Milkman

by Anna Burns

  Now it was true he did have renouncer links. His father and his eldest sister and his eldest brother – until their deaths – all had been renouncers. But you can’t claim credit, least not forever in a staunchly anti-state, paramilitary stronghold, for what your da did, for what your big sister did, for what your big brother did, if you weren’t forwarding on the cause with actions yourself. You might get leeway for a while, a bit of attention, some respect filtering down because of your blood connections. In particular, visitors to the area, history-seekers, that type, might be impressed and even esteem you because how would they know better? The locals though, did know better, and the thing with these feverishly demented supporters who end up thinking they’re paramilitaries when they’re not paramilitaries is that they distance themselves from everybody with their self-advancing showing-off. That was the true position of McSomebody and it didn’t occur to him – for you could buy a balaclava anywhere – how completely he was transparent. It was said he’d been doing his peddling of superhero freedom-fighting to such a noisy extent now that the renouncers themselves were thinking of having a word. He came to me again then, regardless of my earlier rebuff, and he started in on this new chat-up. He said he could see how someone like me would understand, given my own renouncer-blood credentials, that any day now he might – as in the case of my fourth brother – have to go on the run. It was very annoying. At first I was again polite, wondering what amount of time could be passed before saying, ‘I have to go now.’ It’s that they have this idea, these people, that you’re stupid, that you’re incapable of discerning that they think you stupid. Also, they don’t see you as a person but instead as some cipher, some valueless nobody whose sole objective is to reflect back onto them the glory of themselves. Their compliments and solicitousness too, are creepy. They’re inappropriate, squirmy, calculated, rapacious, particularly as not long afterwards – or not long before as in my case – you know it’s going to be insults, threats of violence, threats of death and variations on stalk-talk. It’s that in their own lack of intelligence they think they see you coming when it’s you who sees them coming, the question then being whether to be kind or to swat them with viciousness out of your way. But I was polite for there had been further deaths in McSomebody’s family, the last two happening only months before. These latest deaths now took that family almost to the number one spot as the one with the most violent deaths to have occurred in it in our area, except my longest friend from primary school came from a family in which everybody in it was now dead from the problems bar her. Poor McSomebody though. It was clear that his relatives’ deaths had affected him, that they had unhinged him, that they must account, at least in part, for his losing grip so spectacularly like that. First his father, then his oldest sister, then his oldest brother, all killed over the last ten years in various renouncer activity. Then there’d been that favourite of the family, the second oldest male, who’d died that time while crossing the road. Two months on from the favourite’s death, there came a day when the fourth boy, still in his nuclear-arms distraction, also died. Pills, drink, a plastic bag over his head and leaving a note which astounded everybody: ‘It is because of Russia and because of America that I am doing this.’ After that, and out of that original family of two parents and twelve siblings, there was only Somebody McSomebody, his now psychologically debilitated mother, his six sisters and the three-year-old boy left. Not my fault though. Not my fault either, that I didn’t find him attractive. You cannot go out with someone just because you feel sorry for them because they’ve had a long run of death in their family; and particularly you cannot do it if, from the outset, from the first moment ever of setting eyes on them, even before any interaction were to take place with them, something about them made you feel sick. Initially I’d feel guilty about the sick bit, but then I stopped feeling guilty when he started in on his death threats after that first rejection of him. Then I became further resolved in not feeling guilty after my second rejection when he spoke of ‘our kindredship’ because of ‘our renouncership’, making mention too of ‘our relationship’ when we didn’t have a relationship, which was when I realised he was treating those two rebuffs as if they’d been acceptances, as if indeed, they had constituted our first dates. As for all this stalk-talk he did, and his surety of our relationship, and the futurity of our coupledom, never could I have imagined that the menacing, deluded, obsessive, deranged types of this world could instantly recover from being menacing, deluded, obsessive and deranged and instead backpedal like no tomorrow into sycophancy and obscurity. That was what happened to McSomebody when news reached him of the interest about to be furthered in me by the milkman, by an individual even McSomebody could grasp was of a far more menacing and stalking capability than him.

  *

  Now, after the cessation of McSomebody’s romance hostilities, here I was, standing beside this milkman, my thoughts easily to become terrified, not helped either by the dead cat’s head I was holding in my hands. All through our exchange I made no reference to this head, nor did I look at it. He too, appeared not to look at it. I knew though, that he was well aware of what it was. Probably had gotten the detail of my picking it up, of walking back, walking forth, all that dithering about beforehand. I was sure too, he’d have clocked my rolling it in the hankies, lifting it, perhaps also mind-reading my intention to carry it up to the usual place. Just as I was saying nothing about it though, he also was saying nothing, as if it were inconsequential to be standing where nobody ever stood at a quarter to ten of a summer’s night beside a teenage girl holding a decapitated head, while chatting to her about taking the life of the boyfriend she was maybe-involved with. No wonder then, given the effect his appearance and words were having upon me, that for a tiny space of time I had forgotten the head was there. Just for a moment, however, because then it reminded me. As the milkman opened his mouth, once again to say something that I knew was going to unnerve me, my hands, which had been tightly cupping the handkerchiefs, now began in a fitful way to fidget the fabric about. One of my fingers came upon a long front tooth and in my confusion I turned this to the long front tooth coming through the fabric upon my finger. And it was at that moment that my spine again moved. It did so in that similar unnatural fashion it had moved in the classroom earlier. After that came the leg shudders, those hamstring currents, all those neural, rippling dreads and permeations around my thighs and backside. Then my mind free-associated back to maggots – to those clumps about the nose, the ear, the eye and now he was talking again. This time he’d moved off the subject of murdering maybe-boyfriend, which had not been spelled out as murder anyway in that everything had been suggested. Much older than me, more assured than me and with no waste of energy despite that languid-seeming indifference, this man was back to offering me lifts in his cars.

  Again, as at our second meeting in the parks & reservoirs, he said he wasn’t happy, that he was concerned, that walking about in this place – downtown, anywhere outside the area – never could be good for me, that it wouldn’t be safe for me. He added he hoped I’d remember it was of no bother to him to lay on transport for me – his own or, when busy, that of someone else. He’d speak to others, he said, about assisting me during those occasions when he himself wouldn’t be available to. And here he spoke again about my work. Not to worry, he said. He’d get me safely to it, then, end of day, I’d be collected from it. I’d be spared the bother of bus-jackings, of those public vehicles getting caught up in every riot and crossfire, plus I’d be spared all other irritations of daily public transport as well. Again, this was suggestion, with his continuing in that friendly, obliging vein, the one of doing me favours, of helping me out by taking my walking away, taking my running away, taking away maybe-boyfriend. There was no overt sense here that he could be transgressing so that again perhaps I was mistaken and he wasn’t transgressing. As he spoke on, however, and no matter my confusion, I knew I must not – as a crucial bottom line – ever get into his cars. It seemed e
verything had microscoped down to that last one threshold, as if to do so, to cross over, to get into one, would signal some ‘end of’ as well as some ‘commencement of’. Meanwhile, I continued to stand there, in this territory of things pretended and not clearly stated, also in this area where individuals shouldn’t just hurry, but should make a point really, of never entering in the first place. But here I was, in it. And there he was, in it, and by this time I’d got so worked up that I’d reached that state of agitated emotion which easily brought on fractures of the psyche – where suddenly I might say ‘No!’ or ‘Fuck off!’ or where I might scream or drop the head or even – who knows? – fire it at him. What did happen though, was that other men appeared.

  They didn’t appear exactly, for it turned out they’d been waiting in this area already. This surprised me because the reputation of this place – for dark arts, for witchcraft stories, sorcery stories, bogeymen rumours, human-sacrifice rumours, scary tales about upside-down crucifixes; regardless too, of whether or not the state security forces with their black ops and their dupery of a general public were thought, least in these present troubles, to be at the bottom of it – meant most people might hurry through the ten-minute area because they had to get from A to B but other than that, would tend to stay away. The fact I myself was in it, talking to a sinister man while holding the head of a cat that had been bombed to death by Nazis was proof, if anything, that the ten-minute area was not for normal things. But there they were and there were four of them. It seemed too, they were coming out of concealment or at least from half-concealment. The first stepped out from a shop recess, the shop being closed now because it was evening and not because it was eerie and should never have been opened. He came from within the shadows and for a brief moment glanced towards us, then he looked away. After that he stood there ignoring us, though again why should he stand there? Two others then emerged from the decayed grounds of each of the derelict churches a little bit up from us and they too, briefly looked our way. Then they stood about – all three standing, expectant, waiting. They were also equi-distant from each other, with the milkman and I down at the other end. At first I had the fearful notion that these were plainclothes men about to ambush and shoot the milkman, which meant most likely they’d shoot me as an associate of this milkman. However, I sensed then that, as well as some current of mental triangulation going on between those three, there was a further connection reaching from them to us. It was that they were together, those three and the milkman. At that point a fourth and final man walked right by me and I jumped for I hadn’t seen or heard him come up. He passed inches from me, without glancing or acknowledging either me or the milkman. This was when I gave another jump, for on turning away from him and back to the milkman, I realised that he had gone as well.

  He had left me, and I didn’t know why that should have shocked me, given that not one thing about this man’s presence had so far reassured me. It was that the instants and the suddens of him had each time caught me unawares. Automatically I looked again behind, townwards, in the direction that the fourth man was taking, to see if I could glance the milkman accompanying him. He couldn’t have gone the other way, for I’d have caught sight of him heading towards those others. At that moment those men then chose also to walk by me and, although they did this individually, I continued to feel the coordination and sense of a shared plan. They were together. All four together. And all five – of this I was sure – were going to converge before long at the same point.

  *

  You’re a mad person.

  Once more this was me talking to myself after the milkman had left me. He and the others, doing that pretence of not being together, had gone off separately in the direction of downtown. I was now alone and had started to walk the opposite way out of this ten-minute area, my thoughts on tacit no-running threats, tacit no-walking threats and especially that tacit carbomb murder threat. Plus there was that cat’s head I was holding in my hands. With the time just off ten o’clock, and with only the tiniest of daylight remaining, there was no way, now, I was going to take it to the usual place. Things were different in the dark, but even if the last of the light should suffice to see me in there, get me down the back and in amongst those ancient stones and grasses; if it should suffice further to enable me to locate a place of repose for the head as initially I had intended, I felt that now, in spite of his having already met me and delivered unto me his latest commands and wishes, still that milkman could make another appearance from behind some Tombstone of Dracula to carry on the next part of his plan. I knew by now, regarding me, that he had a plan, some workable agenda. Therefore I couldn’t be going to the graveyard. Still though, I did want to take the head some place. Deep foliage was what was wanted. Some patch of green, and, of course, such existed in the parks & reservoirs. As with this ten-minute area though, the parks & reservoirs, especially at night, were particularly not to be entered. Why transport a head anyway, from one dark place only to leave it in another dark place? And even if I managed to steel myself to go into the parks & reservoirs, to bury it in some bush or hide it in some undergrowth, those state spies in the bush or in the undergrowth – especially given their sense of conviction of my association now with the milkman – would dig it up immediately to see what it was. So not that green. But there were other greens. The weedy surrounds of the two remaining churches were green, but yet again, they were depressing. Besides, they were still in this ten-minute area. There were gardens, other people’s, because we didn’t have a garden, so how about I choose an overgrown one on my way home and sneak in and leave it there? By now, this development of plan had become overly involved and fretful, meaning I wanted to give up which was not at all the attitude. The attitude, however, had been dissipating bit by bit even before the appearance of the milkman. From the moment I’d left teacher and my classmates in town and had started to walk out of the centre and up towards my own area, I’d felt that constriction, that insidious ‘There’s no point, what’s the use, what’s the point?’ coming over me or building up from within me and it was while in that state of dithering and of discouragement, also of berating myself with, ‘You’re a mad girl, drawing enfeeblement to yourself by your madness by the minute,’ even as I was thinking too, to set the head down, just set it down, anywhere, on the next bit of concrete and leave it, I realised I was already out of the ten-minute area and had walked up as far as the usual place. So I was at the ancient, rusted cemetery gates, and this was when I heard a car behind me. Instantly I had another attack of shudders. Oh no. Him! Walk on. Keep walking. Don’t look round or engage.

  I passed the graveyard entrance just as the vehicle drew alongside me. A voice called out. ‘Hello! Hello there! Are you all right?’ I stopped for it wasn’t the milkman. It was someone else. It was real milkman, for there was a real milkman, one who lived in our area, who did take milk orders, who did have a proper milk lorry and who really did deliver the district’s milk. He was also the man who didn’t love anybody, one of our district’s official beyond-the-pales. He lived around the corner from us and had been judged beyond-the-pale because one day he came back from that country ‘over the water’ where his brother had been dying and realised something was wrong in his house. He lived alone and had gone out his back to get a shovelful of coal and saw someone had been digging. So he dug too, to find out why. After a bit, and very dirty, he came out his door, carrying two armfuls of rifles. These rifles were wrapped in plastic and he carried them into the middle of the street and dumped them on the road. As he did so, he shouted, ‘Bury them in your own backyards, why don’t you!’, then he returned to his house and came out with more. This continued because after the rifles came handguns, dismantled guns, heaps of ammunition and further stockpiles wrapped in cloths and more plastic. Everything got thrown, with him beside himself in temper, continuing to shout until he saw a pile of children who had been playing – up to the point he’d altered their landscape – on the spot where the guns now were. At fir
st the children had jumped to the side and from there had been watching proceedings. When he caught sight of them, the man who didn’t love anybody stopped shouting. Then he resumed shouting, this time at them. ‘Get out of it!’ he yelled. ‘I said out of it!’ and he was so explosive that the children, now targets, did get out of it. A handful though, remained frozen to the spot and began to cry. The man who didn’t love anybody then shouted to his neighbours who had come out their doors to see what the commotion was. He told them to come and get these children, demanding to know too, if any of these good neighbours had been aware of what, during his absence, the renouncers-of-the-state had been up to in his house. So he fought with everybody, this man who didn’t love anybody, this real milkman. He even fought with children. But to draw the distinction: he became known as a beyond-the-pale because he’d dumped arms when everybody knew if you found arms in your house after they’d got in and buried them, you were supposed to lump it and put up with it; and he became known as the man who didn’t love anybody because once, without compunction, without even saying sorry, he had made children cry.

  So he wasn’t popular with the renouncers for digging up their arsenal; not popular with them either, when he voiced dissent over their local rules and regulations; not popular again when he objected to their courts of nuisance and to the rough justice meted out by them whenever we inhabitants didn’t obey their rules and regulations; and whenever he made a fuss over the disappearance of suspected informers, once again, and by the renouncers, he was disliked. Another point about him was that he never got credit from the residents of the area whenever credit was due to him. This would be during times he helped people, which often he did, in spite of his unloving reputation suggesting he did not. This inability of the community to acknowledge his good deeds was because his reputation for general all-round unfriendliness had become so fixed in the district consciousness that it would have taken an enormous explosion of conscious effort to shift that particular bit of hearsay on to the truth. As there was little inclination for re-adjusting even the tiniest of misperceptions here, such conscious mental effort to reach awareness on the part of the community on behalf of real milkman was never going to happen anytime soon. But he did help people. He helped nuclear boy’s ma, who was also the mother of that renouncer-in-fantasy, Somebody McSomebody. On the evening of that day when nuclear boy had suicided, real milkman had gone looking for her, as others in the area had also gone looking for her. She’d gone missing on hearing the news of this latest family death. It was rumoured that just as with the son, she too, had gone off to suicide, but real milkman found her, roaming the streets of another district, distracted, dishevelled, not knowing anybody or even who she was. In spite of bringing her home, and in spite of seeking further help for her from the pious women who were also our medicos of the district, the designation still stood that real milkman was none other than the most horrid of people you could know. I myself didn’t consider him horrid or very cross, or even much beyond-the-pale, that is, considering the other beyond-the-pales in our area. There was tablets girl, then her disconcerting shiny sister, then poor nuclear boy when he’d been alive, then the heavy-handed, preachy issue women. They all seemed far more on the rim than ever had been this man. Probably I viewed things that way because real milkman and my mother had been friends ever since their schooldays, which meant he paid visits to our house on a regular basis in order to see and to catch up with her. He assisted her too, with free milk and extra-fortified dairy, bakery and tinned provision products. And he helped out also with our house’s DIY. He did the plumbing, the painting, the carpentry, even insisting on taking over the electrics from wee sisters. So, no matter his misanthropic ways, or his reputation for such ways, he did possess the characteristic of having a stern concern for people. And now, this man, real milkman, the man beyond-the-pale who was the man who didn’t love anybody, had turned up that evening by the graveyard to help me.