Milkman

by Anna Burns

  Ma then took the second call which I was not glad about. It was from maybe-boyfriend and it didn’t go well. First, it was unprecedented for I didn’t know maybe-boyfriend had my number. He never called me at my home and I never called him at his home, nor did I have his number or even knew whether or not he had a number. Telephones didn’t feature much for me, nor had I thought they featured for maybe-boyfriend. One reason I had nineteenth-century literature as back-up was so I wouldn’t have to get into any modern-day, fraught, involved stuff like that. Our arrangements were such that we made them at the end of each last meeting and we stuck to them. This was the case, partly because of phones being generally distrusted – as technological objects, as abnormal communication objects. Mainly though, they were not trusted because of ‘dirty tricks’, unofficial-party-line, state-surveillance campaigns. This meant ordinary people didn’t use them for private things, meaning vulnerable romance things. Of course the paramilitary-renouncers didn’t use them either, but I’m not talking about them here. So phones weren’t trusted; indeed we only had one because it had been in the house when we moved in and ma was wary to have it removed in case the people who came to remove it weren’t really telephone wiremen but instead state spymaster-infiltrators in disguise. They’d take the phone away, warned neighbours, but in the process they’d plant other things, things evidential of us being tight-in with renouncers when we weren’t tight-in with renouncers. Despite two of my brothers having been renouncers, we were averagely in, the normal amount in, that too, more at the beginning than we were these latter days. Now, though still in principle approving their initial objective and in no way prepared to denounce them publicly to a state to which she did not ascribe validity, depending upon the latest of what they had done and her current level of ambivalence towards them, ma had no qualms denouncing them to their face – proof more or less, I suppose, that we weren’t tight-in. So our phone hung on the wall by the stairs and people used it sometimes. Thing was though, you had to open phones everywhere and every time you wanted to use one in order to see if there was a bug inside. On the rare occasion when I did use one I did this checking too, though I’d no idea what a bug looked like, or if it would be in the phone, or outside on the overhead cable, or at the telephone exchange if exchanges still happened. In truth, I was just going through the motions with the bug thing, which was what I suspected others, also regularly taking their phones apart, were simply doing as well.

  So I didn’t have his number, if he had one, and I thought he didn’t have mine because of the convolutions to be got through by having them. Mainly though, the not having each other’s numbers was because of the ‘maybe’ category our relationship was in. This ‘maybeness’ was why I didn’t tell about tablets girl poisoning me, why I didn’t tell about Milkman pursuing me, why I didn’t tell about the district gossip overriding me. It didn’t occur to me to tell because why would maybe-boyfriend in our maybe-relationship want to know, or think either of us should presume permission to disclose, thoughts, feelings and neediness about that? Also, what if I attempted and he didn’t hear? What if he was unable to take in the weight of what I myself couldn’t take in the weight of? But he rang and ma answered and he asked for me and she said, ‘Oh no you don’t. I don’t care about your conjurations or how great a renouncer you are or how gallant in action or what your hero standing is in the community. You’re a befouler of young girls and a depraved, fraud milkman who gives bad names to people who are really milkmen. You’re not going to speak to her. You’re not going to vitiate her. You stay away from her. Take yourself and your bombs – you married man! – off.’ This she said without care, without couching, without the least concealment should third parties be listening. She hung up then, with no goodbyes either, no wearing herself out with adieux for his benefit. During this I was in bed but could hear perfectly all she was saying, mistakenly thinking, as she was, that it was Milkman himself on the line. With all his skill at surveillance of course he’d be far more likely to have my telephone number than even myself or my ‘almost one year so far maybe-boyfriend’ would be likely to have it. And now here he was, reaching with his unstoppable predations right inside my home. I thought of maybe-boyfriend then, and did so with longing, wishing for the first time since being poisoned that he was here, in this house, in this bedroom, right next me. If only he’d contact me. Those thoughts didn’t stay long though, because of the one that followed. This was of ma and of how impossible it would be if ever she were to meet him: ‘So, young man, and when is to be the wedding? And, young man, when are to be the babies? And it is true, young man, is it not, that you are the right religion and that you are not already married?’ Yes. Awful. I pushed him out of my mind, not because he didn’t matter but because he did matter. How lucky he was though, to have had parents who long ago had run away.

