The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Dan! Dan!’

  Some people close to him started to laugh. He felt briefly embarrassed and then, in a moment of unusual boldness, shouted again.

  ‘Dan!’

  Dan was not to experience his fight with Cutty Dawson as something complete. What happened happened and he was part of it. The full reality of it was lost in its occurrence, like a prolonged explosion. It existed as a time he was only able to think about clearly once it was past and even then it was a kind of black hole in his life, something that only memory could come near to understanding and yet not too near or it vanished into the sheerness of unassimilable event.

  It was the darkest experience of his life, the place where all the contradictions clashed, found free and rabid life beyond his ability to cage them in rational attitudes. He could only endure them. It was where ideas and beliefs and attitudes met too, in violent interaction. Doubts he had long thought tame went wild again and he was what they hunted. All that immediately survived their attack was the need for survival.

  Yet, intractable as the experience was, thought had to come back to it to make it exist for him and let him keep his sense of his own continuity. So his fight was both what had happened and what his memory made of it, which was a strange amalgam of what he tried to remember and what his will put there.

  He had heard in Alistair’s voice just a sound, meaningless, like the other noises that came to him as dehumanised as the cries of seagulls quarrelling over food. Most of him was deferred. Friendship was a complication that didn’t register here. He knew Matt Mason was talking to him but he didn’t understand what was being said. He shivered slightly. Divested of his track-suit top, he seemed stripped to a sliver of himself, and felt himself oddly victimised by the others, still wrapped in the warm colours of their clothes. He wondered who they were. He was trying to impose on the amorphousness of what was happening his own sense of it. This was a fight coming up. But nothing he had done, none of the careful thought-processes through which he had led his mind, had prepared him for this. It was too various.

  He had realised that he had seen Cutty Dawson before. He looked very powerful but was loose around the belly. Dan’s mind recorded the fact like a filing-system. He had seen that face in newspapers some years ago. The beaten-down skin above the eyes was what he remembered. Cutty Dawson had been a heavyweight boxer. He had been Mike Dawson then. There was something Dan had read about him that he couldn’t bring back to mind. That he knew Cutty Dawson was odder than confronting a stranger would have been. It seemed an elaborately incomprehensible contrivance that they should meet each other for the first time stripped to the waist across a patch of grass. He wondered if Matt Mason and Frankie White had avoided reminding him of who Cutty was in case they worried him with his reputation. Such practicality would have been irrelevant to an event as weird as this, a ridiculous pretence that the whole thing made sense.

  This didn’t make sense. An accident made sense. If you were in a car and you drove too fast or you were drunk or you hit black ice, the result made sense – injury or death. Those were understandable rules. They might not be fair but they were understandable. He found himself thinking that if the common enemy was death, what was the point of lesser fights? But he believed the thought was a weakness and he deliberately tried to turn away from it.

  A bird volleyed past on the wind and he was aware of the size of the sky, could imagine the vast vaults of the day stretching around them and they were trapped in this small, dim preoccupation as under a shell. He knew he must concentrate and yet couldn’t believe in what was about to happen. The expectant faces that ringed him were a conspiracy in which they all supported one another’s conviction that they were in a real place to see a real event. He thought of the long runs on the roads around Thornbank and all he could remember of the purpose he had had was the beauty of the mornings. He could feel no anger against Cutty Dawson. This wasn’t something that had ignited by accident between them, an incident fuelled by its own spontaneous intensity. He had as much reason for dancing with Cutty Dawson as for fighting him – more, given the brightness of the day. This was a meanness, a distortion of the possibilities.

  Suddenly, fully realised and rank in his mind, like a weed he hadn’t known had taken such firm root, was a memory of adolescence. He must have been seventeen and he was walking alone on a beach. An autumn sun was withering in the sky. It was just a cold afternoon with nowhere to be, when he had somehow mislaid his friends, and one of those teenage moods had rolled in like a fog and lost him in itself. He was nobody in particular. His sole substance seemed to be one walk on the shore. He had been improvising identities for himself as he went along. For a while he was a thrower of stones into the sea. Then he became a jumper on to clumps of seaweed, an artist of the popping sounds they made, searching with tireless ingenuity for the one true, ultimate, original and inimitable pop.

