‘You played well, son.’
‘Made a mess of that corner.’
‘The wind was deceptive. What did Helenio Herrera say?’
The name of the famous football manager was their private joke about the Company Leader.
‘He’s daft. Know what he said? “You didn’t die for the jerseys.” You’d think it was the World Cup.’
John agreed with Gary but the distance in years between them made that agreement strange. At Gary’s age, John would have taken the Company Leader seriously. He would have wanted to die for the jerseys. Gary’s perspective on things disconcerted him, as it often did.
‘Gary. Your mother’s told you about the divorce?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Gary had been fiddling with the glove compartment. He took out a sheet of petrol stamps and studied them like a philatelist.
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘Doesn’t make any difference to us, does it?’
‘No, that’s right.’
‘Well.’
‘Any word of the other house yet?’
‘Not yet. Mum says there’s plenty of time. We don’t have to move out of this one for a while.’
Gary seemed calm. John didn’t want to disturb that calmness. He didn’t say anything else till they pulled up at the door.
‘Thanks, Dad. So when will I see you? We’ve got a game on Saturday.’
‘I’ll be there. With my rattle.’
Gary was surprised when John got out of the car as well.
‘There’s something I’ve to collect,’ John said.
They came up the path together. The door opened before they reached it and Katherine was there, forestalling the need for John to come into the house. She was already holding out the envelope.
‘Well, Dad.’ Gary was standing awkwardly between them. ‘Thanks. See you on Saturday?’
‘Sure. You go and have your bath.’
Katherine was gazing out into the street, waiting for them to finish. She was wearing a black leather jump-suit, unzipped to show her cleavage, and high heels that almost qualified as stilts. John had noticed that any time they met each other by appointment, she had a new outfit on and was carefully coiffed. She seemed to like to show him what he had lost. When Gary went into the house, she smiled pityingly and handed John the sealed envelope as if it contained his extradition papers from Eden. The envelope felt very light.
‘Fourteen years don’t weigh much,’ John said.
‘Did they ever?’
John wasn’t sure he knew what that was supposed to mean, but that wasn’t a feeling alien to him when talking to Katherine. He recognised a technique with which he was familiar. Katherine always preferred gestures to actions. Her conversation had always been rich in glib phrases and rhetorical questions that, on examination, frequently defied any search for substance. But they sounded good at the time.
‘It’s all here?’ John asked.
‘A cheque for four thousand pounds. And goodbye.’
John nodded and turned away and then turned back.
‘Oh, Katherine. I’m not sure this is adequate compensation. I may appeal to an industrial tribunal.’
She closed the door. In the car he had to open the envelope, just to make sure it didn’t contain a joke card. There it was: a cheque for four thousand pounds, signed ‘Katherine Hannah’. It was his agreed share from the sale of the house, once the mortgage was settled. It was less than Katherine was getting, because he didn’t want to cause the children any financial problems besides the others they must be having. And Katherine had everything else, the furniture, the car.
The signature offended him. It was the punch line to the joke he felt his life had become. His life had been used by her and now she was paying him off, like a hired hand whose services were no longer required. This was his redundancy money. He put the cheque back in its envelope, put the envelope in his inside pocket and drove to Gillisland Road.
He thought of the maintenance he had been paying since they separated, more than he could afford, and he seemed to feel the money dwindle in his pocket. There was no point in using it as a down-payment on a small house because he wouldn’t be able to keep up the mortgage. Knowing the cheque was due tonight, he had been vaguely looking towards it as a partial solution to his problems. Now that he had it, he dreaded it would be lost like loose change down the widening cracks in the financial basis of his life and he would be left with nothing to show for it. The cheque served only to highlight the hopelessness he saw ahead, years of scrabbling to meet his financial commitments, of travelling between Gillisland Road and wherever Katherine bought a house or wherever Gary was playing football or Carole was singing in a concert with her choir. He saw himself driving through the time ahead like a demented delivery man, leaving his affection where other people could collect it. When he parked the car in Gillisland Road, he couldn’t bring himself to go up into his room, as if he would be volunteering to accept his fate.
He left the car and decided to go for a drink. Walking, he was glad he had made the remark about the industrial tribunal. His mind clung to the joke like a lifebelt keeping him afloat a little longer.
4
Death of a spinster
Each weekday was mapped. When the digital alarm went, she would press the snooze mechanism two separate times so that she would have about ten minutes more in bed. When she got out of bed, she would reset the alarm for next day, making sure each time that it was set for a.m. Tomorrow was promised.
The day took her to itself like an assembly line. Routine precludes the time to weep. She showered, wearing the floral shower-cap. (She only washed her hair at weekends.) Soaping her body was a sensual ceremony and she always noted how firm she still was in her late fifties, taking a dispassionate inventory of herself like someone viewing an empty house. She dried and dressed in the clothes she had laid out the previous evening.
She clicked on the already filled kettle. She turned on the gas till it clicked alight and put on it the two eggs waiting in their panful of water. She gave the eggs three minutes from the time the water boiled. She toasted one slice of bread and buttered it. She poured the hot water into the cup containing instant coffee and one sweetener. She put one egg, taken out of the pan with a tablespoon and dried with a teacloth, into an eggcup and the other in the saucer beside it. She breakfasted.
