Walking Wounded (10 page)

12

Tig

W
hen they barred Mickey Andrews from ‘The Narrow Place', they did a bad thing. ‘The Narrow Place' was a one-room bar, one entrance, one exit. It had been named by Big Fergie, the owner, presumably from a sepulchral sense of humour, since he had been told it meant the grave. It was a gantry, a counter, a piece of worn linoleum to stand on and one continuous red leather bench seat along the wall, pockmarked with cigarette burns. The Cairo Hilton it wasn't. So where did Big Fergie get off barring anybody from there in the first place?

He did it on a Thursday night after the dogs. If there had been no dogs, there would have been no ‘Narrow Place'. The dog-track at Thornbank was a flapping track, which meant that it was unofficial, not subject to the rules of the National Greyhound Racing Council. Interesting things happened there. The markings on a particular black and white dog might change subtly from one week to the next. A dog that had appeared to be running through molasses for three weeks in a row would suddenly look to be in danger of catching the hare. These things were a puzzle and a mystery to many.

But every Tuesday and Thursday night the many came and tried to solve the mystery once again. One of the many was Mickey Andrews. He was a small man of a mainly pleasant disposition. The central preoccupation of his life
was animals. Around the edges of this preoccupation Mickey had almost absent-mindedly acquired a wife and three daughters. The three girls were married and Sadie, his wife, had long ago learned to find her own preoccupations, which included her grandchildren, bingo and television soap operas.

Mickey's preoccupations might have seemed less varied than Sadie's, but only to an outsider. As many animals as there were, so many animals was Mickey interested in. Apart from his interest in all kinds of domestic animals, he watched any television programme he could find about nature. He speculated philosophically about many aspects of the natural world: for example, which would win in a straight contest – a crocodile or a shark? Or what is, pound for pound, the most ferocious creature on earth? Mickey's main bet was on the wolverine, with a side-bet on a Pyrenean rodent, called a desman, which he had seen on a David Attenborough programme. A wolverine was, in Mickey's assessment, a set of champing teeth with fur round it.

Mickey loved all animals, fierce or gentle. ‘Their nature's their nature,' he sometimes said cryptically. As with all true lovers, love gave him knowledge of the beloved. People with pets in the Graithnock housing development where he lived came to him with their problems. They weren't always well received.

Once a woman came to Mickey's door with a toy poodle which was wearing what looked like a small but rather expensive fur coat. The dog, the woman said, was pining. The first sign that Mickey's diagnosis wasn't favourable was that he didn't ask her in. He stared at the dog which was fidgeting on his doorstep.

Mickey loved all animals but there was a kind of hierarchy to his love and the toy poodle did not occupy a high place in it. He had once described a toy poodle as ‘a sandwich for an alsatian'.

‘Yes,' he said to the woman. ‘Your dog's got a problem.'

‘What is it?' she asked.

‘You.'

The woman stared at him.

‘Missus,' he said. ‘Its legs are bucklin' under that thing on its back. What's that for? Dogs've got coats already. How'd
you
like two skins? Ye'd suffocate. Yer dog's pinin' right enough. It's pinin' for an owner with a brain.'

And he closed the door. For Mickey wanted animals to be animals. He hated human sentimentality to be superimposed on the animal world. ‘Give them their own natures,' he sometimes said cryptically. And, ‘When an animal dies, it dies.' And, ‘You ever see a canary die? Just draps aff the perch. Doesny phone a doctor. No relatives round the bed.' Mickey hated people who had birthday parties for dogs or sent Christmas cards with pawmarks on them. But his love of animals was real. It was a love for the animals, not his idea of them. It was a love so unmistakable that a friend had once referred to him as St Francis of Assisi. Yet Mickey had characteristics St Francis appears not to have had. One of them was irrational anger.

It was the anger that led to his being barred from ‘The Narrow Place'. That Thursday Mickey had gone to Thornbank greyhound track. Every Tuesday and Thursday he did that. Those nights were the highlight of his week.

Each night came in two parts. There was the session at the stadium with the heraldry of the greyhounds parading on the green turf and racing under the lights, the frosted breath of the onlookers rising up into the air like prayers. There was the session in the pub afterwards.

