Anna Burns - Milkman

‘Come,’ she persisted. ‘Why have you turned your backs?’ For we had turned our backs; it had been instinctive and protective. But she made us turn round to face the sky once more. This time she proceeded to point through various panes at sections of sky that were not blue but instead lilac, purple, patches of pink – differing pinks – with one patch of green that had a yellow gold extending along it. And green? How come green was up there? Then, as the sunset was not most visible from this window, she marched us out of our classroom and along the corridor into the littérateurs ’ classroom. That evening their room was empty because they had gone to the theatre with pens, flashlights and little notebooks to watch and critique Playboy of the Western World . Here teacher bade us look at the sky from this brand new perspective, where the sun – enormous and of the most gigantic orange-red colour – in a sky too, with no blue in it – was going down behind buildings in a section of windowpane.

As for this sky, it was now a mix of pink and lemon with a glow of mauve behind it. It had changed colours during our short trip along the corridor and before our eyes was changing colours yet. An emerging gold above the mauve was moving towards a slip of silver, with a different mauve in a corner drifting in from the side. Then there was further pinking. Then more lilac. Then a turquoise that pressed clouds – not white – out of its way. Layers were mixing and blending, forming and transforming which was exactly what happened during that sunset a week earlier. ‘Will we go and see the sun go down?’ maybe-boyfriend, to my startled ears, had said. ‘Why?’ I accused. ‘Because it’s the sun,’ he said. ‘Okay,’ I said, as if this wasn’t unprecedented, as if people in my environment suggested sunsets to each other frequently. So I said yes, and after my run with third brother-in-law I went home, got showered, got changed, put on make-up and high heels and maybe-boyfriend picked me up where usually he picked me up, at the bottom of my district on our side of the interface road. This sad and lonely road ran between the religions and I would meet him there, not because he was the opposite religion, for he wasn’t, but because it was easier to do that than to have him call for me at my door. Not long after this first sunset, however, he started to complain about our complex, perilous meeting arrangements, saying I didn’t want him calling for me directly, or for us to do anything inside my area because I was ashamed to be seen with him which was unbelievable to my ears. I said there was nowhere to go in my area which wasn’t true and which he knew wasn’t true because it was a known fact that eleven of our religion’s best drinking-clubs existed in my district, including the most popular in the city for our particular creed. So he said I was being evasive which was true but not for the reason of being ashamed of him was I evasive. It was that I didn’t want him calling to the door because of ma. It would have been questions. Then the marriage sermon. Then the baby sermon and, if not them, he’d get accused of being the milkman. Also there were those prayers she’d burst into at any moment, meaning there was just so much discomfiture I could take. So it wasn’t shame of him, or to spare him, that we kept things convoluted and parlous by meeting at that dark and bitter sectarian flashpoint. It was to save me the awkwardness of having to explain her.

At that sunset with maybe-boyfriend which was before his bitter words over the pick-up point, he picked me up as usual on the road of separation and he did this in his latest put-together car. We took a drive out of town to some coastal place where he bought drinks and where we stood outside, along with strangers, all to await this event, this sun, which I didn’t understand, go down. It wasn’t just sunsets I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand stars or moons or breezes or dew or flowers or the weather or the avidity some people took – older people took – in what time they were going to bed at, and at what time the following day they were going to get up at, also what Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature it was outside, and what Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature it was inside, and the state of their bowels, their digestive tracts, their feet, their teeth, where one of them says loudly on the crowded bus, ‘Do you know what? I’ll have a nice slice of toast when I go home before my dinner,’ and where the companion replies equally loudly, ‘I’ll have a nice slice of toast in my house as a start before dinner too.’ If not that, then it’s ‘Did you have a nice slice of toast in your house yesterday?’ ‘Yes, but have you eaten yourself since?’ ‘Oh, I don’t eat. Had scrambled eggs. Have this friend called Pam but stop me if I’ve already told you, but we used to go and buy kettles and ironing boards together …’ and it was entirely in order that I should not understand these things. Same too, with sunsets because it was not being labelled a beyond-the-pale young person and maybe-boyfriend, who was young himself – only two years older than me – shouldn’t be understanding and appreciating either, what nobody our age would be odd enough to notice was there. Faced with his behaviour, and with this skyscape in front of me, and with the expectation I was supposed to observe it, witness it, attend in some way and have an appropriate reaction to it, I stood beside him and looked and nodded even though I didn’t know what it was I was looking and nodding at. This was when I began to wonder, again, if maybe-boyfriend should be going to sunsets, if he should be owning coffee pots, if he should like football whilst giving the impression of not liking football, no matter I myself didn’t like football but my not liking football, apart from that Match of the Day music, wasn’t the point. Certainly he tinkered with cars and it was normal for boys to tinker with cars, to want to drive them, to dream of driving them if they couldn’t afford to buy them to drive them and weren’t sufficiently car-nutty to steal them to drive them. All the same, I did feel worried that maybe-boyfriend in some male way was refusing to fit in. Again this confused me for was I saying then, that I was ashamed of him, that mainstream boys, the ones who did fit in, the ones who wanted to beat up Julie Covington for singing ‘Only Women Bleed’ which they thought was a song about periods when it wasn’t a song about periods even though everybody else, including me, also thought it was a song about periods; boys too, who, if they had an interest in you, would blame you for this interest in you – was I saying I preferred to be going on dates with the likes of them? Whenever I pondered this, which I didn’t like to do for again it exposed to me my irreconcilables, those uncontrollable irrationalities, I felt uneasy. I knew I preferred maybe-boyfriend to any of my former maybe-boyfriends and that my favourite days of the week were the days I spent with maybe-boyfriend, that the only boy too, I’d wanted to sleep with so far and had slept with so far had been maybe-boyfriend. Also, given that since he’d brought up the idea of us living together and I’d refused, I found myself daydreaming of what it might be like to live with maybe-boyfriend – being in the same house as him, sharing the same bed as him, waking up every day right there beside him – could life together, if that were the case, really be that bad?

So I nodded at the sunset, at this horizon, which made no sense, all the while taken up with these contradictory sentiments, with maybe-boyfriend beside me, with all these odd people, also gazing upon the sunset, around me, and it was at that moment, just as I was thinking, what the fuck are they — that something out there – or something in me – then changed. It fell into place because now, instead of blue, blue and more blue – the official blue everyone understood and thought was up there – the truth hit my senses. It became clear as I gazed that there was no blue out there at all. For the first time I saw colours, just as a week later in this French class also was I seeing colours. On both occasions, these colours were blending and mixing, sliding and extending, new colours arriving, all colours combining, colours going on forever, except one which was missing, which was blue. Maybe-boyfriend had taken this in his stride, as had all those others standing about us. I said nothing, just as I said nothing a week later in this French class, but two sunsets in one week when before that there hadn’t been any sunsets – that must mean something. Question was, was it a safe something or a threatening something? What was it, really, I was responding to here?