Anna Burns

I liked walking – walking and reading, walking and thinking.

At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there? At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment. I had a feeling for them, an intuition, a sense of repugnance for some situations and some people, but I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.

Local women en masse, however, did so command, and on the rare occasions when they rose up against some civic, social or local circumstance, they presented a surprising formidable force of which other forces, usually considered more formidable, had no choice but to take note.

There was the fact that you created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn’t want to.

As regards our friendship, this was the one person I could speak with, the one person I could listen to, totalling in fact the last trusted-fewest person who wouldn’t drain the life out of me that I had left in the world.

I was getting an education on just how much I was impacting people without any awareness I’d been visible to people.

I didn’t know what ma meant by my knowledge of the world. My knowledge of the world consisted of fucking hell, fucking hell, fucking hell, which didn’t lend itself to detail, the detail really being those words themselves.

I came to understand how much I’d been closed down, how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man. Also by the community, by the very mental atmosphere, that minutiae of invasion.

a recklessness, an abandonment, a rejection of me by me – had returned to me. I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’d be dead, all the time, violently murdered – and that, I now understand, gave a certain edge. It offered a different perspective, a freeing-up of the fear option.

Then again, I knew all along it wouldn’t be over. With these sorts of things you have to take each day, each person, each reprisal, at a time.