The Big Man (15 page)

Dan smiled with bewilderment and took the pint of orange juice that was waiting for him and looked a reprimand at Frankie White, who must have known what had been in store. Going through the back-slaps and the comments and the faces that wanted a bit of his attention, Dan couldn’t resist the pleasure of the occasion but was wishing that he could. He was like a man with an ulcer drinking spirits. He knew both how good it felt and how bad it was going to feel. All this bonhomie he was accepting was later going to turn sour in him. For it didn’t agree with his own sense of what he was doing. He was going to fight for his own strange reasons, reasons that were perhaps a rejection of his past among these people. He had no right to their good wishes. Like preliminary pangs of what he was going to suffer, two conversations spoiled the mood of the moment.

One was with Vince Mabon. Vince had been standing close to the bar, biding his time with that slightly complacent containment he often affected, as if he had an important message to deliver once all the nonsense subsided. Dan became aware of Vince behind him, talking into his ear, like the man who stood behind the victor in a Roman triumph.

‘Dan,’ he said.

And Dan turned round.

‘Hullo, Vince. How are ye?’

‘How are you? That’s more to the point. You really going to do this?’

‘Ah better now, Ah suppose, after all this carry-on.’

‘Why?’

‘Money for one thing.’

‘You’re being a mug. That’s not the kind of fighting we should be doing.’

Perhaps because Vince was touching a sore place, perhaps because he seemed to have forgotten his own involvement in the start of this, Dan looked at him angrily and saw him through the clarity of his anger. He saw a student who at the same time boasted of smoking pot and despising the fashionable escapism of his society. He saw someone who returned among his own people offering theory and refused to let the often painful realities he found there compromise the theory for a second. He saw a boy who called ‘be radical’ from an armchair.

‘Vince,’ Dan said. ‘You know what Ah don’t need? Just at the moment. Your crappy theories. You can afford them, Vince. Because you’re one of those people who’re never goin’ to be in any danger from their own ideas.’

But the exchange continued to trouble Dan, who couldn’t pretend to himself that winning the verbal skirmish meant being right. His worries were added to by Wullie Mairshall.

Dan hadn’t spoken to Wullie since their last conversation in the lavatory of the Red Lion. He had seen him a few times and always been glad of the distance between them. It wasn’t that he confused the messenger with the bad news he had brought. It was more that Dan knew Wullie’s watchfulness was prompting him. He wasn’t a disinterested informant. He wanted something from him.

What Dan suspected Wullie wanted was a resurrection of the past. Wullie believed in working-class machismo, physical hardness as a kind of moral law. Adultery with the wife meant punishment from the husband, if not to the point of death then at least to prolonged hospitalisation. In his contempt for the laxity of modern life, Wullie was wishing – Dan would guess – for a sign of retribution, some Moses from the mountain who
would re-engrave the old commandments on someone’s body.

Dan sensed he might be Wullie’s chosen man and, although he knew how far he was from Wullie’s image of him, he dreaded the promptings. Since Wullie had told him of his suspicions about Betty, Dan had wandered a little wilderness of dementia. He hadn’t confronted Betty, since there was nothing to confront her with, and he felt guilty at even having listened to Wullie. That husky, confiding voice was something he wished he had never heard. Yet he needed to hear it again. And when he did, the words went into his mind like poisoned darts.

It looks as if Ah might have been right, big Dan,’ he said. ‘Seems a right bastard, this one.’

Dan was watching Davie Dykes and old Mary Barclay, who had been brought in a car to share the occasion. He didn’t look at Wullie.

‘Ah think you’re wrong, Wullie. Let’s leave it, eh?’

‘Ah’m not wrong, Dan. Ah wish Ah was.’

‘Not Betty,’ Dan said. ‘Not Betty.’

He said it quietly but vehemently, to the room, as if there might be others there who thought as Wullie did. The oppressiveness of the place was suddenly overwhelming. He wanted away from it, to leave the confusions it bred in him behind. Most of all he wanted away from Wullie’s voice.

‘Ah’m gettin’ more on it.’

