Milkman

by Anna Burns

  Why indeed? Once again, I was back to pondering this ‘marrying of the wrong spouse’ business. I don’t mean the outgrowing of what was once a successful union, with each partner contributing and committing to each other, celebrating each other until they reached a natural end of their shared path together when they’d part with or without love and a blessing before moving on to somebody or to something else. I mean this business of people marrying people they didn’t love and didn’t want and where someone from the outside might look in and shake their head and say that somebody ought not to be in such an intimate position in another somebody’s life if it turned out they were the wrong somebody. In the general local thinking though, there were reasons for this. One was the political situation here in which the spouse you really wanted might not have a premature, violent death, but then again, he or she might have. Why invest your heart in the one person in the world you loved and wanted to spend your life with when maybe not that long down the road they were going to abandon you for the grave? Another reason was fear of being alone because of the social stigma that automatically attached to it. Marry anybody therefore. He’ll do. Yer man there will do. Or she’ll do. Pick yer woman. Then there was being bullied into it because you have to fit convention, because you can’t let people down – the date’s been set, the cake’s been ordered, haven’t you even gone and booked the honeymoon? Then there was fear of oneself, of one’s independence, of one’s potential, so avoid that path by marrying somebody not on it, somebody with no feeling for it, somebody who wouldn’t recognise it or encourage it in you. Then there was not going for the one you want because by doing so, you might cause envy and anger to arise in others, others whom you knew wanted this person too. There were other reasons for the wrong spouse – fear of losing control through letting the desired into your subsoil, or marrying somebody close to the one you wanted but who didn’t want you so have their best friend, their colleague from work, a relative, even the person living next door to them. Of course there was the big one, the biggest reason for not marrying the right spouse. If you married that one, the one you loved and desired and who loved and desired you back, with the union proving true and good and replete with the most fulfilling happiness, well, what if this wonderful spouse didn’t fall out of love with you, or you with them, and neither of you either, got killed in the political problems? All those joyful evers and infinites? Are you sure, really, really sure, you could cope with the prospect of that? The community decided that no, it couldn’t. Great and sustained happiness was far too much to ask of it. That was why marrying in doubt, marrying in guilt, marrying in regret, in fear, in despair, in blame, also in terrible self-sacrifice was pretty much the unspoken matrimonial requisite here. That was why too, I protected myself by not getting married; further, by sticking to maybe-relationships in spite of my intermittent longing for, and futile attempts to mould me and maybe-boyfriend into, a proper relationship. These were all the reasons then – certainly an ample selection of them – for the so-called accident of marrying the wrong spouse. And now I knew da had been the wrong spouse because although she’d blamed him, always had blamed him – for his depressions, for staying in bed, for going into hospital, for dying, for not being in love with her – it wasn’t da. It was that she’d been in love, still was in love, with real milkman all the time. As for da, had he known he was the wrong spouse? Had he cared, been broken-hearted, not only because he’d been falsely positioned but because he’d allowed himself to be falsely positioned? Or had da known that ma, through all those years of marriage, even before marriage, had been for him the wrong spouse too?

  *

  Now, nearly two weeks on, ma was still away at the hospital seeing to real milkman, with me at home seeing to the girls. Their panic had subsided, given now they understood she hadn’t gone forever, hadn’t disappeared, been disappeared, stolen away to spooky places such as the hospital or the jailhouse, that she wasn’t dead with her body buried in some secretly dug-out, then hurriedly filled-in grave. They accepted that for a while she’d turn up sporadically and that on those occasions they could be with her; also, that in the meantime they could run rings around me which was then what they did. ‘Mammy says we can have this.’ ‘Mammy says we can go there.’ ‘Mammy says we can stay out till four o’clock in the morning.’ I let them away with some of these mammies, and at night-time I read to them because wee sisters loved being read to. It was at this time also, because they demanded them and because I too, was getting pangs for them, that I went that early suppertime into the heart of the area to purchase (in a manner of speaking) those damn chips.

