Milkman

by Anna Burns

  ‘She’s in!’

  ‘Hurry up!’

  ‘Stations everybody! Careful! Oh watch out! Pills girl! It’s pills girl!’

  This would be hissed by every person in the club. At this point drunken panic would ensue and whoever had been designated that week as watchman or watchwoman for each group at each table would rush back to respective tables from the dancefloor, the toilets, the bar, the shadowed embrace in the corner, from wherever he or she at that moment happened to be. This would be to guard the drinks but even then the rest of us would remain on edge, totally attuned to her presence. We’d nudge each other, turn and turn about, follow her procession through the club, keeping all attention fixed upon her, while she, like some phantom, some horrific nightmare, would dander in and sidle around. You’d have thought, given our hypervigilance, that we, the majority, would have been best-placed to thwart tablets girl and protect our own health interests. When it came to it though, this lone combatant won hands down every time. No one knew how she did it but she had a way of getting substances in regardless of the person at the table. The person at the table, as could be evidenced by everybody, had dashed back conscientiously and grabbed in the drinks, keeping them close, taking no chances. Politeness wasn’t pretended either in the urgency to get her away. ‘Fuck off!’ they’d shout, maintaining afterwards that it was best always to be frank in these poison situations. ‘Fuck off!’ they’d yell. ‘Fuck off!’ they’d abandon propriety. ‘Fuck off!’ they’d slip into appalling rudeness. By this time though, if they’d had to shout that many fuck-offs to the district’s all-time most successful superior poisoner and still she hadn’t gone from them, chances were they, and at least one other of their party, would be doubled over in pain, thrashing, clenching, trembling, contorting, dosed up on all kinds of expurgating substances, crying and begging too, from exhaustion, for death to overtake them, all to get it over with, and all before that long night into morning was through.

  So she got herself thoroughly disliked, but contrarily, for all this disliking, tablets girl was pretty much taken in the district’s stride. Even if it were a jumpy stride, a paranoid stride, a poisoned stride, because people might get furious, they might want to kill her. It never occurred to anybody though, that she should be barred from the district’s most popular club. Nor either, that she should be hospitalised, jailed, that her family shouldn’t let her out or, at least, should have a rota going to chaperone her whenever she did go out, that the rest of us shouldn’t have to, every Friday night, go through this poison ordeal. Menace that she was, in that different time, during that different consciousness, and with all that other approach to life and to death and to custom, she was tolerated, just as the weather was tolerated, just as an Act of God or those Friday night armies coming in had to be tolerated. Declaring her a beyond-the-pale seemed as far as we, the community, could go. So always she was allowed back and always she came back and continued her poisoning. Then her trajectory changed and she started poisoning people on other days besides Friday, also becoming verbose as to why.

  She had recently poisoned her own sister, said friend, though so far the family had it under wraps and were keeping very quiet about it. She had accused her sister of being some unacceptable aspect of herself. I said, ‘This is getting complicated. Do you mean—’ ‘That’s right,’ said longest friend. ‘Some split-off usurping aspect of herself.’ Seemed there hadn’t been enough room in the district for these contrary sides of her and so, from self-preservation – and given one part was a poisoner, the other part that wasn’t a poisoner, her sister – had to go. Longest friend then agreed that yes, since tablets girl had started in on her explanations, the communal ability to explain her was indeed getting complicated and that perhaps if I’d stop walking about with a book at my face and got into proper reality, I might notice just how much the community itself was struggling to keep up. Everybody, of course, ‘moved things on’ here. There was a constant and unerring ‘moving of one on’ here, and this ‘moving of things on one’ happened pretty much all the time. The shifting sands of acceptable dislocations could easily be assimilated by the community’s race consciousness, but when it came to those beyond-the-pales such as tablets girl (such as myself now too, though still I was baulking), they were a law unto themselves. Often the pales were said to flout convention, to move things not reasonably on one as everybody else did, but unapproved, unannounced, move things on two, or three, or even side-step their convolutions entirely on to some new, even more farfetched footing. That was what tablets girl, thinking her sister an oppositional side of herself, did.

  Friend explained that the poisoned younger sister, the shiny one, had been poisoned right up to the hospital and in truth, well beyond the hospital. She had been poisoned to the extent of having most of her body in the ground. Of course she didn’t go to hospital because, as with calling the police here – meaning you didn’t call them – involving yourself with medical authorities could be viewed as imprudent as well. One set of authorities, pronounced the community, always brought on another set of authorities, and should it be that you were shot, or poisoned, or knifed, or damaged in any way you didn’t feel like talking about, the police would be informed by the hospital regardless of your wishes and they would show up from their barracks right away. What would happen then, warned the community, was that this state-enemy force, on discovering which side of the fence you came from, would compromise you and present you with a choice. That choice would be: either you were to be falsely rigged up and hinted at in your district to be an informer for them, or else you were really to become an informer and inform on the renouncers-of-the-state from your district for them. Either way sooner or later, courtesy of the renouncers, your corpse would be the latest to be found up an entry with the obligatory tenner in its hand and the bullets in its head. So no. According to communal rules you didn’t want to bother with hospitals. Why would you anyway, with safe-house surgery theatres, back-parlour casualty wards, homemade apothecaries and with more than enough garden-shed pharmacies dotted about the place?

