The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  He was glad the farmer had finally agreed. The other fields they had looked at hadn’t been right. This one was ideal – a small, natural arena hidden among farms, an uncultivatable remnant of the past that the developed, arable land hadn’t managed to obliterate. You could have imagined primitive champions meeting there, to settle the meaning of things, with the tribe and their elders looking on.

  He was glad Matt had offered the extra money to clinch it. For a moment, as they talked to the farmer in the middle of the cattle market, Eddie had thought he wasn’t going to agree. He was a big, balding man with a moustache and one of those deceptively open faces that Eddie now associated with farmers. He wore his red cheeks and his crinkled forthright expression, which suggested he was used to looking into all kinds of weather, like make-up that was almost convincing. Ah, well, ye see, he was troubled by the fact that all this wasn’t strictly legal. His misgivings got higher and higher until the money managed to clear them. Eddie would never again take farmers for simple people. He supposed that if you had won arguments with the earth there weren’t a lot of other ones you were likely to lose.

  That had been the second-last cog in the machine. The last one, with his jaw clamped like a vice to hold his will in place, was looking good. He had come a long way from a pub car park in Thornbank, and Eddie had played his part in it. He remembered with a smile something Matt Mason had said as they were leaving the cattle market with the venue fixed. Among the stench and the bellowing and the loud voices, Matt had slapped the haunch of a penned bull and said, ‘If Dan Scoular comes on all right, we might get him to take on one of these.’ They had laughed, but Cutty Dawson might be well within his range.

  Matt Mason wasn’t so sure. He was looking for something he still wasn’t convinced he had seen. He remembered Roddy Stewart’s comment when he had seen Dan Scoular for the first time in the gym: The horse looks good but the jockey seems to have doubts.’ And he remembered Tommy Brogan’s question on the same occasion: ‘Does he go for it?’ Well, did he? After the two weeks’ general training and fifteen hours locked in with Tommy Brogan, Matt Mason still couldn’t tell. Perhaps the answer could only come in ‘no-man’s-land’, as the farmer had called it. But, being a bookmaker, he would have liked to feel he could calculate the odds here and now, especially since he understood more and more that he wasn’t just gambling on a fight but on a way to control the future so that it would be a continuation of his past. He wanted Dan Scoular to prove something for him and so he watched him greedily, willing him to acknowledge that he would, through some secret sign that only Matt Mason himself would understand.

  The nearest Mason had come to believing in such an indication had been when they were confronting each other before the training. Whatever the others had thought was happening, he had been pleased with Dan’s refusal to back off. It was the stance from which Mason himself had started out.

  But since then only one moment had given him the same hope. It had come at the end of a punishing series of exercises. Tommy had slammed the medicine ball at Dan until he was tired. He had left Dan punching the heavy bag until Matt Mason could feel the pain in his own arms. He had him doing stretching exercises on the floor, again and again. Suddenly, Dan Scoular’s eyes, lit with a fierce incandescence, had raked everybody else in the room as he laboured. It was a vicious look, declared everybody else an enemy.

  As it hit Frankie White, he glanced away. That look had been like a sudden transformation of Dan Scoular before his eyes. Frankie had never seen that expression on Dan’s face before – not when he had dealt with Billy Fleming, not in Alan Morrison’s improvised gym, not last night when his anger had been ingoing, troubled. Frankie wondered what they had done to him. He felt like leaving, dissociating himself from the rest of what would happen. As Dan said, he had done his bit. He would have preferred to take his money now and just go.

  While Tommy Brogan peeled off his singlet and put on boxing gloves, having told Dan he could take a couple of minutes’ rest, and while nobody else spoke, Frankie found the gym oppressive with its smells of embrocation and resin and sweat, pungent as the incense he associated with the church services of his schooldays when he had had to endure explanations of the meaning of life he didn’t want to believe. Just as he had felt nothing was as serious as they had made out then, so he couldn’t accept that anything was as serious as this. He didn’t want to come too near to seeing clearly what the way he lived involved for he could only cope with his life as a series of unexamined, vaguely romantic gestures. But he was obliged to stay as Tommy Brogan led him nearer to the raw centre of what he had helped to bring about.

