Anna Burns - Milkman

This is mad, you’re mad , I told myself. What are you gonna say next and what if this flag business ends up at kangaroo court level? Will you propound that the guy from ‘over the road’ – Ivor, shall we say? – who must be assumed, more because of his religion than because of his fictitiousness, not to want to appear in person in an enemy-renouncer commandery, might be willing all the same, in support of his workmate, to write a little note? Is Ivor in this notelette going to vouch that it was he who possessed the bit with the flag on, perhaps enclosing a Polaroid of himself beside this bit with the flag on, with other indications in the background of his ‘over the road’ status – more flags perhaps? That should do the trick. This predictive if sarcastic part of myself again brought back the rashness of maybe-boyfriend and of how badly he must be suffering car fever and compulsive hoarding-to-the-rafters that he should transgress the imperatives of our political, social and religious codes. With boys it’s not the same as with girls. That business of ‘what’s allowed’ and ‘what’s not allowed’ was more rigid with them, more difficult and most of the male side of that I wasn’t terribly up on. Things such as beer, lager, even certain spirits; sport too, I wasn’t up on, because I hated sport, and I hated beer, and I hated hard spirits and the same with lager, so I never paid attention to the urgent aspect of the indigenous male’s political and religious choice of these things. Not really cars either did I know, which ones were acceptably ‘over the water’ and which were a no-no. As for the Blower Bentley, even I had come to feel that that vehicle definitely suggested some kind of nation-defining emblem – but could it not be possible, I wondered – as maybe-boyfriend’s gentle, diplomatic neighbour earlier had wondered – for it to qualify as one of those permissible crossover exceptions? The angry rumour currently circulating in maybe-boyfriend’s area seemed to suggest not. No neutral bits therefore. All traitorous bits therefore. And what if Ivor was bigoted and refused to write the note?

‘A carbomb blows up and out.’

This was the milkman and I jumped at his words. He said, ‘It had been “a device”, hadn’t it? What quaintly they call “a device”, attached to the inside of the exhaust before it was dropped off for a routine service? I must say, I’m surprised your sister’s ex, given his profession, didn’t discover something so obviously to be found by a motor mechanic as that.’ At this I thought, no, that’s wrong, he’s got that wrong. Sister’s dead ex, the one who cheated on her then got killed in his car when sectarian workmates of the opposite religion planted a bomb underneath it in the factory carpark, had been a plumber not a motor mechanic. Maybe-boyfriend was the motor mechanic. Then I thought, but why’s he talking about sister and her ex? It seemed to me that although the milkman had got Greek and Roman wrong, it couldn’t be possible that such as he would be ignorant as not to know something that wasn’t even a secret. And, of course, he hadn’t been ignorant. Hadn’t mixed up plumbers and motor mechanics. It was that my own powers of inference hadn’t yet twigged to the suggestive way in which he liked to deliver his words. But he talked on, dropping hints, giving me time, a generous opportunity. Seamlessly he slipped back and forth, from sister’s dead ex and the defender bomb that had killed him to, ‘He’s working now on a battered car at home, isn’t he?’, meaning maybe-boyfriend. Then it was back to the dead husband, who never did become the husband, but the real one nonetheless of his grieving widowed ex-girlfriend’s heart. He shook his head then, feeling sorry for them, for sister and her dead lover. ‘Wrong place, wrong time, wrong religion,’ he said, also saying that he hoped first sister would recover and not grieve perpetually for the loss of the motor mechanic: ‘Fine woman, still a fine woman. Very good-looking’ – all the time too, making no reference to the man she did marry, to her actual husband, to first brother-in-law. By now I was confused. Is it sister then? I was thinking. Have I got this wrong and all the time it’s been first sister and not me he’s after? But why mention her ex-boyfriend? And why that bomb that killed him? And why maybe-boyfriend? Meanwhile, during all this puzzlement, those unpleasant waves, biological ripple upon nasty ripple, kept up assailment on my legs and backbone.

