Walking Wounded

by William McIlvanney

  ‘You want me to see about this?’ he quavered quietly.

  ‘Ah can see a light in there!’ the voice was announcing to the immediate neighbourhood. ‘There’s somebody in there.’

  ‘Oh my God, no!’

  The panic the thought had engendered in Sally would have been unflattering in another situation. Here, with the guardian of ‘The Barley Bree’ sending his voice along the hall like a flame-thrower, it seemed no more than a perfectly reasonable response, confirmation of the obvious.

  ‘Right! We can do it the easy way or the hard way! With a handle or without a handle! Ah’m countin tae ten! One!’

  It wasn’t the kind of accomplishment you would have expected a voice like that to have but they couldn’t just wait there and see if he got stuck at seven. They scrabbled from the bed, moving in quite a few directions at once. The room became a flurry of movement without progress, as if they were caught in a film being run backwards and forwards at the wrong speed.

  Sally ran naked to the bedroom door and then ran back. John bent down and put on a sock.

  ‘Two!’

  Sally plumped one pillow, dented the other. Some desperate plan seemed to be forming in her mind.

  ‘Three!’

  As John bent down to pick up his clothes, Sally shoved them under the bed with her foot on her way to pick up the Laura Ashley nightdress that was draped across a wickerwork chair.

  ‘Four!’

  ‘Hey!’ John hissed. Sally’s head, emerging from the neck of the nightdress was shaking vigorously as she stared, wild-eyed, at John. ‘No time!’ she screamed silently.

  ‘Five!’

  Sally smoothed down her nightdress, made a couple of meaningless passes at the duvet. She turned to see John whirling in the middle of the floor, as if he had chosen this moment to practise miming a dervish.

  ‘Six!’

  Sally pointed at the Wendy House, pushed John towards it. He looked at her. She opened the cardboard door and jabbed her finger ferociously at the interior several times. He couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Seven!’

  He believed it. He crouched inside while Sally closed the door on him. He heard her sprint across the bedroom and then, at the door, begin to walk along the hall.

  ‘Alec?’

  Her voice sounded so sleepy. The other voice had started to say ‘eight’ and trailed off. To John, huddled in his Wendy House, the blue tinge of the light had taken on a sinister quality, moonscape, jowls of the dead.

  ‘Alec? Is that you, Alec?’

  John could hear the yawn in her voice from where he was. Listening to that expertly feigned sleepiness induced in him an agony of ambivalence. (The door was being opened. Godzilla comes.) He couldn’t believe that his Sally of the gentle eyes and honest smile could be such an actress. There were questions he had to think over, though not now. The other part of the feeling was the fervent hope that she really was as good an actress as she sounded. A lot depended on her performance.

  ‘It took you long enough.’

  ‘I was sleeping, Alec. Here, let me help you.’

  Alec’s feet were thudding all over the hall and there were noises that might have been several bodies hitting off the walls. He sounded like a drunken regiment. An alarming proximity of heavy breathing made John think they had reached the bedroom door. It might have been John’s imagination but he had a suspicion of the presence of foetid breath, as of a carnivore exhaling close at hand.

  ‘You’ve had somebody in here!’

  John was suddenly aware of the fragility of Wendy Houses. A tunnel would have been handy.

  ‘That’s right. Four men.’

  John didn’t see the joke. Pacify, pacify, he was thinking.

  ‘You’ve had somebody in here!’

  ‘I was sleeping!’

  ‘Maybe. Ah’m goin’ to check.’

  There was an amazing amount of noise, which was apparently Alec going through to the living-room. Whatever previous convictions had qualified Alec for admission to ‘The Barley Bree’, burglary wasn’t one of them. He made a small riot of coming back towards the bedroom. Sally was still insisting on helping him. John wondered how you did that. It must have been like guiding a stampede.

  ‘That’s you now,’ she was saying. ‘There we are. Satisfied now?’

  ‘Okay, love. Ah know ye’re tellin’ the truth. When Ah saw that the telly was off.’

