Walking Wounded

by William McIlvanney

  Mickey put a piece of wood on the mantelpiece and sat down and stared at it. Sadie glanced up from watching television. It was an ordinary-looking piece of wood. It was about a foot long, two inches wide and an inch-and-a-half thick. Mickey had obviously been planing it smooth. Sadie knew the rules of the game Mickey was playing and when she spoke she didn’t expect an answer.

  ‘That’s lovely, Mickey,’ she said. ‘But d’ye think it’ll ever catch on?’

  Mickey smiled. After ten minutes’ further contemplation, he took the piece of wood and went back out to his hut. When he returned and replaced the piece of wood on the mantelpiece, Sadie looked up again. Mickey had bored two holes, one at each end of the wood. From each hole, knotted so that it held firm, dangled a two-foot length of rope.

  ‘My,’ Sadie said. ‘Ye’re a wonder. Only you would’ve seen that’s exactly what was needed.’

  Mickey smiled. Quite a few people missed him at the Thornbank dogs on Tuesday night and commented on his absence. The comments extended into ‘The Narrow Place’. There was a lot of talk about him. Some felt that he shouldn’t have been barred. The big man who had been punched on the mouth was one of the leading voices in presenting Mickey’s appeal. Being punched by Mickey, he said, was like being assaulted with a ping-pong ball. But Big Fergie wouldn’t waver. Mickey Andrews was barred.

  It was then, as magically as if their talk had conjured him, that Mickey appeared. He stood in the doorway of the bar, holding open one of the double doors. The pub seemed even busier than usual, perhaps in expectation of a sequel to the barring of Mickey Andrews, and it took some time for everybody in the bar to realise that Mickey was there. But the talk subsided piecemeal until everyone in the place was craning and staring to see Mickey Andrews. The bar was as quiet as a Western street at sun-up. Mickey was staring steadily at Big Fergie. Big Fergie was staring steadily at Mickey.

  ‘You meant it?’ Mickey said. ‘That Ah’m barred?’

  ‘Ah meant it. You’re barred.’

  ‘For how long then?’

  ‘How long you got to live?’

  ‘You mean for life?’

  ‘You’re barred for life. And if you get reincarnated, try to remember that.’

  ‘Okay,’ Mickey said. ‘Just thought Ah’d check,’ and he took from inside his jacket Dusky, the cancer-ridden rabbit which Old Stan had finally asked him to have put down.

  ‘Die nobly, friend,’ Mickey muttered to Dusky. ‘It’s comin’ to us all.’ And then, remembering the old childhood game, he shouted to Big Fergie, ‘Tig! You’re het,’ as he threw the rabbit into the bar.

  It landed on a man’s shoulder and hopped onto the bar. It seemed to have a new and spectacular life that enabled it, however briefly, to outrun its cancer.

  Mickey saw it jump from the counter on to the gantry area, scattering glasses and bottles, as Big Fergie swore, as dogs leaped and barked, twanging their leashes, as men fell and glasses broke, as the noise reached panic-stricken crescendo, as Mickey closed the door and rammed home the piece of wood he had taken from his pocket and tied the ropes in a quadruple knot round the double door-handles and walked off down the empty street.

  13

  Beached

  There was one yacht’s sail out in the bay, sickled with wind stress, a cipher of all the journeys she would never make. The beach was almost empty. As Marion shook sand from the towel, she paused. The moment held her like a freeze-frame in a film. Beyond the preoccupations of the moment, she studied where she really was.

  The sky predominated, surrounded her in a vivid air that she felt lucid with loss. The clouds offered no certain shapes. They appeared to her lost purposes that loitered round the thought of what they might have been, a house, a bridge, a map of a country where she might have gone. Involuntarily, she held the towel to her, the comfort-rag a child can’t bear to part with.

  The sea was grey. The day was almost over. And she was held again in that moment where near gold of an afternoon converts to lead, recurrent mood of life’s failed alchemy.

  The beach was littered with sought pleasure. A burst beach-ball lay abandoned. A Coca-Cola bottle was embedded in the sand. An empty plastic bag was imitating tumble-weed. She saw an afternoon as archaeology.

