The Big Man (16 page)

‘Too much is still not enough.’

In the moments of brief rest that had to punctuate even Tommy Brogan’s progress to what he took for fitness, Dan sometimes tried to meet him in an ambience other than sweat. But whoever Tommy Brogan was, he wasn’t for sharing. His answers took to questions the way a ferret takes to rabbits.

‘You married, Tommy?’

‘Was
married. Once. Never again. She was tried and found wanton.’

Or, ‘This all ye do? Training people, Ah mean?’

‘A side-line.’

‘What’s yer main thing?’

‘A semi-professional chastiser.’

Within two days Dan understood that their only point of contact was to be in physical effort, mainly his own. It was an unusual experience for him because he was a man for whom almost any meeting was a vestigial relationship. People normally responded to his openness. But Tommy Brogan neither liked him nor disliked him. He was a job of work. He would do the best he could with it and, beyond that, didn’t care.

So, they must be alone together. In that room stale with the sweat of generations of men, like two people of different faiths worshipping in the same dilapidated chapel, they performed service and response in unison, and were apart. Tommy Brogan knew where Dan had to go. Dan went there and found what Tommy Brogan hadn’t known was there, for Dan went there as himself. They worked the heavy bag, they worked the punch ball. Tommy Brogan battered Dan Scoular’s stomach with the medicine ball and his stomach learned to absorb it without yielding much. Moving around the ring with the headguards and the gloves, they fought a stylised fight within a stylised fight. Tommy Brogan prodded, elicited, sought. Dan Scoular responded, chose, withheld. Sometimes, in the moments of tension their strange ballet created, Tommy Brogan would look for the bedrock of where Dan Scoular was. But it shifted in front of him.

‘Come on, come on. Ye coulda hit me there.’

‘Ah know, Ah know. Ah imagined doin’ it.’

Or, ‘Don’t worry about me. Give it all ye’ve got.’

‘Don’t need to. Ah’m keepin’ it for after.’

In the hardening body and quickening reflexes of Dan Scoular, they each saw different things. Tommy Brogan saw a machine being programmed. Dan felt a widening area of choice, a physical precision that could split a second into options. They were greater strangers than they had been before they met, by the time Matt Mason came on the third day.

He wasn’t alone. Dan Scoular was noticing that he was never alone. He wore other people like armour. This time, besides Eddie Foley, there was a man Dan recognised from having seen his photograph in the papers. It was as well he did, because nobody introduced him. The man’s name was Roddy Stewart.
He was a well-known lawyer, defender in a few widely reported cases.

Dan had the fine gloves on and was punching the heavy bag. Tommy Brogan had opened the locked door at the sound of the knock, without taking his eyes off Dan, as if he had known that whoever was coming was coming. The three men came in and closed the door and the four of them stood watching Dan work. He was stripped to the waist with his track-suit trousers on and his body was sheened in sweat.

Matt Mason and Roddy Stewart were smoking cigars. They had the afterglow of a brandy-lunch on them. Their eyes were sternly appraising.

‘Well, Roddy. What do you think?’ Matt Mason said.

‘Looks a bit tasty,’ Roddy Stewart said. ‘But a lot of people can look like that.’

‘What says the man?’ Matt Mason said.

He was speaking to Tommy Brogan.

‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ Tommy Brogan said. ‘He’s got everything else. But has he got the thing? Ah know a boy in the SAS. He’s got a sayin’: Does he go for it? Ye’ll only find that out on Sunday. Ah’ll bring him the best he can be tae the line. Then we’ll have tae wait an’ find out, won’t we? Right. Ye can rest now.’

Dan Scoular went on beating the heavy bag, counting up to twenty in his head before he stopped. He stood letting the pain in his arms subside. He had counted slowly.

‘How are you feeling . . .’ Roddy Stewart turned questioning towards Matt Mason.

‘Dan,’ Matt Mason said. ‘Dan Scoular.’

‘How are you feeling, Dan?’

‘Ah feel all right.’

Dan Scoular peeled the gloves like an extra layer of skin from his sweating hands and walked about the room, cowled in his own exhaustion. He picked up a towel that stank with his sweat and tried to dry himself off. But his pores were still working, and beaded him again at once. He kept on walking.

‘You think I should bet on you?’ Roddy Stewart said.

‘It’s your money.’

‘Well.’ Roddy Stewart was talking to Matt Mason. The horse looks good. But the jockey seems to have doubts. I wonder what Cutty’s saying.’

‘Who cares?’ Matt Mason said. ‘I didn’t buy the big man for his mouth. I don’t expect him to talk Cutty out the game. The only thing his head needs to be able to do is take a punch. Not even a kick. This is going to be a fair fight.’

The others laughed, except for Tommy Brogan.

‘Well, we’ll see,’ Roddy Stewart said. ‘Tommy. There’s something I have to talk to you about. I think it’s a bit important.’

Roddy Stewart was looking at the wall. His expression was a customer looking for a waiter.

‘Dan,’ Matt Mason said. He said it gently, like the name of someone he cared about. He nodded approximately towards the wall where there were two doors, one into the dressing-room and one into what Dan had assumed was an office. ‘You think you could give us a minute?’

Dan was nearer the door to the office. As he went in, he heard Roddy Stewart saying, ‘I’ll tell you what, Matt. I think that dinner tonight is an interesting idea.’

Dan pushed the door shut. He sat on the one chair in the place, a wooden one, and dabbed himself again. He spread the towel and draped it over his shoulders. As he sat excluded from the importance of their conversation, his body shivered as if in confirmation of the indignity his mind had registered. He recalled a moment from the past, one of those incidents which seem casual at the time but which the mind keeps like a found instrument by which to measure subsequent experience.

