Anna Burns - Milkman

Third brother-in-law’s house was en route to the parks & reservoirs and as I approached everything was as expected: brother-in-law on his garden path, in his gear, warming up. He was muttering curses and I didn’t think he knew himself he was muttering them. ‘Fuckin’ fuckin’’ issued softly from him as he stretched his right gastrocnemius muscle then his left gastrocnemius muscle, then more ‘fuckin’s’ during the right and left soleus muscles, then he said from profile, because stretching was a focused business, also without indication that here I was, returning to run with him after a considerable breach since last running with him, ‘We’re doing eight miles today.’ ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Eight miles it is.’ This shocked him. I knew I’d been expected to frown, to assert that eight miles certainly was what we were not doing, then in one of those imperialistic, goddess fashions, to assert how many miles we were doing. My mind though, was on the milkman so I didn’t care how many miles we did. He straightened up and looked at me. ‘Did you hear me, sister-in-law? I said nine miles. Ten. Twelve miles is what we’re doing.’ Again this was my cue to take issue and pick bone. Normally I’d have obliged but at that moment I didn’t care if we ran the length and breadth of the country till we reached the point where the littlest cough – even someone else’s – should cause our legs to fall off. But I tried. ‘Ach no, brother-in-law,’ I said. ‘Not twelve miles.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘fourteen miles.’ Clearly then, I hadn’t tried hard enough. Worse, my throwaway attitude, given the nature of my sex, now had him properly agitated. He looked intensely at me, maybe as he wondered was I sick or something. I didn’t ever know what brother-in-law wondered but I did know it wasn’t that he didn’t want to do fourteen miles or wasn’t capable of fourteen miles. To him – in his need to be gainsaid – as to me – in my preoccupation with the milkman – the mileage was the most irrelevant thing in the world. It was that I hadn’t browbeaten him and, ‘I’m no browbeater,’ he began, which meant we were in for a prolonged bout of one-sided haggling, but then his wife, my third sister, stepped out onto their path.

‘Runnin’!’ she grunted, and this sister was standing in her drainpipes and flip-flops with every toenail painted a different colour. This was before the years when people except in Ancient Egypt painted toenails different colours. She had a glass of Bushmills in one hand and a glass of Bacardi in the other because she was still at that stage of working out what to have for her first drink. ‘You two are fuckers,’ she said. ‘Uptight control freaks. Obsessive, anally retentive nutcases of— Anyway, what class of bastard goes runnin’?’ Then she left off because five of her friends turned up at their door. Two used their feet to shove open the tiny house’s little gate, for their arms couldn’t do the shoving because their arms were piled with alcohol. The others went through the hedge which meant yet again that hedge was made a mess of. This was a miniature hedge, a foot high, ‘a feature’ as my sister called it, but it hadn’t been able to feature because of people forgetting it was there and pushing through it or falling over it, which was what three of the friends now did. As a verdure therefore, it was distressed again, pulled out of shape again as these women made their way through it out onto the grass. Before they squashed into the tiny house, as usual they mocked the two of us as runners. This they did in passing, nudging us out of our stretches – the tradition whenever they came across us in any solemn, warming-up stance. Finally, before they closed the front door and we two had jumped the hedge to set off on our running, already I could smell the cigarettes and hear the laughter and bad language from the living room; could hear too, the glug of a long liquid being poured into a long glass.

We ran along the top reservoir, which was seven days after I’d last run along it with the milkman, with third brother-in-law continuing quietly to curse to himself. I myself was keeping a look-out for the disturbance even though I did not want that person in my head. I wanted maybe-boyfriend in my head, for there he’d been, all cosy, until uneasiness about the milkman had pushed him out of it. This was Tuesday and I was meeting him later that evening after I’d finished this run and he’d finished tinkering on his latest beat-up car. I called the present one grey and he called it a silver zero-x-something and he’d set aside his fixed-up white one to get in this beat-up grey one to start resuscitation immediately, but when I walked into his living room last Tuesday he had a completely different bit of car on the floor. I said, ‘You got car on the carpet,’ and he said, ‘Yeah I know, isn’t it brilliant?’ Then he explained that all of them – meaning the guys at work – had been overcome with orgasms because some super-special motor vehicle, built by some high-dream carmaker, was dumped – ‘For fuck all! For nothin’! They wanted nothin’ for it!’ he cried – into the middle of their garage, into the middle of their laps. ‘Can you imagine?’ he said. ‘No beans! No sausages!’ meaning money, meaning the owners not wanting any. He seemed in shock so I was unclear if this encounter with the dream car had been a good thing or a bad thing. I was about to ask but still he hadn’t finished. ‘The people who brought it in,’ he said, ‘also said, “You fellas can have our broken cooker, our bit of fridge, our mangle, some ratty carpet that’s okay really just a bit smelly so give it a wash then put it in your toilet, plus you can have all our broken glass and breezeblocks and bags of rubble for to make a conservatory hardcore foundation with as well.” So then we thought,’ said maybe-boyfriend, ‘that these poor auld people think we’re a boneyard and not a car mechanics and so maybe it wouldn’t be right to take the Blower off them because they’re mentally confused and don’t know what they’re doing, don’t know either maybe, what that car – even in the state it’s in – is worth. Some of us though, nudged others of us and hissed, “Don’t be sayin’ anything. They want rid of it, so we’ll just take it,” but some of us did say something – rephrasing the mental bit so as not to hurt feelings of course.’ He said the couple then rounded and said, ‘Are you saying we’re stupid or something? Are you saying we’re poor or something? What is it you’re saying? What something?’ Then they got insulting. ‘If you fuckers think we’re mad, then we’ll leave and take our white furnitures, our rubbles, our lumbers, our Blower Bentley, our carpet, all our excellent material that we brought for you with goodwill with us. So take it or leave it, see if we care.’ ‘Of course we took it,’ said maybe-boyfriend. At this point I opened my mouth to ask what was a— but he pre-empted by saying ‘racing car’, supposedly to make it easier for me. Normally he didn’t make it easier – not deliberately, but because he’d get carried away even though once again he was ill-judging his audience whenever he talked car and I was his audience. He’d talk on, giving technical exposition to the last hyphen and punctuation mark which was more than needful, indeed helpful, but I understood he had to make use of me because he was excited by the car and I was the only one in the room. Of course he wouldn’t intend me to remember, just as I wouldn’t intend him to remember The Brothers Karamazov, Tristram Shandy, Vanity Fair or Madame Bovary just because once, in a state of high excitement, I told him of them. Even though ours was a maybe-relationship, not a proper committed, going-somewhere relationship, each was allowed in heightened moments to give full coverage, with the other making an effort to take in at least a part. Besides, I wasn’t completely ignorant. I could see now he was happy about what had happened at the garage. I knew too, that a Bentley was a car.