Anna Burns - Milkman

It seemed, listening to him, that if a person was determined, they could make an argument out of anything, and here he was, making it out of it not being normal to bring that flag in. Well, that was true, it wasn’t normal. Then again, maybe-boyfriend hadn’t brought it in. During all this, maybe-boyfriend wasn’t saying anything. There was a cloud on his face though, a shadow, and maybe-boyfriend rarely had shadows. Instead he had agility, mobility, playfulness which was something else attractive about him, such as twenty minutes earlier, when there’d only been me and him in the room. Then, he’d been pleased with the supercharger, had shown he was pleased, and even later with these others, still he’d shown pleasure, if without the same display of pride and elation he’d felt safe to show me about it earlier. Instead, with them, he’d been cautious – not just to be polite and not boastful, but because of envy when people can suddenly turn on you and want revenge just because they do. It was trophy time, yes, but also humility with the trophy which was why maybe-boyfriend, with his neighbours, toned all his euphoria down. I could see though, that there was stubbornness, that again he was doing that thing which periodically he did when in the company of someone he didn’t respect and so wouldn’t offer explanations. I thought him foolish in this instance, given the seriousness of this flags-and-emblems issue which was why I was glad when his friends had spoken up. He himself was not naturally argumentative and nor did he link with the punch-up mentality. The only occasions really, when he’d get angry and involve himself in fighting would be when others picked on chef, his longest friend from primary school. But now he was looking at his neighbour who was shrugging and bad behaviour on the part of that neighbour – coming into maybe-boyfriend’s house, inviting himself into the house along with the others, then talking like that, breaking rules of hospitality, stirring up trouble, being jealous. No wonder then, at the start of another ‘far be it from me’, he got himself punched on the nose. One of maybe-boyfriend’s friends – the impetuous one, the one who objected to being called hotheaded though everybody knew he broke into fights even over things he was happy about – he punched him. Yer man himself though, didn’t retaliate. Instead he rushed out in one of those adrenalin runs, throwing behind him something of maybe-boyfriend having brought the slur of that flag onto himself as well as onto the community. Hardly could it be surprising, he shouted, that consequence would follow upon that. Then he disappeared, colliding on the doorstep with chef who, looking set-upon and harried, had just that moment arrived at maybe-boyfriend’s after work.

There was now a feeling in the room to which nobody was admitting: unpleasant, ominous, grey. Impossible to get the room back too, for the energy had shifted, killing off the car talk. Although a few tried, nobody was able to get it off the ground again. Maybe-boyfriend’s longest friend, as usual with him, then cleared the room in seconds. This was chef – truly a man of nerves. Here I mean pure nerves, total nerves, dramatic nerves, nerves up to high doh, a hundred per cent not average. He was driven, unsmiling, sunken-eyed, also perpetually exhausted and he’d been these things even before the idea to become a chef had ever entered his head. As it was, he didn’t become a chef, though often when drunk, he’d speak of going to cooking-school for to become one. In his working-life he was a brickie and had started getting called chef on the sites as part of a joke about his liking cooking when a man shouldn’t like cooking and the name after that stuck. So did other insults – his fine palate, his going to bed with cookbooks, being obsessed with the innermost nature of the carrot, being a woman of fastidious over-refinement. They could never tell though, these workmates, if they’d managed to wind him up because from the moment he’d arrive in the morning until going home in the evening, chef seemed wound up as a matter of course anyhow. Even before starting work, and going back to schooldays, and again for reasons of his seeming unmanliness, certain boys would want to fight with him. It seemed a rite of passage to fight with him. This tended to happen until one day maybe-boyfriend in the schoolyard took him under his wing. Chef didn’t know he’d been taken under a wing and gained no understanding, even after numerous beatings, that he’d needed to be. After maybe-boyfriend got involved though, and by extension maybe-boyfriend’s other friends, those looking to fight with chef mostly then backed off. From time to time, even now, there’d be the odd outbreak of ‘How’s your artichokes?’ followed by a violent encounter. I’d turn up at maybe-boyfriend’s to find chef in the kitchen – sometimes on his own but most oftener with maybe-boyfriend – tending to the latest of his queer-bashed wounds. As for the idea of chefness itself, there existed in maybe-boyfriend’s area, also in my area, a sense that male chefs – especially of little pastries and petit fours and fancies and dainties to which one could level the criticism ‘desserts’ and which chef here was a maker of – were not in demand and not socially acceptable. Contrary to other chef parts of the world, a man here could be a cook , though even then he’d better work on the boats, or in a man’s internment camp or in some other full-on male environment. Otherwise he was a chef which meant homosexual with a drive to recruit male heterosexuals into the homosexual fold. If they existed therefore, these chefs, they were a species hidden, few in number, with chef here – even though he wasn’t – being the only one I knew in a radius of a million miles. There was too, his borderline, compound emotional state which he’d exhibit without embarrassment or provocation – and over silly things such as measuring jugs and spoons. When he wasn’t on the touchiness brink over food and kitchen things generally, he could be found, usually late at night and more so at the weekend, murmuring ‘pomegranate molasses, orange flower water, crème caramel, crepe Suzette, bombe Alaska’ softly and with drink taken in some corner to himself. So he talked food, read food, lent food books (which freaked me out) to maybe-boyfriend who (also freaking me out) read them. And he experimented with food, thinking all the time he was an average guy, with no average guy, not even his mates, who did like him, thinking him this also. And now here he was, walking into the uncomfortable silence of maybe-boyfriend’s living room, adding to the edgy atmosphere just by the force of his personality being there.

On the other hand, maybe not. This time, for the first time, it started with the usual, ‘Oh no – not chef!’ with people about to dash off, but then realising it was a relief to see him. Definitely he was preferable to that former contentious flag affair. Before he’d come in maybe-boyfriend’s neighbours had shifted from the carefreeness of car talk to that old political ‘us and them’ trajectory. Increasingly too, they were distancing themselves from maybe-boyfriend because, although there were superchargers, there were also kangaroo courts and collusion and disloyalty and informership. Chef though, immediately helped snap everybody into place. As usual he didn’t notice the atmosphere, nor did he glance at the supercharger or at the specks of blood from maybe-boyfriend’s neighbour’s nose which were now about the supercharger. Instead he looked around, alarmed at what he did see. His eyebrows raised an octave. ‘Nobody told me there was this many. How many are you? Easily a hundred. I’m not counting. There’s no way,’ he shook his head, ‘no way, I’m plating up for all of you.’ But he was mistaken. If that neighbour hadn’t brought up the problems, probably it would have been prolonged car talk, followed by a drink session, then a music session, then a drunken carry-out from the chip shop or curry house session. Culinariness and little cakes from chef would not have been required. But chef was well into the amuse-bouches he was not going to make them, the detailed main course he was not going to make them, the dessert that definitely he was not going to make them and so the neighbours stood up and started in at once. ‘You’re all right there, chef,’ they said and this was as jovial as they could feign it. ‘No worries. No problem. We’re leaving. Gotta go anyway.’ At this they cast a last look, now more of an ambivalent look, towards the supercharger. Bit too quintessential after all, perhaps? Unsurprisingly, there came no more offers to buy. Instead they said goodbye to maybe-boyfriend, then goodbye to his mates who were staying on a bit longer. Then some, as an afterthought, remembered and nodded goodbye into the corner, to me.