Anna Burns - Milkman

Not long after I arrived, I left my drinking-friends to go to the toilets. I hadn’t spoken of the shooting to these friends and they had said nothing of it to me. This was normal. There were friends for drinking with and friends for revealing to. I had one friend for revealing, but full-on drinking-sessions weren’t really longest friend from primary school’s scene. I pushed open the toilets door and as I did so, that man who was really a boy, Somebody McSomebody, pushed in behind me. By now in our non-relationship relationship he had dropped his amateur stalking and instead, like the other lickspittles in the area who had believed me mistress, had moved to bowing and scraping and pretending to like me. Ma though, about him, continued to get it wrong. ‘Such a nice wee boy,’ she said. ‘Sturdy. Reliable. Right religion – and there’s those nice love letters he’s for-putting for you through our letterbox so would you not date him? Would you not think of marryin’ him?’ But my mother, desperate to get us wed, to anybody, before the old age of twenty, knew nothing because she was still in her day with her people, not realising it was now my day with different people, but the nice wee boy, Somebody McSomebody, pushed into the toilets and shoved me up against the sink. He was holding a handgun and it was stuck in my breast so then I knew – for already I had suspected – that the death of Milkman wouldn’t mean, for me, the end of Milkman. Because of their stories; because they thought Milkman had gained ownership; because of my haughtiness; because my protection was now dead; because it was now being put about I’d tried to evade retribution for cheating on him with a car mechanic; because after any significant death that was communal rather than personal always there was allowed that extra bit of anarchy – because of all these becauses, perhaps it suited the more extreme in the area to push the rumour out completely and have it be me and not that state death squad who’d orchestrated the killing of Milkman all along. Even at the outer limits of absurdity and contradiction people will make up anything. Then they will believe and build on this anything. It was true that, given the time and place, I might have been scary, walking around, terrorising the neighbourhood with ‘How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’, but it wasn’t just me. In their own idiosyncratic ways, an awful lot of other people were pretty scary here as well.

And now, returning to his former stalking personality, it seemed McSomebody was taking advantage of the dead Milkman situation to nip in quick and get his own back. To my surprise, he was now intermingling his stalk-talk with a dollop of anti-stalk-talk – perhaps to wrest back pride and control after being flouted twice by me as well as feeling compelled to genuflect with ‘Here, Your Majesty, have this, Your Majesty’ every time I, as one of Milkman’s possessions, walked by. Easier on the mind perhaps, to have me now the intemperate one, doggedly determined in my pursuit of him. ‘Just leave us alone!’ he cried. ‘All we ever wanted was for you to leave us alone. Stop following us. Stop entrapping us. What are you planning to do to us? Get off us. Why can’t you take on board you’re not wanted, that your advances are not to be accepted, that it’s thanks but no thanks? You mean nothing to us, we don’t even think of you and another thing, you can’t just act with impunity, carrying on as if it didn’t happen, as if you didn’t start this, as if you didn’t stir things up. You’re a cat – that’s right, you heard us, a cat – a double cat! We don’t think you’re up to the level of even being a cat. But don’t you push us so far because this is aggravated harassment.’ He was right. It was aggravated harassment. Before Milkman, he’d sent a letter – one of those love letters ma in her ignorance had referred to his putting through our letterbox. In it he’d threatened to kill himself in our front garden only we didn’t have a garden. In a second letter, this was amended to ‘outside your front door’. Now, at this encounter in the toilets, his written threat of suicide seemed to have got turned into my written threat of suicide. In my hand-delivered missive to him apparently I’d warned I was going to take my life outside his door to make him feel guilty for not wanting me. This set me wondering if his words were shadow-speak for him planning to kill me right now inside these toilets by this sink. Clearly then, he was still attracted. Equally clearly, he was furious about it. If there was one thing McSomebody could never be accused of amongst all the things he could be accused of, that would be of not thinking complexly. Meantime I was at a loss on how to respond to his words.

‘This is not the sort of place, you sub-cat,’ he began, but then he ran out of words, too suffused with rage, I suppose, to complete on what he’d set out to convey to me. Not necessary though, for it was easy to read between the lines. He meant this drinking-club, this district, was not the sort of place into which you strolled without letters of introduction, without seals of approval; nor was it a place in which the harmonious tended to happen – the temptation to be animal, to be elemental, often overpowering in times of bloody conflict for the more ascensional side of a person to prevail. He was saying that anything went here, that I should know anything went here given I was from here. As he spoke my mind was racing, thinking, this boy is stupid but he’s dangerous stupid, and he wants to fuck me and he wants to beat me and from the look of things might even now want to shoot me. But then, already he’d made up his mind. I knew he wanted revenge, that for a long time he’d nursed revenge – even from before the era of Milkman. He’d made his decision because I was supposed to have been a nice girl and further, his nice girl, but some mistake had occurred which confused him and insulted him but because of Milkman setting his sights, he’d been forced to retreat and keep resentment in check. He could not then have called for justice. But now he could call for justice. Indeed, he could administer the justice. With Milkman out of the way, with everyone just getting on with it, what was there, who was there, to stop him after all?

‘Do you think anybody here gives a fuck if we teach you a—’

Not sure, unsure, of all he was to say next ’cos he never got saying it. I snapped the gun off him, getting it by the barrel, the muzzle, the end, whatever that bit was called. He wasn’t expecting that and before I did it, neither was I. Again that long-ago phrase – a recklessness, an abandonment, a rejection of me by me – had returned to me. I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’d be dead, all the time, violently murdered – and that, I now understand, gave a certain edge. It offered a different perspective, a freeing-up of the fear option. That was why too, I wasn’t freshly in that place of terror that he thought, with his gun, he had just put me in. So I grabbed it and I hit him in the face with it, I mean the balaclava with it, with the handle, the butt, whatever that bit was called. It wasn’t though, a satisfying crunch of metal on bone, of someone having their head broke open which until that moment I wouldn’t have thought I’d be so bloodthirsty for. It was a clumsy feeble hit and before I could gather myself to have another go he punched me and grabbed the gun off me. Then he hit me in the face with it. I wasn’t wearing a balaclava. After that, he pulled me up the wall and dug the gun in my breast as before.

That was all he was able to do because something else he hadn’t reckoned on, hadn’t overhauled his blueprint on, was women, particularly women in toilets, these women, in these toilets. These women took it upon themselves to jump McSomebody which was then what most of them did. The gun fell out of the scrum, then a second gun fell out also. Nobody seemed bothered by the guns and I too, glancing at them, wasn’t bothered by them. They seemed cumbersome and irrelevant, or maybe just irrelevant. This called for bare hands, stilettos, booted feet, flesh-on-flesh, bone-on-bone, hearing the cracks, causing the cracks, venting all that pent-up anger. The guns were ignored therefore, not wanted, kicked about during the kicking of McSomebody. Meanwhile, I watched this new development keeping well to the side of the sink where he had shoved me. Had to. The pile of women, with him somewhere in amongst them, at that moment was blocking the only door.