Walking Wounded Read Free

the importance of career. But he wasn’t hypocritical enough to let them reach his mouth. Duncan was right. Who needs a career? It was never any substitute for a life.
    He stared at Duncan and envied him his eyes. He wondered where they were going, what they would see. He looked past Duncan wistfully, as if straining to hear something, perhaps an echo of that strange internal music of the young that promises so much. The moment passed and he was left feeling like the boy with the limp the Pied Piper left behind. In place of that lost elation all he had was self-awareness. He understood afresh how the responsibility of status could cripple your enjoyment. He was reminded of the price he paid for career and respectability, a constant drain on his spontaneity he hardly noticed any more, like the tax on tobacco. He saw himself as someone waving to life as it passed by. But if all he could do was wave, he would wave nice. He wasn’t so far gone that he would be giving it the V-sign.
    â€˜Duncan,’ he said. ‘If you’re going, you’re going. Your job’ll be here for you when you get back. If you get back. You relax on that score. That’s all I can promise. About the money. Let me think about it. No promises there, mind.’
    But he was already making a promise to himself. He would be taking a collection for Duncan. He couldn’t think of anybody who wouldn’t want to give, especially among the women. And he would top it up himself and make sure it was respectable. Marie wouldn’t even know about it.
    â€˜Mr Watson,’ Duncan said. He was shaking his head, the blue eyes even wider. ‘That’s just great. That is just great. Ah mean . . .’
    Duncan stood with his hands out, waiting for the words to arrive that would match his gratitude. His eyes gave out their innocent incandescence, unaware of what an affront they were to Bert Watson’s sense of his own life.
    â€˜Duncan. I’m busy, right? We’ll talk more about this in a day or two.’
    Duncan smiled and nodded and turned away vaguely, trying to work out where the door was.
    â€˜And Duncan. Don’t go on the bevvy tonight to celebrate. You’re saving up. Remember?’
    Duncan gave the thumbs up and went out. Bert Watson sat down behind his desk. He stared at the door. He remembered an evening with Marie before they were engaged. They had been walking near the Bringan and it started to rain. Sheltering among some trees, they kissed and found lust waiting for them as if by appointment. They got down to it there and then, churning the loam with their bodies, writhing on tree roots and wet leaves, gasping among sensations of dark sky and scuttering noises of animal life and nervously interrupted birdsong. Finished, they waited to come back inside their bodies, their bare thighs frosting in the evening air. The rain had stopped sometime. As they picked the residue of their passion from each other like monkeys grooming, twigs from Marie’s hair, small balls of impacted mud from his knees, Bert noticed the ingrained dirt on Marie’s thighs and the embedded imprint of a root. The sight thrilled him. It was as if he had won her from the earth itself. His trousers had been ruined with mud, he remembered.
    He would have settled for having his trousers in that state now, no matter how much they cost. He wondered what Marie thought of that moment, if she ever thought about it. Perhaps she saw it as the kind of holiday from common sense you could have when you were young and daft, but not any more. Certainly, he couldn’t imagine her enjoying the dirt. She had turned herself into a Geiger counter for dust and seemed able to hear a glass making a ring-mark on a table from the next room.
    Never mind a blood test before marriage, Bert thought. They should invent a machine that, when you stepped into it, projected your nature into the future so that the other person could see which characteristics