Walking Wounded

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Of course, the turkey was round. I saw the bloody thing. The turkey was bloody round.’ The governor paused. He had used a swear-word. The governor never swore in front of the men. He looked sternly at McQueen as though trying to convince McQueen that he was the one who had sworn. ‘So what?’

  ‘Turkeys aren’t round, sur.’

  ‘I know turkeys aren’t round, McQueen. You don’t have to tell me that. That was part of a turkey. What you ate was part of a turkey.’

  ‘Which part was that, sur?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What part of a turkey’s round?’

  ‘There’s no part of a turkey that’s round.’ The governor hesitated. ‘Or if there is, I wouldn’t know. That’s not the point. You ate turkey. You had turkey for your Christmas dinner. I’m telling you that. You ate turkey, McQueen.’

  McQueen looked at the floor stubbornly, unconvinced. A small dawn rose in the governor’s eyes. McQueen had been in for six years this time. Before that, he had been outside only for brief spells over a period of twelve years. Other inmates referred to McQueen’s time outside as taking his holidays. McQueen was simply out of touch with the ways of the world.

  ‘McQueen,’ the governor said. ‘It was turkey roll.’

  ‘What, sur?’

  ‘What you ate. It was turkey roll.’

  McQueen considered the possibility.

  ‘It’s a process, McQueen. A modern process. You take a lot of turkeys and make them into a turkey roll. With machinery. You refine the turkeys.’

  ‘How do ye do that, sur?’

  The governor looked away.

  ‘You. Pass them through machinery.’

  ‘What? Everything, sur?’

  ‘How would I know, McQueen? I suppose you take the feathers off. Just accept the fact, man. Everybody else does. It was turkey roll.’

  ‘It wasn’t turkey, sur.’

  ‘McQueen. Turkey roll is turkey. Everybody accepts that. It’s what a lot of people eat.’

  ‘Then they’re not eatin’ turkey, sur. Turkey roll, as ye call it, isn’t turkey. It may be like turkey. But it’s not turkey.’

  ‘It is turkey! What else would it be?’

  McQueen was taking the question seriously.

  ‘See when they refine it, sur? What is the exact process?’

  The governor was watching McQueen, realising something. But McQueen was too caught up in pursuit of his own ideas to notice. The governor observed him from a distance, like a business-manager full of grave responsibilities looking out of his office window to see a grown-up layabout, who should know better, chasing after butterflies in the park.

  ‘See what I mean, sur? What happens when they turn a turkey into turkey roll? What is it they do, sur? Do you know? Do I know? Do any of the ordinary people know? They take out the bones. Right? They must take out the bones, sur. But nowadays, who knows? Maybe they powder them, sur. And mix it in with the whole mish-mash. But what exactly do they do? What is the machinery like, sur? And.’ McQueen paused with the look of a man who has found the incontrovertible point, the argument with which you must agree. ‘What else do they put in? It’s guaranteed they put in something, sur. If turkey roll’s not a substitute for turkey, why not just have the turkey? Eh?’ McQueen was smiling in triumph. ‘It’s cheaper. And what are they doing to make it cheaper? They could put any kind of crap in there, sur, and we wouldn’t know. Preservatives. Bits of dead dogs for all we know. We’re being had, sur. Everybody’s being had. Turkey roll isn’t turkey. Sur.’

  The governor was looking at McQueen. What he had realised was that McQueen was enjoying this. All the men did that. Let out of their routine for any purpose, they contrived to make an event of it. It was part of the emotional economy of prison, like a man going to be hanged who decides he’ll try to enjoy the walk to the gallows. The governor understood that.

  But McQueen’s was an extreme case. He had just been brought up from solitary on a very grave breach of discipline. It could be incitement to riot. And he had contrived to turn his appearance before the governor into a metaphysical discussion on what constitutes a turkey. Was he serious?

  The governor studied McQueen, who let himself be studied without apparent discomfort. The intensity of McQueen’s commitment to the great turkey question seemed unreal but his reaction to the Christmas dinner had been real enough. You had to wonder if round turkeys were just an excuse but when you looked at McQueen they sure enough felt like a reason.

