Anna Burns - Milkman

As on the last two occasions of our meeting, that is, of his orchestrating of our meeting, this time too, mostly he asked questions, though without appearing anxious for any response. This was because his questions weren’t real questions. Not sincere requests for information or for confirmation of his surmises. These were statements of assertion, rhetorical power comments, hints, warnings, to let me know he was in the business of knowing already, with those tag-on ‘weren’t you?’, ‘didn’t you?’, ‘isn’t that right?’, ‘is not that so?’ appended for pretence of query at the end. So he made his remark about the Greek and Roman and as he was doing so, I thought of that van, that white van, and of how it must have been his all along up that entry. Was he following me then? Had he been sitting in that van all the time I’d been in my French lesson, watching me, watching the others, noting our anxiety as we underwent our sunset? And again he was talking as if he knew me, as if previously in some appropriate manner we’d been introduced to each other. This time too, as in the parks & reservoirs, he was looking aslant and not directly at me; more of a gaze to the side of me. Then it was another question, this one about maybe-boyfriend, someone he hadn’t made reference to until this point.

He did so in the manner of it being time, that it was time, was it not, that we should have our little discussion about this so-called, kind of, boyfriend? He said, ‘That guy you see sometimes, the young guy,’ and he said ‘young guy’ as if maybe-boyfriend was too young, as if he wasn’t two years older than myself. ‘You dance with the young guy at the clubs outside your area and inside his area, don’t you? At those few clubs in town too, and the others up around the university? You go drinking with the young guy, yeah?’ Here he listed specific bars, exact places, days, times, then said he’d noticed I didn’t always catch the weekday bus now into town. He didn’t mean the morning bus I used to get that he’d spoken of last time, but already the new one that recently, in attempts to evade him, I’d gone out of my way to catch. That was because, he said, on certain mornings I’d get a lift to work from the young guy after spending the night in the young guy’s house. So he knew maybe-boyfriend’s house, his district, also his name, who his mates were, where he worked, even that he used to work in that car factory that had to close that time with the entire workforce made redundant. He knew too, that I slept with maybe-boyfriend and here I became annoyed for feeling myself caught because of the connotations that could be, and that I knew were being, implied by those words. ‘Not a date though, is he?’ he said. ‘Not a proper dating, nothing steady, nothing established, something you’re treading water with, isn’t he?’ during which I was wrong-footed because if I’d been expecting anything from this milkman at this, our third meeting, it would have been reproof at my continuing to go running when, according to him, I should not only be pacing myself by walking-during-running but also, shouldn’t anymore be walking because – had he not said last time? – I did too much walking, therefore a disappointment to him that here I was, still doing both. Not only that, I was doing the running with third brother-in-law in the parks & reservoirs. But he didn’t mention third brother-in-law, nor my continued use of legs, nor the parks & reservoirs. Completely therefore, was I thrown by this new line of talk.

He said – just a tiny mention – that the young guy still worked with cars, didn’t he? So now it was the exact whereabouts of maybe-boyfriend’s current place of work. He said too, about the Blower Bentley. Then it was that supercharger. Then that flag from ‘over the water’ which was when the rapidities at the back of my legs took on an unpleasant rhythmic hold. He had down all maybe-boyfriend’s routine, all his movements, just as he had down my routine and my movements. Then he said the young guy liked sunsets and he said this as if it were an incongruity that anyone – particularly anyone male – should even notice sunsets, as if in all his years of researching, of shadowing and of setting people up to be murdered, never had he come across anybody odd enough – actually odd enough – to take time to drive to a sunset which – excepting the research and the shadowing and the setting people up to be murdered – was exactly where I, regarding maybe-boyfriend and sunsets, was coming from myself. Then he said, ‘Each to their own,’ and this was said quietly, perhaps more to himself, in the manner of it affording some light, diverting entertainment. Then he returned to the supercharger, or rather, to that rumour now circulating in maybe-boyfriend’s area regarding him and the supercharger, and of his supposed leanings – traitorous leanings – at having such a quintessential ‘over the water’ item that had that red, white and blue thing on it in his house.