  John was relieved that Alec’s deductive powers weren’t in proportion to his imagined bulk. John was holding himself well back from the cut-out windows of the Wendy House. Christine or Sally had stuck cellophane across them and John decided now that the light was like trying to see underwater – the mysteries of the deep. He was aware of Sally’s white nightdress with red flowers eddying uncertainly around the room. A huge dark shape swayed beside her.

  ‘Ah haven’t seen you for a fortnight,’ Alec growled gently.

  ‘You’re seeing me now. Come on, lie down. You look whacked.’

  ‘A fortnight,’ Alec said.

  ‘You need some rest.’

  ‘A fortnight.’

  Once Alec got hold of an idea, he didn’t give it up easily. He wasn’t moving. The thought that he hadn’t seen Sally for a fortnight appeared to have transfixed him, like some great revelation not vouchsafed to many.

  ‘A fortnight.’

  ‘A fortnight, Alec.’

  Something was biting into John’s unstockinged foot savagely. The pain was becoming unbearable but he was afraid to move. He was also terrified that if he changed the position of his other leg the knee would crack. He could be the first recorded case of a stiff knee proving fatal. Alec spoke an eerie echo of John’s thought.

  ‘It’s a good thing for whoever it is that he isny here.’

  The logic was opaque but John understood it perfectly.

  ‘That’s right,’ Sally said.

  ‘A fortnight,’ Alec said.

  In a moment of wild panic, John could imagine the cryptic exchange going on until his emaciated body was lifted too late, from the Wendy House. There was a noise that he was sure meant Alec had sat down on the bed. He hoped that was a good sign. Something hit the Wendy House and it buckled slightly and rattled against his head. He almost called out in panic.

  ‘Oops,’ Alec said.

  ‘Watch Christine’s Wendy House.’

  No, no, you bloody mug, John was screaming to himself. Don’t draw his attention to it. What Wendy House? There is no Wendy House. He might come over and inspect it for damage.

  ‘’S all right, love,’ Alec said. ‘Just ma shoe.’

  The other shoe hit the floor.

  ‘Lie down, Alec.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Let me get your jacket off. That’s it. Right, lie down.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  The bed squeaked on its castors. Alec sighed, a sound like a small whirlwind. There was silence. John strained into it desperately. He was about to move his leg when he froze the movement, biting his lip.

  ‘Sally,’ Alec said.

  Sally said nothing. A couple of minutes passed. Someone was at the door of the Wendy House. Although John had seen Sally’s nightdress move towards him, he was still tensed as the door opened, as though it might have been Alec in drag. Sally was crouched looking in at him, her forefinger to her lips. Did she think he might be singing? She held his clothes with one arm against her body. With the other she motioned him to follow.

  Tiptoeing after her, John couldn’t escape the hallucinatory feeling that he was in a fairy story after all. And John tiptoed from his little house past the sleeping giant and followed the good fairy. He glanced very quickly at Alec in case looking at him might waken him. He seemed gross in sleep. His mouth, like every other part of him, appeared to make more noise than was consistent with performing its basic function. His lips flapped in the wind of his breathing.

  In the hall, John studied his heel briefly and saw the imprint of the face of the miniature doll – savage littl
e household god. As he dressed very swiftly, Sally stroked his hair a couple of times. She mouthed his ear. Was she mad? He had noticed that before about women, how quickly they forgot risk when they were feeling roused. At the open door she held his arm.

  ‘It’s all right now,’ she whispered. ‘It’s just that he’s impossible when he’s drunk.’

  John nodded.

  ‘In the morning I’ll send him packing. No problem. He’ll go like a lamb.’

  John nodded.

  ‘I don’t see him now, you know. That’s all finished. There’s nothing between us. It’s just taking him time to get over it. He’s living in the past. But he has no rights here. And he knows it.’

  John nodded. Of course. That’s why he was taking up two-thirds of her bed.

  ‘Listen. I hope this hasn’t put you off.’

  John nodded and then changed to shaking his head. Not at all. Why should the possibility of being beaten to death every time you got into bed put you off?

