by Anna Burns
SEVEN
Three times in my life I’ve wanted to slap faces and once in my life I’ve wanted to hit someone in the face with a gun. I did do the gun but I have never slapped anybody. Of the three I’ve wanted to slap, one was eldest sister when she rushed in on the day in question to tell me the state forces had shot and killed Milkman. She looked gleeful, excited, that this man she thought was my lover, this man she thought had mattered to me, was dead. Openly she scanned my face to see how I would take it and even in my obstinacy – which had taken me, in opposition to Milkman and to the rumours about me and Milkman, to a deeper, more entrapped place than ever I had been in – still I could see how unconscious of herself she was at this point. She thinks this will teach me a lesson, I thought. Not because of the political scene and of what he had represented in it. Not because of what his killers represented. That was nothing. This was everything to do with her not wanting me to have what long ago she had stopped allowing herself. Like her, I must be content, must make do, not with the man I desired as she thought, with the man I had loved and lost as loved and lost she had, but with some unwanted substitute who might now, after Milkman, come along. She continued to look transported, far from that state of grief she’d been walking about in for ages. She was not though, going to have her transports at my expense. Stop being happy, that’s not to make you happy – slap! – was how my thinking went. For actual response, even as she awaited my reaction, I kept my face, as was usual now with me, nearly-remote and almost-inaccessible. Then, with a hint of feigned emotion, just enough to convey that for a moment, for one tiny moment, I was pointing out some mildly diverting curiosity, I said, ‘You look like you’re having an orgasm now.’
Her glee – not so much either, that sickening triumphant glee that some people get who certainly deserve to have faces slapped, but the glee of someone who finds herself alive for an instant in all the awfulness when her usual condition was to feel completely dead – well, that glee ceased, as I knew it would, for I had got her where I wanted her, where I had intended to get her, right at her centre. That’s where I would have been got had she, or anybody, said those words to me. She slapped my face then, a recoil reaction, because I had got in where I’d no right to get in and even though in the moment I considered myself of every right, I did not, could not, slap her back. After the initial satisfaction of shocking her, of shaming her out of her victory, already I was regretting my words. So enough. I wanted her to go now, to take herself and her make-do husband, and his dirty slanders which had started everything, and to go now. Things were not gentle, not ever, then.
She went, loaded with grief again, standing at the foot of the cross again, and as for glee, I had not felt any of that. I wasn’t happy he was dead, not glad – or maybe I was, for really, why should not I be? What I did know was that relief was coursing through me with an intensity I had not ever in my life felt before. My body was proclaiming, ‘Halleluiah! He’s dead. Thank fuck halleluiah!’ even if those were not the actual words at the forefront of my mind. What was at the forefront was that maybe I’ll calm down now, maybe I’ll get better now, maybe this’ll be the end of all that ‘don’t let it be Milkman, oh please don’t let it be Milkman’, no more having to watch my back, expecting to turn a corner to have him fall into step with me, no more being followed, being spied upon, photographed, misperceived, encircled, anticipated. No more being commanded. No more capitulation such as the night before when I got beat down enough, had become indifferent to my fate enough as to have stepped inside his van. Most of all there would be no more worry about ex-maybe-boyfriend being killed by a carbomb. So it was, while standing in our kitchen digesting this bit of consequence, that I came to understand how much I’d been closed down, how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man. Also by the community, by the very mental atmosphere, that minutiae of invasion. As for his death, they had ambushed him late morning as he pulled up in that white van outside the parks & reservoirs, which meant that after six false starts, they had got their man at last. Before Milkman, they had shot a binman, two busdrivers, a road sweeper, a real milkman who was our milkman, then another person who didn’t have any blue-collar or service-industry connections – all in mistake for Milkman. Then they shot Milkman. Then they played down the mistaken shootings while playing up the intended shooting, as if it had been Milkman and only Milkman they had shot all along.
