The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  He remembered Raymond telling him last week about a dream he had had. Raymond was walking in a street alone when he saw a woman lying there. He had known, as you know in dreams without knowing how you know, that she was dead. She was dressed in a skirt and a blouse. ‘Maybe like an office worker,’ Raymond had said. He had knelt over her and noticed blood trickling from the side of her mouth. While he was studying her, he had heard a noise that frightened him. As he glanced up, a creature was running towards him, completely covered in hair. ‘But it was a woman,’ Raymond said. ‘It was an animal. But I knew it was a woman.’ He had tried to run away but she had trapped him against the wall. He had wakened with her about to sink her fanged teeth in his throat.

  Dan had explained to Raymond that he thought the dream was just about growing up, about seeing women not as neutral adults but as something sexual. But what had reassured Raymond had troubled Dan. It had told him how much Raymond was growing up, the difficult places he was moving into, and it showed Dan his own time contracting. Whatever significant influence he was still to have on them, whatever coherent message his life was meant to convey, he had better find it quick. He thought of seeing Betty through the window today and knowing how much she meant to him. Whatever love was supposed to be, that was what he felt. But his love was somehow isolated in him, like a genie in a bottle. He had to find the means to release it, to show himself to them as he wanted to be.

  He took a sip of his beer and decided that it wasn’t helping. One of the strangers over at the window rose and went through to the lavatory. When Dan turned a little later to see what Frankie White was having, he discovered that Frankie had gone as well. Dan set him up a drink in his absence.

  Matt Mason was still urinating by the time Frankie White came through. Frankie took the stall beside him. Matt Mason didn’t look up. He seemed transfixed by the sight of his water.

  That’s your man?’

  That’s Dan Scoular.’

  ‘Seems a bit lost in himself.’

  ‘Ah told ye. He’s got a lot of problems. Who hasn’t around here these days?’

  ‘Who’s the gonk with the mouth like a megaphone?’

  ‘Vince Mabon. He’s a student.’

  ‘Big man likes him, does he?’

  ‘Dan likes most people. But, aye, he seems to like Vince.’

  ‘Uh-huh. We can maybe arrange to see how much. The gonk’ll do.’

  ‘How d’ye mean?’

  Matt Mason was finished, waved his penis as if it were a large and cumbersome object. He went across to wash his hands and found no soap. He was fastidiously annoyed. Frankie finished and didn’t bother to wash his hands. He was too preoccupied.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Matt Mason was rubbing his hands together under the water, which, after testing, he had realised wasn’t hot. He tutted like an old maid. Finished, he made sure the tap was fully turned off and looked round for a towel. He noticed that it was a hot-air hand-dryer.

  ‘Daft old bastard,’ he muttered. ‘One modern convenience in his place and it’s a bummer.’

  He hit the button angrily and felt the hot air play ineffectually on his hands.

  ‘Whoever invented these,’ he shouted above the noise of the machine, ‘should definitely not get a Nobel Prize.’

  Standing amid the smell of his own urine, Frankie White suddenly realised where they were. Like a bank robber who has had his pocket picked, he felt outraged. The feeling gave him the courage to shout at Matt Mason above the sound.

  ‘No, no. Wait a minute. We don’t need any wee tests. Ah’ve told you what the man can do. That’s not what Ah thought the night was about.’

  Matt Mason was turning his hands back and forward in the heat.

  ‘Come on, Matt! We don’t need this.’

  Suddenly, the machine shut itself off. Frankie White cringed from the sound of his own voice. Matt Mason was rubbing the fingers of each hand on the palms, dissatisfied. Without warning, he leaned across and dried them on Frankie’s jacket.

  ‘I’m not a punter,’ he said. ‘I’m a bookie. Always check the odds.’ He turned at the door. ‘But it’s okay. I’ve warned Billy it’s a fair fight.’

  He went back through to the bar. Frankie hung about for a moment until he admitted to himself that there was nothing he could do but follow. Going back to his whisky, he saw the scene begin to move under its own impetus, as if he had accidentally hit the start-button of a machine he didn’t know how to stop. Matt Mason was nodding to Billy Fleming. Billy Fleming lifted his pint and began to finish it.