  I pushed open the poky saloon doors and went in and had that unpleasant experience of being made an accessory-after-the-fact of tablets girl’s murder which, of course, by the time I was back out in the street I had decided probably had nothing to do with him at all. This was more of their sensationalism, more of those makings-up, those lies of theirs that they wanted to be true and so in their heads and in their gossip they made true. Anyway, if I was an accessory, who were they to talk, because all of them would be accessories too. I pushed open the doors and went in, and then, not long after – in shock, in shame, with free chips, also with that angry ‘Kill them, Milkman. Kill all of them. I hate them. Hurry up and kill them’ – I came out again. I walked along the street from the chip shop and headed round the corner, thinking, so is this how it is to be now? I meant the start of getting things for nothing. I’d witnessed over time that select others in the area got things for nothing. They’d go into shops, have silent, sometimes unfriendly though mostly always over-anxious and over-friendly shopkeepers pushing free packages at them. So was this to be my role in Milkman’s infrastructure now? I was to be hated, feared, despised, but crucially to be kept in with. If that were the case – all this giving to me of things, delivering onto me of things, more and more things, whether or not I wanted them – what then, I worried, should be my next move? Should I get it over with, take the free things, pile them in the corner and never once look at them? Should I be firm, not coerced, not bullied, slap my money on the counter? Or should I leave with self-respect intact without buying or accepting anything? If it were to be the last, I’d keep control, but I had taken the chips so already they had control. This meant there was nothing for it but that I’d have to venture out of the area in order to do the messages – not just the tiniest of items either, but probably the whole weekly shop. Also I wasn’t trained for this, in how to oppose it, how to surmount it. Should he die – should Milkman die – or be jailed, or disappeared – because the renouncers thought nothing of now and again disappearing each other – or should he even reach the point of just no longer desiring me, I’d plummet in the ratings, and they, the shopkeepers, in turn, would want reprisals for all that arse-licking as well as demanding all their packages back. So I walked on, despondent in my thoughts, bleak in outlook, thinking, what’s the point? What’s the use? and with a pile of negativities growing up inside me. It was then too, that that unpleasant physical floatiness in my body once again assailed me, my legs no longer having feeling and my feet no longer touching the ground. I could see them moving, but I could gain no sensation of them moving. Once more too, I got that impression of being naked and exposed from behind. What’s happening? I hate this, I thought, and here I ceased walking and took hold of some railings. This was when, as if on cue, another bout of those quivering anti-orgasms passed through me. So it was to be shock upon shock, one shitty thing after another shitty thing until, it seemed, I should get the message. But what message? How was it my fault that they had decided that he, for me, had cut her throat?

  Then I remembered the chips. I was still holding them, encumbered by them, so I chucked them. Then, when they were on the ground, I ruined this noble gesture by thinking, now why’d I go and do that? Should I pick them up? I wondered. They’re not dirty, still in their wrappings. I could dust them off, give the sign of the cross over them and bring them home to wee sisters? The ma
tter was settled, however, by a pack of street dogs appearing out of nowhere, bolting to the chips, fighting each other for them, with the victors, within moments, wolfing them down. The violence of the dogs brought a gasp from over the way and I looked and there was tablets girl’s sister, the one who, like me, and by the same person, had recently been poisoned unto death. Again like me, she was holding on to railings, looking startled, looking too, as they said she was, as if at the beginning of her poison ordeal instead of having already undergone the purge of her poison ordeal. She was squinting over, first at me, then at the dogs and I saw it was true too, that ever since her poisoning they said she hadn’t recovered her shininess – also that she could no longer properly see. They said she didn’t use a stick and here she was, not using one. Instead she was adapting what was left of her eyesight, plus walls, palings, lampposts, hedges and it was in that manner she negotiated her passage, bringing her face close to objects and feeling her way along. ‘She’s fine, out and about’ was the communal prognosis upon her, also the communal euphemism for ‘mended though broken’, itself another euphemism for ‘in urgent need of medical care and attention’, all of which the person in need unfortunately was not going to attend hospital to get. As for her shininess, I now had my own confirmation that it was damaged, patchy, hardly to be discernible. Apart from a few dithering blinks and the odd, sullen twinkle, she could have been any one of us with our heavy, slumbering loads. There were few people on the street at this hour because most were indoors, having their tea, watching the news, and those who did appear were walking straight by her. Some deliberately didn’t look; others halted, slowed down, paused, then crossed the road abruptly to where the dogs were still fighting, choosing that route as the least unsettling by which to pass by. One or two hesitated, as I was hesitating, not because we didn’t want to help, but because tablets girl’s sister, in her diminished shininess, in her encroaching darkness, might now rebut offers of help. Then too, a person might want to help but not be able to, owing to a state of clinging to railings herself. Those hesitating across from me then made up their minds. They too, crossed the road, so then there was only me and tablets girl’s sister. There were the dogs, of course – some fighting, some licking, even eating the chip-papers. Then I saw two men just up from us and they too, were fighting, physically fighting. The reason I hadn’t seen them earlier was because no sound was issuing from them at all. They were at it in silence, absolute quietness – fists up, lunging, jab-punch, jab-jab-hook, undercut, evading, leaping around, grabbing hold of each other. This was strange to behold but what was stranger was that each of these men, during their physical exertions, had a lazy, long cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  I let go of my railing and went over to tablets girl’s sister. I told who I was for it didn’t seem clear she could discern me. I asked if she wanted a hand but didn’t believe she’d say yes and was unsure she’d even answer, one reason being that, like the others in the chip shop, if she thought I’d had a hand in the slaying of her sister, why would she think I’d think she’d want a hand from me now? Two was more of that marrying in doubt, the wrong-spouse business. Indeed some were saying that this new taint of darkness which had befallen tablets girl’s sister had not been down so much to her poisoning by her sister as down to a gradual giving-up of her spirit after being dumped a year earlier by her long-term boyfriend. Given who had dumped her, almost in fact, jilted her, given too, my blood association with this person, my mind in that moment just couldn’t go there. But I did offer to help and she said, ‘What’d you do? I saw movement and now there are dogs and I can’t get past them.’ Already she was turning to take the long route the opposite way. Presumably this meant railing after railing, hedge after hedge, broken lamppost upon broken lamppost until she got round to her own house. ‘Throwing chips away,’ I explained then I said, ‘Don’t go that way. Men are fighting that way.’ At this she paused, then said she was struggling to make things out. Especially street signs, she said, and she indicated with her hand, saying they were palely written. I looked to where she was pointing but there were no street signs. In this district, where most streets were identical, the renouncers, to slow and confuse the enemy, had removed every single street sign, something she should have known, so that had me wondering if her brain had been affected by the poisoning as well. ‘I was counting my way,’ she said, and still she peered, her hand holding to the railing. ‘I couldn’t remember if I’d turned into—’ – here she mentioned two streets, neither of which she’d turned into. Her own street though, was only three streets away. I explained where we were and intended asking if she’d like for us to walk together. Instead both of us spoke at the same time. Our words went to essentials and I’d warned myself beforehand not to be selfish by saying what the very second later I went and did say which was, ‘I didn’t kill your sister. Nor am I responsible for you being rejected by your true lover.’ Meanwhile, her words were, ‘We found a letter in my sister’s room the other day.’