  ‘Sally!’

  She winked, kissed the tips of her fingers and touched them to his lips.

  ‘It’s all right, Alec,’ John heard her call as he came downstairs, letting the darkness take him into it. She rattled the milk bottles she had put out when the baby-sitter left. ‘I’m just locking up.’

  John had brooded on the significance of that evening ever since. Sometimes, without warning, fragments of it would occur to him. He would hear ‘Sally! Sally!’ or see her face, distorted with panic, as she lay beneath him. Such moments came to him isolated and complete, inexplicable but stubbornly there, ciphers the pilgrim found along his way. But in what direction were they pointing him? Their repetitiousness suggested he hadn’t resolved them. They were liable to turn up anywhere, in a pub, in the car, at a football match on a wet evening.

  ‘Tackle, Freddie, tackle!’ Jodhpurs was calling.

  Gary had the ball. As Freddie lunged towards him, Gary drew the ball back and then threaded it neatly through Freddie’s legs and ran round him, leaving him stranded. ‘Nutmegged him,’ John muttered to himself. It was a way in which professional players hated to be beaten, perhaps because it made you look so silly – your legs, the very basis of your craft, being reduced to the role of a triumphal arch for the parade of your opponent’s skills. John was absurdly pleased. He glanced along at Jodhpurs as if he had taken revenge on her loud ignorance.

  ‘Sally! Sally!’

  He had seen her since then in her office and once had a drink with her (not in ‘The Barley Bree’). She gave him occasional reports on the nocturnal activities of Alec Manson. His visits were apparently becoming less frequent. ‘He’s coming to his senses,’ Sally had said but John wasn’t convinced that would ever be a permanent place of residence for Alec. Sally seemed still to expect that they would some time continue where they had left off, once Alec’s supposed refusal to forget the past had died of exhaustion. John wasn’t so sure.

  He had thought about it a lot and and he believed (how could he be sure?) that his uncertainties didn’t come from fear of Alec. Now that he understood the risks, the location and habits of the dragon as it were, he felt he could work out ways to reach the maiden safely. But he suspected she was no longer the maiden he had thought she was. He still relished the memory of her body and would have liked to go back there but – such was the fervour of his dreams – he could only do it with his faith intact. Paradoxically, to accept her offer of herself would have been for him to diminish her unless he did it on terms of belief in her.

  That belief had been undermined to some extent. ‘A fortnight’ had been carved on John’s mind. Alec had said it as if it meant a long time in his terms. Surely he wasn’t always drunk and surely he didn’t always go there just to sleep. John thought perhaps Sally had been lying to him. And, besides that central matter, his sense of Sally had been irredeemably altered. ‘Oh shite!’ was something he would never have imagined her saying, a glimpse of another person, just as the nature of Alec had been. How had she become involved with a bouncer from ‘The Barley Bree’?’

  One of the times John had been in that pub, a group of women in their thirties had been skipping rope, one at each end spinning the rope and the others jumping in turn, repeating the rhymes of their childhood. It had been an arresting scene to witness coming in off the street, rather like pushing open a door in an industrial West of Scotland town and entering the atmosphere of a frontier saloon in the American West. It was all loud laughter and the abandonment of bouncing breasts and shouted encouragement. A bystander, who appeared to be a regular, explained to John how the scene had come about, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  It seemed one of the women had been shopping before coming into the pub and happened to mention over her drink that she had been buying a new clothes-rope. There had been talk of how times had changed for all of them, how rope had at one time meant not the boring duty of hanging out washing but the carefree pleasure of jumping rope. Someone had said it would have been great to go back there so they had gone, there and then, challenging one another to demonstrate their skills. The man who was telling John of the background to the event seemed to be concerned to make it clear that this didn’t happen every day in the pub. That didn’t make the place much less remarkable in John’s eyes. ‘The Barley Bree’ might not be the kind of pub where big, buxom women skipped rope every day like maenads but it was the kind of pub where, if they had the notion to do so and a rope was handy, they just carried on – and the barman looked on with a kind of reluctant indulgence, perhaps because there were other uses to which a rope could be put.

