Walking Wounded

by William McIlvanney

  He stared at Duncan and envied him his eyes. He wondered where they were going, what they would see. He looked past Duncan wistfully, as if straining to hear something, perhaps an echo of that strange internal music of the young that promises so much. The moment passed and he was left feeling like the boy with the limp the Pied Piper left behind. In place of that lost elation all he had was self-awareness. He understood afresh how the responsibility of status could cripple your enjoyment. He was reminded of the price he paid for career and respectability, a constant drain on his spontaneity he hardly noticed any more, like the tax on tobacco. He saw himself as someone waving to life as it passed by. But if all he could do was wave, he would wave nice. He wasn’t so far gone that he would be giving it the V-sign.

  ‘Duncan,’ he said. ‘If you’re going, you’re going. Your job’ll be here for you when you get back. If you get back. You relax on that score. That’s all I can promise. About the money. Let me think about it. No promises there, mind.’

  But he was already making a promise to himself. He would be taking a collection for Duncan. He couldn’t think of anybody who wouldn’t want to give, especially among the women. And he would top it up himself and make sure it was respectable. Marie wouldn’t even know about it.

  ‘Mr Watson,’ Duncan said. He was shaking his head, the blue eyes even wider. ‘That’s just great. That is just great. Ah mean . . .’

  Duncan stood with his hands out, waiting for the words to arrive that would match his gratitude. His eyes gave out their innocent incandescence, unaware of what an affront they were to Bert Watson’s sense of his own life.

  ‘Duncan. I’m busy, right? We’ll talk more about this in a day or two.’

  Duncan smiled and nodded and turned away vaguely, trying to work out where the door was.

  ‘And Duncan. Don’t go on the bevvy tonight to celebrate. You’re saving up. Remember?’

  Duncan gave the thumbs up and went out. Bert Watson sat down behind his desk. He stared at the door. He remembered an evening with Marie before they were engaged. They had been walking near the Bringan and it started to rain. Sheltering among some trees, they kissed and found lust waiting for them as if by appointment. They got down to it there and then, churning the loam with their bodies, writhing on tree roots and wet leaves, gasping among sensations of dark sky and scuttering noises of animal life and nervously interrupted birdsong. Finished, they waited to come back inside their bodies, their bare thighs frosting in the evening air. The rain had stopped sometime. As they picked the residue of their passion from each other like monkeys grooming, twigs from Marie’s hair, small balls of impacted mud from his knees, Bert noticed the ingrained dirt on Marie’s thighs and the embedded imprint of a root. The sight thrilled him. It was as if he had won her from the earth itself. His trousers had been ruined with mud, he remembered.

  He would have settled for having his trousers in that state now, no matter how much they cost. He wondered what Marie thought of that moment, if she ever thought about it. Perhaps she saw it as the kind of holiday from common sense you could have when you were young and daft, but not any more. Certainly, he couldn’t imagine her enjoying the dirt. She had turned herself into a Geiger counter for dust and seemed able to hear a glass making a ring-mark on a table from the next room.

  Never mind a blood test before marriage, Bert thought. They should invent a machine that, when you stepped into it, projected your nature into the future so that the other person could see which characteristics would survive, which aspects of your character would wither and which get more pronounced. Then maybe you could tell which randy teenager was destined to become a pillar of the Women’s Guild, which demure young woman would learn how to keep a tiger in the bedroom, and which girl who could bare herself beautifully among the trees would, in middle age, wear a nightdress like a cotton chastity belt.

  Bert Watson sighed. He sat in his expensive suit, successful, longing for mud. What was the exact miscalculation with the dresses?

  ‘Who gives a monkey’s fart?’ he said aloud and looked at Samantha and wondered if Sally had left the office yet.

  2

  Performance

  Fast Frankie White didn’t go into a bar. He entered. He felt his name precede him like a fanfare he had to live up to. As with a lot of small criminals, he had no house of his own, no money in the bank, no deposit account of social status to draw on. He had no fixed place in the scheme of things that could feed back a clear sense of himself, be a mirror. His only collateral was his reputation, a whiff of mild scandal that clung round him like eau-de-Cologne.

