Milkman

by Anna Burns

  So ma would be back to her onwards-and-upwards talk, to her hierarchy of suffering: those who were allowed it; those who were allowed it but fell down badly by outstaying their quota in it; those who, like da, were upstart illegitimates, stealing the right to suffer that belonged to somebody else. ‘Your da,’ she said. ‘Your da. Do you know that even his sister said he’d lie abed during the sirens with places around him on fire and not go to the shelters with the other people? Only young too – sixteen, maybe seventeen – with me twelve years old at the time and having more sense than he had. Crazy. Wanting those bombs to fall on him. Crazy,’ which at first time of hearing – for this was not first time – also before my own depressions started – I used to think was crazy too. And now she was talking of the big war, that world one, the second one, the one – ask any teenager – with nothing to do with up-to-date humanity and modern-society living; the one no one my age could attend to which wasn’t surprising, given most of us could hardly attend to the current, more local one, we were in. ‘After the war,’ said ma, ‘even after we married, for years until his death, and especially when the sorrows started, all you’d get would be him burying his head in them dark things.’ She meant his newspapers, his tomes, his logs, his collecting and collating of everything to do with the political problems; meeting up too, with likeminded friends exactly as brooding, obsessive and overhung with cliffs, crags, ravens, crows and skeletons as him. They would share their docking and filing, their categorising, their updating of all the tragedies of the political problems, to the extent too, that it seemed as if it were their job to do it when it wasn’t their job to do it and of course da, after a bit, couldn’t keep it up. Even we, his children, could see that all that hyper-engrossment, all that exactitude, the fixation, had to crash at some point. And it would, with him collapsing with it, plunging headlong from ledgering, from scrapbooking, from all his prescriptive newspaper-cutting, only to sink down deep again into despondency when all he’d be fit for then would be his bed, the hospital, his comics, his sports pages, or those Holocaust programmes on the TV. Natural disaster programmes too, such as David Attenborough talking about insects eating other insects and ferocious wildlife pouncing upon gentle wildlife. Never would he watch programmes about heather or how to keep butterflies in happy, carefree countenance. Those types of programmes never drew him, never interested him, wouldn’t ever, as ma put it, ‘be allowed to cheer him up’. Of course the whole household knew that the Holocaust and the world wars and animals eating other animals, all those anaesthetics which also included our political problems when he could get back to them didn’t cheer him up either. It was clear though, they served some purpose, some sense of ‘See! Look at that. What’s the point? There’s no point,’ thus confirming for him, solacing him even, in his despair, that as things stood, as always they’d stood, there couldn’t be triumphs and overcomings because overcomings were fancies and triumphs were daydreams, effort and renewed effort a vain waste of time. ‘I knew your da was in a good way,’ said ma, ‘when he’d sing, and I knew he was in a bad way when he’d lie abed all day, be up all night, not sleeping, not opening curtains, instead filling in chinks, blocking out the nightlight and all the natural daylight. His melancholy, daughter. Not natural. If it were natural, would he not have felt good on it? Would he not have looked well on it? But what reason, what reason, tell me, had he for keeping himself always in that dark, brooding place?’

  So with da and his type, unlike ma and her type, it wasn’t a case of ‘I must be cheerful because of the Holocaust’ or ‘I’ve a boil on my nose but yer man down the street’s missing a nose so I must be cheerful he’s missing a nose whereas I’m not missing a nose and he must be cheerful because of the Holocaust.’ With da it was never ‘Must get down on knees and give thanks that others in the world are suffering far worse than me’. I couldn’t see how he couldn’t be right too, because everybody knew life didn’t work like that. If life worked like that then all of us – except the person agreed upon to have the most misfortune in the world – would be happy, yet most people I knew weren’t happy. Neither in this workaday world, in this little human-being world, did we spend time counting blessings and eschewing the relative in favour of the eternal. That relative, that temporal plane – where sensitivities vary, where no one has the same personal history even if they have the same communal history, where something which is a trigger for one person passes off unnoticed by another person – definitely was the plane where the raw living of life and the imperfect mental response to that living of life took place. Even ma and her type – for all their intolerance of depressives and of especially getting down on knees in the face of tragedies to offer thanks that there for the grace of God would have gone them only some other poor buggers had been selected by God to suffer such dreadful fates instead of them – even they didn’t rest easy. As for the few, those very few who did seem to rest easy, or who at least continued to give off a constant goodwill and a trust in people and in life even in the face of not exactly resting easy, well, both ma and her type, and da and his type, pretty much everybody I knew, including me, had difficulty coming to terms with that type too.

