The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  Also by William McIlvanney

  Fiction

  Remedy is None

  Gift from Nessus

  The Big Man

  Walking Wounded

  The Kiln

  Weekend

  The Detective Laidlaw trilogy

  Laidlaw

  The Papers of Tony Veitch

  Strange Loyalties

  Poetry

  The Longships in Harbour

  In Through the Head

  These Words: Weddings and After

  Non Fiction

  Shades of Grey – Glasgow 1956–1987, with Oscar Marzaroli

  Surviving the Shipwreck

  ‘A splendid and utterly convincing portrayal of Scottish working-class life’

  Stephen Glover, in the Daily Telegraph

  ‘An absorbing study of a man and the small economically depressed Scottish town that has formed him. At his best Mcllvanney digs deep and fruitfully into a class unconscious, into the way men dispossessed not only of jobs but of their belief in past or future, struggle to make – and unmake – their own heroes’

  Margaret Walters, in the Observer

  ‘His LAIDLAW thrillers brilliantly marry tension and acute observation with a style that would do justice to the best urban tradition. They’re his most successful books, but DOCHERTY and THE BIG MAN are no small achievements. His people are powerful creations, his dialogue a crisp slap in the face for defeat’

  Nick Kimberley, in City Limits

  ‘As so often his work surprises, jolts, impresses, THE BIG MAN is the work of a thoroughly intelligent and adult novelist writing at the height of his powers. (It is) the book that will make 1985 a pivotal year in our fiction . . . it tackles unemployment and its psychological wounds, and illuminates the roots and roles of violence in Scottish notions of manhood’

  Isobel Murray, in the Scotsman

  ‘A brilliant study, truly beautiful . . . Mcllvanney makes most of his contemporaries seem effete and ineffectual; a massively gifted, totally aware, compassionate writer’

  Bob Flynn, in New Musical Express

  ‘An exciting blend of violent action and perceptive character study’

  Glasgow Herald

  ‘When Mcllvanney allows his characters freedom in the lives he has created for them, THE BIG MAN succeeds both as moral drama and first-rate entertainment’

  James Campbell in The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Brilliant... A commentary on the state of Scotland itself’

  Kevin Dunion, Radical Scotland

  THE BIG MAN

  William McIlvanney

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  First published in Great Britain in 1985 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

  Sceptre edition 1986

  Copyright © 1985 by William McIlvanney

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78211 1955

  www.canongate.tv

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  For Siobhàn

  What is a rebel? A man who

  says no: but whose refusal

  does not imply a renunciation.

  ALBERT CAMUS

  ONE

  ‘Look,’ one of the three boys in a field said as the white Mercedes slid, silenced by distance, in and out of view along the road. The boy had bright red hair which the teachers at his school had learned to dread appearing in their classrooms for it meant mischief, a spark of social arson.

  ‘A shark. A great white.’

  His two companions looked where his finger pointed and caught the melodrama of the gesture. The one who was holding the greyhound said, ‘Kill, Craigie Boy, kill,’ and the big, brindled dog barked and lolloped on the leash. The red-haired boy started imitating the theme music from the film Jaws and the other two joined in. Their voices hurried to crescendo as they saw the car disappearing over the top of a hill.

  The car moved on under a sky where some cloud-racks looked like canyons leading to infinity and others were dissolving islands. There, floating in the air, were the dreams of some mad architect, wild, fantasticated structures that darkness would soon demolish. They were of a variousness you couldn’t number.

  ‘Five,’ the biggest man in the car said. He was called Billy Fleming. He spoke without expression. His face looked mean enough to grudge giving away a reaction.

  There was no immediate response from the other two. A boring journey had made reactions in the car sluggish. Each was in his own thoughts like a sleeping-bag.

  ‘Five what?’ the driver said after a time, thinking it wouldn’t be long until he needed the lights. His name was Eddie Foley.

