Milkman

by Anna Burns

  She ended this homily with her usual, ‘Mark my words, you think you’re having this cake and eating it, believing this is what brings you alive, that ordinary life is boring, that the rest of us are boring, but the truth will cut across your life, wee girl, whether you want it to or not. There’s nothing wrong with being ordinary, with marrying an ordinary man, with carrying out life’s ordinary duties. But I see you’re hypnotised by the flashiness, blinded by the ornament, by money, by subcultures, by being taken in, by your very own youth, your immaturity. But it’ll end badly,’ she said. ‘You’ll come a shell, moulded by him, controlled by him, emptied, leached of all your strength and your animating spirit. You’ll be lost, will lose yourself, will slide down into evil. And as for all that vague something of what he did, of what he does, all that – Now what was it? What was that vague something, all that something of vagueness that in his paramilitary lifestyle he gets up to? – you won’t remember. Deliberately you’ll misremember and it’s strange I didn’t see this till now, but the more I encounter you as an adult, the more like your father in his moods and psychologicals, in his belief in nothing, you also, daughter, in your attraction for the shadows, seem to be.’

  So that was that. That was me told. And no longer was I a vile old spinster refusing to get married, but now most definitely an unconnected, unbonded loose woman, but her words, insulting and disdaining, came not from her daughter’s ill-working of creative raw material, but from her own ill-working of creative raw material; relaying to me too, the latest rumour of me and the milkman whilst managing to perpetuate it on at the same time. As with the milkman – as with all of them – here again was someone who knew the answers so wasn’t asking questions, wasn’t interested either, in how I might respond. Not that anymore I would respond or be anxious to explain to her that still I was not the milkman’s. With that ‘liar!’ insult still stinging me from last time, and doubtless my silence still rankling her from last time, simply she’d throw the words out and I’d refuse to admit their impact. They were though, having an impact, as were the differences I’d also started to perceive in the district’s attitude towards myself. Not just from the gossips of the area either, attending to, then furthering on their stories and their updating of their stories. It was that the local paramilitary groupies were also now paying attention. It was they who next decided to call.

  It happened one evening when six approached me in the toilets of the district’s most popular drinking-club. They surrounded me and regarded my face in the glass. One asked if I’d like a piece of her chewing gum. Another offered me to try out her lipstick. Yet another passed over her Estée Lauder. And they were friendly, or pretending to be friendly and I accepted this friendship or overture of pretend-friendship for no other reason than to buy time because I was afraid.

  ‘I’d always have a tough guy,’ said the oldest-looking, the one who’d handed over the perfume. She was at the sink beside me, talking to my reflection, before transferring her gaze over to herself. She looked at her cleavage. Seemed pleased. Adjusted it. Re-adjusted it. Seemed more pleased. ‘A dangerous man,’ she said. ‘Masculine. Very. Has to be. Love that sort of thing.’ As she invited my reflection to agree another interrupted. ‘But that searching for the extreme, the one-way ticket, no change of mind, no walk-away an option, I mean all that life and death and heroism,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget that.’ ‘It’s always a dice game,’ said a third. ‘Has to be, because no matter the rehearsal, the going-over of points, everybody knows he could have an off day, with that off day spelling his last day, but still …’ – here she left her sentence hanging, then – ‘The average man,’ said another, ‘cannot do that. Not even the average renouncer.’ ‘Yes, and you’re always a little afraid, aren’t you?’ came someone from the back. ‘A little anxious, that you’re living your last hours with him, that if a mission goes wrong – it’s boom! it’s bang! it’s too bad! – he falls, he dies or he faces life imprisonment. It’s like you have to get into training for it, have to stay motivated for it’ which was when I learned what motivation, in paramilitary groupie terms, meant. ‘Let him know how much he means to you,’ they said. ‘Look good. Look classy. Always dresses. No trousers. High heels, mind – and jewellery. Never let him down. Never go to the bar yourself. Never get on the dancefloor with another fella or find yourself alone with a guy on the edge of flirtation. Never consider another relationship, not even a maybe-relationship. Honour him. Do him proud. Don’t be loud. Don’t spill beans and don’t ask questions. Appreciate,’ they said and on they went, instructing, because I came to realise this was what it was, instructing. With these women, in these toilets, I was being handed the hangers-on welcome pack.

  Before I could formulate an answer, or know in the moment how to formulate an answer, they were back to the risk, to the appeal, to why it was all worth it. ‘That buzz,’ they said. ‘The deference, the entourage. All that confident, fantastic, elemental male presence. It’s a force of nature. It’s that they take control, they keep control, they have everybody wrapped around their fingers.’ Listening to these women, I learned that not only was the average man incapable of being a renouncer, but apparently the average woman wasn’t up either, to being the woman of a renouncer. ‘Wouldn’t be able to stand it,’ they said. ‘Would long for that lifestyle but be too repressed for it – far, far too fearful of it. The common woman,’ they said, ‘nice, ordinary, boring – she can’t have that.’ ‘She loves dully,’ they went on. ‘Takes no gamble, is terrified of risk, fills her life with timid tasks and mundane men, not men of high calibre, of the high-wire, commanding the tumultuous, the unpredictable. These women live the secure, safe bubble, the nine-to-five, decent bubble. But who wants sleepy bubbles when you can have the excitant of the power, the stimulus of control, even of the cruelty. All that gradual, cunning, imperceptible advancement. Don’t you just love,’ they said, ‘the sudden erotic alarm?’

