THE MILKMAN INQUISITION

In a future maybe not so far ahead the milk bottle may be a precious object, and woe betide he (or she) who smashes one....

Craven looked at Joanna, despair etched on his face and in the dark lines that encircled his eyes. The crash had brought him out of a reverie in which things went right. Now, back in reality, things were going wrong, as usual.

“What was that?” he asked, his eyes begging for any answer but the truth.

"I'm sorry," moaned Joanna. "I didn't do it on purpose -I wouldn't - it just slipped out of my hands - Craven, I don't want to - you know what!"

"What slipped out of your hands?" he asked, dreading her response.

"I was holding it, Craven, holding it as carefully as I could, and it was wet - they get wet when you rinse them, you know - and without me knowing what was happening it slid through my fingers. Like in slow motion. I should have been able to stop it, I should have been able to grasp it tightly, but I couldn't."

"What did?" Exasperation sounded in the sudden harshness of his voice. He knew the answer, of course he did, there was only one thing in the damned house that could smash when it was dropped, but he wanted to hear her say it. He wanted to hear her give a name to it. He wanted her to admit the dreadful, awful truth.

"The milk bottle," she whispered. "Oh, Craven, help me! I don't want to - to - to die..."

"They"ll find out," he replied, dully." You know they will. Ever since the green crisis of '21 they've had their eyes everywhere. There"ll be a Milkman on his way now, I"ll bet you. He'll be knocking on the door if he doesn't attack it with an axe first, and they'll take you away - and I love you!"

"We'll say it was Jacob," she gabbled.

"What? Blame a two year-old? How could you even think of doing such a dreadful thing! The child's innocent!"

"He was there when I dropped it! I was trying to wipe his nose with one hand and hold the bottle with the other, I'm only a mortal woman, you know, and I can"t always multi-task without risking stuff, and I let it slip, slowly, from my fingers - I'm so sorry - I should have dropped Jacob instead!"

"You know the rules, Joanna. The milk bottle must be kept intact for our life-time and if anything happens to it then someone has to be punished. It's the only way our planet can be saved from disaster! Soon green things will start spreading again like they used to. Soon the scientists will crack the code and breed new generations of trees, and the air will slowly purify and we'll be able to smash milk bottles whenever we want to! But until then..."

"Until then the breaking of a milk bottle is a capital offence!" rasped a new voice.

Craven looked up, though he didn't have to. He knew who it was, all right. It was the milkman, who had come into the apartment without knocking or so much as a by-your-leave. The man who was tasked with the control of milk-bottles, with the disciplining of careless criminals who damaged them, who broke them, even. The milkman had a harsh and vindictive voice because that's what his job made him, and anyway he was recruited in the first place for his callous, brutish streak. He had to be that way. No suggestion of sympathy or empathy or anything like that should ever creep into his thinking. His was the job of ensuring there were always milk bottles for the distribution of milk, shining glass bottles because they were the best, and for every one broken there was a penalty to pay. It had to be that way. It was the best.

"Get your things together, woman, and come with me!" he shouted, though shouting was rarely if ever necessary. It was just that he enjoyed control, power, and shouting.

"Can't I say goodbye?" almost whispered Craven. "Joanna: she's my wife, the mother of our bairn, she's all I've got."

"Serve you right for marrying the kind of t**d that smashes precious glass bottles, then!" shouted the Milkman. "Serve you right for being so cavalier over your choices in life! You know as well as I do that that there can be no smashed milk bottles and if there is then a price has to be paid. The law says it. A life for a life and a life for a bottle. That's the equation and you know it,"

He grabbed Joanna by one shoulder, gripped it tightly, and marched her out. He enjoyed his job all right, and the next bit was the best of all. The next bit was when he took her to the court and held a trial. It was all written down for him to read. It didn't require any actual thinking on his part. Milkmen weren't renowned for their thinking prowess. Their strength lay elsewhere, in the love of mindless cruelty.

He sat her in the Court, and read his script slowly and hesitantly because, truth to tell, he wasn't far from being illiterate. But despite his intellectual impoverishment and the constant mispronunciation of his script he managed to condemn her to death. The last bit he knew by heart, and loved it.

"You will be taken from this place to the execution chamber where your various elements will be salvaged and stored for the benefit of all who live, and your useless, unwanted components will be returned as dust for your family to treasure for as long as they all do live!"

She heard the words, but they made no sense to her. Her mind was swimming with the stuff of her short life, and Craven, the way she had to love him, and Jacob, the precious bundle of snotty joy. Blindly, almost, she was led away by the Milkman, and savagely the pre-ordained sentence was carried out - another favourite of the Milkman.

Craven received the dust that had been part of Joanna the next day. It was grey, like sand from a sterile desert, and smelt slightly of sour milk

Author's Note

I wrote an early draft of this many years ago and I've no idea where it is unless somewhere I have a three inch computer disc, formatted for my beloved old Amstrad CPC ... but with no machine to load it on