Text

Milk for Connolly and Sons

“‘They’re just things. I have them too, and mine don’t make nearly as much of a fuss as yours — they sit tight in rows or else columns and they only come of use when I say — they don’t lose their wits, they don’t sour, they don’t squirm, yet when called upon they are for all intents and purposes intensely purposeful.’ I said.
Back in my eighties there was a big boom in old-builds. Young people were building classically-fashioned homes all over the place with their own money — I was astounded — and selling them to people through a sort of stock exchange. The mechanism is more or less the same: you pay a percentage and you own a percentage, and I owned the, symptom of the old-builds, nasty west-facing room and as my extra five percent owed me, the room with no discernible flooring — only one painting by René Magritte, and a toilet facing the window. I lived more so in the weird room than anyplace else. At mealtimes I saw the woman in the kitchen and tried to talk sense with her. We defined each other’s position in neither comradeship nor conflict, only as longing for the other to be swapped out for a more electrifying another. We both knew, however, how the stock exchanged work back then. A rule is a rule is a rule.
A symptom of the old-builds: I was once alone in an elevator that missed the fourth and fifth floors. Sometimes I had come across elevators that missed out one floor, but never twice — and never consecutively. And no, it was not probable that every day of my stay had there never been anyone to hail the elevator at four or five. What to do in the time between six and three, where there was no credible possibility of being disturbed? It seems unfortunate that the equivalent of an entire floor can be spent making as prudent a decision as is necessary. Then your second of two floors has a lot riding on it. I panicked, and picked my nose and felt that at least it was something I could not have done in public; I reached the third floor and said my greetings to a new man, a tall, blonde, hypnotist; the two of us reached the second floor where a dangerous man joined us, and the latter’s eventual victims appeared on Floor 1; at ground floor we were all relieved to see the city had not yet been removed. I know about the murder on Floor 1 through a previous correspondent, and had been chuffed at my judgement of the culprit as ‘dangerous’ from the moment I laid eyes upon him. Such were small triumphs. I had made haste across the lobby floor, I remember its sensation of hollowness, as if it were temporary. Only staying until somewhere better opened up, and then we’d all be swallowed up by the ground.
‘Tell me if you might, how do you get down and up? Because the elevator doesn’t stop at four or five, or at least it hasn’t since I got here,’ I was saying to my friend who lived on the fourth floor, apartment thirty nine, as we sat in identical trousers on the bus to the workplace.
And that’s as much as I can recall of my most senior years of life: only a few incongruent phenomena, seldom inspired.”
‘It’s a good, good account entirely, but only when you read it without a lot of poking it or prodding it up and down, you see,’ said Hamish at the dining table. If anything he was being generous. They, the Connolly’s, hated the milkman’s boy. There he was, hanging by the doorway, though unafraid as his father was excellent, the very best, and he could even see the rings and clouds of milk in all four of their chubby glasses. His pride in service had lent an assured air to his reading. He thought of himself as having done himself good, getting a job like his father. People like the Connolly’s were untalented in the field of reading, they could be made a fortune of.
After he was given his two dollars, one for the story, the milkman’s son debated what was to be best achieved with the rest of his morning. His own morning, and no one else’s. What a delight! and he threw himself down the stairs and onto the street.
It was only two days later when an officer from the city council came to the classroom and stood, face melting, and asked solemnly when bade entrance where, and the harsh words only just left his mouth, where the ruddy little astigmatism was to be hiding. All of the boys and girls turned and pointed at him: he, once a great and storied milkman’s boy, but here in school something different entirely. As he was marched out and along the corridor past all of his former classrooms (he was in the final year of first school) a flurry of words came out of the officer’s mouth, none too delicate. They made certain inquiries into the nature of the boy’s insubordination, his lack of community, the self-indulgence of his facial expressions, the neglect by his mother and father that was rollicking out more and more misbehaviour by the second, and lastly, timed to the striking of the lunch bell and the iron fence opening, were these words.
‘Your grandfather has been killed,’ and his eyes welled poisonous, ‘by a disease.’
They looked at each other’s faces.
‘And he has left you a few things. I have seen all of them. A number have been confiscated by myself and my colleagues. I’ll tell you what they were, which should be for a small child as yourself enough to feel thrilled. A bow, four dozen arrows, a bear-trap, a long knife, and a sword.’
‘A sword?’
The officer appeared to be thinking over something. Then he said, ‘No, I was making a joke. But the rest,
yes, and very dangerous. You know that he was a hunter for many years, yes, and lived in the new part of town?’
The boy nodded.
‘Good. Now I’ve brought you out here amongst the fresh air for no real reason. I suppose you can go back inside now and mingle with your classmates and such.’ And he leant down and shook the boy’s hand. He stooped into a black car and drove. Through the back window the boy watched the officer’s head confusing itself with lights and reflections, shadows, curvature, the slight rosy tint of the glass.
Now that his grandfather was very real, and of course dead, maybe the Connollys would like the account better.