Anna Burns - Milkman

Maybe-boyfriend, now enlightened, or thinking he was enlightened, said that sometimes yes, they happened, that of course they did, but that I must know myself they didn’t always happen, that carbombs, in terms commensurate with the population, hardly ever happened. ‘Most people here don’t get blown up by carbombs,’ he said. ‘Most people here don’t get blown up. Besides, maybe-girlfriend, you can’t not live your life just because somebody someday might kill you.’ He made it sound easy which was proof he hadn’t received the full particulars yet. I didn’t know either, when he would receive them because apart from this encroachment upon me by the milkman, there were those other encroachments upon me by the community. The scandal of this milkman affair had mushroomed to the point where it was now rabid and raging and fast becoming a best-seller and because of it, because of all those compounding violations, I was finding myself more and more circumscribed into an incoherent, debilitated place. Maybe-boyfriend then said who was going to kill him anyway? It wasn’t as if he worked in a defender area. He didn’t even work in a mixed area. ‘Look, love,’ he said. ‘You’re only thinking this because of what happened to your poor sister’s ex-boyfriend. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to everybody’s boyfriend – probably less so too,’ he joked, ‘to maybe -boyfriends.’ Again it sounded easy, as if such a thing, such an outcome, was very far from his view of his world. He tried to touch me then, but I pulled away, then stepped away, right away, from him. Before the milkman, maybe-boyfriend’s touch, those fingers, his hands, had been the best, the most, the absolute of lovely. But now, since the milkman, any part of maybe-boyfriend coming towards me brought up in me mounting bouts of revulsion and a feeling that I might at any moment be sick. He was repulsing me, my own maybe-boyfriend was repulsing me, and even though I did not want to be repulsed and was trying my best not to become aware I was repulsed, I’d find myself blaming him for feeling it and for not being able to reason myself out of it. Instead I’d fling his hand, fling his fingers, push him off, tense up, have stomach pains. I knew too, that this was because of the milkman but I couldn’t figure out how it could be the milkman. In all the small time since he’d set his sights on me and had started in on destroying me, still only that first time in the car had he even looked at me, never either, said anything lewd or mocking or of outright provocation to me. Most especially he hadn’t laid a finger on me. Not one finger. Not once.

As for the community, and my affair with the milkman according to this community, I was now well in it, that being the case whether I was or not. It was put about I had regular engagements with him, rendezvous, intimate ‘dot dot dots’ at various ‘dot dot dot’ places. In particular we frequented our two favourite romance spots which were the parks & reservoirs and the ten-minute area, though also we were partial, it was said, to spending time, just the two of us – and presumably all the people who were spying on us – where the tall grasses grew over the ancient tombstones in the old part of the usual place. Ever so confidently, ever so arrogantly, I stepped into his flashy cars, it was said, for yes, many people had seen me. ‘Picks her up for assignations,’ they said, ‘for their trysts, their lovers’ appointments, and they go to these places.’ ‘When they’re not there,’ it was also said, ‘they’re fostering illicit togethernesses downtown at those risky bars and clubs.’ ‘Already he’s married, you know,’ whispered people and, ‘Already he’s covering her,’ whispered back other people. ‘Well, he is him,’ they said. ‘And as for her, doesn’t she have that leaning of maybe-relationships instead of highly principled, rectitudinous coupledom relationships?’ – which translated meant it wouldn’t be long now before he moved me out of the family home and into some pad for established cinqasepts with him, the pad being located of course up the road in the red-light street. ‘Mark our words,’ said people, and again all this made sense within the context of our intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district. But out of context, away from all that itchiness, the whispering, the passing of notes and where an unhealthy interest in sexual matters existed to the extent of sexual dirt being the most best for general gossip whenever you wanted a rest from political gossip, it would have been difficult to gauge how all these locals were arriving at the most detailed of information regarding me and him that they were. Their creative imaginings would reach my ears slander by gravitational slander. Then there were those other occasions when the more direct line of communication was attempted, such as when they’d chase me down to havoc me with questions, this time up close face-to-face.

My suspiciousness of questions had long existed before the rumour of me and the milkman. When asked one I’d think, who is this person? What’s behind that question? Why are they going all around the houses, thinking they are deceiving me by going all around them? Why, in their supposedly hidden way, are they ‘putting-on’ with hints and pointed comment when I know they’re attempting with this sample testing of my thoughts, opinion and inclination, to elicit a previously intended response from me and dishonestly to catch me in my words? I had noticed – certainly by the end of primary school I had noticed – that often it could be discerned when someone was up to something even when they thought they were concealing they were up to something. Wasn’t either, that some inner or verbal aspect of themselves would be the only thing to give them away. Their true nature also would be revealed by the very contaminated, off-kilter atmosphere in which they chose to surround themselves. This energy field would accompany them as they made their way towards me, whereupon descrying them, my own skin would crawl and the hairs would move up on the back of my neck. It was the contrast between that – all those powerful yet invisible indicators – and the supposedly innocuous, parenthetical manner my neighbours assumed they were presenting to me that most would reveal to me they were not, for whatever reason, coming from the truth. Of course, I might not know why a person was dissembling. Could be that with certain individuals it wasn’t to make game of me, to invoke immoderate emotion in me or to lure me verbally to my detriment. Might have been some personal concern of their own about which vulnerably and humanly they felt a need to keep silent, but on which nonetheless they needed clarification or information from someone else. With gossips and rumour-mongers however – and certainly with our gossips and our super-rumour-mongers – always it came down to scrutiny, to wangling, to listening for leverage, to the dedication public opinion here was invested in conjecture, not only abroad but within the Home Circle front.

So they’d embark on offensives and approach with their questions, but these were not straightforward questions, as in ‘wherefore this?’ or ‘what about that?’ Instead it was ‘So-and-so said’ and ‘It has been said’ and ‘We heard our uncle’s cousin’s brother’s daughter’s friend who doesn’t live in the area anymore said’. Some too, would make mention of the actual word ‘rumour’, as in ‘Rumour says’, before going on to personify rumour, as if it wasn’t they who were launching or perpetuating Rumour themselves. With their seemingly innocent queries, often too, with assertions left hanging, they’d open their mouths in the hope of inciting me – in shock, in fear, in defensive disposition – into opening mine to give some juicy, easily to be expanded-upon response. Before they could utter a single ‘So-and-so said’, however, I’d have picked up on their covertness without betraying I’d picked up on it. The only way though, I knew how to counter them was by doing my own dissembling myself. I would do this in such a way as to get my reaction off the ground as swiftly and unsuspiciously as possible. This would be by feigning ignorance of their intention and giving a continuous ‘I don’t know’ to every probing query they put out. I’d launch my ‘I don’t know’ as the biggest player in my verbal defence repertoire and I’d be prepared to carry on saying it because another thing I’d learned by the end of primary school was that it was best not to open my mouth in the interests of truth except to a trusted few persons, this trusted-few becoming a trusted-fewer as time progressed in primary school and then I was in secondary school and by that time – age eleven through to sixteen – my trusted-fewer people had declined further so that by age eighteen – the time of me and the milkman as well as of this gossip about me and the milkman – it had got to the point where there was now only one remaining trusted-fewest person left for me to have faith in in all the world. I suspected that if I kept up this curtailing, this cauterising, all the distrust and systematic removal of myself from society, by age twenty it was more than likely I’d be at the stage of no longer opening my mouth to anyone, anywhere, at all.