Milkman

by Anna Burns

  They were kissing now, tightly embracing; he, leaning her over, supporting her by her back, her waist – and her, arms about his neck, letting him hold her, letting him support her, letting him lean her over. Soon indeed, it seemed he was kissing her backwards off her feet. It was one of those ‘you’ll never be kissed like this until you smell like this’ Christmas French perfume advertisements and here too, I noticed – though they didn’t – others had come to view them as well. The majority of these people had broken off from the small crowd which had gathered to observe the strange spectacle of the men fighting down the street. They were still at it, those men, in silence, doing so too, with those cigarettes dangling. Perhaps it had been a fight too quiet, too prolonged, too puzzling, a disconcerting fight, difficult to gauge, one which worked largely perhaps by association of ideas, some modern, stylistic art nouveau encounter. Being a conventional audience, however, used to chronological and traditional realism, the majority began to doubt that those men, indeed, were fighting at all. That was why they lost interest and broke away to come down to us, and most of these neighbours were now nodding, and nodding sagely. The woman beside me nodded sagely to the woman on the other side of me, who acknowledged her sage nod by herself nodding sagely. ‘I knew it was guilt,’ said the first, now talking to me. ‘That explains your brother’s behaviour, his furtiveness in sneaking into the area and the same on his rushing out of the area. Guilt. Only guilt. Nothing to do with the political problems, with renouncership or with any possible suspicion of informership. All guilt – also remorse – and a bad conscience at what he’d done to her. But do you have any idea’ – and at this all of them turned to me – ‘what his wrong wife is going to say about that?’

  That was something else. Brothers. My brothers. I had four brothers, three really, and one of them, the second one, was dead. I still counted dead second brother because still he was my brother. I counted fourth brother also, the one who’d never been my brother but who instead had been second brother’s longest friend since their days at the baby school. Always he’d lived with us, this fourth brother, even though he had his own family – two parents, two brothers, seven sisters – still had them too, residing just four streets away. At age fourteen, having left school, he’d continued to live in our house, though by that time he’d joined the renouncers. Second brother also had joined the renouncers. Even now, with second brother gone, fourth brother in theory still lived with us as part of our family, although at present he wasn’t in our house because he was on the run. They said he’d taken motorbike for the border after shooting up that patrol during which deliberately he’d killed four state people and accidentally three ordinary people – one adult and two six-year-olds, standing at their countryside bus-stop waiting for their bus. No longer now did we see him, although it was said he was somewhere down there, in one of those counties in that country ‘over the border’. As for first brother, eldest brother, well, by tradition, it was expected that if anyone in a family here was to go and join the movement, it would be the firstborn son who’d go and join the movement. So much was this believed that when ma’s second son, my second brother, who had joined the movement, got killed while himself in a shootout with the state forces, the policemen, when they came to fetch ma to identify the body, kept getting it wrong and calling him her firstborn instead. In the case of ma’s actual firstborn, my first brother, he didn’t join the renouncers but instead fell over drunk one night in town and broke his arm. He took himself to the hospital and said it had been the fault of a loose paving stone and put in a claim and was believed by those in charge of believing or not believing and was awarded a whack of thousands. He gave a lump sum to ma, then, regarding the country and its political problems, said, ‘Fuck this, I’m outta here,’ and went to the Middle East for a bit of peace and quiet and sunshine instead. Before going, he offered to take the brothers with him, but second brother and fourth brother, deep in their renouncership, said they didn’t want to go, and third brother didn’t want to go because he was in love with tablets girl’s sister. So first brother went alone and no one has heard tell of him since. So this brother, first brother errant, went and did his thing. And second brother, my late brother, he did his thing. Fourth brother was currently doing his thing. As for third brother, jilting his right spouse then marrying the wrong one, then doing nothing about it till now, delineated – least also until now – all that could be said about him.

