Anna Burns - Milkman

So it hadn’t been a fight, not another hauling of reckonings, decrying of insufficiencies, mutual accusing. No shouting, no sulking. I knew though, that I wouldn’t see ex-maybe-boyfriend, or step into his house, again. As I walked along in the night, heading, it seemed, to the taxi rank, and just as when I’d left the chip shop earlier, I couldn’t feel my legs. I could see my legs, see the ground, but impossible it was to get a connection with them. Reaching my hands to my thighs, purposely I felt them, pressed them, doing so unobtrusively, however, because as usual now with me, I had that feeling of being observed.

But no anger. I didn’t feel angry. I knew though, that in there, underneath the numbness, the anger must exist. At ex-maybe-boyfriend. At chef. At first brother-in-law for inception of the stories, then for spreading of his stories, including the latest of how foolish I was to cheat on Milkman in broad daylight with that boy from across town my own age. Anger also at the gossips, for embellishing brother-in-law’s stories, for fabricating their own stories. At the sycophants who resented me and the chip-shop keepers and all those general storekeepers, who in time would feel pressured to present to me anything of their wares they thought I might like to have. It was missing, gone away, this anger, and, as with the legs which I could see but couldn’t feel, and the ground I knew was there but above which I seemed to be floating, it was as if I had no right to be angry because if I’d managed this differently it wouldn’t now be my fault. If only I’d done such and such instead of such and such, gone there instead of there, said that and not that, or looked different, or hadn’t gone out that day with Ivanhoe or that night or that week or anytime during the last two months when I’d let him catch sight of me and want me. Here I stumbled and it was then the white van drew up alongside me. The passenger door opened and that sensation of ‘not going freshly into that place of terror’ settled upon me once more.

I got in as if it was natural, as if this was not the first time of van, of this nondescript, played-down, most-important vehicle. Before I myself could do so, he leaned over and, close as millimetres, without touching, without looking, pulled the door to at my end. He had shifted some long-lens camera from the passenger seat, placing it in the roomy compartment bit of the van between us. Also in this compartment were a few small medicine bottles holding many of those shiny black pills with the white dots in the middle of them, one of which was still in my handbag. After closing my door, he leaned back into his seat and started up the engine. Then together, as a proper couple, we moved off. It was strange though, that after that whole build-up, after the last bastion of ‘mustn’t get in his vehicles’, of being warned, not just by myself but by longest friend from primary school, ‘that whatever you do, no matter what, friend, do not get in his vehicles’ , once I did step over that threshold, I would have imagined – two months earlier certainly I would have imagined – that doing so would have produced much more tumult and emotion than this. There was no tumult. No emotion. Here was this thing that happened for always I knew it was going to happen, for it had been telling me for ages that it was coming and that it was going to happen. And now it was beginning. What was there then, to get emotional and tumultuous about? What remained was to get in, to get it over. And it wasn’t that consciously I thought, may as well have me ’cos he knew all along he was going to have me and I can’t stop this, can’t stop him from having me ; or that here I was, journeying now to have done to me what I should have accepted long ago was going to be done to me. Instead it was that by this time of van, I’d been adapted into some hypnotised, debilitated state. Ex-maybe-boyfriend himself had said, ‘Don’t know, maybe-girl, but … look at your face and it’s as if your sense organs are disappearing or as if they’ve already disappeared.’ Some things stick. That stuck. I wished he had not commented on the dispossession of my face.

Looking ahead as always, Milkman said, ‘That’s that done. Taken care of.’ His voice was quiet, unhurried, not pleasant. Then, with his next words, he sounded appreciative, even surprised. ‘That was a turn-up. Bet they didn’t reckon on yon squireman with his knives. But that’ll stop it. They’ll leave it now, leave him now. As for the other, the one with the cars – the erstwhile attachment – he’ll be fine. No consequence of flag or of informership will come upon him. It was that you misesteemed him, didn’t you? A maybe-boyfriend, wasn’t he? No worries, princess. We won’t have to concern ourselves there anymore.’

He drove me home without another word, and still without looking at me, until we reached my ma’s front door. His not speaking during the journey was clever, but then Milkman had been clever. This was the perfect build-up, the creation of the optimal best atmosphere in which I was to hear and take in his last words. We drove out of ex-maybe-boyfriend’s side of town, down into town, out the other side of town, keeping to the right geography and passing all my personal landmarks. After that it was more interface roads, then into my own area where as a properly established couple we parked outside my mother’s front door. And I knew it was that I should have been shocked, should have been revolted, should have been at least astonished instead of not even surprised that here I was in this notorious vehicle, sitting inches from this notorious man. But there was no choice. It was that there was no more alternative. Ill-equipped I’d been to take in what everybody else from the outset easily had taken in: I was Milkman’s fait accompli all along.

Still in his van, in the dark, he turned off the engine, turned too, in his seat towards me. Finally I felt the gaze, the long, slow gaze, upon me, because now he could look, could allow himself to look. Here was success, completion, property. In contrast, I was the one who remained this time looking ahead. He took off his gloves and said, ‘Very good. Excellent,’ though I think more to himself than that it was calculation I should hear it. He leaned over then and lifted his fingers to my face. They paused in mid-air, very still, very close. Then he changed his mind and withdrew them. He sat back in his seat. Then came his last words. He said that I was beautiful, did I know I was beautiful, that I must believe I was beautiful. He said he’d made arrangements, that we’d go somewhere nice, do something nice, that he’d take me to a surprise nice place for our first date. He said I’d have to miss my Greek and Roman but that he was sure I wouldn’t mind missing my Greek and Roman. Besides, he said, did I really need all that Greek and Roman? Something for us to decide, he said, later on. He said then that for as long as I remained living in the family home, he’d call up to my door but wait outside and that I was to go to him. He said then he’d call at seven the following night in one of his cars. ‘Not this,’ he added, dismissing the van, mentioning instead one of those alpha-numericals. For my part – here he meant what I could do for him, how I could make him happy – I could come out the door on time and not keep him waiting. Also I could wear something lovely, he said. ‘Not trousers. Something lovely. Some feminine, womanly, elegant, nice dress.’

Three times in my life I’ve wanted to slap faces and once in my life I’ve wanted to hit someone in the face with a gun. I did do the gun but I have never slapped anybody. Of the three I’ve wanted to slap, one was eldest sister when she rushed in on the day in question to tell me the state forces had shot and killed Milkman. She looked gleeful, excited, that this man she thought was my lover, this man she thought had mattered to me, was dead. Openly she scanned my face to see how I would take it and even in my obstinacy – which had taken me, in opposition to Milkman and to the rumours about me and Milkman, to a deeper, more entrapped place than ever I had been in – still I could see how unconscious of herself she was at this point. She thinks this will teach me a lesson, I thought. Not because of the political scene and of what he had represented in it. Not because of what his killers represented. That was nothing. This was everything to do with her not wanting me to have what long ago she had stopped allowing herself. Like her, I must be content, must make do, not with the man I desired as she thought, with the man I had loved and lost as loved and lost she had, but with some unwanted substitute who might now, after Milkman, come along. She continued to look transported, far from that state of grief she’d been walking about in for ages. She was not though, going to have her transports at my expense. Stop being happy, that’s not to make you happy – slap! – was how my thinking went. For actual response, even as she awaited my reaction, I kept my face, as was usual now with me, nearly-remote and almost-inaccessible. Then, with a hint of feigned emotion, just enough to convey that for a moment, for one tiny moment, I was pointing out some mildly diverting curiosity, I said, ‘You look like you’re having an orgasm now.’