The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Ah don’t smoke.’

  ‘Ah told ye,’ Frankie said.

  But he missed the point. It wasn’t a matter of checking on his information. It was improvised stage-business, self-taught management technique for controlling situations. Matt Mason’s timing was a matter of instinct but what he used it to promote was a well-rehearsed performance. He lit Eddie’s cigarette with his gold lighter and then his own cigar. He re-emerged looking at Dan from behind a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, Merlin of the cigar.

  ‘I’m arranging a bare-knuckle fight,’ he said.

  Dan Scoular looked across towards the others in the bar as if checking his location in normalcy. Having confirmed his fix on where he was, he looked back at these three as if they were somewhere else, maybe inhabiting their own fantasy or just trying to take the mickey out of him. Frankie White was nodding reassuringly.

  ‘What for?’ Dan said.

  ‘It’s a complicated story,’ Matt Mason said. ‘Frankie White’ll tell you. If you agree to do it. If you don’t, you won’t have to know, will you?’

  ‘Ye’re kiddin’.’

  ‘I stopped kidding when I came out of the pram.’

  Dan took a sip of his pint. It seemed to feel strange in his mouth. The idea was so bizarre that he came at it tangentially.

  ‘Ah’ve had a few scuffles,’ he said. ‘But they were always for a reason.’

  ‘Money’s not a reason?’

  ‘A fight in the street’s different.’

  ‘What’s different? You’re doing the same thing, aren’t you? It’s man against man.’

  ‘Naw. It’s different. Ah’ve watched a lot of boxing on the telly. That’s a different game. More complicated. Street fightin’s just two things.’

  ‘What would they be?’

  ‘Suddenness. And meanin’ it. Ye go fast. If ye can, ye go first. An’ ye stop when it’s over. That’s all Ah can do.’

  ‘Should be enough.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Eddie Foley said, ‘that’s not true, big man. Listen –’

  Vince Mabon had come over to their table. Matt Mason looked up as if wherever he sat he was booking a private room and Vince hadn’t knocked. Eddie Foley cut his sentence dead. It was less polite than talking on and ignoring Vince’s presence would have been.

  ‘Excuse me, Dan,’ Vince Mabon said. ‘Ah want to thank you for what you did there.’

  ‘Any time, Vince. We’ve got to protect the nation’s intellectuals.’

  But the demon of sloganising that was in Vince had to climb on to even his gratitude like a soap-box.

  ‘But I still don’t agree with that kind of violence. That wasn’t the kind of violence I was talking about.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Matt Mason said, ‘he should’ve left you to explain that to Big Billy. In the dummy alphabet.’

  Perhaps Vince was learning from humiliation but this second time around he found a response. With a slightly unsteady hand, he put his partly drunk pint on their table.

  ‘I don’t think I want your drink, mister,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t taste right.’

  Matt Mason looked as if he was going to get up. Dan took hold of Vince’s arm with his left hand and held up his right, palm towards Mason.

  ‘Okay, Vince,’ he said. ‘Cheers.’

  He let go of Vince’s arm and Vince walked straight out of the pub.

  ‘He’s only a boy,’ Dan said.

  ‘He’s only a shitehead.’

  ‘He’s only a boy. You’re maybe big where you come from, sir. But this is his pub.’

  ‘His pub?’ Matt Mason smiled. ‘Does he own it? Mind you, who would want to? It’s your pub when you own it. Not when you buy a couple of beers in it. I should know. I own more than one.’

  ‘Matt,’ Eddie Foley said. ‘Anyway, we came for a reason. Listen, Dan. As Ah wis sayin’. Ye’re wrong about all it is that ye can do. Suddenness and meanin’ it? Against Big Billy, Ah could be just as sudden and mean it more. And it wouldn’t do me a lotta good. It would still be a short-cut to the blood bank. You’ve got somethin’ special. Ah’m tellin’ ye. Ah’ve seen a few. It’s just that ye haven’t explored it yet. And you’re a mug if ye don’t. A mug! It’s a talent like anythin’ else. Maybe the only one ye’ve got. It might amaze ye what ye can do with it. It might amaze ye the money it could get ye. You never considered that?’