  An acquaintance of John claimed to have been in ‘The Barley Bree’ one Saturday afternoon when a dog and bitch decided to consummate their passion in a corner. Nobody had paid particular attention, John’s acquaintance said, and when he had expressed his amazement to someone sitting near him, the man had answered, ‘What can ye expect? They see it every day in the hoose.’

  The story could have been apocryphal but it matched John’s sense of the place. Sally’s association with ‘The Barley Bree’ changed John’s sense of her. The enchanted bedroom was surrounded by quicksand. He wasn’t judging her life or anybody else’s. It wasn’t in his nature to do that. He was simply looking for a habitation for his private longings, a place where he could share them with someone. Sally had not only made him think that it might be impossible to share them with her, she had also made him wonder if it would ever be possible to share them with anyone.

  He would sit in his room, reading the greasy moquette pattern of his suite into a significance as mysterious as the Rosetta stone and, whatever it meant, the message was a sad one. The incomprehensible Gaelic songs would drift hauntingly around him like the sound of all the lost dreams of which his was just another. The cistern would gurgle from time to time. Andrew Finlay would cough nervously through the evening, as if embarrassedly trying to attract the world’s attention. John would look through the jazz records for which he had no record-player (‘Out of the Galleon’ was the one he held the most) and they became in his melancholy a symbol of his life, the mute longing, the music that couldn’t be heard.

  The ridiculous image of himself hiding in the Wendy House began to seem more than an accidental moment in his life. There were perhaps times, it appeared to him, when a fleeting gesture or a spontaneous stance could freeze into definition, like a head stamped on a coin, and become your essential currency. For a great footballer it might be one game or one goal. For another man, the moment of his marriage. John dreaded that for him it might be his sojourn in the Wendy House. That might become the prison of his own sense of himself. Perhaps that’s who he was – a ridiculous naked man with one sock on hiding in a cardboard house, waiting for his own true love.

  ‘Ah can’t wait to get home an’ get the wife’s knickers off,’ one of the players in the works’ game said to another. ‘They’re killin’ me.’

  ‘Aye,’ the other one answered. ‘If they had pints laid
out across the park, Ah would cover the ground a lot quicker.’

  ‘Referee!’ somebody shouted. ‘There’s a man here wankin’. Is that a foul?’

  The player who had been adjusting his shorts responded at once: ‘Only when the balls are in play.’

  The harsh self-confidence of everything they said and did was like a mockery of John’s uncertainty about himself. He stood on the path of neutral ground between the two games and felt his position as an irrelevant spectator to be a just expression of himself. In his attempts to adjust to the kind of life Katherine had wanted, he had lost the rough spontaneity he had come from, the ability the works’ game was celebrating to take whatever life offered and shrug and have another pint in a way that suggested you hadn’t expected much more of the devious bastard. Yet, leaving that behind, he hadn’t managed to reach the place that presumably Gary and most of these other boys were practising to get to, where you knew all the practical social rules and could apply them to your advantage. He felt as if he didn’t fit anywhere, didn’t seem to know what position he was supposed to be playing, might never know what the score was when the final whistle blew.

  When it blew for the end of Gary’s game, he was glad. Gary’s team had won three–two.

  ‘Shake hands! Shake hands!’ Gary’s Company Leader shouted unnecessarily.

  All the boys were shaking hands anyway. John approved in theory of the idea that they should. But the formality with which they did it seemed to him false, an adult imposition on their natural reactions, like a bow-tie on a tee-shirt. As they came off the field, some parents joined them on the walk back to the clubhouse.

  ‘Well played, Freddie. Well played!’

  John settled for gently slapping the back of Gary’s head as he passed and Gary’s right hand hinted at a wave of acknowledgement. It was their relationship in miniature: affection inhibited by circumstances. As John waited for Gary to come back out, he wondered if Katherine had told the children that the divorce had been finalised. He thought that she must have told them. But in the car he glanced at Gary and wondered.

  ‘What did you think, Dad?’ Gary asked.