Anna Burns - Milkman

So God was great and all, according to ma, but imagine giving up real milkman for Him. That was what she said. Ma actually said this and it was revelatory coming from her mouth straight into my ears. Here was my mother, one of the Top Five pious women of the district, coming out with the unbelievable ‘God’s great and all but’. This was scandalous, also exciting, even rather refreshing – that a person of the sanctities was showing herself to be not one hundred per cent of the sanctities, or else there was nothing for it but that the sanctities would have to adjust in meaning to include the lower half of the body now as well. So we were right. My sisters and I were right. Ma had had trysts and assignations with men in her youth at ‘dot dot dot’ places – or had attempted to have them, or at least wasn’t against having them. In her deep recesses she upheld them. Death is truthful, and ‘ambushed and shot and nearly dead’ is also truthful. I would never have got this lowdown about ma and real milkman and Peggy and the district’s upper echelon of advanced pious secular women if real milkman hadn’t been shot and nearly killed that day. And here she was, continuing on. It made them happy, she said, when longest friend took the veil, though not for long as conflict between them then ensued in earnest. ‘They vied for him,’ she said. ‘And I too, daughter, I vied for him.’ I kept quiet here because I wanted her to finish, didn’t want her coming to her senses, remembering who she was, who I was, also that other man, the dead man, my father whom she’d married. ‘But an awful thing happened,’ she said, ‘something not considered by myself or by any of the others.’ This awful thing turned out to be that real milkman, in accordance with his usual oppositional contrariness, decided the issue of his own marital status himself. If he wasn’t to have Peggy, he had decided, he wasn’t going to have anybody. As for the source of his name – ma moved directly next to that.

Along with everybody of my generation, I thought he was known about the area as ‘the man who didn’t love anybody’ because he’d gotten cross that time and shouted at children – unloving, anti-social, bad-tempered – the district had said he was. Also, that he hadn’t been a team player, that he’d proved unsupportive of the efforts of the renouncers. ‘They were for our good, those guns,’ said people, ‘and the local boys had had to hide them somewhere.’ Uncooperative therefore, the consensus also was. He was prone to arguments too, again mainly with the renouncers – over their death threat to tablets girl, over their flogging of our second sister, over their trying to kill guest speakers coming to the feminist shed to give talks on worldwide women’s issues. He’d even argued over kneecappings, beatings, protection rackets, tar and featherings – not just others’ tar and featherings, but also his own. You could see the dilemma he was creating, said people. He went about not being peaceful, not being tactful, but instead stern and conscious and aware and unyielding. Naturally, these were the reasons my generation were given to understand had brought about his ‘not loving anybody’ name. There was his other name, of course, that of ‘real milkman’ but that came into play only latterly as a way to differentiate him from the one I was supposed to be in love with. But now it transpired, listening to ma, there was another, older reason for his name. ‘When Peggy broke his heart for God,’ she said, ‘he broke every other girl’s heart by marrying nobody and by refusing to get over her.’ He carried on being handsome, though now in that marred, loss of innocence, bitter tinge of acerbity way, so that at first he was ‘the man who was incapable of loving anybody but Peggy’. Then he became ‘the man who deliberately wouldn’t love anybody but Peggy’. Then, during his ash-and-wormwood, ergot-diseased, hard-hearted phase, he was ‘the man who’d set a grim policy never to love anybody, especially Peggy’ which, for brevity’s sake, got shortened to ‘the man who didn’t love anybody’ which, until ‘real milkman’ came along, had been graven onto stone as his name. Undiminished too, that name was, said ma, by his deeds of goodness for still he did deeds of goodness. He’d helped Somebody McSomebody’s ma, who was also poor dead nuclear boy’s ma, after her husband’s death, then after her daughter’s death, then again after each of her four sons’ deaths. Then he’d helped ma when da died, then when second brother died, also when second sister got into trouble with the renouncers over her rebellious choice of a spouse. He’d helped me too, after that meeting I’d had in the ten-minute area with Milkman. So he’d gone to the aid of others, many others, tablets girl too, who’d rebuffed him, though surprisingly she hadn’t poisoned him. The women with the issues also he’d helped when communal attitude towards them was one of mockery and chastisement for storms in teacups when eight hundred years of the political problems were still to be sorted. So he did all this helping, and he did it too, from some wider perspective, some higher state of consciousness. All the same, it counted for nothing as far as his name in our community went. ‘A waste,’ said ma. ‘Such a man. Such a fine, fair, honest man. And his looks, daughter—’ Here she veered off to ask if I was in accord that he was the spit of the actor James Stewart, also of the actors Robert Stack, Gregory Peck, John Garfield, Robert Mitchum, Victor Mature, Alan Ladd, Tyrone Power and Clark Gable. I couldn’t say I was in accord but people in love, I knew, saw crazy things all the time. ‘Eventually us women had to leave off,’ she said, which had me looking at her, which then had her, even in the dark, sensing that I was looking at her. Hurriedly she tried to amend. ‘Not me ,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean me . Already long ago I’d got over him.’ But no she hadn’t. Oh no she hadn’t. It was during that night then, for me, that something clicked into place. ‘Of course I got over him,’ she persisted, and she raised her voice here in an attempt to prevent my new insight from penetrating. ‘If I hadn’t got over him, daughter’ – this was supposed to be proof – ‘why ever would I have married your da?’

