The Big Man (29 page)

The man he had thought of as his opponent lay motionless, the white covers making of him a humped mystery. He was flat on the bed, without a pillow. He looked like a sacrificial offering.

‘That you, Davie?’

Dan said nothing. The ordinariness of the voice coming from the mummified stillness took him aback. He was held suspended between the awesomeness of things and their banality.

‘That you, Davie? You all right? What happened?’

Dan came to the bed and, not knowing anything to say,
reached out clumsily and touched the right hand that lay on the counterpane and shook it.

‘Who are you? Ah thought it was Davie.’

‘Cutty. It’s me. Dan Scoular.’

The hand Dan was holding in his froze and then withdrew, paused briefly an inch away and then closed firmly again on Dan’s and shook it gently. Dan sensed the chasm of inner distance that inch had measured and the generosity of spirit it took to cross it.

‘Ah thought it was Davie,’ Cutty said. The nurse said it was ma brother.’

‘Ah told her that. It was the only way Ah could get in.’

A smile almost came on Cutty’s mouth, didn’t survive.

‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘Ah told them the fight had been with ma brother. Maybe they thought that’s who ye were.’

They did. Why did ye tell them that?’

‘They were talkin’ about the polis. Who needs that? Ah’m in enough bother. Wi’out puttin’ the polis on to Cam Colvin an’ Matt Mason. At least Ah’m still breathin’. Ye got a seat? Sit on the bed there.’

Sitting down, Dan was surprised at the measured practicality of Cutty’s responses, not just in how he was solicitous that Dan should have a place to sit but in the way the enormity of what had happened to him was held in a vice of pragmatism. Bad could still have been worse. This could be the way he was for life but he assessed it carefully.

‘How did ye know Ah wis here?’ he asked.

‘Word gets around,’ Dan said, not wanting to be too specific about what had happened to his brother.

‘Oor Davie? What’s happened to him?’

‘Well, he came. Where we were.’

The Black Chip. Naw. Ah told him. The daft bugger. So what’s happened?’

‘He’s all right.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Well, he was shoutin’ the odds a bit. No wonder.’

‘Jesus Christ. Where does he think we live? Dodge City? Where is he?’

‘He’s all right.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘He left walkin’. He’s all right. He wis just ragin’. No wonder.’

‘No wonder my arse. But maybe that’s it out his system. He’ll never learn. Two vodkas an’ the pish goes over the brain.’

The stillness of his anger had been strange.

‘So you’re having a party?’ he said.

‘Well, aye.’

‘Aye. Why would ye no’? Ah can remember some of those maself. Funny. Don’t know how you felt. But they never worked too well for me after a fight. Remember winnin’ the Scottish title. Christ, what’s that? How many Scottish heavyweights have there ever been? But it meant a lot to me at the time. It was somethin’ Ah had been aimin’ for. Well, we had a party after it. An’ it went completely flat for me. Like ye couldny get anythin’ tae match what ye thought ye had done.’ For the first time since the fight, Dan felt his experience connect with someone else’s. ‘Still, Ah’d rather be havin’ one o’ those the night than be lyin’ here.’

Dan heard movement in the corridor outside and, thinking they might be interrupted soon, cut across Cutty’s remarks.

‘Cutty,’ he said. ‘Ah’m sorry.’

Cutty’s hand was up before Dan had finished speaking. His face looked almost prim, as if he hoped Dan wasn’t going to commit a breach of etiquette.

‘Naw,’ he said. ‘Naw, naw. That’s the way it goes. Not your fault. Not anybody’s fault.’

‘But your eyes. What’s the chances?’

‘Not too clever. See, the right eye’s a dead man, anyway. Has been for years. They told me at the time the left yin could go the same way. Warned me not to put it at risk. But Ah knew that, didn’t Ah? So it was ma choice.’

‘But why, Cutty?’

‘Ah needed the money. Ye always need the money, don’t ye?’

‘Ye all right for money at least?’

Cutty smiled bitterly.

‘Well, Ah almost was. Ah thought Ah had ye for a while there.’

‘Ye did.’

‘Aye, ye were goin’.’

‘But ye still get yer money?’

Dan was remembering Matt Mason saying that winners win money, losers lose it.

‘Ah owed Cam Colvin, didn’t Ah? An’ Mason took a right few quid off him.’

‘Ye get nothin’?’

‘That was the deal. Ah agreed to it.’

‘But after what’s happened?’

‘What’s happened is Ah got beat.’

‘But ye could be blind. They reckon that, do they? Ah mean, can they tell at this stage?’

