Walking Wounded (15 page)

‘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

I
t 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

M
orrison 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 student 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.

‘It's what you come out
as
that counts,' Rafferty said. ‘Men get raped in here. You know the one they call Rhoda? Queer as a three-legged budgie. They use him like a roller-towel. Me, I want to be so honed. Anybody tries to take me, be like grabbing an open razor.'

Morrison remembered Rafferty today in the visiting room. The woman who must be his wife had been crying. Rafferty had sat for more than twenty minutes without moving. Everybody had started to notice. Rafferty had a silence that could fill a room. In their cell Rafferty had
said simply, ‘She's leaving me.' Morrison had muttered something about maybe she wouldn't.

‘It's all in the black box,' Rafferty said.

It was only now, his mind sharpened by fear, that Morrison understood what he meant. The black box was the part that survived the aircraft crash intact. It was the machine that went to the extremities of experience and came back with the answer to what had happened. On the basis of its findings, understanding could be achieved and blame apportioned. And action taken.

Morrison panicked. The sound of Rafferty's breathing was looking for someone, burrowing unstoppably towards a destination. Would it be him? He felt the injustice of his position, as he felt the injustice of Rafferty's. Why was it like this? He wanted to scream. He sensed the sound of Rafferty's breathing pushing out endlessly into the night. Then Rafferty stopped. There was a shuffling noise. Morrison knew that he had started doing press-ups. He was counting. ‘One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . .' His voice was quiet.

Morrison in his dread imagined the count being taken up all over the country by men in dark places that weren't as dark as their hearts, the legions of the dispossessed, the terminally disenchanted, the keepers of accounts their society refused to honour.

‘Twenty-two . . . twenty-three . . . twenty-four . . . twenty-five . . .'

I hope they get you, Morrison was saying to himself like a placative prayer that would fend off Rafferty. I hope they get you. I didn't cause this mess. I'm just a thief, an incompetent thief. It's you they're after, you in your big houses and your fancy cars, the ones who've forgotten to care, the ones who think that poverty is a personal choice and that exploitation is a birthright and that pain is a weakness. It's you they're after. He bit his finger to stop from shouting and cringed from Rafferty's voice which
sounded to him like some strange talking calendar or the countdown to some terrible event.

‘Eighty-five,' Rafferty said. ‘Eighty-six . . . eighty-seven . . . eighty-eight . . . eighty-nine . . .'

20

Dreaming

H
e was dreaming.

‘Sammy! Sammy!'

He woke to the awareness first of the comfort of his room, the protective stacks of paperback books and the colourful posters on the wall and then, beyond the window, the sky looking as if it had been quarried from grey slate. He wasn't who he had been dreaming he was. He was Sammy Nelson.

‘Sammy!'

‘Okay.'

‘Time you were up. You've got that interview.'

‘What time is it? That's in the afternoon.'

‘Doesn't matter. It's the early bird that catches the worm.'

‘Don't like worms.'

And then his father's voice: ‘That's enough o' that. You're not too big to hit.'

‘Ladies and gentlemen, it's the Cliche Show. As you know the object of the game is to talk for as long as possible without saying anything of your own. Today's contestants: Peter and Mary Nelson, who have been practising for years. And remember, if you make the mistake of uttering one original thought or using a form of words that you didn't read somewhere or get from someone else, you will hear this sound . . . And disqualification will be immediate.'

Playing with the idea outwitted the boringness of washing and getting dressed. He had wondered about shaving. But
he couldn't be bothered going on safari across his face to find the isolated prickles that were hiding out there. You had to turn your head all different ways to flush the fair hairs out into the light. He thought perhaps he should be more hairy at seventeen. But the problem was rendered irrelevant by the faces he made at himself in the mirror. He mugged himself into a kind of maturity that he brought downstairs with him

‘Aye, maw. Da.'

‘Mornin', son,' his mother said. ‘My, you look smart.'

‘Not before time,' his father said.

Sammy liked his parents. He had begun to realise how kind his mother was and his father's grumpiness was not offensive so much as defensive, like a dog barking because it's frightened you might come too close to it. But he was aware of the bafflement with which they regarded him. He felt it in the room now.

With his mother, it was a kind of head-shaking incomprehension, as if she would be forever trying to work out what he meant. His awareness of the feeling had repeatedly crystallised itself on the occasions that he brought his report cards home from school. He remembered the awe with which his mother had once mouthed to herself the word ‘precocious'. Perhaps he had been, he thought dispassionately. He had certainly never found schoolwork any trouble.

With his father, it was a deep suspiciousness. His father couldn't understand how a son of his could have earned entrance to university. And then he couldn't understand why he hadn't taken it up. Sammy wasn't sure he understood either and he wasn't sure he cared. But he often caught his father looking at him oddly, perhaps wondering if he was a changeling.

