by Anna Burns
Maybe-boyfriend, now enlightened, or thinking he was enlightened, said that sometimes yes, they happened, that of course they did, but that I must know myself they didn’t always happen, that carbombs, in terms commensurate with the population, hardly ever happened. ‘Most people here don’t get blown up by carbombs,’ he said. ‘Most people here don’t get blown up. Besides, maybe-girlfriend, you can’t not live your life just because somebody someday might kill you.’ He made it sound easy which was proof he hadn’t received the full particulars yet. I didn’t know either, when he would receive them because apart from this encroachment upon me by the milkman, there were those other encroachments upon me by the community. The scandal of this milkman affair had mushroomed to the point where it was now rabid and raging and fast becoming a best-seller and because of it, because of all those compounding violations, I was finding myself more and more circumscribed into an incoherent, debilitated place. Maybe-boyfriend then said who was going to kill him anyway? It wasn’t as if he worked in a defender area. He didn’t even work in a mixed area. ‘Look, love,’ he said. ‘You’re only thinking this because of what happened to your poor sister’s ex-boyfriend. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to everybody’s boyfriend – probably less so too,’ he joked, ‘to maybe-boyfriends.’ Again it sounded easy, as if such a thing, such an outcome, was very far from his view of his world. He tried to touch me then, but I pulled away, then stepped away, right away, from him. Before the milkman, maybe-boyfriend’s touch, those fingers, his hands, had been the best, the most, the absolute of lovely. But now, since the milkman, any part of maybe-boyfriend coming towards me brought up in me mounting bouts of revulsion and a feeling that I might at any moment be sick. He was repulsing me, my own maybe-boyfriend was repulsing me, and even though I did not want to be repulsed and was trying my best not to become aware I was repulsed, I’d find myself blaming him for feeling it and for not being able to reason myself out of it. Instead I’d fling his hand, fling his fingers, push him off, tense up, have stomach pains. I knew too, that this was because of the milkman but I couldn’t figure out how it could be the milkman. In all the small time since he’d set his sights on me and had started in on destroying me, still only that first time in the car had he even looked at me, never either, said anything lewd or mocking or of outright provocation to me. Most especially he hadn’t laid a finger on me. Not one finger. Not once.
As for the community, and my affair with the milkman according to this community, I was now well in it, that being the case whether I was or not. It was put about I had regular engagements with him, rendezvous, intimate ‘dot dot dots’ at various ‘dot dot dot’ places. In particular we frequented our two favourite romance spots which were the parks & reservoirs and the ten-minute area, though also we were partial, it was said, to spending time, just the two of us – and presumably all the people who were spying on us – where the tall grasses grew over the ancient tombstones in the old part of the usual place. Ever so confidently, ever so arrogantly, I stepped into his flashy cars, it was said, for yes, many people had seen me. ‘Picks her up for assignations,’ they said, ‘for their trysts, their lovers’ appointments, and they go to these places.’ ‘When they’re not there,’ it was also said, ‘they’re fostering illicit togethernesses downtown at those risky bars and clubs.’ ‘Already he’s married, you know,’ whispered people and, ‘Already he’s covering her,’ whispered back other people. ‘Well, he is him,’ they said. ‘And as for her, doesn’t she have that leaning of maybe-relationships instead of highly principled, rectitudinous coupledom relationships?’ – which translated meant it wouldn’t be long now before he moved me out of the family home and into some pad for established cinqasepts with him, the pad being located of course up the road in the red-light street. ‘Mark our words,’ said people, and again all this made sense within the context of our intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district. But out of context, away from all that itchiness, the whispering, the passing of notes and where an unhealthy interest in sexual matters existed to the extent of sexual dirt being the most best for general gossip whenever you wanted a rest from political gossip, it would have been difficult to gauge how all these locals were arriving at the most detailed of information regarding me and him that they were. Their creative imaginings would reach my ears slander by gravitational slander. Then there were those other occasions when the more direct line of communication was attempted, such as when they’d chase me down to havoc me with questions, this time up close face-to-face.