Owing to this milkman’s intimations, I found then my fears starting to shift from the outraged of his own area wishing harm on maybe-boyfriend – for neglecting his history, for forgetting his community, for bringing home outrageous emblems not wanted in his area and stacking them sky-high along with his motorcar parts in his hoarded-up cupboards in his hoarded-up house. Shifted too, my fears did, from that of a more personal revenge by envious workmates of any religion wanting the worst for maybe-boyfriend because he’d won a world-famous prized car part that they themselves had wanted to win. Now, at the milkman’s words, I became worried that maybe-boyfriend was in a danger more imminent than that. Certainly he worked with cars, lots of cars, probably too, to the extent of being blasé, of leaping into them, of casually turning keys in ignitions. As for the religions at his work, I had never asked maybe-boyfriend about that. It might be he worked in a mixed environment and if so, it could be a decent mixed environment or one of the more likely bitter, tense, murderous mixed environments. I didn’t know. And he too, didn’t know, hadn’t asked the same about me. I did work with some girls from the opposite religion, though never would I have felt the need to discover whether or not they were the opposite religion except that these things tended to come out by themselves. Sometimes this would be gradually, as with time passing when people naturally got to know each other; more often though, it would happen quickly, as for example, upon hearing each other’s father’s, grandfather’s, uncle’s and brother’s names. For me and maybe-boyfriend, never did that conversation arise, though naturally we didn’t hold soft spots for the other country’s army, or for the police here, or for the governing state here, or for the governing state ‘over there’, or for the paramilitary defenders-of-the-state ‘over the road’, or for anybody of any religion going at it with intent to find out another’s persuasion. Of course, as regards living here, a person could not help but have a view. Impossible it would be – in those days, those extreme, awful crowd days, and on those streets too, which were the battlefield which were the streets – to live here and not have a view about it. I myself spent most of my time with my back turned in the nineteenth century, even the eighteenth century, sometimes the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, yet even then, I couldn’t stop having a view. Third brother-in-law too, for all his exercise obsession and of whom everybody in my district could have sworn didn’t have a view, turned out to have a sharp view. There was no getting away from views and of course, the problem was these views between the areas, between one side and the other, were not just not the same. It was that each was intolerant of the other to the extent that highly volatile, built-up contentions periodically would result from them; the reason why too, if you didn’t want to get into that explosive upsurge despite your view which you couldn’t help having, you had to have manners and exercise politeness to overcome, or at any rate balance out, the violence, the hatred and the blaming – for how to live otherwise? This was not schizophrenia. This was living otherwise. This was underneath the trauma and the darkness a normality trying to happen. Observing the niceties therefore, not the antipathies, was crucial to co-existence and an example of that would be our French class, a mixed class, where it was okay to run down France, say, or more to the point, French metaphorical writers, but where absolutely it was not okay, not for one second, in respect of the proprieties, to demand someone declare themselves or make reference to their view or to your view at all. As for the renouncers – as in maybe-boyfriend’s and my view of the renouncers – we didn’t talk of them either. For my part, this was because two things dominated my mind then. One was maybe-boyfriend, and two was our ‘not quite on, not quite off’ relationship. Now, also, there was the milkman – so three things, not two things. Then, if the complexity of the renouncers was to gain entrance, forcing me to have a comprehensive – meaning, conflicting – opinion about them, that would mean four things. Then the political problems, because I couldn’t have the renouncers in my head without the reason for the renouncers – so that would be five things. Five things . This is what happens when doors swing open on inner contraries. Impossible then, with all these irreconcilables, to account, not just politically-correctly, but even sensibly for oneself. Hence, the dichotomy, the cauterising, the jamais vu , the blanking-out, the reading-while-walking – even my consideration of whether to forgo the current codex altogether for the safety of the scroll and papyrus of earlier centuries. Otherwise, if unmediated forces and feelings burst to my consciousness, I wouldn’t know what to do. I could see the necessity for them, for the renouncers, for how it was they came about, how it seemed they had to come about, given all the legalised and defended imbalances. Then there was that lack of listening, a stubbornness unyielding, an entrenchment indicative of those turbulent times themselves. So the cracking of the faultlines was inevitable; so too, were the renouncers inevitable. As for the killings, they were the usual, meaning they were not to be belaboured, not because they were nothing but because they were enormous, also so numerous that rapidly there became no time for them. Every so often, however, an event would occur so beyond-the-pale that everyone – ‘this side of the road’, ‘that side of the road’, ‘over the water’ and ‘over the border’ – couldn’t help but be stopped in their tracks. A renouncer-atrocity would send you reeling with, ‘God o God o God. How can I have a view that helped on this action?’ which would be the case until you’d forget, which would happen when the other side went and did one of their awful things. Again this was reeling and spinning. It was revenge and counter-revenge. It was joining peace movements, showing commitment to cross-community discussions, to those all-inclusive marches, to true, good citizenship – until the point it was suspected that these peace movements and goodwill and true, good citizenship were being infiltrated by one faction or the other faction. So then you’d leave the movements, drop hope, abandon potential solutions and drift back to the view that always was familiar, dependable, inevitable. In those days then, impossible it was not to be closed-up because closed-upness was everywhere: closings in our community, closings in their community, the state here closed, the government ‘over there’ closed, the newspapers and radio and television closed because no information could be forthcoming that wouldn’t be perceived by at least one party to be a distortion of the truth. When it got down to it, although people spoke of ordinariness, there wasn’t really ordinariness because moderation itself had spun out of control. No matter the reservations held then – as to methods and morals and about the various groupings that came into operation or which from the outset already had been in operation; no matter too, that for us, in our community, on ‘our side of the road’, the government here was the enemy, and the police here was the enemy, and the government ‘over there’ was the enemy, and the soldiers from ‘over there’ were the enemy, and the defender-paramilitaries from ‘over the road’ were the enemy and, by extension – thanks to suspicion and history and paranoia – the hospital, the electricity board, the gas board, the water board, the school board, telephone people and anybody wearing a uniform or garments easily to be mistaken for a uniform also were the enemy, and where we were viewed in our turn by our enemies as the enemy – in those dark days, which were the extreme of days, if we hadn’t had the renouncers as our underground buffer between us and this overwhelming and combined enemy, who else, in all the world, would we have had?