Milkman

by Anna Burns

  So we were upstairs in the lounge and we ordered our drinks and sat at the back, and after a bit of not talking, which was not unusual in the initial stages between me and longest friend, she said, ‘Knowing you, you’ve probably not done anything, but according to rumour, seems you’ve done everything. Now don’t jump down my throat, longest friend, but tell me, what’s the crack with you and Milkman?’

  I noticed she called him Milkman and that she gave him a capital letter. To everybody else he was ‘the milkman’, with only the very youngest in the area believing he was a milkman, though even then, that didn’t last long. If she was calling him ‘Milkman’, I now decided, that must be because he was ‘Milkman’. She’d know more about it than any uninitiated outside influence and so, because of her inside knowledge, and because of our friendship, it was a relief to tell, though I didn’t know how much of a relief until I opened my mouth and out it all came. I knew she’d believe me, because she knew me, because I knew her, or at least used to know her, so there’d be no need for anxiety or for having to decide whether or not to trust her. Nor would I have to make efforts to persuade her. I could just lay it all out exactly as it was. So I did. I told of his quick appearances and of his quiet pronouncements, of his knowledge of my whereabouts, of his knowing everything there was to know about my life. I told about his telling me what to do without openly telling me to do it. Then there were his swift leave-takings as startling as his arrivals, with my overwhelming sensation of falling into a trap. He was trailing me, tracking me, knowing my routines, my movements, also the routines of everyone I met up with. It was that he had some plan, I said, but was in no hurry, was going at his pace, though with the clear intention of one day carrying it out. Also his not touching I spoke of, even though it seemed always he was touching, and all the time the hairs being up – waiting, anticipating, dreading – at the back of my neck. I said then of the flashy cars and of the van, though I knew longest friend would know of those already, telling also of my instinct that warned never to get beaten down enough to step into one of them. I spoke then of the state forces and of their surveillance upon me because of their surveillance upon him. They took photos, I said, not just of me and him, but now of me on my own or me with anyone – persons met by chance or persons I’d arranged to meet up with. These hidden cameras would click, I said, with unconnected people then getting implicated, regardless that nothing was, or had, or was about to, go on. I mentioned then the emergence of the arse-lickers, the lickspittles, given that those individuals had started to appear, pretending that they liked me when of course they didn’t like me. To my surprise, I even mentioned lascivious first brother-in-law. Towards the end there was ma and her sanctities and the holy people she had praying for me, then the elusive rumour-mongers who changed things if they heard things and who made things up when they did not hear things. Finally I ended on some possible future carbomb which just might kill the boyfriend I was in a maybe-relationship with. And that was it. I had said all. I stopped talking, took a big drink and sank back on the velvety cushioned bench, feeling lighter. I had told out to the right person. Definitely, longest friend had been the right person. The fact this had come out organically – even plausibly unchronologically – seemed to me to be proof of this.

  So I was heard, and it felt good and respectful to be heard, to be got, not to be interrupted or cut off by opinionated, poorly attuned people. For the longest while longest friend didn’t say anything and I didn’t mind her not saying anything. Indeed I welcomed it. It seemed a sign she was digesting the information, letting it speak to her timely, to authenticate also in its proper moment the right and just response. So she stayed quiet and stayed still and looked ahead and it was then for the first time it struck me that this staring into the middle distance, which often she’d do when we’d meet, was identical to that of Milkman. Apart from the first time in his car when he’d leaned over and looked out at me, never again had he turned towards me. Was this some ‘profile display stance’ then, that they all learn at their paramilitary finishing schools? As I was pondering this, longest friend then did speak. Without turning, she said, ‘I understand your not wanting to talk. That makes sense, and how could it not, now that you’re considered a community beyond-the-pale.’

