Milkman

by Anna Burns

  Mostly so far, during their exchange, my attention had been on maybe-boyfriend because why wouldn’t it be on maybe-boyfriend? But now I glanced at chef and instantly got a shock. The expression on his face – intense, uncouched, for he believed himself unobserved, therefore no reason for couching – was one of love. This was not a ‘best friend’ look of love, or a dispassionate, ‘concerned for all mankind’ look of love. There was no ‘maybe’ category about this look either. I had never – certainly not for my maybe-boyfriend – seen such a look on chef’s face before. Then again, I had not often looked at chef, not at his face, not really. This was just chef, the bent guy, the harmless guy, the one to be protected by the other guys; the one also to be condescended to, amused by, especially during the times he went into one of his food fits. At bottom, I’d supposed that chef was to be felt sorry for, and again not a proper sorry but one of those ‘it must be awful to be him so I’m glad I’m not him’ type of sorries. Not really to be regarded, not perceived as on the same level. Now though, it seemed to me, I was seeing this person for the first time. I understood now that this was why my instincts had stayed me, had prevented me from making my presence known. I’d even had premonition shudders, second time now to have had them without Milkman being involved. And now chef was removing the dishcloth and, as he did so, that look on his face increased and shocked me further. He brought his hand over to maybe-boyfriend’s face – and maybe-boyfriend let him. This was no ‘Let me have a look then’ rough male fumble. Wasn’t even to maybe-boyfriend’s injured eyes that he brought his hand. He had placed it on his cheek. Then he stroked the cheek, once, bringing his hand down, then shifting it gently, slowly, over to the other cheek. Again maybe-boyfriend let him, keeping his own eyes, all the time, closed. I saw then that the blood from earlier, those splotches, hadn’t been from maybe-boyfriend’s eyes but were coming from his nose. He brushed chef’s hand aside at that moment to wipe at them. Then he pushed chef’s hand away again, then again, which was what I would have expected him to have done right away. At this point there was no speaking, just that gentle hand-removing and quiet hand-replacing, one set of eyes closed, the other open, maybe-boyfriend on the chair, chef beside him, leaning over him, standing up.

  Maybe-boyfriend then said, ‘Stop. Stop, chef. We can’t do this. We can’t keep doing this.’ Then, in support of his words, his hand came up and again pushed chef’s hand away. So he pushed, but he returned, then maybe-boyfriend pushed again, not strongly. Then he halted. There was no cursing, no ‘Fuck off, chef. What are you doin’? I’m not like that.’ No surprise either between them, the surprise and unexpectedness at what was happening in that kitchen between those men was turning out to be only so for me. And now maybe-boyfriend, after pushing chef off, stopped and he took hold of this other man’s arms and with his own eyes still closed, he held them. He leaned into them, into chef’s middle, with chef bending over till his face was in maybe-boyfriend’s hair. One of them then moaned, then there was, ‘Leave it. It’s over, chef, leave it,’ but when chef released his grip to step away, perhaps to leave it, maybe-boyfriend turned his own face up and pulled him down towards him yet again.

  This was when I pulled round into the living room, for no, I thought. I knew what was coming and this was not for my eyes to see or my ears to hear. Hold on, I then thought. What do you mean not for your eyes and ears? This is your maybe-boyfriend, maybe-boyfriend too, of the oh-so-recent ‘you confound me, maybe-girlfriend, always hard to second-guess, impossible to connect with’. But how long? How long have them two …? I seemed to slip into a state of incomprehension whilst fully comprehending at the same time. And now they’d stopped murmuring which I guessed meant, though I dared not look, the second Gaultier kiss of the night was in process. After that, the murmuring started up once more. ‘Wrong person,’ said maybe-boyfriend – again meaning me – and chef said, ‘… for you, all for you, did it for you because …’ ‘Afraid. Risky. Too risky … What an idjit! … What a scared idjit! … If they’d killed you! If those lot … You could have died and never would I have been able—’ This last could have been either chef or maybe-boyfriend. I wondered if my legs would get me to the front door. Meanwhile, I carried on standing, slumping, against the wall to the side of the kitchen in maybe-boyfriend’s living room where the front door had been busted. And why it had been busted, why his compulsive hoarding had been interrupted, I no longer knew nor cared. As for the telephone fight, our recent fight – given that now he and chef … that he and him … that they … – what had that telephone fight really been about? So much for thinking maybe-boyfriend unstudied, uncomplicated, free from deception, the man who eschewed protections for his heart when here he was, confirming to chef, and to myself, that he too, had been a ‘settler’, had chosen some safety-net wrong person instead of the right person. What an idjit me, I thought, and I meant in thinking I’d protected myself, believing myself safe from the wrong-spouse category by staying in the maybe-category when it now turns out a person can be done to death in the maybe-category as well. The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult. It was while in the middle of maybe-boyfriend’s continued declaration of being an idjit and of my berating myself also for being an idjit, that chef returned the three of us to the moment by demanding the hospital once more.

