Anna Burns - Milkman

‘Don’t worry,’ teacher then said. ‘Your unease, even your temporary unhingement, dear students, in the face of this sunset is encouraging. It can only mean progress. It can only mean enlightenment. Please don’t think you have betrayed or ruined yourselves.’ She did more deep breathing then, hoping to encourage us by example into a more doughty and adventurous spirit. In the littérateurs ’ classroom, however, there was no sense of adventure, even less with the others than I think with me. At least I’d experienced the shock of the sky, the subversiveness of a sunset, and only a week previously, whereas from the look of them, and regardless of age, it seemed they were struggling with this encounter for the very first time. Of course the urge to panic was upon me also. I could feel it stirring in the air, as well as sense it coming in ripples, then in wave upon wave from the others. I think though, because I’d experienced this selfsame panic during my earlier sunset, yet had discovered that by keeping still, by not letting it overwhelm me, gradually it had subsided, this time I was accepting of it and so, after a bit of tuning-in or tuning-out, and to get respite from what might have been, after all, a non-conforming, unfamiliar, restful consciousness, I glanced down to street level. This was when I saw a white van parked up the narrow entryway opposite. I froze, jolted out of the almost peaceful consciousness of just a moment before.

The bonnet of this van was peeping out of the entry, the entry running between the back of a row of drinking-bars on one side and the back of a line of businesses on the other. I managed to unfreeze enough to step away from the window in case he should be in there – with binoculars? telescope? camera? – looking up. And now I was thinking, fool – meaning me – for I’d considered myself successful, had taken cheer, self-congratulated in the belief I’d cracked the problem, that by reinstating my runs with third brother-in-law I’d succeeded in keeping this milkman away. So much for hypotheses. So much for inner boasting. Only a week gone by and already my circumvention of him had disintegrated. Why oh why had it not occurred to me that he’d switch tactics from pursuing me in the parks & reservoirs simply to resume interest in me from somewhere else?

Teacher started again. This time it was the fugacious (whatever that meant) black appearance of street trees owing to the crepuscular (whatever that meant) quality of the sky behind them, with the others – still in their own struggle – complaining that our town didn’t have fugacity, crepuscules or street trees, black or any colour, before being made to look again and conceding that okay, maybe we did have street trees but they must have been put in half an hour earlier as nobody here had noticed them before. During this, I was telling myself to wise up, to get a grip, that here I was, downtown, which meant that van could be anybody’s van and how likely would it be anyway, that he’d so happen to park his vehicle right opposite the college where I so happened to have my night class? Very unlikely. Too coincidental. Therefore, couldn’t be his. In proof of this, next time I leaned forward to peep, the van up that entryway was gone. With eagerness I sprang to recovery, forgetting the van, rejoining the class, the sky, the trees, whatever else they were now bickering about. At the same time I dismissed a strange bodily sensation that had run the lower back half of my body, during which the base of my spine had seemed to move. It had moved. Not a normal moving as in forward bends, backward bends, sideways and twistings. This had been a movement unnatural, an omen of warning, originating in the coccyx, with its vibration then setting off ripples – ugly, rapid, threatening ripples – travelling into my buttocks, gathering speed into my hamstrings from where, inside a moment, they sped to the dark recesses behind my knees and disappeared. This took one second, just one second, and my first thought – unbidden, unchecked – was that this was the underside of an orgasm, how one might imagine some creepy, back-of-body, partially convulsive shadow of an orgasm – an anti-orgasm . But then I dismissed this shiver, those currents, whatever they had been, and I returned to the window where some reactionary ‘ Fathers and forefathers!’, ‘Mothers and foremothers!’, ‘What’s the harm in it – blue’s utilitarian!’ were taking place. The majority of the class, however, remained subdued, also worried, for along with me, they knew that that sky that evening had been an initiation. And so quietness then came over us, which grew into complete silence. Teacher then sighed. Then we sighed. Then she led us back to our classroom, saying, ‘Take further moments, dearest class, of calmness, of repose, of remembering what you have been gazing upon. Then we’ll return to our literary passage and to those tropes in another language,’ which, for the rest of the evening, was what we did.

I said goodbye on the college steps to Siobhan, Willard, Russell, Nigel, Jason, Patrick, Kiera, Rupert of Earl and the rest because as usual they were heading to the bar to criticise the outrageousness and disharmony and the unfitness to be a teacher of our teacher, and of how we knew even less French now than in September when we joined. This time I didn’t want to go because this was not the moment to be sitting down but one in which to think and always my thinking was at its best, its most flowering, whenever I was walking. So I set off and I didn’t once consider taking Castle Rackrent out to read. I was too buzzy to read, thinking of teacher, of her manner of saying there were sunsets every day, that we weren’t meant to be coffined and buried whilst all the time still living, that nothing of the dark was so enormous that never could we surmount it, that always there were new chapters, that we must let go the old, open ourselves to symbolism, to the most unexpected of interpretations, that we must too, uncover what we’ve kept hidden, what we think we might have lost. ‘Implement a choice, dear class,’ she said. ‘Come out from those places. You never know,’ she concluded, ‘the moment of the fulcrum, the pivot, the turnaround, the instant when the meaning of it all will appear.’ Well, weird. But that was her philosophy and being philosophy, must not that mean God was in there somewhere? I wasn’t sure how I felt about God being in there because, although she hadn’t mentioned God, what would happen, given the delicate balance and the good manners existing in our class regarding religious sensitivities and the political problems when it came time and she did? As for this new sunset tradition, I’d had two in eight days which meant I needed only one more in order to do my homework. Teacher told us to describe three sunsets – ‘in French if you like’ – which betrayed, though we knew already, her priorities did not lie with that tongue. At her words there was further protest but milder protest, given that most of us were still dazed by the ensemble of that evening to work up our usual dissent and complaint.

So we packed up and left and they headed to the bar and I headed home towards my no-go area. After a bit of walking and thinking – about colour, about transformation, about upheavals of inner landscapes – I came out of my thoughts to give attention to my surroundings which was when I noticed I’d reached the ten-minute area on the outskirts of downtown. This ten-minute area wasn’t officially called the ten-minute area. It was that it took ten minutes to walk through it. This would be hurrying, no dawdling, though no one in their right mind would think of dawdling here. Not that it was a politically hazardous place, that apart from the possibility of one of its dilapidated churches accidentally falling on you that something awful might happen to you in this spot because of the political problems. No. The political problems, for the duration of these minutes, seemed in comparison with this area to be naïve, clumsy, hardly of consequence. It was that the ten-minute area was, and always had been, some bleak, eerie, Mary Celeste little place.