  After completing the Jean Paul Gaultier kiss, and oblivious still of us, the audience, third brother swept his true wife off her feet and up into his arms. He said one word, ‘Hospital!’, then, switching from earlier declarations of love and self-idiocy to ‘urgent need of medical care and attention’, he turned and carried his love to his car. ‘Shouldn’t take her to hospital,’ murmured the crowd, now shaking their heads. ‘Hospital’s wrong, entirely wrong. There’s nothing so wrong as a hospital. There’ll be forms to fill in. Questions asked on who poisoned her. Then the Schutzstaffel will be sent for and them two will be forced into informership.’ They turned to me then. ‘They’ll recognise your brother, you know. They’ll know who he is, that he’s your dead second brother’s brother and your fugitive fourth brother’s brother and it’ll make no difference that he himself is no renouncer. Being an associate of a renouncer,’ they said, ‘a family member of a renouncer, will be seen as proof that he’s connected as well.’ With this they waited for me to respond. As for me, I just wished they’d give over about the hospital. Lots of people here bucked the trend now, broke the hospital embargo and took themselves down there regularly. The hospital was busting with people from my area who weren’t supposed to be in it. Before long it’ll be day-trips to the hospital and booking your holidays down at the hospital. Now was the dawning of a new era, at least concerning hospitals, and the sooner these neighbours realised that, the sooner we could all adjust and move on. I knew of course they wouldn’t dare mention what they were edging around, which was that third brother would also be recognised as the brother of the sister who was sexually involved with that major paramilitary player, the one who not long ago had been background person in those killings of judges and judges’ wives and who’d killed too, the most major of poisoners our district had ever known. Instead these neighbours skirted that whole murder business, also the business of myself having been the inducement to the ‘ordinary murder’ aspect of it. Instead they reiterated the turning by the police of third brother and his girlfriend into informers. Meanwhile, this brother, deaf to sageness and to disapproval and to the dangers of opening oneself to informership, placed the love of his life into the passenger seat of his car. He threw himself over the bonnet and straightaway was in the driving seat where at once he gunned the engine. The car roared up the street and screeched round the corner into the interface road that led to the hospital. After that, all sight and sound of my worried but now happy third brother, with his newly happy but perilously ill former ex-lover, disappeared.

  *

  That was that. All action over. Far more than enough of it too, for me, for one day. I didn’t like action because hardly ever was it good action, hardly ever to do with things nice. So now I was going home and the adjusted plan for the rest of the evening was that wee sisters could eat cake. After cake, they could go out on adventures and I myself would stay in, have a bubble bath, eat cake too, in bath, put feet up during and after bath, finish off Persian Letters, possibly with it disintegrating in steam and water-dribbles owing to sogginess which didn’t matter as in a few pages I’d have done with it anyhow. After that, if ma still wasn’t back by wee sisters’ bedtime, I’d read them some Hardy for they were well into their Hardy phase. Before that it had been their Kafka phase followed by their Conrad phase which was absurd given none of them had reached ten. So I’d read to them even though it was the hideous century of Hardy and not the acceptable century of Hardy, but I’d do it then, to round off the evening, I’d get into my own bed and start in on my eighteenth-century Some Consi
derations on the Causes of Roman Greatness and Decadence which, published in 1734, was pretty much, I reckoned, how all books should be. So it was a simple and sequential plan, no involutions, easy of implementation, but I got in the door and wee sisters came out the back living room holding oriental parasols with tinsel wrapped around themselves from the Christmas box kept out of the way on top of the wardrobe and their first words to me were, ‘Somebody for you called maybe-boyfriend rang up.’ This surprised me because it was unprecedented that maybe-boyfriend should have 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 know whether or not he— Wee sisters by now were continuing on. ‘We informed this person you were at the chip shop getting us chips, middle sister’ – they looked for the chips but in my hands there were not any – ‘then we requested his telephonic number for you to return the call but he said, “If she’s only gone for chips, if that’s all she’s gone for,” and said he’d ring again in half an hour. He rang thirty-seven minutes later but still you weren’t here. You were taking a long time getting our chips, middle sister’ – again they looked for the chips, frowns of tiny proportion forming on their faces – ‘so we suggested once more his telephonic number and once more, “Don’t bother yourselves,” this person, your maybe-boyfriend, said. Then he asked if we were your sisters and we answered yes but, middle sister, where are the chips?’ They had gone to the heart of the matter so I explained about the no-chip situation without giving any truth in my explanation. Instead I offered a vague non-committal about the chip shop not having any, even though I knew non-committals and vagueness never sat easily with them. To pass quickly on, as well as to counter any disapproving comment they might make about my moral probity in telling lies to them, I slipped in that they could have whatever they wanted from the kitchen cupboards – hoping that outstanding treat-foods would be in the kitchen cupboards – then I closed the chapter on the chips by announcing that tablets girl’s sister and third brother were sort of, kind of, back together again.