  Prison magnified trivia. Everything came at you as if it was under a microscope. If a man you didn’t like raised his forefinger, it looked like an obelisk. The governor had known a man who was killed for not paying the tobacco he owed. The tobacco, carefully used, would have made five cigarettes. The governor had a blessedly brief vision of the terrible complexities with which he was dealing. Habit came to his rescue.

  ‘McQueen,’ the governor said. ‘That’s it? Because the turkey was round?’

  ‘It wasn’t turkey, sur.’

  ‘It was turkey roll.’

  ‘We were promised turkey.’

  ‘Everybody else seemed satisfied.’

  ‘That’s up to them.’

  The governor contemplated the strange wildness of McQueen’s behaviour and gave it up.

  ‘You’re back to solitary, McQueen,’ he said. ‘Till I decide. I see no justification for your behaviour. I don’t even see that you’re sorry for it. Are you? I mean, was that the only way you could express yourself?’

  McQueen shrugged.

  ‘You said it yerself, sur. Ye can’t complain to the waiter, can ye?’

  The governor wondered how he was supposed to have said it himself. Then he remembered having mentioned the idea of a waiter serving from the wrong side. There it was again, tangential attempts to meet. One of us, the governor thought, is wrong. Or perhaps we both are. He hadn’t time to pursue the thought.

  ‘McQueen. I’m disappointed in you. You know the score here. Every man in here is a long-termer from another place. This is where you get a chance to prepare for outside. You know this is an easy ticket. We’re trying to make a transition here. From hard jails to the real world.’

  ‘That’s the real world, sur? Broken promises? Synthetic turkey?’

  ‘The interview’s over, McQueen. Don’t you understand that? And you didn’t get the job. I’ve tried to give you a chance. We’ll do it my way now. And you’ll just listen. In the meantime you’re back yourself. I don’t want any rotten apples in my barrel. You’re a mug. You’ve maybe just worked your ticket to a real jail. I’ll let you know. In the meantime, stew in your juice. I hope you enjoy it. Thing is, you’re not even a violent man. Then you do this. Hoof it.’

  As McQueen turned, one thing was still niggling at the governor’s mind.

  ‘McQueen!’

  McQueen stopped, turned round.

  ‘You ate the turkey.’

  ‘Sorry, sur?’

  ‘You ate the turkey. And then you ate the pudding. Was the pudding all right, by the way? Was that to your taste?’

  ‘It wasn’t really, sur.’

  ‘Oh. What was wrong with that?’

  ‘Ah don’t like a cold thing and a warm thing put together.’

  ‘You mean the ice-cream and the hot apple tart?’

  ‘That’s right, sur.’

  ‘I hope you like the menu better where you’re going.’

  McQueen was turning away again.

  ‘But you miss the point,’ the governor said.

  McQueen turned back, practised in patience.

  ‘You ate the turkey,’ the governor said. ‘You ate the pudding. You ate everything. And then you made your protest. Why?’

  McQueen gave him that habitual look that suggested the world was out to con him.

  ‘Ah was hungry, sur,’ he said.

  The governor was left staring into the remark. It opened like a window on to a place he had never been. He saw McQueen sitting eating his meal in the b
ig hall. Around him were faces that wouldn’t have been out of place on Notre Dame Cathedral. McQueen was grumbling but nobody else was giving him any support. McQueen was hungry, so he ate everything and then exploded. The precision was where the governor had never been, the precision of passion, the risk of choosing the moment when you try to express utterly what you feel. McQueen, the governor understood with a dismay that would quickly bury the understanding in disbelief like dead leaves, was capable of something of which the governor was not. McQueen was capable of freedom.

  The assistant governor opened the door and looked in.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘We’ll see. He goes back down today. Then I’ll decide.’

  ‘It’s a bad one. We don’t need that stuff here.’

  ‘I know that. We’ll see.’

  The assistant governor contrived to make a nod look negative and went out.

