Walking Wounded

by William McIlvanney

  Harry provided the soil. Marion had found some photographs of him. She didn’t just show them to Eddie. She kept setting them in gilt-frames of anecdote, touching them up into icons. She was re-instating Harry in his shrine and doing penance before it for her unworthiness, as exemplified, presumably, by what they had done tonight.

  ‘Selective embalming,’ Eddie said.

  Marion’s smile became a wound.

  ‘Why do you say that? You don’t know what a good person he was.’

  ‘If that’s what bothers you, you can forget it. Because I knew him.’

  ‘You’re lying. How could you be so sure?’

  ‘Harry Bland. Worked for Maynard’s, didn’t he? I thought I knew the name. And the photos clinched it.’

  ‘You’re lying. You would’ve said before this.’

  ‘I don’t like desecrating shrines.’

  ‘You seem to manage.’

  ‘I didn’t know then that the deity was malign.’

  ‘Oh, you’re lying.’

  ‘Maynard’s. Area Supervisor. Right? I met him more than once. Conferences. Once in London with people I knew. Not official biographer status, right enough. But enough to get a perspective. I always remember he had the top of a finger missing. How’s that for a birthmark?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Marion gathered all the photographs and replaced them in the shoe-box. She put the lid on very carefully, nursing the box on her lap.

  ‘If you knew him at all,’ she said, ‘then you’ll understand how lousy I feel in comparison.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you didn’t know him.’

  ‘I know that he chased tail. With what amounted to dedication. Not too successfully but keenly.’

  ‘Get to hell out of my flat!’

  ‘I’m not dressed for a dramatic exit.’

  ‘Just leave! Get out!’

  ‘Oh, piss off,’ he said. ‘You’re like a sparrow thinks its being victimised by winter. Nobody’s after you. It’s just if you talk you’re liable to bump into the truth now and again. You better stop letting your thoughts run around in sentences. They’ll get knocked down. And if you insist on clinching with people, naturally you’ll burst your oxygen tent. And you’ll have to breathe real air.’

  ‘What you’re saying isn’t the truth.’

  ‘Of course, it is.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I heard people who knew him well say it. Without malice. And I saw him trying to operate a couple of times.’

  ‘With women?’

  ‘It was all boringly heterosexual.’

  ‘You’re a bastard!’

  ‘Accolades, accolades.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  They went on and Marion painstakingly outlined to Eddie just what an utterly pathetic object he was. He was, it seemed, a superannuated philanderer, a case of severely arrested development and someone who had – triumphant moment of finding the killing phrase – ‘acne of the eyes’. He infected whatever he looked at with his own disease.

  Eddie constructed a rococo verbal edifice in his defence. The way he lived was, apparently, the nature of the game. You had to lose a lot of conventional attitudes trying to find that occasional chord which put the jangle of coincidence in tune. Private lives were getting slightly passé, anyway. They had the television for a mirror. Pretty soon they would all be able to copulate by post. It was old-fashioned of him to want to confront his privacy in a full-length, wasting mirror every so often. He made himself sound slightly heroic.

  They went on, she in her dressing-gown and slippers, he in trousers and bare feet with his jacket over his naked body, his paunch protruding coyly. Coffee dregs congealed and were thawed out with fresh brewings. The cigarette-stubs sank in a sea of ash.

  Among the sound of the first starlings, she said, ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘About Harry. Damn you!’

  ‘As long as you don’t damn him. He didn’t ask to be canonised.’

  ‘I feel like not bothering to go on.’

  ‘No you don’t. You’ve only lost something you never had. Nothing to be done about that.’

  When it was fully light, he brought in the milk and made more coffee and toast. They breakfasted in silence. He dressed and came over to her. She stood up. They embraced and felt the earth move – not the world, just the rubbish they had heaped on that moment of disturbing love they had experienced together. The feeling was still alive. They looked at each other.

  ‘Are you going to phone?’ she asked.

  He winked.

  ‘Maybe from Mars.’

  She smiled.

  ‘I’ll be out.’

  He went back to the hotel and showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes. He saw two clients in the morning but his conversations with them were like transatlantic telephone calls. He was aware of a recurring gap between what they said and his assimilation of it. His eyes were sparking. He began to think that, functioning like this, he should be on commission from a rival firm.

  He was back in the hotel by 12.30. He lunched in a dining-room where two women whispered among the empty tables and through the window two old men played the nine-hole putting-green in anoraks. The way their caps, unresisted by any hair, fitted themselves to their heads saddened him. They tottered about the grass like a vision of the future. He saw his life relentless as a corridor. From now on there wouldn’t be many doors that opened off it.

  Upstairs, he stripped to shirt, trousers and socks and lay on the bed. He didn’t sleep. He regretted telling her about Harry. He didn’t regret telling her about Harry. He regretted the way he had told her about Harry. He could be a cruel bastard.

  He remembered Allison, his ex-wife – whom God preserve, but far from him – engaging in one of her scenes from the Theatre of the Absurd, during one of those dramatic quarrels that made Eugene O’Neill seem laconic. She had emerged from the bathroom to announce grandly that she had been trying to slit her wrists. He had made the mistake of rushing towards her to comfort her. A magnifying glass could have detected a red line across each wrist. His anger at himself for falling for yet another of her fakeries had made him bitter.