  As for tablets girl’s sister, three-quarters in the grave, she did the best she could, with her family and neighbours also doing their best. Many severe purgings later, everyone attempted to say she was all right. While on the mend, it became clear this young woman’s health and eyesight were dramatically now not what they used to be, so community justice, by way of the renouncers, once again got involved. The family, conflicted, owing to blood-connections with both victim and perpetrator, begged the renouncers to hold off retribution and to give tablets girl one more chance to redeem herself. The renouncers had promised last time that if tablets girl didn’t stop her anti-social behaviour they themselves would stop it for her. Therefore now, in light of the accused’s latest disregard of their warnings, the time had come, the renouncers said, to carry their promise out. Longest friend then said the renouncers didn’t act right away, but instead deliberated further owing to the beseeching of the family. Then they summoned the family and fore-advised them. ‘Okay,’ they said. ‘One more chance, but that’s all.’

  We emptied our glasses then, and left the drinking-club and I went home and got into bed and fell asleep and stayed asleep until I was woken by something invisible wisping into my bedroom, wisping up my bedclothes, getting in my open mouth and slipping down my throat. I jumped awake crying, ‘It got in! It made its way in! They got in while I was sleeping!’ But before I came awake properly and could work out what I was talking about, a burning sensation in my innards took hold. There was a pungency in my mouth too, which at first I thought was a tooth-filling behaving badly. Then I thought, that’s no tooth! This is more of Milkman and of how his coveting is affecting me now. Cramps then took hold, exhaling the air out of me, squeezing it from me, with my muscles going nuts and turning me rigid. Then I fell out of bed, still rigid, my insides turning to stone. I crawled out the bedroom on forearms and knees, bumping the door with my head because I couldn’t lift my head beca
use of the rigidity of my torso. I didn’t know what the head-bumping meant, didn’t know what the door meant, didn’t know either where I was going except that I had to get out and get help.

  On the upstairs landing new pains set in, these of a darting, crisscross fashion. Because of them, I was forced to give up crawling somewhere between my bedroom and the bathroom, all the time hearing strange sounds which I thought were voices on a radio made to go slow. I found out later they’d been my groans and, ‘Guess what! They woke up everybody!’ cried my younger sisters. They were speaking with relish, these sisters, and this was four days on from the poisoning when I was in bed, on the mend, recuperating. They recounted these groans to me, demonstrated a selection for me, described also the events of the middle of that night to me, adding that I looked white – ‘but not that awful white you look usually’. ‘More like milk,’ said oldest-youngest sister. ‘A bottle of milk,’ said middle-youngest sister. ‘Like white milk that’s been painted extra white,’ suggested youngest-youngest sister, ‘so that it glows in the dark.’ A three-way fight broke out between wee sisters over whether this ‘glowing in the dark’ aspect had been true or fabricated. Also they fought over when this extra whiteness had materialised. Had it been before our mother and the neighbours purged me or after our mother and the neighbours purged me? For yes, ma and the neighbours purged me, ma being first to reach me on the landing and to put her arms out and around me but, because of what was happening within me, I hadn’t heard her come up. I felt her strong arms though, felt her warm breath, and knew in that moment that it was good beyond God to have my mother near me. Gripping the hem of her nightdress, then crawling along this nightdress, then inching into the belly of this nightdress, I knew I would be safe, that I would not now be alone.

  At the same time as saving me, of course she had a go at me. Along with her rapid physical examination and quick-fire questions to me – Was I cut? Was I knifed? What did I eat? What did I drink? Did someone out of the ordinary give me something out of the ordinary? Was I in a fight with someone? Had I been kicked in the head earlier by someone? Were all my trusted friends trustworthy? With what had I been poisoned? – came also her first judgemental remark. ‘Well, what do you expect, wee girl,’ she said, ‘if you go round stealing other people’s husbands? Of course those women are going to try to kill you. For all your so-called knowledge of the world, how come you don’t know that?’ I didn’t know what ma meant by my knowledge of the world. My knowledge of the world consisted of fucking hell, fucking hell, fucking hell, which didn’t lend itself to detail, the detail really being those words themselves. Ma, though, hadn’t finished the husband-and-wife bit. Next came more ‘what do you expect’ only this time with variations on my sometimes having affairs with lots of husbands, sometimes with all husbands, sometimes just with one husband, with Milkman. ‘Fool girl. Oh foolhardy! Foolhardy!’ she cried. ‘You a teenager with him more than twice your age too!’ Here she paused to hoist me up against herself to get me down to the bathroom. Then she continued her accusations and her jumping to conclusions, adding grimly, ‘All the same, when this is done with, daughter, I want you to list me all those wives’ names.’ During this time I was still curled in a ball, unable to straighten, unable to stand, with waves of pain building, then pushing from below, then shooting up – still in that crisscross manner – through me. So she lifted me in this ball, bidding me to keep an arm round her neck whilst holding best I could with the other hand to the banisters, urging me too, to reveal to her the poison – ‘But what did they give you? Do you know what they gave you?’ – with at last my managing, ‘No wives, ma. No husbands. No affair with Milkman. No poison.’ Then – not listening because a new thought was now in her head – she turned herself to stone.