  Being an actor, he needed applause. His took the form of mutterings of ‘Fast Frankie White’ most places he went because he chose to go places where they would mutter it. Without that reminder of who he was, he might forget his lines. His favourite lines were cryptic throwaways that reverberated in the minds of the gullible with vaguely dark potential.

  ‘Been doin’ a wee job,’ he said.

  ‘Checkin’ out a couple of things,’ he said.

  ‘A good thing I don’t pay income tax.’

  ‘This round’s on the Bank of Scotland.’

  ‘He’s got his own style, Frankie,’ some people said. But that was a less than astutely critical observation. It was really a lot of other people’s styles observed from the back row of the pictures, a kind of West of Scotland American. Once, when he was twenty, he had seen a Robert Taylor film about New York where some people were wearing white suits. He had snapped his fingers and said, ‘I’m for there!’ A few weeks later, by a never-explained financial alchemy, he was. A few weeks later, he was back but he liked to talk about New York. ‘There’s half-a-million people in the Bronx,’ he would say. ‘And most of them’s bandits.’ It wasn’t Fodor’s Guide to the USA but it sounded impressive, said quickly. And Frankie said everything quickly.

  ‘The Akimbo Arms’ was one of the pubs where he liked to make his entrance. He was originally from Thornbank, a village near Graithnock, but he lived in Glasgow now, people said. Frankie didn’t say where he lived. He would simply appear in a Graithnock bar, dressed, it seemed, in items auctioned off from the wardrobe department of some bankrupt Hollywood studio and produce a wad of notes.

  This time he was wearing a light blue suit, pink shirt, white tie and grey shoes. He looked as if he had stepped out of a detergent advert.

  ‘Where’s ma sunglasses?’ somebody said.

  But Frankie was already flicking a casual hand in acknowledgement of people who didn’t know who he was. He walked round to the end of the bar where he could have his back against the wall, presumably in case the G-men burst in on him, and he prepared to give his performance.

  It was a poor house. Matinees usually were. Mick Haggerty was standing along the bar from him, in earnest debate with an unsuspecting stranger, who probably hadn’t realised Mick’s obsession until it was too late.

  ‘Give me,’ Mick was saying, ‘the four men that’ve played for Scotland an’ their names’ve only got three letters in them.’

  Frankie hoped for the stranger’s sake that he didn’t get the answer right. Doing well in one of Mick’s casual football quizzes was a doubtful honour, earning you the right to face more and more obscure questions the relevance of which to football wasn’t easy to see. ‘Tell me,’ Frankie had once said to Mick by way of parody. ‘In what Scotland–England game did it rain for four-and-a-half minutes at half-time? And how wet was the rain?’

  Over in the usual corner Gus McPhater was sitting with two cronies. Frankie hated the big words Gus used. That left Big Harry behind the bar, besides three others Frankie didn’t know. Big Harry had finally noticed him and was approaching with the speed of a mirage.

  ‘Frankie,’ Big Harry said.

  ‘Harry. I’ll have a drop of the wine of the country.’

  ‘Whit?’

  ‘A whisky, Harry. Grouse. And what you’re havin’ yourself?’

  Big Harry turned down the corners of his mouth even
further. He looked at Frankie as if dismayed at his insensitivity.

  ‘Me?’ Big Harry said. ‘Ye kiddin’? Wi’ ma stomach? Ye want a death on yer conscience? Still.’ His face assumed a look of martyred generosity. ‘Tell ye what. Ah’ll take the price of it an’ have it when Ah finish. Probably no’ get a wink of sleep the night. But ye’ve got to get some pleasure.’

  Frankie remembered Harry’s nickname – Harry Kari. He wasn’t sure whether the nickname was because that was what everybody felt like trying after a conversation with Harry or because that was what people thought Harry should do. No wonder Gus McPhater was quoted as saying, ‘Harry does for conversation what lumbago does for dancin’.’ Harry was the kind of barman who told you his problems.

