The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  ‘That’s right, Frankie,’ Dan said in a loud voice and grabbed his arm.

  Frankie looked up at Dan in surprise. Dan put his finger over his mouth and walked past the door to Matt Mason’s study. Seeing Frankie about to say something, Dan grimaced, shook his head and raised a clenched fist in an orgy of warning signals. The ludicrousness of it was enough to stun Frankie into silence. Still gripping Frankie’s arm, Dan silently opened the cupboard in the hall where his travelling bag had been left. He lifted the bag out and eased the door shut with his foot. He let go of Frankie’s arm long enough to open the outside-door and pushed Frankie firmly out on to the step. He lifted the car keys from the hall table. He stepped outside, put down his travelling bag and eased the door delicately shut.

  The coolness of the night hit him with the realisation of what he had done, like an anaesthetic wearing off. Frankie was staring in horror at the closed door, acting out Dan’s own feeling.

  ‘Whit the fuck is this?’

  ‘You’re drivin’,’ Dan said.

  In Frankie’s eyes possibilities were trying to surface and drowning in disbelief.

  ‘No way,’ he said. ‘Ye’re on yer own, big man. Whit have ye done?’

  Dan caught him and threw him against the car.

  ‘Ah’m countin’ ma chances in seconds, fucker,’ Dan said.

  He opened the driver’s door and jabbed his forefinger at the seat.

  ‘In! Now!’

  Frankie was bundled in. Dan gave him the keys, eased the door closed and ran round the front of the car. He threw his travelling bag in the back seat as he got in.

  ‘Drive quietly till ye’re out the drive,’ he said.

  ‘Listen –’

  Dan’s hand was on the back of Frankie’s neck. It felt like having his head caught in a clamp.

  ‘Drive now or Ah’ll break yer fuckin’ neck.’

  Frankie let the car murmur out on to the roadway.

  ‘The hospital,’ Dan said. ‘As fast as ye can make it.’

  As the car moved further away from the house, the silence was a widening separation. They sat in the same car but they felt like men travelling in different directions. The further they went, the more irrevocable became Dan’s sense of what he had done. From the bright and sudden certainty of that moment in the house, he was moving into shadow, towards what felt to him at this moment like a future of doubts that would only end when he did. Frankie’s head was making the opposite journey. Behind him was whatever had happened, which he didn’t know about. All he knew was that it was something very bad and very dangerous and that the further they went away from it, the worse their destination was likely to be. He was trying to work out ways to make that destination safe. Whatever had taken place back at Matt’s, there had to be some way to forestall its possible consequences for himself. But in order to do that, he had to know more about it.

  ‘All right, Dan,’ he said. ‘So Ah’m drivin’ ye. But at least tell me whit’s happened. Whit did ye do in there?’

  Dan seemed to be wondering himself.

  ‘Ah knocked him out.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ! Have you went mad? Why? An’ what’s this we’re doin’? You tryin’ to steal his car now? This is Matt Mason ye’re dealin’ with.’

  ‘You’re here tae take the car back, Frankie. After ye run me tae the station.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! Ah’ve to go back on ma own? Thanks very much. Why did ye have to involve me in this shite?’

  ‘Ah know, Frankie,’ Dan said. ‘Ah just picked yer name out the hat.’

  ‘Let’s go back now, Dan.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Listen. If we go back right now, there might still be a chance. Ye can say it was just like a fit or somethin’. Maybe even that ye’re still a wee bit punchy from big Cutty. Somethin’ like that.’

  Frankie was wishing he could convince himself. That might have given him a better chance of persuading Dan.

  ‘Ah’m goin’ back tae see Cutty. Ah’ve got money for him.’

  Frankie was so busy trying to follow through with his own specious reasoning that it took him a moment to hear what Dan had said. When it registered, he almost mounted the pavement.

  ‘Money?’

  Dan said nothing.

  ‘What money, Dan? What money?’

  ‘The money Ah took out the safe.’

  Frankie was a robot for several seconds. When he spoke, he spoke quietly, in a flat voice.

  ‘Ah’m drivin’ a hearse, Dan,’ he said.

