The Big Man (27 page)

‘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 him 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.’

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.