  Third call was for ma and it was one of her pious friends, Jason of the Names, ringing in a hurry. Jason said something had happened outside the usual place. One of those state killer squads, she said, had ambushed and shot real milkman, then they took him to the hospital, the hospital being the very place where everybody knew, owing to stigma of informer status, that if you had political ailments it was never safe to go. ‘He didn’t have a say, friend,’ said her friend. ‘There was no choice. They just took him after they shot him. But switch on your wireless to get the latest for they’re saying he was a terrorist. Can you imagine? Real milkman! – the man who doesn’t love anybody! – a terrorist!’ At that point wee sisters said ma dropped the phone.

  She ran up to my room then, saying she had to go to the hospital, that she had to get to real milkman. Would I be strong enough to get up, she said, to look after the wee ones and the home? ‘Is he dead?’ I asked, surprising myself for never was I one to ask that question. She said she didn’t know, but that those hellhounds, those accusers and roamers throughout the earth, going to and fro and up and down in it, had taken him to hospital after shooting him but that it was unclear if Jason meant because he was dead he’d been taken to hospital, meaning the morgue adjacent to the hospital. Or was it, she said, that Jason meant he was unconscious, maybe dying, so couldn’t protest he didn’t want to go to hospital. Or maybe he didn’t mind going to hospital and insisted on being taken to hospital because as everybody knew, real milkman was contrary for doing exactly what the renouncers-of-the-state in our district had ordered people in our district not to do. ‘Don’t know,’ said ma, then she said, ‘They’re saying he was a terrorist. They’re searching his house right now, digging up his backyard, trying to find things terroristic buried there.’ ‘It’s all right, ma,’ I said, getting out of bed. ‘You go and do what you have to and I’ll look after us and everything.’ At that, she leaned over and kissed me, then she leaned down and kissed wee sisters who had followed her up the stairs. They were clinging and crying and begging and pleading, ‘No, mammy! No, mammy! We wish you didn’t go!’ She told them they were good daughters but that they must now do as I, their middle sister, instructed them. After straightening up and extracting their grip, she took a little money from her purse for emergencies, slipped it into her skirt pocket, then handed me the purse with the rest of her money inside. In that moment I knew exactly wee sisters’ state of mind, of clinging, of crying, of begging, of pleading. Ma had handed her purse over only on two former occasions. First had been when the state police had come to fetch her to identify the body of her son, our second brother. At that time, she’d handed the purse to eldest sister, not trusting what she might do, then what might be done to her should those anthropomorphisms, she said, taunt her with, ‘Serves you right. Serves your broodling firstborn right too, in his little militia, for daring to go partisan against us.’ Second time of the purse had been when the renouncers in our district had come for second sister, to kill her or otherwise to punish her – not so much for marrying into the enemy, as for her face in insulting the area by coming back to visit her family after marrying into the enemy – or else it was to get
her to expiate herself for marrying-out by setting up her husband to be killed in an ambush by them. On that occasion, ma hurriedly pushed her purse at third sister before running to the hutment where they were adjudging second sister. She took with her my dead brother’s spare gun from upstairs which I hadn’t known was up there, and which I knew too, she hadn’t a clue how to use. The renouncers took it off her, then they gave her a warning, with second sister then flogged and told she was never again to come back to the area. And now I had the purse. ‘Just in case,’ said ma as she put her coat and headscarf on. Wee sisters were bawling by now and I was down on my hunkers with my arms around them, trying to comfort them. Ma was looking grim, exactly as she hadn’t looked, I couldn’t help noting, when her husband, our father, had been dying in hospital. So I couldn’t blame wee sisters. Felt too, not panic, but a state of mind easily to be tipped into panic. I didn’t want to think about it, but what if wee sisters were right and she did get into a fight and was herself lifted, ending up imprisoned, never to return after all?

  She did return, but not till after dark, by which time wee sisters were in bed, lulled to sleep by Rice Krispies, Tayto Crisps, Paris Buns, bread-in-the-pan, halibut orange tablets with extra sugar on everything. Then there was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which was their choice of matter, not my choice of matter. It ruffled me terribly, being twentieth century but I found it wasn’t really the dialogue or the story wee sisters were interested in, but the fairytale title, which simply they wanted to hear over and over again. I slipped it in therefore, every third phrase which calmed them down and now they were sleeping. Leaving their door ajar, I crept downstairs to the living room and sat in the armchair in the silence of the half dark. I thought of putting on the radio to hear if he was dead but I could not ever bear radios: those voices announcing; those voices murmuring; those voices repeating on the hour, on the half hour, in their special urgent extra bulletins, all those things I didn’t want to hear. I hoped he wasn’t but nearly always in these situations they were dead. Why disturb myself therefore, by facing prematurely all my mind could still have leeway from? I hadn’t reached that point, the critical point, where not to know became more unbearable than getting to know. I was still at the ‘hold off, not yet’ stage of proceedings and it was while I was in it that I heard ma’s key go in our lock.

