Anna Burns - Milkman

And that was why the dogs were necessary. They were important, a balancing act, an interface, a safety buffer against instant, face-to-face, mortal clashes of loathsome and self-loathsome emotions, the very type that erupt in seconds between individuals, between clans, between nations, between sexes, doing irreversible damage all around. To stay it, to evade it, to push away those bad memories, all that pain and history and deterioration of character, you hear the barking, the onset of that savage, tribal barking, and you know then to wait indoors – quarter of an hour thereabouts – to let that soldiery go its way. In that manner you don’t come into contact, you don’t have to feel the powerlessness, the injustice, or worst of all, how you – a normal, ordinary, very nice human being – could want to kill or take relief at a killing. And, if you’re already out there on the street which is the battlefield which is the street when you hear that sudden barking, well, simply you listen and determine by its direction which way those soldiers are heading and, should they be heading your way, easily then, to nip down a sideway into another, less-exposing street. But they killed the dogs, taking out the middlemen, and so, until such times as new dogs were to be born and bred and schooled in partisanship in our area, it appeared we were back to that close-up, face-to-face, early ancient hatred. First though, on the morning after the night of the dog-slaying, and confronting the reality of that enormity of corpses, came the equally face-to-face local response.

Mostly it was silence. Or at first silence, with one dog – initially considered the last surviving dog in the district – looking on along with the rest of us, whimpering periodically, its tail drawn deeply in between its legs. As for myself, it seemed to me, at nine years old, that there were so many of these dogs that the district could never have contained the overrun of them, that the soldiers must have bussed in extra, but once the locals started to identify and to claim them, they claimed all of them, every single one. Also to my child eyes, and to those of third brother who was standing beside me, it seemed the heads of all these dogs, amidst this huge stack of dogs, were missing. We thought they’d been beheaded. ‘Mammy! The heads! They took the heads! Where are the heads?’ we cried. ‘Where’s Lassie, mammy? Where’s daddy? Have the brothers found Lassie? Where’s daddy? Where’s Lassie?’ And we tugged at her coat, then third brother began to cry. His crying set me off, then the both of us set off all the other children. Then the last surviving dog began to howl as well. There were many of us that day, many children, and we huddled and clung to our adults. So at first there was the silence, then there was our crying, then, at the sound of our crying, the adults galvanised themselves into action and set their shock aside. They began to deal with the massacre, with the males – young men, older men, renouncers, non-renouncers – beginning to wade through the slimy, pelty mass. They disentangled the heavy sogginess and the swampiness to differentiate one body from another body, passing each through and along the chain to whoever had come to claim it, was waiting for it, to bring it home on go-carts, in prams, in wheelbarrows, in supermarket trolleys or, more often, bundled up as something that used to be alive in their arms. As for da, I remember third brother’s urgency and my own in asking for him, in pleading for him to be there, to be a man among men, doing normal men things, as he did manage to do years later when searching with the others for Somebody McSomebody’s brother’s head. Perhaps the day of the dogs though, had been a bad day, one of his bed days, hospital days, a Holocaust or an ancient, yellowed, boxing-magazine day. Whichever it had been, he wasn’t there. But the brothers were there and, along with the others, they were digging and it seemed right through to the earth. They were in the middle of the earth, gone below, and still they were digging. I added shovels to them and in my head they were digging with these shovels, the ground now sodden, with the brothers and the men up to their waists. Clots, clumps, streaks, getting redder, browner, darker, stickier – getting black – as they dug down deep to get those dogs out. I remember the sight of the brothers, of all our dogs, of us, the surrounding people. I remember not a thing though, of any death smell. At one point third brother cried, ‘The dogs are moving! MAMMY! THE DOGS ARE MOVING!’ and I looked and they were moving, tiny heavings up and down. Our mother too, I remember – her stoniness, her lack of response to our tugging, to our ‘LASSIE, MAMMY!’, ‘WHERE’S DADDY, MAMMY?’, ‘THE DOGS ARE MOVING, MAMMY!’ Eventually, someone, second sister, explained. She said the heads were still there, that they were bent back, meaning, I realised later, that the throats were cut so deeply towards the bone that it looked to our eyes as if the heads were missing. This explanation seemed easier on the mind, I think too, on third brother’s mind, that the heads should still be there than that they should be missing, than that the soldiers had taken them to make fun of them, to kick them, to prolong the dishonouring of them; or maybe it was relief at being given any explanation at all. We carried on crying, however, as did other children, especially when a particular dog was brought out or as panic heightened in anticipation of a particular dog. There were waves of hope too, that maybe they weren’t dead because yes, they were moving. ‘They are not moving,’ said the adults, then finally, we became too much in our hopeful despair that some older siblings were instructed to take us younger ones home.

First and second sister brought third brother and me home, and at this time we were the youngest in the family. We two continued to look back, to cast back, taking long last backward glances, our minds full of Lassie as we went from that entry where still the brothers and the other males were. These were our dogs, and they were street dogs, meaning every day you put your dog out onto the street to have adventures just as you put your children out to have adventures. At night-time the dogs and children would return except that night the children returned but the dogs did not. So brother and I were led home, away from that entry, with our older sisters’ arms about us. Still we glanced back until nearing the house when new hope sprang within us again. Although the other dogs had died, bar one, and although she’d stayed out all night just as the dead dogs had stayed out all night, maybe Lassie had returned and was even now in the house. So we picked up speed and rushed in the door and there was Lassie. She was lying by the hearth and she lifted her head and growled at us – opening doors on her perhaps? Letting in draughts and disturbing her perhaps? Lassie was no pedigree, as none of these dogs had been pedigree. She had no qualifications, no certificates, wasn’t playful, wasn’t vocational, not one to fetch help for those in danger or to save children from drowning. Lassie had no time for children, for the young of the family, but for us it was the happiest day to see her and to hear her, to know she had a throat still to growl and be petulant with. We didn’t fall on her of course, because Lassie wouldn’t have liked that. But it was a very bad morning until she reappeared. After that, I forgot. I forgot the dogs, their death, the district grief, the shock, the undoubted triumph of the soldiers. That evening after dinner, still nine years old, I set out on my latest adventures, passing that same entry which was now stacked as usual with petrol bombs for the next district riot. There was no hint of dead dogs although I did get a whiff of that powerful cleaner, Jeyes Fluid. That I would remember, given that up until that moment always I’d loved that particular household smell.