Anna Burns - Milkman

After completing the Jean Paul Gaultier kiss, and oblivious still of us, the audience, third brother swept his true wife off her feet and up into his arms. He said one word, ‘Hospital!’, then, switching from earlier declarations of love and self-idiocy to ‘urgent need of medical care and attention’, he turned and carried his love to his car. ‘Shouldn’t take her to hospital,’ murmured the crowd, now shaking their heads. ‘Hospital’s wrong, entirely wrong. There’s nothing so wrong as a hospital. There’ll be forms to fill in. Questions asked on who poisoned her. Then the Schutzstaffel will be sent for and them two will be forced into informership.’ They turned to me then. ‘They’ll recognise your brother, you know. They’ll know who he is, that he’s your dead second brother’s brother and your fugitive fourth brother’s brother and it’ll make no difference that he himself is no renouncer. Being an associate of a renouncer,’ they said, ‘a family member of a renouncer, will be seen as proof that he’s connected as well.’ With this they waited for me to respond. As for me, I just wished they’d give over about the hospital. Lots of people here bucked the trend now, broke the hospital embargo and took themselves down there regularly. The hospital was busting with people from my area who weren’t supposed to be in it. Before long it’ll be day-trips to the hospital and booking your holidays down at the hospital. Now was the dawning of a new era, at least concerning hospitals, and the sooner these neighbours realised that, the sooner we could all adjust and move on. I knew of course they wouldn’t dare mention what they were edging around, which was that third brother would also be recognised as the brother of the sister who was sexually involved with that major paramilitary player, the one who not long ago had been background person in those killings of judges and judges’ wives and who’d killed too, the most major of poisoners our district had ever known. Instead these neighbours skirted that whole murder business, also the business of myself having been the inducement to the ‘ordinary murder’ aspect of it. Instead they reiterated the turning by the police of third brother and his girlfriend into informers. Meanwhile, this brother, deaf to sageness and to disapproval and to the dangers of opening oneself to informership, placed the love of his life into the passenger seat of his car. He threw himself over the bonnet and straightaway was in the driving seat where at once he gunned the engine. The car roared up the street and screeched round the corner into the interface road that led to the hospital. After that, all sight and sound of my worried but now happy third brother, with his newly happy but perilously ill former ex-lover, disappeared.

That was that. All action over. Far more than enough of it too, for me, for one day. I didn’t like action because hardly ever was it good action, hardly ever to do with things nice. So now I was going home and the adjusted plan for the rest of the evening was that wee sisters could eat cake. After cake, they could go out on adventures and I myself would stay in, have a bubble bath, eat cake too, in bath, put feet up during and after bath, finish off Persian Letters , possibly with it disintegrating in steam and water-dribbles owing to sogginess which didn’t matter as in a few pages I’d have done with it anyhow. After that, if ma still wasn’t back by wee sisters’ bedtime, I’d read them some Hardy for they were well into their Hardy phase. Before that it had been their Kafka phase followed by their Conrad phase which was absurd given none of them had reached ten. So I’d read to them even though it was the hideous century of Hardy and not the acceptable century of Hardy, but I’d do it then, to round off the evening, I’d get into my own bed and start in on my eighteenth-century Some Considerations on the Causes of Roman Greatness and Decadence which, published in 1734, was pretty much, I reckoned, how all books should be. So it was a simple and sequential plan, no involutions, easy of implementation, but I got in the door and wee sisters came out the back living room holding oriental parasols with tinsel wrapped around themselves from the Christmas box kept out of the way on top of the wardrobe and their first words to me were, ‘Somebody for you called maybe-boyfriend rang up.’ This surprised me because it was unprecedented that maybe-boyfriend should have my number. He never called me at my home and I never called him at his home, nor did I have his number or even know whether or not he— Wee sisters by now were continuing on. ‘We informed this person you were at the chip shop getting us chips, middle sister’ – they looked for the chips but in my hands there were not any – ‘then we requested his telephonic number for you to return the call but he said, “If she’s only gone for chips, if that’s all she’s gone for,” and said he’d ring again in half an hour. He rang thirty-seven minutes later but still you weren’t here. You were taking a long time getting our chips, middle sister’ – again they looked for the chips, frowns of tiny proportion forming on their faces – ‘so we suggested once more his telephonic number and once more, “Don’t bother yourselves,” this person, your maybe-boyfriend, said. Then he asked if we were your sisters and we answered yes but, middle sister, where are the chips? ’ They had gone to the heart of the matter so I explained about the no-chip situation without giving any truth in my explanation. Instead I offered a vague non-committal about the chip shop not having any, even though I knew non-committals and vagueness never sat easily with them. To pass quickly on, as well as to counter any disapproving comment they might make about my moral probity in telling lies to them, I slipped in that they could have whatever they wanted from the kitchen cupboards – hoping that outstanding treat-foods would be in the kitchen cupboards – then I closed the chapter on the chips by announcing that tablets girl’s sister and third brother were sort of, kind of, back together again.

That was the right manoeuvre, a brilliant piece of sidetracking. Wee sisters loved tablets girl’s sister. So much they loved her that always they’d run towards her, jump up, throw themselves at her, swing on her arms, on her neck, give hugs, laugh, receive hugs and this would be every single time during the time she was the girlfriend of third brother. So it was within reason that when third brother threw her over, they too, were heartbroken, to the extent of crossing third brother off their Christmas list for almost a year. Eleven months, three weeks and up until half a day before the end of Christmas Eve he’d been struck off, after which they relented and put him on again. This exclusion period covered the times too, when he was taking them, along with ma on Tuesdays for those jaunts, those merry-go-rounds, those convivial entertainments, with no understanding, it seemed, of the extensiveness to which he’d been unforgiven, nor of the criminal misconduct in which they had held him, or of how close he’d come to getting no reindeer card, no men’s pair of socks, no men’s shoelaces and no men’s soap-on-rope from wee sisters that particular Christmastime around. And now news of the reconciliation had done the trick. This was best news, not least because tablets girl’s sister reciprocated wee sisters’ love entirely. I’d never met anyone so indulgent of three little individuals discoursing earnestly on the invention of the encyclopaedia, the whirlwinds of the Faeroe Islands, the diatonic scale, prefectures in China, the non-local universe, the theories and facts of material science or on the cultural destruction of the courtyard of the Ca’ d’Oro. Tablets girl’s sister did so indulge. She delighted in wee sisters, listened to them, encouraged them, took them seriously, read their voluminous notes and asked sensible questions, which pleased them. So now, with the couple back together, there was rejoicing, with queries no longer on locus of chips but now on locus of tablets girl’s sister and third brother. Not realising, however, the extent of the effects of poison, just as third brother and I at first also hadn’t realised the ravaging of poisoning, wee sisters were unaware of the precarious state this lovely girl they loved was in. I left off being exact about that as well, about how currently she was at death’s door and even now was down at the hospital with third brother, having the poison seen to. Instead I said probably they could see her and be reunited in just a little while. Meantime, and as long as it was available in the kitchen, I said they could have supper made out of anything, then they could go out and play until very, very late with the added bonus of my reading twentieth-century Hardy to them later on. This was satisfactory and so that was where we were – wee sisters opting for Smarties, Farley’s Rusks, boiled eggs, something called ‘easily expressed mints’ with various other nuncheon-type snack things – when maybe-boyfriend, for the third time that evening, for the fourth time ever, rang up.