My suspiciousness of questions had long existed before the rumour of me and the milkman. When asked one I’d think, who is this person? What’s behind that question? Why are they going all around the houses, thinking they are deceiving me by going all around them? Why, in their supposedly hidden way, are they ‘putting-on’ with hints and pointed comment when I know they’re attempting with this sample testing of my thoughts, opinion and inclination, to elicit a previously intended response from me and dishonestly to catch me in my words? I had noticed – certainly by the end of primary school I had noticed – that often it could be discerned when someone was up to something even when they thought they were concealing they were up to something. Wasn’t either, that some inner or verbal aspect of themselves would be the only thing to give them away. Their true nature also would be revealed by the very contaminated, off-kilter atmosphere in which they chose to surround themselves. This energy field would accompany them as they made their way towards me, whereupon descrying them, my own skin would crawl and the hairs would move up on the back of my neck. It was the contrast between that – all those powerful yet invisible indicators – and the supposedly innocuous, parenthetical manner my neighbours assumed they were presenting to me that most would reveal to me they were not, for whatever reason, coming from the truth. Of course, I might not know why a person was dissembling. Could be that with certain individuals it wasn’t to make game of me, to invoke immoderate emotion in me or to lure me verbally to my detriment. Might have been some personal concern of their own about which vulnerably and humanly they felt a need to keep silent, but on which nonetheless they needed clarification or information from someone else. With gossips and rumour-mongers however – and certainly with our gossips and our super-rumour-mongers – always it came down to scrutiny, to wangling, to listening for leverage, to the dedication public opinion here was invested in conjecture, not only abroad but within the Home Circle front.
So they’d embark on offensives and approach with their questions, but these were not straightforward questions, as in ‘wherefore this?’ or ‘what about that?’ Instead it was ‘So-and-so said’ and ‘It has been said’ and ‘We heard our uncle’s cousin’s brother’s daughter’s friend who doesn’t live in the area anymore said’. Some too, would make mention of the actual word ‘rumour’, as in ‘Rumour says’, before going on to personify rumour, as if it wasn’t they who were launching or perpetuating Rumour themselves. With their seemingly innocent queries, often too, with assertions left hanging, they’d open their mouths in the hope of inciting me – in shock, in fear, in defensive disposition – into opening mine to give some juicy, easily to be expanded-upon response. Before they could utter a single ‘So-and-so said’, however, I’d have picked up on their covertness without betraying I’d picked up on it. The only way though, I knew how to counter them was by doing my own dissembling myself. I would do this in such a way as to get my reaction off the ground as swiftly and unsuspiciously as possible. This would be by feigning ignorance of their intention and giving a continuous ‘I don’t know’ to every probing query they put out. I’d launch my ‘I don’t know’ as the biggest player in my verbal defence repertoire and I’d be prepared to carry on saying it because another thing I’d learned by the end of primary school was that it was best not to open my mouth in the interests of truth except to a trusted few persons, this trusted-few becoming a trusted-fewer as time progressed in primary schoo
l and then I was in secondary school and by that time – age eleven through to sixteen – my trusted-fewer people had declined further so that by age eighteen – the time of me and the milkman as well as of this gossip about me and the milkman – it had got to the point where there was now only one remaining trusted-fewest person left for me to have faith in in all the world. I suspected that if I kept up this curtailing, this cauterising, all the distrust and systematic removal of myself from society, by age twenty it was more than likely I’d be at the stage of no longer opening my mouth to anyone, anywhere, at all.
