Walking Wounded by William McIlvanney Read Free Book Online Page A

pub, a group of women in their thirties had been skipping rope, one at each end spinning the rope and the others jumping in turn, repeating the rhymes of their childhood. It had been an arresting scene to witness coming in off the street, rather like pushing open a door in an industrial West of Scotland town and entering the atmosphere of a frontier saloon in the American West. It was all loud laughter and the abandonment of bouncing breasts and shouted encouragement. A bystander, who appeared to be a regular, explained to John how the scene had come about, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
    It seemed one of the women had been shopping before coming into the pub and happened to mention over her drink that she had been buying a new clothes-rope. There had been talk of how times had changed for all of them, how rope had at one time meant not the boring duty of hanging out washing but the carefree pleasure of jumping rope. Someone had said it would have been great to go back there so they had gone, there and then, challenging one another to demonstrate their skills. The man who was telling John of the background to the event seemed to be concerned to make it clear that this didn’t happen every day in the pub. That didn’t make the place much less remarkable in John’s eyes. ‘The Barley Bree’ might not be the kind of pub where big, buxom women skipped rope every day like maenads but it was the kind of pub where, if they had the notion to do so and a rope was handy, they just carried on – and the barman looked on with a kind of reluctant indulgence, perhaps because there were other uses to which a rope could be put.
    An acquaintance of John claimed to have been in ‘TheBarley Bree’ one Saturday afternoon when a dog and bitch decided to consummate their passion in a corner. Nobody had paid particular attention, John’s acquaintance said, and when he had expressed his amazement to someone sitting near him, the man had answered, ‘What can ye expect? They see it every day in the hoose.’
    The story could have been apocryphal but it matched John’s sense of the place. Sally’s association with ‘The Barley Bree’ changed John’s sense of her. The enchanted bedroom was surrounded by quicksand. He wasn’t judging her life or anybody else’s. It wasn’t in his nature to do that. He was simply looking for a habitation for his private longings, a place where he could share them with someone. Sally had not only made him think that it might be impossible to share them with her, she had also made him wonder if it would ever be possible to share them with anyone.
    He would sit in his room, reading the greasy moquette pattern of his suite into a significance as mysterious as the Rosetta stone and, whatever it meant, the message was a sad one. The incomprehensible Gaelic songs would drift hauntingly around him like the sound of all the lost dreams of which his was just another. The cistern would gurgle from time to time. Andrew Finlay would cough nervously through the evening, as if embarrassedly trying to attract the world’s attention. John would look through the jazz records for which he had no record-player (‘Out of the Galleon’ was the one he held the most) and they became in his melancholy a symbol of his life, the mute longing, the music that couldn’t be heard.
    The ridiculous image of himself hiding in the Wendy House began to seem more than an accidental moment in his life. There were perhaps times, it appeared to him, when a fleeting gesture or a spontaneous stance could freeze into definition, like a head stamped on a coin, and become your essential currency. For a great footballer it might be one game or one goal. For another man, the moment of hismarriage. John dreaded that for him it might be his sojourn in the Wendy House. That might become the prison of his own sense of himself. Perhaps that’s who he was –