Walking Wounded

by William McIlvanney

  He reached the pub just after six. Pauline was due in at quarter past. He wasn’t seeing her for long. She was baby-sitting tonight from seven o’clock onwards. He could have gone with her but she was taking her young sister along and being with Pauline and Denise together was for Sammy like having an erection with a padlock on it. The more excited you got, the more painful it felt. Otherwise, baby-sitting would have been a good idea.

  Sammy and Pauline had made a kind of love already but it hadn’t felt like anything Sammy had read about. Sammy blamed the fact that they had only done it outdoors. Once had been in the shadows at the back of a tenement and an old woman came out to put out the rubbish and seemed to forget what she had come for. While she hovered around as if she couldn’t remember her way back home, Sammy and Pauline had stood frozen. Sammy had stared embarrassedly at the wall, as if he had accidentally left something inside Pauline and he didn’t know how to ask for it back. Luckily, the old woman’s eyesight hadn’t been good. But that was no way to discover the mind-blowing effects of passion. They must find a bed, Sammy had decided.

  In a bed, you could take your time, explore each other. You wouldn’t have to keep turning your head, like a light-house to see where the danger was. You could take as long as you liked and, when it was over, you could talk or smoke and maybe even do it again. That should be possible. Danny McLintock had bragged about doing it ten times in the one night. Sammy knew that was ridiculous. But twice should be possible. But they would need a bed. Baby-sitting would give them one.

  He bought a half-pint of lager. He didn’t drink much since the time he had taken the nine pints of lager and two vodkas and tried to climb the oldest church in the town. He had sprained his ankle and had had to hide in the graveyard when two policemen arrived. The carved, chipped name, ‘John Inglis’, had stared out at him like a warning. It was the same with pot. He had tried it three times. Once he couldn’t stop giggling. Twice he was sick. He had wanted to try it after reading The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. But the only door it had ever shown him was the lavatory door. Sammy decided he knew what was wrong. His mind was still too volatile. Introduce much alcohol or drugs and it went into outer space. He would try again when he was older.

  This wasn’t like an ordinary pub. It was more like a bistro which, Sammy slowly realised as he sat in it, was in Paris, quite close to ‘Les Deux Magots’. Sammy knew a lot about Paris. Some day he hoped to go there. An elderly man and woman sat at a table in a corner, saying nothing to each other. They were brooding on the nature of age and going over Yeats’s Byzantium in their minds. Two tousled young men were talking out of earshot. Sammy doubted if they would ever resolve the question of free choice in a society founded upon economic inequality but he admired the intensity of their commitment. Sammy sipped his lager slowly and thoughtfully but Albert Camus, probably Sammy’s all-time favourite intelligence, didn’t come in. If he had, Sammy was ready to discuss with him The Rebel, the book which, more than any other, had taken possession of his mind.

  But Pauline came in. They talked about various things but Pauline had no way of avoiding taking Denise with her when she was baby-sitting. Sammy was intrigued by how changeable Pauline’s face was. She had come in looking a little like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and by the time they parted she was reminding him of Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters.

  Sammy walked. Sammy liked walking. In some ways he loved this old grotty town. Dingy though it was, especially in the rain and it rained often enough, it wound itself round your bones. It was the people, Sammy decided. He liked the people. Take his parents. It was easy to love his mother. She was kind far beyond any kindness life showed her in return. But even his father he found no difficulty in loving, his father who sometimes appeared to have taken a degree in grumpiness. There was a defiant, last-hopeless-stand quality to his father that Sammy appreciated, a trapped animal pretending it isn’t afraid. His father was all right.

  Most of the people around him were. It was the circumstances of their lives that Sammy rebelled against, the greyness, the lack of horizons, the acceptance of whatever was given. Walking through the dull streets, Sammy became for ten minutes a revolutionary. El Nelsono would lead his people to freedom. Posters would appear everywhere: forty million pesetas for the head of Nelsono. But no one would betray him. Viva Nelsono!

  The vision dispersed, leaving the houses with the lights in the rooms where people were watching television and waiting for whatever would happen to come to them. Sammy liked people too much to be a revolutionary. He wasn’t a revolutionary, he was a poet.

  He was a poet, transforming life into bright colours wherever he touched it. He walked the streets for more than an hour-and-a-half, being a poet. The rain helped. As he gazed at the lighted windows, dramatic clusters of words formed in his mind, dissolving almost as soon as they had shaped themselves.

