Anna Burns - Milkman

Ma, however, had got wind. It wasn’t of the sunset or of maybe-boyfriend she’d got wind, for he didn’t come from my district and I wouldn’t take him into my district, which meant we spent most of our time over in his district, or else downtown at the few inter-communal bars and clubs. Instead it was a rumour put into the air that had got her anxious. So the night before my run with third brother-in-law, also the night before my sunset with maybe-boyfriend, she came upstairs to see me. I heard her coming and, oh God, I thought, what now?

Since my sixteenth birthday two years earlier ma had tormented herself and me because I was not married. My two older sisters were married. Three of my brothers, including the one who had died and the one on the run, had got married. Probably too, my oldest brother gone errant, dropped off the face of the earth, and even though she’d no proof, was married. My other older sister – the unmentionable second sister – also married. So why wasn’t I married? This non-wedlock was selfish, disturbing of the God-given order and unsettling for the younger girls, she said. ‘Look at them!’ she continued, and there they were, standing behind ma, bright-eyed, perky, grinning. From the look of them, not one of these sisters seemed unsettled to me. ‘Sets a bad example,’ said ma. ‘If you don’t get married, they’ll think it’s all right for them not to get married.’ None of these sisters – age seven, eight and nine – was anywhere near the marrying teens yet. ‘What would happen too,’ went on ma, as often she would go on whenever we had this one-sided conversation, ‘when your looks are gone and then nobody wants you?’ I got fed up answering, as in ‘I’m not telling you, ma. Never will I tell you, ma. Leave me alone, ma,’ because the less I gave, the less she could get in. This was tiresome for her as well as for me but in her endeavours ma was not without back-up. In the district there existed a whole chivvy of mothers doing their damnedest to get their daughters wed. Their panic was real, visceral; certainly for them this was no cliché, no comedy, not to be dismissed, also not unusual. What would have been unusual would have been for a mother to have stepped forth from among them who was not of that scene. So it became a battle of wills between ma and me as to which of us would wear the other down first. Anytime she’d get whiff I might be dating (never through me), I couldn’t walk in the door but it would be, ‘Is he the right religion?’ followed by ‘Is he not already married?’ It was vital, after the right religion, that he be not already married. And because I continued to give nothing, this became proof he wasn’t the right religion, that he was married and, more than likely, not only a paramilitary, but an enemy defender-of-the-state paramilitary as well. She did horror stories on herself, filling in blanks where I refused to supply information. This meant she wrote the entire script herself. She began religious observances and visits to the holy men with the intention, my younger, gleeful sisters informed me, that I give up these godless bigamous terrorists I was falling in love with one after the other, and that instead I fall in love suitably this time. I let her do this, especially once I got involved with maybe-boyfriend did I let her do it. There was no way, ever, I was going to give her him. She’d have done a process, had him through the system, one assessment question after another assessment question – hurrying things, hurrying things, trying to complete on things, complete on things, end things (which meant dating), begin things (which meant marriage), tie things up (which meant babies), to make me, for the love of God, get a move on like the rest.

So the religious observances and the visits to the holy men – later also to the holy women – continued, along with her three o’clock prayers, her six o’clock prayers, her nine o’clock prayers and her twelve o’clock prayers. There were also extra petitions at half past five every afternoon for the souls in purgatory who were now no longer able to pray for themselves. None of this o’clock praying interfered with her staple morning and evening praying, in particular her advanced working of intercessions undertaken for me to abandon these trysts she was sure I was having with heretical defenders at ‘dot dot dot’ places about town. Ma always called locations she disapproved of, or was sure she would disapprove of, ‘dot dot dot’ places which occasionally had my older sisters and myself speculating as to what, in her youth, she might have got up to in them once herself. As for her praying, her decreeing, all that became more accentuated, more quick-fire in supplication until one day owing to recklessness it got inverted. It had to. Given the fictitious premise she was basing them on – to rid me of men who had not ever, except in her own head, existed – it now looked as if she’d manifested the very thing neither of us wanted into place.