Certain parts of the media, however, critical of the state, were not prepared to let them away with it. Headlines such as ‘MILKMAN SHOT IN MISTAKE FOR MILKMAN’ and ‘BUTCHER, BAKER, CANDLESTICK-MAKER – WATCH OUT’ had already begun to appear. These were followed by newsreel and further print-runs, reminding the state of its other blunders, its perversions, its secret army outfits, its drive-by shootings, its very own dishevelled status of extra-special beyond-the-pale. Eventually the state responded by admitting that yes, it had precision-targeted a few accidental people in pursuance of intended people, that mistakes had been made, that that had been regrettable, but that the past should be put behind, that there was no point in dwelling. Most of all, in spite of target error and the unforeseen human factor, it reassured all right-thinking people that they could rest easy, now that a leading terrorist-renouncer had permanently been got out of the way. ‘Not to get into equivocation or rhetorical stunts or sly debater tricks or savage glee,’ said their front-of-shop man, ‘but we consider this a job well done.’ No display, therefore, of gloating, of one-upmanship, of triumphalism because triumphalism was not the path to go for public presentation packages. Not just public presentation packages. On hearing the news, and even in the privacy of the subtext of my own mind where nobody but me could witness me being me, also out of fear of being judged in the area some traitorous, cold-hearted bad person, I myself was trying not to be happy. But I kept thinking of my narrow escape from whatever he had planned for me that coming evening and I was happy – happy too though, that no mocking, exposing media spotlight was being shone that moment upon me.
So his death hit the headlines but that wasn’t all that hit the headlines. After they shot him, and the six unfortunates who’d got in the way of him, it was revealed, along with his age, abode, ‘husband to’ and ‘father of’, that Milkman’s name really was Milkman. This was shocking. ‘Can’t be right,’ cried people. ‘Farfetched. Weird. Silly even, to have the name Milkman.’ But when you think about it, why was that weird? Butcher’s a name. Sexton’s a name. So is Weaver, Hunter, Roper, Cleaver, Player, Mason, Thatcher, Carver, Wheeler, Planter, Trapper, Teller, Doolittle, Pope and Nunn. Years later I came across a Mr Postman who was a librarian, so they’re all over the place, those names. As for ‘Milkman’ and the acceptability or not of ‘Milkman’, what would Nigel and Jason, our guardians of the names, have to say about that? Not just our Nigel and Jason either. What of equivalent clerks and clerkesses protecting against names proscribed in other renouncer areas? Even Roisins and Marys guarding against opposing forbidden names in ‘over the road’ defender-run areas? Alarmists, meanwhile, continued to debate over the provenance of the Milkman name. Was it one of ours? One of theirs? Was it from over the road? Over the water? Over the border? Should it be allowed? Banned? Binned? Laughed at? Discounted? What was the consensus? ‘An unusual name,’ everyone, with nervous caution, after great deliberation, said. It broke bounds of credibility, said the news, but lots of things in life break bounds of credibility. Breaking credibility, I was coming to understand, seemed to be what life was about. Nevertheless, the news of this Milkman name unsettled people; it cheated them, frightened them and there seemed no way round a feeling of embarrassment either. When considered a pseudonym, some codename, ‘the milkman’ had possessed mystique, intrigue, theatrical possibility. Once out of symbolism, however, once into the everyday, the banal, into any old Tom, Dick and Harryness, any respect it had garnered as the cognomen of a high-cadre paramilitary activist was undercut immediately and, just as immediately, fell away. People consulte
d phonebooks, encyclopaedias, reference books of names to see if anyone, anywhere in the world had been called Milkman. Many were left stranded, uncomprehending, with nothing for it but to grow speculation, both in the media and in the districts, over just who exactly this Milkman person was. Had he been the chilling, sinister paramilitary everyone here had always believed him to be? Or was it the case that poor Mister Milkman had been nothing but another innocent victim of state murder after all?
Whatever he had been and whatever he’d been called, he was gone, so I did what usually I did around death which was to forget all about it. The whole shambles – as in the old meaning of shambles, as in slaughterhouse, blood-house, meat market, business-as-usual – once again took hold. Deciding to miss my French night class, I put on my make-up and got ready to go to the club. This was to the brightest, the busiest, the most popular of the eleven drinking-clubs existing in our small area and as for going: drinking-clubs were the exact places you would go, exactly what you would do, when both hyper and deadened and in need of alcohol.
