The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  He was going there alone, Dan thought. No supporters would be going with him.

  The car was a 1965 Hillman and seemed old for its years. It had been loaned to them for the day by Geordie Parker, who bought old cars less as a means of transport than as challenges to his engineering skills. He had cars the way a womaniser might have relationships, only holding on to them for as long as they offered scope for his orgiastic love of mechanical experimentation: ‘Now if we put this bit here an’ that bit there an’ switched the cylinder-heads on her, that might be interesting.’ Referring to any car by the feminine pronoun (‘Ah handled ‘er that rough, she blew a gasket’; ‘Ye’ve got to double-declutch her or she’ll give ye nothin”), his conversation could sound like an esoteric translation of the Kamasutra for garage mechanics.

  Seeing them off in it, with Harry Naismith driving, Geordie made a small, formal speech, a bit like a Victorian father letting his daughter out without a chaperon.

  ‘She doesn’t do over fifty, Harry. It’s not her style. She begins tae get the shakes. Soon as ye feel her doin’ that, you ease up. Use her handbrake as little as possible. She’s delicate there. An’ when ye use it, gentle with her. Or the spring pops out an’ ye’ll have to throw bricks in front of the wheels to hold her. An’ she’s not keen on turnin’ left. Ye’ll find she won’t keep the indicator there. As soon as ye let it go, it flicks back down. But you keep movin’ it up an’ down an’ she’ll be flashin’ all right, though ye won’t hear any o’ that tickin’ noise inside. By the way, she’s champion for turning right. You’ll be fine, boys. Just treat her nice an’ ye’ll find that she’s a lady.’

  Geordie’s determined personalising of the car made more sense to Harry Naismith once he had started on the road. It felt less like driving than trying to please a crotchety old maid. Successive owners had attempted to remodel it to their own specifications, most notably changing what must once have been the back window of a shooting brake. It was now a hardboard hatchback, gone so spongy with weathering that to lean your hand on it was to leave your fingerprints for posterity. The back window had shrunk to a kind of Perspex porthole in the middle of the hardboard, and looking through it via the driver’s mirror, you could just about work out whether it was day or night back there. More detailed information was hardly possible. Yet in spite of the efforts to reshape it, the car had retained a stubborn independence.

  Not only did it not take kindly to going over fifty but when the needle stuttered nervously above forty a chill wind blew up the accelerator trouser leg in a very discouraging way. It also seemed to have a circulation problem and would cut out without warning when Harry was changing down, unless he coaxed it very carefully. Once, when they stopped to get cigarettes at a petrol station, they discovered that the back doors didn’t open from the inside.

  But such problems only added to the spirit of adventure that was among them. They were going to see something they had never seen before – a bare-knuckle fight – and they had more right to identify with one of the contestants than anybody else who would be there and it was a bright, crisp day and, in spite of or perhaps because of Frankie White’s directions, they weren’t sure of the way. That compound of circumstances acted upon their natural capacity for enjoying things like the elixir of youth. The car was full of boyish enthusiasm. The uncertainty of the car’s progress was just the necessary element of mild hazard (Would they make it in time? Would they make it at all?) that made a journey out of what might have been merely a trip.

  As they went, they spontaneously developed their roles in the drama of the situation. Alan Morrison was the world-weary traveller whom everything reminded of the past. He had been around all right but he was getting old and who knew how many such undertakings he had left in him? Sam MacKinlay was the leader of the expedition, not officious with it but never quite able to relax as much as the rest. He had to keep a careful eye on Harry Naismith, who was the driver who had once been good but who had been out of it for so long that his nerve was maybe gone. Alistair Corstorphine was the nervous newcomer and couldn’t have played it any other way, with a face that seemed only able to express varying degrees of surprise. He got into character early on by telling Harry at a side road that all was clear and they pulled out in front of a bus. The blare of the horn heightened the atmosphere.

