Anna Burns - Milkman

This change in my mother sobered me. It propelled me out of the belief that she was some cardboard-cut-out person, out of mistaking her compulsive praying for a head full of silliness instead of maybe a head full of worry, out of dismissing her for being fifty with ten children out of her so that the rest of her life – as in any new way of living it – must now be at an end. In that moment I felt bad about the gee-whizz which meant I felt shame at having rubbished my mother. This was despite her own haranguing and prolonged mental battering of me. So I felt like crying when I never cried. Then I felt like cursing as a way to stay the crying. Then came the realisation that I could try to make amends. This could be the moment to say ‘sorry’ – without, of course, saying ‘sorry’ because ‘sorry’, like ‘shame’, nobody yet knew here how to say. We might feel sorry but, as with shame, we wouldn’t know how to contend with the expression of it. Instead I decided to offer ma exactly what she was after, which was to tell all there was about the milkman and myself. So I did. I told her I wasn’t having an affair with him, nor had I ever wished for an affair, that instead, it had been him, solely him, pursuing and importuning, as it seemed, to start an affair with me. I said he’d approached me twice, only twice, and I explained the circumstances of each meeting. I said also that he knew things about me – my work, my family, what I did of an evening after work, what I did at weekends, but not once, I said, had he laid a finger on me or even, apart from the first meeting, directly looked at me, adding also, that I’d never got into his vehicles even if people said I was getting into them all the time. I ended by admitting that I hadn’t wanted to tell out any of this, not just to her, but to anyone. I said this was because of the twisting of words, the fabrication of words and the exaggeration of words that went on in this place. I’d have lost power, such as was my power, if I’d tried to explain and to win over all those gossiping about me. So I’d kept silent, I said. I’d asked no questions, answered no questions, gave no confirmation, no refutation. That way, I said, I’d hoped to maintain a border to keep my mind separate. That way, I said, I’d hoped to ground and protect myself.

During this ma looked at me without interruption but when I finished, and without hesitation, she called me a liar, saying this deceit was nothing but a further mockery of herself. She spoke of other meetings then, between me and the milkman, besides the two to which I admitted. The community was keeping her abreast, she said, which meant she knew I met him regularly for immoral trysts and assignations, knew too, of what we got up to in places too indecent even to give the ‘dot dot dot’ to. ‘You’re some sort of mob-woman,’ she said. ‘Out of the pale. Lost your intrinsic rights and wrongs. You make it hard, wee girl, to love you and if your poor father was alive, certainly he’d have something to say about this.’ I doubted it. When da was alive, hardly ever did he speak to us and his last words to me as he lay dying – perhaps his last words ever – were alarming and focused on himself. ‘I was raped many times as a boy,’ he said. ‘Did I ever tell you that?’ At the time all I could think to reply was, ‘No.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Many times. Many, many times he did me – me, a boy, and him, in his suit and hat, opening his buttons, pulling me back to him, in that back shed, that black shed, over and over and giving me pennies after.’ Da closed his eyes and shuddered and wee sisters, who were with me at the hospital, came round the bed and tugged on my arm. ‘What’s raped?’ they whispered. ‘What’s crumbie?’ because now, with eyes still closed, da was muttering ‘crombie’. ‘Many awful times,’ he said, opening his eyes once more. It seemed he could hear wee sisters, though I didn’t think he could see them. He saw me though, even if unsure which daughter I was. That, of course, could have had nothing to do with dying, because da, when he’d lived, always had been in a state of distraction, spending overlong hours reading papers, watching the news, ears to radios, out in the street, taking in, then talking out, the latest political strife with likeminded neighbours. He was that type, the type who let nothing in except it had to be the political problems. If not the political problems – then any war, anywhere, any predator, any victim. He’d spend lots of time too, with these neighbours who were of the exact fixation and boxed-off aberration as him. As for the names of us offspring, never could he remember them, not without running through a chronological list in his head. While doing this, he’d include his sons’ names even if searching for the name of a daughter. And vice versa. Sooner or later, by running through, he’d hit on the correct one at last. Even that though, became too much and so, after a bit, he dropped the mental catalogue, opting instead for ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ which was easier. And he was right. It was easier which was how the rest of us came to substitute ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and so on ourselves.

‘Backside,’ was what he said next and wee sisters giggled. ‘My legs,’ he said. ‘My thighs, but especially my backside. Always terrible, those sensations, nothing ridded me of them, those trembles, those shudders, those tiny persistent ripples. They just kept coming, kept repeating, kept being awful, my whole life through. But there had been a recklessness, wife,’ he then said, ‘an abandonment, a rejection of me by me that had begun years earlier – I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’ll be dead, all the time, violently murdered – so he may as well have me ’cos he knew all along he was going to have me, couldn’t stop him from having me. All shut down. Get it over with. Not going freshly into that place of terror, which was why, wife, it never felt right between me and you.’ Wee sisters giggled again, this time at ‘wife’ though now there was a nervousness to their giggling. Then da said, this time with anger, ‘That crombie, those suits, that crombie. Nobody wore crombies, brother,’ and again wee sisters tugged at me. ‘Did he,’ da then asked, looking straight at me and seeming for a moment fully to comprehend me, ‘Did he … rape you, brother … as well?’ ‘Middle sister?’ whispered wee sisters. ‘Why’s daddy saying—’ but they didn’t finish. Instead they gravitated closer and closer behind me. Da died of his illness that night after wee sisters and I were gone and ma and some of the others had turned up at the hospital to sit with him. I was left his scarf and his flat working-cap, also a lifelong distaste for the word ‘crombie’ which also I’d thought was ‘crumbie’ until I found it in the dictionary that evening on getting home.

And now ma was angry, threatening me with dead da because I’d lied when I hadn’t lied, because I’d debased both of us, she said, with my falsehoods and hardness of heart when in truth it was that we had no faith in each other. ‘You don’t honour my instruction,’ she said and I said, ‘You don’t honour me.’ In response, and I suppose proving her right, I closed up again, took my teenage satisfaction in renouncing the attempt to seek out any leverage point that might have existed between us. Instead I thought, this is my life and I love you, or maybe I don’t love you, but this is who I am, what I stand for and these are the lines, mother. I didn’t speak this, because I couldn’t have done so without getting into a fight and always we were in fights, always making attack on each other. Instead I closed up, thinking, gee-whizz, gee-whizz, geewhizz, gee-whizz, and I stopped caring too, from that moment, as to whether or not she blamed me. From now on she’d get nothing from me. But was that how it was to be always? Me, according to her, sharp of heart? And her, according to me, ending in nothing but arrowpoints herself?