  ‘Dead crows. That’s five Ah’ve counted. Two on the road. Three at the side of it. They should take out insurance. What are they? Deaf or daft? Always pickin’ on passin’ cars.’

  They came to a village called Blackbrae. The council houses at the edge of it, badly weathered but with well-kept gardens, led on to private houses lined briefly along each side of the street. These sat slightly further off the road, solidly and unelaborately built. Designed less to please the eye than persuade it to look elsewhere, they were squat fortresses of privacy. It was hard to imagine much vanity in possessing them. Yet the meticulous paintwork or the hanging plant in a doorway or the coach-lamp on the wall beside a recently added porch suggested a pleased possessiveness. The names, too, had a cosy complacency. There was Niaroo and Dunromin and, incredibly enough, Nirvana. A passer-by might have wondered at how modest the dreams had been that had found their fulfilment here.

  The street turned left towards a hill that climbed back into the countryside. Changing gears, Eddie Foley hesitated in neutral and gently braked.

  ‘I think we’re lost,’ he said. ‘Did Fast Frankie mention this place?’

  ‘Has anybody ever?’ Billy Fleming asked from the back seat.

  ‘Ask,’ the third man in the car said.

  At the top of the hill a small obelisk with a railing round it was outlined against the sky. On a bench beside it two men sat and a third stood with his foot on the bench, nodding towards the others. In the hollow of the hill, where the car was, there were mainly closed shops. A building that claimed to have been a garage was empty and derelict. Asphalt patches in front of it might have been where the pumps were. The owner’s name was a conundrum of missing letters – Mac- something. The only indication of life between them and the men at the top of the hill was outside the Mayfair Café. The name was carried on a white electric sign, not yet lit, projecting from the wall. The letters declaring the name were slightly smaller than those beneath, which announced a brand of cigarettes, so that it was as if the identity of this place, obviously a focal point of the village, was dependent on a company that had no connections here.

  Five teenagers were standing outside the café, two boys and three girls. One of the boys, the smaller one, was doing an intricate but very contained soft-shoe shuffle with his hands out, palms towards his friends. He was wearing jeans and a black tee-shirt, sleeves rolled up to show his biceps. The others were laughing. Eddie Foley put the car in gear, eased along the kerb towards them and stopped. He loosened his seat-belt, leaned across the empty passenger seat and pressed a button. The window hummed down slow
ly enough for the group on the pavement to become aware of it. The dancer gave his friends a theatrical display of amazement and leaned down towards the open window.

  ‘That was terrific, mister,’ he said. ‘Could ye do it again?’

  ‘Thornbank?’ Eddie Foley said.

  ‘Naw,’ the dancer said. ‘My name’s Wilson.’

  ‘I’m looking for Thornbank.’

  ‘If ye give us a lift, we’ll take ye.’

  ‘It’s either right or left or straight on,’ one of the girls said.

  The wit of it crippled the others with laughter. They leaned helplessly on one another and the girl herself had to admit how good it was, her pink hair coming to rest on the shoulder of the taller boy. Eddie Foley pressed the button and the window went up as the car moved off.

  ‘The natives don’t seem very friendly,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe we shoulda brought some coloured beads,’ Billy Fleming said.

  ‘Children,’ the third man said, ‘grow up into shites quicker every year.’

  He was a small man with thinning hair. He wore nice rings and he had grey eyes that were so cold the flecks in them could have been crushed ice. He was Matt Mason.

  Eddie Foley took the car up the hill and stopped across the road from the three men at the bench. He got out of the car and went over to them. Two of them looked about forty. The one with his foot on the bench must have been over sixty. He was the one who spoke.

  ‘Yes, sir. Can we help ye?’

  ‘I’m looking for Thornbank.’

  ‘Ye’re well out yer way here,’ one of the men on the bench said. ‘Where ye comin’ from?’

  ‘Glasgow.’

  ‘Ye woulda been better holding the dual carriageway tae outside Ayr,’ the third man said.

