by Anna Burns
Here though, even in grief, eldest sister did as instructed. She informed our mother of the milkman situation, and ma had it confirmed in a contrary way by the pious women of the neighbourhood, all of whom by now had heard of it as well. These women were, like ma, people of the incant, the earnest beseech, the reasoned, even legalistic petition. So adept were they in their entreaties to the heavenly authority, so textured into the ordinary life were their treatments and demonstrations, that often this sorority could be heard muttering on their beads from one side of their mouths whilst carrying on everyday conversations from the other at the same time. These women then, along with ma, and with eldest sister and first brother-in-law and all the local general gossips, involved themselves in the situation of me and the milkman. Then one day, according to wee sisters, a pile of these neighbours came round to see ma in our house. Seemed my lover was a milkman, they said – though also they said he was a motor mechanic. He was in his early forties, they said – though also round about his twenties. He was married, they said – also not married. Definitely he was ‘connected’ – though ‘unconnected’ at the same time. An intelligence officer: ‘Ach, you know, neighbour,’ said the neighbours, ‘the one in the background, the one who does that stalking, that tracking, all that shadowing and tailing and profiling, the one who gathers the information on the target then hands it to the trigger men who—’ ‘Baby Jesus!’ cried ma. ‘And you’re saying my girl’s involved with this man!’ She grasped the arms of her chair, said wee sisters, as another thought ran through her. ‘He’s not that milkman, is he – the one of the van, that wee white van, that nondescript, shapeshifting—’ ‘Sorry, neighbour,’ said the neighbours, ‘but we thought it best you know.’ They said then that at least my lover was a renouncer-of-the-state and not a defender-of-the-state, something to be grateful for, this, of course, a quiet allusion to my second sister who’d brought disgrace upon the family as well as upon the community by marrying-out to some state-forces person then going to live in some country over the water, maybe even that country over that water, with the renouncers in our district warning her never to return. Even after the death of this state-forces person – our second brother-in-law whom none of us except second sister had met and who had died, not because the renouncers had killed him but because of some ordinary non-political illness – still sister was not allowed to return which I think anyway she didn’t want to do. ‘At least this daughter can’t be accused of traitorship,’ reassured the neighbours. ‘Though know’t, neighbour,’ they added, ‘severals are saying that that milkman is no bit player but one ruthless character your girl’s involved herself with.’ ‘Name of mercy,’ said ma only this time she spoke quietly and wee sisters said she sounded flat, as if there was no life in her, not even shocked life, which at least would have been some energy. Instead she looked about as unhappy, they said, as when that business happened that banished second sister that time. ‘Of course,’ went on the neighbours, ‘all that mayn’t be true and it could be your daughter’s not involved with that renouncer, or with any renouncer, but that instead she’s in courtship with some twentysomething, nine-to-five, five-and-a-half-day-week, right-religion, motor-trade lad.’ Ma continued unconvinced. The motor-trade aspect came across as spurious, as artificial, as a weak and fabricated attempt by her good friend Jason and those other kindly neighbours to cheer her up in the midst of this bombshell. Instead she opted for the targeteer, the one who bided his time, who kept on going, who persisted unassailably until he got the job done. Besides, the description given by these neighbours of this milkman fitted particularly – bar the wrong religion – the identikit of the person she herself had been praying against. So biased was ma therefore, in her foregone conclusion that I would take up with such a dangerous, deadly lover, that it never occurred to her, not once, that the man might be two men.
