Walking Wounded Read Online Free Page A

playing. Standing between touchlines, John Hannah, his coat collar up, paid most attention to the Boys’ Brigade game – he was here to see Gary – but the works’ match, so noisy and vigorous and expletive, was impossible to ignore. It impinged on the comparative decorum of the boys’ game like the future that was coming to them, no matter what precepts of behaviour the Company Leaders tried to impose on them. John had heard some of the other parents complaining ostentatiously at half-time about the inadvisability of booking a pitch beside a works’ game. ‘After all, it’s an organisation to combat evil influences, not arrange to give them a hearing,’ a woman in a blue antartex coat and jodhpurs andriding-boots had said. Presumably the horse was a white charger.
    John found the contrast between the games instructive. It was like being sandwiched between two parts of his past. The works’ game was an echo of his own origins. He had himself played in games like that often enough. Standing so close to the crunch of bone on bone, the thud of bodies, the force of foot striking ball, he remembered what a physically hard game football is. Watching it from a grandstand, as he had so often lately, you saw it bowdlerised a little, refined into an aesthetic of itself. The harshness of it made him wonder if that was why he hadn’t pursued the game as determinedly as his talent might have justified. He hoped that wasn’t the reason but lately the sense of other failures had made him quest back for some root, one wrong direction taken that had led on to all the others. He had wondered if he had somehow always been a quitter, and his refusal to take football seriously as a career had come back to haunt him.
    Three separate people whose opinions he respected had told him he could be a first-class professional footballer. The thought of that had sustained him secretly at different times of depression for years, like an option still open, and it was only fairly recently that he had forced himself to throw away the idea out of embarrassment. He was forty now. For years the vague dream of playing football had been like a man still taking his teddy-bear to bed with him. He might still occasionally mention what had been said to him but, whereas before he had named the three men and sometimes described the games after which they had said it, now the remark had eroded to a self-deprecating joke: ‘A man once told me . . . At least I think that’s what he said – I couldn’t be sure because his guide-dog was barking a lot at the time’. The joke, like a lot of jokes, was a way of controlling loss.
    â€˜Oh, well done, Freddie!’ the woman in the jodhpurs whinnied.
    John supposed that Freddie was her son. The kind of parents who attended these games were inclined to see one player in sharp focus and twenty-one meaningless blurs, as if parenthood had fitted their eyes with special lenses. What Freddie had done was to mis-head the ball straight up into the air so that it fell at the feet of an opponent. It had to be assumed that the expression of admiration that was torn involuntarily from the mouth of Freddie’s mother was due to the surprising height, about thirty feet, the ball had achieved by bouncing off Freddie’s head. Freddie’s mother was apparently not scouting for one of the senior clubs.
    Gary, John decided after applying rigorous rules of non-favouritism to his judgment, was playing quite well. At ten, he had already acquired basic ball control and he wasn’t quite as guilty as most of them were of simply following the ball wherever it went, as if they were attached to it by ropes of different lengths. John had been following Gary’s games religiously all season, as a way of showing him that he was still very much involved in his life though he might not live in the same house, and the matches had acquired the poignancy of a weekly recital for