Milkman

by Anna Burns

  So that was the usual procedure for the breaking of the curfews. Regarding the latest to be broken, however, events unfurled in not quite the same way. This was because our seven issue women decided this time to involve themselves in it. As usual, and so many days into the curfew, the normal women had had enough. They went out their doors, amassing in contrariness to ‘RETURN TO YOUR HOMES. THIS IS NOT A GAME. THIS IS THE LAST INTIMATION. OBEY THE SIXTEEN HUNDRED HOUR CURFEW. IF YOU ARE NOT OFF THE STREET IN …’ This time, however, our issue women were among the normal women, with the latter at first thinking nothing of it. Everyone, after all, should be welcomed in standing up to the state. To the exasperation of the traditional women, however, and just as they themselves had once more defeated the curfew and were about to rush home to deal with the potatoes, the women with the issues usurped the purpose of the curfew-break, though later they maintained this was hardly their fault. They said it was the media’s fault, and indeed the media had espied the issue women via their placards in amongst the traditional women carrying their own placards. And even though there were only seven of these issue women compared to the few hundred of traditional women, all the world’s cameras instantly focused upon them. Wasn’t either, that the traditional women craved fame and celebrity, that they wanted to be on TV as well as in all of the world’s newspapers. It was that they didn’t want to be identified as part of protests that weren’t aimed at anything other than breaking the curfew and especially not with the issues these women talked ceaselessly on and on about. The normal women had been expecting, indeed dreading, that the issue women, once started, would take the exposure opportunity to harp on in a broad, encyclopaedic fashion about injustice towards and trespasses against women, not just in the present day but all through the ages, using terminology such as ‘terminology’, ‘case studies show’, ‘incorporates the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalised and legislated antipathy of’ and so on that completely these days these women appeared to be steeped in. There would be the injustices too, thought the traditional women, those big ones, the famous ones, the international ones – witch-burnings, footbindings, suttee, honour killings, female circumcision, rape, child marriages, retributions by stoning, female infanticide, gynaecological practices, maternal mortality, domestic servitude, treatment as chattels, as breeding stock, as possessions, girls going missing, girls being sold and all those other worldwide cultural, tribal and religious socialisations and scandalisations, also the warnings given against things throughout patriarchal history that were seen as uncommon for a woman to do or think or say. But no. Not that, which in the middle of a local curfew-break would have been bad enough. Instead these local issue women spoke of homespun, personal, ordinary things, such as walking down the street and getting hit by a guy, any guy, just as you’re walking by, just for nothing, just because he was in a bad mood and felt like hitting you or because some soldier from ‘over the water’ had given him a hard time so now it was your turn to have the hard time so he hits you. Or having your bum felt as you’re walking along. Or having loud male comment passed upon your physical characteristics as you’re passing. Or getting molested in the snow under the guise of some nice friendly snowfight. Or getting hang-ups in the summer about the summer because if you didn’t wear much clothes because it was warm, if you wore a little dress, that would bring upon you all that general summertime street harassment. Then there was menstruation and how it was seen as an affront to being a person. And pregnancy too, how that couldn’t be helped but all the same, an affront to being a person. Then they spoke about ordinary physical violence as if it wasn’t just normal violence, also speaking of how getting your blouse ripped off in a physical fight, or your brassiere ripped off in a physical fight, or getting felt up in a fight wasn’t violence that was physical so much as it was sexual even if, they said, you were supposed to pretend the bra and the breast had been incidental to the physical violence and not the disguised point of the physical violence, making it sexual violence all along. ‘Those sorts of things,’ said the traditional women. ‘Spoken too,’ they said, ‘in all that language of terminology, and only to be laughed at, for everyone was laughing at them – the cameras, the reporters, even the curfew-makers – and no wonder, with all this linen they insist in taking out in public all the time.’ What mostly got to the traditional women, however, was that anybody in the world watching would think that they, the sensible traditional women, were also these issue women. So frostiness set in, owing to this hijacking by the issue women of the curfew, and that was the state of affairs when the issue women said ‘Over our dead bodies’ to the renouncers. The traditional women, although irritated as one might be by idiots wanting to help wash-up but then clumsily breaking all the dishes, nevertheless felt they couldn’t just let the renouncers do their usual deadly thing.