  She could see the figure of a child haloed against the sky in the distance. She couldn’t make out whether it was a boy or a girl. It seemed caught in a dancing prism of light. She couldn’t tell whether the child was advancing or receding.

  In the middle distance was the centre-piece. They were a young man and a girl. Whatever was trivial in them couldn’t be seen from this softening distance, in this poignant light. Their shapes moved her like an ancient hieroglyph, a rune of passion. Their leant heads seemed a brave conspiracy against everything around them.

  They looked so vulnerable she almost wanted to cry out to them but she understood it would be like crying out to herself, shouting a warning to a past self who couldn’t hear. They were where she had once been and would never be again.

  An inexpressible nostalgia that seemed as vast as the sky tremored through her and earthed itself in the practicalities at her feet. She bent and collected Michael’s wet and abandoned trunks, Lucy’s discarded sun-hat. Holding the beach-bag in one hand and gathering up the debris of their day with the other, she seemed to see herself from above, how eccentrically isolated her life had become. She saw herself doubled over like an old woman scrabbling after sticks, the little pieces of identity that would fuel her sense of herself. The small actions, seemingly incidental, defined her identity. They reminded her that Harry was dead and that a part of her would never be quite as alive again. There was hope, of course, but it was a smaller hope.

  And yet the passion in her for living was undiminished. It was simply that it had learned it had no permanent home. Her experience had taught her that. It was as if, psychologically, she would live the rest of her life in a tent. This momentary scene was one of that passion’s temporary houses.

  The faces of the children blotted it out. Michael was impatient to be going. Lucy pressed in on her with the word that she was hungry. Instinctively, she embraced them both, hoarding the profit of her loss. They squirmed a little as if embarrassed but she held on to them. She knew that the moment was only a family on a beach getting ready to go home but she also knew that it was more. She knew that what she saw over their heads was just a widow’s stare but she also knew that the child and the couple and the yacht were a promise life had made to her a while ago, a promise only fully known in its departure.

  She clung to her lonely vision even as it faded, a primitive painting she had made herself from colours that couldn’t survive the corroding salt sea air, mixed crudely on some palette of the heart.

  14

  How many miles to Babylon?

  ‘Benny!’ Matt O’Neill shouted up through cupped hands. ‘Benny Mullen!’

  In a moment, a broad, close-cropped head appeared, projecting beyond the uncompleted upper edge of the building, like a blueprint for a gargoyle. The wide mouth spouted words.

  ‘What the hell is it?’

  ‘Time up, Benny,’ Matt O’Neill called up. ‘Ah’m sendin’ yer taxi for ye.’

  He worked the pulley, and the wooden platform on its chains, normally used as a hoist for building materials, rose steadily till it stopped at the level where Benny was working. Benny had disappeared.

  ‘Watch this,’ Matt O’Neill said.

  ‘That’s Tank’s job,’ Johnny Rayburn said.

  ‘Tank’s job! Got a boy of ten could do it. Goin’ to give Benny a wee thrill here.’

  ‘You watch what ye’re doin’.’

  Matt was smiling.

  ‘It’ll be just like the Big Dipper. Benny says he can’t remember bein’ frightened. Should be no problem for a man of his calibre.’

  He pronounced it jocularly, to rhyme with ‘Khyber’. Wanting no part of it, Johnny Rayburn found a barrow that needed shifting but didn’t shift it to where he couldn’t
see what was happening. Benny reappeared with his jacket over his shoulder and stepped out casually, maybe fifty feet above them, on to the platform, his free hand taking hold of one of the vertical chains. The platform started to descend smoothly with Benny gazing down upon them. Then Matt suddenly spun the pulley. The platform dropped sheer for about fifteen feet before Matt braked it dead. They could hear Benny bouncing on the wooden platform, and muffled cursing among the dancing rattle of the chains, and the worn work jacket, emptily bulbuous at the pockets where Benny always carried his eight slices of bread and cheese, floated like an empty parachute to the ground. Benny’s head came over the edge of the platform and said, ‘Ya bastard! Wait till Ah get doon there.’

  Matt was laughing helplessly.

  ‘Ye’ll need to be more polite than that, Benny, if ye want to get doon,’ he said.

  He was still laughing when he felt a grip manacle almost his entire forearm. He looked into a stare like burnished metal.

