Anna Burns - Milkman

After this came the lighter side of the evening, the indulgent item at the end of the news. We had reached for our drinks and sipped, then sat back, with friend, apropos of just throwing it out, telling me it had been my first brother-in-law who had started the rumours about me. ‘Shouldn’t concern yourself with him though,’ she said. ‘He’s currently being intervened on and soon is to have his own reality check.’ First brother-in-law’s reality check, unsurprisingly, was to stem from his latest sexual obsession. This latest had him visiting nuns – the community’s full-on holy women – with masturbating questions disguised as harmless cultural queries about art. ‘He brought up that sculpture,’ said friend, ‘you know, that statue, the one of the nun, Teresa of Avila, who had her own private levitation sessions?’ I knew the statue she meant. Age twelve, flicking through a book in the art room at school I’d turned a page and seen a picture of that statue, jumping away with an actual cry when I realised what it was I was looking at. It had been unexpected. All of a sudden. A realisation I’d no premonition that day was coming to me. Those billowing clothes, nun’s clothes, on her body, her inside them, suffocating inside them, them outside her, alive, maybe inside-out, swallowing her up. Those folds, those coils, those windings and volumes and living, moving layers, well, of course they frightened me. The picture itself repulsed me – yet it had held me. My thinking at the time, when I recovered from being repulsed and had gone back for a second, then a third, then a fourth, then a fifth look – and only on the fifth look did I take in that angel with the stick thing – my thinking was perhaps it would have been better, less scary, if the clothes had not been on her body. But what if they hadn’t and she was in that contorted condition – bare arms, bare legs, bare bits all over – and that face, looking the way it was looking – helpless, abandoning, enjoying itself – or the opposite of enjoying itself – and her naked and praying – but that didn’t look like praying unless – oh God – that was what praying was? On second thoughts, my twelve-year-old self decided, maybe it was better that the clothes, unsettling and voracious as they were, had been on her body all along.

‘So, sisters,’ had begun first brother-in-law, for he had gone to the convent with the intention of taking out his own magazine picture of that very same statue. Apparently this lover of art had been carrying it around for some time. ‘About this emotive picture about a devotional statue. What do you make of the ecstasy, of the meditative, mystical, voluptuous – sweetly moaning as it seems to me – and yet excessively intrusive, jarringly orgiastic portrayal of the situation? Is this really’ – and here he looked pensive, earnest, saying the next bit supposedly artistically and not at all sexually pervertedly – ‘that this woman, in perfect union with God, this nun – such as you are yourselves – was perhaps rapturously aroused and self-pleasuring via the metaphor of levitation? And as for this seraph thrusting and thrusting and given your own experience—’

That was as far as he got.

He was seen through immediately of course, said friend, for the nuns weren’t stupid, nor were they ignorant of art and even less so of his wink-wink, sexual dislocation-compulsion reputation. They had been praying for him. Indeed, he had almost reached number one at the apex of names of us people urgently to be prayed for locally on their long list. But now they threw him out. This was way past the stage of civilisation, way past quietly asking him to leave, of having courtesy shown him owing to his being a spiritual soul on life’s path such as they themselves were spiritual souls on life’s path. No. They threw him out – or rather, Sister Mary Pius, the big nun, she threw him out – after the rest of the nuns had had a slap at him first. After that, the head nun paid a visit to the sanctities – our pious women of the area who constituted intermediaries between the holy women and the renouncers-of-the-state in our area. When the pious women heard the indecent news they paid a visit to the renouncers. That was when it was decided, said friend, that first brother-in-law’s behaviour had better, for the first time, be put in check.

‘The man is inexpugnable,’ said friend. ‘Yeah he is,’ I said. ‘Just what I was thinking. Only seems now he isn’t. What’ll happen to him? What’ll they do to him?’ – and it wasn’t out of concern for him that I had asked. It was for first sister, his wife, my sister, though when third sister got to hear, she said absolutely she was glad he was to have his comeuppance, not glad either, in any compassionate ‘may God have mercy on his soul’ way. Because he was so into his wild torment, his strivings-through-sensation, his lack of modest thought, his insatiable addiction where everything and anyone – as long as it was female – had to be approached, had to be appropriated, he just couldn’t stop himself. This would be too, us, his sisters-in-law, beginning as twelve-year-olds, or else other females in the area, or nuns as now it turned out to be. It was all about the sexual arena; the man knew not how to engage in any other arena. That was why third sister and I had tried to speak to the girls. Wee sisters, however, said they didn’t need us to warn them to be on the alert as to something feverish, driven and greedyguts about first brother-in-law. That he had some sickly compulsion neurosis, they said, was very plain for all eyes to see. ‘Only, what’s that to us?’ they added. ‘Why are you coming to us, telling this us, warning of first brother-in-law us?’ ‘If he tries anything,’ said third sister. ‘Tries what?’ they said. ‘Even if he speaks to you in a seemingly innocent way on the subject, say, of the French Revolution—’ ‘What aspect of the French Revolution?’ ‘Any aspect,’ said third sister. ‘Or,’ she went on, ‘if he tries to get a discussion going on that marginalised scientific theory you three are keen on, the one about hydrothermal multi-turbulent—’ ‘You’re outlining that incorrectly, third sister,’ wee sisters began. ‘What third sister means,’ I interrupted, ‘is that if he should sidle up with Demosthenes’s disapproval of Alcibiades, or if he should appear suddenly and try to expound on the thesis of Francis Bacon really being William Shakespeare, which means—’ ‘We know what expounding theses means!’ ‘What middle sister is saying,’ said third sister, ‘is that if he gets into a summary exposition on Guy Fawkes’s ordinary signature before he was tortured and Guy Fawkes’s confession signature after he was tortured which means—’ ‘We know what summary exposition means!’ ‘Look, wee sisters, the point is,’ I said, ‘if he tries to lure you in on the pretext of anything – science, art, literature, linguistics, social anthropology, mathematics, politics, chemistry, the intestinal tract, unusual euphemisms, double-entry bookkeeping, the three divisions of the psyche, the Hebrew alphabet, Russian Nihilism, Asian cattle, twelfth-century Chinese porcelain, the Japanese unit—’ ‘We don’t understand,’ cried wee sisters. ‘What’s wrong with talking about them things?’ ‘What’s wrong is that don’t be fooled,’ said third sister. ‘None of that will be the business, won’t be what he’s really after.’ ‘But what’s the business? What will he really be after? What is it you both mean?’ We could see, third sister and me, that far from reassuring and protecting the children, we had alarmed and frightened the children. Third sister then said, ‘It’ll be something abusive, sexually invasive, a violating, creepy thing, always a verbal thing, but on second thoughts, never you mind. You three are too young to know of that yet.’