  This I was not expecting and at once thought I could not have heard properly. ‘What did you say?’ I said and she said it again, delivering the news – which was news – that along with the district poisoner, the poisoner’s sister, the boy who killed himself over America and Russia, the women with the issues, and real milkman, also known as the man who didn’t love anybody, I too, was one of those intemperate, socially outlawed beyond-the-pales. I sat upright, shot upright, and I think my mouth must have fallen open. At least for a moment, for the tiniest time in weeks, even Milkman went out of my head. ‘That can’t be right,’ I said, but longest friend sighed and here she did turn towards me. ‘You brought it on yourself, longest friend. I informed you and informed you. I mean for the longest time ever since primary school I’ve been warning you to kill out that habit you insist on and that now I suspect you’re addicted to – that reading in public as you’re walking about.’ ‘But—’ I said. ‘Not natural,’ she said. ‘But—’ I said. ‘Unnerving behaviour,’ she said. ‘But—’ I said. ‘But—’ I said, ‘I thought you meant in case of traffic, in case I walked into traffic.’ ‘Not traffic,’ she said. ‘More stigmatic than traffic. But too late. The community has pronounced its diagnosis on you now.’

  Nobody, especially a teenager, likes to discover they’ve been earmarked some freak-weirdo person. Me! In the same boat as our poisoner, tablets girl! This was shocking and not at all fair. It seemed too, that once again, everybody, bar maybe-boyfriend and – though I hated to admit it – Milkman, was homing in on my harmless reading-while-walking. These past months, ever since the beginning of Milkman, I was getting an education on just how much I was impacting people without any awareness I’d been visible to people. ‘It’s creepy, perverse, obstinately determined,’ went on longest friend. ‘It’s not as if, friend,’ she said, ‘this were a case of a person glancing at some newspaper as they’re walking along to get the latest headlines or something. It’s the way you do it – reading books, whole books, taking notes, checking footnotes, underlining passages as if you’re at some desk or something, in a little private study or something, the curtains closed, your lamp on, a cup of tea beside you, essays being penned – your discourses, your lucubrations. It’s disturbing. It’s deviant. It’s optical illusional. Not public-spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why – with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with us all having to pull together – would anyone want to call attention to themselves here?’ ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘Are you saying it’s okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?’ ‘I didn’t say not in public. Just don’t do it while you’re walking about. They don’t like it,’ she added, meaning the community then, resuming that looking-ahead of hers, she said she was not prepared to get into amphibologies, into equivocations, into the auld ‘over the water’ double-talk, but if I cared to look at it in its proper surroundings, then Semtex taking precedence as something normal over reading-while-walking – ‘which nobody but you thinks is normal’ – could certainly be construed as the comprehensible interpretation here. ‘Semtex isn’t unusual,’ she said. ‘It’s not not to be expected. It’s not incapable of being mentally grasped, of being understood, even if most people here don’t carry it, have never seen it, don’t know what it looks like and don’t want anything to do with it. It fits in – more than your dangerous reading-while-walking fits in. This is about awareness and your behaviour doesn’t display awareness. So, looked at in those terms, terms of contextual environment, then yeah,’ she concluded, ‘it is okay for him and it’s not okay for you.’