  ‘You won’t win any death-certificates with that,’ he had said.

  ‘You’d think it was funny if I was dying,’ she had said.

  ‘Considering the rate at which you’re losing blood, you can’t have more than twenty years. With a tourniquet you might stretch that to thirty. You should get an elastoplast. It’s not very dramatic to die of septic wrists.’

  He didn’t like himself for having said that. He didn’t like what he’d become. How long was it since he had thought of Margaret Sutton, who had loved him and who had killed herself? He was the one who as a teenager couldn’t watch anybody cry without finding tears in his own eyes. He felt some of that softness re-activate as he thought of Marion. He wanted to protect her. Perhaps he wanted her to protect him, too. He wanted his head examined.

  He thought of a joke card he had bought and put in the alcove in the sitting-room of his flat. It showed a tall, bare-breasted woman standing in the middle of a maze. A small, down-trodden man was standing outside the maze, looking at her and saying, ‘The last time I went into one of those it took me five years to get out.’ The small man had been lucky.

  My life is orderly, he told himself. So is a headstone, he told himself. You want to play that game again? he asked himself. You know another one that matters? he asked himself. At the moment Marion and he were two separate, contained confusions. Together, they could grow into a disaster. Neither of them needed that. But, beyond rationality, small images were budding in his memory, irrelevant as flowers. The softness of her upper arms. The way her head had found his neck before they parted.

  He got up and walked about the room. ‘No way,’ he said aloud. But
it was years since he had felt so alive. He became idiot with anonymity in the hotel room. He whistled and danced to himself in the mirror. He made pum-pum noises and snapped his fingers as he crossed the floor. He lay flat on the bed, reading the Tor Your Information’ leaflet. Then he laid it on his face and carefully tested how hard he had to blow to blow it off. He noticed how squat his feet were in his socks. He found one tendril of dark cobweb dangling from the ceiling and for minutes watched it wafting gently.

  ‘Chambermaid,’ he said loudly. ‘If your proficiency doesn’t improve, you will be beaten to death with a feather-duster.’ He laughed like the villain in a bad film.

  He got up and crossed to the phone and dialled. He hoped she would speak to him. Jane Thomas’s voice answered and, when he introduced himself, she was effusive in her welcome. It was presumably relief because Marion had explained that he wasn’t married with fourteen of a family. The omens were propitious.

  ‘Hullo,’ Marion said.

  ‘Hullo again,’ he said and was talking not just to her but to what was left of the young man he had been.

  18

  Holing out

  It was from the start a day of mild but persistent unease, nothing Bert Watson could pinpoint – a seediness in things, a kind of emotional dyspepsia. His favourite yellow golfing sweater was in the wash. The fat on the breakfast bacon wasn’t crisp. It curled away like rubber when he knifed it to the edge of his plate. Robert was already playing records in his room. It sounded as if it was the same record all the time, something with an amazingly repetitive, thudding beat, like a musical headache. Marie sat across the table from him still in her dressing-gown, reading the paper and saying ‘Ho!’ every so often. He was careful not to ask for elucidation.

  But these petty irritations weren’t really what the feeling was about. They simply allowed him to realise that the feeling was there, moving sluggishly but inexorably inside him. They were like the rash that denotes an allergy. It felt as if it was an allergy to his own life.

  He didn’t like this house, had never really liked it. It had been a bargain at the time. Everybody said so. But what you didn’t like couldn’t be a bargain. Looking through the window, he could see the path in the garden he had often walked back and forth on – dimensions of his cell, bridge of his compassless ship.

  He had wanted to write poetry. It seemed ridiculous at the moment. He was wearing a blue sweater and unhappy with his bacon. He felt his life was an accident that had happened to someone else. How could he ever have written poetry? He was the manager of a hosiery.

  But he suddenly remembered the experience of trying to write. There had been one about the idea of sainthood, a condemnation of it. All he could remember was the last line: ‘They’re welcome to their obscene innocence.’ He must have that poem somewhere. Lately, he had been dreaming of writing the one poem that would express his life. A dilettante’s dream, he thought.

  ‘Robert and Jennifer are both going to enter that essay competition.’ Marie said from behind her paper.

  ‘Scribbling rivalry,’ he said.

  Marie didn’t respond. He wondered when and why he had developed his tendency to make puns. Perhaps it was an attempt to subvert the banality of his life, suggest a fifth-column of alternative meaning behind the ordinariness. Perhaps that was why he had wanted to write poetry. He tried to remember other poems he had written but they all seemed so long ago, mental fossils in a folder somewhere in some drawer, and Walter tooted the horn outside, making his tired thoughts not so much scatter as hop indifferently out of range.

  Marie took his kiss like a corpse and the cheerio he shouted upstairs bounced back off a wall of music. Sunlight from the windscreen of Walter’s car dazzled him so that he stood on the path a moment in a spiral of darkness that slowly led him back out to the light. In the car he felt sustained by Walter’s identity. There was the cigar-smoke and Walter’s voice like seamless piped music filling the car. They would do it to them today and Maureen seemed to have four periods a month these days and who was that daft bastard in the Range Rover.