  ‘Religion?’ Gus McPhater was saying. He was always saying something. ‘Don’t waste ma time. The opium of the masses. It’s done damage worse than a gross of atomic bombs. Chains for the brainbox, that’s religion. Ministers? Press agents for the rulin’ classes. Ye’ll no’ catch me in a church. If Ah could, Ah’d cancel ma christenin’ retrospectively. Take yer stained-glass windaes. Whit’s a windae for? To see through. Right? So what do they do? They cover it in pictures. So that when ye look at the light. The light, mind ye. That’s how ye see, ye know. Light refractin’ on yer pupils. When ye look for the light, it gets translated intae what they want ye tae see. How’s that for slavery? An’ whit d’ye see? A lot of holy mumbo-jumbo. People Ah don’t know from Adam. What’ve a bunch of first-century Jewish fanatics got to do wi’ me? Ah’ll tell ye what. Know when Ah’ll go intae a church? When it’s man’s house. When the stained-glass windaes are full of holy scenes of rivetters in bunnets and women goin’ the messages wi’ two weans hangin’ on to their arse an’ auld folk huddled in at one bar of an electric fire after fifty years o’ slavin’ their guts out for a society that doesny care if they live or die. Those would be windaes worth lookin’ at. That’s what art should be. Holy pictures of the people. Or a mosaic even. How about that? See when they made that daft town centre. The new precinct. The instant slum. See instead o’ that fountain. Why not a big mosaic? Showin’ the lives of the people here an’ now. How about that? The Graithnock mosaic. Why no?’

  Frankie had no desire to join in. He contented himself with a mime of his superior status. Gus McPhater depressed him. People listened to him as if the noises he made with his mouth meant something. He was a balloon. A lot of stories were told about him. He was supposed to have travelled all round the world. He was supposed to be writing a novel or short stories or something. Frankie didn’t believe any of them.

  Gus seemed to Frankie an appropriate patron saint for Graithnock. He was like the town itself – over the hill and sitting in dark pubs inventing the past. Frankie could remember this place when the industry was still going strong. There had been some vigour about the place then. They were all losers now – phoneys, like Gus McPhater.

  Frankie couldn’t believe this place. The only kind of spirit in it was bottled. He felt like an orchid in a cabbage-patch. Where was the old style, the old working-class gallousness? Since the Tory government had come to power, it had really done a job on them, slaughtering all the major industry. They believed they were as useless as the government had told them they were. These men were the cast-offs of capitalism. They were pathetic.

  Well, he was different. If the system was trying to screw him, he would screw it. He had his own heroes and they weren’t kings of industry. He thought of McQueen. He wondered how long it would be before McQueen got back out. McQueen, there was a man. He was more free in the nick than most men were outside it.

  That was what you had to do: defy your circumstances. You were what you declared yourself to be. Frankie looked round the bar and made a decision. He would buy a drink for someone. He pulled his wad of money from his pocket. In the flourish of the gesture he became a successful criminal.

  He decided on Gus McPhater’s group. His distaste for them somehow made the gesture grander. He felt like Robin Hood giving the poor a share of his spoils. Besides, Gus was a great talker. Buying him a drink was as good as a photograph in the paper. They would know he had been. He threw a fiver on the counter.

  ‘Harry,’ he said loudly. ‘Give Gus an’ the boys whatever they want.’

  He noticed a boy who was drinking alone watching him interestedly. It was all the encouragement Frankie needed. He made an elaborate occasion of getting the drinks and taking them over to Gus’s table. He dismissed their thanks with a wave. He took his change and put some of the silver into the bottle where they collected for the old folks. The whole thing became a mini-epic, a Cecil B. De Mille production called ‘The Drink’.

  ‘Okay,’ Frankie said, saluting the room. ‘Don’t do any-thin’ Ah wouldn’t do. If ye can think of anythin’ Ah wouldn’t do.’

  As he went out, he heard the boy asking, ‘Who is that?’ Stepping into the street, he felt the gulped whisky sting his stomach. It was a twinge that matched the bad feeling the pub had given him. Hopeless, he thought. But maybe he was wrong. He remembered the admiration on the boy’s face as he had asked who Frankie was. Frankie lightened his step and started to whistle.