  My attention was first brought to the issue of the shiny people, those rare, baffling, radiant type of people, by that film, Rear Window. I saw it when I was twelve and it unnerved me because of what I believed initially to be its point. A little dog gets killed, strangled, neck broken, which is not the message of the film but for me was the message of the film because its owner – bereft, in shock – wails out her window over all the apartment building, ‘Which one of you did it? … couldn’t imagine … so low you’d kill a little helpless friendly … only thing in this whole neighbourhood who liked anybody. Did you kill him because he liked you, just because he liked you?’ and it was that ‘killing him because he liked you’ that caused shivers to go down my spine. I knew immediately, oh God! It’s true! That is why they killed it! They killed it because it liked them! Turned out that wasn’t why the dog was killed but before I discovered the real reason, absolutely it made sense to me, in the world I was in, that it had happened that way. They killed it because it liked them, because they couldn’t cope with being liked, couldn’t cope with innocence, frankness, openness, with a defencelessness and an affection and purity so pure, so affectionate, that the dog and its qualities had to be done away with. Couldn’t bear it. Had to kill it. Probably they themselves would have viewed this as self-defence. And that was the trouble with the shiny people. Take a whole group of individuals who weren’t shiny, maybe a whole community, a whole nation, or maybe just a statelet immersed long-term on the physical and energetic planes in the dark mental energies; conditioned too, through years of personal and communal suffering, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger – well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that. As for the environment, that too, would object, backing up the pessimism of its people, which was what happened where I lived where the whole place always seemed to be in the dark. It was as if the electric lights were turned off, always turned off, even though dusk was over so they should have been turned on yet nobody was turning them on and nobody noticed either, they weren’t on. All this too, seemed normality which meant then, that part of normality here was this constant, unacknowledged struggle to see. I knew even as a child – maybe because I was a child – that this wasn’t really physical; knew the impression of a pall, of some distorted quality to the light had to do with the political problems, with the hurts that had come, the troubles that had built, with the loss of hope and absence of trust and with a mental incapacitation over which nobody seemed willing or able to prevail. The very physical environment then, in collusion with, or as a result of, the human darkness discharging within it, didn’t itself encourage light. Instead the place was sunk in one long, melancholic story to the extent that the t
ruly shining person coming into this darkness ran the risk of not outliving it, of having their own shininess subsumed into it and, in some cases – if the person was viewed as intolerably extra-bright and extra-shiny – it might even reach the point of that individual having to lose his or her physical life. As for those living in the dark, long attuned to the safeness of the dark, this wasn’t wee buns for them either. What if we accept these points of light, their translucence, their brightness; what if we let ourselves enjoy this, stop fearing it, get used to it; what if we come to believe in it, to expect it, to be impressed upon by it; what if we take hope and forgo our ancient heritage and instead, and infused, begin to entrain with it, with ourselves then to radiate it; what if we do that, get educated up to that, and then, just like that, the light goes off or is snatched away? This was why you didn’t get many shining people in environments overwhelmingly consisting of fear and of sorrow. In this environment which was my environment, there existed but a few. There was French teacher from downtown. Then perhaps there might have been, were it not for the state of his hoarding, maybe-boyfriend. The only person though, in my own neighbourhood who was unanimously agreed upon to be one of the rare shining was the sister of our district poisoner, tablets girl. This sister was my age, which meant younger than tablets girl, and it wasn’t that everybody wanted to dislike her. Indeed part of the problem was we didn’t dislike her. It was that it was hard to deal with the threat she posed by going about completely holding her own. She was translucent, untouched by our darkness, walking in her light in our darkness. Strangely though, she herself was very ordinary about this. Instead of taking hope from whom she was and from what she represented – especially as she came from our area yet had managed to get beyond the prevailing temperament and thought-race of this area; instead of thinking, why, if this one person can do it, can walk abroad with all this sunlight playing about her and within her, then perhaps we …? But no. Easier to remain unchallenged at our diminished acculturated level; also to designate tablets girl’s sister as similar to her sister, that is, a full-on, ostracised, district beyond-the-pale.

