The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  Passing every day the house where he had lived with his parents, he felt it most strongly. That small council cottage-type was his private museum of a past he seemed to understand less every day. He had been an only child, born when his mother and father were already in their thirties. That had at first made them even closer to him than they might have been, for they were ready for a child, whetted with longing and bored with the unrestricted time they had, and they had made their lives around him. But when he came into his teens, things changed. It seemed they couldn’t follow him, even in imagination, into the newness of his experience. They had conceived him to be an extension of their own lives, not a contradiction of them.

  The first time it had become clear to all of them that he was becoming a stranger in the house was when he gave up his academic course at school. His parents were incredulous. They saw education as self-evidently the most important thing in his life, the culmination of their efforts on his behalf. For days they threatened, cajoled, bullied, and he refused. When the noise of argument subsided, something irrevocable had happened in their three-fold relationship. It was as if a betrayal had taken place.

  He had lived with that awareness ever since, still did. His motivation at the time, he now knew, had been partly emotional and instinctive, but only partly. It may have been to some extent compounded simply with impatience. But there had also been in it a blurred groping towards rationality. It had been a serious choice, related to a growing distrust of the dream his parents had nurtured for so long. When he tried to look at their lives, he saw them as a kind of deferment, a belief in the future. They gave you the past like a burden to be carried forward and transformed into fulfilment in your own life, or perhaps simply passed on to your own children, made even heavier. He had always found that the mortification of the present in order to beatify the future was an obscene principle. He believed that the present was all anyone truly had. Also, he simply didn’t accept that the principle worked.

  His parents’ lives had been a long and quiet self-sacrifice. For what? His father had worked in the pits all his life. The gradually improving conditions had done no more than compensate for the erosions of ageing, so that his father had never seemed to do more than hold his own. His mother’s only ambitions had appeared to be for others. He saw their experience as an injustice in which they had acquiesced. His mind tried to reject it.

  Yet every time he passed that house, the memory of it stayed doggedly in step with him for a long time after. Time and again, he fought his father in the back green. Time and again he lost. He could try to generate contempt or pity or anger at what his father had done to him that day but the memory stayed brute, refused to domesticate. He had seen something in his father’s face, a hard grieving, that no subsequent thinking upon could quite make powerless. It was as if his father knew something that he must convey to him, a bleak knowledge to impart beyond the mind to assimilate, a law for the blood to learn.

  That dark transaction, past rationality, haunted him still. What it meant, what it might have done to him, he couldn’t know. Perhaps he would find out with Cutty Dawson. Preparing for that meeting, running, training, he sensed himself building a rational structure on a foundation that was mystery. He might hone his body to a single purpose towards Matt Mason’s ‘line’ but what would arrive there was unknowably more. Seeing Wullie Mairshall from time to time as he ran and being careful to avoid him, Dan realised that what Wullie stood for, as well as many other things, would be waiting for him when the running stopped.

  * * *

  Eddie Foley was in the office himself when the phone rang. Lifting it, he thought he was plugged into several crossed lines. At least three people were shouting somewhere and a fourth voice was saying, ‘Keep it down, will ye?’ Eddie waited with the phone held slightly away from his ear. He was glancing at the daily paper on Matt Mason’s desk when the voice got through with a clear ‘Hullo?’

  ‘Frankie White,’ Eddie said.

  ‘That you, Eddie?’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘Look, I’m checkin’ in to say everythin’s fine here. No sweat. Okay?’

  Phones brought out the Hollywood in Frankie. Perhaps it was because the person at the other end couldn’t see him and therefore couldn’t contradict the image he wanted to project. No doubt it would have been even better if the phone had been an old wall phone so that he could hold one part to his ear and lean urgently into the other part. His voice took on a slightly American tinge.

  ‘So that’s the message,’ he said. Things are looking good. If you would just pass that on to Matt, Eddie. See you.’

  ‘Hold on a minute, Frankie,’ Eddie said. ‘Ye might be seein’ us quicker than ye think if ye don’t wait to speak to Matt personally. He doesn’t like second-hand information.’

