Milkman

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, ‘knew me to see but not to speak to’ and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one.

I think it’s because I’ve resolved something about family issues that I can now do the “bigger” issue – which actually, for me, is the lesser issue.

At this time, in this place, when it came to the political problems, which included bombs and guns and death and maiming, ordinary people said ‘their side did it’ or ‘our side did it’, or ‘their religion did it’ or ‘our religion did it’ or ‘they did it’ or ‘we did it’, when what was really meant was ‘defenders-of-the-state did it’ or ‘renouncers-of-the-state did it’ or ‘the state did it’. Now and then we might make an effort and say ‘defender’ or ‘renouncer ….. that flag of the country from ‘over the water’ which was also the same flag of the community from ‘over the road’.

There was ma too, continuing her barrage of how I wouldn’t get married, of how I was bringing shame by entering paramilitary groupiedom, of how I was bringing down on myself dark and unruly forces, bad-exampling wee sisters, bringing in God too, as in light and dark and the satanic and the infernal.

It’s creepy, perverse, obstinately determined,’ went on longest friend. …. It’s the way you do it –reading books, whole books, taking notes, checking footnotes, underlining passages …. It’s disturbing. It’s deviant. It’s optical illusional. Not public-spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why –with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with us all having to pull together –would anyone want to call attention to themselves here?’

“Are you saying it’s okay for [The Milkman] to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre [walking about] in public?’

look[ed] at it in its proper surroundings, then Semtex taking precedence as something normal over reading-while-walking –‘which nobody but you thinks is normal’ –could certainly be construed as the comprehensible interpretation here …. So, looked at in those terms, terms of contextual environment, then … it is okay for him and it’s not okay for you.’

Take a … statelet immersed …. conditioned… through years of personal and communal suffering, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger –well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that. As for the environment, that too, would object, backing up the pessimism of its people, which was what happened where I lived where the whole place always seemed to be in the dark. It was as if the electric lights were turned off, always turned off, even though dusk was over so they should have been turned on yet nobody was turning them on and nobody noticed either, they weren’t on. All this too, seemed normality which meant then, that part of normality, here was this constant, unacknowledged struggle to see.

After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.

Teacher started again. This time it was the fugacious (whatever that meant) black appearance of street trees owing to the crepuscular (whatever that meant) quality of the sky behind them, with the others –still in their own struggle –complaining that our town didn’t have fugacity, crepuscules or street trees, black or any colour, before being made to look again and conceding that okay, maybe we did have street trees but they must have been put in half an hour earlier as nobody here had noticed them before.

And all this spelled a serious turning bad for us, for me and maybe-boyfriend –in the way that the rumour about me and the milkman in my area was affecting me, and in the way that the rumour about him and the flag in his area was affecting him.

‘You never know,’ they said, ‘what might be considered the most sought-after paraphernalia of these sadnesses in years to come.’

"The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, ‘knew me to see but not to speak to’ and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one."