  So shiny was bad, and ‘too sad’ was bad, and ‘too joyous’ was bad, which meant you had to go around not being anything; also not thinking, least not at top level, which was why everybody kept their private thoughts safe and sound in those recesses underneath. As for da and ma, da went too much ‘the long face’ way, and ma too forcibly the ‘onwards and upwards’ way, with da periodically breaking down and having to go to hospital, and with ma subsequently forgetting ‘onwards and upwards’ and getting angry at him for yet again abandoning her with us in this place. For years I didn’t know, along with the younger in my family, that da was going into hospital, also that it was a mental hospital. We thought, because we were told, that whenever he disappeared he was off to long hours of work, long days of work, lengthy weeks of work in some faraway town or country or, if not that, that he was seeing some specialist doctor far away because of the pains he was getting in his back. But it was mental hospitals, and it was mental breakdowns, which meant cover-up, which meant shame, which meant even more shame in his case because he was a man. Males and mental hospitals went together far less than females and mental hospitals went together. In a man’s case, this equalled a gender falling-down in pursuance of his duties, totalling a failure above all to keep face. Again, at first, I didn’t understand. Didn’t know either, that ma, under emotional pressure, under peer pressure, shame pressure, was presenting her take on da’s illness to the neighbours, who of course had their own take on it themselves. ‘Faraway work in faraway lands, our backsides,’ they’d say, and ma knew this, which was why she blamed da – even after he became no longer living – even more. Often it seemed she didn’t love him but instead she hated him. ‘Sad story!’ she’d flounce. ‘What sad story? No pain really. All in his head really. Nothing out there really.’ And she’d pretend, though wouldn’t be able, to shrug da off. I hated it when ma did this, when she’d speak ill like this, especially to us to whom she should not run down our father. But she’d continue because once started, she’d fixate on his fixating to the point where, primed and triggered and far, far too angry, she’d have to run the course because she couldn’t stop. I used to puzzle over the extent of this anger, of all of ma’s blaming and haranguing and complaining. It was only much later that I came to realise that this was a case of her not forgiving him for many things – maybe for all things – and not just for not cheering up.

  That was what she did. She brought this unforgiveness into every tenuous connection, into such too, as the ten-minute area. Like da, according to ma, it also entertained no hope to brighten up. ‘Too stuck,’ she said, ‘too lingering, too brooding. There’s no rhyme or reason for it, daughter. It’s imaginary – that’s its provenance, meaning it has no provenance.’ ‘I see,’ I said, which of course, regarding the mystery and signature of the ten-minute area, I did not. And now here I was, walking through it, initially mindful of sky and of our teacher, of her words on light and dark and our automatic response of ‘Dark! We’ll have the dark please!’ As for the Nazi bomb, most of the wreckage had by this point been cleared. The ground was still bumpy, not yet flattened, with the site where the church had stood probably not to be turned into a carpark in the way other bombed places here usually ended as carparks. The historical and inexplicable desolation of this ten-minute area would put paid to any possible desire on the part of anybody to come and park their car here.

  There were a few smaller bits of broken masonry still, and they were to be stepped over, skirted around, which was what I was doing as I made my way through and on towards my next landmark. Glancing up towards it, towards the graveyard, I noticed for the first time trees within it, which brought me back to the sky having earlier been green. But if green can be up there, I wondered, or sometimes up there, does not that mean the ground, also at times, can be blue? This had me glancing to the ground and this time I saw that there was something on it. Lying to the side amidst the uncleared rubble was a decapitated, still furry, matted-furry, little cat’s head. The face was turned to the ground, the ground here consisting of bombed-up concrete. My first impression was that of a child’s ball, some toy, a play-moneybag pretending to be a real moneybag, with animal-like ears and fur and whiskers. But it was a cat, the head of a cat, one that had been alive up until that explosion. Something had died then, I realised, in that bomb from long ago after all.

