Walking Wounded Read Online Free Page B

John, a strange orchestration of his past and his present and his uncertain future.
    The movingness was an interweave of many things. Part of it was memory. A municipal football park in Scotland is a casually haunted place, a grid of highly sensitised earth that is ghosted by urgent treble voices and lost energy and small, fierce dreams. John’s dreams had flickered for years most intensely in such places. He could never stand for long watching Gary and these other boys without a lost, wandering pang from those times finding a brief home in him. On countless winter mornings he had stood beside parks like this and remembered his own childhood commitment and wondered what had made so many Scottish boys so desperate to play this game. He could understand thephysical joy of children playing football in a country like Brazil. But on a Saturday morning after a Friday night with too much to drink (and since the separation, every Friday night seemed to end that way), he had turned up to watch Gary and stood, peeled with cold, feeling as if the wind was playing his bones like a xylophone, and seen children struggle across a pitch churned to a treacle of mud. In five minutes they wore claylike leggings, the ball had become as heavy as a cannonball and the wind purpled their thighs. He remembered one touching moment when a goalkeeper had kicked the ball out and then, as the wind blew it back without anyone else touching it, had to dive dramatically to save his own goal-kick.
    â€˜Four-two-four! Four-two-four!’ Gary’s Company Leader shouted, as if he was communicating.
    It was part of the current professional jargon relating to the formation in which a football team should play. Even applied to the professional game, it was, in John’s opinion, the imposition of sterile theory upon the most creatively fluid ball-game in the world. Hurled peremptorily at a group of dazed and innocent ten-year-olds, it was as rational as hitting an infant who is dreaming over the head with a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams. The words depressed John.
    They struck another plangent and familiar chord in his experience of these games. Everything was changing. Week by week, he had been learning the extent of his own failed dreams. Gary had run about so many wintry fields like the vanishing will o’ the wisp of John’s former expectations, moving remorselessly further and further away from him. He had already virtually lost Carole. She was her mother’s daughter, had chosen which side she was on. She would tolerate the times he took them out but, even so young, she had evolved her own discreet code for making their relationship quite formal, like invariably turning her head fractionally when he bent to kiss her, so that her hair on his lips was for him the taste of rejection. Lying in his bed atnight, he used to wonder what her mother was telling her about him.
    Gary was more supportive. He didn’t take sides but when he was with his father he came to him openly, interested in what was happening in his life and concerned to share as much of his own as he could. Yet, in spite of himself, even Gary made John feel excluded – not just because there was so much time when he couldn’t be with him but also because, during the times that they were together, it was as if they were speaking in subtly different dialects. Like a parent who has sent his child to elocution lessons, John felt slightly alienated by the gifts he had tried to give Gary.
    The football games had come to encapsulate the feeling for John. They were where he had been as a boy and they were a significantly different place. He had acquired his close-dribbling skills and the sudden, killing acceleration in street kickabouts and scratch games under Peeweep Hill where as many as thirty might be playing in one game. He had practised for hours in the house with a ball made of rolled up newspapers tied with string. He had owned his first pair of football boots