Little Constructions Read online

  Before going on, I suggest a quiet contemplation on the thing women. When I say women, I don’t know if that’s technically correct. We’re talking about an older woman and a younger woman here maybe. Or maybe one woman and a teenager. Or is it one woman and a child? For you see, fifteen, what does that mean? Are you grown up when you start menstruating? Are you grown up when you develop breasts and curvy bits about you? Do you become an adult when you have sex willingly or unwillingly for the first time? I don’t know. But I would say that the best way to describe Julie Doe would be to forget all that in relation to this person and know that, if ‘grown up’ is being able to tell the difference between respecting the highest of moral orders and just grabbing, then this fifteen-year-old was older than her mother’s thirtysomething friend. Jennifer Doe, in contrast, was pure grabber.

  Jennifer banged the counter with the slap of her hand and cracked her bubble gum explosively. She had a habit of making noise – unless around the men in her life, when she could take a back seat and let them make it for her. Making noise is not a bad thing, mind. It depends on the surrounding vibrations. The vibrations in Tom’s gunshop these days, however, were a brand new baby, delicate and fragile and very given to shattering. The psychic cords in this gunshop could be destroyed by the lightest of a bad touch.

  ‘Has Jetty, JanineJoshuatine or Janet Doe been in here looking for a gun or something?’ Jennifer’s voice was sharp, exactly as her ancestral females’ had been before her. But it didn’t used to be. It used to come from way down in her body, around the area of her toeline, and it would travel up with joy and out her throat on a sweet note. And that was nice. That was very nice. And that was a long time ago. Hearing her question, Customer Tom Cusack, who was on the same side of the counter as she was, jumped off his stool in obvious alarm.

  ‘One of them’s been in,’ he said. ‘One of them women. Are the others meant to be expected in also?’

  Jennifer ignored him, for who the fuck was he anyway?

  ‘Look listen you,’ she said, finger up and pointing at the other Tom. She was trying to pinpoint him with a stare into looking back. This was proving a fluid situation. Every time she nearly hit home, his eyes slid under hers like liquid doing a runner, he’d be away down the plughole, there’d be a burp, a burst of a bubble, and he’d be gone. Instead of being triumphant, as any bully would be at getting the high ground, Jennifer Doe, in her habitual impatience, was annoyed by it immensely.

  ‘Which of them was it and did you sell a gun to her?’ she shouted. ‘Well, did you? What’s wrong with you? You’re like a statue with slidy eyes. Are you sick in the head or what?’

  Reality was, she was most disgusted with this person. She’d heard a rumour from a reliability that Gunshop Tom Spaders was sick in the head, that something had happened to him once and that he was refusing to get over it. Must have been days ago too, she thought. What age was he anyway? Midthirties? More than mid-thirties? That’s embarrassing. Only an auld ginny-ann of a man wouldn’t be over whatever it was by now.

  With everyone staring, Tom tried to say something out of a mouth that could hardly open. It was supposed to be about ducks, but Jennifer jumped, thinking he’d said fucks, and made a move to heave herself over the high counter to get at him. Julie stepped in just in time.

  ‘Aunt Jennie,’ she reasoned, her hands on the enraged concrete bolster now being aided back down from the counter. ‘If it is Aunt Jetty – as we think it is – we know she’ll have been and gone and got a gun, and we know also where it’ll be she’s heading with it. It couldn’t be Mamma, for Mamma never seems to think she’s in danger and so will be at work as usual at the Almost Chemist of the Year. If it’s Aunt Janine – but isn’t she on holiday? – then that would be the worst that could happen, but even then there’d be no point in rushing to prevent it because all the damage, I suppose, would be done.’ Aunt Janine, for the record, was JanineJuliaJoshuatine Doe, a very strange and unwomanly woman. People say she’d done or been around that many injurings and killings that she was now looked upon practically as a very man herself. But that’s sexist so I don’t say it. How shall I put it? It wasn’t the murders anyway, or the ruthless amoral aspect of her that worried most people. It was the Saturday afternoon shopping expeditions in town. She’d bump into people and knock them over without seeing them and without apologising to them, and certainly without bending over and helping to pick them back up. She also had a habit of adjusting and readjusting earplugs, and of muttering ‘No No No! Get off!’ all the time. Thing was, she was embarrassing and odd just in herself. Take her appearance, which in this case was indicative of the inner construct of a disturbed person. Just take a look and you’ll see what I mean. A human wearing clothes funny. She was a human wearing clothes funny. Indoor clothes she’d be wearing outside and outdoor clothes she’d be wearing inside. The coat would be on first, right against the skin. Her legs, they said, would be through the armpit sections, with her dress and undergarments arranged about on top. The woman was an example. Of something. Of Not Making It Easy. And if she had been once groomed and beautiful – with husband, home and child, as some said she had been – that was not something you’d be able to tell now. Most people were of the opinion that Janine Doe was too eccentric, that she should be put away – not especially for her crimes, for can’t crimes always be accommodated? – but because of all the unnerving back-to-frontness she displayed.

