Anna Burns - Milkman

Ma and seventeen women then, were released by the police and let alone by the renouncers. They rushed immediately back to hospital and straight to Intensive Care. There, they were told that real milkman’s condition was ‘stable’ but that none of them, for now, would be allowed in to see him. ‘Sorry, but you’re not family,’ said the hospital, and apparently ‘spouses on all but offer’ didn’t count either in this case. Some of the spouses went home then, to gather reinforcements, to foster plans and contingencies. This was when ma came in our door in the dark and revealed the ancient drama of herself, of Peggy, of real milkman and of those other women; also, of course, of that other issue, the wrong-spouse issue, that had been unmentionable all through their married life between herself and da.

Now here she was, nearly two weeks on from when I’d been poisoned but before I’d gone to the chip shop, trying out my slingbacks, briefly calmed because she could see they suited her. Her sense of insecurity though, was still heightened and already was roving round to the next thing. This turned out to be her ‘rear’ as she called it, for this rear had gotten bigger since last time she’d looked full-on at it in a mirror. That had been years previously. How many years, she didn’t want to say. But she looked, she said, and saw that it had gotten bigger, and she knew this, she said, not only by the fact of looking at herself frontwise in the mirror and seeing that that part had gotten bigger, which followed that the back of her must commensurably have gotten bigger, she knew as well, she said, because incrementally she’d had to increase her dress size and also she knew, she said, by that experience she’d had of that chair in the front parlour that time. I must have looked blank for she added, ‘Talking rearward, daughter. That chair I don’t sit in anymore, well, my rear is the reason why I don’t sit in it. You were probably wondering—’ ‘No, ma,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t wondering – and what chair? I haven’t noticed any chair.’ ‘Of course you have,’ she said, ‘the wooden one with the armrests in the front parlour that used to be one of your Great-Great-Granny Winifred’s chairs. Well, I used to sit in it. Now and then I’d sit in it, and do knitting, or talk to Jason, or to some of the other women, or have a cup of tea by myself in it or with the man who really is a milkman ’ – she looked at me here but I didn’t rise to the occasion – ‘sometimes I’d just sit,’ she said, ‘and think, or listen to the wireless, and that was fine. I’d sit in that chair without complexity, without any sense of consciousness even, that there I was, sitting in it. It was just a chair; not notable to be registered as tormenting to the psyche. I’d lower myself in, then, when done, I’d higher myself out of it. All normal. Not now, daughter. Now, there’s a searing mental pain anytime I have doings with the chair because slightly my rear brushes the armrest of one side as I’m lowering myself in or highering myself out of it, or else my rear brushes similarly the armrest of the other side. These armrests aren’t capable of articulation,’ she stressed. ‘They’re stuck fast to the body because it’s a one-piece chair and of course the chair itself can’t have gotten smaller which means my rear’s gotten bigger but it’s gotten bigger without the concomitant modification to a new way of negotiating furniture and instead is still acting from the retention of the memory of how smaller in the olden days it used to be.’ I opened my mouth, not sure, to say something – or maybe just to have it hang open. ‘But understand, daughter,’ went on ma, ‘I’m not saying my rear cannot now fit in the chair because the chair’s become too tight for it. It can still fit in. It’s just that now it encompasses a certain amount of extra inches or fractions of inches to which it has never acclimatised and which in the old days didn’t used to be.’

