Anna Burns - Milkman

So ‘I don’t know’ was my three-syllable defence in response to the questions. With it successfully I refused to be evoked, drawn out, shocked into revelation. Instead I minimalised, withheld, subverted thinking, dropped all interaction surplus to requirement which meant they got no public content, no symbolic content, no full-bodiedness, no bloodedness, no passion of the moment, no turn of plot, no sad shade, no angry shade, no panicked shade, no location of anything. Just me, downplayed. Just me, devoid. Just me, uncommingled. This meant that by the end of their round-about goads and their many implied and searching significances, still they had nothing from me and I felt justified in presenting this unfruitfulness to them because it was clear to me by this time that in life some people did not deserve the truth. They weren’t good enough for the truth. Not respectable enough to receive it. To lie or to omit therefore was fine. It was fine. That was what I thought. Then came complications. I had been aware that in the delivery of my ‘I don’t know’ I dared not show I was not as unintelligent of their codespeak, their eye signals, their attempt to traduce me, as clearly they were assuming. Knew too, I had to speak my three syllables in the most non-confrontational manner whilst concealing a crucial but unacknowledged preservation of distance between us at the same time. To have called them out otherwise – in this time, in this place – would have been tantamount to abandoning myself to mob-handedness or to some other intense despitefulness and I didn’t feel strong enough to engage with that and with the repercussions of that. So it was a delicate and ongoing process not to reveal I had their measure or that my ‘I don’t know’ really meant ‘Heel! Home! Get out! Get out!’ which meant I had to call upon a back-up manoeuvre. This was one from my non-verbal defence repertoire and I did call upon it, this manoeuvre at once stepping up to the mark. It didn’t, however, do just that. Initially it came into its own and proved itself of invaluable assistance to me. Then, and outside of expectation, and without the least warning, it began to take over proceedings, overturning my ‘I don’t know’ as first initiative and implementing alternate strategies which belatedly I realised were incidental against my gossipy neighbours and more in the main against myself. I was attacking myself and it was my face, the expression on my face – one I had intended as temporary, as provisional, which surely and truly I believed could be nothing but provisional. I’d assumed that how my face looked, how I was making it look, how I presented it outwardly, was down to me, under the control of me, the ‘I am’ deep in the council chamber. I thought this real me was in there, in charge, hidden from them but directing from the undergrowth. Thought too, I’d chosen a subordinate to assist me and not some rebel to turn tables and override me. That though, was what happened and it happened first with the face.

It got stuck. My careful rendering of ‘I don’t know’ , combined with a terminal face – nothing in it, nothing behind it, a well-turned-out nothing – I thought would bemuse the gossips, confound them, run counter to their expectations, so that eventually, frustrated, wearied, they’d call a halt to their persecutions, with everybody giving up and going home. I’d hoped the sheer nullity of me would lead them to doubt their inventions and their convictions, even to suspect that a renouncer – especially that Man of Men, Warrior of Warriors, our high-celebrity, local community hero – could ever have developed lust for such an inert, vapid person as myself. Wasn’t even that I thought they’d think me stupid, or stop at thinking me stupid, but that they’d go further and come to the conclusion that I must not understand language in some prevailing, basal, social-code way. It was that I couldn’t grasp what was being asked of me because the whole issue of emotional and psychological communication must be missing for me. I’d strike them as a textbook, some kind of log table – as in correct, but not really right either. This was what I’d hoped they’d think, that my dissembling and use of face would pay off and I’d be free, safe – at least from them if not from the milkman. However, both the milkman and the gossip about me and the milkman turned out to be a rapid learning on the job. I had not plotted for this. There’d been no time to plot and anyway, my mind didn’t work best in plots, in blueprints, in join-the-dots prognostication arrangements. Instead I relied on instinct, on impromptu sidestepping, on a heightened sensitivity to what was out there for my reaction rather than some cold-headed, pre-planned military precision for my reaction. Belatedly though, I realised that this must be as with informers here. At first they play into the hands of their police handlers then, by their subsequent and supposed stance of ‘I’m not an informer so don’t be thinking me an informer because I’m not an informer’ they play into the hands of the renouncers – I too, was beginning to lose my power of reason, my ability to see obvious connections and to retain even the most elementary sense of how to survive in this place. I can see now, of course, that no matter what I would have done or could have done, those gossips wouldn’t have stopped, never would they have ceased and gone away, not until the man himself had gone away, after having me and had done with me. At the time though, I said my three words and I displayed my depersonalisation and did succeed in puzzling them. As a result, they became slovenly in method, intemperate with impatience, revealing ever more their true natures in their push to make me make sense. Never did it occur to them that my powers of acuity and deception might have exceeded their own powers of acuity and deception. People can be extraordinarily slipshod whenever already they have made up their minds. When it came to it, although I didn’t betray I was emotionally or intellectually charged, that didn’t mean I thought I was not so. Of course I believed myself sentient. Of course I knew I was angry. Of course I knew I was frightened, that I had no doubt my body, to me, was brimming with a natural reaction. At first I could feel this reaction which confirmed I was alive, that I was in there, inside my body, experiencing this under-the-surface turbulence. Thing was though, before I’d gained the understanding of what was happening, my seemingly flattened approach to life became less a pretence and more and more real as time went on. At first an emotional numbness set in. Then my head, which initially had reassured with, ‘Excellent. Well done. Successfully am I fooling them in that they do not know who I am or what I’m thinking or what I’m feeling,’ now began itself to doubt I was even there. ‘Just a minute,’ it said. ‘Where is our reaction? We were having a privately expressed reaction but now we’re not having it. Where is it?’ Thus my feelings stopped expressing. Then they stopped existing. And now this numbance from nowhere had come so far on in its development that along with others in the area finding me inaccessible, I, too, came to find me inaccessible. My inner world, it seemed, had gone away.

Physically too, it got tiring, all that distrust and push-pull, the sniper-open-fire, the countersniper-return-fire, the sidestepping and twisting, with both me and my community appearing to freewheel our way to some final interface. Just as with the milkman, at the end of the day at home when I’d do my checking under the bed, behind the door, in the wardrobe and so on to see if he was in there, or under it, or behind it; checking curtains too, that they were firmly closed, that they weren’t concealing him this side of the glass or that side of the glass, I realised things had reached the point where I was now checking to see if the community was concealing itself in those tucked-away places too. The extraordinary amount of energy I had on these people – as in trying to avoid them – meant, of course, I was attracting them, but I didn’t understand the way of fixated energy then. It took its toll though, all that darkness and mutual games-playing, bringing with it the concomitant that even though the whole meat of my dissembling had been to keep separate by non-participation with them, here I was, making common cause with them. Too late I realised that all the time I’d been an active player, a contributing element, a major componential in the downfall of myself.