Milkman

by Anna Burns

  As I say, complicated. And all this spelled a serious turning bad for us, for me and maybe-boyfriend – in the way that the rumour about me and the milkman in my area was affecting me, and in the way that the rumour about him and the flag in his area was affecting him. Conjointly, these rumours and their effects upon us were turning bad also for our maybe-relationship. Under stress we were starting to fight and were communicating less with each other than the normal amount of sharing of ourselves that we didn’t tend to communicate before. It was clear to me, that as well as my not telling him about the milkman and the stories doing the rounds in my community about me and the milkman, maybe-boyfriend had his own defensive front of silence, stemming from his stubbornness against me and against everybody, as his own way of shielding and keeping safe himself.

  Bickering and squabbles then started in earnest, with the tension between us mounting as every day went by. Besides my ‘Do you have to drive your car?’ or my growing belief that matters might come to my having to obey the milkman and ditch maybe-boyfriend, I hadn’t been able to work out any other solution to this problem at all. Maybe-boyfriend meanwhile, was getting worked up in his area, surprisingly not so much about the flag issue or the fear of being called to mortal account as an informer over the flag issue. It was that he was more worked up because the renouncers had called and asked for a cut at his door. This was to do with the supercharger, for it had been a subject of gossip for so long now that the latest rumour was that he was keeping the flag but selling the supercharger for a massive sum of money. So they visited him, his local renouncers, and asked for a cut though, of course, when I say ‘asked’, that they ‘asked’, that they wondered if possibly they could have some of the money, I mean they demanded it. If ever you’ve lived in a renouncer-run area, often you’ll have heard, ‘We need to commandeer your such-and-such for the good of the cause and the defence of the area.’ That covered everything – your house, your motorcar, to their expecting a percentage on any discount you might receive on anything – a win at bingo, a Christmas bonus, practically even the saving on a marked-down Paris Bun at the bakery or discount on a tube of Smarties at the corner shop. All cuts and percentages of cuts you were obliged to hand over would, of course, be for the good of the cause and the defence of the area. So the local boys, the district renouncers, wanting cuts, calling for cuts, visiting at all hours at private houses for cuts, went on at this time which was why maybe-boyfriend feared them calling, feared them asking for a percentage of what they thought he’d sold which of course never would he sell because he was who he was and it was a Blower Bentley supercharger, but should he think of selling that supercharger, they said, and they said this – four of them in Halloween masks, three in balaclavas, all with guns, at seven o’clock at night on his doorstep – or should he have already sold it, they said, don’t forget them and the need for proceeds for the defence of the area and the furtherance of the cause. They added also that should it be the case that somewhere in that catastrophe of a house of his was the actual caboodle of a whole Blower Bentley racing vehicle, again they’d have to commandeer it and here they paused and stared out from their masks at maybe-boyfriend which was when he knew, he said, it could only be a matter of time before they changed their mind and decided, why take a cut when they could take the whole lot? They went away then, he said, though before doing so, some guy appeared in the middle of this exchange who wasn’t a renouncer. He had no gun, no mask, was wearing a suit and tie, a stranger to the area. It transpired he had sought permission the day before from the renouncers to enter the district. So he turned up and he apologised right away for his intrusion then, standing there amongst the local boys in their masks with their guns and with maybe-boyfriend on his doorstep, he introduced himself as a public relations man from the downtown arts council, adding that he wondered if it would be possible to stick a plaque on maybe-boyfriend’s outside wall. He revealed this plaque and it announced in swirly gold writing that the international couple had once lived in this residence from nineteen-something until nineteen-something, before they’d gone off to be the most spectacular, internationally famous dancing stars in the world. ‘It would make the area a bit more normal,’ he explained, ‘to have this plaque up, showing that it’s not all doom and gloom and war in our little bit of the world, that we’re not always just about shooting and bombing but that also we’re about the arts and famous people and glamour.’ He didn’t go into detail about who he thought would come into that particular paramilitary stronghold to marvel at the plaque and talk about the arts and famous people and that was because no one would come in. In reality, the only people to see it would be the heavily patrolled and fortified units of the statelet police and the military from ‘over the water’, crashing in as periodically they did to ransack for renouncers, hardly people in the mental state to appreciate the plaque or to absorb that type of culture, or else it would be seen by the locals who wouldn’t be enlightened because already they knew the international couple had once lived there. Maybe-boyfriend said he didn’t want the plaque up, and the renouncers told the arts man that just because he apologised for intruding didn’t mean he was no longer intruding. They added that someone calling himself an arts man – which was after all, some kind of government public-servant official, whether or not he had permission to come in – could just as easily be a spy for the state. At this point the man said, ‘Fair enough, we don’t have to put it up.’ With that, and still buoyant, and with the plaque again under his arm, and after attempting to press his card upon maybe-boyfriend who refused it, he left – but they’d return for it, said maybe-boyfriend, moving swiftly back to his belief that the renouncers were determined to lay their hands on his glorious Blower Bentley supercharger, this thing that he’d won fairly and squarely and loved. So this compounded the strain between us because I couldn’t help being astonished at his losing elementary wisdom, in that the renouncers coming for the supercharger, or for to have a cut of the supercharger, should have been the least thing for him to worry about. Given all the accusation of traitorship that was building up against him, it would be more conceivable that by now they would be calling to his house – in their masks, with their guns, probably also with an assortment of field and burial spades – not for to fetch the supercharger but for to fetch him. After all, many lives have been taken for less obvious betrayals than flying flags considered not to belong here even if you weren’t flying them. So I said, ‘Let them have it, maybe-boyfriend, because you must know anyway, because you can’t not know, that if they want it, there’s no way they’re not going to take it,’ which annoyed him. It was clear to me though, if not to him, there was the bigger issue of his life at stake here. It was as if he’d forgotten his life, all because of his stubbornness and besottedness with cars and his inability sensibly to prioritise and accept that sometimes you have to concede, have to let go, maybe you have to lose face, that some things compared to other things are just not worth sticking up for. But he didn’t see it that way and that became one of the contentions between us so we had a fight over this supercharger in his living room one day. He had got into the habit of moving the thing round his house in the most furtive, obsessive manner in what seemed like every fifteen minutes to half an hour. He was hoping that with so much car about, so much hoarding-upon-hoarding, the renouncers would become perplexed, then wearied, then helpless as little babies, then they’d give up rather than persist in searching and again this astonished me. It seemed further proof of how far his mind was dwindling, his good sense slipping, in that he couldn’t see they wouldn’t instigate a search themselves for the supercharger but instead, with him at gunpoint, they’d demand he go fetch it at once from its hiding place for them. I said this too, but that further annoyed him, so it was in perpetual transit, this supercharger, on the run, currently taken from under the hallway’s back floorboards which recently he’d dug up to make a hiding place for it, even though the night before, right up until breakfast this morning, it had been
behind a false wall in the kitchen he’d made a few nights before that. Now, and only until he’d perfected some double-panelled, deceptive hidey-hole which he envisaged making in one of the upstairs rooms that currently he was working on, it had been placed inside some hollowed-out bit of car that he thought resembled a normal piece of compulsive car-hoarding, but already I could see he was casting around for where he was going to conceal the thing after the double-panelled hidey-hole sojourn planned for it upstairs. Meanwhile, there it was, sitting inside this giant bucket-like car contraption, with other sundry car parts plus a bathtowel, dishcloth and some of his own clothes strewn artfully, as in casually, over the top. The whole thing was standing on the low table between us, with this new ongoing tension also now between us. It was then I accused him once more of driving cars. I had barely got into doing so when he interrupted to accuse me for the first time of being ashamed of him because instead of letting him call to my door for me, I only wanted to meet him out of the way on those isolated interface roads. I retaliated with a charge of him liking cooking, of buying ingredients with chef, of actually liking cooking. Then he reinforced his proof of my being ashamed of him by delineating occasions of late when I’d recoiled from him, adding that on Thursdays I no longer stayed over with him, had become remote too, on our Tuesdays and on our Friday nights into Saturdays and our all day Saturdays into Sundays which of course was the case because of the growing repulsion I was transferring over onto him but which I knew in truth belonged to the milkman. At first I was stumped which gave him time to fit in extra charges of an unattractive numbed state he had observed was creeping over me, that he felt was starting to invade and possess me, saying it was as if I was no longer a living person but one of those jointed wooden dollies that artists use in— which was when I had to stop him because I couldn’t bear for him to finish on my growing numbed condition only to start in on my face. Such became the stresses and strains, the building up of unforgiveness between us. There were other stresses too, when we were in his cars. Again I’d home in on why did he have to drive them, with him saying he was taking me home, that he was going to drive me home to my very door. Then I’d think, he’s turning into the milkman, he’s bossing me about, he’s thinking he can control me, or else I’d think, he’s saying he’s had enough of me, so he’s taking me home because he wants rid of me. ‘Stop the car!’ I’d pronounce. ‘Stop the car on this deserted interface road immediately!’ but he wouldn’t want to stop the car. He’d say he didn’t want me to get out but I’d say I’m walking and he’d say ach don’t walk, which again would betray he was trying to lame me, to fell me, to cripple me, just like the milkman. So there was quite a bit of ‘what’s the matter with you?’, ‘you’ve got complications’, ‘so have you got complications’, ‘what’s the matter with you?’. Then there was ‘I’ll give you a lift’, ‘I don’t want a lift’, ‘I’ll give you a lift’, ‘I don’t want a lift’ and to me this was a ruse by which he was no longer wanting rid of me but was now attempting to overcome his amnesia in order to further on our maybe-relationship, not however, further it into a loving, intimate proper relationship but into one of those stalking, possessive, controlling relationships, attempting to do so too, by bullying me which definitely was not the way a person seeking respectful coupledom should go about this. Meantime he’d say my contrariness in getting out of his car in the middle of a dangerous nowhere was a ruse, an unkind manipulation to torment him and emotionally to blackmail him in order to further on our maybe-relationship in some dark, unworthy way. ‘Underhand,’ he’d stress; also stressing that hitherto he would have considered such conduct below me and at this point I’d be forced to call him ‘almost one year maybe-boyfriend’ instead of the more intimate ‘maybe-boyfriend’ and I’d feel justified in distancing myself from him, though he must have felt similar because he’d refer to me even more formally as ‘almost one year so far maybe-girlfriend’ which meant that if we kept this up, soon we’d be addressing each other in terms most official and impersonal, such as might have been appropriate to the time before we met. That became the way of things, with increasing tension between us as he got wound up in his area and I got ground down in my area. Constantly I was getting things mixed up, back-to-front, blaming him for things that weren’t blameworthy or even if they were, he hadn’t done them, and I think he must have been experiencing likewise given his own conduct and his words in his state of mind towards me. Meanwhile, somewhere at the back of this was the milkman wedged between us; also maybe-boyfriend being killed by this milkman wedged between us. At back of all there was the image of my sister, my first, eldest, perpetually grieving sister, sitting in our house in that awful silence, with that look on her face on her murdered ex-lover’s funeral day.

