Milkman

by Anna Burns

  ‘Something’s missing. Do you not think something’s missing?’ one renouncer was said to have asked of another renouncer. The area had become eerily quiet, saturated with quietness. Ghostly, palely quiet it was, as if one hadn’t realised just how unquiet it had been until all that undercurrent of persistent rosary-bead clicking and muttering of prayers had stopped. ‘It’s those pious women,’ said another renouncer. ‘Ex-pious women. They’ve stopped that awful murmuring, that persistent low-level pace-praying, that enervating, “teeth on edge” clock-praying, that bursting into hymn without provocation, all this stopping too, owing to the shooting of yon wanker, the one who doesn’t love anybody, the one who shouts at children, the one who came home from that country “over the water” after the death of his brother and threw our weapons out into the street that time.’ ‘We shouldn’t have tarred and feathered him,’ said another renouncer. ‘We should have spirited him to some impromptu little grave, then shot him.’ ‘Yeah,’ said another. ‘Then again,’ said yet another, ‘we must not be hard on ourselves.’ This renouncer reminded the others of their fledgling days, also reminding that it had been these selfsame women who’d intervened on their ’court proceedings twelve years earlier by turning up and camping right outside their safe-house door. This had been after the man who didn’t love anybody had strewn their guns, had shouted at the children, shouted at his neighbours, with the renouncers then showing up and taking him, along with their rapidly collected arsenal, to the safe house straightaway. In the main, they’d been for killing him, not just for disturbing their belongings, but for strewing them so matter-of-factly into the middle of broad daylight. If that young spotter hadn’t acted fast and rushed to warn them of what had happened, any auld military helicopter – come to hover over the area as often they came to hover – most certainly would have caught view of their weapons right away. So they were for killing the man who didn’t love anybody except they couldn’t because of the women who were in love with him. Ordinarily, these women were obliging, supportive of the efforts of the renouncers. They’d turn out in numbers with binlids, with whistles and they’d warn everybody, including the renouncers, of the approach of the enemy; all for billeting the renouncers too, for tipping them off, for stopping the curfews, for transporting weapons and, of course, there was the expertise of their homespun medical corps. Any renouncer worth his salt would agree there was nothing like getting shot but retaining enough lifeforce to run the warren of side streets and back entries to make it into one of those women’s houses – to have your bullet extracted, to have your skin pulled together, to have yourself sewn up or, if no time for sewing, to be held in place with enough nappypins to give you time to outrun the military house-searches which would by now be going on. So you couldn’t invent that loyalty. But he’d strewn their guns, which was why they’d taken him to the safe house which wasn’t a house really, but one of the chapel’s hutments and they did this, not really either, to go through some protracted kangaroo-court procedure, but to get him in there quickly and to shoot him in the head. Barely had they got him over the threshold than those women appeared, strangely kicking up no fuss as they did so. Instead these women set up camp on the street right outside the very hutment door. In silence, they faced the hutment. They looked at the hutment, and not a few – God forbid – even pointed at the hutment. Before long it became clear to the renouncers what those women were about. They knew, and they knew that the women knew they knew, that it would only take one single helicopter to do its flyover and to catch sight of this crowd of women sitting pointing outside a renouncer-run chapel hutment for that hutment then to be earmarked and ransacked by the state. So it was blackmail, even at the same time as it was human inconsistency. Undeniable it was to the renouncers that these women meant their loyal binlids and their loyal whistles, also their loyal sewing-up of arteries. But it was only undeniable to the same extent that they also meant their threatened betrayal of the renouncers should the man who didn’t love anybody not be released at once. So everything was unspoken but what wasn’t unspoken, for the spokesperson for the women eventually went to the hutment door and banged on it to shout it in at them, was that the man who didn’t love anybody was to be released alive. There was to be no corpse, she shouted, but instead their friend was to be fully intact and breathing. When it came to it though, they didn’t get all they were after because to save face the renouncers’ final judgement was that this milkman of the area had proven another district resistant with anti-social behavioural tendencies not consistent within a standard perimeter of conformability, meaning he qualified as another member of our community’s woebegone beyond-the-pales. As such, he was not all there – here they tapped their heads – which meant the death penalty could be eschewed in the interests of being decent to a district mental vulnerable. However, the man who didn’t love anybody would not get off scot-free. He was to receive a light-to-moderate beating followed by a tar and feathering, also a warning that next time he endangered them and their weapons, and no matter how many people were in love with him, he would not be treated so very leniently as he was being treated this time. ‘But we were too lenient,’ they now said, twelve years on from the spirit of that former occasion. And now they were facing, in times remarkably similar, this very same or almost same women ultimatum once more. ‘Hadn’t they been told not to go to the hospital?’ they said. ‘They were warned, ordered, commanded, and look, they followed him into the horse’s mouth and now have got themselves lifted.’ ‘But what do they see in him?’ ‘Yeah. And at their age too, for some aren’t young.’ ‘Not just some. None of them are young. So-and-so’s ma’s definitely not young and the scouts have informed us that she too, has just been spirited from a hospital cupboard and is now down at the police barracks.’ ‘So has so-and-so’s ma.’ ‘And so-and-so’s ma.’ ‘And my ma,’ confessed a renouncer. ‘Sorry, but I didn’t know, and neither did my da, until today when she rushed off and got herself arrested.’ After a pause, some of the others admitted to the deplorable situation of their own mothers’ involvement with the man who didn’t love anybody too.