  Which was why they went to see them, to see the renouncers. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ they said. ‘You can’t kill them. They’re simpletons. Intellectual simpletons. Academe! That’s all they’re fit for.’ They added that to do away with the issue women, no matter how annoying they were, would be tantamount to unjust, inconsiderate and merciless behaviour towards the more fragile of our district; that by doing so, the renouncers would create one of those landmark incidents such as would bring regretful consequences for their reputation in history books later on. Instead the traditionals said the renouncers could leave the issue women to them, that they themselves would see to it, that they’d go downtown and have a private word with that eighth woman. This was said as diplomatically as possible, as if presenting to the renouncers not a directive but a favour or, even better, an urgent request for assistance and, although the renouncers in their turn knew the difference between a directive and a request for assistance, the fact that their survival as an armed guerrilla outfit in a tightly knit, anti-state environment depended upon local support in that environment, meant that they were quite willing to engage in polite brinkmanship too. They appeared to muse aloud, saying that those women being simpletons or not, and without fear or favour, they would not have the movement or its members jeopardised, nor would it be possible to make allowances for the seven should the eighth dare show her face again in the area. In the end, and after some backwards and forwards – and no matter how much the seven, meantime, continued to harangue about taking a bullet to defend their fellow eighth sister which the renouncers ignored and which had the traditional women telling the issue women just to be quiet and stop talking – both the traditionals and the renouncers seemed to close on some deal. Three of our traditionals then paid a visit downtown to the sub-branch eighth woman to explain the situation. ‘We don’t know what you’ve washed our women’s brains with,’ they said. ‘We don’t know if you’re Mata Hari. We don’t care what happens to you. What we don’t want is for us normal women always having to drop our common tasks and daily rounds to prevent our daft women from being taken away by our paramilitaries. So we mean it. Stay out of our area.’ The eighth woman agreed and that spelled the end of any outside issue woman with expansive worldviews coming to visit our totalitarian enclave and those three stories – the shed behaviour, the association with a state agent, and our seven women putting up the backs of not just our traditionals but also our renouncers – were the reasons why I kept away from these women myself. There was too much of risk, and besides, they were challenging the status quo while I was trying to go under the radar of the status quo. Plus they were being carefully reviewed for furthering signs of deterioration. Even if in some measure regarding their issues I might be in agreement, there was no way ever I was going to link with them. That was why I kept quiet in the lorry with real milkman, listening politely until he came to the end of his words.

  This he did easily enough, the words petering out, probably owing to his own bewilderment over what those women stood for. After that, our journeying went silent, though we were now well away from both the ten-minute area and the usual place. We had reached and passed too, all my remaining landm
arks – the police barracks, the house of baking-bread, the holy women’s house, the parks & reservoirs, followed by the interface roads, then the street with the tiny house of third sister and third brother-in-law. After that we reached and stopped outside my front door. ‘You go in now,’ said real milkman. ‘It’s uncommonly dark, a densely dark night, but don’t worry. I’ll take care of what we talked about.’ Here, he indicated the cat’s head. ‘Tell your ma,’ he then said, ‘if I’ve missed her at that poor woman’s when I get round there, that I’ll come and see her tomorrow.’ I nodded and was about to ask again if really and truly he’d bury it and not pretend he was going to bury it, but then I knew I didn’t have to ask that. ‘Thanks,’ I fumbled, and I was tired, suddenly tired, as if drunkenly tired. So exhausted did I feel that hardly could I get that last ‘Thanks’ out. I wanted to say it again, properly, meaning thank you for the cat, for bringing me home, for being ma’s friend, for being a person in the background. I didn’t though. Instead I got out of his lorry while he waited with the engine running. Then, with the sky now pitch black above us, I got out my key and slipped it – for the first time in what felt like ages – easily, without a shake, into the lock.