‘The Narrow Place' was, more than any other place, where Mickey found his social fulfilment. Every Tuesday and Thursday night it was packed. As far as takings went, Big Fergie could afford to forget the rest of the week. Men and greyhounds crammed themselves in, in apparent defiance of the physical possibilities. The talk was all of dogs and who was trying and who wasn't and how best to
prepare a dog for a race. Among these men Mickey was a king. He knew more about the dogs than anyone else. More importantly, he was among people who, no matter how dubious their motives, acknowledged two nights a week the beauty and grace and importance of greyhounds and, by implication, of animals. It was as close as Mickey got to a place of worship. He couldn't imagine not going there – until that Thursday night.

Mickey was arguing pleasantly with a big man from Thornbank. Mickey liked arguing. ‘Arguing's like monkey-gland steak,' he sometimes said cryptically. But he had never said this to the big man. The big man was not getting angry but he was not getting any happier. They were arguing about judging greyhounds just by looking at them and, while the big man remained unconvinced by Mickey's reasoning, everybody else within earshot was obviously starting to side with Mickey. The big man couldn't help feeling that people were agreeing with Mickey not because he was right but because he often said things with a pleasing neatness, or a displeasing neatness, if you were the big man. He decided that Mickey was not taking the argument very seriously and he thought that he might as well do the same. That was when the big man did something foolish. He knocked off Mickey's cap.

No one who knew Mickey Andrews well would have knocked off his cap. No one with any sensitivity to the mysteriousness of others would knock off anyone's cap. Who knows where the nuclear buttons are in a stranger's nature? Mickey's cap was like an integral part of himself. He wore it in the house as well as outside. Even friends never saw him without it. Rumour had it that he went to bed with it on. When the big man knocked it off Mickey's head, everyone could see why Mickey wore it.

With his cap off, Mickey instantly aged about twenty years. He had thick curly hair at the sides of his head and at the back, still only slightly grey. The entire upper part
of his head shone like a glass eye in the cheap fluorescent light of Big Fergie's bar. The effect of knocking Mickey's cap off was similar to taking the cork off the bottle of an evil genie.

Mickey became a blur of malice. He caught his cap in mid-air and pulled it back on his head and, simultaneously it seemed, punched the big man in the mouth. So tight with people was ‘The Narrow Place' on a dog night that an incident became in seconds a riot. Much noisy confusion and falling about ensued. Dogs barked and men wrestled with leashes. Oaths were heard. People dreaded they might suffocate. Some struggled cravenly towards the door like passengers who think the ship is sinking. All this took up much time. When comparative silence was at last restored by Big Fergie, there was some damage to glasses and one dog had a cut paw and the room was murmuring with vague threats. But Mickey's cap had remained miraculously on his head.

A summary hearing was held. Numerous claims for compensation for spilled beer were brusquely dismissed by Big Fergie. There was only one serious issue here. How had this started? Who was to blame? The evidence, like a forest of fingers, pointed at Mickey. It was useless for him to plead his case. There was no way he could present it effectively. The very core of his defence, the exceptional importance of the cap as a part of his identity, was the very thing he couldn't admit. It would have been equivalent to preserving his propriety by stripping naked. Without the admission of this crucial extenuating circumstance, Big Fergie ruled that a punch in the mouth was in no way a just response to getting your cap playfully knocked off. The verdict was final. Mickey was barred.

Mickey protested. When had he ever caused trouble before? For how many years had he been Big Fergie's customer? How many Tuesday or Thursday nights had he missed that Fergie could remember? And, pathetically
enough (even Mickey felt it), he hadn't finished his pint.

Big Fergie took Mickey's glass with the remains of his pint in it, opened one half of the double doors and threw the beer into the street. He handed the glass to someone else. He held the door open.

‘Your beer's out there,' he said. ‘You want it, follow it.'

Mickey looked at Big Fergie. He knew Big Fergie was jealous of him. Too many times Mickey had shown Big Fergie's pronouncements about greyhounds to be rubbish, the undigested scraps of other men's knowledge heard over the counter. Nonsense talked at the pitch of your voice was still nonsense. But what chance did you have accusing the judge to his face of corruption?