  So ma was wrong, terribly wrong, because listening to these women, these strange, self-satisfied women, it was clear to me that everything she’d warned of their turning of the blind eye, of their vagueness, of their blocking from consciousness of all the dark deeds committed by their lovers, seemed instead to be the very requirements that were attracting these women on. Not a case of being unable to face reality. More a case, I’d say, of getting out the magnifying glass and having a good gawp at it. And for that much-touted woman – she who misreads the bad boys, who mistakes the bad boy for the good boy and strives to tame and transform some socially misunderstood man who hadn’t really meant all that mayhem – it was obvious these women weren’t that woman. Here were females who did love the sound of breaking glass.

  They said my name then, my first name, thereby crossing over and shunning the interface. And there I was, in the middle of them – one of them – even though so far I hadn’t said a word. That wasn’t how it would look, of course, to anyone coming into these toilets and encountering us. And girls were coming in and they were encountering us – glancing towards us, then quickly glancing away. That was what I used to do, who I used to be, whenever I’d come across these groupies, or any groupies, in this club, in other clubs, in these selfsame toilets or anywhere in the areas. I’d look, look away, turn away, because this type, they seemed to me quite mad. It was that I considered them alien, that they were creatures of another planet operating in currents not at all comprehensible. Not only were they not me, but firmly I had decided they were very far below me. That wasn’t only my opinion because, had they not been sexual attachments to the district’s great hero paramilitaries, long ago they would have been ostracised as more of our district’s beyond-the-pales. Omens of danger. Holders of strange passions, especially sexually drugged-to-the-eyeball passions. I was in no doubt their lifestyle could be nothing but anathema to me. At eighteen, however, I was never going to admit that, regarding sex, there was an awful lot I didn’t understand about it. These women – through their appearance, their words, the very way they moved t
heir bodies – also liking to be watched moving and conducting those bodies – were threatening to present sex to me as something unstructured, something uncontrollable, but could I not be older than eighteen before the realisation of the confusion of the massive subtext of sex and the contraries of sex should come upon me and uncertain me? Could I not remain at ‘been there, done that, having it with maybe-boyfriend so know all there is to know about it’, no matter that, given my so far tidy and limited sexual experience with maybe-boyfriend, I knew next to nothing about it? Surely at eighteen, I ought to have been allowed to think for a little longer that I did.

  So I wasn’t ready for that, to admit I might be on some threshold, about to glimpse that again – just as with the political problems here and my maybe-relationship with maybe-boyfriend – I was coming up against the ambivalences in life. As these women spoke on – of their behaviours, their carnality, of pain being arousing so that they trained themselves not to resist, so that always they were going around in pleasure, so that always pain all the time was pleasure; also of being in toils, in trance, unable to act voluntarily; racing hearts, they said, skin ripples, permanent states of arousal – it got to the point where my master control couldn’t cope any longer and just as with third brother-in-law whenever he would get into an overload of exercise talk, I stanched all openings to block them off. Eventually they dropped this enthralment talk and moved on to ‘You have lovely hair’ which startled me and which wasn’t true because I didn’t. Absolutely I didn’t. But they said it again, adding this time that my hair was just like Virginia Mayo’s or even like Kim Novak’s. The patent falseness of this did not put them off. Now it was, ‘You look like Joan Bennett in that film Woman in the Window,’ and no, again, I didn’t. But they carried on, paying me compliments, including me as one of them, attempting to get in with me. This told me that in their eyes I must now be his. If not yet his, then their inside information, their barometer, even just their sentient understanding of these matters must have indicated to them that before long I was going to be his. They were surrounding me and instructing me, not as rivals but as confidantes, suivantes, wanting to know where in the hierarchy they might stand with me. Hence that constant assurance that I was every inch the lick and spittle of whichever film noir star they were estimating I would most prefer to be.

  And now it was my cheekbones. They were just like Ida Lupino’s. Me and Gloria Grahame were something. And Veronica Lake and me. And Jane Greer and me. And Lizabeth Scott and me. And Ann Todd and me and Gene Tierney and Jean Simmons and Alida Valli and they were like wee girls, dressing up as movie stars, as femmes fatales, with myself now invited to play along. ‘We should sit together,’ they said. ‘You come and sit with us. Anytime you like, leave those drinking-friends you’re with and come and sit with us.’ Then they left but not before, ‘Here – but not till you’re indoors.’ It was a pill. A shiny black one. Plump. Tiny, with a tinier white dot right in the middle of it. They extended this to me and my hand opened and received it, as if expecting it. More than anything, it was as if I’d fallen into the very person, according to everybody, I was now supposed to be.

