Walking Wounded (7 page)

‘We were promised turkey.'

‘Everybody else seemed satisfied.'

‘That's up to them.'

The governor contemplated the strange wildness of McQueen's behaviour and gave it up.

‘You're back to solitary, McQueen,' he said. ‘Till I decide. I see no justification for your behaviour. I don't even see that you're sorry for it. Are you? I mean, was that the only way you could express yourself?'

McQueen shrugged.

‘You said it yerself, sur. Ye can't complain to the waiter, can ye?'

The governor wondered how he was supposed to have said it himself. Then he remembered having mentioned the idea of a waiter serving from the wrong side. There it was again, tangential attempts to meet. One of us, the governor thought, is wrong. Or perhaps we both are. He hadn't time to pursue the thought.

‘McQueen. I'm disappointed in you. You know the score here. Every man in here is a long-termer from another place. This is where you get a chance to prepare for outside. You know this is an easy ticket. We're trying to make a transition here. From hard jails to the real world.'

‘That's the real world, sur? Broken promises? Synthetic turkey?'

‘The interview's over, McQueen. Don't you understand that? And you didn't get the job. I've tried to give you a chance. We'll do it my way now. And you'll just listen. In the meantime you're back yourself. I don't want any rotten apples in my barrel. You're a mug. You've maybe just worked your ticket to a real jail. I'll let you know. In the meantime, stew in your juice. I hope you enjoy it. Thing is, you're not even a violent man. Then you do this. Hoof it.'

As McQueen turned, one thing was still niggling at the governor's mind.

‘McQueen!'

McQueen stopped, turned round.

‘You ate the turkey.'

‘Sorry, sur?'

‘You ate the turkey. And then you ate the pudding. Was the pudding all right, by the way? Was that to your taste?'

‘It wasn't really, sur.'

‘Oh. What was wrong with that?'

‘Ah don't like a cold thing and a warm thing put together.'

‘You mean the ice-cream and the hot apple tart?'

‘That's right, sur.'

‘I hope you like the menu better where you're going.'

McQueen was turning away again.

‘But you miss the point,' the governor said.

McQueen turned back, practised in patience.

‘You
ate
the turkey,' the governor said. ‘You
ate
the pudding. You ate everything. And then you made your protest. Why?'

McQueen gave him that habitual look that suggested the world was out to con him.

‘Ah was hungry, sur,' he said.

The governor was left staring into the remark. It opened like a window on to a place he had never been. He saw McQueen sitting eating his meal in the big hall. Around him were faces that wouldn't have been out of place on Notre Dame Cathedral. McQueen was grumbling but nobody else was giving him any support. McQueen was hungry, so he ate everything and then exploded. The precision was where the governor had never been, the precision of passion, the risk of choosing the moment when you try to express utterly what you feel. McQueen, the governor understood with a dismay that would quickly bury the understanding in disbelief like dead leaves, was capable of something of which the governor was not. McQueen was capable of freedom.

The assistant governor opened the door and looked in.

‘Well?' he said.

‘We'll see. He goes back down today. Then I'll decide.'

‘It's a bad one. We don't need that stuff here.'

‘I know that. We'll see.'

The assistant governor contrived to make a nod look negative and went out.

The governor started to sign his mail. When he was finished, he would inspect the kitchens. Then he would have lunch with the assistant governor and Mrs Caldwell, the teacher. They would discuss which inmates might be capable of sitting an external examination, the advisability of an evening creative writing class under a visiting teacher and the case of Branson, who believed he was a genius not being published simply because he was in prison. The afternoon was exactly scheduled. He would leave a little early this evening because he was speaking to the Rotary Club in the nearest town, where he lived. Catriona and the children would be asleep by the time he got back. It was an early rise tomorrow. It was his day off and it was their day for visiting his parents. The drive was long and boring and it only gave them three hours at his parents' house. But maybe that was just as well. His mother was a woman who had turned into a compendium of elusive ailments which she recited as if they were conversation. His father would sit apparently stunned into silent awe at the agonies she went through. They would all get back just in time for bed. As he worked, the governor was vaguely aware of an image prowling the perimeter of his interlocking thoughts. The image was the rumpled figure of McQueen.