  ‘We’ll never get anywhere,’ Vince Mabon was saying, ‘through the parliamentary system. It’s a set-up. The game’s rigged. Look at the last time. They brainwashed the public with a lotta lies.’

  Billy Fleming walked up to the bar.

  ‘A pint of heavy,’ he said.

  Preoccupied, Alan reached for the empty glass and made to put the next pint in it.

  ‘You not got two glasses, like?’ Billy Fleming said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Alan lifted a fresh glass and started to fill it.

  ‘I’m tellin’ ye, Alan. To hell with gradualism. It’s revolution we need. Violence is the only way we’ll go forward. Take the struggle into the streets.’

  ‘You talk shite!’

  The remark had the suddenness of a gun going off, leaving you wondering where it came from or if that was what you had heard at all. The confirmation that it had happened was the solidity of the silence that followed it.

  ‘You hear me? You talka loada shite. Ah’m fed up listenin’ to you.’

  Vince shuffled uncomfortably like a man looking for the way down from a platform. When he spoke, his voice had lost its rhetorical tone.

  ‘I’ve got my opinions.’

  ‘Shurrup!’

  The pint Alan had been filling foamed, forgotten, over the rim of the glass.

  ‘Ah don’t want to hear yer opinions,’ Billy Fleming said. ‘You believe in violence? Come out here an’ Ah’ll show ye violence.’

  Vince spoke quietly.

  ‘That’s not the kind of –’

  ‘Ah said shurrup! You’re not payin’ attention. Open yer mouth again and I’ll put a pint-dish down it.’

  The others in the room watched helplessly while Vince went as still as if a block of ice had formed round him. Alan turned off the beer tap.

  ‘Hey!’

  The word was out of Dan Scoular’s mouth before he knew he was going to say it. Some basic feeling had expressed itself beyond his conscious control. The trouble taking place in the pub wasn’t his and he would have preferred to have no part in it. But the injustice of the event was so blatant. His instincts had cast his vote for him. But nobody else voted with him or, if they did, the ballot was secret. He felt his isolation, and his head was left to work out how to follow where his heart had led.

  The word had been quiet but it introduced a counter-pressure in the room, a careful groping for leverage. Billy Fleming turned slowly, almost luxuriously, towards where he felt the pressure coming from. He looked steadily at Dan Scoular.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Can Ah help ye?’

  ‘The boy’s just talkin’.’

  ‘Not any more he’s not.’

  They watched each other.

  ‘An’ if he does open his mouth, he’ll get it.’

  ‘You’ll not touch the boy.’

  ‘Are you his daddy?’

  The pressure was balanced evenly between them and, deliberately, with very measured calculation, Billy Fleming tilted it in his favour.

  ‘Well, you’ll get it as well, if ye interfere.’

  Dan Scoular smiled, realising Vince had been a decoy. The smile was camouflage he knew couldn’t protect him much longer. He was angry with himself for having been so easily left with no options. He thought of something Betty had once said of him: ‘When you walk into a room, the only attitude that seems to occur to you is, “What game do you play here? I bet I can play t
hat as good as you.” It never seems to occur to you to say, “I don’t believe in that game. I think it’s a rotten game. I’m not playing.” Why do you think you have to accept the rules?’ It looked as if he had done it again. But he was in the game now and all he could think of to do was try and play it with style.

  ‘You want it badly, don’t ye?’ he said.

  He walked towards the other man and, as Billy Fleming tensed in preparation, walked past him. Billy Fleming was momentarily uncertain, thinking he was being walked out on. He was glancing towards Matt Mason as he heard Dan Scoular speaking from the door, which was open.

  ‘Alan doesny like fights in his pub,’ he said and went out.

  As Billy Fleming followed, Matt Mason stood and went to the window. The assurance of his action, as if he had declared himself the promoter of this fight, magnetised the still-stunned reactions of the others into imitation. Nobody followed the two men out. Frankie White crossed towards the window and the three domino players rose and moved hurriedly after him. Alan came tentatively out from the carapace of his bar, paused, turned back for his glass, perhaps thinking he might need its assistance to get as far as the window, and slowly joined them. Vince Mabon, not knowing what else to do, took his place there, too. They had become an audience.