  And yes, those crimes. Were they happening or weren’t they happening? Well, of course they were happening. Men – and some manly women, mistaken for men – were being found. Janine couldn’t have been killing them, though. She hadn’t enough awareness of humans as an actual species to go out and kill any of them and, besides, these murders were drawn-out plotted murders and JanineJoshuatine could never sustain the consciousness for that. Jotty Doe was her sister – and you remember Jotty? – the less-annoyed cousin who hadn’t stabbed her mammy, in contrast to the very-annoyed cousin, Jetty, now with Kalashnikov, who once had? Jotty worried constantly about her sister for she had witnessed more than anyone the unending torment of her sibling, for both Janine and she lived together in the same house. By the way, Janine’s oddities were a source of fascination to John Doe, husband of Janet, father to Julie, and brother to both Janine and Jotty. He was also leader of the town’s Community Centre Action Team. Although possessing strange proclivities to his own name, nevertheless he looked forward to hearing the latest of his eldest sister’s fads. Lastly, you probably didn’t need to know any of that because Janine had, in fact, gone off on holiday. So it’s back to Julie, and Jennifer, and the Tomboys in the shop.

  Julie’s reasoning was top level. There was nothing hidden, subtly layered, or of dry humour underneath this teenager’s statement. She was plain-speaking. Aunt Jetty, she said, had most likely got the gun, so hadn’t they better leave and hurry off to prevent her? Jennifer heard the girl and, whilst itching to hit that moron who was still standing there like a statue, agreed that yes, time was short and they’d better push on.

  ‘Mental bastard!’ she flung at Tom, and honest to God, she thought, who could blame her? Dozy he was. So dozy you could use him as a pillow. And of course he wasn’t married, but just imagine if he was. ‘It would be awful to be married to him! Can you imagine being married to him?’ both Toms could hear as she and Julie made their way out on to the road.

  ‘’Bye, Tom. ’Bye, Tom,’ shouted back Julie, herding her mother’s friend in an easterly direction, the door going ding! as the tender and the enraged disappeared. In the shop one of the Toms continued to stay frozen behind the counter, whilst the other, on automatic reflex, leapt over to put the snib on.

  Chapter Two

  Not fast enough.

  What came after the women was a man, but he might as well have been a woman for all the welcome he got. Tom was a split second from putting on the snib when the door went ding! and a big man’s arm shoved itself through. Tom shoved the arm out and then did manage to put the sni
b on, but the door cracked as the arm, in a thwack, broke the snib through. Tom pushed and the arm pushed and it became a Wuthering Heights moment – where the man in a panic in the bed in that book drags the ghost arm back and forth across the windowsill – only here it was a door and not a window, it was daytime and not night-time and it wasn’t a dream either and it wasn’t about sex. Anyway, Tom pushed and the arm pushed and the door went ding! ding! ding! ding! a few more times. Then the arm paused, took stock of the situation and, with a flick, stumbled Tom to one side. Both Toms watched on helpless then, as the rest of the man pushed himself through. Once in, he shut and barred the door, turned the open sign to closed, pulled down the blind and hauled over a gun cabinet, the weapons rattling and the neat boxes of bullets sliding about inside. When the entrance was blocked, that meant the exit was also. The place was immediately darker, the atmosphere heavier and the stranger, relieved by the transformation, turned in the gloom and walked towards the front.