  ‘In the name of God!’ she cried. ‘Are they correct? Is everybody correct? Have you been fecundated by him, by that renouncer, that “top of wanted list” clever man, the false milkman?’ ‘What?’ I said, for it had been singular, that word she’d used and genuinely for a moment I had not a clue what she meant by it. ‘Imbued by him?’ she elaborated. ‘Engendered in. Breeded in. Fertilised, vexed, embarrassed, sprinkled, caused to feel regret, wished not to have happened – dear God, child, do I have to spell it out?’ Well, why didn’t she spell it out? Why couldn’t she just say pregnant? But this was like ma. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t enough on my plate, without having to take time out from poisoning – which still I hadn’t realised was poisoning – to guess her latest removed remark. She didn’t stay on difficult pregnancies either, for ma could give herself horror stories one right after the other. Next came abortions and I had to guess them also, from ‘vermifuge, squaw mint, Satan’s apple, premature expulsion, being failed in the course of coming into being’ with any doubt dispelled by, ‘Well, daughter, you can’t disappoint me anymore than you’ve already disappointed me, so tell me – what did you procure and which of them drab aunts did you procure it of?’

  This was news to me. I hadn’t known there were drab aunts in the area, that the renouncers would permit them or be unable to stop them. Typical too, of ma, the fount of knowledge, to reveal to me, as always she did, astounding detail about the underside whilst at the same time accusing me of knowing it already. Once again, she was showing no faith, didn’t believe I could be true, that I was true, that I might have enough wit of my own not to take up with such a man as Milkman, all of which didn’t inspire me to inspire her with confidence in me, for why should I? Last time I tried she called me a liar, demanding – even though I had been doing it – that I give her the truth. She didn’t want the truth. All she wanted was confirmation of the rumour. What was the use therefore, in trying to settle the attribution, to get her to see that these spasms, this stiffness, this unable to straighten, unable to stand, weren’t down to poison or to any of her imaginings but instead were an intensified version of the usual? I was being sick because of Milkman stalking me, Milkman tracking me, Milkman knowing everything about me, biding his time, closing in on me, and because of the perniciousness of the secrecy, gawking and gossip that existed in this place. So ma and I were at cross purposes, as always we were at cross purposes, but then I did attempt because in that moment, which was a lonely moment, more than ever I longed for her belief in me, for her properly to perceive me. ‘No wives, ma,’ I said. ‘No husbands, no foetus, no drab aunts, no poison, no suicide’ – adding on that last to save her the trouble of adding it on herself. ‘Well, what is it then?’ she said and in the middle of pain, in the middle of poison, gloriously I felt a comfort go through me, a sense of solace descend on me, all because she’d paused in her admonition to consider I might be telling the truth. It could be easy to love her. Sometimes I could see how easy it could be to love her. Then it was gone and she broke off from hesitation, from prodding and hoisting and falsely accusing, to call to wee sisters. The three sisters were out of bed, standing behind us in their nightclothes at this point.

  She commanded them to help and of course younger sisters were overjoyed to do this. They loved drama, any drama, just so long as it was sheer and they could be part of it, or at least bear witness to it. They rushed over and took hold exactly where ma instructed and between the four of them, got me along the rest of the landing, down the step at the end of the landing, then into the bathroom where wee sisters let go. They thought they were supposed to let go, so I fell along with ma onto the floor. It was sharp and painful, that fall, and at first I cried out with it. Then I realised this floor was good. It was cold, smooth, welcome, but short-lived also, because my body once again began to assert itself. It got back onto forearms, onto knees, in preparation for some imminence. Ma, meantime, was issuing instructions to wee sisters to go and get the keys of her backyard pharmacy from her bedroom and to bring them to her right away. They rushed off as one, which was how wee sisters did everything, and ma, turning back, kept pressing my middle while ordering me to think! think! If not ‘chagrined’, not ‘vermifuged’, not ‘pennyroyaled’,
was there anything of eating? Anything of drinking? Anybody hanging around who shouldn’t have been hanging around, but with me now unable to answer at all. Still contracted, still in that odd shape, stiffly I flung myself towards the bath, towards the floor, towards the toilet, then over the floor again. Something enormous was coming and it seemed my body wasn’t hopeful of getting it out.