  They even improvised their own plot lines. It wasn’t long before Sam and Harry had the quarrel. Sam, in the front passenger seat, had been looking across meaningfully at Harry several times. Sam would have liked to drive himself but he had lost his licence eight months ago for what he called ‘playing at tig with both pavements on the front street’. He had been driving a borrowed van. In the police station he had refused to provide a sample of urine. When the police doctor arrived, Sam had also been reluctant to submit to a blood test, claiming he had only taken a pint and a half of lager. ‘When did you leave the pub, Mr MacKinlay?’ the doctor had asked, looking at him closely. ‘Half-past eight,’ Sam had said at once, deciding that was a time early enough to suggest moderation. ‘That’s interesting,’ the doctor had said. ‘It’s only half-past seven just now.’ But the experience had in no way undermined his confidence in his abilities as a driver.

  ‘Harry,’ he said. ‘You heard Geordie. Take it easy with the car. Ah’ve known people change religions wi’ less bother than you change gears.’

  ‘Look,’ Harry said. ‘Who’s drivin’ the car?’

  ‘Is that what ye’re doin’?’

  ‘At least Ah’m managin’ to stay on one side of the road.’

  ‘Don’t give us that. Ah wis drunk at the time.’

  ‘Aye. Well, see that sample of piss ye wouldn’t give? It’s comin’ out yer mouth.’

  ‘At least Ah had an excuse that time. Ah’ve known people pissed as a pub jaunt who could drive better than you. Ye’ll bugger the gears, man. We want to get there. The gears’ll not have a tooth to their name.’

  They might not be the only ones.’

  ‘Well, stop at the first lay-by and we’ll see.’

  The tension in the car was real. Alistair, who had an ignorance of cars that was almost nineteenth-century, could think of nothing to say that might smooth things out. It was Alan who intervened successfully with the offhand aplomb of an elder statesman whose talent in crisis stems from his having no inhibiting awareness of what is actually going on.

  ‘I was in a car once,’ he said, as if the rigid silence between Harry and Sam were just a natural pause. ‘Coming back from Carlisle. An’ one of the back wheels came off an’ went past us on the road. We pointed through the windscreen an’ said, “Oh, look. Whit’s that?” Then we found out.’

  His memory seemed to put their present situation in perspective. They weren’t in a position as perilous as that. Also, he had successfully evoked in Sam and Harry memories of fathers and uncles who had had the same kind of relationship with old cars as Geordie Parker did. The smell of oil in the car helped. It was the distillation of a lot of working-class outings, the smell of pleasures past. Travelling precariously in the old Hillman, they felt themselves part of a tradition, as if they were driving out of the past, a time when machines were less of a status symbol and coexisted rather peremptorily with people, and the repeated breakdowns tended less to arouse self-righteous indignation in their owners than to leave them in a state of puzzled respect for the wilfulness of the combustion engine.

  The four of them needed such a point of group identification for they were all secretly feeling a certain amount of trepidation about arriving, were experiencing the familiar sensation of being country cousins. The car provided them with the best way of coping with that feeling: a defiant declaration of it. Arriving in a car like this was like coming in team colours. They felt they were supporting what Dan stood for.

  That feeling merged smoothly with the fact that they got lost, which brought a nice, exciting edge to the end of their journey. Time was running out and they couldn’t find the place and there was a real possibility t
hat the fight would have started before they had arrived, and nobody could tell how near to the end of the fight the beginning might be. Harry was being urged to put his foot down, regardless of what was happening up his right trouser leg. Sam said if it was frost-bitten and had to be amputated, they would all chip in to get it mounted for above his fireplace, so that his grandchildren would know of his heroism. The old car jolted them up and down along the country roads, as if it couldn’t quite remember what suspension was.

  ‘Come on, Harry!’ Sam was shouting. ‘Knock the guts out the old bastard if ye have to.’

  ‘Ah’m doin’ that!’

  ‘Do it some more.’

  ‘Maybe if we stopped, we could hear the crowd shouting,’ Alistair said.

  His suggestion wasn’t received with enthusiasm.

  ‘Ask somebody,’ Alan said. ‘We’ve got to ask somebody.’

