Anna Burns - Milkman

This letter had been found by tablets girl’s sister during a concerted search undertaken by her family. They were determined to uncover where tablets girl kept her potions and her poisons, all those tools of her trade. She had a constant supply and it couldn’t, not all of it, always be on her person. Must be concealing them, they thought, somewhere about the house. While some of them tackled the far reaches of the coal-hole, the glory-hole, the toilet cistern, the attic and so on, tablets girl’s sister had gone for the unlikely places. Places, she said, where American Indians, full of wisdom and insight and with an ancient affinity to the environment and its elements, would hide in plain sight and not be found. In translation obviously this meant the living room. Tablets girl, the poisoner, shunned even the most basic of familial get-togethers, so that meant never would she have ventured in there. So tablets girl’s sister went straightaway into the living room and cast around for the most unlikeliest spot in this most unlikeliest of rooms to discover where best her sister could have concealed her poisons. Again the Red Indian answer was obvious. Lying across the top of the settee that day – as it had been lying for five years and counting – was the once beloved family rag-doll. This doll had been passed down the children until it had reached the last child before he turned eleven and had discarded it. Although someone in that family must have thought that one day, one day soon, yes, one day, when he or she had dealt with all the other, much more pressing, essential housework, they’d get around to putting or to giving that doll away. Because it had been such a minor item, practically a fixture and fitting, that day so far had not come. The cleaner in the family then forgot, so the doll continued to lie there in full view over the settee until it became invisible. So tablets girl’s sister went over and picked it up. Inside the belly of this doll, between the sexual chakra and the solar plexus chakra was a big nappy-pinned entrance and exit. Tablets girl’s sister opened the pin, extracted it from the belly of this doll and inside found not tablet girl’s actual poisons but instead a letter folded into eighths. It was written in her sister’s hand and seemed to be a private missive written by some aspect of tablets girl to another aspect of herself. My Dearest Susannah Eleanor Lizabetta Effie , it began. Here tablets girl’s sister paused. As with all members of that conscientious family, she was disinclined to poke about in another’s personal belongings. Ordinarily never would she have done so except the family was under the bigger obligation to hunt out and destroy their relative’s murder weapons and, with the renouncers on the doorstep, threatening to kill this relative, they felt they’d no choice but to get a move on. Whilst the rest of them then continued above and below and out the back, dislodging floorboards, making holes in walls, searching under rafters for the phials and the potions, it was with qualm and scruple that tablets girl’s sister, perching on the edge of the settee, opened out the folds of what amounted to thirteen pages of the smallest, neatest, blackest handwriting. She inhaled deeply. My Dearest Susannah Eleanor Lizabetta Effie , it began.

My Dearest Susannah Eleanor Lizabetta Effie,

It is incumbent upon us to list you your fears lest you forget them: that of being needy; of being clingy; of being odd; of being invisible; of being visible; of being shamed; of being shunned; of being deceived; of being bullied, of being abandoned; of being hit; of being talked about; of being pitied; of being mocked; of being thought both ‘child’ and at the same time ‘old woman’; of anger; of others; of making mistakes; of knowing instinctively; of sadness; of loneliness; of failure; of loss; of love; of death. If not death, then of living – of the body, its needs, its bits, its daring bits, its unwanted bits. Then the shudders, the ripples, our legs turning to pulp because of those shudders and ripples. On a scale of one to ten, nine and nine-tenths of us believe in the loss of our power and in succumbing to weakness, also in the slyness of others. In instability too, we believe. Nine and nine-tenths of us think we are spied upon, that we replay old trauma, that we are tight and unhappy and numb in our facial expression. These are our fears, Dear Susannah Eleanor Lizabetta Effie. Note them please. Remember these points please. Susannah, oh our Susannah. We are afraid.

‘Golly,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ tablets girl’s sister said. ‘And there was more.’