The dishes were gathered and put in the basin with the remainder of the hot water from the kettle which was then refilled. She always noted how scuffed cheap plastic gets with use. The make-up she applied was a suggestion of who she might be. The timed walk to wait for the bus that was invariably busy brought the brief satisfaction of seeing the tired man with the gentle eyes. He seemed unhappy in a way that made her want to talk to him but she never had.
The working day was full of apparent differences that turned out to be the same. She typed letters and dispensed stationery and dealt with problems that didn’t really matter. At lunchtime she had a snack alone in the town and looked at some shops and made sure she was back in time to talk for about twenty minutes with Marion Bland. The afternoon was the same as the morning.
No matter what shopping she had to do, she was home in time to watch the news on television. The strangeness of the world appalled her but she couldn’t resist watching the strangeness. She ate at seven. Lasagne was her favourite. The evening was usually television programmes she had ringed in Radio Times and TV Times. At nine she had her sherry. Sometimes she had one sherry, sometimes two. Three was an orgy.
The evening was also the most dangerous part of her life. Time was less obedient then. Sometimes Margaret and John Hislop came. She didn’t always enjoy their visits. They often seemed to be using her as an audience, allowing her to look on at their cosy warmth and predictable banter. But they were the nearest thing to family she had. Sometimes she thought over things that Marion had said and wondered what Marion’s life was like. Sometimes she talked aloud to the photograph of her nephew, Ro
nnie Milligan, who was in Canada. Sometimes the fantasies came almost more fierce than she could bear and containing images she could hardly admit. On such nights she took two Mogadon instead of one.
These trivia she strung like charms about the pulse of her life. One day the charms broke. An unscheduled car drove straight in between shopping and talking to Marion. The crowd didn’t know her. One man leaning close to her lips heard them give up the meaning of who she had been. In that whisper of breath, that indistinct sound, her life was caught in a moment – politely unheard.
Her lightness was loaded into an ambulance. How slim she had stayed. Behind her she was leaving an unpaid gas bill and Marion bereft of about twenty minutes of daily conversation. Her nephew would hear of it later. Margaret and John Hislop would feel bad about having found her so dull. A handsome restaurant waiter she used to give lavish tips would wonder intermittently what had happened to her and his thoughts would be a kind of requiem, duly paid for. The dishes were unwashed. The alarm would be unanswered.
Stripping off her prim clothes, they were amazed at the vision they saw. Her body was sensuous in rich underwear. The brassiere and the pants were of pale green, sheer silk, beneath which the dark pubic hair shimmered like Atlantis. They went on with what they had to do, unaware that they had witnessed the stubborn resplendence of unfulfilled dreams.
5
The prisoner
‘All right, Rafferty,’ the governor said. ‘Good luck. And let’s hope we won’t be seeing you again.’
The next one he certainly would be seeing again.
McQueen: over the past twenty years more time in prison than out of it. Recidivist. Always the same crime: burglary without violence but also burglary without the slightest indication of ever stopping. Show McQueen a big house and he wanted to screw it. The Don Juan of burglary. His only saving grace as a burglar was his inefficiency. But at least inside he had tended to behave. And now this.
The governor closed the file. He prepared himself for McQueen’s presence, the rumpled hair, the heavy shoulders, the puzzlingly introverted eyes. The feeling that you might never get through to him. Conversations with a totem pole.
Without looking up, the governor knew that the assistant governor was watching him. He also knew, irritatedly, the way he was watching him: that look of those who wait for someone else to see the light. The governor hated that look, smugness like bell metal. The assistant governor was like a Jehovah’s Witness of the hard line, always ready to canvass for his cause, always patient before the benightedness of others, always convinced that phoney liberals would eventually see the error of their ways.
The governor looked up and saw the expression that was pointed towards him like a Bible tract. Let us be righteous and burn the other bastards in hellfire.
‘Okay,’ the governor said. ‘Let’s have him in.’
‘This is a bad one, chief.’
The governor wondered where the assistant governor got his dialogue.
‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘Let’s have him in.’
‘You want me in with you on this one?’
‘No, Frank.’
‘After what he’s done?’
‘I know McQueen.’
‘We all thought we knew McQueen.’
‘Frank. If I shout for help, you come in with the machine-gun.’
Levity was the best defence against the assistant governor. Humour was a foreign language to him. If you wanted him to laugh, you had to tell him it was a joke. He had his customary reaction of mild affront and went out and officiously ushered in McQueen, giving the governor a last significant look: help is at hand.
McQueen came in pleasantly and stood in front of the governor’s desk. The governor decided not to tell him to sit down. This was a stand-up problem. McQueen returned the governor’s look and almost smiled and gazed out of the window. The governor tried not to like that crumpled face that looked as if it might have come out of the womb asking for directions and still not received an answer.
‘McQueen.’
‘Sur!’
