Anna Burns - Milkman

Longest friend looked surprised – something she didn’t do often. ‘This is the main point,’ she said, which had me, then, surprised. ‘I thought Milkman was the main point,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would he be the main point? He was the point before the point. This reading-while-walking, and your unreachable stubbornness at back of it, plus the dangers inherent in it, are the reasons we’re meeting up here tonight. But you know’ – and here she paused, for one of those illuminating, transcendent, contemplative insights seemed now to strike her – ‘it might be as well,’ she went on, ‘I mean as in remedial – and even though it be in one of those unpopular “silver-lining, dark-cloud, learning-through-suffering” fashions – that this predation upon you by Milkman has happened. Your not wanting to be present but now forced by circumstance of Milkman to be present has been one of those reality checks that life has given you – to round you out, to step you up, to set you on the next stage of your journey. And as far as I can see, friend, the only thing that’s done that for you ever has been Milkman appearing, as now he has, on your scene.’ At this I thought, wasn’t she the smug bastard and I said so and she said no, that we had not to get personal even though what was she being if not personal? She said we had to stay focused on the main point. This point was: how I was confounding the community with my reading-while-walking; how some people might not be terribly capable of being explained but that that didn’t stop others explaining them anyway; how no one should go around in a political scene with their head switched off; how I was abnormally unnerved by social questions, by regular queries, even harmless requests for information even though I’d object and say I did uphold questions but no – she shook her head – I upheld only literature questions and even then, only nineteenth-century or earlier questions. The point was also, she said, my refusal to abandon my facial and bodily numbance in spite of everybody knowing that numbance as protection didn’t work here. Then there was the fact the girl who walks— ‘The girl who walks?’ ‘Yes. You’re the girl who walks. Sometimes the one who reads and other times you’re the pale, adamantine, unyielding girl who walks around with the entrenched, boxed-in thinking.’ Then she said she was going to get directive with me as if she hadn’t been directive up to this point. ‘It’s not that you have to give actual autobiographical passages,’ she said, ‘but you do that reading-while-walking and you look nearly-blank and you give nothing which is too little and so they won’t let go and move on to the next person. It’s to bring the house down, friend,’ she said, ‘if you don’t stop being haughty for they see you as haughty and that you think you’ll get away with it because you’re sleeping with—’ ‘Not sleeping with!’ ‘—considered to be sleeping with Milkman, also because in the movement that man’s no lightweight so of course they won’t – not with him behind you – have a direct go. You must know though,’ she concluded, ‘even you must appreciate, that as far as they’re concerned you’ve fallen into the difficult zone.’ She meant the ‘informer-type’ zone – not that I was an informer. It was that miscellany territory where, like the informer, you’re not accepted, you’re not admired, you’re not respected, not by one side, not by the other side, not by anybody, not even really by yourself. In my case though, seems I’d fallen into the difficult zone not only because I wouldn’t tell my life to others, or because of my numbance, or because of my suspiciousness of questions. What was also being held against me was that I wasn’t seen as the clean girlfriend, as in, he didn’t have other attachments. He did have attachments. One was his wife. So I was the upstart, the little Frenchwoman, the arriviste, the hussy. Also, like the informer, when you’re no longer needed, when you’ve been superseded, when you’ve served your purpose or been upended before you’d been able to serve your purpose, others, sometimes suffering the effects of their own presumption, have a tendency to want their own back. That was the difficult zone. It was of complex data, Any Other Business, even of contradiction, all reduced for convenience to a simple catch-all. But she was wrong. It wasn’t that I fell into the difficult zone. It was that I was pushed.

‘Okay. I’ll stop doing it,’ I said, and I meant here the reading-while-walking. I had jumped back to reading-while-walking to get away from stubbornness. If something had to go, I’d rather it was that. ‘That’s the spirit,’ friend urged. ‘Use your loaf, stop the stubbornness, work on your disposition, get off your high horse and show some friendly stray bits. Just something unimportant that would satisfy them rather than encourage them with silence. Then, if you also stop that unfathomable reading-while-walking, that should ameliorate the situation as well.’ I nodded, but said the reading-while-walking wasn’t going to be ‘also’. It was going to be instead of. I needed my silence, my unaccommodation, to shield me from pawing and from molestation by questions. In contrast to friend, I myself was of the view that trying to placate with information to win them over, would not bring benefits of desistence but would encourage and lead them on even more. Besides, I didn’t want to. Still I didn’t want to. This was my one bit of power in this disempowering world. ‘You’d better be careful then,’ said friend, which was what everybody said. People always said you’d better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person – the little person down here on the earth – be that? So I said about the books and the walking as compromise, which seemed easy in comparison. There wasn’t even regret because by now I was no longer getting the old enjoyment from it. That experience of relaxing into it, of walking out the door and slipping the book out of the pocket, of sinking into the paragraph coming up after the recently left-off paragraph, had changed since the stalking, also since the rumouring, since even the state forces had got suspicious and were stopping me to take Martin Chuzzlewit for state-security purposes out of my hands. Then there was being watched as I was reading, being reported upon about my reading, being photographed by at least one person with or without the reading. How could a reader’s concentration upon and enjoyment of a novel be sustained in the face of all that?