She sought me out and started in on the conciliatory note. This was coaxing. This was ‘why don’t you give up this man who’s too old for you anyway, who might impress you now but one day you’ll see he’s just another of them selfish “cake and eat it” fellas? Why not instead take up with one of them nice wee boys from the area, suited to and more consistent with your religion, your marital status and your age?’ Ma’s understanding of the nice wee boys was that they were the right religion, that they were devout, single, preferably not paramilitaries, overall more stable and durable than those – as she put it – ‘fast, breathtaking, fantastically exhilarating, but all the same, daughter, early-to-death rebel men’. ‘Nothing stops them,’ she said, ‘till death stops them. You’ll regret it, daughter, finding yourself ensnared in the underbelly of all that alluring, mind-altering, unruly paramilitary nightlife. It’s not all it seems. It’s on the run. It’s war. It’s killing people. It’s being killed. It’s being put in charge. It’s being beaten. It’s being tortured. It’s being on hunger strike. It’s having yourself made over into an entirely different person. Look at your brothers. I’m telling you, it’ll end badly. You’ll hit the ground with a bump if he doesn’t take you to death first with him. And what of your female destiny? The daily round? The common task? Having babies with the babies having a father and not some tombstone you take them to, to visit once a week in the graveyard? Look at yer woman round the corner. You could say she loved all her saturnine husbands, but where are they now? Where are most of those women’s brooding, single-minded, potently implacable husbands? Again, six feet under in the freedom-fighters’ plot of the usual place.’ At this she turned to the duties of marriage, to the folly of confusing yearning for romance with real-life proper female aims and objectives. Marriage wasn’t meant to be a bed of roses. It was a divine decree, a communal duty, a responsibility, it was acting your age, having right-religion babies and obligations and limitations and restrictions and hindrances. It was not failing to be proposed to then ending up, yellowed and desiccated, dying some timid but determined spinster on some long-forgotten, dusty, spidery shelf. Never would she budge from this position, though often as I grew older I’d wonder if this really was – in the undergrowth of her own recesses – truly what ma believed of women and of their destiny herself? And now she was back to the solution, to the nice wee boys, to those conducive to my being properly matched and proportioned. Here she ticked names off her fingers of sample ones from the area to give me a taster of the kind she approved of. Going by this list, I could have guaranteed, had ma been open to hearing, that none of them were in any way as matchable and proportionable as she described. Some weren’t nice for a start. Also, an awful lot weren’t devout and not a few were already married. A smaller number were living unmarried with their girlfriends in ‘the red-light street’ as the community called it and that ‘dot dot dot’ street as certainly ma, when she should come to hear of it, would call it. Others were renouncers or reputed to be renouncers, deeply committed either to furthering a personal agenda through a political agenda, or else genuinely devoted to the political-problems cause. So ma could pick them without knowing she was picking them, but I chose not to enlighten because I was still in my defensive, protective, ‘giving nothing away’ mode. This was a deliberate withholding on my part because never had it been in my remit not to withhold from my mother because never had it been in her remit to get my message and to take me at my word. It was only when she gave up suggesting ‘that nice wee boy, now what’s his name? – the one who developed that tic of referring to himself in the first person plural – ach, you know, Somebody McSomebody’ as a candidate for me to marry and instead launched into ‘Your sister says her husband says that he heard everybody else say that you—’ that I felt my temper rising. Here we go. ‘He’s a hefty toad, ma,’ I said. ‘Bastard of the first batch. Don’t go listening to him.’
Ma winced. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use that language, that blue french language. It wonders me how comes it you two use that language when none of your other sisters use it.’ She meant me and third sister and it was true, we did use it, though third sister was
more into the french of it than me. ‘Gee-whizz, ma,’ I said, and I said this without thinking, without attending to the fact – for it had been a fact – that I was angry and dismissive and wearied by my mother, frustrated at her living on another planet and insisting in her ignorance that I come live on it with her; also, that I considered her a stereotype, a caricature, something, of course, I would never become myself. So I said ‘gee-whizz’ and it was rude, absently rude. Had I considered though, probably I’d have thought she wouldn’t catch onto it, wouldn’t understand the scorn in it, that my dismissal of her would pass right over her head. But ma did catch on, did understand, and unexpectedly she dropped that comical role, the ‘mamma anxious for wedding bells’ role – a cliché gone away, fallen away – and her real self stepped forward. Now, full of bones and blood and muscle and strength and with a sudden self-definition which included anger, a whole lot of anger, she leaned over and took hold of me by the upper arm.