McQueen sat very still in his cell. With an almost mystical intensity, he was thinking himself beyond the enmeshing smell of urine mixed with disinfectant that had always for him meant prison. He had a method for doing this. He recreated in his mind big houses he had seen. This one was a big detached white house with a semi-circular balcony on the first floor. It faced the sea-front of an Ayrshire coastal town. Sometimes in McQueen's head they were hard to get
into. This one had been easy. He put shaving foam on the burglar alarm and forced the kitchen window.

McQueen landed on his stockinged feet on the kitchen floor. His shoes were on the draining board. He tied their specially long laces together and hung them round his neck. He listened. His eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Something brushed against his leg and he almost called out. It was a cat. McQueen bent down and stroked it gently. He straightened and looked slowly round the kitchen. The kitchen was well appointed, rich in the shining surfaces of affluence. It glowed dimly like the entrance to Ali Baba's cave.

McQueen moved without sound towards the hall. He was wondering what he would find.

6

Homecoming

^‘
G
oing home,' she said.

‘Graithnock,' she said.

‘London,' she said.

‘Frances Ritchie,' she said.

She treated his questions like spaces in an official form, impersonally, never digressing into humanising irrelevance. I am a stranger on a train, she was saying. She asked him nothing in return.

But the man was persistent. He had come on at Dumfries, entering a coach clogged with the boredom of several hours' travel, the unfinished crosswords, the empty whisky miniatures interred in their plastic cups, the crumpled beer cans rattling minutely to the motion of the train. Picking his way among the preoccupied stares and the occasionally stretched legs, he had sat down opposite Fran. The seats had only just been vacated by a mother and a small girl who had made Fran wonder if her own desire for children was as deep as she told herself it was.

His persistence wasn't offensive. It had none of the I-secretly-know-what-you-want-and-need machismo which Fran had learned to recognise from a distance like a waving flag and which caused her to shoot on sight. His persistence was gentle, slightly vulnerable, as if he had decided – for no reason that she could understand – that he wanted to please
her. Although it was a smoker, he asked if she minded him smoking.

‘Just thought I'd check,' he said. ‘The way it's going these days, they'll be issuing a leper's bell with every packet.'

Her smile disappeared like a mistake being erased.

‘So what took you from Graithnock to London?'

She looked out of the window. Would she have known that countryside was Scotland if the stations they passed through hadn't told her?

‘The train,' she said. ‘The 12.10 I think it was.'

The sharpness of her remark made her glance towards his silence. He was smiling.

‘You gave some extra information there,' he said. ‘Does that mean you're softening towards me?'

‘I wouldn't bet on it,' she said.

But she was laughing. She noticed he had a smile as open as a blank cheque. In spite of herself, she felt the moment put down roots and blossom into one of those sudden intimacies between strangers. He discovered that she was a journalist. He claimed to have seen her by-line. (‘That's what you call it? Isn't it? A by-line?') He convinced her by getting the newspaper right. He was a Further Education lecturer in English at Jordanhill College in Glasgow. He had been on a visit to students in Dumfries.

‘I prefer taking the train when I can,' he said. ‘You go by car, it's just a chore, isn't it? This way, you can turn it into a carnival. Watch. Just answer one question, that's all we need. What do you drink?'

He came back from the buffet with two gins and two cans of tonic for her, two whiskies and a plastic cupful of water for himself. They made a party between them. As with all good parties, the conversation went into overdrive.

‘The new Glasgow?' he said. ‘Looks like backdoor Thatcherism to me. What difference is it making to the people in the housing-schemes? How many investors invest for the good of others? That kind of investment's the Trojan
Horse, isn't it? Oh, look, these nice punters are giving us a prezzy. Let's bring it into the city. Then, when it's dark, its belly opens and they all come out to loot and pillage.'

