Anna Burns - Milkman

Her glee – not so much either, that sickening triumphant glee that some people get who certainly deserve to have faces slapped, but the glee of someone who finds herself alive for an instant in all the awfulness when her usual condition was to feel completely dead – well, that glee ceased, as I knew it would, for I had got her where I wanted her, where I had intended to get her, right at her centre. That’s where I would have been got had she, or anybody, said those words to me. She slapped my face then, a recoil reaction, because I had got in where I’d no right to get in and even though in the moment I considered myself of every right, I did not, could not, slap her back. After the initial satisfaction of shocking her, of shaming her out of her victory, already I was regretting my words. So enough. I wanted her to go now, to take herself and her make-do husband, and his dirty slanders which had started everything, and to go now. Things were not gentle, not ever, then.

She went, loaded with grief again, standing at the foot of the cross again, and as for glee, I had not felt any of that. I wasn’t happy he was dead, not glad – or maybe I was, for really, why should not I be? What I did know was that relief was coursing through me with an intensity I had not ever in my life felt before. My body was proclaiming, ‘Halleluiah! He’s dead. Thank fuck halleluiah!’ even if those were not the actual words at the forefront of my mind. What was at the forefront was that maybe I’ll calm down now, maybe I’ll get better now, maybe this’ll be the end of all that ‘don’t let it be Milkman, oh please don’t let it be Milkman’ , no more having to watch my back, expecting to turn a corner to have him fall into step with me, no more being followed, being spied upon, photographed, misperceived, encircled, anticipated. No more being commanded. No more capitulation such as the night before when I got beat down enough, had become indifferent to my fate enough as to have stepped inside his van. Most of all there would be no more worry about ex-maybe-boyfriend being killed by a carbomb. So it was, while standing in our kitchen digesting this bit of consequence, that I came to understand how much I’d been closed down, how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man. Also by the community, by the very mental atmosphere, that minutiae of invasion. As for his death, they had ambushed him late morning as he pulled up in that white van outside the parks & reservoirs, which meant that after six false starts, they had got their man at last. Before Milkman, they had shot a binman, two busdrivers, a road sweeper, a real milkman who was our milkman, then another person who didn’t have any blue-collar or service-industry connections – all in mistake for Milkman. Then they shot Milkman. Then they played down the mistaken shootings while playing up the intended shooting, as if it had been Milkman and only Milkman they had shot all along.

Certain parts of the media, however, critical of the state, were not prepared to let them away with it. Headlines such as ‘MILKMAN SHOT IN MISTAKE FOR MILKMAN’ and ‘BUTCHER, BAKER, CANDLESTICK-MAKER – WATCH OUT’ had already begun to appear. These were followed by newsreel and further print-runs, reminding the state of its other blunders, its perversions, its secret army outfits, its drive-by shootings, its very own dishevelled status of extra-special beyond-the-pale. Eventually the state responded by admitting that yes, it had precision-targeted a few accidental people in pursuance of intended people, that mistakes had been made, that that had been regrettable, but that the past should be put behind, that there was no point in dwelling. Most of all, in spite of target error and the unforeseen human factor, it reassured all right-thinking people that they could rest easy, now that a leading terrorist-renouncer had permanently been got out of the way. ‘Not to get into equivocation or rhetorical stunts or sly debater tricks or savage glee,’ said their front-of-shop man, ‘but we consider this a job well done.’ No display, therefore, of gloating, of one-upmanship, of triumphalism because triumphalism was not the path to go for public presentation packages. Not just public presentation packages. On hearing the news, and even in the privacy of the subtext of my own mind where nobody but me could witness me being me, also out of fear of being judged in the area some traitorous, cold-hearted bad person, I myself was trying not to be happy. But I kept thinking of my narrow escape from whatever he had planned for me that coming evening and I was happy – happy too though, that no mocking, exposing media spotlight was being shone that moment upon me.

So his death hit the headlines but that wasn’t all that hit the headlines. After they shot him, and the six unfortunates who’d got in the way of him, it was revealed, along with his age, abode, ‘husband to’ and ‘father of’, that Milkman’s name really was Milkman. This was shocking. ‘Can’t be right,’ cried people. ‘Farfetched. Weird. Silly even, to have the name Milkman.’ But when you think about it, why was that weird? Butcher’s a name. Sexton’s a name. So is Weaver, Hunter, Roper, Cleaver, Player, Mason, Thatcher, Carver, Wheeler, Planter, Trapper, Teller, Doolittle, Pope and Nunn. Years later I came across a Mr Postman who was a librarian, so they’re all over the place, those names. As for ‘Milkman’ and the acceptability or not of ‘Milkman’, what would Nigel and Jason, our guardians of the names, have to say about that? Not just our Nigel and Jason either. What of equivalent clerks and clerkesses protecting against names proscribed in other renouncer areas? Even Roisins and Marys guarding against opposing forbidden names in ‘over the road’ defender-run areas? Alarmists, meanwhile, continued to debate over the provenance of the Milkman name. Was it one of ours? One of theirs? Was it from over the road? Over the water? Over the border? Should it be allowed? Banned? Binned? Laughed at? Discounted? What was the consensus? ‘An unusual name,’ everyone, with nervous caution, after great deliberation, said. It broke bounds of credibility, said the news, but lots of things in life break bounds of credibility. Breaking credibility, I was coming to understand, seemed to be what life was about. Nevertheless, the news of this Milkman name unsettled people; it cheated them, frightened them and there seemed no way round a feeling of embarrassment either. When considered a pseudonym, some codename, ‘the milkman’ had possessed mystique, intrigue, theatrical possibility. Once out of symbolism, however, once into the everyday, the banal, into any old Tom, Dick and Harryness, any respect it had garnered as the cognomen of a high-cadre paramilitary activist was undercut immediately and, just as immediately, fell away. People consulted phonebooks, encyclopaedias, reference books of names to see if anyone, anywhere in the world had been called Milkman. Many were left stranded, uncomprehending, with nothing for it but to grow speculation, both in the media and in the districts, over just who exactly this Milkman person was. Had he been the chilling, sinister paramilitary everyone here had always believed him to be? Or was it the case that poor Mister Milkman had been nothing but another innocent victim of state murder after all?

Whatever he had been and whatever he’d been called, he was gone, so I did what usually I did around death which was to forget all about it. The whole shambles – as in the old meaning of shambles, as in slaughterhouse, blood-house, meat market, business-as-usual – once again took hold. Deciding to miss my French night class, I put on my make-up and got ready to go to the club. This was to the brightest, the busiest, the most popular of the eleven drinking-clubs existing in our small area and as for going: drinking-clubs were the exact places you would go, exactly what you would do, when both hyper and deadened and in need of alcohol.