  Although the room was now proper dark, she knew I was in it, as a person knows these things, by invisible influences maybe, by mental construction or clear-sensing maybe. She too, didn’t draw the curtains or put the light on. Instead she sat opposite, still in her coat and headscarf, and said he was alive, that his condition was stable but that she didn’t know what ‘stable’ meant and that because she wasn’t family even though real milkman – his only brother years dead – now had no family, they wouldn’t give her, or any of the other neighbours who’d also turned up at the hospital, any information other than that. She veered off then – not unusual – a mind suddenly compelled to convolute and address issues which might be relevant but to the listener seemed not relevant. She began to speak of someone, some girl she used to know. This was in the long ago, she said, when she too, had been a girl, and this person she knew had been her second longest friend, someone I’d never heard of, someone ma had never spoken of. But now she was saying the two of them had ended their friendship and parted company because this friend had taken vows to become a holy woman, going to join the other holy women in their holy house down the road. Ma sighed. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘We were nineteen, and Peggy gave up life – clothes, jewellery, dances, being beautiful – all that that stood for – just for to become a holy woman.’ This wasn’t the most tragic though, according to ma, of what this Peggy person had given up. As ma talked on, I became confused and wondered if she was speaking of this Peggy, who might not have existed, because, in truth, her first and genuine long-time friend since childhood – real milkman – had after all been shot and killed that day. This might be a substitute, some story, one of those blinds for, ‘He’s dead, daughter. He is dead. And now, how will I face that?’ Instead a mind unravelling, determined in its unravelling not to take in bad consequence, inventing anecdotes to delay the consequence, refusing to attend even at the moment of the delivery of the— Ma interrupted my thoughts on her thoughts to say, ‘Thing was, daughter, I wanted him too.’ She was speaking certainly now of real milkman, saying all the girls had had pashes on him, all the girls being none other than those women of the reverences, those middle-aged supplicants in our district, one notch down from the actual holy women and women too, who would have been no notches down if only they hadn’t slipped up by having men and sex and offspring at some time. ‘Clear as day I remember,’ said ma, ‘when they heard about Peggy deciding to enter holy orders. They laughed at the absurdity of it, at the sheer good luck of it, at the timeliness of it for, with Peggy out of the way, who was there, after all, to stop them now?’ Ma said that made her angry, but also that she was angry at Peggy who had turned one hundred per cent contemplative and in her habit, her mystic state, her marriage to Jesus, no longer distinguished real milkman from any man, no longer cared what people thought or said. ‘I was puzzled,’ said ma, ‘because she’d loved him, I knew she’d loved him, yet she renounced him, also her physicality with him, for yes, daughter’ – and here ma lowered her voice – ‘in those days there was respect and much less disclosing and emotionalism and indiscretion than there is these days, but I knew she’d slept with him and at that time too, you never did that.’

  So God was great and all, according to ma, but imagine giving up real milkman for Him. That was what she said. Ma actually said this and it was revelatory coming from her mouth straight into my ears. Here was my mother, one of the Top Five pious women of the district, coming out with the unbelievable ‘God’s great and all but’. This was scandalous, also exciting, even rather refreshing – that a person of the sanctities was showing herself to be not one hundred per cent of the sanctities, or else there was nothing for it but that the sanctities would have to adjust in meaning to include the lower half of the body now as well. So we were right. My sisters and I were right. Ma had had trysts and assignations with men in her youth at ‘dot dot dot’ places – or had attempted to have them, or at least wasn’t against having them. In her deep recesses she upheld them. Death is truthful, and ‘ambushed and shot and nearly dead’ is also truthful. I would never have got this lowdown about ma and real milkman and Peggy and the district’s upper echelon of advanced pious secular women if real milkman hadn’t been shot and nearly killed that day. And here she was, continuing on. It made them happy, she said, when longest friend took the veil, though not for long as conflict between them then ensued in earnest. ‘They vied for him,’ she said. ‘And I too, daughter, I vied for him.’ I kept quiet here because I wanted her to finish, didn’t want her coming to her senses, remembering who she was, who I was, also that other man, the dead man, my father whom she’d married. ‘But an awful thing happened,’ she said, ‘something not considered by myself or by any of the others.’ This awful thing turned out to be that real milkman, in accordance with his usual oppositional contrariness, decided the issue of his own marital status himself. If he wasn’t to have Peggy, he had decided, he wasn’t going to have anybody. As for the source of his name – ma moved directly next to that.

