Anna Burns - Milkman

Everything would end my fault then, because of this lack of faith in my own conviction and of what my feelings were telling me. Was he actually doing anything? Was anything happening? If I didn’t know, how could I explain to and convince anyone else? Instead I sensed that this doubt – of myself, of the situation – would be picked up on and would then lead to comment on my own credibility. Even if I were to be heard, people here were unused to words like ‘pursuit’ and ‘stalking’, that is, in terms of sexual pursuit and sexual stalking. It would be similar to saying ‘kerb-crawling’ as in those American movies, too outlandish, not at all the sort of thing that went on here. If such a thing was entertained to go on, hardly even then would our society take it seriously. It would have been on a par with jay-walking, maybe less than jay-walking, given it was a woman’s thing, taking place too, during an era that was so stuffed with political problems that even a tiny demented person – our district’s most successful superior poisoner – could walk around freely and weekly, poisoning people yet rate not a jot in the rankings. So the Hollywood phenomenon of sexual prowling would have been overshadowed, as everything here was overshadowed, by the main topic of conversation in this place.

Yet others kept coming. Eldest sister kept coming, bringing with her the refrain of ‘If you continue in liaison with this person’ or ‘You’re doing yourself no favours’, only to meet my cold determination not to plead my case or attempt in any way to appease her. By now we’d built up such an investment of hostility that we could not, and would not, hear each other out. Then there was her husband in the background, the horizontal wolf with something about the nostrils, the ears getting bigger and bigger, and pointier and pointier, with his hairy shankiness and hind legs and forelegs and snout and teeth sprouting, with claws, long black ones, floccillating ones, with his tongue egging her on, vexing himself unto death to have her keep on at me, to keep coming round to visit me, to insist on confidences from me. It was clear to everybody though, that first sister was too much in her own issues over her dead ex-lover so that hardly she was holding it together herself. Besides, I’d heard some new sexual preoccupation of his own had now taken hold of first brother-in-law and was fast reaching the level where he was drawing more than a little gossip and trouble towards himself. There was ma too, continuing her barrage of how I wouldn’t get married, of how I was bringing shame by entering paramilitary groupiedom, of how I was bringing down on myself dark and unruly forces, bad-exampling wee sisters, bringing in God too, as in light and dark and the satanic and the infernal. ‘It’s like being hypnotised,’ she said, ‘or how you might imagine those people who are got by vampires in those horror films feel. They don’t see the horror, daughter. Only the people outside see the horror. Instead they are in thrall, entranced, seeing only attraction.’ Relations at work too, were not as they were. I had grown inattentive, drowsy at my workstation because I’d jump awake at night in my bed and not be able to return to sleep again. Partly these were urges that I should get up and again search my room to make sure he or the community had not got in since last time before bed when I’d searched it; jumping awake also, because of nightmares that I’d turned into the sickly, misanthropic Reeve from the ‘General Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales . The house too, was having a go. Raps, noises, movements, agitations of the air, displacement of objects. It was banging and retorting and causing discordance – all to berate me, to warn me, to call attention to the threat that already I knew was surrounding me. And always this would be in my bedroom right in the middle of the night. A thump on the bedside table would wake me up. Things would rattle, such as a picture on the wall, or a hammering would break out on my floor right below me. Or maybe the bedroom door would start to shake. One time the spirits of the home tugged away my eiderdown and flung my feet and lower legs across the bed with such force that my whole torso almost tipped over and fell out of it. Ma shouted from her room, ‘For the love of God, littlest daughters, I’m trying to have a night’s reading here before sleep. What’s all that banging?’, with wee sisters shouting from their room, ‘It’s not us, mammy! We’re sleeping. It’s middle sister.’ ‘It’s not me!’ I shouted. ‘It’s the house. The spirits of the house. I’m sleeping too.’ Apart though, from my guess that the house was telling me to do something, and that it was something about the milkman, I didn’t know what it was expecting I should do. It had taken to awakening me, however, so that then I’d stay awake, with my corresponding lack of sleep at night-time leading to overwhelming sleepiness and dullness at my workstation during the daytime. It got to the point where twice now my supervisor had me into her office to have words. By now too, my French class had lost its sparkle, or I’d lost my eagerness for that sparkle. It became less exciting, more ‘What’s the point? There’s no point’ and I became wearied, finding it more of an effort each week to get myself downtown to it. Then my legs hurt, so that bit by bit I pulled out of my runs with third brother-in-law. First it was the odd run, then more and more cancellations as the pain continued and a lack of coordination overtook me. It came that I couldn’t anymore relax and feel myself in flow, couldn’t breathe properly whereas before, the act of running brought breath through me, kept me in touch, filled me up. Something I’d taken for granted had altered, so that then I stopped running. Even the walking was coming to a halt. My balance went weird. It had grown lopsided, a lameness of stance setting in and overtaking me. At the time I tried to tell myself that it was me giving up the running, me not doing as much walking, that no one was forcing me. Then I gave up one of my days with maybe-boyfriend, the now-and-again day, telling myself that it was my decision, that nobody was making me, that Thursday wasn’t important. It was the day I was least committed to my maybe-relationship, reminding myself also that this was, after all, only a maybe-relationship. Even so, and minus Thursdays, the milkman kept the carbomb pressure up. He had started to weave in a new danger also, the threat of maybe-boyfriend possibly to be killed, either by the renouncers of his area or by everybody else in his area, owing to traitorship and informership. ‘Ridiculous, of course,’ he said, adding that people died here though from ridiculousness as well. With this, the milkman presented himself as saviour and as antidote. He alone, he hinted, had the power to make all that danger facing maybe-boyfriend go away. Then there were those lifts, the offers of lifts which he’d made and which still kept coming. Not just from him either. By now others in the area, his people, the cronies, those servitors of the conviction that they had to do as he bid them, would stop in their cars and offer to take me into town or out of town without any mention that the milkman had sent them. It was obvious though, from this overload of offers that they were acting on instructions. They’d plead with me, telling me I’d be doing them such a big favour if only I’d consent and get in.