  He had, of course. He had wondered about how good he really was many times. It would have been strange if he hadn’t. Whoever hasn’t dreamt of uniqueness must have achieved it by that. Dan Scoular, when he was younger, had had his share of ridiculous dreams, those adolescent imaginings that thrive on impossibility till they overdose on it. But he had come quickly to understand how few his real choices were.

  By the time his early physical prime was passing, he knew there was only one thing he was especially good at. He didn’t pretend to himself that it was a talent that mattered much. But he didn’t have intellectual contempt for it either. It was for him related to pride and some kind of integrity. Not the use of it but the sense of himself it gave him meant a kind of wholeness. He couldn’t understand politics too well or carve out an impressive career or say things that reduced other people to silence. But he had something that was quietly and relaxedly his own.

  Lately, it had felt like all he had. With his job gone and no prospect of another and his marriage baffled, he had been forced to look steadily at the dwindling possibilities in his life. Faced with the blankness of the future, he had taken to wondering about the past. He had wondered if he could have been a boxer, if that would have changed their lives and made things better.

  Eddie Foley had, without knowing it, opened a door on Dan Scoular’s small, pathetic cache of hope. He had put a light on there and said that it was maybe more than he had thought, that it might not be too late. They were now talking to a different man, had activated something in him, like accidentally giving a drink to an alcoholic on the wagon. It meant so much to him that he didn’t want to let them know.

  ‘Ah don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Ah need to mean it. Why would Ah fight another man without a reason?’

  ‘You fought Billy fast enough,’ Matt Mason said.

  ‘He was claiming Vince, wasn’t he?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So Ah know Vince. That woulda been a liberty. The only damage Vince could do ye would be give ye cauliflower ears with talkin’.’

  ‘So imagine the man you’re fighting insulted Vince. Shouldn’t be hard. Most people would.’

  Dan moved another way.

  ‘Anyway, Ah’m thirty-three. What do Ah need with this?’

  Matt Mason shrugged and took a sip of his drink, as if it might be the end of the interview.

  ‘What ye workin’ at just now?’ Eddie Foley asked.

  ‘Not at answerin’ questions you know the answer to already.’

  ‘How d’ye mean?’

  ‘Ye don’t have to enter for Mastermind to know that Frankie here put ye up to this. An’ if he did, he would’ve told ye certain things. Like Ah’m idle.’

  ‘For a man that’s unemployed, ye’ve still got a taste for luxuries.’

  ‘Ye mean what Ah think ye mean?’

  ‘Ah mean it’s a luxury to want to fight for a reason.’

  ‘Ah would’ve thought it was a luxury tae dae anythin’ else.’

  But Dan was talking automatically, as if from a script he had learned a long time ago. Matt Mason leaned forward suddenly and took a wad of money from his inside pocket. He started carefully to count tenners on to the table. He stopped at twenty and put the rest of the money back in his pocket.

  ‘Two hundred quid,’ he said. ‘Tax free. Just to train for two weeks. Where are you going to get a better offer?’

  Dan Scoular looked at the money. It was fanned out on the table so that each separate note was at least partly visible.

  ‘What would be the rules of this fight?’

  ‘Bare knuckles. No feet, no butting, no weapons. A
knockdown ends a round. You get thirty seconds’ rest – to be back at the line. First man to fail to make it loses. Last man standing at the line’s the winner.’

  ‘Who made the rules?’

  ‘That’s not your business. You get paid for obeying them. You take it or leave it. They’re just the rules.’

  ‘When would this be?’

  ‘Three weeks today. He’s got his man. I’ve got to get mine in a hurry. Have I got him?’

  Dan Scoular waited.

  ‘Why me?’ he said. ‘Ah’m just a boy from the country. A man like you must know a lotta harder men than me.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ Matt Mason said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I know men could take you out while you were still wondering if there was something wrong. But we need fresh blood for this one. Somebody who only knows how to fight fair. That way we won’t get disqualified. There’ll be people watching. We’ve got to make it look right.’

  ‘Where would this fight be?’

  ‘In a place. You don’t worry about that. In a safe place.’

  ‘But this isn’t legal.’