  ‘Ye’re wrong, Rab,’ the older man said.

  In the car Matt Mason and Billy Fleming watched but couldn’t hear what was being said. They saw the conspiratorial noddings of the three men before they formed into an advisory committee for Eddie. They saw the pointing gestures, one of the seated men standing up and doing an elaborate mime of directions. They saw Eddie nodding towards the obelisk. In the soft light of late evening the scene had a simple dignity, four men silhouetted against the vastness of the sky in a mime of small preoccupations.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Matt Mason said. ‘Getting a history of the place?’

  Eddie came back across and got in the car. He waved as he drove away and the three men waved back.

  ‘Ah know where we’re goin’ now,’ he said. ‘They were nice men.’

  ‘We’re not here to socialise,’ Matt Mason said.

  ‘That was a monument they were sittin’ beside. To the men from the village. Died in the First and Second World Wars. One of them was holdin’ somethin’. Some kinda tool. Ah hadny a clue what it was for. Imagine that. Ye would think ye would know what it was for. Ah mean, this isny Mars.’

  ‘Is it not?’ Billy Fleming said and glanced across at Matt Mason for confirmation of his sneer.

  Matt Mason looked back at him and then looked down at Billy Fleming’s trainer shoe resting on the back of the driving seat. The foot came off the seat and rested on the floor. Billy Fleming checked that the fawn upholstery wasn’t marked.

  The black and white trainer shoes were part of a strange ensemble. They were topped by jeans and then a black polo-neck cashmere sweater, over which he wore an expensive-looking grey mohair jacket. It gave him an appearance as dual as a centaur. Above, he was a kind of sophistication; below, he was all roughness and readiness to scuffle. The face linked the two: a bland superciliousness overlaid features that bore the traces of impromptu readjustment.

  ‘Ah was goin’ to ask what it was,’ Eddie said. That tool thing. But Ah felt such a mug, Ah didn’t bother.’

  Neither of the other two responded, and Eddie pursued the subject in his mind. The strange object the man had held and the solemnity in the darkening air of those names carved on the obelisk – names he imagined would mean much to most people in the village – had combined to make him feel what strangers they were here, the carelessness of their coming, rough and sudden as a raiding-party. He had sensed in the talk with them a formed and complicated life about the place, a strong awareness among them of who they were, mysterious yet coherent with a coherence he couldn’t understand. It was an uncomfortable feeling, as if he were a hick from the city.

  The atmosphere in the car intensified the feeling. They seemed to be travelling within where they had come from. The plush upholstery appeared foreign to the places they were passing through. With the exception of Billy’s jeans and trainers, their city clothes would have looked out of place outside, as if they had come dressed for the wrong event. The smoke from Matt Mason’s cigar surrounded them, cocooning them in themselves.

  Negotiating the winding ways, Eddie felt himself subject to the unexpected nature of events, the way an outcrop of land suddenly threw the road to the left, the recalcitrance of a hill. These roads were less invention than discovery. They weren’t merely asphalt conveyor belts along which sealed capsules fired people from one identity to the next as if they had dematerialised in the one place and rematerialised in the other. These roads made you notice them, rushed trees towards you, flung them over your shoulder, laid out a valley, flicked a flight of birds into your vision. They made Eddie aware of a countryside his ignorance of which was beginning to oppress him with questions that baffled him. What kind of people would live in that isolated farm on the hill? What kind of trees were they?

  ‘Flowers,’ he said suddenly. ‘The names of flowers. Ah always wanted to know a bit about that. Ah canny tell one from another. That’s true. Ah’ve got bother tellin’ a daisy from a dandelion.’

  ‘Six,’ Billy Fleming said. ‘That was a cracker. Only thing that wasn’t mashed tae a pulp was its beak. Definitely the prize-winner.’

  Eddie became aware of Matt Mason’s silence. He had learned to be wary of that silence. He decided to push his misgivings aside. He was here on a job for Matt Mason. It wouldn’t do to confuse his loyalties.

