Anna Burns - Milkman

Now it was true he did have renouncer links. His father and his eldest sister and his eldest brother – until their deaths – all had been renouncers. But you can’t claim credit, least not forever in a staunchly anti-state, paramilitary stronghold, for what your da did, for what your big sister did, for what your big brother did, if you weren’t forwarding on the cause with actions yourself. You might get leeway for a while, a bit of attention, some respect filtering down because of your blood connections. In particular, visitors to the area, history-seekers, that type, might be impressed and even esteem you because how would they know better? The locals though, did know better, and the thing with these feverishly demented supporters who end up thinking they’re paramilitaries when they’re not paramilitaries is that they distance themselves from everybody with their self-advancing showing-off. That was the true position of McSomebody and it didn’t occur to him – for you could buy a balaclava anywhere – how completely he was transparent. It was said he’d been doing his peddling of superhero freedom-fighting to such a noisy extent now that the renouncers themselves were thinking of having a word. He came to me again then, regardless of my earlier rebuff, and he started in on this new chat-up. He said he could see how someone like me would understand, given my own renouncer-blood credentials, that any day now he might – as in the case of my fourth brother – have to go on the run. It was very annoying. At first I was again polite, wondering what amount of time could be passed before saying, ‘I have to go now.’ It’s that they have this idea, these people, that you’re stupid, that you’re incapable of discerning that they think you stupid. Also, they don’t see you as a person but instead as some cipher, some valueless nobody whose sole objective is to reflect back onto them the glory of themselves. Their compliments and solicitousness too, are creepy. They’re inappropriate, squirmy, calculated, rapacious, particularly as not long afterwards – or not long before as in my case – you know it’s going to be insults, threats of violence, threats of death and variations on stalk-talk. It’s that in their own lack of intelligence they think they see you coming when it’s you who sees them coming, the question then being whether to be kind or to swat them with viciousness out of your way. But I was polite for there had been further deaths in McSomebody’s family, the last two happening only months before. These latest deaths now took that family almost to the number one spot as the one with the most violent deaths to have occurred in it in our area, except my longest friend from primary school came from a family in which everybody in it was now dead from the problems bar her. Poor McSomebody though. It was clear that his relatives’ deaths had affected him, that they had unhinged him, that they must account, at least in part, for his losing grip so spectacularly like that. First his father, then his oldest sister, then his oldest brother, all killed over the last ten years in various renouncer activity. Then there’d been that favourite of the family, the second oldest male, who’d died that time while crossing the road. Two months on from the favourite’s death, there came a day when the fourth boy, still in his nuclear-arms distraction, also died. Pills, drink, a plastic bag over his head and leaving a note which astounded everybody: ‘It is because of Russia and because of America that I am doing this.’ After that, and out of that original family of two parents and twelve siblings, there was only Somebody McSomebody, his now psychologically debilitated mother, his six sisters and the three-year-old boy left. Not my fault though. Not my fault either, that I didn’t find him attractive. You cannot go out with someone just because you feel sorry for them because they’ve had a long run of death in their family; and particularly you cannot do it if, from the outset, from the first moment ever of setting eyes on them, even before any interaction were to take place with them, something about them made you feel sick. Initially I’d feel guilty about the sick bit, but then I stopped feeling guilty when he started in on his death threats after that first rejection of him. Then I became further resolved in not feeling guilty after my second rejection when he spoke of ‘our kindredship’ because of ‘our renouncership’, making mention too of ‘our relationship’ when we didn’t have a relationship, which was when I realised he was treating those two rebuffs as if they’d been acceptances, as if indeed, they had constituted our first dates. As for all this stalk-talk he did, and his surety of our relationship, and the futurity of our coupledom, never could I have imagined that the menacing, deluded, obsessive, deranged types of this world could instantly recover from being menacing, deluded, obsessive and deranged and instead backpedal like no tomorrow into sycophancy and obscurity. That was what happened to McSomebody when news reached him of the interest about to be furthered in me by the milkman, by an individual even McSomebody could grasp was of a far more menacing and stalking capability than him.

Now, after the cessation of McSomebody’s romance hostilities, here I was, standing beside this milkman, my thoughts easily to become terrified, not helped either by the dead cat’s head I was holding in my hands. All through our exchange I made no reference to this head, nor did I look at it. He too, appeared not to look at it. I knew though, that he was well aware of what it was. Probably had gotten the detail of my picking it up, of walking back, walking forth, all that dithering about beforehand. I was sure too, he’d have clocked my rolling it in the hankies, lifting it, perhaps also mind-reading my intention to carry it up to the usual place. Just as I was saying nothing about it though, he also was saying nothing, as if it were inconsequential to be standing where nobody ever stood at a quarter to ten of a summer’s night beside a teenage girl holding a decapitated head, while chatting to her about taking the life of the boyfriend she was maybe-involved with. No wonder then, given the effect his appearance and words were having upon me, that for a tiny space of time I had forgotten the head was there. Just for a moment, however, because then it reminded me. As the milkman opened his mouth, once again to say something that I knew was going to unnerve me, my hands, which had been tightly cupping the handkerchiefs, now began in a fitful way to fidget the fabric about. One of my fingers came upon a long front tooth and in my confusion I turned this to the long front tooth coming through the fabric upon my finger. And it was at that moment that my spine again moved. It did so in that similar unnatural fashion it had moved in the classroom earlier. After that came the leg shudders, those hamstring currents, all those neural, rippling dreads and permeations around my thighs and backside. Then my mind free-associated back to maggots – to those clumps about the nose, the ear, the eye and now he was talking again. This time he’d moved off the subject of murdering maybe-boyfriend, which had not been spelled out as murder anyway in that everything had been suggested. Much older than me, more assured than me and with no waste of energy despite that languid-seeming indifference, this man was back to offering me lifts in his cars.

Again, as at our second meeting in the parks & reservoirs, he said he wasn’t happy, that he was concerned, that walking about in this place – downtown, anywhere outside the area – never could be good for me, that it wouldn’t be safe for me. He added he hoped I’d remember it was of no bother to him to lay on transport for me – his own or, when busy, that of someone else. He’d speak to others, he said, about assisting me during those occasions when he himself wouldn’t be available to. And here he spoke again about my work. Not to worry, he said. He’d get me safely to it, then, end of day, I’d be collected from it. I’d be spared the bother of bus-jackings, of those public vehicles getting caught up in every riot and crossfire, plus I’d be spared all other irritations of daily public transport as well. Again, this was suggestion, with his continuing in that friendly, obliging vein, the one of doing me favours, of helping me out by taking my walking away, taking my running away, taking away maybe-boyfriend. There was no overt sense here that he could be transgressing so that again perhaps I was mistaken and he wasn’t transgressing. As he spoke on, however, and no matter my confusion, I knew I must not – as a crucial bottom line – ever get into his cars. It seemed everything had microscoped down to that last one threshold, as if to do so, to cross over, to get into one, would signal some ‘end of’ as well as some ‘commencement of’. Meanwhile, I continued to stand there, in this territory of things pretended and not clearly stated, also in this area where individuals shouldn’t just hurry, but should make a point really, of never entering in the first place. But here I was, in it. And there he was, in it, and by this time I’d got so worked up that I’d reached that state of agitated emotion which easily brought on fractures of the psyche – where suddenly I might say ‘No!’ or ‘Fuck off!’ or where I might scream or drop the head or even – who knows? – fire it at him. What did happen though, was that other men appeared.