She was a delicate girl, pale, with wispy fair hair and eyes suggestive of tiredness, the purplish shadows moving out from the edge of her nose. The colour of one eye seemed possibly slightly paler than the other. The man was fat and balding. He had her against a pillar, leaning over her. He was whispering very quietly but Alistair heard him. ‘Oh, I think we will,’ the man was saying.
Alistair’s hunt for exotica led him to find them in surprising places. Even the people he knew here seemed changed by their surroundings, as if they had taken on the more garish colours of the place. Sam MacKinlay had become a playboy for the night. He was moving around with two women in tow, ordering drinks for them and enjoying the way they laughed at nearly everything he said.
‘I’m sorry I can’t give you girls a run home in the car,’ Alistair heard him saying at one point. ‘But I’ve promised a few of the mates I’ll get them back home. The fella who drives for me is over there.’
As Alistair moved away, he heard Sam describing Thornbank as a picturesque village. Alan Morrison came up and asked Alistair what he thought of the place. It was, Alan said as he looked round, giving him a few ideas. Considering the strobe lights and the mirrors and the fluted columns and the leather- upholstered bar, Alistair wondered what the ideas were. Alan told him.
There’s nothing like this around Thornbank. It’s an untapped market. I wonder, I wonder. I’ve got that old stable building.’
Alistair had a confused vision of Mary Barclay discoing and Wullie Mairshall trying to read the Socialist Weekly in this light. He suspected they might be about as enthusiastic as Harry Naismith. Harry was revealing an unexpected streak of puritanism. There were two girls who were walking around checking that people were enjoying themselves. They wore low-cut, skimpy tunics, apparently supposed to be Grecian in design. Harry was outraged.
‘The sowls!’ he said to Alistair more than once. ‘What would their mothers think if they saw them? They could get their death o’ cold goin’ about like that.’
Frankie White heard him, laughed and went about telling people what Harry had said. It was perhaps a way of distancing himself from the Thornbank men. He saw their entrenched parochialism as an indirect compliment to himself. They were the amazing disadvantages he had overcome.
For Frankie was feeling he had finally arrived. He was a figure in this company. Matt Mason had referred to him as ‘my best scout’. Roddy Stewart had called him ‘our man in Ayrshire’. Chuck Walker had said, ‘Ah hear you picked a winner, Frankie.’ Sandra treated him as if he were a celebrity. He had become quite proprietary about Dan Scoular within an hour, providing snippets of biographical detail (The only man who ever beat him was his father’, ‘The only thing he’s frightened of is dogs. That’s true’) and sometimes bringing strangers up to introduce them.
The introductions bewildered Dan further. It was as if the people were introducing him to himself. ‘You’re some man,’ someone said. ‘You really planned that fight to perfection,’ another man said. A woman gave him a card with her phone number on it. ‘Try not to make it too long,’ she said. She winked and smiled at him, suggesting she knew exactly the kind of person he was. The room was full of a sense of him that he didn’t agree with. He found himself taking note of their messages like a secretary who would pass them on if the person they were meant for turned up. He heard their voices as a refinement of the shouts of the crowd, confident assertions about what had happened that didn’t match his experience of it from the inside. Matt Mason confirmed the unreality of it.
‘I saw something today,’ he said. ‘I know what it means. You’ll do. I’ve got a job for you.’
The possibility came to him as a threat. What the others had said was temporary, a mood of the moment. But if he accepted Matt Mason’s offer, he had to accept the meaning of what had happened that it implied. But he still didn’t know what had happened. To accept or reject that offer, he had to do it as himself, had to know what it meant.
Realising, from what had been said to him, that he was the centre of the party for the others, and that the centre of himself was such confusion, he saw the event as pretence. The identity they were trying to give him didn’t relate to where he had been. It defied the past he had just come from. Having been washed up accidentally on their lives, he had been assigned the role they needed him to have. Precisely because they knew so little about him, he served their purpose. They could make him into what they wanted. They could dress him in their purposes and simplify him into an image. In parading him before themselves, they were parading their own beliefs. But they weren’t beliefs he knew to be his.