‘Don’t you be coming out with your proud words to me, your superior ways, your condescension, your wee belittling sarcasms. Is it that you think I haven’t lived, daughter? Is it that you think I haven’t intelligence, haven’t learned anything in all the years I’ve been here? Well, I’ve learned things, I know things, and I’ll tell you what one of them is. It’s one thing to be off-colour in your talk, and another, worse thing to be full of yourself and mocking of other people. I’d rather you came out with your filthy, unfitting language for the rest of your life than for you to turn out one of them cowardly people who can’t speak their minds but won’t hold their peace and instead mumble behind hands and get their fights out in sneakery and in whispers. Those ones aren’t as clever or as respectable, daughter, as in their own heads and in their dramatic love of themselves they think they are. Attend to your words and your tone. I’m disappointed. Thought I reared you to better manners than that.’ She dropped my arm then, and made to walk away which was amazing, something that had never happened between us before. Usually I’d be the one who’d had enough, who’d become indignant, pronounce last words then, in exasperation, turn and walk from her. This time though, I stepped after and I put my hand out to stay her. ‘Ma,’ I said, though with no idea of what was to come next.
I didn’t know shame. I mean as a word, because as a word, it hadn’t yet entered the communal vocabulary. Certainly I knew the feeling of shame and I knew everybody around me knew that feeling as well. In no way was it a weak feeling, for it seemed more potent than anger, more potent than hatred, stronger even than that most disguised of emotions, fear. At that time there was no way to grapple with or transcend it. Another thing was that often it was a public feeling, needing numbers to swell its effectiveness, regardless of whether you were the one doing the shaming, the one witnessing the shaming, or the one having the shame done unto you. Given it was such a complex, involved, very advanced feeling, most people here did all kinds of permutations in order not to have it: killing people, doing verbal damage to people, doing mental damage to people and, not least, also not infrequently, doing those things to oneself.
This change in my mother sobered me. It propelled me out of the belief that she was some cardboard-cut-out person, out of mistaking her compulsive praying for a head full of silliness instead of maybe a head full of worry, out of dismissing her for being fifty with ten children out of her so that the rest of her life – as in any new way of living it – must now be at an end. In that moment I felt bad about the gee-whizz which meant I felt shame at having rubbished my mother. This was despite her own haranguing and prolonged mental battering of me. So I felt like crying when I never cried. Then I felt like cursing as a way to stay the crying. Then came the realisation that I could try to make amends. This could be the moment to say ‘sorry’ – without, of course, saying ‘sorry’ because ‘sorry’, like ‘shame’, nobody yet knew here how to say. We might feel sorry but, as with shame, we wouldn’t know how to contend with the expression of it. Instead I decided to offer ma exactly what she was after, which was to tell all there was about the milkman and myself. So I did. I told her I wasn’t having an affair with him, nor had I ever wished for an affair, that instead, it had been him, solely him, pursuing and importuning, as it seemed, to start an affair with me. I said he’d approached me twice, only twice, and I explained the circumstances of each meeting. I said also that he knew things about me – my work, my family, what I did of an evening after work, what I did at weekends, but not once, I said, had he laid a finger on me or even, apart from the first meeting, directly looked at me, adding also, that I’d never got into his vehicles even if people said I was getting into them all the time. I ended by admitting that I hadn’t wanted to tell out any of this, not just to her, but to anyone. I said this was because of the twisting of words, the fabrication of words and the exaggeration of words that went on in this place. I’d have lost power, such as was my power, if I’d tried to explain and to win over all those gossiping about me. So I’d kept silent, I said. I’d asked no questions, answered no questions, gave no confirmation, no refutation. That way, I said, I’d hoped to maintain a border to keep my mind separate. That way, I said, I’d hoped to ground and protect myself.