  The governor started to sign his mail. When he was finished, he would inspect the kitchens. Then he would have lunch with the assistant governor and Mrs Caldwell, the teacher. They would discuss which inmates might be capable of sitting an external examination, the advisability of an evening creative writing class under a visiting teacher and the case of Branson, who believed he was a genius not being published simply because he was in prison. The afternoon was exactly scheduled. He would leave a little early this evening because he was speaking to the Rotary Club in the nearest town, where he lived. Catriona and the children would be asleep by the time he got back. It was an early rise tomorrow. It was his day off and it was their day for visiting his parents. The drive was long and boring and it only gave them three hours at his parents’ house. But maybe that was just as well. His mother was a woman who had turned into a compendium of elusive ailments which she recited as if they were conversation. His father would sit apparently stunned into silent awe at the agonies she went through. They would all get back just in time for bed. As he worked, the governor was vaguely aware of an image prowling the perimeter of his interlocking thoughts. The image was the rumpled figure of McQueen.

  McQueen sat very still in his cell. With an almost mystical intensity, he was thinking himself beyond the enmeshing smell of urine mixed with disinfectant that had always for him meant prison. He had a method for doing this. He recreated in his mind big houses he had seen. This one was a big detached white house with a semi-circular balcony on the first floor. It faced the sea-front of an Ayrshire coastal town. Sometimes in McQueen’s head they were hard to get into. This one had been easy. He put shaving foam on the burglar alarm and forced the kitchen window.

  McQueen landed on his stockinged feet on the kitchen floor. His shoes were on the draining board. He tied their specially long laces together and hung them round his neck. He listened. His eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Something brushed against his leg and he almost called out. It was a cat. McQueen bent down and stroked it gently. He straightened and looked slowly round the kitchen. The kitchen was well appointed, rich in the shining surfaces of affluence. It glowed dimly like the entrance to Ali Baba’s cave.

  McQueen moved without sound towards the hall. He was wondering what he would find.

  6

  Homecoming

  ‘Going home,’ she said.

  ‘Graithnock,’ she said.

  ‘London,’ she said.

  ‘Frances Ritchie,’ she said.

  She treated his questions like spaces in an official form, impersonally, never digressing into humanising irrelevance. I am a stranger on a train, she was saying. She asked him nothing in return.

  But the man was persistent. He had come on at Dumfries, entering a coach clogged with the boredom of several hours’ travel, the unfinished crosswords, the empty whisky miniatures interred in their plastic cups, the crumpled beer cans rattling minutely to the motion of the train. Picking his way among the preoccupied stares and the occasionally stretched legs, he had sat down opposite Fran. The seats had only just been vacated by a mother and a small girl who had made Fran wonder if her own desire for children was as deep as she told herself it was.

  His persistence wasn’t offensive. It had none of the I-secretly-know-what-you-want-and-need machismo which Fran had learned to recognise from a distance like a waving flag and which caused her to shoot on sight. His persistence was gentle, slightly vulnerable, as if he had decided – for no reason that she could understand – that he wanted to please her. Although it was a smoker, he asked if she minded him smoking.

  ‘Just thought I’d check,’ he said. ‘The way it’s going these days, they’ll be issuing a leper’s bell with every packet.’

  Her smile disappeared like a mistake being erased.

  ‘So what took you from Graithnock to London?’

  She looked out of the window. Would she have known that countryside was Scotland if the stations they passed through hadn’t told her?

  ‘The train,’ she said. ‘The 12.10 I think it was.’

  The sharpness of her remark made her glance towards his silence. He was smiling.

  ‘You gave some extra information there,’ he said. ‘Does that mean you’re softening towards me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ she said.

  But she was laughing. She noticed he had a smile as open as a blank cheque. In spite of herself, she felt the moment put down roots and blossom into one of those sudden intimacies between strangers. He discovered that she was a journalist. He claimed to have seen her by-line. (‘That’s what you call it? Isn’t it? A by-line?’) He convinced her by getting the newspaper right. He was a Further Education lecturer in English at Jordanhill College in Glasgow. He had been on a visit to students in Dumfries.