  ‘Right, big man,’ he said. ‘Enough of the kiddin’. Now the real stuff.’

  They went into the ring. Frankie knew that Tommy fancied himself at that. He had good reason. They said of him that he had never lost a street fight in his life. Tommy was a physical freak, Frankie thought. He moved with a speed he should have lost years ago. Watching him, Frankie was wondering if there were people of such strong will that what they wanted badly enough they got. He remembered reading in a magazine about Gandhi and how he had believed later in his life that having sex took away the vital juices from a person. That fitted Tommy. Frankie could recall talking to him in a pub once and hearing him say, quite casually, something that had chilled Frankie to the bone. ‘See me when Ah was young,’ Tommy had said. ‘Ah would always rather fight than fuck. Always.’ He hadn’t changed. His reason for being was to perfect a single gift, the ability to destroy another man physically. If he could have split his private atom, he would have made himself into a bomb.

  Yet he was completely and obviously outclassed by Dan Scoular, a man who had never tried as hard as he had and who, within a week, had surpassed him. Frankie didn’t believe it was merely a matter of age. There might be six or seven years in it but Tommy was a maniac for fitness, and today he had tried to sap Dan before taking him into the ring. Yet Dan made him miss by inches time and again and placed punches on him that he simultaneously pulled, like someone constructing diagrams for a book on boxing.

  Frankie relaxed a little, seeing the Dan Scoular who was familiar to him. There was an element of the comic in the situation and Frankie felt comfortable with comedy. Eddie appreciated the grace of what Dan was doing. Matt Mason felt cheated. Dan wasn’t showing himself. You couldn’t tell what he was capable of.

  Tommy Brogan, presumably aware of the impression he was failing to make, precipitated the exhibition into an event. He wrestled Dan roughly into a corner, held him with his left hand and hooked him on the jaw with his right. It was then Matt Mason found his sign, brief it was true, but brilliantly clear. In a blurred sequence of reflexes that Dan was as much a victim of as Tommy, Dan ducked away and, as Tommy turned to find him, spun him with a left into position and crossed his right precisely into the moving arc of Tommy’s head. Tommy volleyed on to his back.

  ‘Jesus!’

  The word was pulled out of Eddie Foley’s mouth in compelled admiration. Frankie found his misgivings about what he had done temporarily suppressed yet again by the realisation that he might have picked a winner. Matt Mason believed he had seen what he was waiting for. The way Dan had confronted him when he had come in at first could be faked, was a gesture not an action. But in there with Tommy he had shown, however briefly, the unfakable will to fight that ignites the reflexes under pressure. Then, in the very giving of the sign, Dan erased it.

  He was across immediately, helping Tommy up. Tommy let himself be helped and then, as consciousness came back, he angrily shook Dan off. The others’ awareness was still behind what was happening in the ring, trying to reconstruct the punch. It was like trying to remember where a flash of lightning has been that fuses as it happens.

  ‘Ah’m sorry,’ Dan said. ‘That wasn’t needed.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Tommy said.

  ‘Ah was worried about me,’ Dan said.

  ‘Save it, save it. Start worryin’ when ye miss.’r />
  It was an exchange in mutually incompatible idioms that translated into their opposites. Tommy offered a gruff admiration and Dan heard a rejection. Dan extended a concern and Tommy received an insult. Tommy was deeply offended. The offence wasn’t in the blow but in the offer of help. The blow was what a man took from another man, the gentleness wasn’t. Matt Mason shared Tommy’s feeling of offence. He watched Dan bend out of the ring and Frankie White come forward to take off his gloves. Dan picked up his towel and sat down alone. Still unsure of what he had bought, Mason decided he had better use what he had been keeping in reserve to tilt the odds in his favour as far as he could. A discreetly applied stimulant might be in order.

  There’s something I want to show you,’ he said.