  As for the police flipping the ex-pious women into informers or the renouncers chasing down the ex-pious women to see if they had been flipped as informers, nothing came of it. Women numbers had by now increased. The women with the issues – ‘Oh no, not them!’ cried all military and paramilitary personnel – had also appeared and had rushed to the hospital out of support for real milkman. He was the only one in their area, they said, who fully comprehended and respected them and their cause. After that came the media, including that small but irksome hostile segment, that even now, without proof, were publishing a ‘MILKMAN REALLY MILKMAN!’ taunting lunchtime news headline, declaring the state again had got it wrong. The state, on discovering this was correct, that they had got it wrong, decided to call closure over the whole affair which they announced on the next television news bulletin. Meanwhile, the renouncers, worried as they had been about having to sit in ’court and pass stern and impartial judgement upon possible informants most likely to be their own mothers, watched this television bulletin of the state calling for closure and, for the first time ever, agreed with their adversaries, concurring that in this case they’d be happy to call it a day as well.

  Ma and seventeen women then, were released by the police and let alone by the renouncers. They rushed immediately back to hospital and straight to Intensive Care. There, they were told that real milkman’s condition was ‘stable’ but that none of them, for now, would be allowed in to see him. ‘Sorry, but you’re not family,’ said the hospital, and apparently ‘spouses on all but offer’ didn’t count either in this case. Some of the spouses went home then, to gather reinforcements, to foster plans and contingencies. This was when ma came in our door in the dark and revealed the ancient drama of herself, of Peggy, of real milkman and of those other women; also, of course, of that other issue, the wrong-spouse issue, that had been unmentionable all through their married life be
tween herself and da.

  *

  Now here she was, nearly two weeks on from when I’d been poisoned but before I’d gone to the chip shop, trying out my slingbacks, briefly calmed because she could see they suited her. Her sense of insecurity though, was still heightened and already was roving round to the next thing. This turned out to be her ‘rear’ as she called it, for this rear had gotten bigger since last time she’d looked full-on at it in a mirror. That had been years previously. How many years, she didn’t want to say. But she looked, she said, and saw that it had gotten bigger, and she knew this, she said, not only by the fact of looking at herself frontwise in the mirror and seeing that that part had gotten bigger, which followed that the back of her must commensurably have gotten bigger, she knew as well, she said, because incrementally she’d had to increase her dress size and also she knew, she said, by that experience she’d had of that chair in the front parlour that time. I must have looked blank for she added, ‘Talking rearward, daughter. That chair I don’t sit in anymore, well, my rear is the reason why I don’t sit in it. You were probably wondering—’ ‘No, ma,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t wondering – and what chair? I haven’t noticed any chair.’ ‘Of course you have,’ she said, ‘the wooden one with the armrests in the front parlour that used to be one of your Great-Great-Granny Winifred’s chairs. Well, I used to sit in it. Now and then I’d sit in it, and do knitting, or talk to Jason, or to some of the other women, or have a cup of tea by myself in it or with the man who really is a milkman’ – she looked at me here but I didn’t rise to the occasion – ‘sometimes I’d just sit,’ she said, ‘and think, or listen to the wireless, and that was fine. I’d sit in that chair without complexity, without any sense of consciousness even, that there I was, sitting in it. It was just a chair; not notable to be registered as tormenting to the psyche. I’d lower myself in, then, when done, I’d higher myself out of it. All normal. Not now, daughter. Now, there’s a searing mental pain anytime I have doings with the chair because slightly my rear brushes the armrest of one side as I’m lowering myself in or highering myself out of it, or else my rear brushes similarly the armrest of the other side. These armrests aren’t capable of articulation,’ she stressed. ‘They’re stuck fast to the body because it’s a one-piece chair and of course the chair itself can’t have gotten smaller which means my rear’s gotten bigger but it’s gotten bigger without the concomitant modification to a new way of negotiating furniture and instead is still acting from the retention of the memory of how smaller in the olden days it used to be.’ I opened my mouth, not sure, to say something – or maybe just to have it hang open. ‘But understand, daughter,’ went on ma, ‘I’m not saying my rear cannot now fit in the chair because the chair’s become too tight for it. It can still fit in. It’s just that now it encompasses a certain amount of extra inches or fractions of inches to which it has never acclimatised and which in the old days didn’t used to be.’

