The Big Man (13 page)

‘Ah want tae know exactly what ye mean,’ Dan said. ‘Ye mean like killin’?’

Impaled on those eyes, Frankie White had no option but to be honest.

‘Ah might mean that,’ he said. ‘Dan, Ah don’t know. Ah tell ye the truth. It’s a certainty Matt Mason has done that before. Ah mean, Ah couldn’t take ye and show ye the body. But that just makes it more worrying, doesn’t it? If Ah could, he wouldn’t be here. But he is here. And that’s our problem. Ah don’t know. Maybe if you reneged, it wouldn’t be as serious as that. But, oh, it would be serious. Very, very serious. Bad injuries at the least. Like, very bad. And maybe just the chance of terminal ones. A man like him, Dan. He can’t afford anybody makin’ him look silly. That’s his version of the Wall Street crash. Suddenly, he’s got nothin’ in the bank. Suddenly, it’s goin’ to take three weeks of threats to get him a free packet of fags. Fear. That’s his currency, Dan. It’s as good a money as any. An’ he’s got
plenty of his kinda currency, Ah’m tellin’ ye. Like very plenty. Ah’ve seen him go into places and buy them with a look. Ye think the delicate conscience of some big, nice man from Thornbank is something he’s goin’ to decide he can afford to subsidise? Grow up, big Dan. Ye’re playin’ in the first division here. We’re not usin’ jackets for goalposts. Dan, you made a promise with your hand. Ye took two hundred quid. It’s simple. Keep the promise or maybe die.’

Dan Scoular stared, not without a certain amount of fear, into what he had said. When he spoke, the smallness of what he had to say was an inverse measure of his innocence. Hearing him, Frankie liked him for it and was frustrated by it at the same time.

‘Ye could’ve told me what ye were gettin’ me into,’ Dan Scoular said.

‘Dan!’ Frankie said. ‘Ah thought Ah was gettin’ ye into a fight. Just one more fight. Just what ye’re good at. That’s all Ah thought Ah was doin’. Ah should’ve known better. In this place. But Ah know Matt Mason’s lookin’ for a puncher. Ah think to maself, Ah know a real puncher. Dan, it seemed simple at the time. It was easy, Ah’m tellin’ ye. Here’s a fight. Here’s a man who can fight. Let’s put them together. And Ah’ll admit Ah saw somethin’ in it for me. But Ah saw somethin’ in it for you as well. That was the beauty of it. Everythin’ fitted. It really did. Everythin’ fitted. Everybody was making somethin’ out it. You as well. An’ there could be more in this for you if ye won. Matt Mason’s got a lot of power. Could change yer life. And all you’re bein’ asked to do is what ye’re good at.’

‘What are you good at, Frankie?’ Dan Scoular said.

‘Hey, Ah’m still lookin’.’ Frankie, for a moment, was back defensively performing. ‘That’s something Ah’m not sure Ah’ve found yet.’

‘When ye do find it, Frankie, don’t practise it on me. If we get out this all right.’

They sat in their own thoughts.

‘Frankie. So tell me. If it’s as serious as you say, Ah better know everythin’ there is tae know. Ah want tae know where Ah am here.’

Frankie felt again the ambivalence this place caused in him. He thought perhaps he shouldn’t come back, perhaps he should make this his last trip except for coming in to see his mother and getting out as quickly as possible. It was too complicated coming here. He remembered Matt Mason’s warning about telling Dan Scoular as little as possible. He remembered how much he liked Dan Scoular. In choosing to tell Dan as much as he knew of the truth, he honestly didn’t know whether he was obeying Matt Mason in a subtle way, making out of the truth the ultimate expediency, deploying the only method he knew to make Dan’s honesty conform, or whether he was reacting straight to Dan Scoular’s demand, obeying his growing liking and respect for an undevious man.

‘Okay, Dan,’ he said. ‘This is what Ah know. And it won’t take up a lot of yer time. Matt Mason is a bookie. He’s got pubs. As Ah’ve suggested to ye, he’s done a couple of other things. Don’t ask me what they were. But they were nasty. As nasty as you can imagine, Ah’ll settle for that. Now there’s another man. He’s called Cam Colvin. He’s more severe than Matt. Don’t have any doubts about that, Dan. Most of us live in a world we don’t know’s there. Ah promise you. People die and they call it natural causes. Ah wish Ah could believe in natural causes. Dan, Ah think maybe we’ve lost the natural causes. They used to be there. See when ma mother dies. They can call it what they like. But she was killed. When it happens, she was killed. So what am I goin’ to do? Ah’ll go to the funeral and be a nice son. But Ah’ll know that she went through what she didn’t have to go through. Ah know that, Dan. It’s how we live. Some of us pay for others. That’s not fair.’