  Dan blinked away his sweat, looking up at him. Matt Mason turned towards Frankie White and winked. To Frankie it felt like an amnesty. Mason turned back towards Dan.

  ‘In the office here,’ he said.

  Dan rose and followed him. As Mason closed the office door, he was studying Dan’s reaction to the fact that there was somebody there, somebody who had been there all the time. Benny Smith’s appearance matched that unobtrusiveness. He had moved the chair into the corner of the room beside the window and had almost managed to merge with the wall. Dressed in jeans and jerkin, he was very thin and his eyes were redrimmed. He didn’t look at Dan but his eyes took in Matt Mason briefly and then concentrated on the floor.

  This is Smithy,’ Mason said.

  Dan nodded to the downturned head.

  ‘Show him your arms, Smithy.’

  The man struggled out of his jerkin and pulled up first one sleeve of his checked shirt and then the other. The skin was conspicuously punctured, the needle-marks most dramatic in the soft hollow where forearm and upper arm met.

  ‘You know what that means?’ Mason said to Dan.

  Dan nodded.

  ‘You wondering why I’m showing you this?’

  Dan didn’t answer.

  ‘Smithy. Tell the man who supplies you with that shite.’

  ‘Cam Colvin.’

  ‘And who put you on it in the first place?’

  ‘One of Cam’s operators.”

  ‘You ever tried to come off it?’

  ‘I’ve tried.’

  ‘You ever going to come off it, do you think?’

  ‘Oh aye. When they bury me.’

  ‘What age are you, Smithy?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  Mason liked the way Smithy had responded, as if his only function was to illustrate the points Mason was making. But Dan Scoular’s face was still impassive. Mason went on deliberately to talk about Smithy as if he couldn’t hear what was being said, was only for their inspection like a specimen floating in formaldehyde.

  ‘And look at him. He looks older already than he will ever be. He’ll just go on till there’s nothing left of him to stick a needle into. You know what can happen with people like that at the end? They run out of places to jag. I’ve known them injecting themselves in the prick. Only place they could find a vein. There’s a lot of Smithy around. And getting more every year. What’s wrong, big man? You not like facing the truth?’

  Dan turned as if he was going to go out. He swung back towards Matt Mason.

  ‘That’s a man ye’re talkin’ about. Not a tailor’s dummy. He can hear ye.’

  ‘Oh. You think I’m hurting his pride. Grow up. What pride? Why do you think he’s here?’

  Dan looked back at Smithy.

  ‘He’s here for money. He’s earning money. Look.’ He took two ten-pound notes from his pocket and handed them to Smithy. ‘Put that in your veins, Smithy. Cheers!’

  The man went out without a word.

  ‘What else do you want me to do? I’m doing him a favour. The quicker he gets to an overdose, the better it’ll be for everybody.’

  He took out his cigar-case, selected one. Dan wasn’t going to speak but Mason held up his hand with the lighter in it as if to forestall him.

  ‘Before you start talking like a social worker, Dan. You can maybe afford pride but he can’t. It never occur to you that people get to places where pride can’t follow them? He’s there. Your worries about talking like that in front of him. That’s your pride you’re talking about. He doesn’t have any left to worry about. And he never will again. You know why I showed you that?’

  He lit up his cigar.

  To make something clear to you. That’s what you’re fighting, Dan. Cutty Dawson works for Cam Colvin. And that’s how Cam Colvin makes his money. That’s where we live. So I’ve bent a few rules myself. Because there’s no other way to work in this shit-heap. But never anything like that. Remember that on Sunday, Dan. You better have your shower before you get a chill. We want you fit for Cutty.’

  When he followed Dan out a moment later he found him staring at the ring. Tomorrow was a rest day. This was the last time he would see it. Matt Mason looked at Dan Scoular looking at the ring and wondered what he was seeing there.

  There is a pub in Graithnock called the Akimbo Arms where the lounge bar and the public bar, though separate, are linked by an arched doorway from one gantry to the other. It means the same bar-staff can serve both places and so, like a reversible raincoat, it is an economical way of presenting two images to the changing times.

