Anna Burns - Milkman

So the soldiers killed the dogs, and the locals killed the cats, and now cats were also being killed by the Luftwaffe. I glanced at the little head lying in the detritus and I felt jolted as I hadn’t remembered ever feeling jolted, not understanding why either, in this instance I was having this strong response. I dealt with it by averting my eyes, by walking firmly on, yet it stayed with me. It carried on accompanying me until I found myself stopping and turning round. I retraced my steps and was again beside the head and this time I looked closely and saw that it was wet, a bit black, blood-black, soggier at the neck, or where the neck had used to be. I got down on my hunkers and with a bit of rubble, edged the head around. Its face now fully upwards, I saw it was recognisable still as a cat, bigger eyes perhaps, or bigger sockets because one of the eyes was missing. The empty socket was huge and the head itself had something going on inside. Insect activity was what I thought, and as proof I saw clumps, bulges – at the nose, the ears, the mouth, and the remaining eye had a bulge also. There were a few sluggish maggots visible, though as yet, and apart from something sweetish and yeast-like, there wasn’t much of a smell. As for the rest of the body, I glanced around but I couldn’t see it. The head by itself though, was enough for now. Then it was too much. I stood and walked away again because that French class had been nice. I’d enjoyed it, as always I enjoyed it – the eccentricity of teacher, her talk of that ‘still, small voice’, of ‘living in the moment’, of ‘abandoning what you think should happen for what then might happen’. There was too, her ‘Change one thing, class, just one thing, and I assure you, everything else will change also’ – and to say that to us , to people who were not only not into metaphors, but not into admitting to what patently was there. But it had felt valuable. She felt valuable, and I didn’t want to lose that feeling. It seemed though, that with this head in the dirt – and before that, the van, the ten-minute area, the war-time bomb which had brought up dead da and his depressions with ma attacking him for his depressions – already all that ‘What’s the point? There’s no use in having any point?’ had started to reappear. ‘Attempts and repeated attempts,’ teacher had said. ‘That’s the way to do it.’ But what if she was wrong about attempts and repeated attempts, about moving on to next chapters? What if the next chapter was the same as this chapter, as had been the last chapter? What if all chapters stayed the same or even, as time went on, got worse? Again, during my thoughts, I had physically brought myself back to the cat, retracing my steps as if having no choice in the matter. Don’t be daft, I said. What are you going to do – stand forever and just stare at it? I’ll pick it up, I answered. I’ll take it to some green. Now, this surprised me. It astonished me. Then I astonished me with hedges, bushes, the root of a tree. I could cover it, not leave it in this open awful place. But why? I argued. In less than one minute you could be out of here. You could have reached the graveyard, your second landmark. Then it’ll be the police barracks, then the soothing smell of cinnamon from that house with the bakery, then — Of course! I interrupted. The usual place!

Already I had my handkerchiefs out, and these were real hankies, fabric, not paper, and not that long ago they used only to be male ones, those big white linen ones, because pretty as the female ones were, they weren’t much for blowing your nose. I grew to appreciate them, however, after being presented with a boxed set by wee sisters one Christmastime. Since then, I’d carry a female one for cultural, aesthetic purposes and a male one for practical purposes and that evening I intended putting both to practical and symbolic use. First, I opened out onto the ground the small, dainty, female one, then with the big, plain, male one, gently I nudged the head over onto it. As I did so, I could feel the cat’s front fangs pricking through the fabric and the skin on its head begin to slide. Some hair loosened and here I panicked, thinking the skull was going to slip from its covering. But then, mission accomplished, and with the head in the middle of the female, I wrapped the fancy embroidered cotton all around. After that I placed the female hankie containing the head onto the now spread-out big male hankie, wrapping that one around as well. Proof of madness , I continued. You’re actually going to walk up the road with a head, knowing full well that no matter how deserted a place seems, at least one person somewhere is watching? This means more gossip, more fabrication, more elaboration on the deterioration of your character. In that moment though, I didn’t care. Besides, I couldn’t stop myself. It would be only a moment, I estimated, because quickly I’d find the right spot – a place of privacy, of quietness, by the far wall perhaps, where the ancient plots were, where the ground was tangled and clumpy with unmown grass that the gravetenders never bothered their arses with. By now I had tied the ends of the big hankie together and was all for fulfilling on my intention when I stood up and almost collided with the milkman. So silent had he been, and so engrossed had I been, that I hadn’t sensed his presence. Now he was inches from me, and I from him, with only those hankies, with their dark, dead contents, acting as buffer in between.

First thing that happened was again I got those spine shivers, those scrabblings, the scuttlings, all that shiddery-shudderiness inside me, from the bottom of my backbone right into my legs. Instinctively everything in me then stopped. Just stopped. All my mechanism. I did not move and he did not move. Standing there, neither of us moved, nor spoke, then he spoke, saying, ‘At your Greek and Roman class, were you?’ and this was the only thing, ever, in his profiling of me that the milkman got wrong. Not that I hadn’t considered Greek and Roman, as in Greek and Roman Classical Studies instead of French for my night class. I’d been attracted by those ancient peoples – their uncontained emotions, their unprincipled characters, their myths, rituals, all that macabre, outlandish, paranoiac scheming and purging. Then there were their capricious gods and the curses the common people supplicated from these gods to have put on all their enemies, these enemies turning out to be the very people next door. It was all very alice in wonderland, as were those immodest Caesars marrying apple trees and making consuls out of their horses. Something there interesting, something psychological, something not normal that a normal person with only acceptable aberrations could get their head around. This was why I got as far as perusing the prospectus to see if I could enrol in this night class, but Greek and Roman was on Tuesday nights and maybe-boyfriend was my Tuesday nights, so French being Wednesday became my choice instead. That meant the milkman got it wrong and I didn’t correct him for getting it wrong because it gave me hope that in the middle of his knowing everything he didn’t know everything. Not real hope though, as I was to realise when I got home and did a deconstruction on this later on. He’d read my thoughts about the class, yes, and they’d been top-level thoughts, thoughts from the topsoil, meaning unimportant, not secret, not vulnerable enough to be encrypted. Any of those Toms, Dicks and Harrys therefore, had they been inclined, easily, very easily, could have walked in. All the same, he’d read them when he hadn’t even been near me during the time I’d been thinking them. This struck me as eerie, indicative too, of a thorough research carried out by a man who gleaned, docketed and filed each and every bit of information, even if on this occasion he mistook the outcome in the end.