  It seemed though, that before that evening of the groupie bonding session in the toilets of the district’s most popular drinking-club, also before realising which powerful renouncer had set his stalker-sights upon me, Somebody McSomebody – my amateur stalker – must have heard I was aspiring to paramilitary groupiedom and so thought to chance his arm with his new romance-advancement plan. This new plan was part of his second attempt to come at me after that first time when he’d been rejected by me. This time he was going all-out in his wooing in the hope that when he revealed his true self to me – given too, I was ambitious of falling in love, not with any auld renouncer but with the utmost, super-eminent of renouncers – that I would think, Christ! One of those guys! Yes please, I’ll have that. Up until this point, Somebody McSomebody had been known about the area as a fervent supporter of the renouncers and certainly he came from an entrenched renouncer family. After being the rabid type for a while, however, he fell into that other category, the one of thinking himself a renouncer which meant, he implied when he made this second move on me, that I’d made a mistake in rejecting him first time. He said that although he’d come out with a lot of stalk-talk on that occasion in response to my rejection of him, he hadn’t meant all that ‘just you wait, filthy cat, you’re going to die’. He said he hoped I hadn’t taken it in the wrong vein but instead had known really, had accepted his words really, as expressive of his natural desire for my company. And now, after some thought, he had decided, he said, that the time had come to trust me with the most secret information of his life. This was when he said he was a renouncer-of-the-state, a true patriot, one of those heroes humbly willing to lay down his life, to sacrifice everything for the movement, for the cause, for the country. He was convinced, I could see, that this time round his words would produce quite the opposite effect upon me – as in favourable, as in advantageous – especially as I’d had two brothers in the renouncers myself. Contrary to the grapevine, however, and to all those gossipy unmentionables of supposedly knowing who was a renouncer in the area and who wasn’t a renouncer, I hadn’t known two of my brothers were renouncers, not until the funeral of one of them when the coffin got draped in that flag ‘from over the border’, with the cortege then making its way, not to the commoners’ plot of the usual place, but to the renouncers’ plot of the usual place, where three of them in uniform appeared speedily out of nowhere and fired a volley of shots over his grave. That came as a surprise, I mean to me, and a further surprise was later, when I enquired of others about this aspect of the brothers. This was when I discovered that my mother and all my siblings, including wee sisters, had known that second and fourth brother had been renouncers, though none showed sympathy or patience at my being left out of this knowledge; not surprising, they said, owing to my deliberate obfuscation of reading while walking about. As for McSomebody springing his secret upon me, it was embarrassing. Plain as day too, that he wasn’t a renouncer and that in his gone-mad fever he was taking in nobody but himself. But he carried on. One minute he was an actual paramilitary. Next, he was top adviser having the respectful ears of the utmost of paramilitaries, the point being I should be impressed by his sexy hero-standing and leap into his arms before it was too late. He said, or rather boasted, assuming too, that I was on-message with him, that he had found it imperative to hold the nerve, to keep faith no matter what might happen when you were out on operations. ‘We can have an off day,’ he said, ‘with that off day spelling our last day. The average man, you know, even the average renouncer,’ he shrugged, ‘can’t, when it comes to it, always manage that. We get a little enervated, a little nervous’ – and here he said my name, my first name, forename – ‘because just beforehand,’ he went on, ‘we have this feeling that we’re living our last hours and that there are three options – we’ll live, we’ll die, we’ll be injured, we’ll fail, the state will catch us,’ which was five options. I decided not to cut in to correct, for that would encourage him on. ‘When we’re playing with our life,’ he said, ‘we don’t take anything for granted,’ and here he said my name, my forename, once again. ‘For three or four hours,’ he said, ‘we’re acutely aware that we’re going to be on edge until it’s over. If, at the end, when it is over, when we’ve accomplished our mission, well then,’ he said, ‘that’s when we realise how beautiful life is.’ There was more to this modest boast, along the lines of ‘psychological drive’, ‘nerves of steel’, ‘superhuman endurance’, ‘the unique sacrifice of a normal domestic lifestyle’. Shorn of its context though, and indeed, even in its context, it was another of those earbashings, such as I’d been undergoing of late with various people in this place. ‘For us, as you know,’ he said, continuing to refer to himself, as again he was, in the first person plural, ‘as with our family – though also we think as with your family – the army life is as important as eating, breathin
g and sleeping. But you can’t question us’ – here he put up his hand actually to stop me from questioning him, all the while looking at me pointedly, stressing the bond that linked us together, as if indeed, we were in this together, as if he’d just put himself in my favour by telling me where he stood in the paramilitary-renouncer world. ’Cept he hadn’t. Hadn’t impressed me, hadn’t put himself in favour, wasn’t either, a renouncer. Even if he was, even if all he’d said had managed romantically and sentimentally to have bowled me over, still he was Somebody McSomebody, telling lies as usual in the James Bond mode.