  Matt Mason overdid his expression of horror.

  ‘Away you go. I’ll have to fire that lawyer of mine. He’s misled me again. Look, if I want a holy text, I’ll go to a wayside pulpit. You’re not being asked to pass judgment on the thing. Just to participate.’

  Dan Scoular thoughtfully riffled the notes.

  ‘Training?’

  ‘You would train two weeks with Frankie. Down here in your own backyard. We would want you kept out of the way. You would be our secret weapon. Running. Eating right. Staying off that stuff.’ He pointed at the beer in the bottom of Dan’s glass. ‘Just getting fit. The last week I’d get you up to Glasgow. Into a gym. You’d get another hundred quid for that.’

  Dan Scoular was seeing three hundred pounds on the table.

  ‘If that’s for trainin’, what would Ah get for fightin’?’

  That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘How you fight.’

  ‘So what’s the wee print?’

  ‘Winners win money. Losers lose it. I’d be betting a lot of money on you. You win, you get your percentage. Double what’s on the table. You lose, you get your bus money out of Glasgow. As far as the city boundary. The Tinto Firs.’

  ‘Ah don’t fancy that bit.’

  Then don’t.’ Matt Mason was getting impatient. ‘It’s a freelance job. It doesn’t have a pension scheme.’

  He lifted the notes and held them up, halfway between the table and his pocket, his rings glinting above the money like a promise of what it could lead to.

  ‘Money depreciates fast these days,’ he said. ‘Look. I’ve got things to do. Your first fight, big man, is with yourself. Can you win it? You’ve got thirty seconds – to come to the line.’

  He was smiling at his own pun. He was so sure of things. Dan couldn’t think at the moment of one certainty, except the feeling he had to use himself in some way for his family. He sensed that what he was being offered must separate him from where he had been. But perhaps he was already separated from there. He looked at Alan Morrison and the others in the bar. They hadn’t exactly rallied round when he challenged Billy Fleming. Why should he worry about distancing himself from them? He saw no particular merit in his ability to fight. It had meant something important to his father, almost a kind of sacred trust that you shouldn’t abuse. But if you had lost the way to think like that, if you didn’t believe in the gift, why not make money out of it? It was at least putting it to a use. If he wasn’t who Wullie Mairshall and others thought he was, why not be who he could be? How many chances was he going to get? And the offer was closing.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Looks like either the money goes in your pocket or me.’

  THREE

  Fast Frankie White was a person of great but misdirected enthusiasms, the sort of man who, if he had been of a more literary inclination, might have devoted two years of his life to learning Spanish in order to read Dante in the original. As a young man, he had been inexplicably to America and, though the trip was so short that people meeting him in the street on his return would ask him when he was going, the experience was something he always carried around with him, a fragment of fool’s gold he believed would lead him to the real thing. For the hurried vision of America he had glimpsed, the sense of how quickly and surprisingly money could be made, had left him with a kind of Klondyke mentality. Like a mad prospector who has lost his map, he stumbled around his life, looking for gold where there was none, following hunches that were hardly more than superstitions.

  His main belief was that the quickest way to money was through crime. It was a fixation which had persisted in the face of spectacular proof to the contrary. Frankie White had been involved in handling stolen property, break-ins, loads switched from lorries on dark nights, bank-card swindles, none of it ever on a big scale, and if the money he had made were set against the sentences he had served, a just society would have felt that it owed him. If crime had been a company, he could have gone on strike and won his case. Yet he had a kind of status in his own world. A lot of policemen had a liking for him because he had never been known to use violence in his life. A lot of more successful criminals didn’t mind his presence on the fringes of their activities because he had never informed on anyone else, no matter what kind of mess he was in himself. A novice who had never achieved ordination, he remained a sincere believer and was a worldly innocent. Excluded from participation in the more serious acts of crime, he had in his amateur way memorised its rituals and its forms. He knew a lot of its tricks and many of its ways of speaking. In him these were no more than imitative but he himself wasn’t conscious of that. He meant them.

  Clothes were a part of his identification with the image he had made for himself. He could always believe in himself more strongly when he felt he looked as he ought to. This meant that most of the time he dressed the way he believed a successful criminal should – in flashy suits. This morning the costume was different.