  ‘But there’s really nothin’ to tell, Eddie. It’s all goin’ smooth.’

  ‘Well, let’s keep it that way, Frankie. You just wait there. Matt’s out in the shop. He may be a wee while coming. But Ah would wait if Ah was you. Even if it costs ye a few bob more. Could cost ye dearer if you don’t.’

  Eddie put the phone down on the desk and crossed to the window of one-way glass that looked down on to Matt Mason’s betting shop. He saw Matt talking to the marker up on his elevated platform. A couple of other people looked as if they were waiting to talk to Matt. Eddie went down, picked his way among the punters and whispered in Matt Mason’s ear. Matt nodded and went on talking. Eddie came back up into the office, closed the door, lifted the phone and said, ‘He’s comin’,’ put it back down and started to read the paper.

  At the other end of the line, Frankie White was standing behind the bar of the Red Lion, looking suave and nodding to Davie Dykes across the room. He was wishing he didn’t have to speak to Matt Mason because he didn’t want his feeling about how good things were here interfered with. It was the fifth day of their training and Frankie would have enjoyed just going on like this.

  The place was more alive than he had seen it in a long time. For a Friday lunch-time this had to be a record in recent years. Dan and he had been making a small impact in the town. A lot of people didn’t know exactly what was going on, just vaguely knew Dan Scoular was training for some kind of fight but that had been enough to arouse their interest. Alan Morrison had offered an outbuilding as training quarters. It was a place Alan had gone out to look at from time to time, presumably converted stables, and sometimes under the inspirational promptings of the whisky it had metamorphosed in his imagination to a Bierkeller or a function room where flushed and well-fed dinner-dancers swirled to the sound of real music. But always it had reverted with his hangover to its bleak, grey self. Now, without too large an expenditure of capital – a home-made heavy bag hung from the ceiling, a couple of old chairs, some towels and a skipping rope – it had become a gymnasium. It was proving a sound investment, for it meant that Dan and his trainer were in the pub every day and that meant a lot of other people were as well. One of their rewards was that Frankie could use Alan’s private phone.

  Frankie was enjoying his status. It was perhaps the first time since his childhood that he had felt he really belonged in Thornbank. He saw more to the place than he had seen in it before. This was the closest he had ever come to finding an external set of circumstances that matched the vague blueprint he had of himself. He was doing something he felt to be slightly glamorous and slightly disreputable and it made him known and he was getting paid for it. If Matt Mason were just to keep the expenses coming, Frankie felt he could have settled for this, the early-morning runs, the supervised sweating sessions, the banter in the pub, him training Dan Scoular for ever for a fight that never happened. Wouldn’t that have done?

  He looked across at the man who had been responsible for this feeling. Dan Scoular was sitting drinking his orange juice and talking to Davie Dykes. Wullie Mairshall, who hadn’t yet worked out the solution to the barking dog mystery, had wandered over to them. Even Davie’s stories seemed to ha
ve found an extra thrust to their fantasy. Dan was laughing. He looked already as if he was sitting in a slightly brighter light than the others, and he would get fitter. He was beginning to enjoy the emergence of harder edges in himself. Frankie felt a slight pang when he looked at him. He was so open and happy sitting there, like a party to which everybody was invited. He knew so little about what he was involved in. Frankie wasn’t sure he himself knew much more. Their temporary happiness didn’t belong to them, it was rented.

  ‘Yes,’ the landlord said.

  ‘Hullo, Matt. Frankie White here.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was the Duke of Edinburgh. Where you speaking from? Dial-a-riot?’

  ‘Ah’m in the Red Lion. Well, Matt, things are going well. We’re –’

  ‘I hope that big man’s not in there with you.’

  ‘Dan’s on the orange juice. Come on, Matt. He’s behaving like a champion. He’s three times fitter than he was when you saw him already.’

  ‘But I don’t want him sitting in there advertising. We’re not selling tickets for this, you know. You sorted out the misgivings you said he was having?’

