Anna Burns - Milkman

‘Something’s missing. Do you not think something’s missing?’ one renouncer was said to have asked of another renouncer. The area had become eerily quiet, saturated with quietness. Ghostly, palely quiet it was, as if one hadn’t realised just how unquiet it had been until all that undercurrent of persistent rosary-bead clicking and muttering of prayers had stopped. ‘It’s those pious women,’ said another renouncer. ‘Ex-pious women. They’ve stopped that awful murmuring, that persistent low-level pace-praying, that enervating, “teeth on edge” clock-praying, that bursting into hymn without provocation, all this stopping too, owing to the shooting of yon wanker, the one who doesn’t love anybody, the one who shouts at children, the one who came home from that country “over the water” after the death of his brother and threw our weapons out into the street that time.’ ‘We shouldn’t have tarred and feathered him,’ said another renouncer. ‘We should have spirited him to some impromptu little grave, then shot him.’ ‘Yeah,’ said another. ‘Then again,’ said yet another, ‘we must not be hard on ourselves.’ This renouncer reminded the others of their fledgling days, also reminding that it had been these selfsame women who’d intervened on their ’court proceedings twelve years earlier by turning up and camping right outside their safe-house door. This had been after the man who didn’t love anybody had strewn their guns, had shouted at the children, shouted at his neighbours, with the renouncers then showing up and taking him, along with their rapidly collected arsenal, to the safe house straightaway. In the main, they’d been for killing him, not just for disturbing their belongings, but for strewing them so matter-of-factly into the middle of broad daylight. If that young spotter hadn’t acted fast and rushed to warn them of what had happened, any auld military helicopter – come to hover over the area as often they came to hover – most certainly would have caught view of their weapons right away. So they were for killing the man who didn’t love anybody except they couldn’t because of the women who were in love with him. Ordinarily, these women were obliging, supportive of the efforts of the renouncers. They’d turn out in numbers with binlids, with whistles and they’d warn everybody, including the renouncers, of the approach of the enemy; all for billeting the renouncers too, for tipping them off, for stopping the curfews, for transporting weapons and, of course, there was the expertise of their homespun medical corps. Any renouncer worth his salt would agree there was nothing like getting shot but retaining enough lifeforce to run the warren of side streets and back entries to make it into one of those women’s houses – to have your bullet extracted, to have your skin pulled together, to have yourself sewn up or, if no time for sewing, to be held in place with enough nappypins to give you time to outrun the military house-searches which would by now be going on. So you couldn’t invent that loyalty. But he’d strewn their guns, which was why they’d taken him to the safe house which wasn’t a house really, but one of the chapel’s hutments and they did this, not really either, to go through some protracted kangaroo-court procedure, but to get him in there quickly and to shoot him in the head. Barely had they got him over the threshold than those women appeared, strangely kicking up no fuss as they did so. Instead these women set up camp on the street right outside the very hutment door. In silence, they faced the hutment. They looked at the hutment, and not a few – God forbid – even pointed at the hutment. Before long it became clear to the renouncers what those women were about. They knew, and they knew that the women knew they knew, that it would only take one single helicopter to do its flyover and to catch sight of this crowd of women sitting pointing outside a renouncer-run chapel hutment for that hutment then to be earmarked and ransacked by the state. So it was blackmail, even at the same time as it was human inconsistency. Undeniable it was to the renouncers that these women meant their loyal binlids and their loyal whistles, also their loyal sewing-up of arteries. But it was only undeniable to the same extent that they also meant their threatened betrayal of the renouncers should the man who didn’t love anybody not be released at once. So everything was unspoken but what wasn’t unspoken, for the spokesperson for the women eventually went to the hutment door and banged on it to shout it in at them, was that the man who didn’t love anybody was to be released alive. There was to be no corpse, she shouted, but instead their friend was to be fully intact and breathing. When it came to it though, they didn’t get all they were after because to save face the renouncers’ final judgement was that this milkman of the area had proven another district resistant with anti-social behavioural tendencies not consistent within a standard perimeter of conformability, meaning he qualified as another member of our community’s woebegone beyond-the-pales. As such, he was not all there – here they tapped their heads – which meant the death penalty could be eschewed in the interests of being decent to a district mental vulnerable. However, the man who didn’t love anybody would not get off scot-free. He was to receive a light-to-moderate beating followed by a tar and feathering, also a warning that next time he endangered them and their weapons, and no matter how many people were in love with him, he would not be treated so very leniently as he was being treated this time. ‘But we were too lenient,’ they now said, twelve years on from the spirit of that former occasion. And now they were facing, in times remarkably similar, this very same or almost same women ultimatum once more. ‘Hadn’t they been told not to go to the hospital?’ they said. ‘They were warned, ordered, commanded, and look, they followed him into the horse’s mouth and now have got themselves lifted.’ ‘But what do they see in him?’ ‘Yeah. And at their age too, for some aren’t young.’ ‘Not just some. None of them are young. So-and-so’s ma’s definitely not young and the scouts have informed us that she too, has just been spirited from a hospital cupboard and is now down at the police barracks.’ ‘So has so-and-so’s ma.’ ‘And so-and-so’s ma.’ ‘And my ma,’ confessed a renouncer. ‘Sorry, but I didn’t know, and neither did my da, until today when she rushed off and got herself arrested.’ After a pause, some of the others admitted to the deplorable situation of their own mothers’ involvement with the man who didn’t love anybody too.

As for the police flipping the ex-pious women into informers or the renouncers chasing down the ex-pious women to see if they had been flipped as informers, nothing came of it. Women numbers had by now increased. The women with the issues – ‘Oh no, not them!’ cried all military and paramilitary personnel – had also appeared and had rushed to the hospital out of support for real milkman. He was the only one in their area, they said, who fully comprehended and respected them and their cause. After that came the media, including that small but irksome hostile segment, that even now, without proof, were publishing a ‘MILKMAN REALLY MILKMAN!’ taunting lunchtime news headline, declaring the state again had got it wrong. The state, on discovering this was correct, that they had got it wrong, decided to call closure over the whole affair which they announced on the next television news bulletin. Meanwhile, the renouncers, worried as they had been about having to sit in ’court and pass stern and impartial judgement upon possible informants most likely to be their own mothers, watched this television bulletin of the state calling for closure and, for the first time ever, agreed with their adversaries, concurring that in this case they’d be happy to call it a day as well.