  ‘Fast Frankie’s not too hot on the directions,’ he said, reidentifying himself with the other two and their purposes. ‘Ah hope his information’s more reliable. Ye think the big man’s what he says he is?’

  ‘Frankie thinks he is,’ Matt Mason said, and remembered the time in the Old Scotia with Frankie talking.

  Fast Frankie White was a handsome quick-eyed man with a smile as selective as a roller-towel. He had been born in Thornbank – so he should know what he was talking about – and had left it by way of petty theft. He still went back there from time to time, usually when he was in trouble, to wrap his widowed mother’s house round him like a bandage. He often said more than it was wise to believe but in the Old Scotia he had sounded convincing.

  ‘Okay. Ye’ve got a decision to make. Fast. Ah know. But Ah’m tellin’ ye. He’s yer man. No question. Ah’ve known him for years. He’s the man ye’re lookin’ for. And easily worked. A big, straight man. Straight as a die. That’s what ye need, isn’t it? Honesty’s the best raw material in the world. Especially the poor kind. He’s gold for you, Matt. A rough nugget, certainly. But you could shape him into anything ye want. What’s he got in Thornbank? What’s anybody got in Thornbank? He’s on his uppers. Been idle for months. Used to work in the pits. How many pits are there now? Was working up at Sullom Voe for a while. But the wife didn’t fancy the separation. See, that’s the secret. That’s how you’re goin’ to get him. He’s a great family man. An’ what’s he providin’ for his wife and weans? You can offer him a way to do that. He’ll bite, Matt. Ah’m tellin’ ye, he’ll bite. And once he’s got a taste, ye’ll have him for good. An’ all they’re goin’ to be able to do . . . With this man? Come on!’

  Matt Mason remembered the image of Frankie with his arms crossed in front of him. He had swung his arms apart, hands up, with the brightness and activity of the pub behind him. It was the gesture of surrender
we’re supposed to make when faced with a gun.

  ‘Different class,’ Frankie White had said.

  In the almost dark a pit-bing loomed on their right. It was overgrown with rough grass, a man-made parody of a hill. The despoliation of the countryside around them made them feel more at home. Inside the car they enlivened into a conversation.

  ‘Not long now,’ Eddie said. ‘If he’s that good, what’s he doin’ living in a place like this?’

  Matt Mason smiled to himself.

  ‘Maybe he likes the quiet life.’

  ‘He better learn not to like it then,’ Billy Fleming said.

  ‘We’ll find out how good he is,’ Matt Mason said.

  Eddie put the lights on.

  ‘He’ll maybe not come,’ he said.

  ‘Same time every Sunday, Frankie says,’ Matt Mason said.

  ‘The Red Lion,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Funny name for a hotel,’ Billy Fleming said. ‘Ye wonder who thinks them up.’

  The arrival of darkness had welded them into a group with a unified purpose. The variousness of the countryside was obliterated. It could have been anywhere. There was only the familiar interior of the car and the headlights blow-torching their own path through the night. Matt Mason looked at his watch.

  ‘We’ll be in good time,’ he said. He looked across at Billy Fleming. ‘You ready?’

  ‘Born ready.’

  In the dim light he looked as if he might be telling the truth. The big shoulders seemed to be filling most of the back seat of the car. The face, planing intermittently out of obscurity, looked relentless as a statue. He carefully took off his wrist-watch and wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it in his jacket pocket.

  Everybody knows and doesn’t know a Thornbank. It’s one of those places you’ve driven through and never been there. It occurs in conversations like parentheses. ‘It took us four hours to get there,’ someone says, ‘and the kids were fractious after two miles. We went the Thornbank road.’ Hearing it mentioned, outsiders who know of it may still have to think briefly to relocate it. It’s the kind of place people get a fix on by association with the nearest big town, knowing it as a lost suburb of somewhere else.