The Big Man (30 page)

Dan had lost his. The argument he had been having with his father had clarified itself against Cutty. Assumption of your own innocence was guilt. He felt himself come into his patiently accrued experience as something earned. He would find how to spend it. He would spend it not just for himself, since others had helped him to earn it.

He remembered the darkness he had found in himself at the end of the fight. It had frightened him, that fierceness. He hadn’t wanted to face it as part of himself. It had haunted him in the bath at Matt Mason’s house. It had made him fear he might pollute his children. He saw the party as an attempt to celebrate the void he had found in himself. He wouldn’t celebrate it. But he had to live with it.

He recalled looking down at his body after the fight and seeing the strange map of where he had been. He had explored himself and had discovered an anger to the bone he hadn’t known was in him. Matt Mason obviously thought that made Dan the same as him. But it didn’t. ‘Whit is it you believe in, boay?’

He believed he had choice. He remembered his realisation, when he was training with Tommy Brogan, that you could split a second into options. No matter what the conditions, no matter what you discovered your nature to be, you still had choice. You couldn’t choose what happened to you but you could choose what you did with it. You couldn’t choose who you were but you could choose how to use who you were.

He looked at Cutty again and saw what he himself might become, as good as blind and just as helpless. He lay waiting
for what would happen. What more was there for him to do? He hadn’t only himself to think of. He had to protect his family. But Dan decided that the first thing he had to give his family was himself, as free as he could be. He couldn’t accept the contract with events that Cutty and his father had agreed to. He had a clause of his own to insert. What the exact terms of it were he didn’t yet know.

The door opened and the Sister looked in. She was holding something in her hands and kept the door open with her body. Her expression was a gentle reprimand to him for taking such advantage of her busyness. Dan nodded.

‘Ah better go, Cutty,’ he said.

‘It was decent of ye to come in.’

‘Ah’ll hear how it goes with ye.’

‘You take care of yerself.’

‘Aye,’ said Dan. ‘Whatever that means.’

As he came out, Frankie rose from his chair in the corridor.

‘Okay, Dan?’

‘Terrible,’ Dan said – then he winked, ‘and okay.’

Frankie left it at that.

When Dan and Frankie came out of the car at the Black Chip, Dan smiled to see the Thornbank men straggling out. Their voices bobbed on the night air, swimmers going towards the open sea, innocent of what might be moving underneath the surface.

‘What a night!’

‘The day Thornbank came to town.’

‘Better than winnin’ the Junior Cup.’

Dan loved the generosity of their responses and saw its danger. These men had a worrying adaptability. They could cultivate pleasure anywhere. Put them on a battlefield and they would be grateful for every poppy that they found. They would improvise songs out of whatever was going on but they were a chorus that, often unable to see what was taking place, would chant a song of celebration as events dragged them down. He loved the tune but he had his own still-forming idea of what the words should be. They gave him the old ones.

‘The man himself!’

‘What a fight, what a night!’

‘We’re goin’ to get them to put up a statue in Thornbank. The Dan Scoular memorial.’

Two blind men trying to gouge each other’s eyes out, Dan thought. They were squeezing his arms and touching his back. They were honouring a cheque that, had he been only his past, was certain to bounce. But he would turn it into real currency.

‘That Matt Mason knows how to lay it on, eh?’ Sam MacKinlay was saying. ‘Some man, that.’

Dan looked at Sam’s flushed face and added it to what was owed. Sam was the sort of guest who would have thanked the Borgias for a lovely meal.

‘How’s Cutty Dawson, Dan?’

The voice introduced the possibility of an alternative sense of things. Dan was grateful to Alistair, baffled listener into other people’s lives.

‘He might be blind,’ Dan said.

Cutty was the guest they hadn’t realised was at the party. They felt guilty at ignoring him. They all stood with the wind in their hair and realised it was cold. Feeling the sense of the night change around him, Frankie spoke like an MC trying to rally their mood.

‘Come on, come on,’ he said. ‘It’s not your fault, Dan. It was a fair fight.’

‘Aye,’ Dan said. ‘If you weren’t in it.’

The others murmured their penances.

‘Pair sowl.’

‘That’s a bad break.’

‘Hope he gets over it.’