  This letter had been found by tablets girl’s sister during a concerted search undertaken by her family. They were determined to uncover where tablets girl kept her potions and her poisons, all those tools of her trade. She had a constant supply and it couldn’t, not all of it, always be on her person. Must be concealing them, they thought, somewhere about the house. While some of them tackled the far reaches of the coal-hole, the glory-hole, the toilet cistern, the attic and so on, tablets girl’s sister had gone for the unlikely places. Places, she said, where American Indians, full of wisdom and insight and with an ancient affinity to the environment and its elements, would hide in plain sight and not be found. In translation obviously this meant the living room. Tablets girl, the poisoner, shunned even the most basic of familial get-togethers, so that meant never would she have ventured in there. So tablets girl’s sister went straightaway into the living room and cast around for the most unlikeliest spot in this most unlikeliest of rooms to discover where best her sister could have concealed her poisons. Again the Red Indian answer was obvious. Lying across the top of the settee that day – as it had been lying for five years and counting – was the once beloved family rag-doll. This doll had been passed down the children until it had reached the last child before he turned eleven and had discarded it. Although someone in that family must have thought that one day, one day soon, yes, one day, when he or she had dealt with all the other, much more pressing, essential housework, they’d get around to putting or to giving that doll away. Because it had been such a minor item, practically a fixture and fitting, that day so far had not come. The cleaner in the family then forgot, so the doll continued to lie there in full view over the settee until it became invisible. So tablets girl’s sister went over and picked it up. Inside the belly of this doll, between the sexual chakra and the solar plexus chakra was a big nappy-pinned entrance and exit. Tablets girl’s sister opened the pin, extracted it from the belly of this doll and inside found not tablet girl’s actual poisons but instead a letter folded into eighths. It was written in her sister’s hand and seemed to be a private missive written by some aspect of tablets girl to another aspect of herself. My Dearest Susannah Eleanor Lizabetta Effie, it began. Here tablets girl’s sister paused. As with all members of that conscientious family, she was disinclined to poke about in another’s personal belongings. Ordinarily never would she have done so except the family was under the bigger obligation to hunt out and destroy their relative’s murder weapons and, with the renouncers on the doorstep, threatening to kill this relative, they felt they’d no choice but to get a move on. Whilst the rest of them then continued above and below and out the back, dislodging floorboards, making holes in walls, searching under rafters for the phials and the potions, it was with qualm and scruple that tablets girl’s sister, perching on the edge of the settee, opened out the folds of what amounted to thirteen pages of the smallest, neatest, blackest handwriting. She inhaled deeply. My Dearest Susannah Eleanor Lizabetta Effie, it began.