Walking Wounded (4 page)

It wasn't a happy thought. But he decided that the seediness of his present, ironic in relation to his shimmering mirage of the future, was only temporary. His present was the frog. Come the kiss . . . But he didn't seek it promiscuously. The strength of his romanticism lay in not devaluing the dream. Only once in the three years or more they had been apart had he become seriously involved with a woman, wondered if at last this was the one.

Sally Galbraith worked in one of the offices he visited. She was in her thirties, divorced, with a daughter. She had luxuriant brown hair, gentle eyes and quite marvellous
breasts. But it was her smile that had brought her into sharp focus out of the crowd scene that was his thoughts about women. The smile was quite unlike most of the smiles that met him on his rounds – ‘do not disturb' signs hung on the mouth while, behind them, the eyes went on with private business. The smile was disturbingly genuine. It was attached to the eyes and seemed personal to him. He felt they were sharing something, an immediate rapport. It was as if he knew her already, but he managed not to say that.

‘You're new,' he said instead, and didn't feel it was much more dashingly original.

‘Am I? I don't feel as if I am.'

He liked that.

‘I would've remembered you.'

‘I've just started.'

‘Who do I call you?'

‘Sally.'

‘John.'

He had carried that conversation around with him all day and taken it back at night to his room in Gillisland Road and opened it up and made a meal of it, like a Chinese carry-out. It might have seemed dull on the outside but the secret ingredients were exactly to the taste of his loneliness, all piquant implication and succulent innuendo. Like a gastronome of small talk, he knew exactly what it was made of.

Incredibly enough, he had proved right. On each subsequent visit, the more he assumed the more his assumptions were welcomed. In a month he had asked her out to dinner. He took things slowly. He didn't want the route taken to mar the view he imagined of the arrival. Like someone learning as much as he can about the country to which he wants to emigrate, John studied Sally carefully at meals, on visits to the pictures, in pubs, on walks. He came to know the bleakness of her marriage, interchangeable with a lot of other people's, the fact that she hadn't been with a man in
a long time. He met her daughter, Christine, a nine-year-old with a disconcerting habit of talking to her mother as if he wasn't there. He became familiar with the house, a flat with a lot of hanging plants (Sally had done a night class in macramé). Meanwhile, Sally had been taking lessons in John's past.

The night they graduated to bodies seemed to happen by mutual agreement. They had been eating out and were sitting chatting at the end of a good meal when they touched hands and knew at once what both of them wanted for afters. The waiter suggested liqueurs but John settled the bill and they went straight to Sally's flat. The baby-sitter was watching a serial. They had a drink and began to regret their patience in moving towards this moment. John wondered if it was an omnibus edition of the serial. As the baby-sitter was eventually leaving, Christine got out of bed to discuss what she would have to take to school the next day for P.E. There was some doubt, apparently, about whether they would be in the gymnasium or outside.

When Christine went back to her room and while they waited to make sure she was asleep, they kissed and touched each other in delicious preparation. Sally's body was such an exciting place for his hands to wander in and her mouth felt so capable of swallowing his tongue that John was glad of the drinks he had had. He thought they would slow down his reactions nicely. It had been some time now since he had made love and he didn't want to be finished before they had started.

Sally broke away from him and went through to check on Christine. Coming back, she stood in the doorway with her mouth slightly open. She nodded.

‘She sleeps through anything,' Sally said. John came across to her and they led each other clumsily through to the bedroom.

The room was a fully furnished annexe of John's dreams. The lighting was from one heavily shaded lamp and it
seeped a soft, blueish glow into the room. ‘The Blue Grotto', John's mind offered from somewhere, like homage. In the light the yellow walls seemed insubstantial. The bed, with the duvet pulled back, was fawn and inviting.

As they undressed, Sally said, ‘I'm sorry about the Wendy House'.

In his feverish preoccupation, John couldn't understand what she meant. He thought at first that it might be a code expression. He wondered bizarrely if she was euphemistically telling him that her period was here. Then he lost his balance slightly taking off a sock and, turning as he steadied himself, he saw the cardboard structure against the wall. Sally was talking about a real Wendy House.