  *

  Cats are not adoring like dogs. They don’t care. They can never be relied upon to shore up a human ego. They go their way, do their thing, are not subservient and will never apologise. No one has ever come across a cat apologising and if a cat did, it would patently be obvious it was not being sincere. As for dead cats – as in the deliberate killing of cats, killing them as a matter of course – I have come across that many times. The days of my childhood was when I would come across it, during the time cats were vermin, subversive, witch-like, the left hand, bad luck, feminine – though no one ever came out and levelled the feminine except during drunkenness with the drunkenness – should violence then ensue towards some hapless female – later being blamed for the cause. Men and boys killed the cats, or at least in default of killing them, kicked them or catapulted them with stones on passing. It was one of those things that happened, so you didn’t mention the occasions when you happened to come across a dead cat. As for myself, I did not kill cats, did not want to be around either, the killing of them. So conditioned was I, however, by those times, by a learned revulsion, that I feared to come across one that was living even more than seeing one that was dead. I would have dreaded the contact, would have screamed myself silly to have touched one. Lots of cats then, years ago, dead. Dogs, on the other hand, were in abundance and absolutely they were okay. Dogs were sturdy, loyal, feudal, good for man’s account of himself and with a slavish need to be obedient to someone. Acceptable therefore. To be proud of. To be viewed as vicious, as protective and everybody had on
e but that didn’t save them either, because one night nearly all of them, bar two of them, got killed as well. They got killed once, the dead dogs, all at once, and this great canicide, as opposed to the casual, everyday felicide, also took place in my childhood, took place too, in a macabre, spectacular fashion when the soldiery from ‘over the water’ slit the district’s dogs’ throats in the middle of one night. They left the dead bodies in a giant heap, strategically placed at the top of one of the entries, those same entries where usually the milkcrates of ragged-up petrol bombs would be stacked for the next district riot that would take place at some point during that same day. Everybody knew it had been the soldiers, that it had been a statement by them to teach us, the natives, a lesson, to announce they could deal with our dogs, could overcome our dogs barking and snarling and warning renouncers of their presence. Our dogs though, had never been just about that.

  It had been for the benefit of all of us that they should bark and snarl and be alarm dogs, not just for the benefit of the renouncers. By doing so, our dogs alerted everyone, particularly all boys and men – young men, older men, renouncers, non-renouncers – for males got it worse – to the presence of those soldiers, who’d arrive in saturated numbers in their armoured cars and vehicles from which they’d leap out and patrol with heightened suspicion all our streets around. Everyone appreciated the early warning system the dogs offered owing to the few moments’ leeway it afforded, because in that manner easier it was, usually, to get oneself out of their way. It wasn’t agreeable to go out your door otherwise, and to be stopped on the street and, outnumbered and at gunpoint, ordered to answer questions, to spread against a wall, to be searched against that wall – beside the entries, the tops of those entries – to stay put in that exact search position for as long as those soldiers thought appropriate; not agreeable either, to be smirked at by these grown men with their guns, should you – the wife, the sister, the mother, the daughter – come out your door to bear witness to what was being done to your son, your brother, your husband or your father. Especially was it not agreeable when it was made clear that your son or your brother or your husband or your father would stay put against that wall for as long as you remained there, being witness to what was going on. So do you continue? Do you stand strong? Do you bear witness, even if, in the process, you cause more suffering and prolonged humiliation for your son or your brother or your husband or your father? Or do you go away, back inside, abandoning your son or your brother or your husband or your father to these people? If not that, then it couldn’t possibly be agreeable to any woman coming out her door to have the drip-drip effect of sexual comments made to her, goaded by those lewdsters of the very bad remark. ‘Your boot,’ they’d say. ‘Your box,’ they’d say. ‘Your suitability for doxiness.’ Then, ‘What we’d do to your face if …’ or something like that, and again with their guns and barely contained, often uncontained, emotions, spilling out over the brim. Naturally – or maybe not naturally but understandably – it wouldn’t be untoward for the girl or the woman on the receiving end of this language to think, if a renouncer-sniper from some upstairs window takes your head off now with a rifle-shot, soldier, not only would your passing not chagrin me, I think it would be a pleasant, mentally relieving, charming, karmic thing. So this was hatred. It was great hatred, the great Seventies hatred. One must set aside too, the misleading and cumbersome inadequacy of the political problems, and all rationalisations and choice conclusions about the political problems, in order appropriately to gauge the weight of this hatred. As someone, a very ordinary person from ‘over the road’, once said on TV, succinctly too, because he wanted to kill every person of my religion in my area – which meant everybody in my area – in retaliation for some renouncer-of-the-state from my area walking over the road and bombing to death many people of his religion in his area, ‘It’s amazing the feelings that are in you.’ And he was right. It is amazing, no matter it may not be yourself who pulls the trigger in the end.