  At first all they could see were their images reflected in the curtainless window, a motley group portrait straining into the darkness to look at themselves. Then the headlights of a car came on. They saw Billy Fleming take off his jacket and lay it across the bonnet of the car. Dan Scoular kept on his light jerkin.

  The figures flickered briefly in the headlights of the car and it was over, like a lantern-slide show that breaks down just as it’s getting started. They were looking at an effect that didn’t appear to have had any very clear cause. Billy Fleming’s head hit the ground with a soundless and sickening jolt that some grimacing expulsions of breath in the bar provided the sound-track for. He lay with a peacefulness that suggested he had found his final resting place. A man came out of the car and Dan Scoular started to help him to lift Billy Fleming into the back seat. Billy Fleming had obviously regained consciousness before they got him there but he raised no objections to their assistance.

  The realisation that he didn’t appear to be too seriously hurt opened a valve on the tension of what they had just seen and humour blew out, a gush of relief at not having to go on confronting seriously the reality of violence.

  ‘Ah’m glad Ah didny buy a ticket for that one,’ Sam MacKinlay said. ‘Ah wish it had been on the telly. At least we could see a slow-motion replay.’

  Nearly everybody laughed. Dan Scoular walked back in to a festive atmosphere that caught him unawares. He had been involved in that mood of nervous recuperation that had always followed a fight for him, a dazed sense of having had his self- control mugged by his own violence. Their smiling faces seemed to him contrived. They couldn’t be feeling something as simple as their expressions showed. He felt like a man in quicksand with whom other people were leaning over to shake hands. Nobody had wanted the fight to happen and now everybody seemed delighted that it had. Even the man who had been with the one he hit was smiling.

  ‘Right!’ he was saying to Alan. ‘Everybody gets a drink. Give everybody what they’re having. And a gin and tonic for me.’

  Frankie White was looking at him and saying, ‘What did Ah tell ye? One good hit!’

  ‘Come on,’ the man said. ‘Do it. And a double for yourself.’

  The room was becoming a party and Dan Scoular was apparently the guest of honour. It seemed churlish not to attend. He shrugged.

  ‘Ye not want to get yer big bodyguard a pint on a drip?’ Sam MacKinlay shouted.

  Everybody was laughing. Alan Morrison was hurrying about behind the bar as if the place was crowded.

  ‘A few folk will be sorry that they weren’t here the night,’ he said.

  Before Dan Scoular had cleared his head, he was sitting at a table with Frankie White and the other man.

  ‘Dan,’ Frankie White was saying. ‘This gentleman is Matt Mason. Matt, you’ve seen who this is. Dan Scoular in person. A man with a demolition-ball at the end of each wrist.’

  The talk of the others was like background music, all being played by special request for Dan Scoular. Matt Mason shook hands with him. The man who had been in the car came in and sat at their table. Matt Mason introduced him.

  ‘Ah think Big Billy has a slight case of concussion,’ Eddie Foley said. ‘His head hit the ground with a terrible wallop.’

  The domino players were shouting over.

  ‘Thanks, mate.’

  ‘Cheers!’

  ‘All the best.’

  Matt Mason gave them a regal wave.

  ‘A lucky hit, you think?’ he asked Eddie Foley teasingly.

  Eddie Foley laughed.

  ‘Came out a telescopic rifle, that punch. If that was lucky, beatin’ the Light Brigade was a fluke. This man can go a bit.’

  ‘He would have to against Cutty.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Dan Scoular said. He looked at Frankie White. ‘What did you set me up for here?’

  Matt Mason held up his hands.

  ‘I can explain,’ he said. ‘You want to give me a minute?’

  ‘Ah don’t know.’

