The movingness was an interweave of many things. Part of it was memory. A municipal football park in Scotland is a casually haunted place, a grid of highly sensitised earth that is ghosted by urgent treble voices and lost energy and small, fierce dreams. John’s dreams had flickered for years most intensely in such places. He could never stand for long watching Gary and these other boys without a lost, wandering pang from those times finding a brief home in him. On countless winter mornings he had stood beside parks like this and remembered his own childhood commitment and wondered what had made so many Scottish boys so desperate to play this game. He could understand the physical joy of children playing football in a country like Brazil. But on a Saturday morning after a Friday night with too much to drink (and since the separation, every Friday night seemed to end that way), he had turned up to watch Gary and stood, peeled with cold, feeling as if the wind was playing his bones like a xylophone, and seen children struggle across a pitch churned to a treacle of mud. In five minutes they wore claylike leggings, the ball had become as heavy as a cannonball and the wind purpled their thighs. He remembered one touching moment when a goalkeeper had kicked the ball out and then, as the wind blew it back without anyone else touching it, had to dive dramatically to save his own goal-kick.
‘Four-two-four! Four-two-four!’ Gary’s Company Leader shouted, as if he was communicating.
It was part of the current professional jargon relating to the formation in which a football team should play. Even applied to the professional game, it was, in John’s opinion, the imposition of sterile theory upon the most creatively fluid ball-game in the world. Hurled peremptorily at a group of dazed and innocent ten-year-olds, it was as rational as hitting an infant who is dreaming over the head with a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams. The words depressed John.
They struck another plangent and familiar chord in his experience of these games. Everything was changing. Week by week, he had been learning the extent of his own failed dreams. Gary had run about so many wintry fields like the vanishing will o’ the wisp of John’s former expectations, moving remorselessly further and further away from him. He had already virtually lost Carole. She was her mother’s daughter, had chosen which side she was on. She would tolerate the times he took them out but, even so young, she had evolved her own discreet code for making their relationship quite formal, like invariably turning her head fractionally when he bent to kiss her, so that her hair on his lips was for him the taste of rejection. Lying in his bed at night, he used to wonder what her mother was telling her about him.
Gary was more supportive. He didn’t take sides but when he was with his father he came to him openly, interested in what was happening in his life and concerned to share as much of his own as he could. Yet, in spite of himself, even Gary made John feel excluded – not just because there was so much time when he couldn’t be with him but also because, during the times that they were together, it was as if they were speaking in subtly different dialects. Like a parent who has sent his child to elocution lessons, John felt slightly alienated by the gifts he had tried to give Gary.
The football games had come to encapsulate the feeling for John. They were where he had been as a boy and they were a significantly different place. He had acquired his close-dribbling skills and the sudden, killing acceleration in street kickabouts and scratch games under Peeweep Hill where as many as thirty might be playing in one game. He had practised for hours in the house with a ball made of rolled up newspapers tied with string. He had owned his first pair of football boots when he was fifteen.
‘Put a pea in yer bloody whistle, ref,’ one of the works’ team players bellowed.
‘Pull your stocking up, Freddie,’ the jodhpurs sang.
And John’s past and his son’s future met in his head and failed to mate. The game wasn’t for Gary what it had been for John, a fierce and secret romanticism that fed itself on found scraps – an amazing goal scored and kept pressed in the mind like a perfect rose – a passionate refusal to believe in the boring pragmatism of the conventional authority his teachers represented, a tunnel that ran beneath the crowds of the commonplace and would one day open into a bowl of sunlight and bright grass and the roar of adulation. For Gary it was something you did for the time being, an orderly business of accepted rules and laundered strips and football boots renewed yearly. He could take it or leave it. In a year or two, he would probably leave it. He was starting to play tennis.