‘I think maybe
Manhattan
,' she said. ‘But it's not exactly an easy choice. I still love
Play it again, Sam
, that scene where the hairdrier almost blows him away. I just think he's great. Who was it said that? Bette Midler? “You want to take him home and burp him.”'

‘Maybe I just haven't found the man,' she said. ‘You volunteering? I'm involved at the moment, actually. But I don't think marriage is exactly imminent.'

‘It's interesting enough,' she said. ‘But you go to a lot of places without really seeing them. Because you're there for one purpose. It can be like travelling in a tunnel.'

‘Oh, that was the worst time,' he said. ‘Don't worry about it. Divorce? I can see what Dr Crippen was getting at. I'm not saying I agree with him. But murder must be a lot less hassle.'

Before the buffet closed (‘Haven't we been lucky?' he said. ‘They usually shut it about Carlisle but the fella in the buffet's drunk.'), she went and fetched them two more drinks. By the time they were drawing into Graithnock she had his telephone number (but he didn't have hers) and Fran was about to say goodbye to Tom.

Departure heightened their sense of closeness. He was helping her with her case and threatening to come with her since he felt it only right, considering how far they were along the road to marriage, that he should meet her parents. Just before he opened the door for her, he kissed her on the cheek.

Then she was on the platform with her case beside her and he was leaning out, waving with mock drama, and she felt slightly dazed with alcohol and elation, as if she were taking part in a scene from a film in which she might be the heroine and didn't know what would happen next, and then she turned and saw her parents.

They were standing thirty yards away, waiting for her to notice them. They would be doing that – not for them the spontaneity of running towards her. Victor and Agnes Ritchie, informal as a letterhead. They stood slightly apart, her father with his clipped, grey military moustache, a general in the army of the genteel, her mother with that expression some unknown experience had pickled on her face countless years ago. Fran wondered again how they had acquired their ability to turn joy to a dead thing at a touch and how they had managed to pass the gift on to her. Years of hopelessness they had taught her resurfaced in her at once. She suspected the value of the pleasure she had just had.

Her life in miniature, she thought, this journey. A promise something in her wouldn't allow her to fulfil. She didn't think she would be phoning him. She hoped she would but, standing there, she would have bet against it. She felt her faith in life and living evaporate. Her parents had taught her well. Maybe home is simply where you can't get away from, she thought.

As she lifted her case and walked towards them, she fingered the return ticket in the pocket of her jacket, wondering how far she would have to go finally to get away from here.

7

At the bar

T
he pub was quiet. When the big man with the ill-fitting suit came in, the barman noticed him more than he normally would have done. The suit was slightly out of fashion yet looked quite new and it was too big for him. He could have come back to it after a long illness. Yet it wasn't that either. Whatever had happened to him had tightened him but not diminished him. The charcoal grey cloth sat on him loosely but that looked like the suit's problem. You wouldn't have fancied whoever the suit might fit to come against the man who wore it.

He came up to the bar and seemed uncertain about what to order. He looked along the gantry with a bemused innocence, like a small boy in a sweet-shop.

‘Sir?' the barman said.

The big man sighed and shook his head and took his time. His face looked as if it had just come off a whetstone. The cheek-bones were sharp, the mouth was taut. The eyes were preoccupied with their own thoughts. His pallor suggested a plant kept out of the light. Prison, the barman thought.

‘Uh-huh,' the big man said. ‘Fine day. I'll have.' It seemed a momentous choice. ‘A pint of heavy.'

He watched the barman pull it. Paying, he took a small wad of singles from his pocket and fingered them
deliberately. He studied his change carefully. Then he retreated inside himself.

Making sure the patch of bar in front of him was clean, he spread his
Daily Record
on it and started to read, the sports pages first. His beer seemed to be for moistening his lips.

Before turning back to the television, the barman checked the pub in his quick but careful way. The afternoon was boringly in place. Old Dave and Sal were over to his left, beside the Space Invader. As usual, they were staring past each other. Dave was nursing half-an-inch of beer and Sal had only the lemon left from her gin and tonic, her thin lips working against each other endlessly, crocheting silence. That should be them till they went home for their tea. At the other end of the bar, Barney, the retired schoolteacher, was doing
The Times
crossword. Did he ever finish it? In the light from the window his half-pint looked as stale as cold tea.