  Along with everybody of my generation, I thought he was known about the area as ‘the man who didn’t love anybody’ because he’d gotten cross that time and shouted at children – unloving, anti-social, bad-tempered – the district had said he was. Also, that he hadn’t been a team player, that he’d proved unsupportive of the efforts of the renouncers. ‘They were for our good, those guns,’ said people, ‘and the local boys had had to hide them somewhere.’ Uncooperative therefore, the consensus also was. He was prone to arguments too, again mainly with the renouncers – over their death threat to tablets girl, over their flogging of our second sister, over their trying to kill guest speake
rs coming to the feminist shed to give talks on worldwide women’s issues. He’d even argued over kneecappings, beatings, protection rackets, tar and featherings – not just others’ tar and featherings, but also his own. You could see the dilemma he was creating, said people. He went about not being peaceful, not being tactful, but instead stern and conscious and aware and unyielding. Naturally, these were the reasons my generation were given to understand had brought about his ‘not loving anybody’ name. There was his other name, of course, that of ‘real milkman’ but that came into play only latterly as a way to differentiate him from the one I was supposed to be in love with. But now it transpired, listening to ma, there was another, older reason for his name. ‘When Peggy broke his heart for God,’ she said, ‘he broke every other girl’s heart by marrying nobody and by refusing to get over her.’ He carried on being handsome, though now in that marred, loss of innocence, bitter tinge of acerbity way, so that at first he was ‘the man who was incapable of loving anybody but Peggy’. Then he became ‘the man who deliberately wouldn’t love anybody but Peggy’. Then, during his ash-and-wormwood, ergot-diseased, hard-hearted phase, he was ‘the man who’d set a grim policy never to love anybody, especially Peggy’ which, for brevity’s sake, got shortened to ‘the man who didn’t love anybody’ which, until ‘real milkman’ came along, had been graven onto stone as his name. Undiminished too, that name was, said ma, by his deeds of goodness for still he did deeds of goodness. He’d helped Somebody McSomebody’s ma, who was also poor dead nuclear boy’s ma, after her husband’s death, then after her daughter’s death, then again after each of her four sons’ deaths. Then he’d helped ma when da died, then when second brother died, also when second sister got into trouble with the renouncers over her rebellious choice of a spouse. He’d helped me too, after that meeting I’d had in the ten-minute area with Milkman. So he’d gone to the aid of others, many others, tablets girl too, who’d rebuffed him, though surprisingly she hadn’t poisoned him. The women with the issues also he’d helped when communal attitude towards them was one of mockery and chastisement for storms in teacups when eight hundred years of the political problems were still to be sorted. So he did all this helping, and he did it too, from some wider perspective, some higher state of consciousness. All the same, it counted for nothing as far as his name in our community went. ‘A waste,’ said ma. ‘Such a man. Such a fine, fair, honest man. And his looks, daughter—’ Here she veered off to ask if I was in accord that he was the spit of the actor James Stewart, also of the actors Robert Stack, Gregory Peck, John Garfield, Robert Mitchum, Victor Mature, Alan Ladd, Tyrone Power and Clark Gable. I couldn’t say I was in accord but people in love, I knew, saw crazy things all the time. ‘Eventually us women had to leave off,’ she said, which had me looking at her, which then had her, even in the dark, sensing that I was looking at her. Hurriedly she tried to amend. ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean me. Already long ago I’d got over him.’ But no she hadn’t. Oh no she hadn’t. It was during that night then, for me, that something clicked into place. ‘Of course I got over him,’ she persisted, and she raised her voice here in an attempt to prevent my new insight from penetrating. ‘If I hadn’t got over him, daughter’ – this was supposed to be proof – ‘why ever would I have married your da?’