Walking Wounded (9 page)

‘Ah'm just thinkin',' Gus said.

‘What's that?' Benny said.

‘Ah got the name wrong,' Gus said.

‘How's that?' Benny said.

‘Spartacus. Know what he did, Benny? He led a rebellion that brought Rome to its knees. Then when he had the city at his mercy, he turned back and went to Sicily. His home, like. They killed him there. It was the wrong name.'

‘We could always change the name. We would have tae, after that last carry-on.'

‘And maybe if Fin didn't come with us to the track.'

They both nodded. They had all finished eating the cheese sandwiches Benny had brought with him and finished drinking Gus's flask-tea. Gus and Benny were lying in bright sunshine in the hilly part of a field while below them Fin was playing with Spartacus, the homing greyhound. In the happy plenitude of such moments a burp can taste of profundity and maybe mayflies hallucinate eternity.

9

Sentences

T
he way the grey-haired man came into the room, its location might have been Mars and not Edinburgh. He waited just inside the door for several moments, using the area like a decompression chamber. He was looking round uncertainly. All there was to see was an old Victorian bar, reflective with wood, and a few customers scattered round it. There were two people behind the oval counter, a young man and an older woman. The young man had a face so smug he could have been feeling sorry for the rest of the world that it wasn't him. The older woman was looking at the young man as if she might be agreeing with him. They were chatting.

The grey-haired man moved. He walked with a diffidence that belied his appearance. He looked vaguely military. He wore a beautifully laundered blue-checked shirt, a tie that could have been knotted by computer and a navy cashmere sweater. His fawn trousers had a crease that suggested he had never sat down in them. The brown brogues were highly polished. He had a carefully-clipped moustache and his hair was neatly cut. He carried in his left hand what looked like a large black envelope. It was a fine plastic raincoat, folded and held in a perspex pouch. It was a day of particular heat, of cloudless sky.

The grey-haired man walked tentatively round the entire oval of the bar. His glances indicated that he was looking
for someone. They were glances too quick to be registering much, furtive as a camera shutter. They were a means not of seeing who was there, merely who wasn't. The young man was following the walk round the bar with his eyes without stopping talking. The grey-haired man came back to the point inside the door where he had been and he hesitated again. He was deciding something.

He crossed to the bar. He waited. The young barman must have stopped watching the grey-haired man, for he made no move. The grey-haired man waited. The woman behind the bar looked up at him. As she made to move, the barman put his hand on her arm without looking round. He winked at her and finished what he was saying and turned slowly and walked along the bar.

‘Thought you were just sight-seeing,' he said.

The grey-haired man laughed. The barman didn't.

‘A gin and tonic,' the grey-haired man said. The barman was turning away. ‘And –'

The barman turned back towards him.

‘And a vodka and lemonade. Both with ice.'

The barman made a performance of looking to see if there were someone behind the grey-haired man.

‘Sorry?'

‘A gin and tonic and a vodka and lemonade. Both with ice.'

The barman shrugged. While he mixed the drinks, the grey-haired man looked at his watch. When the drinks came, the grey-haired man paid and lifted the glasses and paused again. There was no seating at the bar but there were tables positioned away from the counter. Most of them were empty. The grey-haired man chose the table nearest the door. He sat down and set aside the vodka and lemonade and began to sip the gin and tonic.

Two girls came in, their accents announcing them as American as the door opened. They looked about twenty, one wearing jeans and a tee-shirt, the other a shirt and a
long wrap-around skirt. Their eager exchange seemed to consist mainly of names like Degas and Renoir and Pissarro. They hit the muted atmosphere of the bar like a carnival in a graveyard. They had marvellously vivid and open faces, as if the light from the Statue of Liberty were illuminating them from within. The barman was waiting for them at the counter by the time they arrived.

‘Yes, ladies. What can we do you for?'

‘Two beers, please,' the blonde one said. She smiled absently and her mouth appeared to have enough large and perfect teeth to provide an extra set for someone else.

‘Beers?' the barman said archly.

The girls noticed him.

‘Beers? For ladies of your obvious sophistication?'

‘We're slumming today,' the dark-haired one said. ‘You got lager?'

‘Indeed we have. I take it you mean halves?'

‘Yeah. Glasses of beer,' the dark-haired one said.

While he was getting the drinks, the barman continued to talk to them, asking what they had seen and where they had come from. Twice he said, ‘Yeah.' The girls made polite responses without seriously interrupting their conversation. Still preoccupied with painters, they sat down on the nearest available seats, which happened to be at the same table as the grey-haired man. ‘Hi,' the blonde girl said to him and they went on talking to each other.