  ‘I prefer taking the train when I can,’ he said. ‘You go by car, it’s just a chore, isn’t it? This way, you can turn it into a carnival. Watch. Just answer one question, that’s all we need. What do you drink?’

  He came back from the buffet with two gins and two cans of tonic for her, two whiskies and a plastic cupful of water for himself. They made a party between them. As with all good parties, the conversation went into overdrive.

  ‘The new Glasgow?’ he said. ‘Looks like backdoor Thatcherism to me. What difference is it making to the people in the housing-schemes? How many investors invest for the good of others? That kind of investment’s the Trojan Horse, isn’t it? Oh, look, these nice punters are giving us a prezzy. Let’s bring it into the city. Then, when it’s dark, its belly opens and they all come out to loot and pillage.’

  ‘I think maybe Manhattan,’ she said. ‘But it’s not exactly an easy choice. I still love Play it again, Sam, that scene where the hairdrier almost blows him away. I just think he’s great. Who was it said that? Bette Midler? “You want to take him home and burp him.”’

  ‘Maybe I just haven’t found the man,’ she said. ‘You volunteering? I’m involved at the moment, actually. But I don’t think marriage is exactly imminent.’

  ‘It’s interesting enough,’ she said. ‘But you go to a lot of places without really seeing them. Because you’re there for one purpose. It can be like travelling in a tunnel.’

  ‘Oh, that was the worst time,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it. Divorce? I can see what Dr Crippen was getting at. I’m not saying I agree with him. But murder must be a lot less hassle.’

  Before the buffet closed (‘Haven’t we been lucky?’ he said. ‘They usually shut it about Carlisle but the fella in the buffet’s drunk.’), she went and fetched them two more drinks. By the time they were drawing into Graithnock she had his telephone number (but he didn’t have hers) and Fran was about to say goodbye to Tom.

  Departure heightened their sense of closeness. He was helping her with her case and threatening to come with her since he felt it only right, considering how far they were along the road to marriage, that he should meet her parents. Just before he opened the door for her, he kissed her on the cheek.

  Then she was on the platform with her case beside her and he was leaning out, wavi
ng with mock drama, and she felt slightly dazed with alcohol and elation, as if she were taking part in a scene from a film in which she might be the heroine and didn’t know what would happen next, and then she turned and saw her parents.

  They were standing thirty yards away, waiting for her to notice them. They would be doing that – not for them the spontaneity of running towards her. Victor and Agnes Ritchie, informal as a letterhead. They stood slightly apart, her father with his clipped, grey military moustache, a general in the army of the genteel, her mother with that expression some unknown experience had pickled on her face countless years ago. Fran wondered again how they had acquired their ability to turn joy to a dead thing at a touch and how they had managed to pass the gift on to her. Years of hopelessness they had taught her resurfaced in her at once. She suspected the value of the pleasure she had just had.

  Her life in miniature, she thought, this journey. A promise something in her wouldn’t allow her to fulfil. She didn’t think she would be phoning him. She hoped she would but, standing there, she would have bet against it. She felt her faith in life and living evaporate. Her parents had taught her well. Maybe home is simply where you can’t get away from, she thought.

  As she lifted her case and walked towards them, she fingered the return ticket in the pocket of her jacket, wondering how far she would have to go finally to get away from here.

  7

  At the bar

  The pub was quiet. When the big man with the ill-fitting suit came in, the barman noticed him more than he normally would have done. The suit was slightly out of fashion yet looked quite new and it was too big for him. He could have come back to it after a long illness. Yet it wasn’t that either. Whatever had happened to him had tightened him but not diminished him. The charcoal grey cloth sat on him loosely but that looked like the suit’s problem. You wouldn’t have fancied whoever the suit might fit to come against the man who wore it.

  He came up to the bar and seemed uncertain about what to order. He looked along the gantry with a bemused innocence, like a small boy in a sweet-shop.

  ‘Sir?’ the barman said.