Anna Burns - Milkman

Third call was for ma and it was one of her pious friends, Jason of the Names, ringing in a hurry. Jason said something had happened outside the usual place. One of those state killer squads, she said, had ambushed and shot real milkman, then they took him to the hospital, the hospital being the very place where everybody knew, owing to stigma of informer status, that if you had political ailments it was never safe to go. ‘He didn’t have a say, friend,’ said her friend. ‘There was no choice. They just took him after they shot him. But switch on your wireless to get the latest for they’re saying he was a terrorist. Can you imagine? Real milkman! – the man who doesn’t love anybody! – a terrorist! ’ At that point wee sisters said ma dropped the phone.

She ran up to my room then, saying she had to go to the hospital, that she had to get to real milkman. Would I be strong enough to get up, she said, to look after the wee ones and the home? ‘Is he dead?’ I asked, surprising myself for never was I one to ask that question. She said she didn’t know, but that those hellhounds, those accusers and roamers throughout the earth, going to and fro and up and down in it, had taken him to hospital after shooting him but that it was unclear if Jason meant because he was dead he’d been taken to hospital, meaning the morgue adjacent to the hospital. Or was it, she said, that Jason meant he was unconscious, maybe dying, so couldn’t protest he didn’t want to go to hospital. Or maybe he didn’t mind going to hospital and insisted on being taken to hospital because as everybody knew, real milkman was contrary for doing exactly what the renouncers-of-the-state in our district had ordered people in our district not to do. ‘Don’t know,’ said ma, then she said, ‘They’re saying he was a terrorist. They’re searching his house right now, digging up his backyard, trying to find things terroristic buried there.’ ‘It’s all right, ma,’ I said, getting out of bed. ‘You go and do what you have to and I’ll look after us and everything.’ At that, she leaned over and kissed me, then she leaned down and kissed wee sisters who had followed her up the stairs. They were clinging and crying and begging and pleading, ‘No, mammy! No, mammy! We wish you didn’t go!’ She told them they were good daughters but that they must now do as I, their middle sister, instructed them. After straightening up and extracting their grip, she took a little money from her purse for emergencies, slipped it into her skirt pocket, then handed me the purse with the rest of her money inside. In that moment I knew exactly wee sisters’ state of mind, of clinging, of crying, of begging, of pleading. Ma had handed her purse over only on two former occasions. First had been when the state police had come to fetch her to identify the body of her son, our second brother. At that time, she’d handed the purse to eldest sister, not trusting what she might do, then what might be done to her should those anthropomorphisms, she said, taunt her with, ‘Serves you right. Serves your broodling firstborn right too, in his little militia, for daring to go partisan against us.’ Second time of the purse had been when the renouncers in our district had come for second sister, to kill her or otherwise to punish her – not so much for marrying into the enemy, as for her face in insulting the area by coming back to visit her family after marrying into the enemy – or else it was to get her to expiate herself for marrying-out by setting up her husband to be killed in an ambush by them. On that occasion, ma hurriedly pushed her purse at third sister before running to the hutment where they were adjudging second sister. She took with her my dead brother’s spare gun from upstairs which I hadn’t known was up there, and which I knew too, she hadn’t a clue how to use. The renouncers took it off her, then they gave her a warning, with second sister then flogged and told she was never again to come back to the area. And now I had the purse. ‘Just in case,’ said ma as she put her coat and headscarf on. Wee sisters were bawling by now and I was down on my hunkers with my arms around them, trying to comfort them. Ma was looking grim, exactly as she hadn’t looked, I couldn’t help noting, when her husband, our father, had been dying in hospital. So I couldn’t blame wee sisters. Felt too, not panic, but a state of mind easily to be tipped into panic. I didn’t want to think about it, but what if wee sisters were right and she did get into a fight and was herself lifted, ending up imprisoned, never to return after all?