  That was the right manoeuvre, a brilliant piece of sidetracking. Wee sisters loved tablets girl’s sister. So much they loved her that always they’d run towards her, jump up, throw themselves at her, swing on her arms, on her neck, give hugs, laugh, receive hugs and this would be every single time during the time she was the girlfriend of third brother. So it was within reason that when third brother threw her over, they too, were heartbroken, to the extent of crossing third brother off their Christmas list for almost a year. Eleven months, three weeks and up until half a day before the end of Christmas Eve he’d been struck off, after which they relented and put him on again. This exclusion period covered the times too, when he was taking them, along with ma on Tuesdays for those jaunts, those merry-go-rounds, those convivial entertainments, with no understanding, it seemed, of the extensiveness to which he’d been unforgiven, nor of the criminal misconduct in which they had held him, or of how close he’d come to getting no reindeer card, no men’s pair of socks, no men’s shoelaces and no men’s soap-on-rope from wee sisters that particular Christmastime around. And now news of the reconciliation had done the trick. This was best news, not least because tablets girl’s sister reciprocated wee sisters’ love entirely. I’d never met anyone so indulgent of three little individuals discoursing earnestly on the invention of the encyclopaedia, the whirlwinds of the Faeroe Islands, the diatonic scale, prefectures in China, the non-local universe, the theories and facts of material science or on the cultural destruction of the courtyard of the Ca’ d’Oro. Tablets girl’s sister did so indulge. She delighted in wee sisters, listened to them, encouraged them, took them seriously, read their voluminous notes and asked sensible questions, which pleased them. So now, with the couple back together, there was rejoicing, with queries no longer on locus of chips but now on locus of tablets girl’s sister and third brother. Not realising, however, the extent of the effects of poison, just as third brother and I at first also hadn’t realised the ravaging of poisoning, wee sisters were unaware of the precarious state this lovely girl they loved was in. I left off being exact about that as well, about how currently she was at death’s door and even now was down at the hospital with third brother, having the poison seen to. Instead I said probably they could see her and be reunited in just a little while. Meantime, and as long as it was available in the kitchen, I said they could have supper made out of anything, then they could go out and play until very, very late with the added bonus of my reading twentieth-century Hardy to them later on. This was satisfactory and so that was where we were – wee sisters opting for Smarties, Farley’s Rusks, boiled eggs, something called ‘easily expressed mints’ with various other nuncheon-type snack things – when maybe-boyfriend, for the third time that evening, for the fourth time ever, rang up.

  ‘Well, go and have them then,’ I shouted, meaning their aliments because, as the telephone rang and I answered, wee sisters were about to set off for the kitchen. Then, when maybe-boyfriend said, ‘It’s yourself,’ I covered the mouthpiece to shout further, ‘And close the door behind you and don’t listen to this telephone call!’ As this was the first time to talk with maybe-boyfriend – with any maybe-boyfriend – via the telephone, I felt inhibited, so I didn’t want any overhearers to our conversation, meaning wee sisters in this instance, listening in. Of course there was also the security forces with their electronic surveillance but as for them, if they were listening – because maybe no one was listening – there wasn’t a lot in the moment, bar not speaking to maybe-boyfriend, that I could do. So I shouted to wee sisters to eat their nuncheons out the back, then to leave by the back, then I sat on the stairs, uncovered the mouthpiece, placed the receiver back at my ear and said, ‘Maybe-boyfriend.’ I was glad it was him, very glad, even though it was weird to talk on the telephone. Only eight times, seven, maybe six, ever had I done so. Maybe-boyfriend said, ‘You took a long time getting those chips, maybe-girlfriend,’ and his voice sounded like him which meant lovely, which meant male, which meant welcoming, and he was bantering about the chips, with my taking it at first to be banter. So the telephone call started fine, but by the end – by the time we got through the bit about my ma calling him a terrorist, the bit about his being under further siege, not solely now from that supercharger and flag rumour, but also because of some new rumour involving him way over in his district but for which he seemed to think I was responsible way over here in my district – I was reeling and reassessing his remark of ‘took a long time’ as not really some affectionate opening banter. Before long I became sure it was an attack upon me after all.