They can tell so much. But Ah need to stay absolutely still for a day or that. Then they can confirm. An upper detachment, they call it. Whit Ah canny understand is it’s the bottom o’ ma e’e that’s affected. Just greyness. Like the tide risin’ up yer eyeball. Ah can just about keek over it. Ah’m terrified Ah waken up the morra an’ Ah’m overheads wi’ it.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

Cutty’s stillness seemed to Dan more than physical. It was as if his spirit was immobilised as well. That’s the way it goes.’ ‘Not anybody’s fault.’ Something terrible and unnecessary had happened and even the victim of it acquiesced.

‘Cutty. That was your family Ah saw outside there?’

‘Coulda been. They just left.’

Two women, two girls.’

That would be them. That was ma mither, wi’ Jean an’ the lassies. Davie left earlier. But ye know that.’

‘That’s all the family ye’ve got?’

‘Jean an’ the lassies. Aye. Cathy and Maureen. They’re fourteen an’ twelve. Ah’d like to see them as women. But we’ll have to wait and see. Still. They’ve got a good mither. She’ll see them all right.’

Dan remembered sitting in that gloomy living-room with his mother and realising how much she had had to carry all her life. He saw those women outside as her descendants. Not only did they have to deal with the daily problems of living. They had to impart to it its true feeling as well, dignify it with their tears.
By the passion of their pain they were offering some human measurement of what had happened to Cutty.

If those women were descended from his mother, he saw Cutty as his father’s true heir, inheritor of a hard philosophy. He lay there, it seemed to Dan, having made a heroic statue of himself, sealed off from admitting the enormity of his own hurt. Dan felt admiration for Cutty and through him for his father and all those men he had felt he was fighting in that field, but he also felt the unadmitted pathos of them. In order to achieve that attitude of strength, much richness of feeling had to be foregone. The reality of their condition could not be admitted. It was as if true human responses to the mysteries of our experience became women’s work and it was men’s to predetermine themselves into an immutable stance.

The distinction between the two roles was false. They shared the same condition. The same fragility had to be admitted. Dan thought he began to understand for the first time what the fight meant. He hadn’t won. Cutty had lost. His father had lost. All those self-defeatingly brave men of his boyhood had lost. Like their champion, Cutty had tried to deny the truth of his own situation, had agreed to the unfair odds, had tried to impose the strength of his will on impossible circumstances. Sitting with Cutty, Dan felt himself at a wake for a way of life, a brave philosophy which didn’t work. In trying to prove that it did, Cutty had damaged himself, perhaps irreparably.

‘So it was ma choice.’ What kind of choice was that? They hadn’t been fighting each other. They had been using themselves as conduits for a quarrel that wasn’t theirs.

That fight, Cutty,’ Dan said. ‘What was it about?’

‘Money.’

‘Ye must know more than that. What was the quarrel between Matt Mason an’ that Cam Colvin?’

‘Hey. Ah’m a big, thick puncher. Or Ah was. Ma brains are in ma knuckles. How would Ah know?’

‘Ye heard nothin’ about the background to it? Ah canny believe that. Ye said ye owed Cam Colvin. That means ye must have been involved wi’ him before this.’

‘On the edges. Ye think these fellas advertise? They tell ye
what to do, not why to do it. The less ye know the better. It’s like insurance.’

Is it true that Colvin’s intae drugs?’

Cutty didn’t answer at once, as if Dan was asking him to breach some code of manhood.

‘Who told ye that?’ Cutty asked.

‘Matt Mason.’

‘He should talk.’

‘How d’ye mean?’

‘Look. Ye’ve got yer wages. Ah think ye should go back to wherever it is an’ let it go at that.’

‘Matt Mason’s talkin’ about givin’ me a job.’

‘Oh.’

Cutty’s lips pursed, trying to decide.

‘Look, Ah don’t like talkin’ about this. But Ah’ll tell ye what little Ah know. Aye, Colvin deals in drugs. Ye think Matt Mason doesny? It’s where the money is, isn’t it? What they call an expandin’ market. Ah reckon they’re both involved in it.’

‘Matt Mason as well? So why were we fightin’ the day?’

‘Ah’ve heard different things.’

‘Like what?’

‘How many stories do ye want?’

‘The one you believe.’

‘Ah wouldn’t know what to believe. But Ah can tell ye the most popular one. The rumour that’s runnin’ favourite. There’s a man called Tony Freeman. Used tae be in Glesca. They reckon he’s in Spain now. Round about Benidorm. Marbella. That kinna area. But they reckon the money he’s spendin’ there isny his.’

‘So?’

