Anna Burns - Milkman

I was alone and not reading this time, for I never read while running. And there he was, again out of nowhere, this time falling into step beside me where he’d never been before. Instantly we were running together and it looked as if always we were running together and again I was startled, as I would be startled by every encounter, except the last, I was to have with this man. At first he didn’t speak, and I could not speak. Then he did and his talk was mid-conversation as if too, always we were mid-conversation. His words were brief and a little strained because of my pace of running, and it was of my place of work that he spoke. He knew my work – where it was, what I did there, the hours, the days and the twenty-past-eight bus I caught every morning when it wasn’t being hijacked to get me into town to it. Also he made the pronouncement that I never caught this bus home. This was true. Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century. I suppose now, looking back, this milkman knew all of that as well.

So he spoke his words as we were going along one of the sides of the top-end reservoir. There was a smaller reservoir near the child’s playground down at the bottom end. He looked ahead, this man, as he spoke to me, not once turning towards me. Throughout this second meeting he didn’t ask one question of me. Nor did he seem to want any response. Not that I could have given one. I was still at the part of ‘where did he come from?’ Also, why was he acting as if he knew me, as if we knew each other, when we did not know each other? Why was he presuming I didn’t mind him beside me when I did mind him beside me? Why could I just not stop this running and tell this man to leave me alone? Apart from ‘where did he come from?’ I didn’t have those other thoughts until later, and I don’t mean an hour later. I mean twenty years later. 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. Best I could manage in those days was to hope the person concerned would hurry up and say whatever it was he or she thought they were being friendly and obliging by saying, then for them to go away; or else to go away myself, politely and quickly, the very moment I could.

I knew by this second meeting that the milkman was attracted to me, that he was making some move on me. I knew I didn’t like him being attracted and that I did not feel the same way towards him myself. But he uttered no direct words by way of forwarding on this attraction. Still too, he asked nothing of me. Nor was he physically touching me. Not once so far in this second meeting had he even looked at me. Plus he was older than me, far older, so could it be, I wondered, that I was getting this wrong, that the situation was not as I imagined? As for the running, we were in a public place. This was two conjoined large parks during the day, a sinister environment at night, though during the day also it was sinister. People didn’t like to admit to the day section being sinister because everyone wanted at least one place where they could go. I didn’t own this territory so that meant he was allowed to run in it just as much as I was allowed to run in it, just as much as children in the Seventies felt entitled to drink their alcohol in it, just as slightly older children would later in the Eighties feel justified sniffing their glue in it, just as older people again in the Nineties would come to inject themselves with heroin in it, just as at present the state forces were hiding in it to photograph renouncers-of-the-state. They also photographed renouncers’ known and unknown associates, which was what then happened just at this point. An audible ‘click’ sounded as the milkman and I ran by a bush and this was a bush I’d run by lots of times without clicks coming out of it. I knew it had happened this time because of the milkman and his involvement, and by ‘involvement’ I mean connected, and by ‘connected’ I mean active rebellion, and by ‘active rebellion’ I mean state-enemy renouncer owing to the political problems that existed in this place. So now I was to be on file somewhere, in a photograph somewhere, as a once unknown, but now certainly known associate. This milkman himself made no reference to the click even though it was impossible he had not heard it. I dealt with it by picking up my pace to get this run over with, also by pretending I had not heard the click myself.

He slowed the run down though, right down, until we were walking. This was not because he was unfit generally but because he was no runner. He had no interest in running. All that running along the reservoirs where I had not ever seen him run had never been about running. All that running, I knew, was about me. He implied it was because of pacing, that he was slowing the run because of pacing, but I knew pacing and for me, walking during running was not that. I could not say so, however, for I could not be fitter than this man, could not be more knowledgeable about my own regime than this man, because the conditioning of males and females here would never have allowed that. This was the ‘I’m male and you’re female’ territory. This was what you could say if you were a girl to a boy, or a woman to a man, or a girl to a man, and what you were not – least not officially, least not in public, least not often – permitted to say. This was certain girls not being tolerated if it was deemed they did not defer to males, did not acknowledge the superiority of males, might even go so far as almost to contradict males, basically, the female wayward, a species insolent and far too sure of herself. Not all boys and men though, were like that. Some laughed and found the affronted men funny. Those ones I liked – and maybe-boyfriend was one of that lot. He laughed and said, ‘You’re having me on. Can’t be that bad, is it that bad?’ when I mentioned boys I knew who loathed each other yet united in rage at the loudness of Barbra Streisand; boys incensed at Sigourney Weaver for killing the creature in that new film when none of the men in that film had been able to kill the creature; boys reacting against Kate Bush for being catlike, cats for being female-like, though I didn’t tell about cats being found dead and mutilated up entries to the point where there weren’t many of them left in my area anymore. Instead I ended on Freddie Mercury still to be admired just as long as it could be denied he was in any way fruity, which had maybe-boyfriend setting down his coffee pot – only he and his friend, chef, out of everybody I knew had coffee pots – then sitting down himself and laughing all over again.

This was my ‘almost one year so far maybe-boyfriend’ whom I met up with on Tuesday nights, now and again on a Thursday night, most Friday nights into Saturday, then all Saturday nights into Sunday. Sometimes this seemed steady dating. Other times not at all dating. A few over his way saw us as a proper couple. Most though, saw us as one of those non-couple couples, the type who might meet regularly but who couldn’t be designated a proper pairing for all that. I would have liked to have been a proper pairing and to have been officially dating and said so at one point to maybe-boyfriend, but he said no, that that wasn’t true, that I must have forgot and so he’d remind me. He said that once we tried – with him being my steady boy and me being his steady girl, with us meeting and arranging and seemingly moving, as did proper couples, towards some future end. He said I went peculiar. He said he also went peculiar, but that never had he seen me with so much fear in me before. Vaguely, as he spoke, I remembered something of what he was recounting. Another part of me though, was thinking, is he making this up? He said he’d suggested, for the sake of whatever it was we did have, that we split up as steady girl and steady boy which, in his opinion, had just been me anyway attempting that ‘talking about feelings’ which, given my freak-out when we did, given too, I spoke of feelings even less than he spoke of feelings, I mustn’t have believed in any of that all along. Instead he put forward that we go back to the maybe territory of not knowing whether or not we were dating. So we did and he said I calmed down and that he calmed down as well.