Still Mickey couldn't step out the door. To cross that line was to abandon the most purely pleasurable place of meeting he had in his life. What would he do without it? How could he leave? Big Fergie solved his problem for him. He took Mickey by the shoulder with his free hand and flung him out. The door closed behind him.

Mickey came back at the door as if he had been on elastic. His pride was outraged. But with one hand on each of the brass handles of the double doors, he halted. A countercharge of pride went through him like an electric shock. He wouldn't be begging. They could keep their pub. But this wasn't over. Somehow Big Fergie would pay for this. Somehow he would pay. Mickey went home.

Throughout the next few days Mickey brooded. Sadie was aware of the difference in him but, after a few unsuccessful enquiries, she left him to deal with it. She knew that Mickey believed in what he called ‘men's business'. It meant that there were areas of their lives that were primarily his concern. Just as he wouldn't dare to advise Sadie on how to cook whatever meal she gave him, so if a grizzly bear came to the door, he wouldn't ask her to answer it. He would take care of the bad things. This appeared to be one of them.

During the weekend the usual sort of visitors came and
went, bringing their small problems. Mrs Wallace's budgerigar needed to have its claws clipped. Old Stan Baird brought his pet rabbit Dusky, an animal Mickey had previously suggested couldn't have been much older than Stan himself. Stan was worried about Dusky. No wonder. Running his hands over it expertly, Mickey said gently, ‘What we've got here is a growth with a rabbit attached.' Brutus, Danny Park's alsatian, was showing the first signs of distemper. A small tear-stained girl turned up with a goldfish floating in a goldfish bowl. A lot of people believed in Mickey Andrews.

Mickey gave everybody an audience but he did it absently, in the manner of Solomon solving other people's problems while conducting an internal argument with God. Sadie knew that whatever had been worrying him was continuing to worry him. It was Monday evening before Mickey came in from his hut in the back garden with a less troubled expression on his face. It was an interesting expression. It wasn't happy, exactly. It was more an expression of calm and intense concentration, like someone who is trying to see through walls.

Mickey put a piece of wood on the mantelpiece and sat down and stared at it. Sadie glanced up from watching television. It was an ordinary-looking piece of wood. It was about a foot long, two inches wide and an inch-and-a-half thick. Mickey had obviously been planing it smooth. Sadie knew the rules of the game Mickey was playing and when she spoke she didn't expect an answer.

‘That's lovely, Mickey,' she said. ‘But d'ye think it'll ever catch on?'

Mickey smiled. After ten minutes' further contemplation, he took the piece of wood and went back out to his hut. When he returned and replaced the piece of wood on the mantelpiece, Sadie looked up again. Mickey had bored two holes, one at each end of the wood. From each hole, knotted so that it held firm, dangled a two-foot length of rope.

‘My,' Sadie said. ‘Ye're a wonder. Only you would've seen that's exactly what was needed.'

Mickey smiled. Quite a few people missed him at the Thornbank dogs on Tuesday night and commented on his absence. The comments extended into ‘The Narrow Place'. There was a lot of talk about him. Some felt that he shouldn't have been barred. The big man who had been punched on the mouth was one of the leading voices in presenting Mickey's appeal. Being punched by Mickey, he said, was like being assaulted with a ping-pong ball. But Big Fergie wouldn't waver. Mickey Andrews was barred.

It was then, as magically as if their talk had conjured him, that Mickey appeared. He stood in the doorway of the bar, holding open one of the double doors. The pub seemed even busier than usual, perhaps in expectation of a sequel to the barring of Mickey Andrews, and it took some time for everybody in the bar to realise that Mickey was there. But the talk subsided piecemeal until everyone in the place was craning and staring to see Mickey Andrews. The bar was as quiet as a Western street at sun-up. Mickey was staring steadily at Big Fergie. Big Fergie was staring steadily at Mickey.

‘You meant it?' Mickey said. ‘That Ah'm barred?'

‘Ah meant it. You're barred.'

‘For how long then?'

‘How long you got to live?'