Anna Burns - Milkman

So they beat him up. And it was for his behaviour that they beat him up, not for the irritation of guns, for wearing a balaclava when everybody knew who he was anyway; not for threatening me either, a woman, one of their soul sisters. No. It was for being a man and coming into the Ladies unannounced. He had shown disrespect, been dismissive of female fragilities and delicacies and sensibilities, had shown no courtesy, displayed no chivalry, no gallantry, no honour. It was that he had no manners basically. If he chose to walk in on them while they were applying lipstick, adjusting hair, sharing secrets, changing sanitary towels, then so be it, there would be consequences. And here they were, those consequences, happening now. After the current consequences, after they told their men which they were going to do in a minute, there would be further consequences. Just as that state task force then, hadn’t killed Milkman to do me a favour, this rescue too, hadn’t been so planned. Help was help though, no matter from what quarter. This meant that once again, twice in one day, I’d been handed a gratuity, a perquisite, some residual but much appreciated side effect; fortunately also, I’d been handed it at just the right moment in time.

So he was done in by them. Then he was done in by their boyfriends. Then next I heard – without asking, because never I asked, because always I would be minding my business when these things would come at me – he was had up at a kangaroo court. ’Courts happened. They just did. This one had confusion to start with over what exactly to charge him with. Then someone piped up with the charge of one-quarter rape.

And that was what they did. Amongst themselves, and while stringently codifying into a range of pernickety, encyclopaedic, rather impressive though obsessive hierarchies, our renouncers divided and sub-divided all possible crimes and misdemeanours, all anti-social behaviours that could be committed by us as transgressors, miscreants and contemptible scoundrels of the area, until in the end they had what could only be described as an owner and user’s guide. With their preciosity and over-fine distinctions, they proved themselves schoolmasters and fusspots in this area – except when it came to women’s issues. Women’s issues were baffling, demanding, awful bloody annoying, not least because anybody with an ounce of clergy could see that women who had issues – as evidenced by our sample grouping who still met weekly in that backyard shed – were completely off their heads. In those days, however, with times achanging, with the approach of the Eighties, it was getting that women had to be cajoled, had to be kept in with. What with female-orientation and female-amalgamation and women-this and women-that, also with talk of the sexes now being equal – seemed you could easily spark an international incident if you didn’t walk out your door and at least make polite gesture to some of their hairbrained, demented ideas. That was why our renouncers tormented themselves and bent over backwards, trying their damnedest to please and to include into the discourse our beyond-the-pale women. At last they considered they’d done so by coming up with the invention of rape with subsections – meaning that in our district there could now be full rape, three-quarter rape, half rape or one-quarter rape – which our renouncers said was better than rape divided by two – as in ‘rape’ and ‘not rape’ which, they added, were the acceptable categories in most fiefdoms as well as in the burlesque courts of the occupiers. ‘Streaks ahead therefore we are,’ they maintained, and they meant in terms of modernity, of conflict resolution and of gender progressiveness. ‘Look at us,’ they said. ‘We take things seriously.’ Rape and all that jazz was practically what it was called. I’m not making this up. They made it up. Excellent, they said. That’ll do for them, meaning women, meaning justice for the women with the issues as well as for women without issues because not all women had issues. With that, one-quarter rape became our district’s default sexual charge.

And Somebody McSomebody was charged with it, for peeking about in women’s toilets, even though none of the women from the toilets had mentioned rape or demanded to have it admitted that that was what it was. This was serious, declared the renouncers, and they wanted to know what McSomebody had to say for himself. But it was a game – more toy soldiers on toy battlefields, more toy trains in the attic, hard men in their teens, hard men in their twenties, hard men in their thirties, in their forties, with the mentality being toys even if it was far from toys these men were playing with. So with this toys outlook they were steeped in, and with the usual rumours everyone was steeped in, I didn’t care what they charged him with. I didn’t care what they did to him, what they did to each other. I had sought none of this, did not want any of it, had not asked for information or ever wanted to know. In the end I wasn’t vouched to warrant which was fine by me as I wouldn’t have warranted anyway, wouldn’t have gone anyway, would not – least not voluntarily – have taken part. I heard finally that, as none of the women who’d beaten him up seemed bothered, the coterie sitting in judgement upon McSomebody quietly dropped the quarter-rape charge which had had a random ‘oh, how about we just say it was this’ quality to it anyway. Instead they charged him with taking guns unauthorised from dumps to use for getting dates with girls purposes, which was not, they admonished, what guns were supposed to be used for.