  ‘Very good, Alan,’ Sam said. ‘You ask that coo there. An’ Ah’ll chat up a coupla rabbits. Who the hell are we gonny ask out here?’

  ‘A farmer, ya daft bastard,’ Alan said, losing his pub manner in the excitement.

  That was what they did, accidentally. They had taken a turning Sam had said he was sure must be the road and they found themselves in a farmyard. A collie was circling the car and barking at them. None of them was keen to get out of the car and Sam, in his role as leader, leaned across and pressed the horn. It sounded like a lost sheep. The man who came out was balding, with a moustache. Sam wound down his window and found the winder come away in his hand.

  ‘What d’ye want?’ the man said. The dog started to bark again. ‘Here!’ The dog lay down and was quiet. ‘What is it ye want?’

  ‘We’re looking for a fight,’ Alistair called out excitedly from the back seat.

  Sam grimaced.

  ‘What he means is we’ve been invited to a bare-knuckle fight.

  To watch, like. We were told it was around here. Can ye help us?’

  The man looked suspiciously at them and at the car. Whether from the appearance of the car or from Alistair’s remark, he seemed convinced of their harmlessness. Two children had come out of the farmhouse into the yard and a woman stood in the doorway.

  ‘Aye,’ the man said. ‘It’s on ma land. Back doon the road there. There’s a track to yer right. Brings ye tae the field.’

  Thanks, pal,’ Sam said. ‘Right, Harry.’

  The man held up his hand.

  The only place ye can park is the house here. Round the back. It’s a pound a head. Ah’ll show ye.’

  Harry drove slowly after him round the house and they came upon an acre of car-metal, gleaming multi-coloured in the pale sunshine.

  ‘Jesus,’ Sam said and called to the man, ‘Ah don’t know whit ye planted. But it’s givin’ ye a good crop.’

  As they got out, Alistair and Alan having to wait until they were released by the other two, they were mesmerised by the money parked casually all around them. Geordie Parker’s car looked as if it might be embarrassed, a feeling shared by Sam when he discovered on re-attaching the winder that it spun uselessly and he couldn’t wind the window back up. He left the winder on the front seat and hoped it wasn’t raining on the way back.

  ‘An’ Vince Mabon said it wouldny be worth comin’ here,’ Alistair said.

  He looked in wonder at the cars and felt the importance of what was ahead. He had been the more hurt by Vince Mabon’s dismissiveness of their journey, given in the incontrovertible tones of someone reading a prepared statement (‘A meaningless event. The only possible result is no-contest’), because he hadn’t been able, as he seldom was, to think of a reply. He felt he was looking at an effective answer now. A lot of important people must be here and surely that made the event itself important.

  Alan was offering the man a pound note and the man was staring at it.

  ‘A pound a head,’ the man said.

  That’s right,’ Alan said.

  ‘A pound a head. There’s four of ye.’

  ‘But there’s only the one car.’

  ‘A pound a head.’

  ‘What if we’d come in a double-decker?’ Sam said.

  ‘A pound a head.’

  Their silence was forming into a group vote for confrontation when the murmur of a small crowd came to them on the wind, the seductive sound of human expectation. They looked at one another and their eyes were a shared admission. Their common thought kindled every face to a smile. What did the money matter? He couldn’t charge them more than their excitement was worth. The other three were searching for their pounds when Alan, catching the style of the moment, waved their efforts aside and gave the man three more single notes. As the man followed them round the edge of the farmhouse, he saw three of them begin to break into a run, but a hobbled run, as if they were trying to give the laggard Alan a tow from their enthusiasm. The man stood watching them, shaking his head. The two children drifted towards the running figures, magnetised by their eagerness.

  ‘Here! You two!’ the man said. ‘Don’t you go near there the day. Ah’ve warned ye alreadies. You play up here.’

  ‘Is there somethin’ ye’re ashamed of down there, like?’ the woman in the doorway said. She was younger than the man but her big, handsome face was already more worn than his.

  ‘That’s enough, Jessie. Ah’ve explained it tae ye.’

  ‘Ye’ve explained it tae yerself. An’ Ah hope ye’re convinced.’

