Anna Burns - Milkman

This I was not expecting and at once thought I could not have heard properly. ‘What did you say?’ I said and she said it again, delivering the news – which was news – that along with the district poisoner, the poisoner’s sister, the boy who killed himself over America and Russia, the women with the issues, and real milkman, also known as the man who didn’t love anybody, I too, was one of those intemperate, socially outlawed beyond-the-pales. I sat upright, shot upright, and I think my mouth must have fallen open. At least for a moment, for the tiniest time in weeks, even Milkman went out of my head. ‘That can’t be right,’ I said, but longest friend sighed and here she did turn towards me. ‘You brought it on yourself, longest friend. I informed you and informed you. I mean for the longest time ever since primary school I’ve been warning you to kill out that habit you insist on and that now I suspect you’re addicted to – that reading in public as you’re walking about.’ ‘But—’ I said. ‘Not natural,’ she said. ‘But—’ I said. ‘Unnerving behaviour,’ she said. ‘But—’ I said. ‘But—’ I said, ‘I thought you meant in case of traffic, in case I walked into traffic.’ ‘Not traffic,’ she said. ‘More stigmatic than traffic. But too late. The community has pronounced its diagnosis on you now.’

Nobody, especially a teenager, likes to discover they’ve been earmarked some freak-weirdo person. Me! In the same boat as our poisoner, tablets girl! This was shocking and not at all fair. It seemed too, that once again, everybody, bar maybe-boyfriend and – though I hated to admit it – Milkman, was homing in on my harmless reading-while-walking. These past months, ever since the beginning of Milkman, I was getting an education on just how much I was impacting people without any awareness I’d been visible to people. ‘It’s creepy, perverse, obstinately determined,’ went on longest friend. ‘It’s not as if, friend,’ she said, ‘this were a case of a person glancing at some newspaper as they’re walking along to get the latest headlines or something. It’s the way you do it – reading books, whole books , taking notes, checking footnotes, underlining passages as if you’re at some desk or something, in a little private study or something, the curtains closed, your lamp on, a cup of tea beside you, essays being penned – your discourses, your lucubrations. It’s disturbing. It’s deviant. It’s optical illusional. Not public-spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why – with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with us all having to pull together – would anyone want to call attention to themselves here?’ ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘Are you saying it’s okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?’ ‘I didn’t say not in public. Just don’t do it while you’re walking about. They don’t like it,’ she added, meaning the community then, resuming that looking-ahead of hers, she said she was not prepared to get into amphibologies, into equivocations, into the auld ‘over the water’ double-talk, but if I cared to look at it in its proper surroundings, then Semtex taking precedence as something normal over reading-while-walking – ‘which nobody but you thinks is normal’ – could certainly be construed as the comprehensible interpretation here. ‘Semtex isn’t unusual,’ she said. ‘It’s not not to be expected. It’s not incapable of being mentally grasped, of being understood, even if most people here don’t carry it, have never seen it, don’t know what it looks like and don’t want anything to do with it. It fits in – more than your dangerous reading-while-walking fits in. This is about awareness and your behaviour doesn’t display awareness. So, looked at in those terms, terms of contextual environment, then yeah,’ she concluded, ‘it is okay for him and it’s not okay for you.’

I could sense her words, in one of those medieval, philosophical, ‘relative versus absolute’ dimensions, did have some ring of truth about them. Still, I didn’t like the implication that I had contracted an incurable beyond-the-pale. ‘Just because I’m outnumbered in my reading-while-walking,’ I said, ‘doesn’t mean I’m wrong. What if one person happened to be sane, longest friend, against a whole background, a race mind, that wasn’t sane, that person would probably be viewed by the mass consciousness as mad – but would that person be mad? ’ ‘Yes,’ said friend, ‘if they persisted in their version of life in the stacked-up odds of an opposing world. But that’s not you anyway,’ she went on, ‘because there’s this other thing.’ I assumed – for why wouldn’t I? – this must mean more Milkman, but friend said she didn’t want to be harsh, that she didn’t want to put me on the spot or to embarrass me. ‘But what are you doing, longest friend,’ she said, ‘what are you thinking of, walking around with cats’ heads?’ This was when it came out I had dead animals on me. Perhaps for ceremonial, black-magic purposes? longest friend said the community was hazarding. Perhaps to invoke a ritual with piecemeal familiars in opposition to the pious women with their bells and birds and prognostications and auguries? Or was I pregnant? Had Milkman made me pregnant? ‘Yes, that must be it!’ they were saying. ‘Milkman’s made her pregnant and because of hormones —’ ‘Not cats’ heads!’ I cried. ‘ Cat’s head! Only one head! Only once!’ Friend bit her lip. ‘So you think,’ she said, ‘walking about while reading with your desk lamp on during riots and gunplay with one dead animal in your pocket instead of countless animals isn’t going to tip the balance? Question is, friend, why are you carrying a cat’s head about? ’ I took a breath, for how to explain? How to start in that I’d only carried it once, for one moment, and look – even then I’d been spied upon. I didn’t know how to talk anymore and I realised that even here, with longest friend, my one-time sister-in-thought, I was to have life drained from me after all. Here I was, having to persuade and prove credible to someone who’d always been in my confidence, someone whom I’d felt was authenticated in my heart even though as time went by – as four years went by – I could see the traffic was no longer two-way; that nowadays – didn’t know why – because of that unspoken agreement between us perhaps? for my own good perhaps? – very little in the way of confidences tended to come back. I could say to her, I supposed, that I thought it must have been that bomb in the ten-minute area that did it; that it was Semtex or what would have been Semtex if it hadn’t been an old-time bomb, that did it; that whoever left the bomb, or dropped the bomb from their bomber plane, did it, that I’d wanted to take the cat to the graveyard away from the brash, exploded concrete in order to offer it some green. I didn’t say this because there was no way to do so that wouldn’t have me come out like a madwoman. Plus the unposed, unrehearsed candidness that had existed between me and longest friend since primary school seemed now to be at an end. No longer did I want to explain, for I could see myself in the moment exactly as she was seeing me, as all of them were seeing me. Besides, I didn’t know why I carried it. And now, quite suddenly, I felt sad. It wasn’t that I was the one breaking ties and pulling first from longest friend but that longest friend had already done the pulling. Something of trust was over even if fondness remained but fondness was another of those maybes. So, leaving that , shunning that – for that was people, that was relationships, always what was to be expected – leaving also the cat business, I said, ‘Can we get back to the main point now?’