  ‘He’s all right, Matt. He’s just such a decent big man. Ah mean, it’s not the sort of thing he’s done before. But that’s one of the reasons for letting him be about here. Keeps his spirits up.’

  ‘All right. Just so long as he doesn’t interfere with any other kind of spirits. You let me know the first sip of beer, even, he takes. I know he’s going to turn up. Even if it’s in a coffin. But I want his head as right for the job as we can get it. I’m going to arrange something for him when he gets up here. Just to put him right in the mood, if he’s wavering.’

  ‘How do you mean, Matt?’

  ‘I know what I mean. You don’t have to. Just you work on your end of it. It’s not just the body, you know. I think he’s got it there. But I’m not so sure about his head. He tries to see round corners too much.’

  ‘On that very subject, Matt. How about this? Ah let three of the boys from down here come up for the fight. What Ah think –’

  ‘You’re not on.’

  ‘But, Matt. What that would –’

  ‘Forget it. We’re not running buses with “Thornbank Supporters Club” on them. What’s wrong with you? All that country air must be addling your three brain cells. That won’t happen.’

  Frankie smiled to somebody in the bar.

  ‘That it then?’ Matt Mason said.

  ‘That’s it.’ Frankie was thinking of something else to say when the line went dead.

  ‘Cheers then, Matt,’ he said loudly, laughing. ‘Sure, sure. Ah’ll keep in touch.’

  He put down the phone.

  ‘Sorry Ah took so long there, Alan,’ he said. ‘But he likes to know how the man’s doin’. How much for that then?’

  ‘Forget it, Frankie,’ Alan said. His hand gestured towards the busy bar. ‘I think it’s covered. We’ve even got some ladies in, the day. Civilisation at last.’

  Frankie had noticed the women. He usually did. Since his teens, they had been noticing him. His looks were perhaps the gift that had stunted his growth, as gifts often do. Finding it so easy to be attractive to people when he was young, Frankie had never really matured beyond the belief that effort was a sign of innate inferiority. One of the women was Sarah Haggerty. Sarah, like Frankie’s mother, like most women, activated subtle danger signals in him. He secretly felt them to be much more substantial than he was, capable of such exotic emotions as passion and commitment. He knew his way around their anatomies all right but his visits there tended to be fleeting and functional because he had felt hidden in those marvellous recesses of flesh enough warmth and intensity to shrivel his awareness of himself into an admission of how much he lacked those qualities. Women were the place where Frankie had come nearest to having to acknowledge the hollowness that filled his flashy suits. And since he was afraid of them, he had adopted the most popular and the most convenient camouflage. He had become a philanderer. He made sure that when he was with one woman, he was always en route to another one, in case, should he stay too long, he might discover less in himself than he wanted to find. With them, he talked a filibuster against the coming of that moment when he might confess a stricken silence and lay his head against a woman and admit, uncleverly, incomprehensibly, he loved her.

  Of all women, Sarah Haggerty set that alarm system ringing loudest because, being younger then, he had come closer than at any time since to taking the chance of finding out what was really in him. She was the more banal but the more substantial truth of himself he had been in flight from for so long. She had been watching him on the phone with such honest interest that it wasn’t immodest of him to suspect that she was here to see him. The realisation did two things, in rapid succession. It made him wonder if he hadn’t been wrong, all those years ago. It made him afraid to be wondering such things. He put on his act like a visor and went over.

  ‘Sarah, love of my life,’ he said and kissed her hand.

  The three women started laughing. The other two would be about the same age as Sarah, therefore about the same age as he was himself. One of them wasn’t bad. She was blonde and mildly plump, held an expression of coquetry to her face like a slightly battered fan. The other, he thought, was gone. Her overdone make-up was a promise so desperate it could have been a threat. She looked like a reheated meal. Sarah was still very good-looking, the only one he could have been serious about, so he made sure to pay attention to the blonde one. Sarah introduced them but he was so involved in his own routine he didn’t catch the names.

  ‘As always, it’s great to see you,’ he said, his eyes including the blonde woman.

