Anna Burns - Milkman

They said it was now obvious she was periodically using, not just legitimate issues of gender injustice, but also other legitimate issues of any kind of injustice as a front to cover up her madness. Just the way, they added, anybody can use anything to cover up madness – education, career, homelife, sexlife, religion, physical fitness, stuffing your face, starving your face, child-rearing, freedom-fighting, governmental administration of a country. All this poor woman was doing, they concluded, was her individual rather than collective version of that. The women with the issues had told the renouncers earlier that it was pointless to keep warning tablets girl to stop doing what she was doing because she couldn’t stop what she was doing and that she needed intervention – just not their type of intervention. They then went on to say that as the renouncers had elected themselves rulers of the roost here, how about they leave tablets girl to them, to the issue women, and instead investigate one of their own? They could do something, suggested these women, about that middle-aged letch in their movement who went around preying upon and grooming young women. The renouncers responded by saying they would not be drawn into equivocation, nor would they be dictated to. ‘You had your go with tablets girl,’ they said. ‘And you failed, even ending up, so we heard, with a few of yourselves poisoned. So out of the road, we’ll deal with it’ – meaning, of course, deal with it in their time-proven, unmistakable way.

So the renouncers issued their warnings, saying that having poisoned too many people, tablets girl was now not allowed to poison a single other person, but she did and the last one, I then found out, hadn’t even been me. After me came somebody else, a man, and she poisoned him thinking he was – I don’t know, Hitler maybe – with the man up all night, and the man’s wife up all night, along with their neighbours, purging him. Afterwards, the wife had gone to the renouncers to tell them what tablets girl had done. Before the renouncers could take action, some mystery person took action. This was according to ma, sitting on my bedroom chair across from me, relaying in shock this buzz of the grapevine to me. They’d come to our door, she said, because their mission was now no longer to kill tablets girl, but to discover who had killed her. Every person recently having dealings with her was required to go to the renouncers and give clear account of him or herself. Exceptions had been made for me – who’d been seen talking with tablets girl in the drinking-club some nights earlier – also for the man mistaken for Hitler, with the renouncers coming to us as we were both still too ill to get out of our beds. The poisoned man had been able to prove he hadn’t killed her because his family and purgers bore witness to his incapacitation. My mother, on our threshold, then told the renouncers that our family and our purgers, on my behalf, could assert the same thing.

The renouncers didn’t come back, satisfied that I too, had been laid up during the murder of tablets girl, and strange it was that still I hadn’t registered this person was no longer living. Instead my stubbornness at my mother, because of her stubbornness at me, prevailed. It was clear she had accepted that the man mistaken for Hitler could conceivably have been poisoned by tablets girl, yet her belief in the rumours of my involvement with Milkman was still so strong, and her faith in me so weak, that there was no way in her mentality I could be permitted to be poisoned by her as well. At the same time as feeling relief that my bad night had been down to tablets girl and so had had nothing to do with the effects upon me of Milkman, an irritation at my mother for not seeing what was in front of her was steadily building up. As she continued to talk about the death, having forgotten, it seemed, that eight times out of ten ‘poor tablets girl’ was responsible for the district’s intentional poisonings, I snapped and came out, not with the most pertinent remark, but best I could manage in the moment. ‘Look, ma, she’s not a wee girl. She’s older than me. She’s a woman!’ with ma responding, ‘Ach, you know what I mean. She was tiny and titchy and everybody knew there was something wrong with her. Even if she hadn’t been killed, that wee girl would never have grown up.’ It was at that moment the realisation of tablets girl’s death came through.

And ma was worried. She said that if the renouncers hadn’t killed her – and they said they hadn’t, with there no reason why they would say they hadn’t if they had, given they’d been going around declaring they were going to kill her – this could only mean an ordinary murder had taken place. Ordinary murders were eerie, unfathomable, the exact murders that didn’t happen here. People had no idea how to gauge them, how to categorise them, how to begin a discussion on them, and that was because only political murders happened in this place. ‘Political’ of course, covered anything to do with the border, anything that could be construed – even in the slightest, even in the most contorted, even something the rest of the world, if interested, would view as most unlikely – as to do with the border. Any killing other than political and the community was in perplexity, also in anxiety, as to how to proceed.

‘I don’t know what we’re coming to,’ said ma, and yes, definitely she was worried. ‘We’re turning into that country “over the water”. Anything happens there. Ordinary murders happen there. Loose morals happen there. People marry there, have affairs, but their spouses don’t care about these affairs because they’re having their own affairs also – so why get married? They don’t say why they got married. Then they get divorced, or don’t bother getting divorced but instead just marry their own children. Then they have children by their children. Then they abduct other children. You can’t walk out your door over there but you’re falling over sex crimes.’ I had never seen ma like this, in shock, getting hysterical, which is what happens, I suppose, when you have ordinary murders in the vicinity of people not used to them. ‘Ma,’ I said. I tried to stop her, tried to intervene on her. ‘Ma! Ma!’ Ma looked up, confused, then she struggled to re-focus. ‘Tell me, ma,’ I said. ‘What else did you hear about tablets girl?’

She knew nothing else, apart from the state police getting involved, with next to nobody in the community speaking to them. A few double-talked them, another few merry-danced them. Snipers, no doubt, were getting ready to shoot them. As soon as the heavily fortified patrol with their own countersniping unit and the corpse were gone though, the community as always wouldn’t shut up. There was more of that ‘Can’t be an ordinary murder. We don’t have ordinary murders. Must be a political murder only does anybody know in what way it could be political?’ And that was the state of things, or so I thought when almost two weeks later I decided to take myself to the chip shop.

Since recovering from being poisoned I couldn’t stop eating. Neither could I stop having fantasies of eating when I wasn’t actually eating, my mind presenting sweet and savoury special-effect shows in my head. There was more Fray Bentos, but now also Farley’s Rusks, Sugar Puffs, pilchards in tomato sauce, custard cream biscuit sandwiches, Mars Bar sandwiches, potato crisp sandwiches, wilucs, pigs’ feet, dulse, fried liver, dolly mixture in the porridge – former baby treats, childhood treats, most of them usually now to me, disgusting. It was only when I felt the urge for chips, just chips, nothing but chips, that I thought, ah, proper food. Back to normal again now.

I left the house with the usual worry I now carried as to sudden appearances of Milkman, reached the chip shop in the heart of the area without Milkman appearing, pushed open the poky saloon doors and immediately was in the middle of all that lovely chip smell. So much was I in it, savouring it, wallowing in it, that I didn’t realise at first the strange atmosphere surrounding me, which was similar, I realised later, to not noticing I had been poisoned until long after a sensible person would have noticed they’d been poisoned. This chip shop situation proved exactly like that.