‘Well, it’s supposed to be somethin’ to do wi’ him. But the rumours fork out a bit from there. Take yer pick. But he diddled Matt Mason an’ Cam Colvin in some way. They say he was supplyin’ drugs an’ made a dummy delivery to the two o’ them. Wan theory is our fight wis settlin’ two things. Who would compensate the other. An’ who would attend to Freeman. But Ah don’t know. Ah really don’t.’

The little that Cutty knew gave Dan a fix on the dimensions of the ignorance of both of them. He had an image of the two of
them in the centre of the field while the others watched without for a second seeing what was truly happening. Their efforts had been a decoy.

Even the fragments of his own experience of it he felt shifting painfully inside him, like pieces of shrapnel. The successive layers of pain he had gone through seemed meaningless. The triumph he had felt came back to mock him. The mutual ordeal to which they had subjected themselves, and which he had vaguely been thinking was a ferocious measuring of each other, was rigged. They had already been measured. In their crazy journey around the field the destination had been decided.

Thinking of it now, Dan felt their efforts take on an edge of irony. If there had been a commentary on their fight, he decided, it would have preceded their actions, determining them. They hadn’t been controlling events. They were being controlled by them. The training for the fight, which he had thought he was doing around Thornbank and in the gym at Ingram Street, had taken place a long time before, for both of them. They had been conditioned over years in dead-end jobs and dole queues, picking the seams of empty pockets, learning to add up their individual bitterness and disillusionment and charge it against somebody as hapless as themselves. They had been well trained in futility.

And while they spent themselves against each other, cancelling out each other’s force, neutralising the meaning of their joint experience, a parasitical significance had been feeding off them. A balance of power that they would never share in was affected, money of which they would only ever see a fraction shifted places, perhaps someone’s life or death was being decided.

There couldn’t be triumph in such a winning. Both fighters had lost. Only the promoters had won. He had no honour from it. The terms he had allowed himself to be judged in weren’t his. In order to have honour, he had to introduce his own terms, but he didn’t know how.

‘You should have somethin’ from this, Cutty,’ he said. ‘You should.’

‘Maybe. But that’s no’ the way it works.’

‘Why not?’

‘Ask God that yin.’

‘Ah think the responsibility’s maybe nearer. Look. What we did wis illegal. We can put the hammer on them for your money. Or say we’ll tell the polis.’

That right?’

That’s right.’

‘Oh aye.’

‘We can have them where we want them.’

‘The only place Ah want them is far away from me.’

‘There’s plenty of witnesses.’

‘Talk sense. Who do ye think brought them there in the first place? Matt Mason an’ Cam Colvin. Who’s gonny turn their tongue on them?’

‘You can still talk.’

‘It might be tricky talkin’ from a coffin.’

‘Well, Ah can talk.’

‘Listen, Dan Scoular. You’re a country boy. Take yer money an’ go back there. An’ take yer mouth with ye. Ye don’t play heroes wi’ these men. They just kill ye. You maybe punched me blind. But Ah think Ah punched you daft. Forget it! This is me, whit’s left o’ me. An’ that’s you. An’ those are the men in charge. Just concentrate on keepin’ breathin’.’

‘Cutty. Ah’m goin’ tae stop them if they don’t pay ye.’

‘An’ Ah’m gonny deny everything you say. Where’ll that leave ye? Lookin’ daft before ye’re dead. All right? You leave it. Ah’m all right.’

It was as if they hadn’t shared any common experience. Dan was to go back to Thornbank with his money and Cutty was to go back into his perhaps ruined life and that was it. Cam Colvin had lost money, Matt Mason had made money, and maybe a man in Spain would die. Thank you and separate bills, please.

‘Cutty,’ he said. ‘What more can they do tae ye? Ye might be blind.’

‘Maybe,’ Cutty said. ‘But ma family’s not.’

Dan looked at him and sympathised but didn’t agree. Cutty was offering both of them absolution. Dan didn’t accept it. They were both guilty. It could have been Cutty’s party tonight. That was Dan’s forgiveness, if he had wanted it.

But he was guilty. So was Cutty, so was his father, so were
his boyhood heroes. He saw their heroic stances as gestures of despair. They didn’t believe there was anything else they could do. They chose a kind of stoical innocence and waited for others to improve their circumstances. For that to happen, they had to go on believing in innocence. Dan thought he understood at last, through his fight with Cutty, his fight with his father. It was his father’s last stand against a possibility he couldn’t admit. For if his own son were corruptible, what hope could he have of those who were supposed to be the liberators, the ones who would see that the conditions of his life were made more just? Despair needed false optimism to go on.