The only other person in the pub was someone the barman didn't like. He had started to come in lately. Denim-dressed, he looked nasty-hard, a broad pitted face framed in long black hair. He was a fidgety drinker, one of those who keep looking over both shoulders as if they know somebody must be trying to take a liberty and they're determined to catch him at it. Just now, standing at the bar, he kept glancing along at the big man and seemed annoyed to get no reaction. His eyes were a demonstration looking for a place to happen. He took his pint like a penance.

The television was showing some kind of afternoon chat-show, two men talking who made the pub seem interesting. Each question sounded boring until you heard the answer and that made you want another question very quick. The barman was relieved to see Old Dave come towards the bar as if he was walking across America. It would be good if he made it before he died.

‘Yes, Dave,' the barman said to encourage his progress. ‘Another drink? What is this? Your anniversary?'

The barman noticed the big man had the paper open at page three. He knew what the man was seeing, having studied her this morning, a dark-haired girl called Minette with breasts like two separate states. But the big man wasn't looking at her so much as he was reading her, like a long novel. Then he flicked over to the front page, glanced, sipped his beer till it was an inch down the glass and went to the lavatory.

‘Same again,' Dave said, having arrived. ‘Tae hell wi' it. Ye're only young once.'

The barman laughed and turned his back on him. He had to cut more lemon. He had to find one of the lemons the pub had started getting in specially for Sal. After brief puzzlement, he did. He cut it carefully. He filled out gin, found ice, added the lemon. He turned back, put the drink on the counter, pulled a pint. As he laid the pint beside the gin and opened the tonic, pouring it, he noticed something in among the activity that bothered him. He suddenly realised what it was. The big man's pint-dish held nothing but traces of froth.

The barman was about to speak to the hard-faced man in denim when the big man walked back from the lavatory to the bar. His arrival froze the barman. The big man made to touch his paper, paused. He looked at his empty pint.

‘Excuse me,' he said to the barman. ‘Ah had a pint there.'

The moment crackled like an electrical storm. Even Old Dave got the message. His purse hung in his hand. He stared at the counter. The barman was wincing.

‘That's right,' the man in denim said. ‘Ye had a pint. But Ah drank it.'

The silence prolonged itself like an empty street with a man at either end of it. The barman knew that nobody else could interfere.

‘Sorry?' the big man said.

‘Ye had a pint, right enough. But Ah felt like it. So Ah drank it. That's the dinky-dory.'

So that was the story. The big man stared and lowered his eyes, looked up and smiled. It wasn't convincing. Nonchalant surrender never is. But he was doing his best to make it look as if it was.

‘Oh, look,' he said. ‘What does it matter? Ah can afford another one. Forget it.'

The barman was grateful but contemptuous. He didn't want trouble but he wouldn't have liked to go to sleep in the big man's head. And when the big man spoke again, he could hardly believe it.

‘Look. If you need a drink, let me buy you another one. Come on. Give the man a pint of heavy.'

The barman felt as if he was pouring out the big man's blood but he did it. It was his job to keep the peace. The man in denim lifted the pint, winked at the barman.

‘Cheers,' he said to the big man, smiling at him. ‘Your good health. You obviously value it.'

He hadn't managed his first mouthful before the side of the big man's clenched right hand had hit the base of the glass like a demolition-ball. There was a splintered scream among the shards of exploding glass and the volleying beer.

Not unused to fast violence, the barman was stunned. The big man picked up his paper. He laid the price of a pint on the counter and nodded to the barman.

‘If he's lookin' for me,' he said, ‘the name's Rafferty. Cheerio. Nice shop you run.'

He went out. Lifting a dish-towel, the barman hurried round the counter and gave it to the man in denim. While he held his face together with it and the cloth saturated instantly with blood and he kept moaning, the barman found his first coherent reaction to the situation.

‘You're barred,' he said.