  His tone had changed. Sharp, stern, commanding. Even when maybe-boyfriend said, ‘It’s nearly back, nearly normal. See, m’eyes are coming back. I can see a bit already,’ chef still said, ‘We’re going, but give me a minute till I throw on another shirt.’ I panicked, for with chef about to enter the living room to head upstairs – He keeps his shirts here? Well, of course he keeps his shirts here! – he’d discover me, and that frightened me because chef now did frighten me, not being the man I’d thought until now he was. But then, who had I thought him? I hadn’t considered him. Hadn’t found him particularly friendly, but nor had that bothered me because in the whole hierarchy of importance, he hadn’t been in that hierarchy. But not harmless. This man, I could now see, was not harmless. Considering how proprietorial he got around food, what on earth would he be like over rights in a man? Then I thought of the knife, his knife, bloody, in the sink, still bloody. Thought too, that I might faint even though never in my life had I fainted. But I was light-headed, warm, oozy. There was a buzzing, insect-type swarming going on around me or within me, and by now, of course, those new familiars, the shudders, were firmly running up and down my lower spine and legs. There came further sounds then, intimate, from within the kitchen, moans suggestive of, at the very least, further Gaultier behaviour. One of them then said, ‘Husband,’ then there was, ‘Let’s chuck this. Why are we here anyway? Let’s go to South America. We’ll go to Buenos Aires – Cuba! Let’s go to Cuba. I like Cuba. You’ll like Cuba,’ with me thinking, Husband! Cuba! Let’s! – when me and him couldn’t make it beyond a maybe-relationship or get as far as down the road to the red-light street.

  I went unseen, across the haphazard room, out the busted door, down the path and away along that meander-cut-through. They never knew I’d been there, though as I went, I played out in my head what would have happened if. What if, to keep this ordinary, to make it normal, to cancel it out, I were to sneak out the front door only to make a noise of going back in again? They’d think I was turning up for the first time. I’d notice the busted door, shout immediately for ex-maybe-boyfriend. Ex-maybe-boyfriend and chef in the kitchen would have time then, physically to draw apart. They’d compose themselves and quickly do couching and editing before I entered. Ex-maybe-boyfriend would shout, ‘In here, in the kitchen, maybe-girlfriend,’ and I’d go in and there they’d be, two friends, knife in sink, out of sight, no longer calling for explanation. Ex-maybe-boyfriend’s eyes and the blood though, would remain as before. Chef would demand hospitals and ex-maybe-boyfriend would reject hospitals. Nothing intimate, nothing tender, none of that intensity of look or of the
ir touching. I would gasp, maybe scream, rush over, take hold of ex-maybe-boyfriend. ‘What happened, maybe-boyfriend? Oh God! What happened?’ and they’d explain, or let me infer, that homophobes in the area had again set upon chef which meant we’d get through it, we’d improvise, we’d keep it vague and dishonest. There’d be nothing of contradictory sentiment, nothing irreconcilable. Just chef getting attacked and then protected as usual. What neither would say, what certainly I would not say, as I hadn’t, would be, ‘Perhaps it’s time we three had a talk.’

  So it hadn’t been a fight, not another hauling of reckonings, decrying of insufficiencies, mutual accusing. No shouting, no sulking. I knew though, that I wouldn’t see ex-maybe-boyfriend, or step into his house, again. As I walked along in the night, heading, it seemed, to the taxi rank, and just as when I’d left the chip shop earlier, I couldn’t feel my legs. I could see my legs, see the ground, but impossible it was to get a connection with them. Reaching my hands to my thighs, purposely I felt them, pressed them, doing so unobtrusively, however, because as usual now with me, I had that feeling of being observed.

  But no anger. I didn’t feel angry. I knew though, that in there, underneath the numbness, the anger must exist. At ex-maybe-boyfriend. At chef. At first brother-in-law for inception of the stories, then for spreading of his stories, including the latest of how foolish I was to cheat on Milkman in broad daylight with that boy from across town my own age. Anger also at the gossips, for embellishing brother-in-law’s stories, for fabricating their own stories. At the sycophants who resented me and the chip-shop keepers and all those general storekeepers, who in time would feel pressured to present to me anything of their wares they thought I might like to have. It was missing, gone away, this anger, and, as with the legs which I could see but couldn’t feel, and the ground I knew was there but above which I seemed to be floating, it was as if I had no right to be angry because if I’d managed this differently it wouldn’t now be my fault. If only I’d done such and such instead of such and such, gone there instead of there, said that and not that, or looked different, or hadn’t gone out that day with Ivanhoe or that night or that week or anytime during the last two months when I’d let him catch sight of me and want me. Here I stumbled and it was then the white van drew up alongside me. The passenger door opened and that sensation of ‘not going freshly into that place of terror’ settled upon me once more.