‘There's nowhere else to put it,' she said. ‘If we put it in Christine's bedroom, it fills the room.'

He didn't mind. It was certainly incongruous here, as if a
femme fatale
were discovered playing with her dolls. But in a way it added to the moment, he convinced himself – like making love in a fairy story. He was naked. Sally was naked. The beauty of her breasts owed nothing to the brassiere manufacturers. He approached and touched them, awestruck, as if he had found the holy grail twice. They embraced and fell in luxurious slow motion on to the bed, Sally on top. A part of his mind, like an accountant at an orgy, carefully recorded that she must have had the electric blanket on for some time. It was like making love in hot sand.

Everything went right. In the arrogance of his formidable erection, John knew that he was the scriptwriter for this scene. They passed through their initial clumsiness into a sweet harmony of movements, hands, mouths, legs moving as if they were part of the same being. When he went into her, she smiled with her mouth wide open and said, ‘Oh yes, yes, yes'. He was above her now and they were moving towards a meeting he knew he could arrange to the moment.

Then there was a hammering at the outside door, rather as if a yeti were paying a call. With a hand on either side
of her head, John paused and looked down at her and shook his head masterfully. He was renewing his purpose when the hammering came again and he heard the letter-box being lifted.

‘Sally!'

It sounded as if a Friesian bull had been taking a language course.

‘Sally! Ah know ye're in there!'

The expression on Sally's face was like an ice-pack applied to John's scrotum. It was the kind of look the heroine gives in a horror film when she knows the monster has her trapped.

‘Oh shite!' Sally said.

‘Sally! Open this door! If ye don't want it landin' in the middle of yer loabby.'

‘Ignore him,' John suggested unconvincingly.

‘I can't, I can't,' Sally said.

John could see her point. It would have been like trying to ignore a hurricane as it blew you away. They had pulled apart from each other now and his penis, treacherous comrade, was already going into hiding. No fun, no me, it seemed to be saying. Suddenly, the atmosphere was that of an air-raid. They stared at each other, paralysed. When they spoke, they found they were whispering.

‘Who
is
he?' John mouthed, as if they had time for biographical notes.

‘Sally!'

‘Alec Manson. He's stone mad.'

The news didn't encourage John in the plan he had been vaguely forming – to pull on his trousers and go to the door. It occurred to him that if Alec Manson happened to be shouting through the letter-box at the time John would probably be blown back along the hall. His nakedness felt
very
naked.

‘What does he
do
!' John whispered, not sure himself why he was asking. Was he thinking of pulling rank?

‘He's a bouncer in “The Barley Bree Bar”.'

John's eyes disappeared briefly under his eyelids. It was roughly equivalent to being told that Alec Manson charged a pack of dingoes protection money. John had only been in ‘The Barley Bree' twice in his life and he tended to talk of the occasions the way an explorer might talk about the Amazon Basin. It was regarded as being the roughest pub in Graithnock and that made it very rough. ‘If you don't have ten previous convictions, ye're barred,' someone had once told him. But, he told himself, a man's got to offer to do what a man's terrified to do.

‘You want me to see about this?' he quavered quietly.

‘Ah can see a light in there!' the voice was announcing to the immediate neighbourhood. ‘There's somebody in there.'

‘Oh my God, no!'

The panic the thought had engendered in Sally would have been unflattering in another situation. Here, with the guardian of ‘The Barley Bree' sending his voice along the hall like a flame-thrower, it seemed no more than a perfectly reasonable response, confirmation of the obvious.

‘Right! We can do it the easy way or the hard way! With a handle or without a handle! Ah'm countin tae ten! One!'

It wasn't the kind of accomplishment you would have expected a voice like that to have but they couldn't just wait there and see if he got stuck at seven. They scrabbled from the bed, moving in quite a few directions at once. The room became a flurry of movement without progress, as if they were caught in a film being run backwards and forwards at the wrong speed.

