Milkman

People in this place did give a fuck.

There was the fact that you created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn’t want to.

it came the case that my own fearful fantasies and catastrophic thinking were predicting maybe-boyfriend’s violent death.

This ‘maybeness’ was why I didn’t tell about tablets girl poisoning me, why I didn’t tell about Milkman pursuing me, why I didn’t tell about the district gossip overriding me.

I’d learned by the end of primary school was that it was best not to open my mouth in the interests of truth except to a trusted few persons, this trusted-few becoming a trusted-fewer as time progressed in primary school and then I was in secondary school and by that time

that part of normality here was this constant, unacknowledged struggle to see.

because his reputation for general all-round unfriendliness had become so fixed in the district consciousness that it would have taken an enormous explosion of conscious effort to shift that particular bit of hearsay on to the truth.

it came about that of everybody who had heard of the wooing of me by Milkman, third brother-in-law was the only one who, unquestioningly, hadn’t considered it to have taken place.

realised things had reached the point where I was now checking to see if the community was concealing itself in those tucked-away places too.