Frankie took another sip of the double whisky Sarah Haggerty had sent over. Dan Scoular didn’t want him to drink any more just at the moment, needed him clear.

‘Frankie,’ he said. ‘You were sayin’.’

Frankie swallowed the indulgence of his own sadness.

‘Well, that’s it, Dan,’ he said. ‘Matt Mason and Cam Colvin. Something has happened there, Ah honestly don’t know what. But there’s some kind of trouble. It’s not our business. How could it be our business? We’re boys from the country. Like you
said. But they need us just now. And there’s money there for the takin’.
Because
they need us. Let’s take it, Dan. Let’s you and me just take what we can get. While it’s goin’. The way things are, it might not be there for ever. Come on, Dan. Let’s you and me take it. And we can. We really can. You can take Cutty Dawson, Dan. Ah know you can.’

‘What kinda trouble is that, Frankie?’

‘Ah don’t know.’ Frankie was strangely drunk, more drunk than the drink should have made him. ‘Ah told ye that, Dan. Ah really don’t know. There’s something happened between them. This is the way they’re goin’ to settle it. That’s all Ah know. But we better turn up. Because. If we don’t, Matt Mason’s lost without a fight. And there has to be a fight. There has to be. If it isn’t you and Cutty, Matt’ll make it another one. Better fighting Cutty, Dan. That’s an easier proposition.’

Dan Scoular finished his orange juice. He rose and went through to the lavatory. Frankie took his whisky and lifted the empty glasses and crossed with them to the bar. The only other person in the bar besides Alan was Wullie Mairshall, hovering without apparent purpose, and he followed Dan into the lavatory.

While he passed the time with Alan, Frankie wondered what effect his words had had on Dan. You couldn’t be sure with that big man. In the face of what seemed the most obvious necessity, he seemed to retain a belief in choice, as if his will was something he would insist on taking with him to the edge of his own grave. Thinking such an uncomfortable and troublesome thought, Frankie began to be concerned about how long Dan was taking in the lavatory. Maybe he had climbed out of a window and was gone.

Frankie went across to the lavatory, the door of which Alan had wedged open, presumably in preparation for cleaning it or perhaps just to give his customers the hint that he was closing. Pausing in the doorway, Frankie heard the hot-air dryer shut itself off. The silence that followed was too deep, too long to be a natural pause.

‘What did ye say his name was?’ Dan Scoular’s voice said.

The voice was strained, emerged with difficulty from a man caught in a thumbscrew of private pain. It made Frankie want
to hold back. Wullie Mairshall’s answer was muted, as if he too wanted to back off. Perhaps he was afraid the hurt he was causing might rebound on himself.

‘Struthers. Gordon Struthers.’

‘How d’ye know about this?’

‘Ah don’t absolutely know. Ah’m doin’ gardens in Blackbrae. Ah hear things. There’s a woman cleans to this fella’s wife. Ah know her man. He says they saw Betty and this man in a pub in Graithnock. That’s what he says.’

Frankie walked back to the bar. He didn’t want to know any more. The pain in Dan’s voice was his own problem. All Frankie hoped was that whatever was going on in him didn’t interfere with his ability to fight. While he waited for Dan and Wullie to emerge, Frankie was only interested to gauge the effect their conversation had had on Dan’s commitment to the fight. But Dan’s face, as he came out, told Frankie nothing. Certainly, Alan seemed to notice no difference. He was just glad to be finished. He became polite on the strength of knowing they didn’t want anything else to drink.

Thank you, boys,’ he said. ‘So it’s back to the grind? It’ll all payoff, big Dan. Don’t you worry. How’s Betty, by the way?’

Betty’s first reactions to the fact that Dan was going to take part in a bare-knuckle fight had been no more than a practising of reactions, a confused search for the response that could contain the strangeness of the event. When he told her, coming in from the pub that night with a track-suit in his hands, he had been still large-eyed with the surprise of it. ‘Ah just said “Hey!”, he said. ‘And all this happens.’

She had first felt disbelief. He had gone out from a situation that was all too familiar, the two of them bleakly sending each other messages like dead letters, and he came back in with a strange new possibility in his hands. The maroon track-suit had lain on the settee where he had dropped it, mysterious with unforeseeable implications.

