Walking Wounded

by William McIlvanney

  Mick’s street is mainly like that. The council has refurbished a few houses, adding red-brick porches to the front. But the majority of the houses are the architectural equivalent of a huddle of winos. Some have been boarded up. Grass grows through the flagstones of the pavement in some places. From the scale of the dog-turds that aren’t uncommon on the pavement, it wouldn’t take an Indian scout to work out that the dogs around here tend to come in big sizes. One or two can be seen almost at any time of the day, mooching vaguely around as now, as if they too were on the dole. A big black dog is reading the pavement with its nose. From time to time it lifts its leg and squirts like an aerosol, adding its own comment.

  Mick is heading towards the park as his shortest way to the town centre. His route takes him past the rubble of a recently demolished block of old flats towards a vast empty area already cleared. Men appear to be testing the ground there, presumably for rebuilding. On his left is a lemonade-making factory not long shut down. A few of its windows are broken and a door hangs open. He knows three sisters not much younger than himself who never married and who had worked in that place since they left school.

  Mick himself is fifty-seven now. It is four years since he worked. There have been times, he says, when he could lose one job and find another in the same day. Since he came from Ireland to Glasgow (where he lived for three years) when he was eighteen, he has worked in a flour mill, in an engineering works, on hydro-electric schemes but mainly in the building trade. He was proud of his reputation as a good worker. He was never given to saving, knowing there would always be another job. Then, four years ago, there wasn’t. There still isn’t. He should know, he says. He has been looking.

  When he arrives at the pedestrian precinct in the town centre, he joins some men he knows who are lounging there. The desultory talk among them is about the horses and the dogs and who’s done what and to whom and where there might be a job going.

  Mick wonders briefly about going along to the Job Centre and decides against it. It’s a bit like having your own uselessness officially confirmed. He used to go there a lot but the regularity of failure becomes harder to take, not easier. And every year that passes makes work for him less likely. ‘It’s hard enough for men in their forties,’ he says. ‘They don’t want you when you’re my age.’

  Mick leaves the men in the precinct and goes to the Public Library. There’s a nice girl there who knows him by name now. His favourite books are detective stories and cowboy stories. But he reads more or less anything. One of the books he really enjoyed was by a man named Leonard Woolf. He thinks it was called The Village in the Jungle. Today he picks three cowboy books: Max Brand’s Best Western Stories, Trask and The Mark of Kane and Manhunter.

  When he comes out, the temptation is to go to the pub. But if he goes to the pub, the danger is that he will stay there, nursing pints till it closes. This is only Tuesday. If he exhausts his money now, it will be a long way to the next oasis. He walks back home.

  Old Freddie is still in his bed. He isn’t feeling talkative. Mick comes through to the living-room and starts half-heartedly reading Max Brand’s Best Western Stories. He doesn’t like reading so much during the day. His best time for reading is late at night and in the early hours of the morning. Old Freddie is coughing.

  The drinking doesn’t agree with Freddie any more, if it ever did. It is perhaps a good thing that he no longer has his redundancy money. When he was paid off, he was offered £30 a month or a small lump sum. Freddie chose the lump sum and had liquefied his assets, as it were, within a year. But he had some good nights.

  Mick finally goes to the pub in late afternoon. The pub is the focal point of his life. It is companionship, unofficial social work department and cabaret. Everybody knows him. If he is struggling, quite a few people there are prepared to stand him a drink. It is an understandable indulgence because any time Mick has money he isn’t against buying a drink for someone else.

  In the pub, too, both the owners and the customers have been known to help Mick out. He may get a pub-meal for free. Someone may bring him in a winter anorak. He may get the offer of a few hours’ gardening. It’s that kind of pub, a talking shop rich in anecdote where most of the people who go are well-known to one another. Perhaps people don’t mind helping Mick because he is remarkably unself-pitying and unembittered about his situation. If he ever falls out with anyone, it is usually in a righteous cause.