  ‘What’s this you and Dan are up to?’ Sarah asked. ‘Your second childhood?’

  She was indicating his track-suit.

  ‘Quite the contraire,’ Frankie said. He had always thought the occasional word of French made all the difference with women. They had to be very occasional. The only other two he felt he could use with confidence were ‘amour’ and ‘bon’. ‘This is very serious business. Work for men.’

  They tell me Dan Scoular’s goin’ to fight somebody,’ the blonde woman said. The fierceness of her stare had no connection with the lightness of the remark, as if her eyes were dislocated from her mouth.

  There is a rumour to that effect.’ Frankie smiled at them mysteriously. ‘Ah’ve heard as much myself.’

  ‘So what are you?’ the reheated meal was saying. ‘His manager or what?’

  ‘His trainer, lovely.’ The epithet was the toll his indifference paid. ‘Ah’m just gettin’ him fit. Givin’ him a few wrinkles. Few tricks of the trade.’

  ‘So where is this?’ Sarah asked. ‘You couldn’t get us some tickets?’

  ‘It’s not that kind of fight, Sarah,’ Frankie said. ‘A strictly private affair. Ah would if Ah could. You know that, love. Tell you what. As compensation, Ah’ll buy ye all a drink.’

  He had done it smoothly, conveyed an impression without getting involved in serious business and then got out, neat as shinning down the back ronepipe as the husband arrived. He could imagine the interest he was leaving behind him.

  On his way towards Dan’s table, he was stopped by Sam MacKinlay. Frankie enjoyed the experience of people reaching out to touch him. It was as near as he would get to fans tearing off a piece of his clothes. Harry Naismith and Alistair Corstorphine, the other two domino players, were sitting with him. Frankie gave them his attention the more generously because he couldn’t remember them ever wanting it before. He saw Sam as the only one of the three really worth the time, at least a quick mouth. Harry was a man lost in his fifties, who had hitched his life to Sam’s to see if he might not manage some mileage yet. Alistair was a gentle mid-thirties man, still testing life with his toe.

  ‘Frankie, what’s the news?’ Sam MacKinlay said.

  ‘He doesn’t fancy it, Sam.’

  ‘That’s the best ye can do?’

  ‘Sam. Yo
u saw the man. What he says goes.’

  ‘But it’s only us three and maybe old Alan,’ Sam said. ‘We’re not askin’ to book the whole North Stand. Christ, ye could smuggle that lot in in yer pockets.’

  ‘We’d love to see it, Frankie,’ Alistair said.

  ‘That’s a fact,’ Harry said.

  Frankie stared past them thoughtfully, let them register how much he cared. He thought he could see a way to play Matt Mason right but it wouldn’t be to his advantage to tell them that. He thought suspense might be good for them. He had a commodity to sell.

  ‘Ah’ll be honest, boys,’ he said. ‘Ah asked him there. He shat on it from a great height. “Forget it!” That’s what he said. “We’re not running buses.” “You’re not on.” Those were his exact words. What can Ah say?’

  Alistair put his hand to his head. Harry looked at Sam Mackinlay.

  ‘Come on, Frankie,’ Sam said. ‘Don’t give us that. You count a bit up in Glasgow. We’re where you come from. Big Dan’s Thornbank. So are we. And so are you. Us country boys have to stick thegither. What ye say?’

  Frankie was shaking his head, wishing he could find a way to help them. He made to speak, hesitated.

  ‘There’s one possible way,’ he said. ‘Ach, naw. Let’s forget it. He says no, boys.’

  ‘Frankie!’ Sam said. ‘Just tell us the way. Come on. Ah knew you when you had vents at yer arse the tailor never made. So what’s the way?’

  ‘Well. There’s going to be checkers at the gate. Right? Ah could bung them a few quid. Maybe that way, Ah could get ye in. But it means it would cost ye. Maybe at least forty for the four of ye. It’s a liberty. Ah don’t want to do that with ma mates. Ah think we should forget it.’