Sally ran naked to the bedroom door and then ran back. John bent down and put on a sock.

‘Two!'

Sally plumped one pillow, dented the other. Some desperate plan seemed to be forming in her mind.

‘Three!'

As John bent down to pick up his clothes, Sally shoved
them under the bed with her foot on her way to pick up the Laura Ashley nightdress that was draped across a wickerwork chair.

‘Four!'

‘Hey!' John hissed. Sally's head, emerging from the neck of the nightdress was shaking vigorously as she stared, wild-eyed, at John. ‘No time!' she screamed silently.

‘Five!'

Sally smoothed down her nightdress, made a couple of meaningless passes at the duvet. She turned to see John whirling in the middle of the floor, as if he had chosen this moment to practise miming a dervish.

‘Six!'

Sally pointed at the Wendy House, pushed John towards it. He looked at her. She opened the cardboard door and jabbed her finger ferociously at the interior several times. He couldn't believe it.

‘Seven!'

He believed it. He crouched inside while Sally closed the door on him. He heard her sprint across the bedroom and then, at the door, begin to walk along the hall.

‘Alec?'

Her voice sounded so sleepy. The other voice had started to say ‘eight' and trailed off. To John, huddled in his Wendy House, the blue tinge of the light had taken on a sinister quality, moonscape, jowls of the dead.

‘Alec? Is that you, Alec?'

John could hear the yawn in her voice from where he was. Listening to that expertly feigned sleepiness induced in him an agony of ambivalence. (The door was being opened. Godzilla comes.) He couldn't believe that his Sally of the gentle eyes and honest smile could be such an actress. There were questions he had to think over, though not now. The other part of the feeling was the fervent hope that she really was as good an actress as she sounded. A lot depended on her performance.

‘It took you long enough.'

‘I was sleeping, Alec. Here, let me help you.'

Alec's feet were thudding all over the hall and there were noises that might have been several bodies hitting off the walls. He sounded like a drunken regiment. An alarming proximity of heavy breathing made John think they had reached the bedroom door. It might have been John's imagination but he had a suspicion of the presence of foetid breath, as of a carnivore exhaling close at hand.

‘You've had somebody in here!'

John was suddenly aware of the fragility of Wendy Houses. A tunnel would have been handy.

‘That's right. Four men.'

John didn't see the joke. Pacify, pacify, he was thinking.

‘You've had somebody in here!'

‘I was sleeping!'

‘Maybe. Ah'm goin' to check.'

There was an amazing amount of noise, which was apparently Alec going through to the living-room. Whatever previous convictions had qualified Alec for admission to ‘The Barley Bree', burglary wasn't one of them. He made a small riot of coming back towards the bedroom. Sally was still insisting on helping him. John wondered how you did that. It must have been like guiding a stampede.

‘That's you now,' she was saying. ‘There we are. Satisfied now?'

‘Okay, love. Ah know ye're tellin' the truth. When Ah saw that the telly was off.'

John was relieved that Alec's deductive powers weren't in proportion to his imagined bulk. John was holding himself well back from the cut-out windows of the Wendy House. Christine or Sally had stuck cellophane across them and John decided now that the light was like trying to see underwater – the mysteries of the deep. He was aware of Sally's white nightdress with red flowers eddying
uncertainly around the room. A huge dark shape swayed beside her.

‘Ah haven't seen you for a fortnight,' Alec growled gently.

‘You're seeing me now. Come on, lie down. You look whacked.'

‘A fortnight,' Alec said.

‘You need some rest.'

‘A fortnight.'

Once Alec got hold of an idea, he didn't give it up easily. He wasn't moving. The thought that he hadn't seen Sally for a fortnight appeared to have transfixed him, like some great revelation not vouchsafed to many.

‘A fortnight.'

‘A fortnight, Alec.'

Something was biting into John's unstockinged foot savagely. The pain was becoming unbearable but he was afraid to move. He was also terrified that if he changed the position of his other leg the knee would crack. He could be the first recorded case of a stiff knee proving fatal. Alec spoke an eerie echo of John's thought.