  ‘The daftness of ither folk’s no’ ma problem.’

  ‘Naw. But it’s oor land.’

  ‘Aye, an’ that bit’s makin’ us money for the first time since we’ve had it.’

  ‘Oan the Sabbath as well,’ the woman said.

  ‘You two!’ the man said. ‘Keep away from those cars.’

  Alan caught up with the others at the gate where the narrow, rutted pathway ended. Beyond the gate two big men were standing. One was the man Dan Scoular had knocked out in the car park of the Red Lion. Alan assumed that the other man belonged to the rival camp. The men seemed reluctant to let them in until Frankie White came forward and said, ‘It’s all right. These are the boys from Thornbank. The official supporters’ club. You should remember them, Billy.’ Billy Fleming opened the gate quickly.

  Alistair was effusive in his thanks to Frankie, who didn’t bother to explain that he was glad to find a role for himself in the proceedings. He led them into the small, widening field towards the noise.

  ‘How about this?’ Frankie said. ‘You don’t see things like this too often in Thornbank, eh?’

  The scene had a bright, heraldic simplicity. In the small bowl of the field that was edged with a few trees, the crowd – not large, maybe a hundred – formed a rough, broken circle. The way they were all turned towards the centre and the muted expectancy among them and the green strangeness of the place created a frisson among the new arrivals, as if they had stumbled on the meeting of a secret sect. Alistair, romantic in proportion to his lack of experience, felt it most strongly. It was as if a ceremony were about to take place, a truth about to be revealed, and he was to share in it.

  Drawing nearer and becoming a part of the crowd didn’t dispel that first impression in him. For the others familiarity normalised the event. They had arrived at an exciting place among people who obviously had a lot of money and, with Geordie Parker’s car safely out of sight, they could mingle and act as if they belonged here. Sam and Harry decided to move among the crowd, looking for good odds against the admission money Frankie White hadn’t taken from them. Alan was a good audience for Frankie’s proprietary running commentary on the occasion. But Alistair, wandering off himself, enlarged his awe on everything around him and found himself more and more mystified about where it was they had come to.

  A woman in a red coat waved to someone. A group of four had a basket of food and were drinking from glasses. A man had his son sitting on his shoulders, a boy of about nine. There were people here Alistair recognised. He saw a face he knew from seeing it on television. A
fter some thought, he identified the woman as an actress he had watched recently in a play about battered wives. There was a well-known footballer standing with his arm round a woman and on the other side of him was a team-mate. It gave Alistair an odd feeling to think how often he had talked about the player, discussed goals he had scored, and here he was standing beside him, just another member of the same crowd.

  Then Alistair saw Dan. He was standing inside the edge of the circle of people, wearing only his track-suit trousers and trainer shoes. His body looked startlingly white. Alistair, having manoeuvred himself to the front of the crowd, looked across and saw the other man, stripped as well, looking huge and menacing. Alistair stared at Dan again and felt a sudden compassion for him. He remembered talking to Dan in the Red Lion, seeing him in the streets of Thornbank. This man didn’t look like Dan. He was bewildered and white and taut. His body looked to Alistair as tender as a piece of fruit peeled for consumption.

  Alistair looked again at the people whose faces he had recognised. He thought of his mother watching the actress on television and being impressed by the emotion she had conveyed, the sense of the injustice of her life. He thought of the footballer and the number of people who looked on him as a hero. As he watched them, they were watching Dan, and he saw them not as solidities in themselves but as images that were the refraction of something else. Dan and the other man were that something else. In that moment the scene became sinister for Alistair.

  He felt they had come to watch one of their own being used in a way they shouldn’t have accepted. He didn’t want Dan to fight and Dan, if Alistair could judge from the way he looked, didn’t want to fight either. Alistair felt the moment out of the control of all of them. He thought that, instead of being here to watch, he and the others he had come with should be ranging themselves alongside Dan, ready to fight beside him. Impelled by the feeling beyond his usual timidity, he identified with Dan in the only way he could find. He shouted.