So ‘I don’t know’ was my three-syllable defence in response to the questions. With it successfully I refused to be evoked, drawn out, shocked into revelation. Instead I minimalised, withheld, subverted thinking, dropped all interaction surplus to requirement which meant they got no public content, no symbolic content, no full-bodiedness, no bloodedness, no passion of the moment, no turn of plot, no sad shade, no angry shade, no panicked shade, no location of anything. Just me, downplayed. Just me, devoid. Just me, uncommingled. This meant that by the end of their round-about goads and their many implied and searching significances, still they had nothing from me and I felt justified in presenting this unfruitfulness to them because it was clear to me by this time that in life some people did not deserve the truth. They weren’t good enough for the truth. Not respectable enough to receive it. To lie or to omit therefore was fine. It was fine. That was what I thought. Then came complications. I had been aware that in the delivery of my ‘I don’t know’ I dared not show I was not as unintelligent of their codespeak, their eye signals, their attempt to traduce me, as clearly they were assuming. Knew too, I had to speak my three syllables in the most non-confrontational manner whilst concealing a crucial but unacknowledged preservation of distance between us at the same time. To have called them out otherwise – in this time, in this place – would have been tantamount to abandoning myself to mob-handedness or to some other intense despitefulness and I didn’t feel strong enough to engage with that and with the repercussions of that. So it was a delicate and ongoing process not to reveal I had their measure or that my ‘I don’t know’ really meant ‘Heel! Home! Get out! Get out!’ which meant I had to call upon a back-up manoeuvre. This was one from my non-verbal defence repertoire and I did call upon it, this manoeuvre at once stepping up to the mark. It didn’t, however, do just that. Initially it came into its own and proved itself of invaluable assistance to me. Then, and outside of expectation, and without the least warning, it began to take over proceedings, overturning my ‘I don’t know’ as first initiative and implementing alternate strategies which belatedly I realised were incidental against my gossipy neighbours and more in the main against myself. I was attacking myself and it was my face, the expression on my face – one I had intended as temporary, as provisional, which surely and truly I believed could be nothing but provisional. I’d assumed that how my face looked, how I was making it look, how I presented it outwardly, was down to me, under the control of me, the ‘I am’ deep in the council chamber. I thought this real me was in there, in charge, hidden from them but directing from the undergrowth. Thought too, I’d chosen a subordinate to assist me and not some rebel to turn tables and override me. That though, was what happened and it happened first with the face.
It got stuck. My careful rendering of ‘I don’t know’, combined with a terminal face – nothing in it, nothing behind it, a well-turned-out nothing – I thought would bemuse the gossips, confound them, run counter to their expectations, so that eventually, frustrated, wearied, they’d call a halt to their persecutions, with everybody giving up and going home. I’d hoped the sheer nullity of me would lead them to doubt their inventions and their convictions, even to suspect that a renouncer – especially that Man of Men, Warrior of Warriors, our high-celebrity, local community hero – could ever have developed lust for such an inert, vapid person as myself. Wasn’t even that I thought they’d think me stupid, or stop at thinking me stupid, but that they’d go further and come to the conclusion that I must not understand language in some prevailing, basal, social-code way. It was that I couldn’t grasp what was being asked of me because the whole issue of emotional and psychological communication must be missing for me. I’d strike them as a textbook, some kind of log table – as in correct, but not really right either. This was what I’d hoped they’d think, that my dissembling and use of face would pay off and I’d be free, safe – at least from them if not from the milkman. However, both the milkman and the gossip about me and the milkman turned out to be a rapid learning on the job. I had not plotted for this. There’d been no time to plot and anyway, my mind didn’t work best in plots, in blueprints, in join-the-dots prognostication arrangements. Instead I relied on instinct, on impromptu sidestepping, on a heightened sensitivity to what was out there for my reaction rather than some cold-headed, pre-planned military precision for my reaction. Belatedly though, I realised that this must be as with informers here. At first they play into the hands of their police handlers then, by their subsequent and supposed stance of ‘I’m not an informer so don’t be thinking me an informer because I’m not an informer’ they play into the hands of the renouncers – I too, was beginning to lose my power of reason, my ability to see obvious connections and to retain even the most elementary sense of how to survive in this place. I can see now, of course, that no matter what I would have done or could have done, those gossips wouldn’t have stopped, never would they have ceased and gone away, not until the man himself had gone away, after having me and had done with me. At the time though, I said my three words and I displayed my depersonalisation and did succeed in puzzling them. As a result, they became slovenly in method, intemperate with impatience, revealing ever more their true natures in their push to make me make sense. Never did it occur to them that my powers of acuity and deception might have exceeded their own powers of acuity and deception. People can be extraordinarily slipshod whenever already they have made up their minds. When it came to it, although I didn’t betray I was emotionally or intellectually charged, that didn’t mean I thought I was not so. Of course I believed myself sentient. Of course I knew I was angry. Of course I knew I was frightened, that I had no doubt my body, to me, was brimming with a natural reaction. At first I could feel this reaction which confirmed I was alive, that I was in there, inside my body, experiencing this under-the-surface turbulence. Thing was though, before I’d gained the understanding of what was happening, my seemingly flattened approach to life became less a pretence and more and more real as time went on. At first an emotional numbness set in. Then my head, which initially had reassured with, ‘Excellent. Well done. Successfully am I fooling them in that they do not know who I am or what I’m thinking or what I’m feeling,’ now began itself to doubt I was even there. ‘Just a minute,’ it said. ‘Where is our reaction? We were having a privately expressed reaction but now we’re not having it. Where is it?’ Thus my feelings stopped expressing. Then they stopped existing. And now this numbance from nowhere had come so far on in its development that along with others in the area finding me inaccessible, I, too, came to find me inaccessible. My inner world, it seemed, had gone away.
