Walking Wounded Read Online Free PDF Page A

when he was fifteen.
    â€˜Put a pea in yer bloody whistle, ref,’ one of the works’ team players bellowed.
    â€˜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 yearor 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 realityof 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