‘We’ll see ye when ye get back down, Dan?’ Alistair said. ‘Ye don’t want a lift just now?’

‘No. Thanks, Alistair. Ah’ve a man to see.’

‘Maybe just as well,’ Sam said. ‘We’ll probably all be dead wi’ frostbite when we get there. There’s a windae we canny shut.’

‘Maybe we should phone Geordie Parker,’ Harry said. ‘Find out the secret spell ye use tae get it shut. Everything else in the bloody car has a mind of its own.’

The levity was a rehearsal, not an achieved performance. As
they walked away to find the car, debating where they had left it, Dan could imagine them having trouble finding their way home, but perhaps not as much as he might have.

Inside, the party was hectic. Dan realised that it was still early, for some. Noise was round them like a plastic bubble. The doorman he had told to mind his own business seemed to be doing that. He was talking (confidentially) to two other men and he had his hand resting casually on the blonde woman’s thigh. Eddie Foley was one of the other men. Tommy Brogan was standing alone at the bar.

‘Dan.’ Frankie appeared at his elbow, having been speaking to one of the other doormen. ‘Matt an’ the others are up at the house. We’ve got to go on up there.’

Dan felt as if he was seeing it for Cutty Dawson. It was, it seemed to him, like walking into a fancy restaurant straight from the slaughterhouse. Frankie was fidgeting.

‘Dan,’ he said. ‘We’re wastin’ time.’

‘Ah don’t know,’ Dan said. ‘Sometimes the way ye go gives ye a better view of where ye’re comin’ to.’

SEVEN

It was the first time he had been aware of seeing the house. When they had brought him earlier today, the place had been just part of a continuing confusion of sensations, the clean smell of the hallway, the plushness of carpets, the soothing bath. Seeing it from the outside as Frankie turned the Mercedes riskily into the driveway, and gave himself a last thrill before he handed over the keys, Dan was struck by the size of the building.

It was a detached house set on a small prominence, having two gateways to it joined by a crescent of driveway that hemmed in a semi-circle of lawn with some trees. Built in grey sandstone, it belonged to a time before the aquarium school of modern architecture. Glass was used discreetly here. The downstairs bay windows were large but the overall size of the place made them seem modest. Upstairs, the solid base of the building began to be full of its own importance, turning whimsical. Several little turrets appeared, defying any purpose you could imagine. Crenellation ran along the roof-edge as if the house had begun to mistake itself for a castle.

The fortress-like impression made Dan realise suddenly that it was a building out of his childhood. It merged for him with some houses he had seen in and around Thornbank when he was small. Often enough, out playing or coming back from a walk in the country, he had stared at a house like that and wondered what it must be like inside. How many rooms would there be in a place like that? Would they have servants? What sort of people would live there? What would they talk about?

The vagueness of those other buildings, wrapped in mists of dreaming fancy and ignorance and incomprehension, had crystallised into this one. This was the house he had wondered
about. He had been a long time getting here by a devious route but he had arrived. Mystery had an address.

As he got out of the car, he remembered the sitting-room where they had been drinking earlier and, thinking of the room and trying to work out its position in the house, he reckoned it must be an extension. The thought gave him a perspective different from the one he had had as a boy. Even these big solid houses that looked like immovable facts were changing and adapting subtly. They might still look from the front like statements that nothing could challenge but discreetly they were inserting extra clauses in the declaration they made, admitting qualifications. The realisation made them less awesome.

He was interested to be back here, having gone through the experience of the night. Knowing the little more he knew about Matt Mason, he was surprised how easy it was to walk in. Frankie rang the bell and pushed down the handle of the door and it opened. There was no guard, no grille, no Doberman. Perhaps Matt Mason’s reputation was around it like a moat.

Matt Mason looked out from the sitting-room as Frankie closed the door, laying the car keys on the hall table, and he waved them into what Dan felt was the core of the evening. They went into the room and, while Matt Mason got them a drink, Dan saw who was there. It seemed to him as if the evening had been panned of all its dross and only the hard value remained. Cutty Dawson was stowed in hospital. The Thornbank men had gone home. The residue of the party was twitching itself to death in the Black Chip.