  Tom and Frank were waiting for them in the locker-room. While he changed slowly, pausing to pick some of the hardened dirt from the spikes of his golf-shoes, Walter and Tom talked business. He wondered whose business it was. It wasn’t his. They made jokes that he seemed to miss for they teased him about it, sympathising with Walter about having to partner him. When they clattered out for some putting practice, he sat a little longer in the locker-room. He felt tired. Irrelevantly, he felt envious that Frank was taking a course at the Open University.

  He played quite well. They halved the first two holes and Walter lost them the third by missing a two-foot putt. ‘No gimmes,’ Frank had said. At the fourth hole with Walter out of it, he chipped out of a bunker and holed out. They were all square. They called him Trevino for a couple of minutes.

  But the sky seemed somehow too big for him. Walking down the fairways, he felt himself dwindling. He felt exposed. He wondered what he was doing here. The game appeared a strange convention he had never understood. His drive off the fifth tee was long but sliced into the rough. A five iron took him close to the hole but still in the rough. Helping him to find the ball, Walter said, ‘You’ve got a good lie anyway’.

  For no reason he could understand, he thought of two people. He thought of Duncan MacFarlane, who had gone to Argentina five years ago in 1978 and had returned and looked after his mother until she died, and then had gone to America. He thought of a boy called Sammy Nelson who had applied for a job and had been so ridiculously bright that it would have been an embarrassment to offer him such menial work. It’s wrong, he thought. The whole thing’s wrong. We’re doing it wrong. The thought came to him simple and sheer, like an undeniable revelation. He held the vision of those two intense and honest and just faces in his mind and saw the enormity of the injustices ranged against them. He moved one hand helplessly in front of him, as if to bless them wherever they might be.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Walter shouted.

  He decided on an eight iron. As he stood beside the ball taking practice swings, he was feeling strange. The rhythm of his swing had a life of its own. There was a core of dark in the light of the day. He wanted to shout but it wasn’t what you did. In that moment he came to his double senses. All life was a game and you played by the rules, fair ways and foul, and your arms were just members of a club that they had joined. You stayed true to the lies where you found yourself, took the rough with the smooth, didn’t care a pin. But he seemed to happen in a strange slow motion, held the top of the arc for a second too long, felt his stance was wrong and a lack of balance as the blue of the sky broke his concentration, understood this wasn’t just a practice shot but a chip off the block of the one real thing. The ball he addressed was addressed to him – too late now to change direction. The bag was mixed and the game was rigged, the last hole what they put you in. But even as his heart – too early – broke, he followed through to the end, took one last stroke.

  19

  Deathwatch beetle

  Morrison woke, suddenly staring into the darkness as if it was the barrel of a gun. Since he had come to prison two months ago, he slept like a hen. He was awake and he was terrified. He was awake because there was a noise in the cell. He was terrified because he didn’t understand what the sound was. As he slowly deciphered the sound from the dark, he became much more terrified.

  Rafferty was exercising. Morrison lay in the darkness listening. He didn’t know what time it was but he estimated it to be the early hours of the morning. He was afraid to let it be known he was awake. He heard the steady, self-absorbed rhythm of Rafferty’s breathing undermining the stillness of the night. Like a deathwatch beetle, he thought. It was the relentless patience of it that was so frightening. It knew no purpose but itself. It was a compelled progress nothing could deflect. The breathing communicated confidentially with the darkness, a mad language no one else could understand. But Morrison, enforced stu
dent of Rafferty as he was, was making his hesitant translation.

  ‘I’m not stepping out of anybody’s way ever again,’ Rafferty had said. ‘As long as I live. It’s down to iron rations here. You find out who you are. That’s who I am. Some men get sentimental about the outside. Cling to it like a belief in the afterlife. I don’t do that. This is it. I wouldn’t let a wasp sting me without getting the bastard.’

  I’m a thief, Morrison repeated to himself like a prayer. I’m just a thief. I’ve never hurt anybody in my life. What am I doing among men like these? And Rafferty’s breathing surrounded him, achieved articulation in his mind like a response.

  ‘The nick’s not a suspension of life,’ Rafferty had said. ‘It’s a logical extension of it. The way the sewers are with plumbing. And the only way out is through. You have to find your own way through. I hate the way some people talk about the nick. You know? Like, paying your debt to society. Most of society’ve got no idea what they’re charging you. They think they’re removing you from society? They’re shoving you right up its arse. They’re showing you what society’s really like. Because the nick’s not a removal from society. It is society. Without the etiquette.’

  I can’t survive this, Morrison thought.

  ‘There’s men in here who breathe violently,’ Rafferty said. ‘They were probably putting the head on their mother’s womb. They look at a cutlery drawer and see an armoury. Take it easy, people say. Avoid trouble. Keep a low profile. There’s no low profiles in here. There’s people in here catch the sound of a pimple bursting. They can smell your fear before you know it’s there. So don’t let it be there.’

  It is, Morrison thought, it is.