He thought that at least he knew the meaning of the party. It meant renewal of what they wanted to believe through him. They weren’t celebrating him, they were celebrating the surrogate means he had given them of reaffirming their own lives without responsibility to what was past. He hadn’t created the reason for this party alone. Cutty Dawson had done that with him. These people were using Dan to obscure that truth. He thought he saw the spirit the party was trying to incarnate. It was the desire to happen without history, to escape through a loophole in time and find a new moment where maybe you could begin yourself afresh. It was a distortion of the reality of all of us to invent the reality of some of us. Realising that, Dan excluded himself from the exclusiveness of the party. Among them, he felt himself more with Cutty Dawson. Just as his will had created his victory, so now it unmade it.
Standing around like the skeleton at his own feast, he experienced a moment that entered his awareness like a messenger bringing news of himself. It happened on the edge of things, a voice hardly anyone heard. Dan was watching the blonde woman he had noticed earlier because she was so drunk. She was talking to the smallest of the three doormen. A man suddenly broke through the door beside them. Another of the doormen came in and caught the man’s jacket. The man’s face was like a reflection of Dan’s mood – rejection of the room.
‘Ya bastards!’ he screamed.
The man was struggling to come all the way in. The doorman who was talking to the blonde moved away from her quickly. She stood looking vaguely around, trying to focus her drunkenness. The two doormen were wrestling with the man. People were talking among themselves. The music still played. Dan wasn’t sure how much of what he took in was hearing and how much was lip-reading. But instinctively, he knew what the man shouted.
‘Ma brother’s blind, ya bastards! He’s fuckin’ blind! In the –’ he shouted the name of a hospital Dan couldn’t make out.
Then he was gone and the doors were swinging, erasing his presence. Dan went towards the doors quickly. He knew Frankie was following. Before Dan had reached the doors, the smallest doorman had come back through them.
‘No problem,’ he said to Dan.
Dan brushed past him and went outside. The second doorman was standing alone. But the third wasn’t there. Dan walked to the left for about fifty yards. There was nobody there. By the time he came back to the door of the disco, the third doorman was back.
‘Where’s the man who came in?’ Dan said.
‘Ah walked him up the road a bit,’ the third doorman said.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Gospel, big man. He was all right.’
Dan went back inside. Frankie was there.
‘Who was that?’ Dan demanded.
‘Davie Dawson. Cutty’s brother,’ Frankie said.
In the shipwreck of his senses since the fight, Dan knew there was someone left behind he had to go back for. He was aware of a lot of people looking at him. He thought how misguided they were. They hadn’t seen the real event, only its reflection in their mirror for the evening. He saw the Thornbank men staring at him, alarmed. He was glad to trouble them. He felt he was being honest with them for the first time that night. They were, at last, staring past the pretence into the reality that lay behind the party.
‘What hospital was that he mentioned?’
Frankie shrugged. Matt Mason had come over. Eddi
e Foley had followed him, as if attached by a leash.
‘What’s the problem, Dan?’ Matt Mason said.
‘Cutty Dawson’s in hospital.’
‘So?’
‘Ah’m goin’ to see him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Ah put him there. That’s why.’
‘Relax. That’s not part of the contract.’
‘Pardon? What contract’s that? You think you bought ma head as well as ma hands? Maybe you should fire that lawyer of yours. He’s misled you, right enough.’
Chuck Walker had wandered over to join the group, perhaps sensing a problem. Dan pointed at him.
‘You,’ he said. ‘Hireling. This isn’t your business. Fuck off!’
Chuck Walker rode the remark as if it had been a punch. He contained himself and looked at Matt Mason. Matt Mason nodded. Chuck Walker went away.
‘You seem upset,’ Matt Mason said, tensely.
‘The world’s upset. You haven’t noticed? Ah’m just reacting to it.’
‘Come on. Don’t give us your riddles. What is the problem?’