  Then he found the rock-pool. It was oblong, barely a yard in length. At first, when he looked into it, he saw only himself thirsting after himself, like a variant of all those times he had stared for relentless minutes at his image in the glass of his bedroom, trying to discover who he was. But his shadow took the surface off the mirror and the pool became three- dimensional, a small water-chamber in which he soon saw creatures move. He didn’t know whether they were insects or fish, fragile, almost-transparent entities that could have died of his forefinger. They sculled around in that little wave-worked aquarium, yards from the sea, darting menacingly at one another, having their own minute, self-absorbed war. The potential for gloom that follows adolescents around like a private, forty-piece band, ready to orchestrate passing depressions into despair, had found symphonic expression in him then. But now, standing with a light wind in his face, he felt an echo of that moment and it didn’t seem something to be mocked. He thought maybe he had been looking in a mirror that day after all.

  He would have liked these people to understand the strangeness of why he was here. It had nothing to do with Cutty Dawson. It was really about his wife, about the way his life hadn’t been going right, about the fact that he had no job. And he had said ‘Hey!’ in a pub one night. It didn’t make sense. He didn’t understand it. He had always admired Cutty Dawson. He used to read about him in the papers and he had respected the way he took defeat. He had heard him interviewed on television once, after he had lost a fight. He had been very generous to his opponent. Dan remembered one thing that Cutty had said. ‘Ah think maybe Ah taught the boy a coupla things. An’ he learned them fast. Ah suppose everybody ye beat, ye take a bit of them with ye. Good luck to him.’

  He didn’t understand it. He didn’t know where this field was. They had brought him in a car and unloaded him here. He didn’t know who all these people were or what had made them come here. He wanted to believe his wife loved him again.

  This wasn’t right. Somebody else had arranged this. He and Cutty Dawson had nothing to fight about. Why were they fighting? He would have liked to talk to Cutty Dawson about his life. That would have been interesting. He must have had a strange life, to be a boxer and then be standing here. What had happened to him to bring him to this field?

  Dan found himself being led towards Cutty Dawson as if no other possibility were present. Cutty Dawson seemed sure enough of the rightness of what was happening. He was flexing his massive shoulders and jerking his neck from side to side, his eyes never leaving Dan Scoular’s face. He had a tattoo on his right forearm that looked like a sword with a snake curled round it. Cam Colvin, looking small and ordinary in a dark overcoat, and another man stood beside Cutty Dawson. Matt Mason and Tommy Brogan were with Dan. They all met where a length of thick rope had been stamped into the ground, held taut at either end by two small stakes.

  Cutty Dawson was smiling and Dan saw a whole way of life in that smile, an unbendable conviction, a formed attitude. He saw his father in it, sensed behind it the weight of the past Dan himself had come from. It was as if he was confronting all the men he had worked w
ith, all the men he had admired as a boy. Cutty Dawson’s stance was an echo of theirs as Dan had seen them perform it at countless corners, the cocky tilt of the head, the shrug of the shoulders, all questions being irrelevant. Here they stood and they backed off from nothing.

  Strangely, the smile didn’t intimidate Dan, as it was meant to. Its intractability seemed to him at this moment a sign of weakness. Neither of them knew what was going to happen. Cutty Dawson was pre-deciding his response. His mind beginning to convert itself into an armoury, Dan found a memory and shaped it to a weapon. He remembered reading of a churchman being burnt for heresy who had said, ‘If I flinch in the flames, believe not a word I have written.’ Dan had always distrusted that statement. Human beings should flinch in flames. If they could distort the extremities of experience to that extent, what grotesqueness couldn’t they impose on words and ideas? If Cutty Dawson had decided already that he knew where they were going, Dan might have a good chance against him, because he was lying to himself. He was nailing himself to his position. Dan, brimming with his own fear, knew the fluidity it gave him.