‘Forget it, Ah said. Forget it.’

‘Okay, Dan. You’re the boss.’

Dan was pushing towards where Frankie White was standing, as if that would somehow bring departure nearer. But Wullie’s voice found him one last time, leaving a mark on his mind that would bruise in the next few days.

‘But Wednesday, Dan. Ah’ll be sure by Wednesday. Ah’ll be in here all night. If ye want to phone.’

Frankie was with the domino players. Alan Morrison had joined them. They were all very animated, discussing how they would get a car, since Alan had been advised to sell his Vauxhall after his last heart attack.

‘We’re comin’ to see you, big man,’ Sam MacKinlay said. ‘Frankie’s knocked it off. Got us in for free.’

Frankie smiled uncertainly. The euphoria here had affected him as well. Having convinced Matt Mason over the phone how important the presence of supporters might be for Dan, he had still been intending to take his commission from them. But the atmosphere in the pub made him feel for the moment this was where he belonged and he had decided to be honest with them. He could only hope his pockets didn’t hurt him tomorrow.

Then Eddie Foley was there. While he had a quick drink, while they made their way through the crush, Dan kissing Mary Barclay, while most of the people in the bar crowded outside to see them off, through the waving and shouting, Dan held one thought to himself like a talisman – how Betty and he had been last night. He wanted her to remember, as if her thoughts could help him through what was ahead.

Betty remembered the night before but still wasn’t sure what it meant. She wasn’t certain she knew what anything meant any more. Her strongest objection to what he was doing was paradoxically what had made her more open to him again. It was the risk he was running. She dreaded what might happen to him in the fight. Once she had come to believe that he was going through with it, she couldn’t withhold herself so effectively from him. No matter how unacceptable to her his intention was, he was doing it partly for her and Raymond and Danny. She also felt guilt that it might relate to a need to reinstate himself in her eyes, however misguided.

It was as if he was saying he wasn’t finished yet, was trying to remind her of why she had fallen in love with him. He seemed dimly to sense a way simultaneously to reshape his future and reclaim his past. For the past few days she had felt him telling her in code that her support was essential to him but the nature of his pride had meant that he couldn’t merely plead for it. By the showing of who and what he still was, he was trying to elicit it.

This oblique, taut second wooing was in the regained confidence of his presence, in his casual solicitousness, in an atmosphere of natural relaxation where Raymond and Danny had begun to realise that the minefield each day used to be had been
temporarily defused. Reactions didn’t have to go on tiptoe here. Betty understood that whatever worries Dan was having about what was ahead, he was determined not to bring them into the house. She felt herself responding to his plea for a truce but she didn’t know how far she could come out past the entrenched entanglements of the past, her barbed confusions.

They became more accessible to each other in a fleeting, intermittent way as clumsy as courting. Then, before they were married, they had always been trying to find themselves alone. In a way, they were doing that again, though now the people who got in the way lived in themselves, those parts of them that had become estranged from each other. It was more difficult now.

Raymond and Danny helped by not knowing that they were helping, suggested by their behaviour that they might still be a family. The Saturday night before Dan was due to leave for Glasgow, the boys’ going to bed had been a series of exits and entrances, an impromptu skit of reluctance and fear of the dark that all of them enjoyed. When they had gone, Dan touched Betty in the passing and they saw themselves just as themselves and made love there in the living-room, sudden and slow, her hands with that touch he believed could stroke a bubble and not burst it, his voice low in the tender naming of parts. Lying together on the floor in front of the fire, Betty wondering vaguely if she had committed mental adultery, they were a tentative pact, trying to trust each other at least a little longer.

‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘We’ll make things good again, love.’

She knew that his certainty was a lie he hoped would come true. She understood that the love was in the hope.

FOUR

Certain buildings have the capacity to impart awe from the interior. They give a sense of being consecrated places, devoted to a purpose which, whether you agree with it or not, forcibly impresses you with its intensity. Churches, of course, can be such buildings. Stock exchanges are, and so is a boxing gymnasium.