‘Ah thought Ah told you,’ he said carefully, as if he were teaching a child his ABC: ‘Ah put a man in the hospital. Ah’m goin’ to see him. Ah’ve got a contract with me. Or didn’t you know? Goin’ there is part of it.’
‘And what about your guests?’
Dan glanced round the room and smiled.
‘So where are they?’ he said.
‘They’re here to see you.’
‘Naw. They’re here because you asked them. They don’t know who Ah am. Ah’m the one that goes to the hospital to see Cutty Dawson.’
Matt Mason looked at Frankie. Frankie could find no reaction. All of the fears he had had about this arrangement had just walked in and said hullo. He shrugged. He was good at shrugging.
‘Dan,’ Matt Mason said. ‘I would like to talk to you. I told you that.’
‘So Ah’ll come back. And we’ll talk. Did you think Ah wouldn’t? You owe me money.’
Matt Mason smiled. He was relaxed again.
‘Now that I do understand,’ he said. ‘All right, all right. That’s what you do. It’s maybe good you should get this out of your system. Keys, Eddie.’ Eddie Foley handed them over. Matt Mason passed them to Frankie. ‘You take Dan, Frankie.’ Matt Mason winked. ‘Then bring him back here. Don’t be too long.’
Dan noticed that Frankie didn’t ask which hospital it was.
‘How about this?’ Frankie White was saying. He was enjoying driving the Mercedes. It helped him to forget his problems. ‘You’re sitting in the jackpot, big man. Feel the width. This is bigger than some of the houses the old folks used to live in. A week ago you were on Shanks’s pony an’ Ah was on a push-bike. Baby, look at us now. Funny old world, intit?’
He swung the car about with a confidence that suggested it was a tank and it was up to other drivers to keep out of its way. An oncoming car that had pulled out to pass a stationary bus honked him.
‘Fade, ya bastard, fade,’ Frankie said. ‘The Germans are comin’.’
‘How much did you drink in there?’ Dan asked.
‘How about that place? Wall-to-wall women. And they’re all for you, Dan. Give or take the odd femm that could be very fatal. Like Margaret Mason. She’s all right, eh? She’s class, the big wumman. Imagine makin’ it wi’ her. She’s probably got a built-in jacuzzi up there. An’ that Black Chip is just starters for you, big man. You’re a fully paid up member now.’
As if anxious to get full use of his toy before he had to return it to its owner, Frankie switched on the radio and the sound swelled to fill the car. Before Frankie had time to recognise the tune, Dan had reached across and switched it off. He didn’t want distractions.
‘Just drive,’ he said.
Dan hadn’t spoken again by the time Frankie had parked the car on the brow of the hill and they were walking down the incline into the hospital. Coming towards them was a group of people who had obviously just left the building. They were two women and two girls.
They seemed invisibly tethered together, moving along with a clumsy unity, the halting of the oldest woman pulling up the others haphazardly when they felt the tug of her stillness. Three of them were crying. Only the younger girl was silent, as if numbed by the shocking effect events were having on the others. As Dan and Frankie passed, the younger woman was cuddling the older woman and vaguely trying to gather the girls to her with her other arm. She was talking.
‘Don’t worry, Mother. He’ll be all right. Ah know he will. He will, he will.’
What made the scene more painful for Dan was that the younger woman was crying more sorely than any of the others. Her face was crumpled and held to the side as if absorbing a blow and the tears sluiced helplessly down her cheeks. Her ritual comfort was offered blindly to the dusk and simultaneously denied by the hopelessness of her grief. She was like a failed priest dispensing a faith he could no longer share.
‘Aye,’ Frankie said to Dan sympathetically. ‘It’s always at somebody’s door.’
He said it as if such grief were an inexplicable visitation, like a virus. Dan didn’t feel that way. His guilt made the scene personal to him. He was like a pilot who, having bombed a place indiscriminately, walks its streets afterwards and wonders if every passing wound is part of his doing. These people might be Cutty Dawson’s family. He saw them as Cutty’s mother, his wife and his daughters. A feeling he had suppressed in himself just before the fight came back to him now, doubled through denial. He remembered thinking that if death was the common enemy, what was the point of lesser fights? If pain was finally inevitable, why inflict it unnecessarily on one another? The pain he had seen humbled him, made the rationalisations by which he had brought himself to the fight seem petty.