His father was looking at him that way now, as Sammy ate his breakfast. His father was developing one of his favourite conversational themes, assisted by his mother. It was the ‘What kind of son have we reared?' theme. It was
a stylised performance in which the person under discussion was frequently referred to in the third person, as if he weren't present.

‘Ah mean, can ye believe it?' his father was saying. ‘Spending the day just readin' books? And playin' records. It's not natural.'

‘Your father's right,' his mother was saying.

‘It's not natural.'

‘You should get more fresh air. A boy your age.'

‘When Ah was his age, Ah was bringin' in a wage.'

‘He does bring money into the house, Peter. Give him that.'

‘And where does he get it? And television, that's another thing. If he's not readin' books, he's watchin' telly. Everything and anything. Opera!'

‘You do watch too much telly, son.'

‘He watches bloody opera.'

Sammy realised it was less a conversation than a duet. He smiled affectionately to himself and looked at his parents. His mother, at the sink with the frying-pan in her hands covered with suds, was wearing Victorian mourning. His father was a caricature working-man, collarless shirt, sleeves rolled up. His face had haggard lines from make-up. The music was allegro.

‘Whence comes this child?' his father's tenor voice sang.

‘Wanton and wild,' his mother's soprano answered.

‘Nay, we know not –' their voices blending.

‘Is he our own?'

‘Or made of stone?'

‘Nay, we know not.'

‘When will this end?'

‘When we're round the bend?'

‘Nay, we know not.'

There was more. Sammy enjoyed it fine. He rinsed his plate, knife and fork and coffee-mug under the hot water tap before putting them in the basin to be washed. His
mother smiled to herself. She was a believer in small omens. She knew that as long as he kept the natural considerateness for others he seemed always to have shown, there was still hope for him.

The morning passed pleasantly enough. Sammy was given temporary absolution from learning the catechism of his inadequacies. His mother was busy in the house. His father was pottering out the back. He was on his two nights off, starting today, and that part of the week always quietened slightly the perpetual grumbling of his nature, like a dog that forgets what it was barking about and becomes interested in smells again. Tonight he would have a few beers and that might help.

Sammy read the paper, amazed all over again at the lives of other people. There was a story about a man dying of asbestosis, who was having difficulty claiming compensation. The asbestos factory where he had worked was implying that he hadn't always taken as many precautions as he should have. The point seemed ludicrous to Sammy. He was a man and he had worked for them most of his life and now he was dying because of it. Sammy felt that the man's very life had in a way been manufactured into the objects of which the asbestos was a part, and now the remains of it were being discarded like industrial waste.

Sammy read a little from three of the books he was involved with at the moment. But nothing seized him. He put on television and watched a programme for children under school-age. The elaborate behaviour of the presenters fascinated him. They made a conspiratorial mystery of trivia. They mimed everything they were saying. Sammy wondered why childhood should be treated like idiocy. Still, he didn't suppose it would do the children any harm. It might permanently damage the presenters, though. He imagined them in the pub after a day's work, walking like great big giants towards the bar, miming what they wanted
to drink and rolling their eyes in astonished pleasure when they tasted it. He tried out the technique briefly at the lunch table.

‘Ah told ye,' his father said. ‘He's bloody daft.'

‘No, Ah was watchin' Play School there,' Sammy said. ‘It gets to you after a while.'

‘Bloody Play School,' his father said. ‘And he's supposed to be applyin' for a job.'

‘Don't do that during yer interview, anyway,' his mother said.

The interview was a nonsense, as Sammy had suspected it would be. The job was for a junior clerk in a local government office. There were over two hundred applicants for the post. Sammy was, the man decided immediately, over-qualified. But that didn't terminate the interview.

The man wanted to tell him things, deep things, things that might change his life, it seemed. He was a heavy-set man who said ‘Good Morning' as if it was a comment you might want to make a note of.

‘I'd like to help you,' the man was still saying after more than five minutes. ‘So few of you youngsters today understand what life is really about. You're going to have to learn. That's the real world out there.'

The man gazed mystically out of the window. What was out there was a brown-brick shopping precinct that was looking tatty by the time they finished putting it up, some houses, factories, most of them closed or closing. But it could have been the roof of the world and the man was interpreting the whole of life for Sammy like a map. The man turned back towards Sammy. He looked at him with kind condescension. It was obviously a key moment. The air in the room tensed in preparation for the weight of the pronouncement it would have to take.

‘Work,' the man said. He didn't say where you were to find it. ‘Work.' He waited. Big meanings take a long time to absorb. ‘Effort. Sheer effort.' He looked as if running for
a bus would give him a cardiac arrest. ‘Effort. And then again effort. Work. You get nothing for nothing.'