  He didn’t want to know any more. He knew enough to know that Dan wouldn’t be going back. Dan couldn’t go back. I’m right, Frankie thought, this is a hearse. The only thing Frankie could do now was to try to make sure that it only had one dead man in it. What Dan Scoular was dying of could be contagious.

  Frankie glanced across at him staring through the windscreen. He felt as if he were already taking his farewell of that face which over the past weeks had seemed to him about as familiar as his own. He imagined it wouldn’t find that slow, thoughtful smile many more times from now on. The wasted possibilities angered Frankie. He reflected on the ingratitude of Dan Scoular, the way in which he had so carelessly implicated Frankie in what he had done, the spectacular stupidity of his actions. Given time, there was a lot Frankie could have taught him. In three weeks he had opened up for himself the kind of opportunity Frankie had dreamed about most of his life. But Frankie said nothing. Words were wasted on a corpse.

  Neither had spoken again when Frankie pulled up at the entrance to the hospital.

  ‘Give me two minutes,’ Dan said.

  He got out of the car and stood for a minute on the hospital steps, separating his money into two bundles and putting each bundle in a different pocket. The reception desk was empty but he could hear movement in the office behind it. He moved quickly and quietly, knowing this time exactly where he was going. He reached the door of Cutty’s room without being seen.

  Cutty was lying with the night light on, just as Dan had left him. What else would he be doing? He sounded as if he might be asleep. Dan tiptoed across to the bed. He took the money from his right-hand pocket, neatly folded, and eased it into the palm of Cutty’s hand. The hand made no response and Dan gently closed the fingers round the money.

  ‘What?’ Cutty said and was awake.

  ‘Cutty. It’s me. Dan Scoular.’

  ‘Dan Scoular?’

  ‘Dan Scoular.’

  Cutty’s hand stirred, feeling the notes.

  ‘Whit’s this?’

  ‘We had a whip-roon’ for ye, Cutty. That’s for you.’

  ‘For me, Dan? What is it?’

  ‘Five hundred quid.’

  ‘Where does this come fae?’

  ‘It’s whit ye earned, Cutty. You take it.’

  Cutty’s hand eventually closed on the money.

  ‘Ah canny believe it,’ he said.

  ‘You hide it somewhere. Ye want me tae put it somewhere for ye?’

  ‘Naw. Don’t you worry. Ah’ll hold it till the wife gets here.’

  ‘Good luck, Cutty. Ah’ve got tae go.’

  He pressed his arm and was at the door when Cutty’s voice stopped him.

  ‘Dan. You sure this is all right?’

  ‘It is for the night. The morra’s the morra.’

  ‘Well, whatever happens about it. Thanks for doin’ this.’

  On the way downstairs Dan was stopped by a nurse who wanted to know what he was doing here.

  ‘Don’t worry, hen,’ Dan said. ‘Ah’ve already been chased. One o’ the sisters saw me there an’ gave me ma walkin’ papers. Ah wis tryin’ tae see somebody. Ah’m sorry.’

  He moved too quickly to allow her professional indignation to regroup. He halted at the top of the steps outside and saw first that the car was gone and then that his travelling bag had been left on the bottom step. He was already running by the time he picked up the bag.

  He remembered that they had passed a ta
xi-rank on the way to the hospital. There had been three taxis waiting. But he estimated that it was more than half a mile away. As he ran, he was watching any cars that were coming, very carefully. He was surprised at the freedom with which his body moved, at the clarity of his head, the decisiveness he felt in himself.

  When he glanced back and saw a taxi coming with its ‘for hire’ sign lit, he ran into the middle of the road and flagged it down. It occurred to him that the quicker he got off the streets the better and that a taxi-rank was a place that they might watch. He was inside with his bag on the floor and the door shut before the driver had his handbrake on.

  ‘How much tae take me tae Thornbank?’ Dan said.

  ‘Tae where?’

  ‘Thornbank.’

  ‘Thornliebank?’

  ‘Naw. Thorn-bank.’

  ‘Well, that depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Like where the hell it is, for starters. That could be south o’ Manchester for all Ah know, by the way. Ye don’t have tae take a boat, do ye?’

  ‘Ye take the road tae Ayr. Ah can direct ye fae there.’