  FOUR

  That third encounter with the milkman was not the end of the milkman. Further meetings – real ones as well as the communally fabricated ones – also took place. At the real ones, and similar to when we met in the ten-minute area, the milkman didn’t pretend any accidental bumping into me. There was no feigned surprise, no ‘fancy seeing you here’. Instead it was, ‘Ah, there you are,’ plus other familiar expressions, all said casually as if we were fulfilling on some prior arrangement to meet up. These meetings took place everywhere. I’d pop to the local shops, he’d be there. I’d go into town, he’d be there. I’d come out of work, he’d be there. I’d visit the library, he’d be there. Even when I’d go to places and come out of them and he wasn’t there, still it seemed as if he was there. Sometimes too, I’d recognise one of those district spotters and think, that child’s been sent by him to spot me. Probably hadn’t, of course. More likely the infant was doing its normal state-forces and military-insurgency spotting, or maybe it was having a day off from spotting. Thing was, my growing suspicions of almost everyone and everything was proof of how the milkman had got in. He’d infiltrated my psyche and now it was clear those first three meetings had never been the accidental encounters I’d tried to pretend to myself they had been. And now he was appearing, stopping me, standing in the way of me or falling into step beside me, all in the manner of some ordinary meeting up. This felt an injustice. In my memory-lapse moments I’d long for the ordinary things with boys, daydreaming of how nice it would be if maybe-boyfriend and I could meet in one of those regular fashions at the end of our workdays, the way I’d see proper couples meeting at the end of their workdays. The proper boyfriend would finish his work then stroll round to the City Hall to await his proper girlfriend. She too, would finish her work then make her way, in an equally ordinary entitled fashion, roundabouts to the City Hall to meet him. Quite a number of couples did this. I’d see them at it as I was going home from work and I’d know this was part of what made up proper coupledom. In some casual, comfortable, everyday manner they’d meet and do some casual, comfortable, everyday thing. They might go to a fish-and-chip salon for supper and over their meal, chat and exchange news on how their day was going. Although this ordinariness seemed a simple thing, I knew really it was the biggest thing, demonstrating that in proper coupledom there was nothing of the ‘maybe’ going on. Not so with us. My timetable and maybe-boyfriend’s timetable didn’t permit of this kind of intimacy. Really though, it was our ‘maybe’ status that didn’t permit of this kind of intimacy. But now, with these escalating unwanted encounters, and in just that way he’d read my mind regarding the Greek and Roman class, again this milkman was picking up on my secret desires and dreams. But he was the wrong man. And this taking me for granted was without my acquiescence. Still though, he kept appearing, incapable of being averted; sometimes too, I’d see him, or think I’d see him, when downtown with maybe-boyfriend at the bars and clubs. These bars, these clubs, they were uncertain venues, risky venues, few in number too, owing to the political problems. In theory they were places anyone could go to, meaning mixed places, intended for all religions. There were smatterings of other religions apart from the two warring religions but in comparison with the warring ones, those others, whatever they were, didn’t count. Also in these downtown socialising environments state-appointed undercover squads with their spying, their infiltrating, their hidden weapons and sessions of photography, were frequenters, meaning they were okay to go to, these bars, these clubs, for one drink say, or two drinks, but not the sort of place you’d want to end up drunk in. That was why most locals who were ordinary people – such as me and maybe-boyfriend – not up to anything political, might drop in to start with, to have a drink or two, to marvel at the idiocy of tourists, then to move on to more safely acceptable drinking establishments in the staunchly no-go areas elsewhere. In our case it was always his no-go area and not my no-go area because of the danger of ma weighing in with her assessment questions and marriage plans. Lately though, while downtown at the bars and clubs with maybe-boyfriend, I’d find myself glancing around, anxious that the milkman might be in here with us. I thought he might be watching us, spying on us, perhaps taking secret pictures of us, and especially I’d be worried because he’d made his position clear on my dating maybe-boyfriend. Yet here I was, still dating maybe-boyfriend, which didn’t mean, however, I’d dismissed that bomb threat.