Sammy's eyes were going out of focus trying to concentrate on the unreality of what was going on. This man was talking garbage in a holy voice. One of his father's favourite words for Sammy, always offered as an accusation, was ‘dreamer'. But who was dreaming here? Did this man really believe the platitudes he was intoning? He certainly seemed to. Sammy could almost smell the incense. He felt the room go dim as a Buddhist temple. Somewhere candles were burning.

‘I'll give you this,' the man was saying.

It was a general application form for employment in local government, one for the files. It was the third time the man had offered it to him. Each time he had withdrawn it again, perhaps feeling that he hadn't yet sufficiently impressed on Sammy the sacredness of the document.

‘I'll give you this. Now don't lose it. Don't forget about it. Fill it in. Use it. Return it to us. Who knows . . .'

Sammy stared at the man in disbelief. He was the eastern guru in the Guinness advertisement Sammy had seen on television, imparting the secrets of the universe to his bald-headed novitiate, Grasshopper. His saffron robe glowed in the dingy office. Behind his wispy moustache and beard, his lips moved with the wisdom of the ages.

‘Glasshoppah. There many thing in life we cannaw understan. Why ver, very, rish people sit on fat arses for forty year and just get risher. Ah, why, Glasshoppah? Is ordained. Poor people must stay poor, Glasshoppah. And must be happy as a pig in shit. Look. I give you this. Paypah? Piece of paypah? Glasshoppah, you have mush to learn. Is secret of universe. You make necessary maks on this piece paypah. All thing come to pass. You get job. Job, Glasshoppah. Shitty job, but job. You work forty, fifty year. Your blain turn to cement. Happiness. Happiness, Glasshoppah, is not being able to think. We teach you how.
Take magic paypah, Glasshoppah. Take. Take. Take.'

‘Thank you, master,' Sammy said as he went out and didn't look back to see the man staring after him.

Sammy crossed the street and sat on a bench to contemplate the incredibility of the world. He looked at the building he had just come out of. It was an ugly Victorian building fairly liberally encrusted with birdshit. Where did it get the idea that it was a Temple? Strange were the ways of the world.

An old man came and sat on the bench beside Sammy. His clothes looked as if they had been put through a mangle with him in them. His face was blotched and lumpy and his skin sagged enough to have been someone else's he had just borrowed for a time. Sammy wondered what his story was. Perhaps he was one of those who at seventeen had filled in the kind of form Sammy had in his hand. Perhaps he had filled in the form and then opted out too late to find anything else he wanted to do and now just wandered around, trying to find out who he was. When he was younger, he probably looked a bit like Robert Duvall. Sammy had seen Robert Duvall in a picture called
Tender Mercies.
It was a good picture. Robert Duvall was a Country and Western singer whose career had been ruined by alcoholism. Sammy liked Country and Western. He didn't
like
it exactly. He was more amazed by it. It was so full of outrageous feelings, it answered something in himself. The old man saw Sammy looking at him and started to sing. His voice was reedy and it quavered a lot but you could tell he meant it.

‘When you live in a bottle, it's board and it's bed.

You pull the warm whisky right over your head.

It's sister, it's brother, it's father and mother.

It's all the old friends who are dead.

I just need a little to get me a bottle

And I'll have a warm place I can lie.

With luck it's the one where I'll die.

See, I wasn't bad, was a bit of a lad

And wanted the things that I'd never had.

But they're selling life here

At a price that's too dear.

I'm a fool and I answered the ad,

Again and again and again

And I've lived in a bottle since then.

Hey, don't you be afraid.

This face that I've made

Is less ugly than what I have seen

It's a map of old pain

Where I'm going again.

It's just all the places I've been.

Five pence would be aces

To keep me from places

I feel myself going again.

And I've lived in a bottle since then.'

The old man was starting back on the opening chorus when Sammy gave him the ten pence.

‘God bless ye, son,' the old man said. ‘Ye wouldn't have a fag on ye?'

It occurred to Sammy that it was a good thing they weren't in America. Words meant different things in different places. He knew a lot about America. Some day he hoped to go there. Sammy smoked very little and he wasn't sure if he had any cigarettes. But he found a packet with two in it and they took one each. Then Sammy located a match in the ticket pocket of his jacket and picked the fluff off it and struck it on the metal of the bench and they shared the light.

‘You're all right,' the old man said as if he were bestowing a knighthood.

Sammy wanted to give him more but he needed the money for betting. They said cheerio and Sammy crossed the street, crumpling the application form as he went.
Outside the door of the building he had been in, he put his cigarette to the fuse of the old-fashioned anarchist's bomb in his hand and threw it into the entrance hall of the building. He heard the tremendous explosion as he walked along the street but didn't look back.