During this ma looked at me without interruption but when I finished, and without hesitation, she called me a liar, saying this deceit was nothing but a further mockery of herself. She spoke of other meetings then, between me and the milkman, besides the two to which I admitted. The community was keeping her abreast, she said, which meant she knew I met him regularly for immoral trysts and assignations, knew too, of what we got up to in places too indecent even to give the ‘dot dot dot’ to. ‘You’re some sort of mob-woman,’ she said. ‘Out of the pale. Lost your intrinsic rights and wrongs. You make it hard, wee girl, to love you and if your poor father was alive, certainly he’d have something to say about this.’ I doubted it. When da was alive, hardly ever did he speak to us and his last words to me as he lay dying – perhaps his last words ever – were alarming and focused on himself. ‘I was raped many times as a boy,’ he said. ‘Did I ever tell you that?’ At the time all I could think to reply was, ‘No.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Many times. Many, many times he did me – me, a boy, and him, in his suit and hat, opening his buttons, pulling me back to him, in that back shed, that black shed, over and over and giving me pennies after.’ Da closed his eyes and shuddered and wee sisters, who were with me at the hospital, came round the bed and tugged on my arm. ‘What’s raped?’ they whispered. ‘What’s crumbie?’ because now, with eyes still closed, da was muttering ‘crombie’. ‘Many awful times,’ he said, opening his eyes once more. It seemed he could hear wee sisters, though I didn’t think he could see them. He saw me though, even if unsure which daughter I was. That, of course, could have had nothing to do with dying, because da, when he’d lived, always had been in a state of distraction, spending overlong hours reading papers, watching the news, ears to radios, out in the street, taking in, then talking out, the latest political strife with likeminded neighbours. He was that type, the type who let nothing in except it had to be the political problems. If not the political problems – then any war, anywhere, any predator, any victim. He’d spend lots of time too, with these neighbours who were of the exact fixation and boxed-off aberration as him. As for the names of us offspring, never could he remember them, not without running through a chronological list in his head. While doing this, he’d include his sons’ names even if searching for the name of a daughter. And vice versa. Sooner or later, by running through, he’d hit on the correct one at last. Even that though, became too much and so, after a bit, he dropped the mental catalogue, opting instead for ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ which was easier. And he was right. It was easier which was how the rest of us came to substitute ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and so on ourselves.
‘Backside,’ was what he said next and wee sisters giggled. ‘My legs,’ he said. ‘My thighs, but especially my backside. Always terrible, those sensations, nothing ridded me of them, thos
e trembles, those shudders, those tiny persistent ripples. They just kept coming, kept repeating, kept being awful, my whole life through. But there had been a recklessness, wife,’ he then said, ‘an abandonment, a rejection of me by me that had begun years earlier – I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’ll be dead, all the time, violently murdered – so he may as well have me ’cos he knew all along he was going to have me, couldn’t stop him from having me. All shut down. Get it over with. Not going freshly into that place of terror, which was why, wife, it never felt right between me and you.’ Wee sisters giggled again, this time at ‘wife’ though now there was a nervousness to their giggling. Then da said, this time with anger, ‘That crombie, those suits, that crombie. Nobody wore crombies, brother,’ and again wee sisters tugged at me. ‘Did he,’ da then asked, looking straight at me and seeming for a moment fully to comprehend me, ‘Did he … rape you, brother … as well?’ ‘Middle sister?’ whispered wee sisters. ‘Why’s daddy saying—’ but they didn’t finish. Instead they gravitated closer and closer behind me. Da died of his illness that night after wee sisters and I were gone and ma and some of the others had turned up at the hospital to sit with him. I was left his scarf and his flat working-cap, also a lifelong distaste for the word ‘crombie’ which also I’d thought was ‘crumbie’ until I found it in the dictionary that evening on getting home.
And now ma was angry, threatening me with dead da because I’d lied when I hadn’t lied, because I’d debased both of us, she said, with my falsehoods and hardness of heart when in truth it was that we had no faith in each other. ‘You don’t honour my instruction,’ she said and I said, ‘You don’t honour me.’ In response, and I suppose proving her right, I closed up again, took my teenage satisfaction in renouncing the attempt to seek out any leverage point that might have existed between us. Instead I thought, this is my life and I love you, or maybe I don’t love you, but this is who I am, what I stand for and these are the lines, mother. I didn’t speak this, because I couldn’t have done so without getting into a fight and always we were in fights, always making attack on each other. Instead I closed up, thinking, gee-whizz, gee-whizz, geewhizz, gee-whizz, and I stopped caring too, from that moment, as to whether or not she blamed me. From now on she’d get nothing from me. But was that how it was to be always? Me, according to her, sharp of heart? And her, according to me, ending in nothing but arrowpoints herself?