A smile had occurred like a spasm on the grey-haired man's face when the blonde girl spoke to him. The spasm became a general nervousness. His eyes were unable to find a place where they could comfortably rest. He fidgeted a lot.

Suddenly he stood up, lifting both glasses and, awkwardly, his plastic raincoat. He crossed quickly and sat down at another table. The dark-haired girl glanced across at him and made a face of incomprehension to her friend. The table the grey-haired man had chosen was beside
another long table with two men there, one at each end of it. The grey-haired man made as if to get up again and then subsided.

Neither of the two men acknowledged the grey-haired man's sudden shift of position. They were obviously not together. One of them was reading a book. He had a pint on the table in front of him. The other man was turning a beer-mat ruminatively in his fingers. He looked like someone trying to commit its texture to memory. His glass of whisky and water shone in one spear of moted sunlight from the window behind him, like a holy object in a Hollywood film.

The grey-haired man looked at his watch again. His gin and tonic was more than half-full but he gulped it down, the unmelted ice rattling against his teeth. He rose and crossed to the bar surprisingly quickly. The barman and the woman were busy talking and the grey-haired man moved round the counter until he was in the barman's line of vision. He held up his glass.

‘Same again?' the barman said.

‘Yes, please,' the grey-haired man said.

He was watching the door. When the barman brought him a gin and tonic and a vodka and lemonade, the grey-haired man pulled back his hand, which was holding a pound note.

‘Oh,' he said.

‘What?' the barman said.

‘Sorry. Nothing.'

The grey-haired man took more money from his pocket and paid for the drinks and brought them back to his table. He sat looking at the two vodkas with lemonade and the gin and tonic. He took the first vodka and lemonade he had bought and started to drink it. He didn't seem to be enjoying it but in three swallows it was finished. He got up and put the glass on the bar beside the woman. He put the glass down noisily, so that the woman turned round and saw it and started to wash it. He came and sat down and arranged
the two remaining glasses on the table in front of him. He did it with the deliberation of someone dressing a window, putting his head to the side to look at it.

A woman came into the bar. She was already past middle age but still attractive. Her body was slightly heavy without being unshapely. Her face had a confidence that gave it an unsagging definition. The grey-haired man was already making to get up and waving to her but she had seen him at once and came towards his table.

‘Agnes!' he called unnecessarily.

‘I thought you'd wait outside,' she said.

‘I didn't know how much longer you would be.'

‘What difference does that make?'

‘I've only just come in.'

‘I hope you haven't been drinking.'

The grey-haired man indicated the two full glasses on his table.

‘I was waiting for
you
,' he said.

He stood up to pull out a chair for her. She glanced at the two men at the next table.

‘Not here,' she said. ‘Bring the drinks.'

She walked to a table that was well away from anyone else and sat down. The grey-haired man followed her with the drinks, his plastic raincoat held clumsily under one arm.

The man with the book looked up. He stared at the back of the grey-haired man as he went away careful not to spill any of the drink. The man with the beer-mat was watching too. They turned towards each other.

The man with the book exhaled incredulity.

‘I wonder how long he's been putting up with that?'

The man with the beer-mat shook his head.

‘You would hope not long,' he said. ‘But maybe that stuff's very ageing. Maybe he's only twenty-five.'

They smiled at each other and withdrew into their separate camps of disbelief. They didn't know that thirty-two
years, five months and nine days previously the grey-haired man had been found by his wife in the living-room of their house with his hand up the dress of the woman from next door and had received no remission of sentence for good conduct.

10

Getting along

M
argaret and John Hislop had one of those marriages where there wasn't room to swing an ego. All was mutual justice and consideration and fairness. He only golfed between the hours of two and six on a Sunday because that was when she visited her mother. Her night-class was always on a Tuesday, regardless of what was available then, for that was when he worked late. Both watched television programmes which were neither's favourite. They didn't have arguments, they had discussions. It was a marriage made by a committee and each day passed like a stifled yawn. It was as if the family crypt had been ordered early and they were living in it.

Then she saw him where he wasn't supposed to be and he had another woman with him and the marriage ended. It did not end immediately. They had half-hearted discussions when she seemed to be looking at him through her fingers. Something was dead in her. They expended a lot of breath but it was like trying to give the kiss of life to a corpse. He went to the other woman, who seemed to her unattractively brash (Margaret had demanded a meeting) and, what was most hurtful to her, older.

The settlement was fine. She was able to buy a nice apartment and she had the furniture. She still had her job and she had money in the bank. She went out occasionally with other men for a while.

