The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  She had changed her clothes, presumably in preparation for the party. There was to be a party. It seemed a bizarre idea to him. She was wearing stiletto heels and a red velvet dress with a cheongsam-style slit at one side. As she bent over the towel-rail, the dress moulded itself to her and her cheeks were offered to him like some fabulous peach, exotic fruit of the country. Her black hair swung as she leant over and looked like a good place to hide. The ordinariness of her actions, the unselfconsciousness of glamour, struck him. What he saw was incidental to the naturalness of how she had come in, the casualness of her shared presence, as if she were telling him to relax into what was happening. There was nothing inaccessible about the luxury of the room, the opulence of her body. It was all within his reach.

  She turned and watched him watching her. She crossed towards him and very gently touched his face.

  ‘Your lovely bruises,’ she said.

  Her scent caught and held him like a fine-meshed net. She mouthed his abraded cheek delicately.

  ‘I’ll suck all the pain out later. All you’ll have to do is rest. And I’ll suck till you feel no pain.’

  Her hand moved slowly across his wet chest and he felt his nipples stiffen.

  ‘Mine feel the same,’ she said.

  Her hand moved lower, hovering, and he was embarrassed by the colour of the water, muddied from his body. The hand stroked his lower chest and then smoothly, with hardly a disturbance of the surface, went under the water.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  She threw her hair back and caught it behind her head in her other hand and was moving her face nearer the water when they heard Roddy Stewart shouting.

  ‘Melanie! What are you doing in there? You having a bath as well?’

  There was laughter. She held him briefly and smiled at him, her eyes opaque.

  ‘I’m putting my marker on you. For later.’

  She rose and dried her hand on one of the towels. She lifted his dirty clothes and, looking at him, held them against her cheek.

  ‘Your sweat’s just become my favourite perfume,’ she said.

  When she went out, he lay still, waiting for the feeling in him to subside. He had accepted her attentions as if they were a rite of the unknown place where he found himself. He stood up and reached for a towel but the bathroom was too wide. He had to put one foot on the carpeted floor, grab the towel and step back. There were wet toe-prints on the bath-mat. They shouldn’t take long to dry. As he was drying himself, standing in the bath, his body, foreign with bruises, was something he looked at with curiosity. He stepped out on to the towel and finished drying himself. Putting on his underpants, he scrubbed at the bath with a soaped sponge till he got rid of the tide-mark his washing had left.

  The familiar clothes brought him back to himself a little but, seeing the facial bruises against the blueness of the laundered shirt, he sensed again the unfamiliarity of where he had been. He knew it was still waiting to be understood. Watching the stranger in the mirror, he heard the others talking. He walked through and their voices, as if they knew what had happened, gave him an identity.

  The conquering hero.’

  ‘Welcome back to civilisation.’

  ‘Where’s your drink?’

  ‘The big man himself.’

  Situation overtook self-doubt. He felt as if, by his walking into it, the room had bloomed on his presence. He remembered two occasions from his childhood with which this formed a trinity. One had been looking up from reading a book and seeing his mother sewing and his father fiddling with a broken watch. A last, fading patch of sunlight lay on the floor. The clock was talking quietly to itself. And he had known the lightness of his being here. He effortlessly belonged. The other was in his primary school. It was towards the end of a winter afternoon. The class were writing and the teacher suddenly put the lights on. He glanced up and was aware of everyone writing and himself among them and the teacher with her pink twin-set and the suspirations of his friends around him and he felt the physical joy of it.

  It was what he felt now, as if his body had become a perfect fit. The french windows showed a lawn beyond them and against it the people in the room seemed as natural as flowers. He was aware of how attractive Matt Mason’s wife was, smiling at him. There was no acquisitiveness in the awareness, just a gladness to be sharing her presence. Eddie Foley winked at him from the arm of the wide leather chair in which Melanie was sitting. The wink was an expression of instant friendship. Frankie White blew him a kiss and ruffled Sandra’s hair.