  I could sense her words, in one of those medieval, philosophical, ‘relative versus absolute’ dimensi
ons, did have some ring of truth about them. Still, I didn’t like the implication that I had contracted an incurable beyond-the-pale. ‘Just because I’m outnumbered in my reading-while-walking,’ I said, ‘doesn’t mean I’m wrong. What if one person happened to be sane, longest friend, against a whole background, a race mind, that wasn’t sane, that person would probably be viewed by the mass consciousness as mad – but would that person be mad?’ ‘Yes,’ said friend, ‘if they persisted in their version of life in the stacked-up odds of an opposing world. But that’s not you anyway,’ she went on, ‘because there’s this other thing.’ I assumed – for why wouldn’t I? – this must mean more Milkman, but friend said she didn’t want to be harsh, that she didn’t want to put me on the spot or to embarrass me. ‘But what are you doing, longest friend,’ she said, ‘what are you thinking of, walking around with cats’ heads?’ This was when it came out I had dead animals on me. Perhaps for ceremonial, black-magic purposes? longest friend said the community was hazarding. Perhaps to invoke a ritual with piecemeal familiars in opposition to the pious women with their bells and birds and prognostications and auguries? Or was I pregnant? Had Milkman made me pregnant? ‘Yes, that must be it!’ they were saying. ‘Milkman’s made her pregnant and because of hormones—’ ‘Not cats’ heads!’ I cried. ‘Cat’s head! Only one head! Only once!’ Friend bit her lip. ‘So you think,’ she said, ‘walking about while reading with your desk lamp on during riots and gunplay with one dead animal in your pocket instead of countless animals isn’t going to tip the balance? Question is, friend, why are you carrying a cat’s head about?’ I took a breath, for how to explain? How to start in that I’d only carried it once, for one moment, and look – even then I’d been spied upon. I didn’t know how to talk anymore and I realised that even here, with longest friend, my one-time sister-in-thought, I was to have life drained from me after all. Here I was, having to persuade and prove credible to someone who’d always been in my confidence, someone whom I’d felt was authenticated in my heart even though as time went by – as four years went by – I could see the traffic was no longer two-way; that nowadays – didn’t know why – because of that unspoken agreement between us perhaps? for my own good perhaps? – very little in the way of confidences tended to come back. I could say to her, I supposed, that I thought it must have been that bomb in the ten-minute area that did it; that it was Semtex or what would have been Semtex if it hadn’t been an old-time bomb, that did it; that whoever left the bomb, or dropped the bomb from their bomber plane, did it, that I’d wanted to take the cat to the graveyard away from the brash, exploded concrete in order to offer it some green. I didn’t say this because there was no way to do so that wouldn’t have me come out like a madwoman. Plus the unposed, unrehearsed candidness that had existed between me and longest friend since primary school seemed now to be at an end. No longer did I want to explain, for I could see myself in the moment exactly as she was seeing me, as all of them were seeing me. Besides, I didn’t know why I carried it. And now, quite suddenly, I felt sad. It wasn’t that I was the one breaking ties and pulling first from longest friend but that longest friend had already done the pulling. Something of trust was over even if fondness remained but fondness was another of those maybes. So, leaving that, shunning that – for that was people, that was relationships, always what was to be expected – leaving also the cat business, I said, ‘Can we get back to the main point now?’