  He asked what had happened. Why had I missed our Tuesdays and our Friday nights into Saturdays and our all day Saturdays into Sundays because, apart from my ending our sometimes-Thursday nights together, neither of us had missed a date during our almost year-long maybe-dating so far? I told him something had come up and that I’d had to stay and look after our house and wee sisters. I didn’t share about real milkman getting shot, or ma being transformed into her true self because of real milkman getting shot, or about my being poisoned, or about tablets girl being murdered, or about Milkman intensifying his predations upon me – indeed, about Milkman. Nor did I share about the community and its fabrications, or the particulars of that carbomb which still remained a live issue between us even though still he was persisting in shrugging it off. There was the chip shop experience too, that I didn’t share, with its attitude of ‘Here! Take these chips, but don’t be thinking you’ll get away with this, hussy!’ and it wasn’t because of stubbornness that I didn’t share. Even so, it started to seem to me that perhaps I could tell, that perhaps my business could be – if maybe-boyfriend wanted it to be – his business also. Still I held back though, thinking, well, what if I did tell? What if I do tell? What if I manage to get it out and, just as with the carbomb, he dismisses and shrugs it off? At this point in my life – and again, because I was confused and shut down by Milkman, and by the community, also
because of this uncommitted status of me and maybe-boyfriend; because too, I’d been watching my back so long I’d no conception I was missing out on my own good opportunities; because of all that then, I construed that the hurtful impact upon me of his shrugging it off would be worse than not revealing at all. So I downplayed it, thinking even at this point that that was how I had to play it, but maybe-boyfriend said, ‘But what happened? What is this thing, maybe-girl, that’s come up?’ After a startled moment, my mouth fell open and despite all my long-held reasons for not telling, spontaneous words came out of my mouth. I heard myself speak of ma’s friend being shot, and of her being down at the hospital a lot now – which was when maybe-boyfriend interrupted to say he would come over, did I want him to come over? I only wished my spontaneity had carried itself further and I’d been able to say what I wanted to say which was yes. He could come over. He could be here. Come also, without ma haranguing, without questions of marriage or babies or of accusations of being Milkman. Even if she’d been here, ma was so distracted now with her own heart issues, it was unlikely she’d even register maybe-boyfriend was in the room. So it wasn’t thoughts of her that were stopping me now, causing me to hesitate, to deprive myself of maybe-boyfriend. It was – well, what if he does come over and he gets to hear? I found myself back, then, with eldest sister, sitting silent in ma’s front parlour on the day and hour of the funeral of her murdered ex-boyfriend. I knew it was unbelievable that I should let myself get pushed into becoming what the gossips were saying I’d already become but, according to the latest in the area, it was the case I’d been in relationship with Milkman for two months by now. That meant it was time to cheat on him, they said, so I was cheating on him, having a dalliance behind his back with some young car mechanic whippersnapper from across town. Because of this new rumour then, I hesitated to get my thoughts straight before answering. Having told out some – the easier bit, the bit that didn’t involve me but only ma and real milkman – it was now time, I decided, to tell out to maybe-boyfriend all the rest. Before I could do this, however, maybe-boyfriend misconstrued my hesitation and pounced, saying I didn’t want him to come over, that never had I wanted him to come over – to pick me up, to drive me home, to spend time with me in my district. At first he said he thought it was because of the rumour of him and the supercharger which had made me ashamed to be seen with him; that perhaps, just as with the gossips over his way, I had even started to believe him an informer too. That had been before the other rumour, he said, for even across town in his own district he had heard of that other rumour – the one about his daring to vie for the affections of a renouncer’s girlfriend. ‘And that renouncer,’ he said. ‘The milkman renouncer. So, maybe-girlfriend, what have you got to say about that?’