  ‘How you feeling?’ Matt Mason said.

  ‘Almost human again.’

  ‘You should be feeling superhuman,’ Frankie said.

  ‘Let me get you another drink,’ Melanie said.

  The voices jingled in his ears like charms that were round his wrist. He could see the different-coloured drinks that were in the glasses as bright as jewels in the soft sunlight. Melanie gave him his own like a piece of gold and the others raised their drinks to him. He had joined them in drinking before he realised he was toasting himself. Roddy Stewart transformed his mistake by colluding in it.

  ‘To us,’ he said. ‘The winners.’

  They all laughed.

  He withdrew from their feeling. He didn’t know why. Something had happened in him that troubled his sense of what was going on. It wasn’t a memory. It was an awareness of something he must remember. With his glass almost touching his mouth, he stood and was stubborn. There was something he wanted to know. He made the memory come. It came as panic, a wondering if he had spoken to Cutty Dawson after the fight. Then he remembered leaning over Cutty and Cutty gripping his arm but not looking up or rising from the canvas seat. ‘You’ll do,’ Cutty had said. The generosity of it made him feel guilty, as if a drowning man had pushed him into the lifeboat. He owed his own sense of where he had been to whoever was there with him. These people hadn’t been there. He was in foreign country. He didn’t belong.

  ‘Okay,’ Matt Mason said. ‘Let’s drink these and get on our way. There’s a party on. They’re waiting for the guest of honour. Here, Dan. Your mates are going to be there. The boys from Thornbank. That boy Sam MacKinlay’s a bit of a case, isn’t he?’

  Dan nodded and in the reflex response he found something, like an amnesiac having a flash of who he might be.

  ‘Ah want to make a phone call,’ Dan said.

  ‘Just now?’ Roddy Stewart said.

  His expression suggested it was a strangely naive thing to want to do. The others smiled tolerantly.

  ‘Sure he does,’ Matt Mason said.

  He took Dan out of the room and showed him into what he called his ‘study’. He left the door ajar and Dan could still hear the murmur of voices as he dialled. Matt Mason put his hand on Dan’s arm.

  ‘I want to talk to you tonight,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a proposition for you. It means a lot more money than you made today.’

  He patted Dan’s arm affectionately and went out.

  ‘Hello?’

  The effect Betty’s voice had on him took him by surprise. The ordinary human warmth and familiarity of it created complicated sensations in him. The voices from the other room and the sound of someone laughing were like a conspiracy from which Betty was excluded. He felt excluded from it, too, as well as from the place where Betty was.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s all right, love,’ he managed. ‘It’s not a heavy breather.’

  ‘Dan.’

  ‘Hello, Betty.’

  There was a silence. He couldn’t break it. The fight lay between him and where he had been and the difficulty of coming to terms with what had happened in the field was compounded by the difficulty of coming to terms with what had preceded it. He could see Betty sitting in the lounge bar with the man. He felt alien to everywhere, to this room with a large vase on the desk, to the background noise of television coming through the phone.

  ‘What happened?’

  He wished he knew.

  ‘Ah won,�
� he said.

  The words described his experience of it as adequately as the dates on a headstone describe a life.

  ‘I’m glad you won, Dan. How are you?’

  ‘Ah’m all right.’

  ‘Are you badly hurt?’

  ‘No, no. Some bruises.’

  ‘Is the other man all right?’

  ‘Aye, Ah think so. He seemed all right.’

  ‘And you’re sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Ah’m fine, Betty. Honest.’

  There was another pause. He couldn’t blame her.

  ‘How’s the kids?’ he said quickly, and regretted it immediately, because he knew what she would do.

  ‘They’re fine, wait and I’ll get them.’

  ‘It’s all –’ but she was gone.

  ‘Hello, Dad!’

  ‘Dad!’

  They were obviously wrestling for the phone.

  ‘Did you win him, Dad?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Great. What round did you knock him out in?’