  I knew now, of course, what she was driving at, though unsure still how to respond. Here seemed a sensitive, painful, microscopic depiction of ma’s view of the growth of her behind, with nothing brash or crude or dumbed-down or of popular culture in the description either. My response therefore, should be comparable to her own words, should be of like tone and weight in order to acknowledge and to respect her older status, even her originality in delineating the depth of her rear condition in relation to the chair she was speaking of. I was also aware, of course, given this turnaround she was undergoing concerning herself and real milkman, and the rivalry between herself and the ex-pious women regarding real milkman, that ma, with this chair minutiae, might instead be cracking up. As for the chair, I was prevented having to give response by wee sisters calling to me from downstairs. They’d run out of the bedroom at the start of this talk to dash down to the front parlour to drag the chair in question out into the hallway. ‘Middle sister! Middle sister!’ they shouted and both ma and I went out to the landing and looked over the banisters and there was the chair down below in the hall. It was just that old chair from the front room, the old-fashioned, high-backed wooden one with armrests which looked harmless enough but apparently in terms of mental torture, were anything but harmless. ‘Here it is, middle sister! This chair! It’s this chair here!’ wee sisters clamoured while ma, averting her eyes and putting her arm out against it, cried, ‘Oh, do not remind me! Take it from me, little daughters.’ So they tugged and struggled and dragged Great-Great-Granny Winifred’s offending chair back into the front parlour then they rushed upstairs and we carried on.

  And now it was her face. It had ‘declined’, she said. Then it was lines and age-spots and wrinkles. ‘This one here’ – she came close for me to note a particular wrinkle. I noted. It was a wrinkle. Amongst others. At the top of her cheek. On her face. ‘That one started first,’ she said. ‘It was slight, rather ghostly, and I had to strain really hard, almost hurting my eyes one day to discern it in the public toilets downtown by the City Hall in my early thirties. I knew what it meant, but after an initial twinge of anxiety I dismissed it, daughter, because you see, I couldn’t help it, there were still years yet.’ Then it was her thighs. ‘They died,’ she said. ‘Felt as if they’d died. Looked as if they’d died. That’s how they look still, no longer any springiness to them.’ Then it was knobbles in knees, gristly sounds in knees, a thickened waist, that rear that had also declined as well as amassing extra inches or fractions of inches. The arch of her lower back, she then said, because of all these downward slopings, was not as shapely arched as in the old days it used to be. ‘I used to be gazelle-like in my movement, like your third sister. I even got pictures of me being it. This too. Do you see this? This red mark here? Do you see it? Well, it used to be up there and before that I didn’t have it.’ Wee sisters whispered that ma had been going on like this for hours and that they were worried. They wanted me to say what was wrong with her and to fix it, to do something, so a few times, though futilely, I tried to intervene. I attempted to reassure ma, because I’d noticed, even if she hadn’t, that a side-benefit to real milkman getting shot but crucially not dying, was that ma was dropping years off her, though in correlation to this, it seemed she was losing a lot of confidence, becoming adolescent, giving off the belief she didn’t stand a chance against those ex-pious women who also seemed to be dropping years off them but who again, and in correlation, also were developing self-esteem issues of their own. Ma, however, wouldn’t let herself be comforted. There was a lot of ‘Yes but’ interruptions no matter what I attempted to bolster her with. These Yes-buts in the end were coming out before I’d even manage to utter the first phrase of the first bolster, and now it was armpits, arms, shaking of arms, the backs of upper arms which women her age shouldn’t do if they didn’t want to torment themselves. Then it was gaps in teeth, more declensions around breasts, joints clicking, bones catching, clunkings in the digestive system, problems with the bowels, with her eyesight going fuzzy as well as starting to take on that little-old-lady eye that little old ladies went about with. Also, her hair was going grey, she said, with new hair growing on her body, particularly – this as a whisper – masculine hair on her face. ‘I could go on,’ she said. And she did. She continued to be insecure about things which, until recently, and given her age, I shouldn’t have believed she’d consider, let alone give a care about. Then again, there was that sense of her getting younger even if she didn’t believe she was getting younger. So I suppose in that back-to-front way that happens in life, it was fitting that fears of growing old should assail her now in her new psychic age of sixteen. It was at this point, and as if letting me know that if I thought up until then I’d been witnessing utter defeat and dejection, what followed was utter defeat and dejection. Glancing again in the mirror, this time because she was sure her height had gotten smaller because her bones were crumbling, she let out the biggest sigh so far. This was more to herself than to me or wee sisters. She said, ‘What’s the point anyway? None of it matters anyway, not now, when
there’s that poor woman to consider, the mother of the four dead boys and of that poor dead girl, also the widow of her poor dead husband.’ This was when she moved on to nuclear boy’s ma.