This was what the day had been about. Here was Matt Mason, whose money and power had controlled the events of the day. Here was Roddy Stewart, the mechanic who made sure the machinery of that power developed no hitches. Here were their women. Here were Melanie and Sandra, reward for the labourer, reward for the hirer. Matt Mason gave Dan and Frankie their drinks and they sat down.

Atmosphere redecorates a room, heightens certain features, mutes others. The spaciousness of earlier in the day, with the sunlight and the garden beyond, was gone. Dan was aware of the solidity of the furnishings, of how the chairs and the couch
created alignments among them, made a group statuary that had a coherent meaning. The curtains weren’t drawn across the french windows and their images were repeated out into the darkness, as if they were all there was.

Small whorls of reflective laughter from something Roddy Stewart had been saying eddied around them. Dan realised how comfortably they had been absorbed into the room, as if they were already a natural part of it. Melanie’s shoulder brushed his, familiar as a habit. Everybody was relaxed. The ease with which Matt Mason referred to Cutty Dawson conveyed that they were all confederates here.

‘You saw him then, Dan?’

‘Cutty? Aye.’

‘How was he?’

‘Not so good. They think he’ll maybe finish blind.’

The words were like a draught through the cosiness of the room, a window blown open. Melanie put her hand on Dan’s arm.

‘It’s not your fault, Dan. Don’t blame yourself.’

‘Of course it’s not,’ Margaret Mason said.

‘Ah don’t know,’ Dan said. ‘Ah was slightly involved at the time. Ah mean, Cutty didn’t walk into a tree or anything.’

‘You ran the same risk as he did,’ Alice Stewart said.

‘No’ quite.’

‘What do you mean?’ It was Matt Mason, watching him and smiling. He gave the impression of being further back from the conversation than the others, letting it happen but monitoring it.

‘Cutty’s eyes were dicey before the fight started. He knew that. So did Tommy Brogan. He tipped me the wink. Did ye know yerself?’

‘I’d heard things. But you hear a lot of things. What difference does it make?’

‘Quite a lot to Cutty.’

‘He should’ve thought of that. Was he complaining?’

‘Naw. That’s the most depressin’ bit about it. He talks as if it wis an act of God.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

Dan looked across at him.

If it was, Ah can give ye God’s address.’

It was the kind of frontal remark that in another context Dan would have expected to be taken as a challenge. Said to Dan’s father or to a man in the pubs he knew, it might have meant a physical confrontation. In this room it evoked laughter. Matt Mason led the procession, closely followed by Roddy Stewart and the women, except Melanie. Frankie joined in, belatedly but enthusiastically – out of relief, Dan suspected.

‘Well, I’ve been called many a thing,’ Matt Mason said.

‘Maybe I should be prostrate in your presence.’ Roddy Stewart was miming his idea in sketch form.

‘I should be keeping my head covered in bed,’ Margaret said.

Dan felt the moment like a more complicated variant of his talk with Cutty Dawson. With Cutty, what he was trying to say hadn’t been taken seriously either. But there the reaction had been closed, determined, could admit only one form of response because otherwise the complex content of what was happening would have been overwhelming. Here the reaction was open, relaxed. They played with the form of what he had said – Matt Mason as God – because they had pre-decided the ridiculousness of the content. They couldn’t take seriously the fact that Cutty’s blindness could in any way be traced back to this house. Their laughter wasn’t malicious. In the way they looked at Dan and shook their heads, there was something like affection.

‘Ah’ll tell ye something even funnier,’ Dan said.

‘I don’t know if I can take it,’ Alice said.

‘Cutty Dawson got nothin’ from the fight.’

‘What?’ Melanie was interested.

‘He got no money. The deal he had wi’ Cam Colvin gives him nothin’ because he lost.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Alice said.

‘Maybe you’ve cleaned him out completely, Matt,’ Roddy Stewart said.

‘It’s a hard life,’ Matt Mason said.

They talked around it some more but Dan took little part in the conversation. He didn’t see the point. He thought of how often, when he was younger, he had argued against the kind of
isolation from others he felt in this room. But he sensed that if he did it here he would become no more than an entertainment. He felt his awkward difference from them, as if he spoke in a moral dialect strange to them, learned from his parents and his past. They would merely And it quaint, that idiom by which us and them desired to be the same.