  The innocence of their pleasure reactivated the confused and ugly reality of the fight for him and made him feel he had perhaps fouled their lives. He experienced guilt. The effect of it was to make him determined to try to understand what had happened. He managed to get the boys to take ‘chances each’ on the phone, first Raymond, then Danny. He kept his answers to their questions minimal until he could get them talking about what they had been up to in his absence. It was news of home, a place he wasn’t sure he knew how to get back to. When he asked to speak to their mother again, the phone whispered in his ear like a shell, suggesting a distance between him and them that mere transport couldn’t cross.

  ‘All right, Dan? When will you be down then?’

  ‘Later tonight, Betty.’

  He didn’t tell her that he wasn’t sure who would be arriving.

  ‘All right, Dan. We’ll see you then.’

  ‘Okay, Betty.’

  ‘Dan. I’m glad you’re all right.’

  ‘Aye.’

  He put down the phone and looked round the room. The self-conscious deliberateness of the furnishings struck him. The room was an odd contrivance for the man who had arranged the fight. He must have sat among this civilised machinery and planned it all. Yet the brute nature of the fight was denied by this place. You couldn’t sit here and know what truly happened. What happened? It had been Betty’s question. It was his. He would have to answer it for himself.

  But Matt Mason, looking in to check if Dan had finished using the phone, had found his own answers already. What had happened was a cause for celebration.

  ‘Come on, come on, large Dan,’ he said. ‘Enjoyment’s serious business. There’s good fun going to waste while you’re standing there.’

  ‘Party’ had been the word at Matt Mason’s house as they all prepared to leave. Everyone used it with that vague expectation of the excitement it was going to produce, as if it was the chrysalis the everyday goes into hoping to emerge in iridescent colours. But Dan’s feeling was more one of unfocused apprehension. He went with them in the spirit of an alien submitting to the strange customs of the natives. Although the party was ostensibly in his honour, it was Matt Mason’s event and Dan arrived there like someone not sure he would get in.

  Anyone standing outside the Black Chip disco and watching the ingredients arrive haphazardly over two or three hours of late afternoon and early evening might have wished that he had one of the small pink cards that guaranteed entry, or better still one of those faces so well known around Glasgow that they were an automatic coupon of admission. He would certainly have felt he needed something more substantial than cheek to brass his way past the three men on the door. Enchanted caves are guarded by dragons.

  The guardians wore evening dress that suited them the way an apron suits a grizzly bear. Among themselves they spoke a language of sotto voce expletives but, taking tickets or welcoming a public face, they said ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ and ‘Have a good evening’. The smiles they wore didn’t fully conceal their true identity.

  There were a few occasions when they had to refuse admission but these didn’t involve taking the smile away from the face. The last was a man on his own. They saw him hesitate a little way off, his aimless walking waylaid by the music. He came uncertainly towards them and said, ‘Deesco?’ It took a moment for one of them to respond.

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

  ‘How much?’

  When they had managed to convey to him that admission was by invitation only (one of them shook hands with himself to indicate friendship), he wandered off to prospect further the tedium of a Scottish Sunday, not realising that he had made his own contribution to the party, like the cat mewing in the cold that makes the room seem warmer.

  By that time the men on the door were themselves becoming curious about how far the event had taken shape. They had seen, as it were, the dismembered limbs arriving. They had noticed the promising clash of styles: the staid smartness of Matt Mason and Roddy Stewart and the self-conscious chic of their wives, clothes that were telling you something as sure as a sergeant’s stripes; the vaguely camp gear of a couple of well-known footballers that seemed to say they were so butch they could afford to take chances; the harlequin parade of a lot of the young that suggested some of them bought themselves by the day at the Glasgow Barras; a blonde woman already lit up like a Christmas tree; four punters who looked as if they had stepped out of a time-machine, one with a Fair Isle pullover, another with what looked like your grandfather’s waistcoat, all of them with determined enjoyment round their eyes like opera-glasses. It remained to see if the miracle of cohesion had taken place, if those separate parts had managed to join to a living whole. Chuck Walker suggested it first.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘This is like guardin’ a cemetery. The worst that’s gonny happen is a bird might shite on our heads. We’ll take it in spells. Ah’ll nip in first an’ see what the story is. Should be some floatin’ cuff in there. Youse two keep each other company. Okay? Back out in ten minutes.’