  Dan Scoular was trying to work out what had happened to bring him here. He had said ‘Hey!’ and the word had been as mysterious in effect as ‘Open Sesame’. His night had been transformed. The result was slightly dazzling but he didn’t like being dazzled and beyond the surface laughter and brightness he had already glimpsed shadows that troubled him. Frankie White had been standing at the bar when Dan came in but he hadn’t just been standing at the bar. Matt Mason had been sitting with the man Dan hit and now he hadn’t even asked about him. It was as if the man had served the purpose he was brought for. He was expendable. Someone had been waiting in the car to switch on the lights. Dan had thought he had been getting involved in a spontaneous fight but it had only been a controlled experiment. In doing what he had thought was winning for himself and Vince Mabon, Dan had been winning, it seemed, for Matt Mason. It had been a fight Matt Mason couldn’t lose. The rules were strange here.

  ‘Dan,’ Frankie White said. ‘Just listen to the man a minute, will you? Please?’

  Alan had brought the drinks across, rested a stepfatherly hand on Dan’s shoulder as he put down his pint.

  ‘That’s how we used to breed them in these parts,’ he said, staking an early claim to proprietorship of this evening’s legend.

  Dan sipped his pint and waited. Realising Alan had gone off without giving him anything, Eddie Foley passed a pound to Frankie White.

  ‘Get us a whisky and a half pint, Frankie.’

  Dan Scoular watched Frankie White’s receding back with thoughtfulness.

  That was Billy Fleming you saw away there,’ Matt Mason said.

  ‘How is he?’ Dan asked Eddie Foley.

  ‘Beat,’ Matt Mason said. ‘You ever lost a fight?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Just the one. But Ah haven’t had too many.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Ma feyther.’

  ‘Your father? What age were you?’

  ‘Ah would be nineteen.’

  ‘How did that come about?’

  Dan Scoular looked at him, decided that whatever his reasons for asking were, he had no reasons for not telling.

  ‘Ah was a cocky boy. Ah hit a man for no reason. Just because Ah felt like it. He didny want to fight. Ah broke his jaw. Ma feyther took me out the back door. An’ hammered me.’

  Matt Mason gave the event his expert consideration, offered the balm of his wisdom to the dead wound.

  ‘Maybe you weren’t trying. I mean, fighting your father. That’s bound to put brakes on you.’

  ‘Oh, Ah was tryin’ all right. But Ah was in the wrong. That’s a bad corner to come out of.’

  ‘You superstiti
ous?’

  ‘What’s that got to do wi’ superstition? Ah walk under ladders an’ everythin’.’

  ‘I mean, having less chance if you’re in the wrong?’

  Frankie White had returned from the camaraderie at the bar. He put down Eddie Foley’s two drinks. Eddie held out his hand and Frankie remembered the change. Dan Scoular watched the handing over of the silver. He took a sip of his pint.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Ah just believe in certain things. Like what ma feyther told me that day. If ye can’t fight for the right reasons, keep yer hands in yer pockets.’

  ‘And what are the right reasons?’

  ‘Ah’m not always sure. But he seemed to be.’

  Matt Mason held up his glass and paused before taking a drink. He might have been showing off his rings.

  ‘You want to make some money?’

  Dan Scoular looked slowly round the group at the table. His look separated himself from them, as if they were a conspiracy.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Was that an interview for a job?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘But, mister, Ah didny apply.’

  ‘All right. But I’m asking you. Do you want to make some money?’

  ‘Who doesny want to make some money? But there’s money and money.’

  Matt Mason looked at Frankie White.

  ‘Does he like talking in riddles?’ he said and looked back at Dan. ‘There’s only one kind of money. The good stuff. Unless it’s home-made. And this won’t be. All right?’

  ‘Ah just mean some money’s dearer than others. Some just costs sweat. Some costs yer self-respect. What do Ah do for it?’

  ‘You do what you’re good at. You fight.’

  ‘For money? You mean in a ring?’

  Matt Mason was enjoying the revelation to come. He took out a leather cigar-case and offered Dan Scoular a cigar. Dan shook his head. Eddie, who had taken out his cigarettes, didn’t seem to notice Frankie White about to take one. He held out the packet to Dan Scoular.