Not to prolong or belabour, the biggest worry, the worry that we hold, and one that if only we didn’t have it, even if we should retain all our other fears, still would we be indescribably happy, that which has condemned us profoundly, changed us negatively, stopped us surmounting trifles such as the fears already listed, and it is that weird something of the psyche – for do you remember, our Susannah, that weird something of the psyche? Of Lightness and Niceness that had got inside us, that was inside us and which, as you recall, possesses us still?

‘She meant me,’ said tablets girl’s sister. ‘Before the poisonings took off, and I mean really took off – I’m referring to the olden days when sister was poisoning just the odd seasonal person – and don’t forget, she was my big sister, my older sister, so I had to respect her for her years – but I went to talk to her but because I’d no understanding, not only of the extent of her fears, but of the very existence of her fears, I went to her room and I blundered in my words. I didn’t know I was blundering but I made things worse. Didn’t see what was staring me in the face. Did nothing with my attempts but arise in her suspicions of me. I tried to elicit the wherefore of her poisoning, unravel the distortions, have her right mind restored to her. She said it was impossible, that it was perilous to focus on good things when there were bad things, all these bad things, she said, that could not be forgot. She said old dark things as well as new dark things had to be remembered, had to be acknowledged because otherwise everything that had gone before would have been in vain. In my ignorance,’ went on tablets girl’s sister, ‘and even though I’d no clue what she meant by “in vainness”, I said could they not have been in vain then, regretfully in vain maybe, but crucially that they could be set down now, that she could walk away from them now? That was when she poisoned me for the first time.’ ‘First time?’ I said. ‘Yes. She poisoned me five times, though the first three times I thought were just periods.’ This younger sister then said that she and her older sister had another cup of tea and a chat on a second occasion. This time, while tablets girl once again made the tea, the younger sister once more heard her speak of bad things that had to be held on to. She realised that her sister was yet entrapped within the issue of the bad things. This time it was how they were not to be let go of, otherwise that would mean forgiveness could get in by the back door. She couldn’t forgive, tablets girl’s sister said tablets girl said, least not while she hadn’t received the sorries. ‘I said,’ said tablets girl’s sister, ‘and again I said this in spite of not knowing who these sorries were to come from or what the unforgiven were to be sorry for – but I said I had an instinct that awaiting the sorries was part of the war-thinking and I asked if she could stop waiting for them, because otherwise to wait around for them would only destroy her even more. She said she couldn’t move forward, that she had to receive the sorries before anything could be possible, and I said she didn’t, that she really, really didn’t, and that was when I thought I’d taken a very bad bout of menstruation for the second time.’ On the third time when they had had tea and a talk together, it seemed, said tablets girl’s sister, that they’d left off that whole subject of ‘in vain’ and of the undelivered sorries, also of whether or not to forgive, and had moved instead to identity, legacy and tradition. ‘I said to her that it seemed to me,’ said tablets girl’s sister, ‘that she was minding to a very great degree, adhering far too much, giving more attention perhaps than was meet, to separating herself, to isolating herself which was what she was doing whenever she did her poisoning. “What about co-existence?” I asked and she said things had to be respected, that besides, if she were to focus only on shiny aspects, then everyone would think there were no other aspects. They’d forget, she said. Consider everything fine and they’d leave her the only one remembering. I didn’t know what these things were that she was talking about. I said that her identity seemed to be coming from an extreme edge so could she not let herself have doubt instead of reinforcing this edge, which was when I took an excruciatingly bad, crampy period for the third time.’ On the fourth time tablets girl’s sister said she realised her sister had been poisoning her and after that, they stopped having tea and chats together. ‘I still thought though,’ she said, ‘there must be another way.’ By then, the renouncers-of-the-state in our district had threatened tablets girl which was when her family began searching for the murder weapons. ‘That was when I found the missive,’ said the sister, ‘which started in that vein of fear and went on for pages and pages, an awful lot of thirteen, smally written pages.’ Eventually though, it ended: