Milkman

by Anna Burns

  First thing that happened was I got those shudders, although they died instantly upon realising this was not the milkman but the other one instead. He was in his lorry and it was a proper milk lorry, also the only vehicle I had ever seen him in. I turned to face him as the handbrake went on. He opened his door and jumped out and came over towards me. Next thing he was beside me and this hadn’t been the first time he’d addressed me but it was the first time he’d said more than the polite, customary few words. Normally these words were ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, or ‘tell your mother I was asking’. Definitely, except for ma, real milkman and I didn’t move in the same circles and even then, apart from living in the same house as her, I didn’t exactly move in ma’s circles, but with them two being friends, it stood to reason I’d run across him at close quarters now and then. This would be on the street, or outside our door, or inside our parlour, where ma would have made special barley bread or one of her other sweetbreads to share with tea with him. Sometimes too, I’d see her in his lorry, being dropped off home from the chapel or bingo or from doing her messages, jumping out of his lorry and laughing as if she were sixteen. So these were the occasions when me and him would meet and we’d greet each other and exchange general nods or ‘hellos’ and now he was asking again if I was all right. He asked if something had happened, if there was anything he could do for me. I nodded, though I’d no idea which question I was nodding in answer to. In truth I had difficulty rationalising what it was I was feeling or even how socially to respond to any question. It seemed I’d just encountered four renouncers – because probably those concealed men had been renouncers – going off to do some deed most likely to make top billing on the news later on. Then there’d been the milkman – probably not Walter Mitty but instead, as everybody said, another renouncer. And now here was real milkman, friend of my mother and one of the designated, outlandish beyond-the-pales. We were standing on the kribbie next to his lorry which was next to the graveyard, and I noticed he looked at the bundle of balled-up handkerchiefs I was holding between us. Then he stopped looking and returned his attention to my face.

  I said, because it came out, ‘I need to go somewhere and leave this or bury it, it’s a cat’s head.’ ‘Right,’ he said as if I’d said, ‘It’s an apple,’ and for that I liked him. I didn’t explain how I’d come to have this head, or its link with the second world war or with the ten-minute area. He said, ‘I’ll take it off you. Will I take it off you?’ And I handed it to him, quite easily, no hesitation, just like that. After I did I said, ‘Don’t throw it away but. Will you not just take it and throw it away but? Don’t wait till I’m gone then dash it in some bin or throw it to the ground somewhere. If you don’t want to do it, to take care of it properly, I mean, then I’ll do it, but please don’t pretend.’ These were many words to come out of me, also true words for there was no excusing of myself here, no asking for permission or for approval. Later I was surprised at my forthrightness in speaking out to a male, to one of my elders, to someone too, with the fiercest reputation for being cross. I knew though, that my emotions had reached critical point over what had happened between me and the milkman, also over holding this head for too long. There was something in this man’s manner that seemed to make talking easy. And in this manner too, he was carrying on. ‘I won’t pretend and I won’t throw it away,’ he said. ‘I want to give it some green,’ I said. ‘The right place is where I want to take it.’ ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Tell you what. I have green. Out my back there’s a patch of green, so how about I put it there, dig a spot and bury it? Does that sound all right with you?’ I nodded then I said, ‘Thanks.’ After that, he stepped to his lorry, reached in at floor level and drew out a green cloth bag and inside were billiards. He emptied these balls out into the deep hold between the lorry-seats, then slipped the head, which was yet in the hankies, into the bag and drew the string at the top. He came back round to me and said, ‘Don’t you worry. You leave it with me. Get in but, for it’s late and I’ll take you home now.’ It seemed, and again I liked this, that this exchange was taking place in that ‘How can we get this done?’ manner, that same manner of maybe-boyfriend, also of teacher, not the prevalent ‘What’s the point, nothing is of use, it’s not gonna make any difference is it?’ and this surprised me. Real milkman, solemn, austere, yet here he was, giving me his time, bringing me hope, listening to me, taking me seriously. He had grasped all, he knew what I meant so that there were none of those enervating and exhausting questions. Yes, a surprise, but he was a surprise and I surprised myself at being able to hand over this burden, then to get in his lorry without worry and to know he could be trusted to be honest and to get the job done. He put the head in the lorry and that was when the camera clicked – one of their cameras, the sound travelling from the first floor of a supposedly empty building just across the road from us and again, as with the milkman that time in the parks & reservoirs, I said nothing about it. Real milkman, however, said, ‘Bloody—’ then he checked himself. ‘Can’t go anywhere but they’re at it,’ he added. ‘Well, they can make of this what they will.’ This attitude again surprised me, and also unexpectedly uplifted me. If he could acknowledge one of the unmentionables, also acknowledge he was unable to do anything to alter this unmentionable, maybe that meant it might be possible for anybody – for me – even in powerlessness, to adopt such an attitude of acknowledgement, of acceptance and detachment too.

  *

  We were driving along, with the bag containing the hankies containing the head placed on top of the billiard balls in that roomy compartment bit of the lorry between us. This was when I heard of the latest death in our area which had taken place that day. It had occurred again in the family of Somebody McSomebody when wee tot, their youngest, fell from their upstairs back bedroom window. Real milkman said that at first it seemed he’d jumped, which was what had been assumed on the grapevine, that the toddler had leapt to his death but that the death hadn’t been deliberate. It was because he’d thought himself Superman, the neighbourhood said. Or Batman. Or Spider-Man. Or one of those other heroes. He was always going about with that red pillowslip pinned to the back of him, shouting, ‘Biff!’, ‘Bash!’, ‘Whamo!’, ‘Bamo!’, ‘Lights out!’, ‘Aarrgh!’. It hadn’t been proved though, said real milkman, that that was how his death in reality had come about. It was being rumoured that way, he said, because that was the thing people invented here because you couldn’t just die here, couldn’t have an ordinary death here, not anymore, not of natural causes, not by accident such as falling out a window, especially not after all the other violent deaths taking place in this district now. It had to be political, he said. Had to be about the border, meaning comprehensible. Failing that, it had to be out-of-the-ordinary, dramatic, something startling, such as thinking oneself a superhero and accidentally jumping to one’s death. People expect that now, he said. So a three-year-old mite, not understanding gravity, or that he was just a wee boy left on his own in the back upstairs room – with his mother also upstairs in the front room but who wasn’t coming out since retreating there in grief, lying on her bed, her mind wandering – made a fatal mistake but not one which proved enough of a reason for someone to die now in the area. Life here, said real milkman, simply has to be lived and died in extremes. It turned out the child had been found in the backyard in the late morning by one of his sisters. There hadn’t been any pillowslip pinned to the back of him either. That day it had been unpinned to be put in the wash.

  I listened to real milkman tell me this, telling also that ma wasn’t at home, that he’d left her recently at the house of Somebody McSomebody, that the other neighbours – the pious women, with their brews and first aid and other top-secret concoctions – were also round at McSomebody’s, all trying to comfort that dead child’s poor ma. Real milkman himself had just come from the morgue and he too, he said, was now heading back to the McSomebodys’. He spoke more on the tragedy then, spoke too, of tragedy in general, its waste, the lack of foresight
, of prevention, of all the ramifications stemming from poverty and these stubborn, entrenched political problems. He went on, mentioning neglect and disadvantage and disfavour and the loss of good opportunities and for a while seemed to go away in his thoughts. When he came back, and I didn’t know if this was by way of association, but he had moved on in his talk to wee sisters, and to me, and to ma.

  ‘Your younger sisters,’ he said. ‘Such bright little girls, such wonderful curiosity and guts and passion and engagement. A natural sense too, they have, of entitlement which as you know in this place is rare. More often it’s the case that keenness and initiative get stifled here, turned to discouragement, twisted too, into darker channels. But it’s that in their nonage they are little girls somewhat wild and uncontained. At times they’re ghoulish,’ he went on, ‘and I’m sure too, they must be a mighty handful for your mother.’ He said that probably they would become more so as the years progressed and they expanded in their thirst for knowledge and for intellectual adventure. He had another think then said, ‘It’s that I believe she might not understand, your dear mother, maybe doesn’t notice their uniqueness, what might be called their genius. And I don’t know why either, their teachers aren’t picking up on it. Are their teachers picking up on it? Have they spoken to your mother about it?’ I thought for a moment then said, ‘I don’t know.’ Then he asked about their school reports and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and in fact, it was ‘I don’t know’ to every question about wee sisters thereafter that he put to me. But truly I didn’t know and how could I be expected to know when these were just wee sisters? They went to school. They read their books. They had discussions and forums and compendia and symposia and comparing and contrasting and exchanges of ideas and what they referred to too, as extra-curricular activities and I didn’t know all they had them on. I had vague notions that their teachers were involved in accounts of this intelligence and talent and precocity. They sent letters and reports to ma. I myself never looked at this correspondence because again, why would I involve myself in school talk to do with wee sisters? I am eighteen, their sibling, not their mother, not their father, not their guardian, so to involve myself in all that would be akin to going on about sunsets and temperatures and false teeth and aches and pains and ‘What are you having for dinner?’ and all those things old people did tend to go on about. Why would I? I think some teachers though, did come to speak to ma. They called her into the school too, because now that I was remembering, it was for special meetings on how to further wee sisters’ something or other that they invited her. ‘Educationese’ I recalled had been mentioned. Or ‘educationalese’. Something like that. They came out to the house too, those teachers, also other educationalese type of people, and they had more discussions and I’m not sure ma herself understood all it was these experts were saying to her, though I did know she’d been meaning to have that letter that subsequently arrived from that child-genius academy interpreted for her by wee sisters only she hadn’t managed to get round to showing it to them yet. As for regular school-term reports, I’m not sure ma read them, or gave account to them, or even wee sisters themselves gave account to them. School reports and certificates here, they didn’t mean much. ‘Not to criticise your mother,’ real milkman was saying, ‘for she’s one fine woman, still a fine woman, a lovely woman, and I know she’s had a hard time what with your father dying and your second brother dying and your second sister— well, you know what happened with your sister. Then there’s your other brother, the fourth one who— but you know what happened with him as well. I think I might ask her about this because there’s great potential here and rightly it should be channelled and firmly directed before another terrible disaster occurs, another waste, another of these tragedies. Such misdirection of energy and enterprise is to be avoided. They need guidance, need to be discerned and attended to. Could take a wrong turn otherwise,’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ because I was trying to be conversational but then something came into my mind as to what he might mean by ‘a wrong turn’. He had said about potentiality and naïveté getting twisted, about lack of experience being put to mistaken ends, to dangerous ends, which of course I took to mean – for what else was there? – bad outcomes stemming from the political problems. And although wee sisters hadn’t shown any inordinate interest in our political problems – not any more, that is, than their interest in phonological places of articulation, or Early Kingdom Egyptology, or the finer points of technical singing, or the state of the universe before it was reduced to order, or the Apotheosis of Heracles, or indeed any of their other many indices and appendices and marginalia and small notes at backs of books and all the rest of it – there was a time a while back when me and the older sisters came in the door and found wee sisters reading the papers from ‘over there’. It was the broadsheet newspapers they were reading and they had a few tabloids from ‘over there’ also. We couldn’t imagine where they’d got them but they had them and at that moment had them spread out in broad view all over the floor. Until that point wee sisters had never looked at these papers, or watched the political news on television, least not watched in any avid way. Instead they’d been going through their Joan of Arc phase. While in it, they let it be known that they were not fond of that country from ‘over the water’, not though, because of the usual legacy of history, and of the power of history that had been built up and passed down and reshaped and elaborated upon over what had taken place involving that country and this country – but because of their very natural support of the French. However, it was also because of the betrayal of Joan that they then turned temporarily against the French, with the dauphin, never a favourite to start with, so unpopular with wee sisters to the point that, had anyone in my area been inclined to put in a word for him, they’d have been wise not to have done so within earshot of the girls. So that was how disliked too, the French had become, so that any age-old antipathy between the country ‘over the water’ and this country hardly got a look in. But my older sisters and I came in that day and we found them, no longer deep in Joan but now at those papers. ‘Wee sisters!’ we cried. ‘Where’d you get these? What on earth is going on?’ ‘Hush, older sisters,’ they said. ‘We’re busy. We’re trying to understand their viewpoint.’ After that they returned to poring over their broadsheets and tabloids while we, their elder sisters, disbelievingly looked on. Then we looked at each other – me, third sister, second sister and first sister. Trying to understand their viewpoint! What obscurity would wee sisters utter next? As for their remark, it was of the type that instantly could taint any person in our area. Did ‘INFORMANTS BEWARE’ mean nothing to those three at all? In our wisdom we tried to point this out, saying that by associating themselves with disallowed paraphernalia they were laying themselves open to accusations of traitorship. But they didn’t heed us, hardly chose to attend us, had forgotten us, so deep were they in those papers from ‘over there’. It was clear to us, their elders, that they’d no care for any motive a passing neighbour, chancing to look in our window, might decide to put upon this matter. Third sister leapt to the window and drew the curtains, which annoyed wee sisters, so one of them sprang up and switched the overhead light on. Another clicked on ma’s two favourite old-time glass lamps and the third got out their three little flashlights. But where’d they get those papers? Had anybody from our area caught sight of them procuring those papers? And so it was on that day that we elder speculated as to whether ages six, seven and eight might not be considered too young by the paramilitaries to punish in the usual manner those thought to be informers, or whether wee sisters might be rebuked only, then ordered by the renouncers to leave off those periodicals and to return instead to Bamber the Pig like little children everywhere else. So was this what real milkman was referring to when he spoke of naïveté, of misdirected keenness, of an ongoing sense of adventure being subverted? I didn’t dare ask. Instead, and because he’d grown silent again, I offered that bit about their teachers getting involved and the talk that wa
s made about exceptional learning establishments and in saying this I felt some relief that after his helping me with the cat, I could contribute something of reassurance to him as well. But he wasn’t reassured. He expressed again his worry about wee sisters and about ma having to cope unaided which was when it struck me that he mightn’t have been ruminating out loud but instead could have been dropping hints for me to pick up on. Was he imputing that the guidance and direction of wee sisters should be down to me, their sister, as well as down to ma? Had I, along with ma, to become involved, to be responsible, to take a hand in their orientation and upbringing? At this I felt dismay. If I had to co-manage wee sisters, definitely I wouldn’t be able to move in with maybe-boyfriend. Again this surprised me that even now, ever since he’d asked me and I’d said no, still I was playing out the scenario of how it would be if I were to move in with maybe-boyfriend. Hopes I hadn’t known I’d entertained were being threatened because of my having to become an apprentice-mother along with my mother. Real milkman, meanwhile, had moved to a new subject. That was the one of the milkman and me. He didn’t say outrightly, ‘Are you having an affair with that man who is two hundred years old?’ Instead he intimated that he was aware there might be an encroachment upon me by some person of paramilitary intent, also one of might and influence in the area. He asked that if that were so, would I feel strong enough to be able to stand up and speak out? As he spoke, I felt myself tighten, whereas until that point with real milkman I’d felt increasingly relaxed or at least not so very anxious. The shudders had stopped. The unnatural movements had stopped. But all returned, as did my confusion, which was when I noticed he was confused as well. He began to apologise for blundering into territory that was not his business. Then he brought up the issue women of our area, mentioning that indeed, they seemed to know an awful lot about gender history and sexual politics. ‘I regret to say,’ he said, ‘that I myself don’t understand mickle-much of these up-and-coming women’s topics. Given though, they have all this expertise, and because it’s well into their chosen territory, might you, if you feel unsafe speaking out on the matter generally in the area, go and have a wee word with them instead?’