  He was the smallest of the three but the most aimlessly violent. The other two agreed. Chuck Walker went in. Standing inside the inner door, he let his eyes circle the room with slow repetition. He could see a couple of women along with too many people to be with anyone in particular. The blonde woman was doing everything but open a stall. She had come alone but she didn’t seem to want to leave that way. If she went on drinking the way she was – she was holding her glass to her mouth like one of those Spanish wine-skins – she might leave in the company of medical attendants. He wondered how she had got here. Matt Mason, like a lot of men of his kind, tended to be as formal as an undertaker. Maybe she had found a ticket on the street. There were possibilities here but it didn’t look like too much of a party.

  Chuck Walker was judging from a very specific viewpoint. He had been picking off strays from events like this for a while, women who had quarrelled with their boyfriends, had come looking for something that they couldn’t find, drunk themselves deliberately past their own inhibitions. Many times, in the early hours of the morning, he had picked clean the bones of their hopes, taken from them what they were too lost or too weak not to give, in the back of a car or a dark street or once – he wore the memory like his brightest feather – in a room in one of Glasgow’s most expensive hotels. His was a specialist eye. When he watched an event like this, he saw only potential carrion, the stagger of hurt, the pain that wandered away from the centre of things into its own lonely desert. He was a scavenger, remorseless in the pursuit of his own nature. All he could taste was his purpose.

  If the blonde woman could steady herself and not pass out, she might be usable. The other two were worth watching but it was too early to move. As he went back out, he noticed that the big puncher from somewhere was smiling. If he had spent the day with Cutty Dawson and could still feel like that, he had to be slightly special. If it ever came to it with him, Chuck Walker thought, better to let h
im walk out first and give him it on the back of the head with a five-giller. He looked simple enough to take it that way.

  Dan was experiencing the party by proxy. He sensed a quickening mood around him, fragile and uncertain, but beginning to happen. There was a man studying a woman’s mouth as she spoke. His eyes seemed to have achieved tunnel vision. He watched her lips with terrible concentration. He was nodding as if he knew what she was saying but his eyes were devoting themselves to the sheer movement of her mouth. He looked as dedicated as a Japanese artist who has found the flower he must paint all his life.

  There was a woman laughing. She couldn’t stop. The group she was with, two men and another woman, looked at one another. One of the men put his arm around her, patted her back. She went on laughing, scattering her laughter like someone who wants to give away all of herself before it is too late. She was a klaxon announcing her own party. Dan wished he had been invited. He consoled himself with the thought that his friends seemed to be enjoying it.

  Alistair Corstorphine had found the event amazing from the start. But then most things amazed him. He lived with his mother and drank too much, but always outside the house. He was so guiltily devoted to his mother that stepping out the door had the excitement of travelling abroad. Tonight was wilder than emigrating.

  He had separated from Sam MacKinlay and Harry Naismith early on, to pursue his own compulsion. He had his quietly replenished drink as iron rations as he explored the strange out-there of other people’s lives, and he kept a constant check on where Dan Scoular was, a regular chart-reading. Meantime, he was collecting specimens. There were some beauties.

  ‘So they want to do me for police assault as well. A bloody liberty.’

  The man who said it was surprisingly small. Alistair might have thought he could beat him himself. It just showed you you couldn’t be too careful. The man to whom he had made the remark, big, with a mottled face, showed no response. He nodded and suggested they get another drink.

  ‘No, we won’t. You know what happened the last time I let you do that. I was sore for weeks.’