  No nonsense taker.

  I think that’s how he’d describe himself.

  And he wasn’t a stranger either, so don’t be thinking that.

  He went round to the safe side and lifted the giant teapot. That seemed to indicate that perhaps all he’d been after was a nice cup of tea. The Toms were not convinced. There existed in the world a certain taunting territorial taking up of another’s teapot, and they were more of the opinion that this was an example of that. They watched as the man lifted Customer Tom’s cup, still containing Tom’s warm coffee, turned it bottom side up and spilled Tom’s contents out on to the ground. Leisurely, he then poured himself a tea, helped himself to milk from the milkbottle, sugar from the sugarbox, then stirred with his fingers, ignoring the tablespoon patently standing in for a teaspoon nearby.

  Shocking. Very rude too.

  But introductions please, no matter how distasteful. Well, okay. This man was Johnjoe Doe, whose real name was Harrison, and although not a Doe de rigueur, he was a longstanding member of the John Doe Community Centre Group. He was also an honorary member of the family, and that would be the Doe family, not Gunshop Tom’s family. Tom didn’t have a family. He’d never wanted one, although there was a time once when he would have loved to have had a wife. He’d forgotten that now. The other Tom did have a wife and one day, when he would get out of hospital, he would tell her of what happened at Tom’s gunshop that morning, for he believed it had been that incident that had ricocheted him into his own tragedy later on. But Johnjoe being an honorary member of the Doe family is what I’m talking about here. He knew the children intimately, which was scary, knew the two sisters, Jetty and Janet, impartially, and by the way, I don’t think I mentioned – Jetty Doe, the annoyed one, the one with the Kalashnikov and the duck pellets in the taxi – she was Janet Doe’s sister and she lived with Janet and Janet’s husband John and the two teenage children in the Doe family home as well.

  So Johnjoe was John Doe’s right-hand man. He was seriously on the staff, being John Doe’s lieutenant, and John Doe often delegated jobs to him that he didn’t have the time or inclination for himself. He also called upon Johnjoe in any kind of emergency. Like this emergency. But excuse me. I have to butt in to offer a short meditation on the thing men.

  The thing men, contrary to appearances, has to be looked at laterally and not linearly. You might cry, ‘Rubbish! I know what that is – guns, swamps, crocodiles – a straight line.’ But I cry no. Don’t be so hasty. I know for a fact there’s more to it than that.

  You might accept, though with reluctance, if I say that some men don’t know the difference between a crocodile and an alligator – even some men living in the crocodile and alligator parts of the world. ‘Okay,’ you’d say. ‘Stretching it, I might believe that.’ But if I then said some men don’t know the difference between a crocodile and a turtle, ‘Oh, now, nonsense, nonsense!’ you’d flounce. ‘You’re just saying that to get me to like them. I may be quiet and unobtrusive and don’t like to give bother, but I’m not stupid and I’m not as naive as all that!’

  But it’s true. It really is true.

  Of course we’re talking crocodiles here, and not guns, for all men know guns, except the Great Exception and I’ll get on to him in a minute. But for now have a look at Gunshop Tom and tell me what you think.

