Anna Burns - Milkman

So I wasn’t ready for that, to admit I might be on some threshold, about to glimpse that again – just as with the political problems here and my maybe-relationship with maybe-boyfriend – I was coming up against the ambivalences in life. As these women spoke on – of their behaviours, their carnality, of pain being arousing so that they trained themselves not to resist, so that always they were going around in pleasure, so that always pain all the time was pleasure; also of being in toils, in trance, unable to act voluntarily; racing hearts, they said, skin ripples, permanent states of arousal – it got to the point where my master control couldn’t cope any longer and just as with third brother-in-law whenever he would get into an overload of exercise talk, I stanched all openings to block them off. Eventually they dropped this enthralment talk and moved on to ‘You have lovely hair’ which startled me and which wasn’t true because I didn’t. Absolutely I didn’t. But they said it again, adding this time that my hair was just like Virginia Mayo’s or even like Kim Novak’s. The patent falseness of this did not put them off. Now it was, ‘You look like Joan Bennett in that film Woman in the Window ,’ and no, again, I didn’t. But they carried on, paying me compliments, including me as one of them, attempting to get in with me. This told me that in their eyes I must now be his. If not yet his, then their inside information, their barometer, even just their sentient understanding of these matters must have indicated to them that before long I was going to be his. They were surrounding me and instructing me, not as rivals but as confidantes, suivantes, wanting to know where in the hierarchy they might stand with me. Hence that constant assurance that I was every inch the lick and spittle of whichever film noir star they were estimating I would most prefer to be.

And now it was my cheekbones. They were just like Ida Lupino’s. Me and Gloria Grahame were something. And Veronica Lake and me. And Jane Greer and me. And Lizabeth Scott and me. And Ann Todd and me and Gene Tierney and Jean Simmons and Alida Valli and they were like wee girls, dressing up as movie stars, as femmes fatales , with myself now invited to play along. ‘We should sit together,’ they said. ‘You come and sit with us. Anytime you like, leave those drinking-friends you’re with and come and sit with us.’ Then they left but not before, ‘Here – but not till you’re indoors.’ It was a pill. A shiny black one. Plump. Tiny, with a tinier white dot right in the middle of it. They extended this to me and my hand opened and received it, as if expecting it. More than anything, it was as if I’d fallen into the very person, according to everybody, I was now supposed to be.

It seemed though, that before that evening of the groupie bonding session in the toilets of the district’s most popular drinking-club, also before realising which powerful renouncer had set his stalker-sights upon me, Somebody McSomebody – my amateur stalker – must have heard I was aspiring to paramilitary groupiedom and so thought to chance his arm with his new romance-advancement plan. This new plan was part of his second attempt to come at me after that first time when he’d been rejected by me. This time he was going all-out in his wooing in the hope that when he revealed his true self to me – given too, I was ambitious of falling in love, not with any auld renouncer but with the utmost, super-eminent of renouncers – that I would think, Christ! One of those guys! Yes please, I’ll have that. Up until this point, Somebody McSomebody had been known about the area as a fervent supporter of the renouncers and certainly he came from an entrenched renouncer family. After being the rabid type for a while, however, he fell into that other category, the one of thinking himself a renouncer which meant, he implied when he made this second move on me, that I’d made a mistake in rejecting him first time. He said that although he’d come out with a lot of stalk-talk on that occasion in response to my rejection of him, he hadn’t meant all that ‘just you wait, filthy cat, you’re going to die’. He said he hoped I hadn’t taken it in the wrong vein but instead had known really, had accepted his words really, as expressive of his natural desire for my company. And now, after some thought, he had decided, he said, that the time had come to trust me with the most secret information of his life. This was when he said he was a renouncer-of-the-state, a true patriot, one of those heroes humbly willing to lay down his life, to sacrifice everything for the movement, for the cause, for the country. He was convinced, I could see, that this time round his words would produce quite the opposite effect upon me – as in favourable, as in advantageous – especially as I’d had two brothers in the renouncers myself. Contrary to the grapevine, however, and to all those gossipy unmentionables of supposedly knowing who was a renouncer in the area and who wasn’t a renouncer, I hadn’t known two of my brothers were renouncers, not until the funeral of one of them when the coffin got draped in that flag ‘from over the border’, with the cortege then making its way, not to the commoners’ plot of the usual place, but to the renouncers’ plot of the usual place, where three of them in uniform appeared speedily out of nowhere and fired a volley of shots over his grave. That came as a surprise, I mean to me, and a further surprise was later, when I enquired of others about this aspect of the brothers. This was when I discovered that my mother and all my siblings, including wee sisters, had known that second and fourth brother had been renouncers, though none showed sympathy or patience at my being left out of this knowledge; not surprising, they said, owing to my deliberate obfuscation of reading while walking about. As for McSomebody springing his secret upon me, it was embarrassing. Plain as day too, that he wasn’t a renouncer and that in his gone-mad fever he was taking in nobody but himself. But he carried on. One minute he was an actual paramilitary. Next, he was top adviser having the respectful ears of the utmost of paramilitaries, the point being I should be impressed by his sexy hero-standing and leap into his arms before it was too late. He said, or rather boasted, assuming too, that I was on-message with him, that he had found it imperative to hold the nerve, to keep faith no matter what might happen when you were out on operations. ‘We can have an off day,’ he said, ‘with that off day spelling our last day. The average man, you know, even the average renouncer,’ he shrugged, ‘can’t, when it comes to it, always manage that. We get a little enervated, a little nervous’ – and here he said my name, my first name, forename – ‘because just beforehand,’ he went on, ‘we have this feeling that we’re living our last hours and that there are three options – we’ll live, we’ll die, we’ll be injured, we’ll fail, the state will catch us,’ which was five options. I decided not to cut in to correct, for that would encourage him on. ‘When we’re playing with our life,’ he said, ‘we don’t take anything for granted,’ and here he said my name, my forename, once again. ‘For three or four hours,’ he said, ‘we’re acutely aware that we’re going to be on edge until it’s over. If, at the end, when it is over, when we’ve accomplished our mission, well then,’ he said, ‘that’s when we realise how beautiful life is.’ There was more to this modest boast, along the lines of ‘psychological drive’, ‘nerves of steel’, ‘superhuman endurance’, ‘the unique sacrifice of a normal domestic lifestyle’. Shorn of its context though, and indeed, even in its context, it was another of those earbashings, such as I’d been undergoing of late with various people in this place. ‘For us, as you know,’ he said, continuing to refer to himself, as again he was, in the first person plural, ‘as with our family – though also we think as with your family – the army life is as important as eating, breathing and sleeping. But you can’t question us’ – here he put up his hand actually to stop me from questioning him, all the while looking at me pointedly, stressing the bond that linked us together, as if indeed, we were in this together, as if he’d just put himself in my favour by telling me where he stood in the paramilitary-renouncer world. ’Cept he hadn’t. Hadn’t impressed me, hadn’t put himself in favour, wasn’t either, a renouncer. Even if he was, even if all he’d said had managed romantically and sentimentally to have bowled me over, still he was Somebody McSomebody, telling lies as usual in the James Bond mode.