  He has more than a touch of the Galahads in his nature. One night in the pub Mick saw a woman being annoyed by a man. Mick decided to adminster chastisement. But the man unsportingly moved and Mick’s fist connected with the woman’s forehead: damsel in deeper distress. But she understood the chivalry of the intention and proceeded to wear the lump like a Burton diamond. (Perhaps the moral is that when a drunk Irishman comes to a lady’s aid, her trouble may only be starting.)

  Tonight Mick stays till the pub shuts and comes out mellow but not, he feels, drunk. There is in the park, between him and home, a flight of earth steps buttressed with wood. The height between steps is uneven. Mick is in the habit of using them to gauge his condition, like a blood sample. Tonight the alcohol count isn’t high.

  When he gets home, Freddie is in the living-room. He has eaten and gone out but he hasn’t had much to drink. Mick makes himself roasted cheese on two slices of bread and a cup of tea. He usually eats more than he has eaten today, his favourite food being liver.

  Freddie doesn’t want anything but they sit and talk as Mick eats. They mention Freddie’s sister, who died in Nottingham. They talk again about whether Mick will ever go back to Feeney. Mick can’t see it happening, since he would hardly know anyone there any more.

  When Freddie goes to bed, Mick picks up Trask And The Mark Of Kane. The street is quiet. He hunkers down into his personal situation, bothering no one.

  But the more time that passes like this, the less capable Mick is likely to become of ever getting out of his present helpless condition. Time never merely passes. It defines us as it goes until we run out of potential to contradict what it tells us. Mick’s situation is like a prison sentence without any crime committed. It is an indeterminate sentence. So far he has served four years.

  12

  Tig

  When they barred Mickey Andrews from ‘The Narrow Place’, they did a bad thing. ‘The Narrow Place’ was a one-room bar, one entrance, one exit. It had been named by Big Fergie, the owner, presumably from a sepulchral sense of humour, since he had been told it meant the grave. It was a gantry, a counter, a piece of worn linoleum to stand on and one continuous red leather bench seat along the wall, pockmarked with cigarette burns. The Cairo Hilton it wasn’t. So where did Big Fergie get off barring anybody from there in the first place?

  He did it on a Thursday night after the dogs. If there had been no dogs, there would have been no ‘Narrow Place’. The dog-track at Thornbank was a flapping track, which meant that it was unofficial, not subject to the rules of the National Greyhound Racing Council. Interesting things happened there. The markings on a particular black and white dog might change subtly from one week to the next. A dog that had appeared to be running through molasses for three weeks in a row would suddenly look to be in danger of catching the hare. These things were a puzzle and a mystery to many.

  But every Tuesday and Thursday night the many came and tried to solve the mystery once again. One of the many was Mickey Andrews. He was a small man of a mainly pleasant disposition. The central preoccupation of his life was animals. Around the edges of this preoccupation Mickey had almost absent-mindedly acquired a wife and three daughters. The three girls were married and Sadie, his wife, had long ago learned to find her own preoccupations, which included her grandchildren, bingo and television soap operas.

  Mickey’s preoccupations might have seemed less varied than Sadie’s, but only to an outsider. As many animals as there were, so many animals was Mickey interested in. Apart from his interest in all kinds of domestic animals, he watched any televi
sion programme he could find about nature. He speculated philosophically about many aspects of the natural world: for example, which would win in a straight contest – a crocodile or a shark? Or what is, pound for pound, the most ferocious creature on earth? Mickey’s main bet was on the wolverine, with a side-bet on a Pyrenean rodent, called a desman, which he had seen on a David Attenborough programme. A wolverine was, in Mickey’s assessment, a set of champing teeth with fur round it.

  Mickey loved all animals, fierce or gentle. ‘Their nature’s their nature,’ he sometimes said cryptically. As with all true lovers, love gave him knowledge of the beloved. People with pets in the Graithnock housing development where he lived came to him with their problems. They weren’t always well received.

  Once a woman came to Mickey’s door with a toy poodle which was wearing what looked like a small but rather expensive fur coat. The dog, the woman said, was pining. The first sign that Mickey’s diagnosis wasn’t favourable was that he didn’t ask her in. He stared at the dog which was fidgeting on his doorstep.