Not long after I arrived, I left my drinking-friends to go to the toilets. I hadn’t spoken of the shooting to these friends and they had said nothing of it to me. This was normal. There were friends for drinking with and friends for revealing to. I had one friend for revealing, but full-on drinking-sessions weren’t really longest friend from primary school’s scene. I pushed open the toilets door and as I did so, that man who was really a boy, Somebody McSomebody, pushed in behind me. By now in our non-relationship relationship he had dropped his amateur stalking and instead, like the other lickspittles in the area who had believed me mistress, had moved to bowing and scraping and pretending to like me. Ma though, about him, continued to get it wrong. ‘Such a nice wee boy,’ she said. ‘Sturdy. Reliable. Right religion – and there’s those nice love letters he’s for-putting for you through our letterbox so would you not date him? Would you not think of marryin’ him?’ But my mother, desperate to get us wed, to anybody, before the old age of twenty, knew nothing because she was still in her day with her people, not realising it was now my day with different people, but the nice wee boy, Somebody McSomebody, pushed into the toilets and shoved me up against the sink. He was holding a handgun and it was stuck in my breast so then I knew – for already I had suspected – that the death of Milkman wouldn’t mean, for me, the end of Milkman. Because of their stories; because they thought Milkman had gained ownership; because of my haughtiness; because my protection was now dead; because it was now being put about I’d tried to evade retribution for cheating on him with a car mechanic; because after any significant death that was communal rather than personal always there was allowed that extra bit of anarchy – because of all these becauses, perhaps it suited the more extreme in the area to push the rumour out completely and have it be me and not that state death squad who’d orchestrated the killing of Milkman all along. Even at the outer limits of absurdity and contradiction people will make up anything. Then they will believe and build on this anything. It was true that, given the time and place, I might have been scary, walking around, terrorising the neighbourhood with ‘How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’, but it wasn’t just me. In their own idiosyncratic ways, an awful lot of other people were pretty scary here as well.
And now, returning to his former stalking personality, it seemed McSomebody was taking advantage of the dead Milkman situation to nip in quick and get his own back. To my surprise, he was now intermingling his stalk-talk with a dollop of anti-stalk-talk – perhaps to wrest back pride and control after being flouted twice by me as well as feeling compelled to genuflect with ‘Here, Your Majesty, have this, Your Majesty’ every time I, as one of Milkman’s possessions, walked by. Easier on the mind perhaps, to have me now the intemperate one, doggedly determined in my pursuit of him. ‘Just leave us alone!’ he cried. ‘All we ever wanted was for you to leave us alone. Stop following us. Stop entrapping us. What are you planning to do to us? Get off us. Why can’t you take on board you’re not wanted, that your advances are not to be accepted, that it’s thanks but no thanks? You mean nothing to us, we don’t even think of you and another thing, you can’t just act with impunity, carrying on as if it didn’t happen, as if you didn’t start this, as if you didn’t stir things up. You’re a cat – that’s right, you heard us, a cat – a double cat! We don’t think you’re up to the level of even being a cat. But don’t you push us so far because this is aggravated harassment.’ He was right. It was aggravated harassment. Before Milkman, he’d sent a letter – one of those love letters ma in her ignorance had referred to his putting through our letterbox. In it he’d threatened to kill himself in our front garden only we didn’t have a garden. In a second letter, this was amended to ‘outside your front door’. Now, at this encounter in the toilets, his written threat of suicide seemed to have got turned into my written threat of suicide. In my hand-delivered missive to him apparently I’d warned I was going to take my life outside his door to make him feel guilty for not wanting me. This set me wondering if his words were shadow-speak for him planning to kill me right now inside these toilets by this sink. Clearly then, he was still attracted. Equally clearly, he was furious about it. If there was one thing McSomebody could never be accused of amongst all the things he could be accused of, that would be of not thinking complexly. Meantime I was at a loss on how to respond to his words.