  ‘What’s the game?’ Tank Anderson said.

  ‘It’s a bit of fun.’

  ‘You’re the only one that’s laughin’.’

  ‘Maybe Ah’m the only one wi’ a sense of humour.’

  ‘Ah’ve seen a man killed in one of these,’ Tank said. ‘You lose control of this, ye’ve got a man wearin’ his pelvis for a hat. Ya bastard. Benny! You okay?’

  ‘Okay, Tank.’

  ‘You wait there till this man comes doon,’ Tank muttered.

  ‘That’ll worry me,’ Matt said.

  Tank reset the pulley gently into motion. A few of the men had gathered to see what would happen. As the platform reached ground level, they could see how shaken Benny was. ‘Okay’ had been an attitude adopted, not a fact. Benny’s face was trying to find an expression of hardness but the expression floated somehow uneasily on his features, wouldn’t gell. Johnny had picked up his jacket and offered it to him. But Benny stepped off the platform and walked past him to face Matt O’Neill.

  ‘Wait a minute, Benny,’ Tank said and, spinning on his heel, hit Matt O’Neill on the jaw with a hand clenched into a club.

  Matt sprawled among a pile of stone chips as if he was going to drown in them. He surfaced and spat a couple of chips. Tank had turned to Benny.

  ‘Ah’m site foreman, Benny,’ he said. ‘It was ma instruction Matt ignored. So it’s ma responsibility. And it’s finished. Okay?’

  Benny nodded. Tank crossed and held out his open hand towards Matt. Matt hesitated only briefly, for the hand extended to him had a local legend on the end of it. He clasped his hand in Tank’s and Tank hauled him erect.

  ‘Better than losin’ yer job,’ Tank said and winked.

  ‘Aye, ye’ve had yer chips, Matt,’ somebody said.

  The laughter was a general amnesty. Tank brought Matt and Benny together to shake hands. Benny grimaced as they shook.

  ‘That bloody chain,’ he said.

  He showed the palm of his hand, bruised where the chain of the platform had gnashed on it.

  ‘Ah’m glad ye don’t shake with yer jaw,’ Matt said and rubbed his chin.

  The crisis shared and averted developed a temporary camaraderie among them, like a small war survived with no serious casualties. Six of them made a little parade to ‘The Market Bar’. Benny wasn’t a regular there. He drank in ‘The Akimbo Arms’. Usually he split off from the men and went there alone after his work. But tonight he felt himself part of them. He had been the centre of a small event and he innocently assumed that was what made them more than normally friendly towards him. It didn’t occur to him that it was because they had seen him momentarily divested of the tough image he wore like a suit of armour. The fear floating on his face as he stepped off the platform had allowed him into their company. Their jokes were the admission charge.

  ‘Bet that’s cured yer constipation, Benny,’ Johnny Rayburn said as they worked on their first pints.

  His bowels were one of the site topics, like the government.

  ‘You still as bad?’ Deke Dawson asked.

  ‘Ye kiddin’?’ Frank Climie said. ‘Ye could hire out Benny’s arse for nestin’. A bird could rear a brood up there between performances.’

  ‘It’s all the cheese sandwiches ye eat,’ Tank was suggesting.

  The pub became busy. As the banter flew around him seeming, under the transforming effect of four pints of heavy beer on his growling stomach, like exotically coloured birds in a noisy aviary, Benny had a visionary experience. He didn’t have them often. This one began in a slow, congealing realisation, a still point glowing in his mind like a steady light. He could have been killed. If Matt O’Neill’s hand had slipped, if the pulley had snapped under the sudden pressure, if the brake hadn’t held . . . he could have been killed.

  He looked at Matt O’Neill nodding to Deke Dawson and laughing into his pint, and Benny felt not anger or a desire for revenge but a strange shivering thrill which his body contained comfortably like an overcoat, an overcoat he was still wearing. He saw Matt not with malice but with something oddly like gratitude, saw those very banal features take on a significance beyond themselves, as if Matt were a messenger from a dark force. The message was the grandeur of ordinary life. The warmth of the pub, the middle-aged barmaid’s back bulging sensuously in two places beneath the strap of her brassiere, the uninhibited laughter of a man at the end of the bar, a whorl of smoke unravelling in air, the found gold that formed in a whisky-glass held to an optic, all were gifts of pleasure. They demanded a bigger expression of gratitude than he had been giving them. He needed a gesture.