Meantime, tension was ever mounting between me and maybe-boyfriend. Apart from my ‘Will you stop driving your car?’, and his ‘Of course I won’t, what you’re asking me there, that’s unreasonable, you’re being unreasonable’, we were both getting into fights about other things. If he was not going to get blown up by a carbomb, then he was going to be taken away by the renouncers as an informer for having the bit with the flag on. If not that, then those who weren’t renouncers in his area but all the same, fanatics of the cause in his area, were going to come in their numbers and do him down over that selfsame imagined-flag thing. As for the rumour of the supercharger, of how it was unpatriotic of maybe-boyfriend to have it whether or not it had the flag on, because of it, according to maybe-boyfriend, he was now being photographed in a minute, expert fashion by the state. I overheard him mention this to chef, saying that he believed, given this photographing, he was attracting attention to himself even from outside his own area. ‘Seems,’ he joked, ‘that owing to flags, emblems, traitorship and superchargers, I’ll make a prospect to be turned informer by the state.’ In contradiction to this, he also said it wouldn’t be untoward if the statelet was not the party doing the photography but that the local paramilitary-renouncers were doing the photography. ‘Could be keeping an eye,’ he joked again, ‘to see if already I’ve turned informer.’ Then there were all those amateur photographers, the lay documentalists, the calendar-moment chroniclers of our troubled times. He said those boys with an eye for the chance, for the possibility of seeking fame and fortune in the future, were popping up everywhere, venturing out with cameras and tape recorders to capture and safeguard, they said, historical, political and social testimony for posterity. ‘You never know,’ they said, ‘what might be considered the most sought-after paraphernalia of these sadnesses in years to come.’ I knew, of course, though maybe-boyfriend didn’t, that not only might he be getting snapped by the state as a potential informer, and snapped by the renouncers as a possible informer, and snapped by those backroom-enterprisers as someone who might be famous one day for being killed as an informer, but also that the state would snap him twice over as an associate of an associate of a man high on their list. As for the effect of the burgeoning rumour of the supercharger having that flag on, maybe-boyfriend’s neighbours and acquaintances continued to edge away bit by bit. Much as they adored the supercharger and had had, for that little stretch of happy time, emotionally invested themselves in their passion for the supercharger, there were other things, such as ‘soldier-lover’, ‘ensign-lover’, ‘country “over the water” lover’, ‘street justice’, all of which had a bigger emotional impact on them than that. Life being short, sometimes incredibly short, why bring upon yourself accusations of collusion, of being an accessory, of implications in conduct unbecoming an inhabitant of the area? This was why it was considered best to sever even the slightest connection with maybe-boyfriend, though of course, his core friends did stay around. So did that other friend, the one purportedly from maybe-boyfriend’s work, who lived ‘over the road’, meaning maybe-boyfriend’s colleague from the opposite religion. It was said this person – Ivor – had shown willingness to vouchsafe maybe-boyfriend didn’t have the bit with the flag on because Ivor himself had the bit with the flag on, with Ivor then offering to oblige his work colleague by sending over a Polaroid of himself in his own defender-run area holding up this bit with the flag on, all so maybe-boyfriend could defend himself should he end up on treason charges in his own area at a renouncer kangaroo court. Ivor said that although the renouncers could go fuck themselves as enemies of all that he himself stood for, he’d be delighted, it was said, to proffer pictorial testimony on behalf of his workmate to help him out of his current difficult spot. When I heard of this rumour of the existence of Ivor, realising my blunder too, at having invented him as an impromptu protection for maybe-boyfriend against the milkman, I was appalled at how easily an unguided thought, even one not expressed, could get plucked from the topsoil and still manage successfully to get through. And now here it was – out – having a life of its own, and I could only hope that, although Ivor at present was in the common round and unfortunately being added on to, eventually this rumour would go to dust and be forgotten, disappearing off the radar as if it had never been. Meanwhile, Ivor – and no matter how well-meaning he might appear or that he might promise to send over a hundred Polaroids and two hundred written testimonies in support of maybe-boyfriend – would not have been believed in maybe-boyfriend’s district, owing to the fact that he wasn’t one of them. Even if he’d existed – even too, overlooking the unlikeliness of his being willing to placate anti-ensign sentiments towards a flag he himself held dearly in his own community – as a bona fide witness he’d have proved less than no good at all. In the event, it was observed that Ivor sent no picture, no negative of a picture and no word of written testimony. Instead, and in spite of all his promises, he had done nothing and this served to reinforce the communal opinion of traitorous maybe-boyfriend having the bit with the flag on after all.