In response I found myself doing something out of character. ‘He didn’t take that flag bit,’ I said. ‘There was no flag bit. That’s being put about by the gossips of his area.’ Then I contradicted myself by adding, ‘Some guy from “over the road” at my boyfriend’s place of work got the bit with the flag on’ – and here three things were new. One was, I was lying, making up completely about someone from the other religion at maybe-boyfriend’s work getting the bit with the flag on. In truth, I didn’t know if there were people from the opposite religion at the mechanics where maybe-boyfriend worked. Second thing was, I had turned ‘maybe-boyfriend’ into ‘my boyfriend’, the first time ever for me to do so. This had been out of protectiveness to stop this milkman from discerning any chink of a ‘maybe’ by which he could slip in between me and maybe-boyfriend and third thing was, all this sudden talking I was doing, this gabbling, splurging – and as I say, lies, in my attempt to defend and to shield maybe-boyfriend from this sinister, omniscient milkman – was in marked contrast to my hardly ever opening my mouth to defend or shield myself. I didn’t understand what was happening, what I was doing, but I sensed the similarity between this and shouting out the window that time at eldest sister when she came round, unjustly, to berate me because her husband had sent her, unjustly, to berate me. I felt then, as now, the losing of my step. I was falling over, slipping in, when my usual procedure was to keep away from gossip, from loose tongues, from that feeding of the five thousand. The very momentum of that invidious group mind was enough to sway and trick a person in. Hardly I knew what I was about, why I was speaking, why explaining and excusing on behalf of maybe-boyfriend, and this, the first time since our initial meeting – when I’d been reading Ivanhoe and he’d pulled up in his car beside me – that I’d attempted any words to this man at all. I carried on though, with my authentic-sounding story, reiterating about the guy from ‘over the road’, saying it ever so casually in order to make it sound real. It occurred to me then, that perhaps I shouldn’t have invented the guy from ‘over the road’, that instead I should have stuck to the truth of there having been no bit with the flag on. But then, everybody ‘this side of the road’, ‘our side of the road’, ‘our religion’, knew that taking a part of anything that came from even a suspected patriotic, ‘over the water’ item might suggest – exactly as maybe-boyfriend’s jealous neighbour had suggested – that flag or no flag, maybe-boyfriend should instinctively have recoiled from partaking in a raffle to win any part of such a car at all. Then there was that whole matter of a raffle, of winning something, of suddenly appearing in the area to have come into a generously sufficient and increasing supply of money, both in pocket and in material possessions that couldn’t in normal terms be accounted for. Usually when that happened rumour was informership was involved. ‘Tell them you’ve come into some money,’ would say the state handlers to their informers. ‘Tell the local boys, the renouncers, that you won this money – this paltry whatever it is we’re giving you in exchange for information – say you won it in a raffle or in a game of housey-housey and we’ll see to it that genuinely you do win it in a raffle or in a game of housey-housey.’ And the informers, unbelievably, would say just that. ‘Won it in a raffle,’ they’d say, and they’d combine their words with extravagant shrugs meant to convey that of course they themselves were not informers and that nobody was to think them informers. It was that they couldn’t seem to learn in spite of the number of informer corpses stacking up in local entries that they were fooling nobody, least of all the renouncers. ‘Won it in a raffle,’ still they would say. ‘It’s in the papers even!’ they’d continue, meaning the nationally printed word of their having won it was evidence that really and truly they weren’t informers. Again though, they meant the ‘wrong’ papers, the papers from ‘over there’. Such a declaration in such a publication was more likely to condemn and seal a fate in my community and in maybe-boyfriend’s community than excuse and save fates in our communities. But despite those newspapers being considered suspect as colluders with the state, the informers would stick to their story as primed by their briefs. Of course, maybe-boyfriend really had won it in a raffle, in a spontaneous game of chance at his workplace. What kind of petty informer anyway, would demand – and get – a supercharger from a Blower Bentley in exchange for what would probably amount to low-grade information on our local renouncers? But complex. Very complex. And twice in this meeting now I’d experienced how easy it was to fall into traps. One can rumour, continue in rumour, get stuck and be unable to get out of rumour, which basically was why I carried on. I had started in on the lie, that of maybe-boyfriend winning a neutral bit of a neutral car when possibly there’d been nothing neutral about it. And now, having pitted myself against a sharp, cold intelligence such as how I imagined was that of the milkman, hardly could I backtrack and present a simpler story – the true story – for if I did, that would only compound matters for maybe-boyfriend as well as reveal to this milkman I’d been lying all along.