His sense of humility increased as he went into the hospital, as it always did in such places. A man who had so far avoided serious illness, he felt a familiar, vague guilt going into hospitals. It was almost as if all the people in here were paying his dues for him. Having no specific religion, it was probably the nearest feeling to church that he had. This was his church of latter-day saints where not through dogma but through the inevitable accidents of experience, people took upon themselves the extremities of our nature, the stigmata of cancered lung and exhausted heart and diseased brain. In an isolation as lonely as any monk’s cell, they endured the last known realities of living and tried to stay human and allow the parade of normalcy to visit and pay its dubious respects. The first article of faith here was that every problem is a practical one.
The woman at the admissions desk was well versed in it. She looked up at them and then turned to the card she was filling in. ‘Yes?’ she said to the card. He asked for Cutty Dawson. Her eyes flickered for a moment like a computer that has been fed the wrong information. Then she traced the malfunction.
There’s no visiting just now.’
‘Ah realise that,’ Dan said. ‘But Ah need to see him.’
‘His family’s just gone out.’
‘Ah know,’ Dan said. He had been right in identifying the people outside as his victims, and the thought masochistically increased his determination.
‘He’s resting,’ the woman said tetchily.
‘Ah know. But Ah’ve only just heard what’s happened to him. Ah’m his brother.’
She frowned at him, her narrowing eyes staring him out of anonymity and into a category as neat as a medical card. She inventoried his bruises.
‘Are you the brother he was fighting with?’
Dan caught the part he had to play.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Are you sure? You look as if you could use a bed here yourself.’
‘No. These’ – his hand flicked towards his face – ‘are about something else. Could Ah see him, please?’
‘You must be some family. I hope you haven’t been carrying on the feud. This really should be a matter for the police.’
‘He’s ma brother.
Can Ah see him?’
She hesitated, reluctant to give up her moment of moral authority.
‘He’s in one of the side rooms in Ward Five. You can ask Sister there. She’ll tell you whether you can get in or not.’
She gave them directions and they climbed stairs and passed wards where in the dim stillness rows of beds floated on their separate voyages. As they moved past the rooms leading to Ward Five, a woman whose air of authority declared her to be the Sister emerged from one of them.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
Dan found his language making a concession to her formality.
‘I’m looking for Mr Dawson,’ Dan said. ‘I’m his brother.’
‘His family has already visited.’
‘I know. But I was late. I need to see him, Sister.’
‘He has to rest.’
‘Sister. I won’t stay long. But I need to see him.’
She contemplated him for a moment. He looked at her. Compassion came to her face, displacing her authoritarian manner with the ease of a familiar visitor. Dan liked her immediately, finding in her an antidote to all the bureaucratic creeps ensconced in labour exchanges and income tax offices and job centres.
‘Wait here,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if he’s awake.’
She went into one of the rooms and they heard her muffled voice. She came back out and nodded.
‘But only you,’ she said to Dan.
‘Absolutely, Sister,’ Frankie said. The mode of address had undertones of Humphrey Bogart in Frankie’s mouth. ‘No problem. I’m just a friend of the family. More of a chauffeur here than anythin’ else.’
‘Listen,’ she said to Dan. ‘His head mustn’t move. He has a retinal detachment. He’s mildly sedated just now. Until we can confirm exactly how bad the injury is he stays absolutely still! You understand? And you haven’t got long.’
She let Dan into the room and closed the door. Dan was disoriented at first. A night light glowed on the wall opposite, its dimness inducing in him a kind of awkward reverence. The figure on the bed intensified the feeling. The strangeness of its condition made him hesitant. It was so much itself, so deeply isolated in its separate entity that any word or gesture would have seemed an intrusion. Dan understood more fully than he ever had before the individuality of another person.
The Big Man Page 22