  Mickey loved all animals but there was a kind of hierarchy to his love and the toy poodle did not occupy a high place in it. He had once described a toy poodle as ‘a sandwich for an alsatian’.

  ‘Yes,’ he said to the woman. ‘Your dog’s got a problem.’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘You.’

  The woman stared at him.

  ‘Missus,’ he said. ‘Its legs are bucklin’ under that thing on its back. What’s that for? Dogs’ve got coats already. How’d you like two skins? Ye’d suffocate. Yer dog’s pinin’ right enough. It’s pinin’ for an owner with a brain.’

  And he closed the door. For Mickey wanted animals to be animals. He hated human sentimentality to be superimposed on the animal world. ‘Give them their own natures,’ he sometimes said cryptically. And, ‘When an animal dies, it dies.’ And, ‘You ever see a canary die? Just draps aff the perch. Doesny phone a doctor. No relatives round the bed.’ Mickey hated people who had birthday parties for dogs or sent Christmas cards with pawmarks on them. But his love of animals was real. It was a love for the animals, not his idea of them. It was a love so unmistakable that a friend had once referred to him as St Francis of Assisi. Yet Mickey had characteristics St Francis appears not to have had. One of them was irrational anger.

  It was the anger that led to his being barred from ‘The Narrow Place’. That Thursday Mickey had gone to Thornbank greyhound track. Every Tuesday and Thursday he did that. Those nights were the highlight of his week.

  Each night came in two parts. There was the session at the stadium with the heraldry of the greyhounds parading on the green turf and racing under the lights, the frosted breath of the onlookers rising up into the air like prayers. There was the session in the pub afterwards.

  ‘The Narrow Place’ was, more than any other place, where Mickey found his social fulfilment. Every Tuesday and Thursday night it was packed. As far as takings went, Big Fergie could afford to forget the rest of the week. Men and greyhounds crammed themselves in, in apparent defiance of the physical possibilities. The talk was all of dogs and who was trying and who wasn’t and how best to prepare a dog for a race. Among these men Mickey was a king. He knew more about the dogs than anyone else. More importantly, he was among people who, no matter how dubious their motives, acknowledged two nights a week the beauty and grace and importance of greyhounds and, by implication, of animals. It was as close as Mickey got to a place of worship. He couldn’t imagine not going there – until that Thursday night.

  Mickey was arguing pleasantly with a big man from Thornbank. Mickey liked arguing. ‘Arguing’s like monkey-gland steak,’ he sometimes said cryptically. But he had never said this to the big man. The big man was not getting angry but he was not getting any happier. They were arguing about judging greyhounds just by looking at them and, while the big man remained unconvinced by Mickey’s reasoning, everybody else within earshot was obviously starting to side with Mickey. The big man couldn’t help feeling that people were agreeing with Mickey not because he was right but because he often said things with a pleasing neatness, or a displeasing neatness, if you were the big man. He decided that Mickey was not taking the argument very seriously and he thought that he might as well do the same. That was when the big man did something foolish. He knocked off Mickey’s cap.

  No one who knew Mickey Andrews well would have knocked off his cap. No one with any sensitivity to the mysteriousness of others would knock off anyone’s cap. Who knows where the nuclear buttons are in a stranger’s nature? Mickey’s cap was like an integral part of himself. He wore it in the house as well as outside. Even friends never saw him without it. Rumour had it that he went to bed with it on. When the big man knocked it off Mickey’s head, everyone could see why Mickey wore it.

  With his cap off, Mickey instantly aged about twenty years. He had thick curly hair at the sides of his head and at the back, still only slightly grey. The entire upper part of his head shone like a glass eye in the cheap fluorescent light of Big Fergie’s bar. The effect of knocking Mickey’s cap off was similar to taking the cork off the bottle of an evil genie.