John felt in some ways younger than his son. Gary was learning sensible rules of living. Somehow, John never had. The romanticism he had failed to fulfil through football had dogged him all his life. He had tried to smother it in the practicalities of living, had allowed his marriage to close round it like a mausoleum. Katherine, acquisitively middle-class, had overlaid the vagueness of his dreams with the structure of her ambitions. Because of her, they had moved from the flat to the old semi-detached house to the new detached house they couldn’t afford, with a mortgage so destructive of every other possibility but the meeting of its terms that sometimes, coming home to his name on the door, he had felt like Dracula pulling the coffin-lid down on himself before a new dawn had a chance to break. Because of Katherine, he had moved out of the factory to be an agent. Though he had come to hate the job, he was still doing it. He hated agreeing with opinions he found unacceptable. He hated the smiles he clamped on his face going into places. He lived most days between two dreads, the dread of having to fake himself and the dread that it would stop being fakery, that he would get out of bed some morning and there would be no act to put on with his pin-stripe suit. The act would be him.
Finding that Katherine was involved with somebody else had been a kind of bitter relief, since he had been doing the same. The result had been less recrimination than admission of an already accomplished fact. They were finished. They were like two actors who had, unknown to each other, secretly contracted out of a long-running play in which neither believed any more. For both, the new involvements hadn’t lasted long.
The affairs had happened not so much for their own sakes as to provide ways of denying their marriage. Once that was denied, John had had to confront the continuing reality of his romanticism. He didn’t want a career, he didn’t want a big house, he didn’t want stability. He wanted a grand passion, he wanted a relationship so real, so intense that it would sustain him till he died.
It was perhaps that rediscovery of himself, the resurgence of vague longings in him that had made him part from Katherine with a grand, flamboyant gesture: He had simply walked out of the house with nothing more than two suitcases and his collection of jazz records. At thirty-seven he went romantically back out into the world with aspirations as foggy as an adolescent’s, some changes of clothes, and records for which he had no record-player. He left the house (in joint names), the car (he had the firm’s car), every stick of furniture, the dog, the cat. Only the children he saw as remaining from his unsuccessful pretence of being someone else. And even there the grandeur of his mood had refused to descend to petty specifications. He had made no stipulations about access. Katherine had never tried to stop him seeing them. They were blood of his blood, he always thought. What could a piece of paper and some legal jargon do to alter that?
That day, struggling along the street to where the car was parked away from the house, with his two suitcases and his jazz records in two plastic bags he was praying wouldn’t give at the handles, he had felt a great elation. The house lay behind him like a discarded uniform. He wasn’t who they had all thought he was. He was a mystery, even to himself. He would be defined by her. Her, wherever she was. Since his teens, lying in bed at night, he had seen her dimly from time to time, as behind a veil, an ectoplasm of limbs, a floating, half-glimpsed smile like a butterfly in moonlight. It was time to take off the veil, to touch the solidity of her presence. He felt as dedicated as a medieval knight. Where would his journey take him?
It took him first of all to 53 Gillisland Road. He rented a singl
e room with a gas-fire that worked on a coin-meter, a papered ceiling which looked as if somebody had started to strip it and then grown bored, a single bed and a moquette suite so larded with the past that John wondered if the settee had doubled as a dinner table. There was a shared kitchen, a shared lavatory. There were in another room two boys from the Western Isles who sang in Gaelic when they were drunk, which appeared to be every night. Their names emerged, from midnight meetings in the kitchen to make coffee, as Calum and Fraser. They were full of oblique jokes only understood by each other, like a touring vaudeville team who hadn’t yet adjusted to the local sense of humour. There was Andrew Finlay, a fifty-five-year-old recent divorcee with a cough that preceded him everywhere like a town-crier. He still couldn’t believe what had happened to him. He was given to knocking at doors throughout the evening until he found someone who could confirm for him that he was really there. John became a frequent victim and had learned to dread that cough, like the lead mourner bringing in his wake the funeral for himself that was Andrew Finlay. There were others who remained no more to John than the same song played again and again or a flushing cistern. The house had once been the sort of place Katherine had always wanted and then it had fallen on hard times and been divided into bedsits, so that John felt he had become a lodger in his own past.
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.’
‘Igno
re 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.
Walking Wounded Page 3