  Nuclear boy’s ma was also, of course, Somebody McSomebody’s ma, also the mother of the favourite sibling who’d been killed in that bomb explosion, the mother of wee tot too, who’d fallen out the window that time. This woman, however, mostly came to be known as nuclear boy’s ma because nuclear boy had made much more of an impression on people’s consciousness owing to his dramatic if incomprehensible nucleomitophobia – not to mention that suicide letter. None of the others in that family, alive or dead, had drawn anywhere near the same attention to themselves as he had. Indeed, apart from Somebody McSomebody, all remaining family members came to be described solely in reference to him. There were nuclear boy’s remaining six sisters. There were nuclear boy’s various cousins and aunties and uncles, nuclear boy’s etcetera and in this case, I now realised, ma was referring to nuclear boy’s ma. Initially when she started in on this, again I could only stare, not knowing what she was intending by it. Ma said, and as if in conclusion for it seemed already she’d been grappling with this, ‘I suppose I’m going to have to let her have him,’ which was when I asked her to explain. She said the ex-pious women, in friendly unison, had come to our door the day before to appeal to her conscience about poor nuclear boy’s mother. They put it to her reasonably, she said, that given ‘POOR POOR POOR POOR’ (as they stressed it) nuclear boy’s mother had suffered more personal political tragedies in her life quantitatively-speaking than had any of them in the area suffered personal political tragedies in their lives, would it not be more noble, spiritual and altruistic, they said, to stand aside and let real milkman be for her? Well, the penny dropped immediately for me but before I could start in on ‘God’s strength, ma, can’t you see the trick o’them? And anyway, it doesn’t work like that,’ she herself was delineating the facts. Counting off on her fingers, she compared the tragedies, again quantitatively-speaking and in accordance with her hierarchy of suffering, that she herself had undergone with those of nuclear boy’s mother. ‘That POOR POOR POOR POOR woman,’ she said. ‘She’s had a husband and four sons and a daughter die, all of them politically, whereas I’ve had a husband and one son die and no daughters – dead I mean, and yes’ – she held up her hand to stop me – ‘it is true that second son died politically, but your father – good man! oh such a good man! and a good father, and a good husband’ – and here she’d veered off, now into compliments about da rather than her usual criticism, which I guessed meant another bout of guilt had assailed her for having repressed for so long her ‘I’m not in love because I’m already married so how can I be in love!’ love for real milkman so that now she was over-compensating with a feeling badness for marrying the wrong person – ‘your father,’ she said, veering back, ‘died ordinarily from illness, God love him, so that meant he didn’t die politically. So I suppose they’re right and I’m going to have to bow out and do the lofty thing and hand real milkman over to her.’