Never heard, wasn’t interested in what happened to Somebody McSomebody after that kangaroo-court judgement upon him, except that probably it involved him re-jigging his archetype of women’s private rooms and of women. As for me, I went back to walking. Not to reading-while-walking. Also I picked up my running. Coming home from work the day after Milkman’s death to put on my gear to go call on third brother-in-law, I opened the front door and there were wee sisters standing on the stairs, dressed up. They were in my clothes, my shoes, my accessories, my jewellery, my make-up, plus extra makeshift garments made out of our downstairs back-room curtains. Also they had added garlands, daisy-chains, amateur flounces and once more that premature tinsel from the Christmas box, all improvised too, I supposed, by themselves. I was about to start in because I’d warned them before about messing with my belongings. At that moment though, the three of them in their finery – my finery – were busy on the telephone. They were perched together on the staircase, holding the receiver between them and speaking in unison. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes,’ they replied. After a pause they said, ‘She’s here now. We’ll tell her.’ Then came the usual ‘Goodbye’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Farewell’, ‘Farewell’ – also telephone kisses – until painstakingly the call was concluded and everyone had rung off. ‘That was mammy,’ they said. ‘She says you’re not to go gallivanting until you make us dinner. She can’t because she’s busy with the milkman.’ They meant real milkman, and they didn’t mean either, any innuendo of milkman, though it was evident something other than the platonic was going on round the corner between those two in real milkman’s house. Before he’d discharged himself – again characteristic in his contrariety to the hospital’s wishes – ma had been spending most of her time down at the hospital and now that he was discharged, she was ever in his house, bringing him cakes, feeding him soup, tending his wounds, checking what she looked like in the mirror, also reading books and newspapers to him, all day long – and all night long too.

‘Goodbye,’ sang youngest sister and I lifted her up and said, ‘It’s okay. The telephone call’s over.’ ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m just making sure.’ She wrapped her legs round my waist then, touched my black eye and said, ‘Did you get that from waltzing? We got these from waltzing,’ then the three stuck out their limbs to display scratches and bruises, strongly identical scratches and bruises, strongly aligned too, on their bodies, not quite, but almost, in the same place. ‘These contusions were sustained,’ explained eldest of wee sisters, ‘whilst playing the international couple.’ Ah, I thought, so that ’s what all that prancing in the street’s about. Here was the answer to a puzzle that had been playing around the fringes of my mind because all the little girls had taken to dressing up and dancing about, not just in our street but in every street of the area – even across the interface road in defender areas, for I’d had a peek in and noticed them one day as I was walking and reading my way into town. All these little girls – ‘our side’, ‘their side’ – were dressed in long clothes and high heels and were falling over as they played the international couple, proving this couple – ex-maybe-boyfriend’s parents – meant very much more here than mere ballroom-dancing champions of the world. They had achieved that outstanding status of straddling the sectarian divide, a feat probably meaning nothing outside the sectarian areas in question, but which inside equated with the most rare and hopeful occurrence in the world. At first I hadn’t paid attention, for the usual reason of wee kids doing wee kid things, but it got to the point where there were so many of them – dressed-up, paired off, dotted about, waltzing, getting in everybody’s way, getting on everybody’s nerves, falling over, getting up, dusting off and waltzing off again – that the phenomenon could not but encroach into the most thickest of thick-skinned minds. And now wee sisters were explaining the joy that was to be had from playing Mr and Mrs International. ‘It’s brilliant,’ they confided, ‘only it nearly was spoilt because of those wee boys.’ They meant the little boys of the area for the little girls of the area had been trying for ages to complete the aesthetic by roping in the little boys to play ex-maybe-boyfriend’s internationally waltzing father while they themselves played the star of the show, his mother, but that had gone nowhere as the little boys hadn’t wanted to play. Instead they wanted to continue throwing miniature anti-personnel devices at the foreign soldiers from the country ‘over the water’ any time a formation of them appeared on our streets. No matter the scolds, the cajoleries, the tears from the little girls, the little boys stubbornly refused to take part. This left the little girls no choice but to double-up and take turns at being both ex-maybe-boyfriend’s glamorous, super-beautiful mother as well as his not-so-glamorous, or interesting – least not to the little girls – boringly dressed famous father and that had been the procedure until it became clear none of the little girls wanted to be him at all. Every one wanted to be her, to be ex-maybe-boyfriend’s amazing championship mother, so they dispensed with the father, either pairing off themselves as two supremely costumed waltzing women, or else just pretending to have a male prop dancing partner, ‘for that way,’ explained wee sisters, ‘you get to dress up and be her every time’. This explained the colour – for there had been an explosion of colour – plus fabric, accessories, make-up, feathers, plumes, tiaras, beads, sparkles, tassels, lace, ribbons, ruffles, layered petticoats, lipsticks, eyeshadows, even fur – I had glimpsed fringed fur – high heels too, which belonged to the little girls’ big sisters and which didn’t fit which was why periodically the little girls fell over, sustaining injuries. ‘But the thing is,’ reiterated wee sisters, ‘and you don’t seem overjoyed by this, middle sister, you get to be her every time! ’ Wee sisters hammered this home, hammering home also, though unconscious of it, that for me this was to be one long getting-over of ex-maybe-boyfriend. Seemed I was to have reminders of him before I even walked out my door. After walking out the door there were further reminders: his parents plastered on billboards, his parents mentioned in every news item, lauded in magazines, praised in newspapers, interviewed on radio stations, imitated by little girls throughout the world and, not least, dancing and looking fabulous on wall murals and on every channel of every TV.