  On one level, I agree, he appears the average swamps-crocodiles-big-guns male specimen, but is it not apparent that, since that mugging and stabbing, he’s not the man he once was? Time was, he’d rush to open his shop with gusto, whistling tunes, getting in there early, rubbing his hands happily, laying out his hardware, hanging up his ‘No licence needed’ and ‘No children allowed’ signs with good heart. But now, since the attack, he was simply going through the motions. There was no longer the purity of the enterprise, no longer the enthusiasm of offering gun assistance. Sickening, he appeared to be, entirely for something else. He had turned from manic gun lover to listless gun indifferent, threatening even to become a full-time milk-tea-bread-and-butter shop man. Come, you’d say, is it really possible for a male to become such a mutually exclusive concept? Ordinarily I would say of course not. And you would say of course not. Even Customer Tom, who was married and settled down but who still liked to keep up with the milder gossip and gun literature, would say of course not. But if you asked Gunshop Tom, he’d become incoherent, stop talking altogether, then turn away. Truth told, it would have been better for Tom to have started falling apart in a manner less obtrusive, for gossip likes a subject and he was becoming it. Naturally, once rumour is up and running, it’s only a matter of time before someone wants to cash in on it. The Doe family, for example, had started to hear about this ‘antithesis of Tom’ as well. ‘Won’t get over some mugging,’ someone said. ‘Did a course on losing friends and falling out with people.’ ‘No longer cares about his stock or hardware.’ ‘Really?’ said John Doe. ‘In that case, perhaps he might also be persuaded into no longer caring about running the better of the best gunshops in town.’

  So there they were: the Toms silently looking on as Johnjoe drank his tea to the tune of loud slurpy noises. Naturally they were frightened and, energetically, he was aware of that. This made him feel powerful. This made him feel respected. This made him feel like he was a really damn decent person. When he’d finished his tea, he set down his mug, splayed his hands over the sugar, which was splayed over the counter. In his own time, he got to the point.

  Johnjoe knew who she was, he said, and he knew she’d been in to get a piece to hunt and shoot John Doe down with. That wasn’t a question. Simply, he wanted to know what weapon she’d chosen, what amount of ammunition she’d taken, what o’clock she’d left at and in what o’clock direction did she go? He directed his questions at Gunshop Tom, who now hated it when people directed questions at him. In his numbed-out state he found it hard enough – without all this being questioned – to get himself to attend to anything at all. So, as Johnjoe spoke, Tom tried to do the deep-breathing exercises the man in the training bottoms and Buddy Holly glasses had tried to teach him at the hospital. Even then, though, it had proved impossible, for yer man had kept shouting, ‘In and out! In and bloody out! Is this difficult for you?’ every time Tom’s diaphragm got it wrong. Big Johnjoe Doe, who wouldn’t be able to give the appearance of patience even if he’d wanted to, was not at all patient. He lifted the huge teapot once more in his mighty hand.

  Now this was a gigantic teapot and aesthetically I would say it belonged in such a large-sized hand as Johnjoe’s, but that wasn’t meant to be the point of this sentence. The point in that sentence was supposed to be that in the old days this teapot would have been down the back at the bun counter and never up at the gun counter, another sign of Tom’s laxity, and – for anyone with an acute eye and a vested interest – a further sign of Tom’s weakening gun vigour and of the general despondency that was settling about his life. It was clear this man no longer cared about damage caused by sugar-spatters, or breadcrumbs falling into precious gun oils, or
firing mechanisms distorted by careless tealeaves to the tune of point zero zero zero zero one of a degree. Yes, as much as that. Johnjoe noticed though, and his eyes licked their lips as he clocked also that Spaders was increasingly becoming a fatigued and womanish individual – he no longer had drums drumming, no longer had songs singing – and he appeared to be the owner of a body irreversibly falling out with itself. Therefore, according to the famous saying ‘Nature hates big holes’, Johnjoe began to have an image of Spaders lying dead and buried in one. The shop would be unowned then, wouldn’t it, for didn’t yer man here have no family? Perhaps – to throw out an idea – the Doe Team could take it over and be the new proprietors instead?

  One thing. It’s about a situation that can happen – and I know you must know it – where you don’t want something for yourself because you view it as a bit of rubbish, but if someone else shows an interest, you don’t want that person to have it instead of you. They might end up being absorbed and happy having it, and you might end up being left out and forgotten. So, to keep you in the middle – adored, envied, hated, doesn’t matter – you decide to take this thing and you do. You store it, along with all the other things you took and didn’t want, and you put them in the attic, in the cupboards, in the corners, in the coalhole, under the floorboards, in huge padlocked boxes under the stairs. They’re all around you, covered in dust and increasing atmospheric pressure, and you’re in the middle and you’re sure to be remembered and, by the way, don’t worry if these things rot. There are always more things to be had.