After my second meeting in the parks & reservoirs with the milkman, nosey first brother-in-law, who of course had sniffed it out, told his wife, my first sister, to tell our mother to come and have a talk with me. This was especially recommended after eldest sister’s earlier chat with me hadn’t gone as planned. So she came round to see ma, and this was the sister who didn’t love her husband because still she was in grief over her ex-boyfriend. No longer was she in grief, however, because he’d cheated on her and taken up with a new woman. Now she was in grief because he was dead. He’d been killed in a carbomb at work because he’d been the wrong religion in the wrong place and that was another thing that happened. He was dead. And sister? My sister. She hadn’t been able to get over him when he was living, so I didn’t know how she’d do that now he was—

Here though, even in grief, eldest sister did as instructed. She informed our mother of the milkman situation, and ma had it confirmed in a contrary way by the pious women of the neighbourhood, all of whom by now had heard of it as well. These women were, like ma, people of the incant, the earnest beseech, the reasoned, even legalistic petition. So adept were they in their entreaties to the heavenly authority, so textured into the ordinary life were their treatments and demonstrations, that often this sorority could be heard muttering on their beads from one side of their mouths whilst carrying on everyday conversations from the other at the same time. These women then, along with ma, and with eldest sister and first brother-in-law and all the local general gossips, involved themselves in the situation of me and the milkman. Then one day, according to wee sisters, a pile of these neighbours came round to see ma in our house. Seemed my lover was a milkman, they said – though also they said he was a motor mechanic. He was in his early forties, they said – though also round about his twenties. He was married, they said – also not married. Definitely he was ‘connected’ – though ‘unconnected’ at the same time. An intelligence officer: ‘Ach, you know, neighbour,’ said the neighbours, ‘the one in the background, the one who does that stalking, that tracking, all that shadowing and tailing and profiling, the one who gathers the information on the target then hands it to the trigger men who—’ ‘Baby Jesus!’ cried ma. ‘And you’re saying my girl’s involved with this man!’ She grasped the arms of her chair, said wee sisters, as another thought ran through her. ‘He’s not that milkman, is he – the one of the van, that wee white van, that nondescript, shapeshifting—’ ‘Sorry, neighbour,’ said the neighbours, ‘but we thought it best you know.’ They said then that at least my lover was a renouncer-of-the-state and not a defender-of-the-state, something to be grateful for, this, of course, a quiet allusion to my second sister who’d brought disgrace upon the family as well as upon the community by marrying-out to some state-forces person then going to live in some country over the water, maybe even that country over that water, with the renouncers in our district warning her never to return. Even after the death of this state-forces person – our second brother-in-law whom none of us except second sister had met and who had died, not because the renouncers had killed him but because of some ordinary non-political illness – still sister was not allowed to return which I think anyway she didn’t want to do. ‘At least this daughter can’t be accused of traitorship,’ reassured the neighbours. ‘Though know’t, neighbour,’ they added, ‘severals are saying that that milkman is no bit player but one ruthless character your girl’s involved herself with.’ ‘Name of mercy,’ said ma only this time she spoke quietly and wee sisters said she sounded flat, as if there was no life in her, not even shocked life, which at least would have been some energy. Instead she looked about as unhappy, they said, as when that business happened that banished second sister that time. ‘Of course,’ went on the neighbours, ‘all that mayn’t be true and it could be your daughter’s not involved with that renouncer, or with any renouncer, but that instead she’s in courtship with some twentysomething, nine-to-five, five-and-a-half-day-week, right-religion, motor-trade lad.’ Ma continued unconvinced. The motor-trade aspect came across as spurious, as artificial, as a weak and fabricated attempt by her good friend Jason and those other kindly neighbours to cheer her up in the midst of this bombshell. Instead she opted for the targeteer, the one who bided his time, who kept on going, who persisted unassailably until he got the job done. Besides, the description given by these neighbours of this milkman fitted particularly – bar the wrong religion – the identikit of the person she herself had been praying against. So biased was ma therefore, in her foregone conclusion that I would take up with such a dangerous, deadly lover, that it never occurred to her, not once, that the man might be two men.