  A good actor never entirely knows the impact he is having. Perhaps in the thinnest house, unnoticed beyond the glare of the actor’s preoccupation, a deep insight is being experienced or young ambitions being formed for life.

  He would try ‘The Cock and Hen’. There might be some real people in there. He side-stepped into a shop doorway and checked his wad of money. He had three fivers left and he repositioned them carefully to make sure they were concealing the packing of toilet paper inside that made them look like a hundred. He would try ‘The Cock and Hen’.

  3

  On the sidelines

  British Summer Time had officially begun but, if you didn’t have a diary, you might not have noticed. The few people standing around in the Dean Park under a smirring rain didn’t seem to be convinced. They knew the clocks had been put forward an hour – that was what enabled these early evening football matches to take place. But the arbitrary human decision to make the nights lighter hadn’t outwitted the weather. The Scottish climate still had its stock of rain and frost and cold snaps to be used up before the summer came, assuming it did.

  Two football pitches were in use. On one of them a works’ game was in progress. On the adjoining pitch two Boys’ Brigade teams were playing. Standing between touchlines, John Hannah, his coat collar up, paid most attention to the Boys’ Brigade game – he was here to see Gary – but the works’ match, so noisy and vigorous and expletive, was impossible to ignore. It impinged on the comparative decorum of the boys’ game like the future that was coming to them, no matter what precepts of behaviour the Company Leaders tried to impose on them. John had heard some of the other parents complaining ostentatiously at half-time about the inadvisability of booking a pitch beside a works’ game. ‘After all, it’s an organisation to combat evil influences, not arrange to give them a hearing,’ a woman in a blue antartex coat and jodhpurs and riding-boots had said. Presumably the horse was a white charger.

  John found the contrast between the games instructive. It was like being sandwiched between two parts of his past. The works’ game was an echo of his own origins. He had himself played in games like that often enough. Standing so close to the crunch of bone on bone, the thud of bodies, the force of foot striking ball, he remembered what a physically hard game football is. Watching it from a grandstand, as he had so often lately, you saw it bowdlerised a little, refined into an aesthetic of itself. The harshness of it made him wonder if that was why he hadn’t pursued the game as determinedly as his talent might have justified. He hoped that wasn’t the reason but lately the sense of other failures had made him quest back for some root, one wrong direction taken that had led on to all the others. He had wondered if he had somehow always been a quitter, and his refusal to take football seriously as a career had come back to haunt him.

  Three sepa
rate people whose opinions he respected had told him he could be a first-class professional footballer. The thought of that had sustained him secretly at different times of depression for years, like an option still open, and it was only fairly recently that he had forced himself to throw away the idea out of embarrassment. He was forty now. For years the vague dream of playing football had been like a man still taking his teddy-bear to bed with him. He might still occasionally mention what had been said to him but, whereas before he had named the three men and sometimes described the games after which they had said it, now the remark had eroded to a self-deprecating joke: ‘A man once told me . . . At least I think that’s what he said – I couldn’t be sure because his guide-dog was barking a lot at the time’. The joke, like a lot of jokes, was a way of controlling loss.

  ‘Oh, well done, Freddie!’ the woman in the jodhpurs whinnied.

  John supposed that Freddie was her son. The kind of parents who attended these games were inclined to see one player in sharp focus and twenty-one meaningless blurs, as if parenthood had fitted their eyes with special lenses. What Freddie had done was to mis-head the ball straight up into the air so that it fell at the feet of an opponent. It had to be assumed that the expression of admiration that was torn involuntarily from the mouth of Freddie’s mother was due to the surprising height, about thirty feet, the ball had achieved by bouncing off Freddie’s head. Freddie’s mother was apparently not scouting for one of the senior clubs.

  Gary, John decided after applying rigorous rules of non-favouritism to his judgment, was playing quite well. At ten, he had already acquired basic ball control and he wasn’t quite as guilty as most of them were of simply following the ball wherever it went, as if they were attached to it by ropes of different lengths. John had been following Gary’s games religiously all season, as a way of showing him that he was still very much involved in his life though he might not live in the same house, and the matches had acquired the poignancy of a weekly recital for John, a strange orchestration of his past and his present and his uncertain future.