The gym at Ingram Street in Glasgow is like that. To see it still and empty may remind you of the small mysteries that move at the edge of our assumptions, the bafflements that haunt the commonplace. The ring that takes up so much of the small room seems such an arbitrary structure with its canvas floor and its taped ropes. Yet it dominates the dialectic of the room like an irrefutable premise, a bleak, simplistic statement the point of which is the abjuration of words. To duck under those ropes is to forswear equivocation or paraphrase, is to endorse brute fact.

The rest of the room is merely an antechamber to the ring. For those who want to go within the ropes, it offers a series of mystifying exercises by which they may believe in their fitness to go there. The heavy bag hangs like an inexhaustible source of power from which the arms may draw. The medicine balls wait to impart resistance to the body. The small punch ball, hung just above head height under its projecting wooden platform, promises to conjure speed and timing into the fists.

Along one wall there is a great gallery of photographs, so numerous and so casually stuck there that they overlap in places, since none of them is framed, and oblige the viewer to turn his head at different angles to see them properly. Some look like press photographs and others like snapshots taken by a drunken uncle on a dark night. They show faces and moments that cover a lot of years. There are handshakes and self-conscious groups
and smiles fighting their way through the pain of recent bruises. There are the recognisably famous and those the mind almost remembers as having been Scottish champions and those whose anonymity evokes a different kind of identity, a memory of a face seen in a bus-station late at night or glimpsed in a dancehall. These are icons, reassurances to the faithful that out of pain comes glory.

If you wander in there off the streets – knowing where the insignificant door leads and mounting the shabby staircase – it will be like coming across the preoccupied activities of a fanatical sect. Your presence will not be remarkable. Nobody will resent you. There’s nothing secret here. The matter-of-factness of it all may make you feel that you’re the oddity and that this is simply what people do, the way it is. You may feel your own life rather flabbily pointless here where, under the encouraging stare of men with proprietary eyes, the young and the getting older pummel and strain and mortify their bodies. They are looking not just for muscles but for a way past the muscles to that place in themselves where they will find a hardness that defies all other hardness, forging themselves into weapons against one another.

Wandering in off his own streets, coming in out of a life where he had never applied such abilities as he had any other way than spontaneously, Dan Scoular was travelling a short distance geographically but a long way in experience. The assumptions here were foreign to him. Tommy Brogan was a strange guide.

‘Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on,’ he would say.

‘If ye beat yerself, ye’ll beat the other man.’

‘There’s stone in yer belly, find it.’

‘It’s no’ me, it’s Cutty Dawson makin’ you suffer like this.’

‘Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.’

While he pushed Dan’s body to places where, cornered, it turned and defied him in fusing stomach muscles and arms that quivered uncontrollably, Tommy Brogan didn’t seem to notice, stared madly beyond at some vision only he could see. It had to be assumed that Matt Mason had hired him with the gym,
three hours every day, from two to five. But his strange, one-dimensional presence, as if born of the one mad purpose, hardly seemed explicable by such an ordinary chain of circumstance. He had been in the gym the day that they arrived, haunting it like a discontented ghost. A rune in a desert, Matt Mason’s introduction to him only told you that you didn’t know what was being said: Tommy Brogan. You won’t find two of him.’ He was still in the gym every day Dan left at five. He was still in the gym each day Dan came back at two. Dan couldn’t imagine him drinking a cup of tea or laughing at the television.

‘Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.’

While Dan pressed and punched and skipped, he had tormented visions of what a strange life must have shaped this man. He might have boxed himself but it was hard to tell if his leathery face had been marked by hands or not. He must have been about forty but was still very fit. His eyes stared out with a terrible bright stagnancy you felt nothing would ever trouble again. Clues to his feelings only came in an ambiguous code. When he threw Dan a towel, it could have been a sort of kindness. Staring out of the window to give Dan time to recover from his exertions, he could have been relaxing.

‘It’s him ye’re hittin’, hate the bastard, hate ‘im.’

‘Take yer body past yer body. Ye’ll find that it’s still there.’