Anna Burns - Milkman

Sisters came back with a jangling of keys and ma jumped up shouting, ‘Back in a minute’ to them. She told them not to leave me, not to take their eyes from me, to make sure I didn’t go on my back or fall asleep and to come and get her if I turned blue or if anything happened except throwing up. She rushed away then and the sisters crowded round and I felt their zeal more than the heat from their bodies. I couldn’t see these bodies because my forehead, in another bout of relief, was pressed again to the cold floor. A respite only, I knew, and I knew too, that I must enjoy this simple pleasure before the onset of more flinging. Immediately though, wee sisters set asquawking. They shook me. Prodded me. ‘Stop that! No sleeping! Mammy says it’s not allowed!’

Ma returned with an awful-smelling, dreadful-looking, monstrous pint-size concoction. So also appeared neighbours, bearing demijohns, bell-jars, green, brown and yellow warning jars, balsams, philtres, phials, herbs, powders, weighing scales, pestle and mortars, huge pharmacopoeias, plus other ‘keep it in the family’ distillations of their own. They had materialised out of nowhere which was usual with neighbours on occasions of ‘not going to hospital’. Like ma, they were prepared, with nightdress sleeves rolled up. First there was a conference held in the bathroom with the women standing over me, speaking to and fro across me. I heard most everything with wee sisters filling in blanks later on. They were debating the course of action, with the purists among them saying it was not good policy to induce vomiting if it hadn’t been ascertained what it was they were dealing with. Others said to take a look, that it was clear this was no time to be precise and godlike, that a makeshift, slapdash approach would be entirely in order here. ‘Speaking of entirely,’ said one of the neighbours, ‘this is entirely similar to that poor girl who had been poisoned by her sister.’ ‘What poor girl?’ said ma, and tones of voice, according to wee sisters, dropped low at this point.

‘Only the other day,’ began the neighbour, ‘and you must keep this quiet, neighbours, those of you who don’t know, for it hasn’t properly been leaked yet into the community, but that wee girl who’s really a woman had another of her fractures. She poisoned her sister, the shiny one. Some of us were in at the purging and take it from us, it looked pretty bad.’ The neighbours nodded because most of them, it seemed, had been in at the purging. But ma hadn’t. And wee sisters hadn’t, and the impact of this news hit them pretty hard. Especially so wee sisters. Much as they loved drama, they loved tablets girl’s sister even more than drama. With this news of her poisoning, and regardless of the excitement at being allowed up in the night to attend the adult equivalent of an Enid Blyton midnight-feast adventure, in this case there was now a blight on the adventure, one being experienced not only by them. In spite of her shininess, her amiable disposition, her all-round goodwill and pretty much asking-for-it openness, tablets girl’s sister was liked by everyone, including everyone in this bathroom. That night then, in the bathroom, wee sisters, on hearing the news, became worried, also did ma look worried. The four of them were shaken. Indeed all the women looked shaken. They paused for an eternity to take in the gravity of what had happened to this radiant young woman, forgetting in eternity’s interim, that another, perhaps not-so-radiant young woman, was lying dying at their feet.

Then another neighbour said, ‘All that is of note but in truth, the situation here isn’t comparable.’ As she spoke, she brought everyone’s attention back to me on the floor. ‘The other seemed to me,’ she said, ‘far worse than this one.’ And here the neighbours who’d been in at the earlier purging concurred that the state of me wasn’t as bad as the state of the poor other. Owing to their misperception, however – that my condition could only be down to vengeance on the part of the wife of Milkman – they didn’t realise the significance of their own words. Ma didn’t either and, in the moment, unbelievably neither did I. Not even when tablets girl’s sister came into my mind whilst on the floor did I register this obvious trail of breadcrumbs. Of course I’d felt sorry for the girl when longest friend told me of what her mad sibling had done to her, but this had been in the manner of feeling sorry for a person whom you’d heard had undergone some dreadful experience without thinking for a second you were about to undergo the very same experience yourself. So it had been a ‘by the by’, a fairly dismissive feeling sorry on my part for tablets girl’s sister, a heedlessness not badly meant but not an emotion of true understanding or of felt compassion either. As for my view of my condition, it would have been preposterous to consider that this tummy ache was down to poison when it was nerves – even if nerves in a worse state than ever they had been in since Milkman – and it was at this point ma did the unthinkable and mooted the hospital, stating she was not prepared to let her daughter die just because societal convention dictated she was not to call an ambulance. Her words were as a bombshell. The neighbours gasped. ‘Enough! Oh enough!’ and they begged her not to go on.

‘Are you mad, dear neighbour!’ they cried. ‘Think upon it. You can’t take her to hospital. Apart from the district mores of not going should there be something wrong that might require a police report, there’s also the fact of your daughter’s reputation preceding her, which most certainly it will do if you take her there. If that police confederation of felons get wind they have mistress of you know who down at the hospital, they’ll think themselves handed best bait to reel in one of the most shadowy renouncers of all.’ ‘Why would they pass up on that?’ another neighbour continued. ‘Your daughter’s only young, easily to be manipulated and intimidated. They’d frighten her, dangle her, implicate her, twist things and – damn their hearts, dogs in the street – not going along with them, as well you know, wouldn’t save her either, the mere hint of informership being more than enough here.’

‘Then there’s yourself,’ enjoined another, ‘poor widow, household of girls, husband dead, one son dead, another son on the run, another son gone errant and yet another son creeping in and out of the area as if he was up to something. Then there’s your eldest daughter in unspeakable grief, your second daughter banished by the renouncers, your third daughter perfectly perfect apart from her french which officially is the bluest in the area. And now there’s this daughter possibly to be had up for traitorship. Consider the wee ones’ – they indicated the wee ones, standing beside them, absorbing into themselves every word. ‘No,’ they shook their heads. ‘No hospital. This one will have to pull through. And she will pull through,’ they persisted. ‘Don’t you be worrying, neighbour.’ Here, they patted ma and put their arms around her. ‘Don’t forget,’ they concluded, ‘it’s not as if we don’t know what’s wanted here. We’ve all of us, including yourself, been through these improvisations, these rudiments, these homespun prescripts many, many times before.’

I agreed with the neighbours, though not from the premise of my reputation preceding me. The only reason such a thing was preceding was because they had made it up and put it there. Mistress of you know who would have been silly if Milkman himself hadn’t been determined on just such a position for me. Also, in a district that thrived on suspicion, supposition and imprecision, where everything was so back-to-front it was impossible to tell a story properly, or not tell it but just remain quiet, nothing could get said here or not said but it was turned into gospel. Given this community then believed this gospel, what chance was there that the state, dealing with the disdain and inflexibility of a no-go area, would not grab at nonsense and photograph it, film it, put it in files, out-context it, and easily believe it as well? As for informership, the police could lift you anyway. Everyone knew they could lift you and try, at any time, to turn you. That would be regardless of whether or not you called an ambulance. Calling an ambulance shouldn’t have been an issue but it was an issue because that had been decided as the way of things then. All the same, I myself didn’t want an ambulance, didn’t want the hospital. Nor did I need them because – how long must I say? – this wasn’t a poisoning. The neighbours, however, weren’t viewing it like that. They suggested purging, that if I were to have all my guts up and out onto the ground, they said, that would be acting on the safe side. ‘After all,’ they continued, ‘seems her body itself is trying to evict something. We’d only be helping.’ Therefore, purging and guts out it became.