  We’d had a fight about it, maybe-boyfriend and me, because the milkman was keeping up the pressure by continuing to highlight it, to make veiled threats, to count down time, to get his point over, basically: stop seeing the young guy or else. Again, he did this by mentioning maybe-boyfriend, then cars, then eldest sister whose husband – the one of her heart she didn’t marry and not the sex-addict gossip whom, out of grief, loss and despair she did marry – had been killed that time by that defender-of-the-state bomb. ‘Carbomb, wasn’t it?’ he’d say again. So it would be maybe-boyfriend. Then cars. Then sister. Then dead lover. Then carbombs. Then it was back to maybe-boyfriend till by the end his words were putting me in mind of Somebody McSomebody and his unrelenting stalk-talk. Eventually he’d get round to maybe-boyfriend and carbombs and the dead man who’d been sister’s lover all in the same sentence, so impossible it was not to grasp what he was dropping big hints about. I did grasp. I drew the allusion, made the underpinnings and next I was picking that fight with maybe-boyfriend. At the time, and given the way my mind was going, it seemed to me this fight was entirely maybe-boyfriend’s fault. Not a case either, this wasn’t, of my not talking anymore, because here I was, talking. Unfortunately though, because of the loose status of our relationship; because he lived the other side of town so wouldn’t have heard the rumour that I was now this milkman’s new love interest; because I was confused and becoming enfeebled, shut down by the tactics of this milkman; and because I was eighteen and had never been demonstrated to in the healthy delivery of thoughts, needs and emotions, my explanations weren’t coherent and nothing I attempted seemed to come out right. Still too, it seemed inconceivable to me that this milkman really and truly would kill maybe-boyfriend. Even I knew though, that people with ideological causes didn’t always act in the name of their cause. Personal slants happened, singular irregularities, subjective interpretations. Crazy people. It wasn’t either, that I thought the milkman couldn’t rig a carbomb because I was fairly sure he could rig a carbomb. It was that still it was hard to believe it would be on that man’s level to do that amount of coveting of me. Ever since he’d started in on this role of getting me ready, of putting me into confusion, edging me to the brink where, defeated, I’d surrender and step voluntarily as his woman into his vehicles, I wasn’t sure anymore what was plausible, what was exaggeration, what might be reality or delusion or paran
oia. Wouldn’t have occurred to me either, that cultivating helplessness and a growing mental dispossession might all be part of this man’s world of stimulation too. But they did happen. Carbombs did happen. Eldest sister was proof of this. She didn’t go to her dead man’s funeral because being married now to somebody else, she wasn’t supposed still to be in love with him. Instead, on the day of the funeral of the man she was in love with, she sat in our house, our mother’s house, not her own house, her face ashen, her eyes enormous, her hand in disbelief up to her mouth. She was staring at the clock, just staring at it, not wanting us near; not crying either, but saying in the most worst voice, ‘Get out. Get out. Get out. Get out’ anytime any of us – even ma – went near. So I had fear for maybe-boyfriend, yet he stood there, not taking it seriously. I said did he have to drive his car and he looked at me and said, ‘I’m a motor mechanic, but even if I wasn’t, maybe-girlfriend, I don’t have to drive my car but I want to drive my car.’ ‘What about …’ I began, ‘things.’ ‘Things?’ said maybe-boyfriend. ‘What things?’ ‘Things …’ I said. ‘You know … strapped to … strapped to …’ ‘Strapped to what?’ ‘… undersides.’ ‘What d’ye mean, maybe-girlfriend?’ Still he waited. ‘What about …’ I began again, ‘… bombs?’