‘This is not the sort of place, you sub-cat,’ he began, but then he ran out of words, too suffused with rage, I suppose, to complete on what he’d set out to convey to me. Not necessary though, for it was easy to read between the lines. He meant this drinking-club, this district, was not the sort of place into which you strolled without letters of introduction, without seals of approval; nor was it a place in which the harmonious tended to happen – the temptation to be animal, to be elemental, often overpowering in times of bloody conflict for the more ascensional side of a person to prevail. He was saying that anything went here, that I should know anything went here given I was from here. As he spoke my mind was racing, thinking, this boy is stupid but he’s dangerous stupid, and he wants to fuck me and he wants to beat me and from the look of things might even now want to shoot me. But then, already he’d made up his mind. I knew he wanted revenge, that for a long time he’d nursed revenge – even from before the era of Milkman. He’d made his decision because I was supposed to have been a nice girl and further, his nice girl, but some mistake had occurred which confused him and insulted him but because of Milkman setting his sights, he’d been forced to retreat and keep resentment in check. He could not then have called for justice. But now he could call for justice. Indeed, he could administer the justice. With Milkman out of the way, with everyone just getting on with it, what was there, who was there, to stop him after all?
‘Do you think anybody here gives a fuck if we teach you a—’
Not sure, unsure, of all he was to say next ’cos he never got saying it. I snapped the gun off him, getting it by the barrel, the muzzle, the end, whatever that bit was called. He wasn’t expecting that and before I did it, neither was I. Again that long-ago phrase – a recklessness, an abandonment, a rejection of me by me – had returned to me. I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’d be dead, all the time, violently murdered – and that, I now understand, gave a certain edge. It offered a different perspective, a freeing-up of the fear option. That was why too, I wasn’t freshly in that place of terror that he thought, with his gun, he had just put me in. So I grabbed it and I hit him in the face with it, I mean the balaclava with it, with the handle, the butt, whatever that bit was called. It wasn’t though, a satisfying crunch of metal on bone, of someone having their head broke open which until that moment I wouldn’t have thought I’d be so bloodthirsty for. It was a clumsy feeble hit and before I could gather myself to have another go he punched me and grabbed the gun off me. Then he hit me in the face with it. I wasn’t wearing a balaclava. After that, he pulled me u
p the wall and dug the gun in my breast as before.
That was all he was able to do because something else he hadn’t reckoned on, hadn’t overhauled his blueprint on, was women, particularly women in toilets, these women, in these toilets. These women took it upon themselves to jump McSomebody which was then what most of them did. The gun fell out of the scrum, then a second gun fell out also. Nobody seemed bothered by the guns and I too, glancing at them, wasn’t bothered by them. They seemed cumbersome and irrelevant, or maybe just irrelevant. This called for bare hands, stilettos, booted feet, flesh-on-flesh, bone-on-bone, hearing the cracks, causing the cracks, venting all that pent-up anger. The guns were ignored therefore, not wanted, kicked about during the kicking of McSomebody. Meanwhile, I watched this new development keeping well to the side of the sink where he had shoved me. Had to. The pile of women, with him somewhere in amongst them, at that moment was blocking the only door.
So they beat him up. And it was for his behaviour that they beat him up, not for the irritation of guns, for wearing a balaclava when everybody knew who he was anyway; not for threatening me either, a woman, one of their soul sisters. No. It was for being a man and coming into the Ladies unannounced. He had shown disrespect, been dismissive of female fragilities and delicacies and sensibilities, had shown no courtesy, displayed no chivalry, no gallantry, no honour. It was that he had no manners basically. If he chose to walk in on them while they were applying lipstick, adjusting hair, sharing secrets, changing sanitary towels, then so be it, there would be consequences. And here they were, those consequences, happening now. After the current consequences, after they told their men which they were going to do in a minute, there would be further consequences. Just as that state task force then, hadn’t killed Milkman to do me a favour, this rescue too, hadn’t been so planned. Help was help though, no matter from what quarter. This meant that once again, twice in one day, I’d been handed a gratuity, a perquisite, some residual but much appreciated side effect; fortunately also, I’d been handed it at just the right moment in time.