Why indeed? Once again, I was back to pondering this ‘marrying of the wrong spouse’ business. I don’t mean the outgrowing of what was once a successful union, with each partner contributing and committing to each other, celebrating each other until they reached a natural end of their shared path together when they’d part with or without love and a blessing before moving on to somebody or to something else. I mean this business of people marrying people they didn’t love and didn’t want and where someone from the outside might look in and shake their head and say that somebody ought not to be in such an intimate position in another somebody’s life if it turned out they were the wrong somebody. In the general local thinking though, there were reasons for this. One was the political situation here in which the spouse you really wanted might not have a premature, violent death, but then again, he or she might have. Why invest your heart in the one person in the world you loved and wanted to spend your life with when maybe not that long down the road they were going to abandon you for the grave? Another reason was fear of being alone because of the social stigma that automatically attached to it. Marry anybody therefore. He’ll do. Yer man there will do. Or she’ll do. Pick yer woman. Then there was being bullied into it because you have to fit convention, because you can’t let people down – the date’s been set, the cake’s been ordered, haven’t you even gone and booked the honeymoon? Then there was fear of oneself, of one’s independence, of one’s potential, so avoid that path by marrying somebody not on it, somebody with no feeling for it, somebody who wouldn’t recognise it or encourage it in you. Then there was not going for the one you want because by doing so, you might cause envy and anger to arise in others, others whom you knew wanted this person too. There were other reasons for the wrong spouse – fear of losing control through letting the desired into your subsoil, or marrying somebody close to the one you wanted but who didn’t want you so have their best friend, their colleague from work, a relative, even the person living next door to them. Of course there was the big one, the biggest reason for not marrying the right spouse. If you married that one, the one you loved and desired and who loved and desired you back, with the union proving true and good and replete with the most fulfilling happiness, well, what if this wonderful spouse didn’t fall out of love with you, or you with them, and neither of you either, got killed in the political problems? All those joyful evers and infinites? Are you sure, really, really sure, you could cope with the prospect of that? The community decided that no, it couldn’t. Great and sustained happiness was far too much to ask of it. That was why marrying in doubt, marrying in guilt, marrying in regret, in fear, in despair, in blame, also in terrible self-sacrifice was pretty much the unspoken matrimonial requisite here. That was why too, I protected myself by not getting married; further, by sticking to maybe-relationships in spite of my intermittent longing for, and futile attempts to mould me and maybe-boyfriend into, a proper relationship. These were all the reasons then – certainly an ample selection of them – for the so-called accident of marrying the wrong spouse. And now I knew da had been the wrong spouse because although she’d blamed him, always had blamed him – for his depressions, for staying in bed, for going into hospital, for dying, for not being in love with her – it wasn’t da. It was that she’d been in love, still was in love, with real milkman all the time. As for da, had he known he was the wrong spouse? Had he cared, been broken-hearted, not only because he’d been falsely positioned but because he’d allowed himself to be falsely positioned? Or had da known that ma, through all those years of marriage, even before marriage, had been for him the wrong spouse too?