Anna Burns - Milkman

As for the gossips, and their response to my response, I knew I was confounding them as I had intended to confound them, even if I hadn’t intended confounding myself as well. It transpired though, that they didn’t care for confoundment and complained that my demeanour was improper, that it was resistant to ordinary treatment, that it was against the common weal, that I was almost-inordinately blank, almost-lifeless, almost-sterile, almost-counter-intuitive which was not and couldn’t ever be, they said, normal for a person on this earth ceaselessly to be. As for their use of ‘almost’ – almost -inordinately blank, almost -lifeless and so on – that of course, on my part had been meant. Although I’d said it was imperative to present myself as blank and empty, what I meant was almost -blank and almost -empty. This was because preciseness and clean-cut methods might work perfectly and give a certain bromidic satisfaction on paper, but they wouldn’t do at all, or fool anybody for a second, in real life. Such meticulousness of planning smacked of aforethought, and obvious aforethought in this community – especially if you were trying to dupe it – was not a good thing. Unless you were dealing with the immensely stupid which I wasn’t, it was best to muss things up, to crease things, to leave tea-stains, to place a small but partial muddy footprint not exactly in the middle of the issue but slightly to the side of, and hopefully suggestive of, an incidental to the issue. So that part worked. But they said I was ungenerous in my facial expression, stressing ‘expression’ as in singular, as in, I only seemed to have one. Near -expressionless too, was what they said it was. It was near -arid, near -solitary, near -deprogrammed and again I took hope from their not saying it was inscrutable. Inscrutability here, as with obvious aforethought, as with topsoil thinking, didn’t work. At first they said they weren’t sure if I was displaying an unamiable Marie Antoinetteness by being stuck-up, by thinking I was above them. Then they decided that no, probably this was some eccentricity in keeping with my character, most likely stemming from all that reading of ancient books I did while walking about. They said that overall, my not being one thing or the other was proving a drain on their resources, which didn’t stop them though, from inferring me all the same. A bit eerie, a bit creepy, they decided, adding that they hadn’t noticed before but it was that I resembled in my open-but-closed perspective the ten-minute area. It was as if there was nothing there when there was something there, while at the same time, as if there was something there when there was nothing there. I was a condition athwart, they said, transverse, not social, though they did mitigate this with, ‘But perhaps that’s only one side of her.’ However, as they didn’t believe there was any other side, that just brought them back to the beginning, to me having only the one.

As far as this communal drain upon me by the community went, and as far as went the drain by me upon the community – with their inferences disturbing me, my face disturbing them, and with my numbance doing all our heads in – thankfully I didn’t have to do ‘I don’t know’ or show my almost-nearly-empty face, or expose my closed-up state to them very much. This was because most of the gossip about me and the milkman went on behind my back. But had the situation been that bad? Had it really and truly been the case that there was nobody, that there hadn’t been a single person to whom in those days I could have gone, could have off-loaded, who might have been able to listen and offer comfort, support and auspices? Had I really been as stubborn and transverse and as ten-minute area as all of the reprehenders of me had said I had? Looking back, and excluding my friendship with my one remaining trusted-fewest person from schooldays, I think too, that yes, I had. My distrust had been phenomenal to the point where I could not see that probably there had existed individuals who could have helped, who might have supported and comforted me – friends I could have made, a support network I might have been part of – only I lost that opportunity through having no faith in them and no faith or sense of entitlement in myself. However, at the time, given my intention had been to keep the nerve and to hold it together in a place where everybody in their own way was also trying to keep the nerve and hold it together, impossible it would have been for me to have glimpsed, to have understood any concept of help or comfort then. Certain individuals did continue to approach me, however, and some of them might have been trustworthy, might have intended good offices. But I continued to withhold, even if not always from my usual fear and stubbornness. There was still my lack of certainty as to whether or not there was anything to tell.

That was the way it worked. Hard to define, this stalking, this predation, because it was piecemeal. A bit here, a bit there, maybe, maybe not, perhaps, don’t know. It was constant hints, symbolisms, representations, metaphors. He could have meant what I thought he’d meant, but equally, he might not have meant anything. Taken on their own, or to describe each incident separately, particularly while in the middle of it, might not seem, once relayed, to be all that much at all. If I’d said, ‘He offered me a lift as I was walking along the interface road reading Ivanhoe ,’ it would have been, ‘Why were you walking along that dangerous interface road and why were you reading Ivanhoe ?’ If I’d said, ‘I was running in the parks & reservoirs and he appeared also running in the parks & reservoirs,’ it would have been, ‘What were you doing, running in such a dangerous, questionable place and what were you doing, choosing to run?’ If I’d said, ‘He was parked in his wee white van up the entry opposite the college while I was with my French class looking at the sky enduring sunsets’ it would have been, ‘You left the safety of our insular area to go downtown to a mixed area to study foreign languages and view life as a figured representation?’ If I’d said, ‘He expressed condolences on my sister’s loss of her murdered man while at the same time linking my almost-maybe-boyfriend to a constantly recurring carbomb,’ they’d have said, ‘How come you’re not married and why do you go out with maybe-boyfriends in the first place?’ Apart from the gossip – and even if there’d been no gossip – my belief from the outset was that not really would I have been heard or believed. If I’d gone to the authorities to have it officially recorded that he was stalking me, that he was threatening me, that he was making preparations for me, then to seek redress from these authorities as in, what were they going to do about it, our renouncers would have replied – well, I didn’t know what they would have replied because he too, was a renouncer so why ever would I have gone to them? In a practical sense too, in what way would I go to them? Although I’d lived in this area which was run by the paramilitaries, which was policed by the paramilitaries, I didn’t know how to approach these guys. I’d have had to enquire as to proper procedure from a community which, in its turn, was also stalking me and about which I would be putting in a complaint also. As for the actual police, the statelet’s police, going to them didn’t rate consideration because one, they were the enemy, and two, of all things crying out to have you killed as an informer in a renouncer-run, no-go area, approaching what was viewed as a highly partisan police force to complain about a renouncer in your area would have been, without doubt, highest on that list. According to the police, of course, our community was a rogue community. It was we who were the enemy, we who were the terrorists, the civilian terrorists, the associates of terrorists or simply individuals suspected of being but not yet discovered to be terrorists. That being the case, and understood by both parties to be the case, the only time you’d call the police in my area would be if you were going to shoot them, and naturally they would know this and so wouldn’t come.