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Memorable Book of 2018: Milkman- A Novel
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Burns was born in Belfast,
Northern Ireland. She is the author of two novels, No Bones and Little
Constructions, and of the novella Mostly Hero. No Bones won the Winifred Holtby
Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She lives
in East Sussex, England.
Chapter One
The day Somebody McSomebody put a
gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same the day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the states 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 rumor started by them, or more likely
by a 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 knew his age, not because he got
shot and it was given by the media, but because there had been talking before
this, for months before the shooting, by these people of the rumor, that
forty-one and eighteen was disgusting, that twenty-three years’ difference was
disgusting, that he was married and not to be fooled by me for there were
plenty of quiet, unnoticeable people who took a bit of watching.
Chapter Two
The morning after that run the session, and earlier than usual, and without telling myself why I walked out
of my way to the other side of the district to catch a different bus into town.
Also, I got that same bus home. For the first time ever I did not do my
reading-while-walking. I did not do my walking. Again I did not tell myself
why. Another thing was I missed my next run session. Had to, in case he
reappeared in the parks & reservoirs. If you’re a serious runner though,
and a distance runner, and of a certain persuasion from a certain part of the
city, you pretty much had to incorporate that whole stretch of territory into
your schedule.
Chapter Three
The third time of the milkman was
when he appeared not long after my adult evening French class. This class was
downtown and it had surprising things. Often these would not be French things.
Often too, there would be more of them than would be the French things. At this the latest lesson, which took place on Wednesday evening, the teacher was reading from
a book.
Chapter Four
That third encounter with the
milkman was not the end of the milkman. Further meetings – real ones as well as
the communally fabricated ones – also took place. At the real ones, and similar
to when we met in the ten-minute area, the milkman didn’t pretend any
accidental bumping into me. There was no feigned surprise, no ‘fancy seeing you
here’.
Chapter Five
The girl who was really a woman
who went around putting poison in drinks poisoned me and I didn’t know she’d
done it, not even when I woke up with the most unbelievable stomach pains two
hours after I went to bed. At first, I thought it was more of those shudders,
those tingles, the horrible sensations coming upon me since Milkman. But no.
Tablets girl had slipped something into my drink. This had been in the club
when I was with the longest friend and we were finishing our discussion which I
thought was to be on Milkman but which turned out to be on my beyond-the-pale
status.
Chapter Six
After hearing of the murder of
tablets girl but before that encounter in the chip shop, I was still in bed
recuperating when three phone calls came through. Two were about me and the first
was from a third brother-in-law. He had heard about the poisoning but wanted to
know from my mother, who had answered, why I was not going running. He said I’d
missed our run a day earlier, that I’d missed other runs, that I hadn’t called
round to discuss this or to get into any altercation with him over it.
Chapter 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 the 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.
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