Anna Burns - Milkman

It was shaped in a round, dominated by three giant churches spaced closely and evenly about its centre. These churches had long been out of action, disused, defeated, almost shells of buildings, though their black spires still towered up there in the sky. As a child I used to imagine those towers trying to touch tips, to converge, to make a witch’s hat which everybody would then be forced to walk through. That had been the first noticeable thing for me all those years ago about this little place. Apart from the witch’s hat, there were few other buildings and what there were also seemed deserted – supposed offices, a few residences – with nobody appearing to live in them or to work in them and people, should you happen to come across any, like you, would have their heads down as they too, went hurrying by. There were four shops in the circle but these were not classed as real shops despite their ‘Open’ signs, their unlocked doors, their clean fronts and the impression that life – not visible perhaps at that moment – was nevertheless going on behind them. Nobody was seen to go into these shops and no one was seen to come out of them; it was unclear even what kind of shops they were. There was a bus-stop too, outside one of the shops, the only bus-stop in the ten-minute area. It too, never had anybody; nobody waited to board from there and nobody ever alighted there. Then there was a letterbox which, apart from wee sisters posting something to themselves once during one of their many scientific investigatory moments to see if it would get delivered which it wasn’t, nobody would dream of posting their post there. All this highlighted the ten-minute area as a ghostly place that simply you had to get through. After getting through, you moved on to your next landmark and I had seven landmarks that peripherally I’d tick off in my head as I read my book and walked along. The ten-minute area was my first landmark after leaving the boundary of downtown. Next came the cemetery which everybody, including the media, the paramilitaries, the state forces – even some postcards – termed ‘the usual place’. After that was the police barracks followed by the house where always there was the smell of baking bread. After the bread house came the holy women’s house where often they could be heard practising hymns, not once ‘Ave Maria’. After the holy house came the parks & reservoirs through which, even if still light, at this time of night, never would I deviate and shortcut through. Instead I’d go the long way round and come to the street and the tiny house of third sister and third brother-in-law. This was the last of my personal landmarks because then came the few short residential roads which led to my street and my own front door. At present I was on the rim of entering the ten-minute area which of late had been disturbed within its own disturbance by a bomb going off in the centre of it. Because of this bomb, one of the three churches was no longer there.

At first the explosion had puzzled everybody. What was the point? There was no point. Why plant a bomb, said all parties, in a dead, creepy, grey place that everybody knew was a dead, creepy, grey place and about which nobody would care anyway, if one day it was blown to kingdom come? The media suggested an accidental bomb, a premature bomb, perhaps a renouncer-of-the-state bomb in transit for the nearby police barracks; or maybe a defender-of-the-state bomb, intended for one of the opposite religion’s segregated drinking establishments situated not far from the barracks but going the other way.

Whichever it had been, nobody had been killed by this bomb, just the unstable empty church which for decades had been unstable anyway, the reverberations of the blast completely bringing it down. So it had collapsed but the other two churches – still unstable, still on the brink – remained standing. The ghost shops too, were intact, their doors open, no windows broken, business as usual. The bus-stop also, still upright, still with nobody at it, so the place appeared not particularly more dead than it had been before the bomb had gone off. After official examination and forensic investigation and experts’ reports, also after recriminations by one side against the other side, it transpired this bomb had been neither that of the renouncers nor that of the defenders. It had been an old bomb, a history bomb, an antiquity Greek and Roman bomb, a big, giant Nazi bomb. That was okay then, thought everybody. Not their side. Not our side. All slinging of accusation and of recrimination stopped.

‘What is the provenance of the eeriness of the ten-minute area?’ I asked ma once. ‘You ask peculiar questions, daughter,’ ma replied. ‘Not as peculiar as those posed by wee sisters,’ I said, ‘and you answer them as if they were normal questions,’ meaning their latest at breakfast. ‘Mammy,’ they’d said, ‘mought it happen that if you were a female and excessively sporty and this thing called menstruation stopped inside you because you were excessively sporty’ – wee sisters had recently discovered menstruation in a book, not yet through personal experience – ‘then you stopped being excessively sporty and your menstruation returned, would that mean you’d have extra time of menstruation to make up for the gap of not having had it when you should have had it only you couldn’t because your sportiness was blocking the production of your follicle-stimulating hormone, also blocking your luteinising hormone from instructing your oestrogen to stimulate the uterine lining in expectation of an egg to be fertilised with the subsequent insufficiency of hormones and oestrogen preventing the release of the egg to be fertilised or – should the egg be released but not fertilised – to the degeneration of the corpus luteum and the shedding of the endometrium or, mammy, would your menstruation stop at the time it was biologically programmed to stop regardless of the months or years of excessive sportiness when your menses didn’t come?’ Ma conceded that yes, she did do this, that she treated wee sisters’ questions as if they were normal questions, but that wee sisters were wee sisters – even their teachers said so – meaning that always they were to be untoward and strange in their querying and acquiring of knowledge, whereas, she said, being of a different cerebration from the wee ones, she had hoped I would have grown out of all of that by now. Then she said she didn’t know, but that always that ten-minute area had been a strange, eerie, grey place, that even in her mother’s day, in her grandmother’s day, in antebellum days – had there been any – still it had been an eerie, grey place, a place attempting perhaps to transcend some dark, evil happening without managing to transcend it and instead succumbing to it, giving in to it, coming to want it, to wallow in it, even, in fact, deteriorating so far in character as to feel a great need for it, dragging down too, she said, neighbouring places along with it when who knows? – she shrugged – there mayn’t have been anything evil that happened in it in the first place. ‘Some locations are just stuck,’ said ma. ‘And deluded. Like some people. Like your da’ – which would be the point when I’d regret having opened my mouth. Anything – be it in any way dark, any way into the shadow, anything to do with what she called ‘the psychologicals’ – always it brought her back to the subject of, and especially to the denigration of, her husband, my da. ‘Back then,’ she’d say, meaning the olden days, meaning her days, their days, ‘even then,’ she said, ‘I never understood your father. When all was said and done, daughter, what had he got to be psychological about?’

She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions. Ma herself didn’t get depressions, didn’t either, tolerate depressions and, as with lots of people here who didn’t get them and didn’t tolerate them, she wanted to shake those who did until they caught themselves on. Of course at that time they weren’t called depressions. They were ‘moods’. People got ‘moods’. They were ‘moody’. Some people who got these moods stayed in bed, she said, with long faces on them, emanating atmospheres of monotonal extended sameness, of tragedy, of affliction, influencing everybody too, with their monotones and long faces and continuous extended samenesses whether or not they ever opened their mouths. You only had to look at them, she said. In fact, you only had to walk in the door and you could sense coming from upstairs, from his room, their room, the exudation of his moody, addicted atmosphere. And – should the moody be of the type who did manage to get out of bed – that hardly precluded them, she said, from blanketing the atmosphere as well. Again with long faces and unvaried pitch they’d be at it, slouching down the street, dragging themselves over the terrain, round and about and down the town in their epidemic grim fashion, infecting everybody and – given they’d got out of bed – they’d be doing this on a much wider, enveloping scale. ‘What these people with the moods and heavy matter should realise,’ said ma – and not just once would she say this but almost anytime da was mentioned in a conversation – ‘is that life’s hard for everybody. It’s not just for them it’s hard so why should they get preferential treatment? You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, get on with life, pull yourself together, be respected. There are some people, daughter,’ she said, ‘people with much more reason for psychologicals, with more cause for suffering than those who help themselves to suffering – but you don’t see them giving in to darkness, giving in to repinement. Instead with courage they continue on their path, refusing, these legitimate people, to succumb.’