Anna Burns - Milkman

Of course you did not say this. Which was why, eighteen years old, I didn’t talk about the renouncers, was unwilling to reflect upon them, pulled down shutters against the topic of them. It was that I wanted to stay as sane in my mind as I thought then I was. This too, was why maybe-boyfriend, at least when with me, also didn’t talk about the renouncers, also perhaps why he was into cars in the way some people were mad on their music. This didn’t mean we weren’t aware, just that we didn’t know how not to be partisan. So there was a loop of regard, at least for the old-school renouncers, those with the principled reasons for resistance and for fighting before most ended up dead or interned, bringing in a preponderance, as ma put it, ‘of the hoodlum, the worldling, the careerist and the personal agenda’. So yes, keep the lid on, buy old books, read old books, seriously consider those scrolls and clay tablets. That was me then, age eighteen. It was also maybe-boyfriend. And we didn’t speak on this, didn’t dwell on it, but of course, along with others we imbibed the day-by-day, drip-by-drip, on-the-street effect of it. And now, helped along by this milkman, it came the case that my own fearful fantasies and catastrophic thinking were predicting maybe-boyfriend’s violent death. It wasn’t really prediction, of course, because in his own phraseology this milkman had pretty much spelled it out for me: death by carbomb, though carbomb may not have been the actual method intended, but only an example utilised for image and effect. It wasn’t either, that his colleagues from ‘the other side’ at work, if there were any, were going to kill maybe-boyfriend out of sectarianism. No. It was that, just as the milkman running in the parks & reservoirs had been about me and not about running in the parks & reservoirs, maybe-boyfriend was to be killed under the catch-all of the political problems even if, in reality, the milkman was going to kill him out of disguised sexual jealousy over me. Such appeared to be underlined by this milkman in the subsoil of our conversation. And so, in the rush of these thoughts – which were confused, panicked thoughts, not my usual nineteenth-century, safe-and-sound literary thoughts – I failed to know how to respond. I knew how not to respond, which was to confront, to question, to push for clarification. Absolutely, that wouldn’t do at all. I knew he knew that finally I’d grasped what it was he was saying to me; also what it was I was socially conditioned into pretending he hadn’t said to me – which wasn’t just social conditioning, but a nerves thing as well. At public, grassroots level I wasn’t even supposed to know this man was a renouncer, which anyway was true because I did not. I accepted he was simply because amongst all the unmentionables here that managed all the same to get mentioned whilst retaining a patina of not being mentioned, there existed a widespread ‘taking for granted’ which in this case – the case of whether or not this milkman was a renouncer – the unmentionable on the grapevine was, ‘Don’t be silly, of course he is.’ I was supposed to accept this, just in the way I was supposed to accept that certain others in the area also were renouncers. Given, however, there was that other recent unmentionable – that of myself being in an affair with the milkman when I knew for certain, if nobody else did, that I wasn’t in an affair with the milkman – might it be in a similar vein that this man wasn’t a paramilitary after all? He may have been some chancer, some fantasist, one of those Walter Mitty people who, whilst not being in anything themselves, attempt, or even manage, to have built up around themselves mythic reputations – in this case as some top renouncer intelligence gatherer – all based entirely on others’ misperceptions of him. Could it be that this milkman had started off as one of the armchair supporters, the type who, in their ardour and fanaticism for the renouncers, sometimes went batty and started to believe, then to hint, then boast, that they themselves also were renouncers? That did happen. Periodically it happened. It happened to Somebody McSomebody, that boy who was to threaten me after the milkman’s death when he cornered me in the toilets of the district’s most popular drinking-club. Certainly, he’d been in the throes of considering that he was some top-drawer renouncer-of-the-state himself.

Somebody McSomebody probably would not agree with this assessment of himself but I consider it fair and accurate. When we were both seventeen, and after he approached me for the first time in order to make a move on me which was when I rejected him because I wasn’t attracted to him, it struck me that McSomebody was of the grudge-bearing, stalker type. ‘We will follow you,’ he said and continued to say as soon as it dawned on him that he was being rebuffed by me and not accepted by me as he had presumed to be accepted. And although I’d tried to be respectful in my rebuffing it didn’t work because, ‘We will be next you, always next you. You started this. You made us look at you. You made us think … You suggested … You don’t know what we’re capable of and when you least expect it, when you think we’re not there, when you think we’ve gone, you’ll pay back for, oh, you’ll pay back for … You’ll …You’ll …’ See? Stalker-type behaviour, referring to himself now too, in the first person plural whereas not long before he’d been a normal first person singular like everybody else. The other thing about McSomebody was that he was a teller of untruths. I don’t mean he lied as in vulnerable, nervous, panicked lies such as the type recently I’d invented on the spot and poured out to the milkman regarding maybe-boyfriend and Ivor and the supercharger and that flag from ‘over the water’. I mean Somebody McSomebody was so far gone in his makings-up that I think he thought every word true himself. These lies started in the James Bond mode, though of course, no one here, on ‘my side of the road’, on ‘this side of the water’, acknowledged James Bond. That was another no-no, though not as no-no as watching the news about our political problems as relayed by what was considered their manipulative network, nor as no-no as reading the wrong type of newspaper – again one from ‘over the water’ – and certainly not as no-no as giving the time of day late at night to that anthem being played on the TV. It was that James Bond was another of the disallowed because, like the supercharger, it was another quintessential, nation-defining, ‘over the water’ patriotism and, if you were from ‘our side of the water’ as well as ‘our side of the road’ and you did watch James Bond, you didn’t make a point of saying so; also you kept the volume very, very low. If someone caught you at it, quickly you’d splutter, ‘Rubbish! Huh! Not realistic! As if those things could happen!’, meaning how implausible it was that James Bond, in full dinner jacket, could be in a coffin one moment at the crematorium, pretending he was dead, then next breaking out of the coffin, defeating villains for his country, going to all the parties and having sex with the most beautiful women in the world. ‘Unlikely,’ you’d say. ‘It’s that they think they’re Americans but they’re not Americans! Huh! Huh!’ That way you excuse yourself for what might come across as a treasonous lack of support for the eight-hundred-year struggle, as well as aligning yourself with the likes of Oliver Cromwell, Elizabeth the First, the invasion of 1172, and Henry the Eighth. So that was James Bond in the general sense, that day-to-day disallowed historical and political sense. Telling lies though, in the James Bond mode was at a slightly different angle from this. It involved making use of that patriotic, great-guy image, the good guy, the heroic guy, the invincible, sexy, maverick male defeater of all bad guys for the glory of his country, only in this case, in our culture, on ‘our side of the road’, who was who and what was what had to be swapped around.