Anna Burns - Milkman

So ma would be back to her onwards-and-upwards talk, to her hierarchy of suffering: those who were allowed it; those who were allowed it but fell down badly by outstaying their quota in it; those who, like da, were upstart illegitimates, stealing the right to suffer that belonged to somebody else. ‘Your da,’ she said. ‘Your da. Do you know that even his sister said he’d lie abed during the sirens with places around him on fire and not go to the shelters with the other people? Only young too – sixteen, maybe seventeen – with me twelve years old at the time and having more sense than he had. Crazy. Wanting those bombs to fall on him. Crazy,’ which at first time of hearing – for this was not first time – also before my own depressions started – I used to think was crazy too. And now she was talking of the big war, that world one, the second one, the one – ask any teenager – with nothing to do with up-to-date humanity and modern-society living; the one no one my age could attend to which wasn’t surprising, given most of us could hardly attend to the current, more local one, we were in. ‘After the war,’ said ma, ‘even after we married, for years until his death, and especially when the sorrows started, all you’d get would be him burying his head in them dark things.’ She meant his newspapers, his tomes, his logs, his collecting and collating of everything to do with the political problems; meeting up too, with likeminded friends exactly as brooding, obsessive and overhung with cliffs, crags, ravens, crows and skeletons as him. They would share their docking and filing, their categorising, their updating of all the tragedies of the political problems, to the extent too, that it seemed as if it were their job to do it when it wasn’t their job to do it and of course da, after a bit, couldn’t keep it up. Even we, his children, could see that all that hyper-engrossment, all that exactitude, the fixation, had to crash at some point. And it would, with him collapsing with it, plunging headlong from ledgering, from scrapbooking, from all his prescriptive newspaper-cutting, only to sink down deep again into despondency when all he’d be fit for then would be his bed, the hospital, his comics, his sports pages, or those Holocaust programmes on the TV. Natural disaster programmes too, such as David Attenborough talking about insects eating other insects and ferocious wildlife pouncing upon gentle wildlife. Never would he watch programmes about heather or how to keep butterflies in happy, carefree countenance. Those types of programmes never drew him, never interested him, wouldn’t ever, as ma put it, ‘be allowed to cheer him up’. Of course the whole household knew that the Holocaust and the world wars and animals eating other animals, all those anaesthetics which also included our political problems when he could get back to them didn’t cheer him up either. It was clear though, they served some purpose, some sense of ‘See! Look at that. What’s the point? There’s no point,’ thus confirming for him, solacing him even, in his despair, that as things stood, as always they’d stood, there couldn’t be triumphs and overcomings because overcomings were fancies and triumphs were daydreams, effort and renewed effort a vain waste of time. ‘I knew your da was in a good way,’ said ma, ‘when he’d sing, and I knew he was in a bad way when he’d lie abed all day, be up all night, not sleeping, not opening curtains, instead filling in chinks, blocking out the nightlight and all the natural daylight. His melancholy, daughter. Not natural. If it were natural, would he not have felt good on it? Would he not have looked well on it? But what reason, what reason, tell me, had he for keeping himself always in that dark, brooding place?’

So with da and his type, unlike ma and her type, it wasn’t a case of ‘I must be cheerful because of the Holocaust’ or ‘I’ve a boil on my nose but yer man down the street’s missing a nose so I must be cheerful he’s missing a nose whereas I’m not missing a nose and he must be cheerful because of the Holocaust.’ With da it was never ‘Must get down on knees and give thanks that others in the world are suffering far worse than me’ . I couldn’t see how he couldn’t be right too, because everybody knew life didn’t work like that. If life worked like that then all of us – except the person agreed upon to have the most misfortune in the world – would be happy, yet most people I knew weren’t happy. Neither in this workaday world, in this little human-being world, did we spend time counting blessings and eschewing the relative in favour of the eternal. That relative, that temporal plane – where sensitivities vary, where no one has the same personal history even if they have the same communal history, where something which is a trigger for one person passes off unnoticed by another person – definitely was the plane where the raw living of life and the imperfect mental response to that living of life took place. Even ma and her type – for all their intolerance of depressives and of especially getting down on knees in the face of tragedies to offer thanks that there for the grace of God would have gone them only some other poor buggers had been selected by God to suffer such dreadful fates instead of them – even they didn’t rest easy. As for the few, those very few who did seem to rest easy, or who at least continued to give off a constant goodwill and a trust in people and in life even in the face of not exactly resting easy, well, both ma and her type, and da and his type, pretty much everybody I knew, including me, had difficulty coming to terms with that type too.