As for the state forces, friend told me not to worry about the cameras, the clicking, the data-storage, saying that even before Milkman there was bound to have been a file on me anyway. ‘The whole community’s a suspect community,’ she said. ‘Everybody has a file on them. Everybody’s house, everybody’s movements, everybody’s connections constantly are checked and kept an eye on. It’s only you who doesn’t seem aware of that. With all their monitoring,’ she went on, ‘their infiltrating, their intercepting, listening at posts, drawing-up of room lay-outs, of position of furniture, of ornament placement, of wallpaper, of watch lists and geo-profiling, cutting feeds and feeding feeds, and “mother goose” and divination by tea-leaves and not least,’ she said, ‘with their helicopters flying over an alienated, cynical, existentially bitter landscape, it’s no wonder everybody has files on them. If someone in a renouncer-run area didn’t have a file on them, that would be a surety there was something dubious about that individual going on. They even photograph shadows,’ she said. ‘People here can be deciphered and likenesses discerned from silhouettes and shadows.’ ‘That’s very attuned,’ I said, impressed. Friend then said that even pre-Milkman there would have been a file with my name on it anyway because of my other associations. I was about to ask what associations when she interrupted. ‘God. I can’t believe this. Your head! Your memory! All those mental separations and splittings-off from consciousness. I mean me! Your association with me! Your brothers! Your second brother! Your fourth brother! ’ And now she was shaking her head. ‘The things you notice yet don’t notice, friend. The disconnect you have going between your brain and what’s out there. This mental misfiring – it’s not normal. It’s abnormal – the recognising, the not recognising, the remembering, the not remembering, the refusing to admit to the obvious. But you encourage that, these brain-twitches, this memory disordering – also this latest police business – all perfect examples they are, of what I’m talking about here.’ She paused then to turn round and stare at me fully and I felt hurt but also panicked, as if at any moment she was going to hurl me into some dimension where I did not wish to go. ‘No wonder,’ she said, ‘they’re clocking and stopping you extra.’ ‘Not extra,’ I objected. ‘They’re clocking and stopping me without previous stoppings because Milk—’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re stopping you because you’ve drawn attention to yourself with your beyond-the-pale reading-while—’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘If that were true, how come they weren’t stopping me before Milk—’ ‘But they were stopping you! They do stop you. They stop everybody! ’ And here her tone became resigned rather than monitory. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that even at this minute we’re entering another bout of your jamais vu .’ ‘What do you mean my jamais vu? ’ I asked. Then I asked, ‘What do you mean another bout of jamais vu? Are you saying I have jamais vu and that frequently I have it?’ which was when it came out that, similar to the way in which I would block as unfamiliar from my memory all my periodic attempts to establish a proper relationship between me and maybe-boyfriend, instead thinking each time to be the first time at furthering on our intimacy, here too, according to friend, I’d experience illusions of never having been stopped previously by the state security forces when it was obvious I was stopped by them, she maintained, all the time. Initially it was just routine, she said, cursory stoppings, the usual thing that they carry out on everybody who comes into and goes out of renouncer areas. But now – owing not to Milkman, but to my escalating beyond-the-paleness – I was being stopped not cursory but much more than cursory times. She ended this talk on surveillance and my disappearances into other dimensions by saying that just as with the camera, I shouldn’t worry disproportionately as to what official gloss they might put upon my behaviour. Given I was now a beyond-the-pale, reputed to read-while-walking as if sitting down; prone, according to the community, to back-to-front reading, starting on the last page and working back to the front page in order to pre-empt narrative surprises because I didn’t like surprises; given I put bookmarks in books, they said, or else turned down pages not correctly where I’d left off, but slyly at misleading places so as to deceive the public for personal round-about, paranoid reasons; given I was reported to have a counting thing where I’d figure cars, lampposts and tick off landmarks whilst at the same time pretend to give directions to invisible people – all while reading-while-walking; given I didn’t like pictures of people’s faces on books or on record sleeves or hanging in frames on walls because I’d imagine I was being spied upon by them; and finally, given I carried dead animals in my pockets, ‘What’s an affair with a major paramilitary player,’ she asked, ‘and who would give a damn anyway, taken amidst the craziness of all that?’