  Longest friend looked surprised – something she didn’t do often. ‘This is the main point,’ she said, which had me, then, surprised. ‘I thought Milkman was the main point,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would he be the main point? He was the point before the point. This reading-while-walking, and your unreachable stubbornness at back of it, plus the dangers inherent in it, are the reasons we’re meeting up here tonight. But you know’ – and here she paused, for one of those illuminating, transcendent, contemplative insights seemed now to strike her – ‘it might be as well,’ she went on, ‘I mean as in remedial – and even though it be in one of those unpopular “silver-lining, dark-cloud, learning-through-suffering” fashions – that this predation upon you by Milkman has happened. Your not wanting to be present but now forced by circumstance of Milkman to be present has been one of those reality checks that life has given you – to round you out, to step you up, to set you on the next stage of your journey. And as far as I can see, friend, the only thing that’s done that for you ever has been Milkman appearing, as now he has, on your scene.’ At this I thought, wasn’t she the smug bastard and I said so and she said no, that we had not to get personal even though what was she being if not personal? She said we had to stay focused on the main point. This point was: how I was confounding the community with my reading-while-walking; how some people might not be terribly capable of being explained but that that didn’t stop others explaining them anyway; how no one should go around in a political scene with their head switched off; how I was abnormally unnerved by social questions, by regular queries, even harmless requests for information even though I’d object and say I did uphold questions but no – she shook her head – I upheld only literature questions and even then, only nineteenth-century or earlier questions. The point was also, she said, my refusal to abandon my facial and bodily numbance in spite of everybody knowing that numbance as protection didn’t work here. Then there was the fact the girl who walks— ‘The girl who walks?’ ‘Yes. You’re the girl who walks. Sometimes the one who reads and other times you’re the pale, adamantine, unyielding girl who walks around with the entrenched, boxed-in thinking.’ Then she said she was going to get directive with me as if she hadn’t been directive up to this point. ‘It’s not that you have to give actual autobiographical passages,’ she said, ‘but you do that reading-while-walking and you look nearly-blank and you give nothing which is too little and so they won’t let go and move on to the next person. It’s to bring the house down, friend,’ she said, ‘if you don’t stop being haughty for they see you as haughty and that you think you’ll get away with it because you’re sleeping with—’ ‘Not sleeping with!’ ‘—considered to be sleeping with Milkman, also because in the movement that man’s no lightweight so of course they won’t – not with him behind you – have a direct go. You must know though,’ she concluded, ‘even you must appreciate, that as far as they’re concerned you’ve fallen into the difficult zone.’ She meant the ‘informer-type’ zone – not that I was an informer. It was that miscellany territory where, like the informer, you’re not accepted, you’re not admired, you’re not respected, not by one side, not by the other side, not by anybody, not even really by yourself. In my case though, seems I’d fallen into the difficult zone not only because I wouldn’t tell my life to others, or because of my numbance, or because of my suspiciousness of questions. What was also being held against me was that I wasn’t seen as the clean girlfriend, as in, he didn’t have other attachments. He did have attachments. One was his wife. So I was the upstart, the little Frenchwoman, the arriviste, the hussy. Also, like the informer, when you’re no longer needed, when you’ve been superseded, when you’ve served your purpose or been upended before you’d been able to serve your purpose, others, sometimes suffering the effects of their own presumption, have a tendency to want their own back. That was the difficult zone. It was of complex data, Any Other Business, even of contradiction, all reduced for convenience to a simple catch-all. But she was wrong. It wasn’t that I fell into the difficult zone. It was that I was pushed.

  ‘Okay. I’ll stop doing it,’ I said, and I meant here the reading-while-walking. I had jumped back to reading-while-walking to get away from stubbornness. If something had to go, I’d rather it was that. ‘That’s the spirit,’ friend urged. ‘Use your loaf, stop the stubbornness, work on your disposition, get off your high horse and show some friendly stray bits. Just something unimportant that would satisfy them rather than encourage them with silence. Then, if you also stop that unfathomable reading-while-walking, that shoul
d ameliorate the situation as well.’ I nodded, but said the reading-while-walking wasn’t going to be ‘also’. It was going to be instead of. I needed my silence, my unaccommodation, to shield me from pawing and from molestation by questions. In contrast to friend, I myself was of the view that trying to placate with information to win them over, would not bring benefits of desistence but would encourage and lead them on even more. Besides, I didn’t want to. Still I didn’t want to. This was my one bit of power in this disempowering world. ‘You’d better be careful then,’ said friend, which was what everybody said. People always said you’d better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person – the little person down here on the earth – be that? So I said about the books and the walking as compromise, which seemed easy in comparison. There wasn’t even regret because by now I was no longer getting the old enjoyment from it. That experience of relaxing into it, of walking out the door and slipping the book out of the pocket, of sinking into the paragraph coming up after the recently left-off paragraph, had changed since the stalking, also since the rumouring, since even the state forces had got suspicious and were stopping me to take Martin Chuzzlewit for state-security purposes out of my hands. Then there was being watched as I was reading, being reported upon about my reading, being photographed by at least one person with or without the reading. How could a reader’s concentration upon and enjoyment of a novel be sustained in the face of all that?