  Then he saw it, a sign the expansiveness of his own mood had created. A man beside him had the Evening Times half-folded on the bar. The headline seemed to point at Benny: The Flying Scots. The photograph beneath it showed three men at Glasgow Airport smiling self-consciously for the camera. They were flying out to Saudi Arabia. The story talked about the strangeness of modern life where workers caught a plane instead of a tram to go to their work. There was a reference to their wives waiting with rolling-pins if their wages were short when they got back. It occurred to Benny sadly that he wouldn’t have had that problem. But the idea struck him like a revelation. The world was a small place. What need did he have to spend his life here? What reason did he have for staying? Time was running out. He didn’t want to waken up at sixty and regret what he hadn’t done. He was going to travel.

  Like a sudden convert to the generous possibilities of life, he bought another round of drinks and included the man with the Evening Times, despite his embarrassed protestations. He slapped Matt O’Neill mystifyingly on the shoulder, as if he had saved his life instead of almost ending it. He said, ‘Aye, Tank by name and Tank by nature’, so many times that Tank said, ‘Actually, ma name’s Harry’. He bought a carry-out of eight cans of export and had to be followed out of the pub by Johnny Rayburn because he had left them behind. Swinging the cans in their plastic bag as he walked, he brought his new dream up the road with him, singing ‘Scotland the Brave’ quietly to himself.

  The house was a place he didn’t like entering in the early evening. It wasn’t so bad late at night because he had usually taken enough beer by then to numb the pain. But this evening was all right. Painlessness had come early. The thought that this council house was too big for him didn’t settle its gloom around him as it normally did, didn’t echo with the ghosts of the children he had wanted as if it were a castle rented for a clan that hadn’t turned up, Mullen’s Folly. He went through and dropped his jacket on the double-bed without noticing particularly how empty it looked. He still moved among dead dreams but already it was as if he had found something that for the moment was a small, if ludicrous, compensation, a dream of his own, a miraculous by-blow, like an illegitimate grandchild where there had been no children.

  He still spent the evening almost entirely in the living-room, though. It was the room that was the nearest thing to home he had. It was where Noreen and he had always sat. Sometimes, when the loneliness was b
ad, he even slept here, buttoning up the heavy army-style coat Noreen had bought for him in Milletts’ Stores and dossing down in front of the coal fire both of them had agreed they would never change. On these occasions, the vague impulse in him was that by not sleeping alone in the bed he wasn’t endorsing the fact of her death, as if he had a say in it.

  Tonight he had first left the living-room to go into the kitchen and put on two pork chops and then had come back through and drunk three cans of export, talking loudly to himself as had become his habit, and waited till the smell of the chops announced that they were burnt. He had salvaged some charred pieces of meat and chewed them into threads which he washed down with more export.

  Having obeyed in his own way one of the several warnings that Noreen had handed down to him as her stoutness dematerialised relentlessly from leukaemia (‘See that you eat right’), he went on with the preferred part of his private communion, the drink. He chatted to the room like company. It was his favourite place for talking to himself, the only part of the house he felt furnished with his presence. The rest of it he couldn’t afford psychologically to maintain.

  ‘A close call right enough,’ he said. ‘It fairly makes ye think.’

  He thought of Noreen. There had been no early warning system for her. Once they knew what she had, they knew what would happen. No chance to rethink their lives, no time significantly to make the most of what was left. The nature of the illness had meant that they couldn’t. The best they had managed was the week in Morecambe after one of the treatments had given her a temporary boost. They had taken a room in a big hotel, at his insistence. He had wanted to take her everywhere, give her everything. But they had been like a one-legged man trying to dance. She had retained all her bantering warmth but instead of its enlarging him, as it had done before, he had shrivelled before it. He caught her looking at him secretly, looks that knew how lost he would be, and he had felt her receding from him and he was colder that week of hot weather than he had ever been before, like being slowly skinned. That week he had spent longer in the lavatory than at any other time. The men on the site might have found that funny. But he had needed a place to cry without being seen.