  The referee had joined them. He was tall. His voice was hoarse and had a soft, hissing quality, like a lit fuse. He stated the rules in a matter-of-fact way, as if a rational tone of voice was a charm against the ugly ferocity of what was about to happen.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Why waste words? We’re no’ here to talk. We all know the score here. It’s the mitts only. Ye kick, butt, elbow, Ah’ll decide how serious it is. If it’s bad, ye’re disqualified. Ye can write to yer MP, do whit ye like. Ye’re disqualified. Ah’m neutral here.’ He indicated Cam Colvin and Matt Mason. ‘These two men have agreed ma judgment’s final. It is. Ah’m warnin’ the two of ye. If ye commit a foul Ah don’t think is too serious. Like if ye try but don’t connect right. Ah give the other man a free punch. Okay? If one of ye refuses that, Ah’ll help the other one tae get intae ye. That’s the story. A knock-down ends a round. Ye get thirty seconds to be back at the line. Ye don’t make it, the fight’s over.’

  He held out his left hand, which contained a stop-watch.

  ‘Ah’ll be timing it exact. Ah call three times. “Ten seconds.” “Twenty seconds.” “Twenty-five seconds.” Then Ah call, “Prepare.” Then “Time!” If ye’re not there by then, don’t bother coming. Just hitch a lift out.’

  He held out his right hand with a white handkerchief in it.

  ‘When Ah drop this handkerchief, a round begins. Ye got all that? Ye’ve the three times called. Then it’s “Prepare.” Then “Time!” and the hanky falls. “Time!” and the hanky go at the same time. So ye can start on the word. Ah don’t think it’s advisable to be lookin’ round for a hanky just at that meenit. Any questions?’

  The arbitrary gibberish of the instructions had the effect on Dan not of rendering the event more coherent but of making it seem even more incomprehensible. The referee might have been lecturing on some abstruse theory of economics.

  ‘Where’s the nearest hospital to Thornbank?’ Cam Colvin said.

  ‘Mr Colvin!’ the referee said. ‘Remarks like that aren’t allowed. Ah was askin’ the boys a question. You an’ Mr Mason here asked me tae referee this fight. That’s what Ah’m gonny do. If ye’re not pleased with me, ye can deal with me after. But don’t try tae intimidate anybody durin’ this fight. We’ve two big, healthy men here. Ready for a square go. That’s what they’re gonny have. Any questions, boys?’

  Cutty Dawson and Dan Scoular stared at each other.

  ‘Right! Back ye go.’

  They retreated to the places where the fold-down canvas seats were and the plastic pails of water with sponges and the towels and the helpers who were strangers. Dan felt his place like a flimsy outpost, last camp of shared concern before he went out alone to explore parts of himself he had never ventured into. Out there where his wilderness was, the referee was standing and shouting, crazy as an anchorite the perfection of whose madness lies in the conviction that his ravings are rational.

  ‘All right, everybody!’ the referee shouted to the people gathered for their own strange reasons. ‘Could we have order, please! Order! Order! Thank you. What we have here is a fight. To the finish. It will be a clean one. Ah’ll see to that. A knock-down ends a round. Thirty seconds to get back to the line. Whoever stands alone at this line’ – his legs were straddling it – ‘when Ah call “Time!” an’ drop this handkerchief –’ he held it up – ‘is the winner. No disputed verdicts. No points-system. One fight, one winner.’

  He paused, perhaps to let the grandeur of the idea take root among them.

  ‘Ah’ll thank all of yese to hold your positions. Don’t crowd in. We have people present who will deal with troublemakers. Trouble is any form of interference. Unless ye want to have an unofficial fight yerself – an’ ye’ll be starting at very long odds – do not, I repeat not, either hinder or help any of the two fighters. If ye so much as put yer hand on one of their elbows, that’s a serious infringement of the rules. Punishable by punishment. The only people allowed to collect bodies are the corner-men. All right! Remember what ye’ve been told.’

  He held his stop-watch high in the air.

  ‘Ah’m now beginning the countdown to the contest.’

  He made an expansive gesture of pressing the button.

  ‘Beginning in thirty seconds from . . . Now!’