  As for the state forces, friend told me not to worry about the cameras, the clicking, the data-storage, saying that even before Milkman there was bound to have been a file on me anyway. ‘The whole community’s a suspect community,’ she said. ‘Everybody has a file on them. Everybody’s house, everybody’s movements, everybody’s connections constantly are checked and kept an eye on. It’s only you who doesn’t seem aware of that. With all their monitoring,’ she went on, ‘their infiltrating, their intercepting, listening at posts, drawing-up of room lay-outs, of position of furniture, of ornament placement, of wallpaper, of watch lists and geo-profiling, cutting feeds and feeding feeds, and “mother goose” and divination by tea-leaves and not least,’ she said, ‘with their helicopters flying over an alienated, cynical, existentially bitter landscape, it’s no wonder everybody has files on them. If someone in a renouncer-run area didn’t have a file on them, that would be a surety there was something dubious about that individual going on. They even photograph shadows,’ she said. ‘People here can be deciphered and likenesses discerned from silhouettes and shadows.’ ‘That’s very attuned,’ I said, impressed. Friend then said that even pre-Milkman there would have been a file with my name on it anyway because of my other associations. I was about to ask what associations when she interrupted. ‘God. I can’t believe this. Your head! Your memory! All those mental separations and splittings-off from consciousness. I mean me! Your association with me! Your brothers! Your second brother! Your fourth brother!’ And now she was shaking her head. ‘The things you notice yet don’t notice, friend. The disconnect you have going between your brain and what’s out there. This mental misfiring – it’s not normal. It’s abnormal – the recognising, the not recognising, the remembering, the not remembering, the refusing to admit to the obvious. But you encourage that, these brain-twitches, this memory disordering – also this latest police business – all perfect examples they are, of what I’m talking about here.’ She paused then to turn round and stare at me fully and I felt hurt but also panicked, as if at any moment she was going to hurl me into some dimension where I did not wish to go. ‘No wonder,’ she said, ‘they’re clocking and stopping you extra.’ ‘Not extra,’ I objected. ‘They’re clocking and stopping me without previous stoppings because Milk—’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re stopping you because you’ve drawn attention to yourself with your beyond-the-pale reading-while—’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘If that were true, how come they weren’t stopping me before Milk—’ ‘But they were stopping you! They do stop you. They stop everybody!’ And here her tone became resigned rather than monitory. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that even at this minute we’re entering another bout of your jamais vu.’ ‘What do you mean my jamais vu?’ I asked. Then I asked, ‘What do you mean another bout of jamais vu? Are you saying I have jamais vu and that frequently I have it?’ which was when it came out that, similar to the way in which I would block as unfamiliar from my memory all my periodic attempts to establish a proper relationship between me and maybe-boyfriend, instead thinking each time to be the first time at furthering on our intimacy, here too, according to friend, I’d experience illusions of never having been stopped previously by the state security forces when it was obvious I was stopped by them, she maintained, all the time. Initially it was just routine, she said, cursory stoppings, the usual thing that they carry out on everybody who comes into and goes out of renouncer areas. But now – owing not to Milkman, but to my escalating beyond-the-paleness – I was being stopped not cursory but much more than cursory times. She ended this talk on surveillance and my disappearances into other dimensions by saying that just as with the camera, I shouldn’t worry disproportionately as to what official gloss they might put upon my behaviour. Given I was now a beyond-the-pale, reputed to read-while-walking as if sitting down; prone, according to the community, to back-to-front reading, starting on the last page and working back to the front page in order to pre-empt narrative surprises because I didn’t like surprises; given I put bookmarks in books, they said, or else turned down pages not correctly where I’d left off, but slyly at misleading places so as to deceive the public for personal round-about, paranoid reasons; given I was reported to have a counting thing where I’d figure cars, lampposts and tick off landmarks whilst at the same time pretend to give directions to invisible people – all while reading-while-walking; given I didn’t like pictures of people’s faces on books or on record sleeves or hanging in frames on walls because I’d imagine I was being spied upon by them; and finally, given I carried dead animals in my pockets, ‘What’s an affair with a major paramilitary player,’ she asked, ‘and who would give a damn anyway, taken amidst the craziness of all that?’