he called her an ‘entirely meaningless adjective’ though absolutely, even drugged, he had not meant to say that, femme, who was herself, and without drugs, climbing the vertical horizontally, either didn’t take it in or, again, didn’t bother to respond.

  Then Great Aunt appeared, or at least - and here hero prided himself on not being so drugged he’d completely lost his faculties - it wasn’t Great Aunt, but another old woman. It was his true grandmother and she was dressed in white and knitting in a rocking chair. This knitting consisted of a ragdoll with dressmaking pins sticking into it - though not, hero guessed, in a dressmaking way. These pins were in the eyes, the ears, the nose, the heart, the soles of the feet and the palms of the hands of this ragdoll, the doll itself hanging from what looked like human bones. These bones were tiny ribs and they constituted the knitting needles. That was the first clue. Second clue was something Grandmother was saying in a conspiratorial manner to his mother. Mother had also appeared, also dressed in white, and was stirring a boiling pot over a fire at this point. ‘Don’t worry about her,’ Grandmother was saying. ‘She’s long unstable, long weakened by sentiment, long surplus to requirements. If we play our cards right, very easily we will kill her. If we don’t kill her, we’ll reduce her to a pissing doll of only one or two life functions, out of the running, confined to some institution for the rest of her days.’ ‘But I fear,’ interrupted Mother, cutting bits of tissue and sinew from some object she was handling, before throwing the meat into the pot and stirring around, ‘that we should not have underestimated the impact upon her of your murdering her lover.’ Grandmother snapped at her daughter to be silent at this point. After a pause, she retracted and leaned forward to stroke her daughter’s back with one of the knitting needles. ‘Sorry, little dolly,’ she said. ‘Of all the daughters I could have had, only you could have satisfied me. But do not anger me. He was her lover yes - but then he was my lover. That meant I was to have final say. We’ll follow the plan, therefore,’ she continued. ‘And that way, as I’ve outlined, she’ll be out of the running before she’s properly back into it. She’ll have no opportunity to fulfil on her appetite - which reminds me - have you fed our little dynasty yet?’ At this, both women broke off and turned towards hero. He was in a cradle, rocking to and fro. Again he felt dread, only this time three decades earlier than first he thought he’d felt it. He did not want to feel it, did not want their gaze upon him, did not want to eat of them, but if he didn’t eat, surely he would die. Already he was hungry; for a long time too, hero had been hungry. Still though, his body remained frozen, his head half turned towards and half turned away. As Mother, still holding the knife, the feathers, the bones, leaned over to pick up her baby, to hold him tight and to murmur, ‘Little investment, little extension, little sacrifice, little “don’t-you-let-us-down now”’, he knew he’d no choice but once again to feed of her. As she turned his face towards her, his dread increased rapidly, reaching culmination as the teat pushed into his mouth.

  Of course anyone who wasn’t drugged would know at once what hero’s mother and grandmother were up to. Spells were what they were up to, this one in particular to cast upon Great Aunt. That wouldn’t work, however, because Great Aunt decided long ago not to have spells put upon her. She refused to allow them. So they couldn’t - with her will proving stronger than that of anyone else in the case. Although she’d been killed many times - mostly shootings but also knifings, hangings, drownings and once by being tied to a railway track with a train at dawn running over her - never, not once, had she been killed by a magic spell. ‘It’s all mind over mind,’ she confided years earlier to her brothers and sisters, and definitely she was world champion in this matter. Hero, for all his dossiers, strangely knew none of this. If he had known, given his current state, probably even then he’d have confused the issue. As it were, he believed that the ‘she’ being referred to by his relatives was none other, could be none other, than his beloved femme herself.