  Mickey became a blur of malice. He caught his cap in mid-air and pulled it back on his head and, simultaneously it seemed, punched the big man in the mouth. So tight with people was ‘The Narrow Place’ on a dog night that an incident became in seconds a riot. Much noisy confusion and falling about ensued. Dogs barked and men wrestled with leashes. Oaths were heard. People dreaded they might suffocate. Some struggled cravenly towards the door like passengers who think the ship is sinking. All this took up much time. When comparative silence was at last restored by Big Fergie, there was some damage to glasses and one dog had a cut paw and the room was murmuring with vague threats. But Mickey’s cap had remained miraculously on his head.

  A summary hearing was held. Numerous claims for compensation for spilled beer were brusquely dismissed by Big Fergie. There was only one serious issue here. How had this started? Who was to blame? The evidence, like a forest of fingers, pointed at Mickey. It was useless for him to plead his case. There was no way he could present it effectively. The very core of his defence, the exceptional importance of the cap as a part of his identity, was the very thing he couldn’t admit. It would have been equivalent to preserving his propriety by stripping naked. Without the admission of this crucial extenuating circumstance, Big Fergie ruled that a punch in the mouth was in no way a just response to getting your cap playfully knocked off. The verdict was final. Mickey was barred.

  Mickey protested. When had he ever caused trouble before? For how many years had he been Big Fergie’s customer? How many Tuesday or Thursday nights had he missed that Fergie could remember? And, pathetically enough (even Mickey felt it), he hadn’t finished his pint.

  Big Fergie took Mickey’s glass with the remains of his pint in it, opened one half of the double doors and threw the beer into the street. He handed the glass to someone else. He held the door open.

  ‘Your beer’s out there,’ he said. ‘You want it, follow it.’

  Mickey looked at Big Fergie. He knew Big Fergie was jealous of him. Too many times Mickey had shown Big Fergie’s pronouncements about greyhounds to be rubbish, the undigested scraps of other men’s knowledge heard over the counter. Nonsense talked at the pitch of your voice was still nonsense. But what chance did you have accusing the judge to his face of corruption?

  Still Mickey couldn’t step out the door. To cross that line was to abandon the most purely pleasurable place of meeting he had in his life. What would he do without it? How could he leave? Big Fergie solved his problem for him. He took Mickey by the shoulder with his free hand and flung him out. The door closed behind him.

  Mickey came back at the door as if he had been on elastic. His pride was outraged. But with one hand on each of the brass handles of the double doors, he halted. A countercharge of pride went through him like an electric shock. He wouldn’t be begging. They could ke
ep their pub. But this wasn’t over. Somehow Big Fergie would pay for this. Somehow he would pay. Mickey went home.

  Throughout the next few days Mickey brooded. Sadie was aware of the difference in him but, after a few unsuccessful enquiries, she left him to deal with it. She knew that Mickey believed in what he called ‘men’s business’. It meant that there were areas of their lives that were primarily his concern. Just as he wouldn’t dare to advise Sadie on how to cook whatever meal she gave him, so if a grizzly bear came to the door, he wouldn’t ask her to answer it. He would take care of the bad things. This appeared to be one of them.

  During the weekend the usual sort of visitors came and went, bringing their small problems. Mrs Wallace’s budgerigar needed to have its claws clipped. Old Stan Baird brought his pet rabbit Dusky, an animal Mickey had previously suggested couldn’t have been much older than Stan himself. Stan was worried about Dusky. No wonder. Running his hands over it expertly, Mickey said gently, ‘What we’ve got here is a growth with a rabbit attached.’ Brutus, Danny Park’s alsatian, was showing the first signs of distemper. A small tear-stained girl turned up with a goldfish floating in a goldfish bowl. A lot of people believed in Mickey Andrews.

  Mickey gave everybody an audience but he did it absently, in the manner of Solomon solving other people’s problems while conducting an internal argument with God. Sadie knew that whatever had been worrying him was continuing to worry him. It was Monday evening before Mickey came in from his hut in the back garden with a less troubled expression on his face. It was an interesting expression. It wasn’t happy, exactly. It was more an expression of calm and intense concentration, like someone who is trying to see through walls.