  ‘Christ, ye’re talkin’ about somethin’ there, son. Ye need the sherpa dogs for that yin. Yer name widny be Captain Oates, wid it? Ye see. Ye’ve a third on to the fare once ye go outside the city limits. An ye’re well outside the limits wi’ this yin. We could fa’ off the edge o’ the world here.’

  ‘Look. If it’s not on, just take me tae a taxi-rank. Like the one at Central Station.’

  ‘Not on? Son, Outer Mongolia’s on. That’s what Ah’m here for. Ah’m just tryin’ tae clarify the situation for ye, like. We’re talkin’ twenty-five tae thirty quid. Or we could be. Depends how far fae Ayr ye are.’

  That’s fair enough.’

  ‘Right ye are, ma son. You sit back an’ enjoy the drive.’

  The driver’s attempts to keep a conversation going approached Dan’s silence several times but could find no way past his monosyllabic responses. Action over for the moment, Dan was wondering how far he agreed with himself.

  The image of his travelling bag sitting at the bottom of the steps came back to him. It seemed to convey to him what he had done, who he was. It fixed itself in his mind with a symbolic completeness, like a family crest. His sense of himself had no permanent residence. It would travel with him from day to day as long as he lived. Its luggage was light. There was no room there for the certainties his father had owned. Dan saw such certainties as dead weights.

  He couldn’t share his father’s belief in the sureness of social improvement. All of his experience had made him doubt it. His discovery through the fight of what was in himself had confirmed these doubts. He couldn’t imitate Cutty Dawson’s stoic acceptance, the certainty of his faith in his own strength. Dan had learned the pointlessness of his strength. It had been his doubts that had enabled him to beat Cutty, his awareness of his own vulnerability that Betty had taught him. He couldn’t obey Matt Mason’s commandment. That would have been to pretend that his nature had only one reflex when it had many.

  The fight which he had been regarding as some kind of arrival had become a new starting-point, one which presumed no particular future destination but which denied the arbitrariness of a past one. It hadn’t said, This is where we’ll go,’ but simply, That is where we won’t go.’

  It had clarified his choices for him. Forced to go to the limits of himself, he had discovered a violence and a selfishness and a capacity to feed on others that he hadn’t known the extent of before. He reflected that he had previously only found fragments of the awareness he now had, in dreams and when he did things in drink of which he wouldn’t have thought himself capable.

  Yet he was glad to know himself more fully. No matter how bad the news, it was of himself. He needed it. The fight with Cutty was a fight with himself and it would never be over, that second fight. Striking Matt Mason had proved that. Frightened as he was of what he had done, he couldn’t wish to retract it. It was the gesture by which he insisted on a continuing choice. No one else was going to tell him what his experience meant. No matter what they did to his body, while his head worked he would decide what it meant to him.

  They were beyond where Graithnock had been. The driver was asking for directions. It was a good question, Dan thought.

  ‘Ye take left at the first roundabout. Then ye take yer first left off the dual carriageway.’

  ‘Over an’ out.’

  He would come to Thornbank the back way, through Fardle Wood. That way, the driver wouldn’t know where he was going. That was maybe crazy but so was his position. Paranoia was perhaps permissible just for tonight. When he told the driver to stop, they were on an empty road, with the wood a hill of darkness on their right.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Here.’

  The cab pulled into the side of the road. The driver put on the interior light. He did his calculations. He wanted twenty-five pounds. Dan gave him twenty-eight.

  ‘Ye’re a decent man, big yin.’

  Dan noticed him studying his face for the first time. He hoped all the driver was taking note of were the bruises. Dan remembered someone saying at the party that he looked like a Red Indian. The driver looked as if he were trying to work out which tribe – maybe Hopi, being left here to go the rest of the way on foot.

  ‘Ye sure this is where ye want off?’

  ‘This is it.’

  ‘It’s just that it doesny look like anywhere.’

  ‘Maybe no’ to you.’

  The driver stared back at him, suddenly smiled.

  ‘Ah don’t know whit ye’re up to, big man,’ he said. ‘But Ah think Ah’m on your side.’

  Dan winked.

  ‘You’re a sound judge,’ he said. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheerio. An’ good luck tae ye.’