The governor felt that McQueen’s respect was subtly disrespectful. He invariably addressed the governor as ‘Sir’ but he invariably used the inflection of his West of Scotland dialect, as if reminding him that they didn’t quite speak the same language. ‘Sur’ was the fifth-column in the standard English McQueen affected when speaking to the governor.
‘You know what this is about.’
‘Yes, sur.’
‘Why?’
McQueen shrugged.
‘Sur?’
‘McQueen. You were obviously unhappy throughout the Christmas meal. Officer Roberts warned you three times. Christmas is a bad time for the men. The slightest bit of trouble could cause a riot. And what did you do? At the end of the meal you smashed your plate on the floor. You jumped on to the table and danced through all the other empty plates. You broke three chairs. And it took four warders to get you out of there. Is that a fair report?’
‘Two chairs, sur. One of them wouldny brek.’
The governor decided to let the pedantry pass.
‘Just tell me why, McQueen.’
He looked off into the distance that lay outside the window and the governor was aware again of the opaque quality of McQueen’s eyes. They were the eyes – the governor had to admit it – of a visionary. A private, bizarre, non-conformist visionary. You could never be sure what was going on in McQueen’s head but you could always be sure it was something. If only he would keep it in there, whatever it was, the governor thought. McQueen looked back at the governor and the governor briefly felt their roles reversed. He knew that McQueen was going to tell him, but with something that felt like condescension. It was as if McQueen had set the governor a simple problem and he was saddened that the governor couldn’t solve it. He would tell him but in the manner of a disappointed teacher reluctantly admitting that his pupil hadn’t made much progress.
‘The turkey, sur,’ he said.
‘The turkey?’
‘The turkey, sur.’
‘What was wrong with the turkey?’
‘Did you see the turkey, sur?’
‘I saw the turkey. McQueen. I ate the turkey. McQueen. It may interest you to know that during any working day I eat the same food as the inmates. I don’t have lunches sent up from the Ritz. I care about this establishment. I think every inmate in here deserves to be punished. But punished in specific ways. And spoiling the food isn’t one of them. I check the kitchen every single day. That was a very special Christmas meal we made. The turkey was of high quality. I tasted it!’
‘It wasn’t the taste.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Sur. It wasn’t the taste. Sur.’
‘No, no. That’s not what I mean. You thought the turkey tasted all right?’
‘I’ve tasted better, sur. But it was all right.’
The governor looked down at the impeccable order of his desk. There was the matching set of marled fountain-pen and propelling pencil which his wife had given him years ago on his first senior appointment. There was the photograph of Catriona and Kim and Jason, looking laundered. There were the books of reference, sandbags between him and procedural error. There was the correspondence waiting to be signed, not an edge of a sheet out of place. The only thing that hinted at the invading chaos of a life like McQueen’s was the big desk blotter. It was covered in hieroglyphics, countless comments and signatures that had come out backwards, overlaying one another and creating a complex palimpsest as difficult to decipher as an ancient manuscript. He would have to renew it soon.
Looking at the blotter, he felt the familiar feeling that came from talking to McQueen. He was trying to define the feeling. About three years ago, Catriona and he had gone to a play. It was the last time they had been to the theatre. They had sat through an hour-and-three-quarters during which people did things that had no connection with anything they had done before and made remarks to one another that seemed to come out of t
hin air. One character spoke for ten minutes at one point without interruption and then the play went on as if she hadn’t opened her mouth. As far as Catriona and he were concerned, she might as well not have. They stayed for the whole performance out of a kind of baffled guilt, exchanging looks. Were they the only ones who hadn’t read the guide-book? At the interval, an ageing man who had two attractive girls with him had said, ‘Surrealist,’ into a gin and tonic. Perhaps McQueen was a surrealist.
‘So the turkey tasted all right,’ the governor said. ‘So what was the problem? The presentation? Did the waiter serve you from the wrong side?’
Something resembling relaxed enjoyment surfaced in McQueen’s eyes and sank again, like a fish in a polluted pool. McQueen had liked the remark. The governor had a moving glimpse of what it might have been like to talk to McQueen outside the walls.
‘Well?’
‘You ate it, sur?’
‘I’ve told you that.’
‘Ye didn’t notice anything, sur?’
‘I noticed it tasted very good. And so did the roast potatoes. And the other vegetable. What was it again? And the stuffing. And the cranberry sauce. We even gave you cranberry sauce!’
‘And that’s all, sur?’
‘What more did you want?’
‘Naw, sur. I meant that’s all you noticed? The taste, like.’
‘What else is there, man?’
McQueen looked at the governor as if he had only just realised what a wag he was. He shook his head: I may look simple but you don’t catch me out as easily as that.
‘McQueen! For heaven’s sake! If you don’t tell me now what was wrong with the turkey . . .’
McQueen pursed his lips. His expression suggested he was being asked to tell a watch the time.
‘It was round,’ he said.
The governor stared at him. He was back watching that incomprehensible play.
‘It was round?’ he asked with the involuntary tone of someone being admitted to a deep secret.
‘The turkey was round, sur,’ McQueen confirmed.
The governor recovered quickly.
Walking Wounded Page 5