  ‘Move a lot,’ Matt Mason said.

  The advice seemed preposterous to Dan at the time, like ‘Try to win’. But it glanced off his mind without effect. He was hearing and seeing with an odd, aberrant clarity. He seemed to be aware of almost everything, of many fragments of the scene around him, and yet somewhere in him choices of what mattered were being made.

  ‘Ten seconds!’

  There was a woman with a marvellous face. Her cheeks were gently hollowed as if she were inhaling life with quiet intensity.

  ‘Twenty seconds!’

  He would rather have talked to her for half an hour than be doing what he was going to do.

  ‘Twenty-five seconds!’

  Yet presumably she wanted him to do this. Hands were pushing him forward. He walked towards the rope. Cutty Dawson was there already, smiling his shield of a smile. They stood within touching distance, awkwardly.

  ‘Prepare! Time!’

  Dan was aware of the handkerchief fluttering to the ground. Voices came at them as they circled each other, half-formed incantations that were meant to influence the outcome. Cutty rushed him suddenly, his arms pumping venom at him. Dan moved easily aside and threw a left that, meeting shoulder-bone, fused his own arm solid for a second. Cutty swung on to him at once, tested his stomach with a right, knuckled his head above the temple with a left.

  From that first core of contact was spawned a complicated series of movements, a wild progression of punches and counter-punches, blocks, sidesteps and lunges, where chance and purpose fought each other in them. They had entered a labyrinth of possibilities down which they pursued each other, a place where the crowd’s understanding couldn’t follow them. The onlookers might catch fragments and force them into a shape but only the two men knew how lost they were, caught the sudden swerves of fortune, heard triumph in a grunt, panic in a whimper, convulsed in secret pain, saw fear down the tunnel of an iris.

  Part of Dan still felt outside of the event. He was aware of the bystanders around them like a frieze, a clash of colours significantly brighter than he had noticed them to be before the fight. A face would suddenly detach itself in his vision with an etched clarity. Cutty’s pale body was blotched where the first punches had hit him, faint, ugly roses. It was as if the tension in which he functioned was the generator that lit up everything around him, putting it under bright lights.

  Even the tactical conclusions he was coming to were coldly clear, came to him like ways of approaching an abstract problem. He was struck by how much room there was. This was unlike any fight he had ever been in before, where it had all been about immediacy and speed and t
ightness of movement and where first advantage was usually final. This was less a battle than a war. It was like the difference he had felt between playing indoor football and playing on a full-sized pitch, where your skills needed to be harnessed to energy and fitness because big distances always stood between them and their realisation.

  He was glad of the training he had done, even of Tommy Brogan’s fanaticism. Cutty was heavier and slower and the covering of a lot of ground should cost him more than it would cost Dan. But his mind had barely assimilated that idea when a contradictory perception called it in question.

  The ground was uneven, catching the foot every so often in a trap, so that fluidity of movement would freeze without warning and you were left for a second longer in a place your reflexes had already abandoned. Twice within a minute, because of the ground, Cutty had found him, once on the head, once on the body, with big punches he had already foreseen and arranged to avoid. The punches were less powerful than they might have been because Cutty, noticing Dan’s evasion, had been redirecting them towards where their target should have been. Their glancing impact gave enough hurt to serve as a warning. This place was mined with risks for a fast mover.

  But the first one the ground significantly helped was Dan. Trying to turn quickly in pursuit, Cutty found an unevenness that jarred his foot and left him standing square-on. Dan had hit him four times on the head before he went down.

  The suddenness of it, the ease with which Cutty collapsed, drew an awed sound from the crowd, one of those reactions by which people create what has happened in preference to observing it. For a second of dazzled elation, Dan admitted the crowd’s sense of what was taking place into his own. But it was like introducing a shaft of light into a cave. It hadn’t clarified his vision, it had blinded him. Within a moment, Dan knew it was the imbalance that had put Cutty down more than the punches and that the very ease with which he fell had neutralised Dan’s impact. Cutty was rising again at once. All that had happened was a chance for a rest.