  I got in as if it was natural, as if this was not the first time of van, of this nondescript, played-down, most-important vehicle. Before I myself could do so, he leaned over and, close as millimetres, without touching, without looking, pulled the door to at my end. He had shifted some long-lens camera from the passenger seat, placing it in the roomy compartment bit of the van between us. Also in this compartment were a few small medicine bottles holding many of those shiny black pills with the white dots in the middle of them, one of which was still in my handbag. After closing my door, he leaned back into his seat and started up the engine. Then together, as a proper couple, we moved off. It was strange though, that after that whole build-up, after the last bastion of ‘mustn’t get in his vehicles’, of being warned, not just by myself but by longest friend from primary school, ‘that whatever you do, no matter what, friend, do not get in his vehicles’, once I did step over that threshold, I would have imagined – two months earlier certainly I would have imagined – that doing so would have produced much more tumult and emotion than this. There was no tumult. No emotion. Here was this thing that happened for always I knew it was going to happen, for it had been telling me for ages that it was coming and that it was going to happen. And now it was beginning. What was there then, to get emotional and tumultuous about? What remained was to get in, to get it over. And it wasn’t that consciously I thought, may as well have me ’cos he knew all along he was going to have me and I can’t stop this, can’t stop him from having me; or that here I was, journeying now to have done to me what I should have accepted long ago was going to be done to me. Instead it was that by this time of van, I’d been adapted into some hypnotised, debilitated state. Ex-maybe-boyfriend himself had said, ‘Don’t know, maybe-girl, but … look at your face and it’s as if your sense organs are disappearing or as if they’ve already disappeared.’ Some things stick. That stuck. I wished he had not commented on the dispossession of my face.

  Looking ahead as always, Milkman said, ‘That’s that done. Taken care of.’ His voice was quiet, unhurried, not pleasant. Then, with his next words, he sounded appreciative, even surprised. ‘That was a turn-up. Bet they didn’t reckon on yon squireman with his knives. But that’ll stop it. They’ll leave it now, leave him now. As for the other, the one with the cars – the erstwhile attachment – he’ll be fine. No consequence of flag or of informership will come upon him. It was that you misesteemed him, didn’t you? A maybe-boyfriend, wasn’t he? No worries, princess. We won’t have to concern ourselves there anymore.’

  He drove me home without another word, and still without looking at me, until we reached my ma’s front door. His not speaking during the journey was clever, but then Milkman had been clever. This was the perfect build-up, the creation of the optimal best atmosphere in which I was to hear and take in his last words. We drove out of ex-maybe-boyfriend’s side of town, down into town, out the other side of town, keeping to the right geography and passing all my personal landmarks. After that it was more interface roads, then into my own area where as a properly established couple we parked outside my mother’s front door. And I knew it was that I should have been shocked, should have been revolted, should have been at least astonished instead of not even surprised that here I was in this notorious vehicle, sitting inches from this notorious man. But there was no choice. It was that there was no more alternative. Ill-equipped I’d been to take in what everybody else from the outset easily had taken in: I was Milkman’s fait accompli all along.

  Still in his van, in the dark, he turned off the engine, turned too, in his seat towards me. Finally I felt the gaze, the long, slow gaze, upon me, because now he could look, could allow himself to look. Here was success, completion, property. In contrast, I was the one who remained this time looking ahead. He took off his gloves and said, ‘Very good. Excellent,’ though I think more to himself than that it was calculation I should hear it. He leaned over then and lifted his fingers to my face. They paused in mid-air, very still, very close. Then he changed his mind and withdrew them. He sat back in his seat. Then came his last words. He said that I was beautiful, did I know I was beautiful, that I must believe I was beautiful. He said he’d made arrangements, that we’d go somewhere nice, do something nice, that he’d take me to a surprise nice place for our first date. He said I’d have to miss my Greek and Roman but that he was sure I wouldn’t mind missing my Greek and Roman. Besides, he said, did I really need all that Greek and Roman? Something for us to decide, he said, later on. He said then that for as long as I remained living in the family home, he’d call up to my door but wait outside and that I was to go to him. He said then he’d call at seven the following night in one of his cars. ‘Not this,’ he added, dismissing the van, mentioning instead one of those alpha-numericals. For my part – here he meant what I could do for him, how I could make him happy – I could come out the door on time and not keep him waiting. Also I could wear something lovely, he said. ‘Not trousers. Something lovely. Some feminine, womanly, elegant, nice dress.’