She did return, but not till after dark, by which time wee sisters were in bed, lulled to sleep by Rice Krispies, Tayto Crisps, Paris Buns, bread-in-the-pan, halibut orange tablets with extra sugar on everything. Then there was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which was their choice of matter, not my choice of matter. It ruffled me terribly, being twentieth century but I found it wasn’t really the dialogue or the story wee sisters were interested in, but the fairytale title, which simply they wanted to hear over and over again. I slipped it in therefore, every third phrase which calmed them down and now they were sleeping. Leaving their door ajar, I crept downstairs to the living room and sat in the armchair in the silence of the half dark. I thought of putting on the radio to hear if he was dead but I could not ever bear radios: those voices announcing; those voices murmuring; those voices repeating on the hour, on the half hour, in their special urgent extra bulletins, all those things I didn’t want to hear. I hoped he wasn’t but nearly always in these situations they were dead. Why disturb myself therefore, by facing prematurely all my mind could still have leeway from? I hadn’t reached that point, the critical point, where not to know became more unbearable than getting to know. I was still at the ‘hold off, not yet’ stage of proceedings and it was while I was in it that I heard ma’s key go in our lock.

Although the room was now proper dark, she knew I was in it, as a person knows these things, by invisible influences maybe, by mental construction or clear-sensing maybe. She too, didn’t draw the curtains or put the light on. Instead she sat opposite, still in her coat and headscarf, and said he was alive, that his condition was stable but that she didn’t know what ‘stable’ meant and that because she wasn’t family even though real milkman – his only brother years dead – now had no family, they wouldn’t give her, or any of the other neighbours who’d also turned up at the hospital, any information other than that. She veered off then – not unusual – a mind suddenly compelled to convolute and address issues which might be relevant but to the listener seemed not relevant. She began to speak of someone, some girl she used to know. This was in the long ago, she said, when she too, had been a girl, and this person she knew had been her second longest friend, someone I’d never heard of, someone ma had never spoken of. But now she was saying the two of them had ended their friendship and parted company because this friend had taken vows to become a holy woman, going to join the other holy women in their holy house down the road. Ma sighed. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘We were nineteen, and Peggy gave up life – clothes, jewellery, dances, being beautiful – all that that stood for – just for to become a holy woman.’ This wasn’t the most tragic though, according to ma, of what this Peggy person had given up. As ma talked on, I became confused and wondered if she was speaking of this Peggy, who might not have existed, because, in truth, her first and genuine long-time friend since childhood – real milkman – had after all been shot and killed that day. This might be a substitute, some story, one of those blinds for, ‘He’s dead, daughter. He is dead. And now, how will I face that?’ Instead a mind unravelling, determined in its unravelling not to take in bad consequence, inventing anecdotes to delay the consequence, refusing to attend even at the moment of the delivery of the— Ma interrupted my thoughts on her thoughts to say, ‘Thing was, daughter, I wanted him too.’ She was speaking certainly now of real milkman, saying all the girls had had pashes on him, all the girls being none other than those women of the reverences, those middle-aged supplicants in our district, one notch down from the actual holy women and women too, who would have been no notches down if only they hadn’t slipped up by having men and sex and offspring at some time. ‘Clear as day I remember,’ said ma, ‘when they heard about Peggy deciding to enter holy orders. They laughed at the absurdity of it, at the sheer good luck of it, at the timeliness of it for, with Peggy out of the way, who was there, after all, to stop them now?’ Ma said that made her angry, but also that she was angry at Peggy who had turned one hundred per cent contemplative and in her habit, her mystic state, her marriage to Jesus, no longer distinguished real milkman from any man, no longer cared what people thought or said. ‘I was puzzled,’ said ma, ‘because she’d loved him, I knew she’d loved him, yet she renounced him, also her physicality with him, for yes, daughter’ – and here ma lowered her voice – ‘in those days there was respect and much less disclosing and emotionalism and indiscretion than there is these days, but I knew she’d slept with him and at that time too, you never did that.’