Disbelief moved towards a kind of envy of the energy he had found. He was walking up and down the room as if trying to see beyond its walls towards the horizons he had only just realised
might be there. The assumption that, wherever he was going, she would be happy to go along made her angry. The anger taught her one thing she was sure she felt – abhorrence of what he was preparing to do.

It seemed to her primitive that two men should agree to try to beat each other senseless, and especially in the furtherance of some quarrel that belonged to neither. Her contempt tried to persuade him to give the money back. But she couldn’t refute him when he said how much they needed it and she knew from the desperation with which he wanted her to accept it that the two hundred pounds meant more than money to him. He laid most of it on the table when she refused to take it. It lay like a bet he was placing with himself, a gamble in which she wasn’t sure if he himself knew what it was he hoped to gain.

It was then that what she thought was her true reaction crystallised. It was a cold relief, an admission of sterility where she had vainly been hoping for growth. There was no hope if he could go through with this. He was letting others buy him for their purposes even though, from the little information he could give, he had no understanding of what those purposes were. He was selling his life in a market.

She made it clear to him that she would have nothing to do with the fight. If it happened, she wouldn’t be there. In the meantime, she would provide him with meals and a laundry service. The money she took as the children’s commission on the sale of their father. And she felt within herself that a limit had perhaps at last been put on their marriage, a point of ultimatum reached.

Yet a strange thing happened. Suspecting the imminence of her separation from Dan, she began to see her relationship with Gordon Struthers with a colder clarity. Now that her relationship with Gordon was threatening to become real, she wondered how real it could be.

Sitting in the lounge bar where they had taken to meeting, she thought, the first time after Dan had told her about the fight, that the place itself seemed hardly real. Its carefully contrived, wall-lighted cosiness shut out the rainy night so effectively that it might have been the only place there was. The piped music
was like double glazing. Conversations murmured privately.

Feeling the fragile hold these moments with Gordon had on the structure of her life, she wondered how deep their roots went. She had met him at a party. It had been a dire occasion, as she found so many parties were. She and Dan had been invited by Elspeth Murchie, a friend whom she had known at school and with whom she had never lost touch, just meaningful contact. At that time things were already so fraught between Dan and her that the house sometimes felt no more than a terminus where their separate days merely happened to end. They had prepared for the party in the way that was usual for that time, with a quarrel.

Dan didn’t want to go. What was the point of it? They could have a fight in their own house. They didn’t have to sell tickets for it. They hardly knew anybody who was going to be there. Hardly knew anybody? Elspeth Murchie had been at school with her. Barney Finnegan, the wino, had been at school with Dan but that didn’t mean they had to go out and have a bevvy with him in his favourite bus-shelter. Elspeth Murchie was her
friend.
Betty hadn’t bothered to add that the thing she remembered most vividly about Elspeth was her habit of cutting off model labels from old garments and sewing them on to clothes she had bought in a chain store. Betty wanted to go out, anywhere, even to Elspeth’s.

Almost as soon as they arrived at the semi-detached sandstone house, which Elspeth’s accountant husband had wittily named Hades and which was lit like a bonfire, Betty wasn’t so sure. Their quarrel had made them late and Elspeth and John, her husband, seemed almost heartbroken that they had missed so much riotous fun already. Large drinks, like passports to pleasure, were put in their hands and they were ushered into a room where a laughing competition appeared to be in progress. The restless ebb and flow of people in pursuit of joy separated them at once.

‘You must meet Bill,’ Elspeth Murchie said. ‘He’s a lady-killer. But nice with it. Just watch he doesn’t charm you out of your pants. This is Betty.’

‘Hi,’ Bill said, and it was the highlight of her conversation with
him. Within five minutes Betty had decided that if Bill was a lady-killer he must be carrying a knife. While he kept his smile trained on her remorselessly like a laser beam – what was she supposed to do, crumble? – he started to tell her about the last time he had been on the ski-slopes at Gstaad. She was still wondering how they got there when she managed to escape, but not to safety.

She found herself with Ralph and Mary Brierley. They seemed to be a joint sales team. What they were selling was the story of their amazingly successful marriage. They had worked out a routine. What they did was they asked you about yourself, creating the cunning impression that they were interested. But really they were playing a private game, a sort of materialistic conkers. They were eliciting facts from you that they could top. If you said you had come in the car, they would ask what make, and then run over it with their BMW, closely followed by their Saab. Betty found herself nonplussed. They were obviously used to and expected certain reactions but she didn’t know what they were supposed to be. Trade names – BMW, Everest, Moulinex – occurred in their talk with the frequency of conjunctions. It was like listening to a quick-fire vaudeville act in a foreign language.