Anna Burns - Milkman

‘She’s in!’

‘Hurry up!’

‘Stations everybody! Careful! Oh watch out! Pills girl! It’s pills girl!’

This would be hissed by every person in the club. At this point drunken panic would ensue and whoever had been designated that week as watchman or watchwoman for each group at each table would rush back to respective tables from the dancefloor, the toilets, the bar, the shadowed embrace in the corner, from wherever he or she at that moment happened to be. This would be to guard the drinks but even then the rest of us would remain on edge, totally attuned to her presence. We’d nudge each other, turn and turn about, follow her procession through the club, keeping all attention fixed upon her, while she, like some phantom, some horrific nightmare, would dander in and sidle around. You’d have thought, given our hypervigilance, that we, the majority, would have been best-placed to thwart tablets girl and protect our own health interests. When it came to it though, this lone combatant won hands down every time. No one knew how she did it but she had a way of getting substances in regardless of the person at the table. The person at the table, as could be evidenced by everybody, had dashed back conscientiously and grabbed in the drinks, keeping them close, taking no chances. Politeness wasn’t pretended either in the urgency to get her away. ‘Fuck off!’ they’d shout, maintaining afterwards that it was best always to be frank in these poison situations. ‘Fuck off!’ they’d yell. ‘Fuck off!’ they’d abandon propriety. ‘Fuck off!’ they’d slip into appalling rudeness. By this time though, if they’d had to shout that many fuck-offs to the district’s all-time most successful superior poisoner and still she hadn’t gone from them, chances were they, and at least one other of their party, would be doubled over in pain, thrashing, clenching, trembling, contorting, dosed up on all kinds of expurgating substances, crying and begging too, from exhaustion, for death to overtake them, all to get it over with, and all before that long night into morning was through.

So she got herself thoroughly disliked, but contrarily, for all this disliking, tablets girl was pretty much taken in the district’s stride. Even if it were a jumpy stride, a paranoid stride, a poisoned stride, because people might get furious, they might want to kill her. It never occurred to anybody though, that she should be barred from the district’s most popular club. Nor either, that she should be hospitalised, jailed, that her family shouldn’t let her out or, at least, should have a rota going to chaperone her whenever she did go out, that the rest of us shouldn’t have to, every Friday night, go through this poison ordeal. Menace that she was, in that different time, during that different consciousness, and with all that other approach to life and to death and to custom, she was tolerated, just as the weather was tolerated, just as an Act of God or those Friday night armies coming in had to be tolerated. Declaring her a beyond-the-pale seemed as far as we, the community, could go. So always she was allowed back and always she came back and continued her poisoning. Then her trajectory changed and she started poisoning people on other days besides Friday, also becoming verbose as to why.

She had recently poisoned her own sister, said friend, though so far the family had it under wraps and were keeping very quiet about it. She had accused her sister of being some unacceptable aspect of herself. I said, ‘This is getting complicated. Do you mean—’ ‘That’s right,’ said longest friend. ‘Some split-off usurping aspect of herself.’ Seemed there hadn’t been enough room in the district for these contrary sides of her and so, from self-preservation – and given one part was a poisoner, the other part that wasn’t a poisoner, her sister – had to go. Longest friend then agreed that yes, since tablets girl had started in on her explanations, the communal ability to explain her was indeed getting complicated and that perhaps if I’d stop walking about with a book at my face and got into proper reality, I might notice just how much the community itself was struggling to keep up. Everybody, of course, ‘moved things on’ here. There was a constant and unerring ‘moving of one on’ here, and this ‘moving of things on one’ happened pretty much all the time. The shifting sands of acceptable dislocations could easily be assimilated by the community’s race consciousness, but when it came to those beyond-the-pales such as tablets girl (such as myself now too, though still I was baulking), they were a law unto themselves. Often the pales were said to flout convention, to move things not reasonably on one as everybody else did, but unapproved, unannounced, move things on two, or three, or even side-step their convolutions entirely on to some new, even more farfetched footing. That was what tablets girl, thinking her sister an oppositional side of herself, did.

Friend explained that the poisoned younger sister, the shiny one, had been poisoned right up to the hospital and in truth, well beyond the hospital. She had been poisoned to the extent of having most of her body in the ground. Of course she didn’t go to hospital because, as with calling the police here – meaning you didn’t call them – involving yourself with medical authorities could be viewed as imprudent as well. One set of authorities, pronounced the community, always brought on another set of authorities, and should it be that you were shot, or poisoned, or knifed, or damaged in any way you didn’t feel like talking about, the police would be informed by the hospital regardless of your wishes and they would show up from their barracks right away. What would happen then, warned the community, was that this state-enemy force, on discovering which side of the fence you came from, would compromise you and present you with a choice. That choice would be: either you were to be falsely rigged up and hinted at in your district to be an informer for them, or else you were really to become an informer and inform on the renouncers-of-the-state from your district for them. Either way sooner or later, courtesy of the renouncers, your corpse would be the latest to be found up an entry with the obligatory tenner in its hand and the bullets in its head. So no. According to communal rules you didn’t want to bother with hospitals. Why would you anyway, with safe-house surgery theatres, back-parlour casualty wards, homemade apothecaries and with more than enough garden-shed pharmacies dotted about the place?

As for tablets girl’s sister, three-quarters in the grave, she did the best she could, with her family and neighbours also doing their best. Many severe purgings later, everyone attempted to say she was all right. While on the mend, it became clear this young woman’s health and eyesight were dramatically now not what they used to be, so community justice, by way of the renouncers, once again got involved. The family, conflicted, owing to blood-connections with both victim and perpetrator, begged the renouncers to hold off retribution and to give tablets girl one more chance to redeem herself. The renouncers had promised last time that if tablets girl didn’t stop her anti-social behaviour they themselves would stop it for her. Therefore now, in light of the accused’s latest disregard of their warnings, the time had come, the renouncers said, to carry their promise out. Longest friend then said the renouncers didn’t act right away, but instead deliberated further owing to the beseeching of the family. Then they summoned the family and fore-advised them. ‘Okay,’ they said. ‘One more chance, but that’s all.’

We emptied our glasses then, and left the drinking-club and I went home and got into bed and fell asleep and stayed asleep until I was woken by something invisible wisping into my bedroom, wisping up my bedclothes, getting in my open mouth and slipping down my throat. I jumped awake crying, ‘It got in! It made its way in! They got in while I was sleeping!’ But before I came awake properly and could work out what I was talking about, a burning sensation in my innards took hold. There was a pungency in my mouth too, which at first I thought was a tooth-filling behaving badly. Then I thought, that’s no tooth! This is more of Milkman and of how his coveting is affecting me now. Cramps then took hold, exhaling the air out of me, squeezing it from me, with my muscles going nuts and turning me rigid. Then I fell out of bed, still rigid, my insides turning to stone. I crawled out the bedroom on forearms and knees, bumping the door with my head because I couldn’t lift my head because of the rigidity of my torso. I didn’t know what the head-bumping meant, didn’t know what the door meant, didn’t know either where I was going except that I had to get out and get help.