Physically too, it got tiring, all that distrust and push-pull, the sniper-open-fire, the countersniper-return-fire, the sidestepping and twisting, with both me and my community appearing to freewheel our way to some final interface. Just as with the milkman, at the end of the day at home when I’d do my checking under the bed, behind the door, in the wardrobe and so on to see if he was in there, or under it, or behind it; checking curtains too, that they were firmly closed, that they weren’t concealing him this side of the glass or that side of the glass, I realised things had reached the point where I was now checking to see if the community was concealing itself in those tucked-away places too. The extraordinary amount of energy I had on these people – as in trying to avoid them – meant, of course, I was attracting them, but I didn’t understand the way of fixated ener
gy then. It took its toll though, all that darkness and mutual games-playing, bringing with it the concomitant that even though the whole meat of my dissembling had been to keep separate by non-participation with them, here I was, making common cause with them. Too late I realised that all the time I’d been an active player, a contributing element, a major componential in the downfall of myself.
As for the gossips, and their response to my response, I knew I was confounding them as I had intended to confound them, even if I hadn’t intended confounding myself as well. It transpired though, that they didn’t care for confoundment and complained that my demeanour was improper, that it was resistant to ordinary treatment, that it was against the common weal, that I was almost-inordinately blank, almost-lifeless, almost-sterile, almost-counter-intuitive which was not and couldn’t ever be, they said, normal for a person on this earth ceaselessly to be. As for their use of ‘almost’ – almost-inordinately blank, almost-lifeless and so on – that of course, on my part had been meant. Although I’d said it was imperative to present myself as blank and empty, what I meant was almost-blank and almost-empty. This was because preciseness and clean-cut methods might work perfectly and give a certain bromidic satisfaction on paper, but they wouldn’t do at all, or fool anybody for a second, in real life. Such meticulousness of planning smacked of aforethought, and obvious aforethought in this community – especially if you were trying to dupe it – was not a good thing. Unless you were dealing with the immensely stupid which I wasn’t, it was best to muss things up, to crease things, to leave tea-stains, to place a small but partial muddy footprint not exactly in the middle of the issue but slightly to the side of, and hopefully suggestive of, an incidental to the issue. So that part worked. But they said I was ungenerous in my facial expression, stressing ‘expression’ as in singular, as in, I only seemed to have one. Near-expressionless too, was what they said it was. It was near-arid, near-solitary, near-deprogrammed and again I took hope from their not saying it was inscrutable. Inscrutability here, as with obvious aforethought, as with topsoil thinking, didn’t work. At first they said they weren’t sure if I was displaying an unamiable Marie Antoinetteness by being stuck-up, by thinking I was above them. Then they decided that no, probably this was some eccentricity in keeping with my character, most likely stemming from all that reading of ancient books I did while walking about. They said that overall, my not being one thing or the other was proving a drain on their resources, which didn’t stop them though, from inferring me all the same. A bit eerie, a bit creepy, they decided, adding that they hadn’t noticed before but it was that I resembled in my open-but-closed perspective the ten-minute area. It was as if there was nothing there when there was something there, while at the same time, as if there was something there when there was nothing there. I was a condition athwart, they said, transverse, not social, though they did mitigate this with, ‘But perhaps that’s only one side of her.’ However, as they didn’t believe there was any other side, that just brought them back to the beginning, to me having only the one.