I knew now, of course, what she was driving at, though unsure still how to respond. Here seemed a sensitive, painful, microscopic depiction of ma’s view of the growth of her behind, with nothing brash or crude or dumbed-down or of popular culture in the description either. My response therefore, should be comparable to her own words, should be of like tone and weight in order to acknowledge and to respect her older status, even her originality in delineating the depth of her rear condition in relation to the chair she was speaking of. I was also aware, of course, given this turnaround she was undergoing concerning herself and real milkman, and the rivalry between herself and the ex-pious women regarding real milkman, that ma, with this chair minutiae, might instead be cracking up. As for the chair, I was prevented having to give response by wee sisters calling to me from downstairs. They’d run out of the bedroom at the start of this talk to dash down to the front parlour to drag the chair in question out into the hallway. ‘Middle sister! Middle sister!’ they shouted and both ma and I went out to the landing and looked over the banisters and there was the chair down below in the hall. It was just that old chair from the front room, the old-fashioned, high-backed wooden one with armrests which looked harmless enough but apparently in terms of mental torture, were anything but harmless. ‘Here it is, middle sister! This chair! It’s this chair here!’ wee sisters clamoured while ma, averting her eyes and putting her arm out against it, cried, ‘Oh, do not remind me! Take it from me, little daughters.’ So they tugged and struggled and dragged Great-Great-Granny Winifred’s offending chair back into the front parlour then they rushed upstairs and we carried on.

And now it was her face. It had ‘declined’, she said. Then it was lines and age-spots and wrinkles. ‘This one here’ – she came close for me to note a particular wrinkle. I noted. It was a wrinkle. Amongst others. At the top of her cheek. On her face. ‘That one started first,’ she said. ‘It was slight, rather ghostly, and I had to strain really hard, almost hurting my eyes one day to discern it in the public toilets downtown by the City Hall in my early thirties. I knew what it meant, but after an initial twinge of anxiety I dismissed it, daughter, because you see, I couldn’t help it, there were still years yet.’ Then it was her thighs. ‘They died,’ she said. ‘Felt as if they’d died. Looked as if they’d died. That’s how they look still, no longer any springiness to them.’ Then it was knobbles in knees, gristly sounds in knees, a thickened waist, that rear that had also declined as well as amassing extra inches or fractions of inches. The arch of her lower back, she then said, because of all these downward slopings, was not as shapely arched as in the old days it used to be. ‘I used to be gazelle-like in my movement, like your third sister. I even got pictures of me being it. This too. Do you see this? This red mark here? Do you see it? Well, it used to be up there and before that I didn’t have it.’ Wee sisters whispered that ma had been going on like this for hours and that they were worried. They wanted me to say what was wrong with her and to fix it, to do something, so a few times, though futilely, I tried to intervene. I attempted to reassure ma, because I’d noticed, even if she hadn’t, that a side-benefit to real milkman getting shot but crucially not dying, was that ma was dropping years off her, though in correlation to this, it seemed she was losing a lot of confidence, becoming adolescent, giving off the belief she didn’t stand a chance against those ex-pious women who also seemed to be dropping years off them but who again, and in correlation, also were developing self-esteem issues of their own. Ma, however, wouldn’t let herself be comforted. There was a lot of ‘Yes but’ interruptions no matter what I attempted to bolster her with. These Yes-buts in the end were coming out before I’d even manage to utter the first phrase of the first bolster, and now it was armpits, arms, shaking of arms, the backs of upper arms which women her age shouldn’t do if they didn’t want to torment themselves. Then it was gaps in teeth, more declensions around breasts, joints clicking, bones catching, clunkings in the digestive system, problems with the bowels, with her eyesight going fuzzy as well as starting to take on that little-old-lady eye that little old ladies went about with. Also, her hair was going grey, she said, with new hair growing on her body, particularly – this as a whisper – masculine hair on her face. ‘I could go on,’ she said. And she did. She continued to be insecure about things which, until recently, and given her age, I shouldn’t have believed she’d consider, let alone give a care about. Then again, there was that sense of her getting younger even if she didn’t believe she was getting younger. So I suppose in that back-to-front way that happens in life, it was fitting that fears of growing old should assail her now in her new psychic age of sixteen. It was at this point, and as if letting me know that if I thought up until then I’d been witnessing utter defeat and dejection, what followed was utter defeat and dejection. Glancing again in the mirror, this time because she was sure her height had gotten smaller because her bones were crumbling, she let out the biggest sigh so far. This was more to herself than to me or wee sisters. She said, ‘What’s the point anyway? None of it matters anyway, not now, when there’s that poor woman to consider, the mother of the four dead boys and of that poor dead girl, also the widow of her poor dead husband.’ This was when she moved on to nuclear boy’s ma.