  *

  Because of these extra meetings – real ones and made-up ones – and because I was continuing not to reveal anything which was now a full-time, batting-away process with me, longest friend from primary school sent word she wanted to meet for a talk. Shunning telephone communication, she sent a message via one of those scouts, those living telegrams most secret of the area, to arrange with me. I told him to tell her I’d meet her in the lounge of the district’s most popular drinking-club at seven o’clock that night. I loved longest friend; at least used to love her, or loved still what I knew of her. It was that hardly now did I know her; hardly ever did I see her. One of the things about her was that her entire family had been killed in the political problems so far. She was the only one left, living alone too – though soon she was to marry – in the dead family house. As regards our friendship, this was the one person I could speak with, the one person I could listen to, totalling in fact the last trusted-fewest person who wouldn’t drain the life out of me that I had left in the world. Like third brother-in-law she didn’t gossip. Politically she kept her eyes and ears open. This was something she accused me deliberately of never doing, which I couldn’t deny because it was true. I backed myself up by reminding her of my hatred of the twentieth century, adding that the unstoppable gossip in the district – also hateful – was more than enough for me. This was not the way of longest friend. Everything meant something to her. Everything was of use to her, or to be made of use, to be stored away for utility at some future opportunistic date. I would say that her information-acquisition, her silence, this stocking-up of hers – not only on factual reality but also on anecdotal and speculated reality – was questionable, also sinister, not a little scary. She would respond by saying this was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Especially she told me this when we met up that night in the upstairs lounge of the district’s most popular drinking-club. In case I didn’t know, she said, I was more than a bit questionable, sinister and scary myself. I thought she meant by my not keeping my ears open, by not accruing information and disseminating local commentary, also because of my lifelong stubbornness in refusing to tell nosey bastards what it wasn’t their business to hear. ‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘It’s not to do with them and anyway, I haven’t done anything.’ ‘Lots of people haven’t done anything,’ said longest friend. ‘And still they’re not doing it, will always be not doing it, in their private coffins down at the usual place.’ ‘But I’m always only minding my business,’ I said, ‘doing my things, walking down the street, just walking down the street and—’ ‘Yeah,’ said friend, ‘there’s that as well.’ I asked her what she meant and she said she’d get on to that in a minute. First there was another point to be got through. Before that point, there was another point which was that ever since the end of our schooldays longest friend and I did not meet often. Whenever we did meet, our encounters were increasingly solemn and less and less cheerful. I can’t remember when last they were cheerful. Even at her wedding, which took place four months after this meeting in the lounge, there was that same lack of cheerfulness. Indeed, so strong had been the impression of everyone present attending a joint funeral instead of one marriage that I couldn’t shake it off and in the end had to leave
the reception early, go home and lie on my bed, in broad daylight, in celebration clothes, depressed. Another point before the point was that between us there was an unspoken understanding that I did not ask her her business and in return she did not tell me it. We had stuck to this arrangement ever since she had started in on her business. That would be something like four years ago now.