  The public bar is what the pub originally was, a place where men drank. But it is smaller now, having been rendered peripheral by the encroachments of the lounge, where men and women drink together on soft seats and under alcove wall-lights. Sometimes women go into the bar but not often. When they drink there, it is usually because there is someone they want to meet and, occasionally, for the making of a point or from a self-conscious decision to go slumming. But they never become regulars.

  The connecting door between the two is most commonly used for access to the men’s lavatory or the pay-phone, both of which are in the public bar. The old bar largely retains its identity as a shrine to a traditional Scottish sense of manhood, though attracting fewer devotees than formerly. The rituals haven’t changed much but the punctilious practice of them is less fanatically adhered to. Swearing is no longer compulsory. Indeed, it is rare enough for some traditionalists to savour a fine, orotund obscenity when they hear it, like a memory of when the service was in Latin.

  It was in the public bar Dan Scoular stood on the night Frankie White missed him in Glasgow. On the occasion of the meal with Matt Mason and the others he had found himself unable any longer to drown with talk the pain of the wound Wullie Mairshall had put in his mind. It was Wednesday. He had risen from the table and phoned the Red Lion. Wullie, like an anti-doctor always on call, had been ready with ointment to exacerbate the sore. His informants had supplied him with it: Thursday was the night. They would be going to a place called the Akimbo Arms. ‘A daft name,’ Wullie said, ‘whatever it means.’ Wullie was a thorough practitioner, he even provided directions on how to get there.

  Not knowing there were two parts to the pub, Dan, screwed up to cope with whatever he would find, had blundered into the public bar. He found some men looking at him curiously. There were no women. As both an expression of relief and a cover for his embarrassment, he ordered a pint. He felt stupid standing here as a projection of Wullie Mairshall’s imagination, dream of the working-class avenging angel. It was then he saw them.

  Framed in the archway leading to the lounge, lit attractively by a wall-light, she sat, like an unholy icon. The image, once seen, was a brand on the eyeballs, blinding him for the moment to everything else. Irrevocability was the first pain he felt, a lifetime fact expressing itself in an instant. I’m here to stay, the moment told him. You remember me till you die. Countless invisible props to his sense of himself, masculine vanities so secure it must have been years since he checked them, attitudes he had hardly questioned, went up like tinder in one sudden flame. It was lurid in the light of it that he saw the other man’s face and vaguely remembered him as someone he had seen at a party. Bu
t that was a long time ago. Could it have been going on as long as that? The tremors from his collapsing present ran back into his past. Not only did he not know where he was. He didn’t know where he had been. Suspicion had become fact and fact became again suspicion.

  Why then did he not move through to the lounge and confront them immediately? He was to wonder about that. That was what, if he had been asked to imagine the scene, he would have been sure would happen. It surely couldn’t have been because he became aware of the barman lugubriously paging his attention with ‘All right, sir?’ The fact that he found himself automatically conducting the trivial business of paying couldn’t have been enough to divert him from acting. It might have been connected with the disorientation from the centre of himself he had felt since going to Glasgow. It might have been partly because he knew what Wullie Mairshall expected him to do. It might have been because he sensed the situation was too important to be expressed in a single action.

  All he knew for sure was that he stood there and, in the time it takes to deny a reflex, felt fall from him like protective clothing his complacent assumptions about himself. He had unconsciously rehearsed for such a moment innumerable times. Since adolescence, the gruff, ritual responses had been taught to him and his friends from anecdotes and in answer to the speculative catechism, ‘What would you do if . . .?’ ‘I’d have him first. An’ then we’d see.’ ‘They like lyin’ thegither, they could have the same grave.’ ‘Kick baith their ribs in.’

  His own life, with its early aggressions and apparent endorsement of hard values, had been an implied subscription to that automatically shared ethos. Now experiencing the reality of it, he had hesitated and he wondered how many others would have behaved as he had done in practice. Those hard threats he had so often heard uttered against the possibility of a wife’s adultery seemed to him here less statements of what would certainly happen than charms to frighten such an event out of taking place.