  The window is a picture-frame

  Where horror sits without a name.

  You only say what you have said.

  The child is weeping and you smile.

  The corpse is laid out on your bed.

  The ruin goes for mile on mile.

  Here from dishevelled vagrancy,

  The bloodshot words and unkempt deeds,

  The white nights and black mornings,

  The wanderings through folds of skin,

  This endless storm I’m houseless in,

  I see you and shout warnings.

  The book is blank, the picture’s fake,

  The worm is in the wedding cake,

  The teapot mashes arsenic.

  There was more but nobody heard him and it was exhausting being a poet and Sammy went home. His mother wasn’t in. It was her night for going to the Labour Club with Mrs Carlin. His father had succumbed to the effect of coming off the nightshift. He was asleep on the couch with the television on. Three empty lager cans lay on the floor beside him.

  It occurred to Sammy that his parents wouldn’t expect to hear the result of his interview for a week or two. They knew there would be a lot of people in for the job. All they would do at this stage would be to ask Sammy how the interview had gone, his mother anxious, his father quizzing him like a policeman, wondering what social crime he had committed this time. That gave Sammy a problem. Should he let them enjoy for a week or so the possibility at last of his being something other than a misfit? Or would that be more cruel than just telling them outright that he wasn’t being considered for the job? He would decide in the morning.

  He was tired. Other people might have felt it was a quiet day but, as far as he was concerned, quite a lot had happened. He hung his jacket over a chair and sat looking at the television his father had left on. The Prime Minister was talking to an interviewer, or rather she was bouncing long monologues off an interviewer who was bland enough to stand in for a wall. Sammy didn’t like her.

  ‘Of course, we must realise,’ the Prime Minister was saying, as if the nation were a kindergarten school. ‘We must realise that the world doesn’t owe us a living. We must work for it.’ Maybe she had been listening to Sammy’s guru. ‘Each person must take responsibility for his or her own life. It is the achievement of this government to create the climate where that is possible. Our record is second to none in that respect.’

  ‘Crap!’ Sammy said to the television.

  The Prime Minister faltered. Her eyes looked shiftily at Sammy and she paused.

  ‘Of course,’ she resumed, ‘this is a lot of nonsense and I might as well tell you the truth. The achievements I’ve been boasting of don’t really exist. What my government has really done is try to dismantle generations of progress in our society. We have created mass unemployment. We have made the rich richer and the poor poorer. We have created a divided nation. We have made the old miserable and the young hopeless. Our record is utterly abominable and if you had any sense you wouldn’t vote for us again.’

  Sammy nodded and crossed and turned the television off. His father was still asleep on the
couch.

  ‘Papa,’ Sammy said to him. ‘I’ve decided not to accept my inheritance. No, no. I must insist. I know my behaviour must seem devilish impractical to you. But I have made my decision. I shall be a modern knight errant. I know it’s dangerous. But what the devil. With the trusty lance of my imagination, I shall challenge the dragons of our time. Pray for me, Papa. Pray that I don’t fall victim to any of the monsters of boredom or indifference or acceptance of pomposity or belief in lies.’

  Sammy’s father turned over on the couch and started to snore in a different key.

  ‘I’ll leave you now,’ Sammy said. ‘I fear my decision has rendered you speechless. There is a sadness in this farewell. For who knows who I shall be tomorrow? Who knows who we shall all be? Eh, Papa? Goodbye then. And try to remember. You’re not really losing a son. You’re gaining a new world.’

  Sammy’s father hadn’t stirred. He didn’t stir when Sammy went out and went upstairs. It was almost forty minutes before he coughed and snuffled himself awake. He had a mouth like a badger’s bum. Life tasted rancid.

  He swung his stockinged feet on to the floor and stared at nothing. One thought floated to the surface of his mind like a dead fish belly-up. Mary wasn’t in yet. He might as well wait for her in bed. He went through to the kitchen and put the empty lager cans in the bin. As he came upstairs, he noticed the light on in Sammy’s room. He looked in to warn Sammy yet again about the damage to your eyes that was caused by reading.

  But Sammy was asleep. He lay with a paperback book open on his chest and around him the room was like a bunker fortified with books and records and prints and posters.

  He was dreaming.