But she could not forgive them. She could not forgive the world and the world did not mind. It passed her window indifferently in sports cars and couples with prams and buses full of preoccupied faces.

The apartment became the only significant terrain of her life. She had rubber plants and tiger plants and potted flowers. She took up painting by numbers. She read a lot, mainly improbable romances. She prepared for years of working around her house like a woman patiently sitting down to sew her own shroud.

11

Mick's day

I
t is Tuesday, not that it matters. The calendar is what other people follow, like an observance Mick Haggerty used to practise but has lost faith in. For Mick, most days come anonymous, without distinguishing features of purpose or appointment.

In any week only one time has constant individuality: Monday when he goes to the Post Office to collect the money on his Social Security book. It is the only money he is ever guaranteed to have. Sometimes in the pub, mainly on a Friday or a Saturday, an evening will enlarge into almost a kind of party, an echo of the times when he was earning. (Earlier this year, a local man home from Toronto, remembering Mick's generosity when he was working, and aware of how things are with him now, slipped him a tenner.) But there is no way to foretell these times. For the most part, the names of the days are irrelevant.

But this is Tuesday. He wakens and reckons the morning is fairly well on. Sleeping late is one way to postpone having to confront the day. Doing that means going to bed late so that he won't surface too early. This is not a room he likes to lie awake in. Its bleakness works on the mind like a battery for recharging your depression.

The permanently drawn curtains are admitting enough daylight to light the room. The wallpaper beside his bed shows the familiar patches of pink below the peeled sections
of floral, landmarks for his consciousness. The floor is bare boards with one small piece of carpet on them. Besides the bed, the furniture is two chairs. One of them is a battered easy chair for holding his clothes. The other is a wickerwork chair on which the ashtray sits, with a week of ash and cigarette-stubs in it.

He has no cigarettes but that isn't important. He has developed an intermittent style of smoking. He occasionally buys a ten-pack of Benson and Hedges and usually only smokes if he is having a drink and sometimes not even then. When he is offered a cigarette, he tends to alternate one acceptance with several refusals, perhaps maintaining his hold on a habit he can't well afford or perhaps measuring the charity he'll accept.

He gets up and dresses. He had thought of changing his shirt but the only clean one he has left is a green shirt someone gave him and his Protestant origins in Feeney near Londonderry make him sometimes a little reluctant to put it on.

He goes through to the living-room where the only timepiece in the house, an old alarm clock, lies face-down on the mantelpiece. If you don't keep it lying face-down, it stops ticking. It is ten past ten. He looks into the other bedroom to check that Old Freddie is all right.

Old Freddie mutters vaguely in acknowledgement of his presence. Freddie is in his early seventies and he has had a rough night. He usually does on a Monday, for that is when Mick pays him his £8 rent from the Social Security money. Freddie can't handle the drink the way he used to. The operation that gave him a bag where his bladder should be can't be helping.

Mick comes back through to the living-room. Its furniture echoes the kind of furniture in the bedroom: bare floorboards with a few pieces of carpet, a battered sideboard and three beat-up chairs and a raddled settee. There is an old wireless. They had a second-hand television but it went on the blink.

They have lived in this house for a year now. Mick doesn't like it as much as the first house. He has had digs with Old Freddie for twelve years, ever since Mick's marriage broke up after sixteen years. ‘It just didn't work,' Mick says. At least there were no children who would suffer. For about a year after that he lived in a Model Lodging House, long since demolished. Then Freddie offered him digs. For a time in the other house Freddie's sister lived with them. She was separated from her husband, a miner who had gone to Nottingham to look for work. Even after she rejoined her husband, the house seemed to retain a little of her touch. Mick feels that a house where there isn't a woman never gets to feel quite right.

He goes through to the kitchen. He and Freddie buy their food separately, keep it in separate cupboards. They find that is the best way to try and make the money last. But if either of them runs short of food, it is an agreement that he can share the other's. Mick makes himself two fried eggs, a slice of bread and butter and a cup of tea.

When he has eaten, he goes to the lavatory. He washes himself in cold water. He comes through to the living-room, puts on his jacket and collects his library books. He may go to the public library two or three times a week. Before leaving the house, he looks in on Old Freddie again.

Outside, it is cold but not raining. One of the bleakest urban prospects you will see is a run-down council housing-scheme. All such architecture ever has to commend it is freshness. When that goes, there is not the residual shabby impressiveness of Victorian buildings, like an old actor rather grandly down on his luck. There is only grey roughcast stained with weather, overgrown gardens, a flotsam of rubbish left when the tide of respectability receded.

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.