My attention was first brought to the issue of the shiny people, those rare, baffling, radiant type of people, by that film, Rear Window . I saw it when I was twelve and it unnerved me because of what I believed initially to be its point. A little dog gets killed, strangled, neck broken, which is not the message of the film but for me was the message of the film because its owner – bereft, in shock – wails out her window over all the apartment building, ‘Which one of you did it? … couldn’t imagine … so low you’d kill a little helpless friendly … only thing in this whole neighbourhood who liked anybody. Did you kill him because he liked you, just because he liked you?’ and it was that ‘killing him because he liked you’ that caused shivers to go down my spine. I knew immediately, oh God! It’s true! That is why they killed it! They killed it because it liked them! Turned out that wasn’t why the dog was killed but before I discovered the real reason, absolutely it made sense to me, in the world I was in, that it had happened that way. They killed it because it liked them, because they couldn’t cope with being liked, couldn’t cope with innocence, frankness, openness, with a defencelessness and an affection and purity so pure, so affectionate, that the dog and its qualities had to be done away with. Couldn’t bear it. Had to kill it. Probably they themselves would have viewed this as self-defence. And that was the trouble with the shiny people. Take a whole group of individuals who weren’t shiny, maybe a whole community, a whole nation, or maybe just a statelet immersed long-term on the physical and energetic planes in the dark mental energies; conditioned too, through years of personal and communal suffering, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger – well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that. As for the environment, that too, would object, backing up the pessimism of its people, which was what happened where I lived where the whole place always seemed to be in the dark. It was as if the electric lights were turned off, always turned off, even though dusk was over so they should have been turned on yet nobody was turning them on and nobody noticed either, they weren’t on. All this too, seemed normality which meant then, that part of normality here was this constant, unacknowledged struggle to see. I knew even as a child – maybe because I was a child – that this wasn’t really physical; knew the impression of a pall, of some distorted quality to the light had to do with the political problems, with the hurts that had come, the troubles that had built, with the loss of hope and absence of trust and with a mental incapacitation over which nobody seemed willing or able to prevail. The very physical environment then, in collusion with, or as a result of, the human darkness discharging within it, didn’t itself encourage light. Instead the place was sunk in one long, melancholic story to the extent that the truly shining person coming into this darkness ran the risk of not outliving it, of having their own shininess subsumed into it and, in some cases – if the person was viewed as intolerably extra-bright and extra-shiny – it might even reach the point of that individual having to lose his or her physical life. As for those living in the dark, long attuned to the safeness of the dark, this wasn’t wee buns for them either. What if we accept these points of light, their translucence, their brightness; what if we let ourselves enjoy this, stop fearing it, get used to it; what if we come to believe in it, to expect it, to be impressed upon by it; what if we take hope and forgo our ancient heritage and instead, and infused, begin to entrain with it, with ourselves then to radiate it; what if we do that, get educated up to that, and then, just like that, the light goes off or is snatched away? This was why you didn’t get many shining people in environments overwhelmingly consisting of fear and of sorrow. In this environment which was my environment, there existed but a few. There was French teacher from downtown. Then perhaps there might have been, were it not for the state of his hoarding, maybe-boyfriend. The only person though, in my own neighbourhood who was unanimously agreed upon to be one of the rare shining was the sister of our district poisoner, tablets girl. This sister was my age, which meant younger than tablets girl, and it wasn’t that everybody wanted to dislike her. Indeed part of the problem was we didn’t dislike her. It was that it was hard to deal with the threat she posed by going about completely holding her own. She was translucent, untouched by our darkness, walking in her light in our darkness. Strangely though, she herself was very ordinary about this. Instead of taking hope from whom she was and from what she represented – especially as she came from our area yet had managed to get beyond the prevailing temperament and thought-race of this area; instead of thinking, why, if this one person can do it, can walk abroad with all this sunlight playing about her and within her, then perhaps we …? But no. Easier to remain unchallenged at our diminished acculturated level; also to designate tablets girl’s sister as similar to her sister, that is, a full-on, ostracised, district beyond-the-pale.