  Dan slammed the door shut, crossed the road, climbed the fence and in fifty yards was wrapped in trees. He knew the wood but in the darkness it was unfamiliar. A lot of days of his boyhood had been spent in this place. It was as if he were back there. The place was liquid with darkness. Sounds happened with infinite suggestiveness around him. He sensed his way forward. Every step was a mystery. But he welcomed the strangeness, defined himself in relation to it. It was like rediscovering the excitement of boyhood. The strangeness of the place became the strangeness of himself. The unexplored possibilities around him became the unexplored possibilities within him. Here, Matt Mason’s study contracted to the size of a stone.

  ‘Fuck it!’ he suddenly bellowed into the darkness. ‘Ah’m who Ah’ll be.’ Don’t make the headstone yet, he thought. And then he promised himself quietly, ‘Betty! All Ah’m offering is me. You take it or leave it!’

  He began to move through the darkness as if it were where he belonged. The bag swung in his hand weightless, just a part of himself.

  EIGHT

  The possible consequences followed him home over the next few days. The aftermath of violence seized him like an ague, bringing the nervous restlessness of a prolonged hangover. In those moments of shivering rejection of a recent self, nothing seemed trivial. Small problems magnified to overwhelming proportions. An oppressive and focusless dread played on his raw nerve-ends.

  That was the time when Mr Hyde turns back into Doctor Jekyll, obliging him to find accommodation in his daily life for an enormity he isn’t sure he can live with. Dan Scoular was terrified by what he had done. He went through a time of hallucinating Matt Mason’s retribution in various forms. He was walking in the street when a car pulled up beside him. That was a recurring image in his mind, suddenly blocking the progress of whatever he was trying to think about. It was an image which spawned various extensions of itself like the nodes of a proliferating cancer. Sometimes there were several men in the car with harsh faces he didn’t know but all of them wearing expressions of intense malice towards him like carvings. Sometimes only Matt Mason sat in the back seat of the car. Sometimes the car was white and sometimes black. Sometimes the stre
et was dark, empty of everything except what was to happen to him. Sometimes it was daylight and the street was busy with people moving like sleepwalkers on private errands that made them oblivious to him. Sometimes the doors of the car burst open and the men came out and the sensation he felt was of going under a stampede. Sometimes the back window of the car slid down and a gun pointed out and a galaxy of fiery light bloomed soundlessly from the muzzle, scattering him into limitless space.

  There were other images that happened without warning in his mind, so sudden, so fully realised that he wondered if they were remembered fragments of a dream. He knew he was dreaming a lot but he couldn’t remember the substance of the dreams, perhaps because a part of him didn’t want to face the content. Only he wakened so much, often several times in a night, with that fear that things were irreparably wrong, that there was no escape from where he was and where he was was a dangerous place.

  The commonest of those sudden images was one of his own crumpled body. The background it lay against was vague. It could have been carpet or wooden floor or stone. He was looking down on it and he didn’t know whether it was dead or just severely injured. But that wasn’t the most frightening image. The most frightening images were ones he wouldn’t allow to fulfil themselves in his thoughts. They remained fragmentary because his mind rejected them in panic, tore them as they occurred.

  They were images of Betty and Raymond and young Danny injured. They were of blood and discoloured skin, head wounds, a pulped eye, a body twisted beyond the hope of being again what it had been. They were a terrible gallery he couldn’t bear to enter, a room of his own mind that held the half-formed nightmare possibilities of what the world can make happen to the people we love. They were the last place of his fear and they turned him back towards trying to find a way to live where he found himself to be.

  If he wasn’t prepared to contemplate those things as imminent possibilities, he had to find a way to make them less likely. He must avoid the temptation to hide out in the house because that would be attracting the danger towards his family. If Matt Mason was determined to find him, he might get impatient of looking for him elsewhere. But if Dan was out and about, Matt Mason would presumably choose to deal with him outside. Dan would have to live with as few external signs of panic as possible and with the maximum vigilance possible. He must let the pattern of his life say one thing while he constantly reminded himself of the truth that was its secret. He must let himself be found and be constantly prepared for when he might be found. He must be vulnerable and strong.