  So the penny dropped but hero hadn’t time to ponder the dubious behaviour of his caregivers or why it was he felt compelled to put himself through perilous situations every time he fancied a bite to eat. Hadn’t time because, not only had femme not betrayed him, it was she herself, he now realised, who was in danger. She’d been abandoned on the shore and if he didn’t do something that lone combatant, or the creatures themselves, would smell her out and come prey on her. What was I thinking! he thought. What have I done! In order to swim to shore to save femme then, he demanded this other femme, this faux femme - undeniably at his flesh and doing something - resolve herself of her bad milk and untie him. With his shreds and discoloration on display, however, and with her family’s nonchalant, throwaway attitude towards surgery and her own clammy, moist skin and lightheadedness attesting to the fact she did not much possess it, femme, of necessity, continued to pay scant attention to his words. It was only when he began shouting, ‘Quick, femme! I’m not the one imperilled. You’re the one imperilled. Untie me so I can swim to shore to save you’ that she looked up from her sewing. ‘I’m here, hero,’ she said. ‘You’re not tied, hero,’ she said. ‘I can’t move my arms,’ he said. ‘So how come you’re moving them?’ she said. And so they continued right up until the last stitch. On cue, free at last, hero jumped into the water and immediately he was on the shore and there was femme. She was saying something, mainly to herself in wonder of his facial inflections. ‘See that?’ she said. ‘Did you see that? Definitely there was emotion in it.’ He laughed and ‘Hero,’ femme responded, reaching out to push strands of hair from his face. It was then hero noticed, and with surprise, that femme was in her underwear, noting also that she wasn’t bothered by this, didn’t seem to care about it, which was certainly a turnaround from all that upside-down angst about female smalls on the cliff. And this was true. Femme’s dress, the one bought for the lunch, had indeed disappeared tatter by tatter, beginning at the cliff, then continuing as they’d journeyed - from cliff to skyscraper, from skyscraper to hospital, from hospital to hero’s apartment - to the very last tatter being blown off in hero’s carpark by the breeze. Femme was in her lilac suede shoes, her small, narrow blue brim hat and her pale blue wisp of a petticoat only and, moments before hero glimpsed her, she was biting her lip as she stuck the needle in, prising it through for the last time. After this, she cut the thread with the knife, then downed all tools and reached over from her position on the floor to change the lighting back from its sharp precision glare to hero’s favourite half-lit half-dark for him. Then she flopped back against the kitchen unit next to his prone body, arms motionless at her sides, one leg bent up underneath her, the other splayed in front.

  So they ended on stitches: hero drugged, repulsed, in love, his guts spilling out; femme loving, feeling she shouldn�
��t love, verging on fainting and sewing them in again. A bit of darkness therefore. Bit of shadowy tableau therefore. A battlefield intimacy. But as Great Aunt’s henchmen would say, who is anyone to judge? Next time might be different. Next time there might not be a next time because both parties might have moved on from each other. Or, instead of blood and stitches, there might be a picnic, a theatre-play, a little boat, minus creatures, rowing home. They could be meeting up at a restaurant, at a proper hour, without the intermediary of any collapsing cliff between them. At this moment hero and femme, half-undressed, fully exposed, wounded, dazed and exhausted, were unable to get up from the floor. Hero was flat on his back, next to the same unit femme had collapsed back upon; both were covered in blood, honey, sweat, sugar and a good chunk of hero’s alcohol; unaccountably also other condiments that hadn’t been taken out from their store. Femme was thinking that at some point soon - not now, for she couldn’t move now - but in one second, she would get up, put the light back on, do a lemon or salt solution and bathe that wound of his. Then she’d dress it with something. She didn’t know what. In their rush to get from the hospital they’d brought nothing back with them, just him, drugged to the eyeballs, insisting he was to drive. Another thing was infection. In her needle and thread ministrations, femme had no idea what microorganisms, what little creatures, she might have sewn up in there with him. If the wound didn’t heal, if his body didn’t overcome - expulsing the creatures, or easily assimilating and decommissioning the creatures - they would have to return to the hospital - but poor hospital. The staff there had never been as bad as hero and femme, in their heightened state, had thought. Normally, they were okay - balanced, well-adjusted, caring professional people. It was that they’d lost their heads owing to the proximity of their idol, which unfortunately had rendered them a little monstrous, a little ravenous, a little sinister at that point. Femme, however, needn’t have worried. True, microbes could, of course, be deadly, but in hero’s book they could never be as deadly as being related to villains could be deadly. Easy, therefore, to throw off microbes or easy to accommodate microbes. Microbes had never been the issue, never the type of infection hero would have had even one emergency story about.