  He studied himself in the dressing-table mirror of the upstairs room, turning to look over his shoulder, bending down to see how his legs were. The maroon track-suit was a good fit. He looked like a boxing trainer, all right. He jumped quietly and athletically downstairs, trying to make sure he didn’t waken his mother. But she was already in the kitchen. She must have heard him moving around in his room, which meant that they were going to go through one of those occasions when they were like people who were appearing in two different plays at the same time. In his play the hero was a worldly-wise criminal who, as worldly-wise criminals will, loved his mother too much to let her know about the dark side of his life. In her play the hero was a basically good-hearted man who had gone wrong but was going to turn over a new leaf. Every time he had come out of prison, her belief in his role had increased.

  She had the advantage of having set the scene. There was half a grapefruit, sugared, on the table beside a bowl of cornflakes and a jug of milk. She was making toast.

  ‘Morning, Maw,’ he said.

  ‘Hullo, Son. You’re up early. My, what ye dressed like that for?’

  ‘Joggin’,’ he said. ‘Got to get a bit fitter.’

  ‘That’s a good idea. Ye should do more of that.’

  ‘Ah was talkin’ to Dan Scoular in the pub last night. He’s comin’ out with me.’

  ‘Has Dan not got a job yet, either?’

  ‘Who has, Maw, these days?’

  That’s true. Everybody has to bide their time with these things. The whole country’s in a terrible state.’

  He finished his grapefruit, put the rind in the waste-bin, ran hot water on the saucer, watching the pips go down the drain, and put the saucer on the draining-board. He started on his cornflakes.

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘It’s good that ye’re keepin’ yerself fit. Ye’re nearly forty.’

  ‘Ah’m all right. Ah just want to be righter.’

  ‘Ye’re
nearly forty. That’s when Sarah Haggerty’s man died. Have ye seen her since ye were back in the town?’

  ‘Saw her on Saturday,’ he mumbled through his cornflakes. ‘Two weans with her. They’re gettin’ up.’

  ‘Oh, her weans are really off her hands now. She’s got the bigger lassie, ye see. She’s eighteen. An’ very sensible. She’s that fond of the young yins, too. Sarah’s really a free agent noo.’

  Frankie was busy finishing his cornflakes.

  ‘Aye,’ Mrs White said. ‘We never ken the day or the hour. Like yer feyther, God rest him. Ye think ye’ll stay a while this time, Son?’

  ‘Ah’ll be here for two weeks anyway, Maw. Then Ah’ve got to go up to Glasgow for a week or so. On business.’

  ‘Ah must get that bedroom of mine redecorated. Ye miss Bert Haggerty for that. And never any mess wi’ him. In and out and hardly a dent in yer purse. Funny the way he went. It’s no’ that he wisny looked after or not fed right. Not a better woman in the town than Sarah Haggerty. An’ she’s never taken up wi’ another man. She’s a loyal yin.’

  Their two separate performances were not without poignancy in the way they played against each other. Frankie’s style, as perhaps befitted his role, was more cinematic than theatrical, Hollywood-cryptic, a bit like Gary Cooper without the loquaciousness. He said so little and everything so obliquely partly because he specifically felt the need to minimise all information to his mother about his doings, because it would only worry her – possibly to death, he sometimes dreaded – and partly because he wasn’t sure specifically what he felt, and didn’t want to know. He was being laconic not only with her but with himself. His inscrutability was self-defence because he dreaded admitting to himself the potentially lacerating guilt his mother’s presence evoked.

  Mrs White’s conversational technique was as highly stylised as a Japanese Noh play. Any verbal gesture might appear very arbitrary and sometimes virtually meaningless yet, to her son, each casual remark could evoke a history of meaning. Hers was a deep and abiding hurt refined by her way of life into bearable and graceful expressions of itself. Forty, for example, was an age of almost magical importance for her. It was then that Frankie’s father, a terrible drinking man, had reformed himself into something like an ideal husband. Thereafter, his home was the most important thing in his life. She believed, she had to believe, that the same thing would happen with Frankie. The word was a charm in her mouth.