It was early evening in his parents’ house. His father wasn’t long home from his work and they were at their tea when the club-man came. The club-man’s presence was never a comfortable one in their house. They paid him money weekly and in return they could buy clothes from the ‘club’ – the name had always seemed an odd one to Dan, suggesting a nice chumminess that belied the hard financial basis of the arrangement. His father resented that he worked as hard as he did and yet the only way they could afford the clothes they needed was to buy them ‘a fuckin’ button at a time’. His mother’s pride
was that everything they had was paid for. Forced by their circumstances to use the club, they had worked out, as they always did, the precise terms of their transaction with the demands of their own experience. They would never take anything from the club until they had almost fully paid the money it required to buy it. No matter how often Mr Burnley, the club-man, tried to talk them into taking the clothes first and paying them up afterwards, they never would. It was how they made their circumstances submit to their pride.

That evening Mr Burnley had been talking in his usual, free-associating way, as if reluctant to leave. He no longer ever mentioned other houses he had been to, because, once when he had done that, trying to elicit a laugh out of something he had seen, Dan’s mother had said, ‘Other folk’s business is other folk’s business. It’s not ours.’ Mr Burnley was talking about the weather and how well his oldest son was doing at school and how quickly children outgrew their clothes. Dan and his father were still at the table. Dan’s mother was standing beside Mr Burnley, waiting for him to give her back the book in which he had recorded her latest payment. As he gave her back the book, Mr Burnley reached across to the mantelpiece.

‘I’ll take a couple of your cigarettes,’ he said. ‘I’ve run out.’

He took three cigarettes. Putting two in his breast pocket, he lit one and threw the match in the fire. As he exhaled the smoke, Dan’s father said the first thing he had said for a few minutes.

‘See next week,’ he said. ‘You wait at the door. We’ll bring the book out tae ye.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Dan’s father was spreading a piece of bread.

‘What do you mean, Mr Scoular?’

Dan’s father looked at him.

‘Just chap the door. We’ll bring the book out.’

Mr Burnley looked at Dan’s mother, who was embarrassed for him.

‘Is it the cigarettes?’ Mr Burnley was shaking his head tolerantly. His hand moved towards his breast pocket. ‘If that’s all it is –’

‘Leave them where they are.’ The quiet commandingness of the voice held the hand still in mid-air. ‘Ye miss the point. Ye could have the packet if ye want. Why no’? Ah’ve given more to a blin’ fiddler. But in people’s houses, ye don’t take. Ye ask. Ah wouldny smoke in a tramp’s bothy unless Ah was sure it was all right with him.’

‘Mr Scoular –’

‘Cheerio.’

‘Ah’ll see ye tae the door, Mr Burnley,’ Dan’s mother said.

Shivering under his towel, Dan smiled wryly to himself. He had to admit he agreed with his parents about some things. He was glad they had passed on to him a sense of pride so finely calibrated that it could have registered a fly landing where it shouldn’t. He had missed none of the insults the last few minutes had offhandedly given him: the arranged inspection about which everybody seemed to know except him, although he was the focus of it; the discussion of him as if he weren’t there; Roddy Stewart’s vagueness about who he was, as though he only mattered as a function; his withdrawal to the servants’ quarters while they conducted serious business.

As he carefully quantified their insultingness, he could imagine his father’s reaction to the fact that he had done nothing but accept the insults. He envisaged a facial expression of his father’s, a grimace so familiar to Dan’s memory that it was how he almost always remembered his father, his personal death-mask of him. It was how Dan’s father had endured the preparedness of others to submit to treatment no one should submit to. He turned his face towards his own right shoulder and his eyes stared conspiratorially at nothing and his right cheek developed a moving lump as if he were chewing on a wad of disbelief that tasted bitter. Perhaps he had been communing with all the proud Scoulars he was convinced he came from. Dan confronted that expression in his memory and acknowledged its rightness for his father but also felt its irrelevance to where he was.

He had the same sense of pride as his father but it had had to develop even finer calibrations because it had to lead him through a more complicated, a more various experience. In a
way, precisely because the terms he had to face were more harsh and more obvious, the pride of Dan’s father had been a luxury, his only luxury and one Dan knew he himself couldn’t quite afford.

His parents’ poverty had been not spectacular but sheer. They ate and they managed to feed and clothe themselves and him. But beyond that, from the time that they were children, there had been just a cliff-edge. Nothing more for so long had been possible. Given the clarity of the terms by which they lived, their responses to those terms were equally clear. They knew precisely how little they had and since the area they had was so small, they could defend it totally without exhausting their moral resources. For someone to move into the narrow enclave of their lives was like moving into themselves. They knew the mental placement of everything that mattered to them. The minutest aggression was observed as soon as it occurred and action taken. They knew what they were fighting for and what they were fighting against and had drawn up their lines accordingly.

But Dan was aware of how much the conflict had changed for him. His parents had been engaged in a kind of trench-warfare with their circumstances. Do certain things, you were a traitor. Cross certain lines and die to them. They knew enemy action when they saw it. They were enlisted young and their experience formed them and they were never subsequently able to demobilise themselves. While the weaponry ranged against them became modernised, while the tactics of social exploitation developed unforeseen subtleties that outmanoeuvred their past principles completely, they stayed stubbornly at their posts, though the battle had moved past them, and they died there, still clutching beliefs that their confused leadership had forgotten to countermand. And even their son, trained by his own experience in different methods, couldn’t endorse their actions.

But too late, in retrospect and with them dead, he could appreciate. Sitting alone there, preparing for a strange fight of his own and one the implications of which he couldn’t fully grasp, he thought perhaps he was nearer to understanding his father’s dark rage against him in the back green. Maybe his father hadn’t
just been fighting him. Maybe he had been trying to fight all the changes he felt coming, the loss of crucial principles. Maybe he had tried to bar at least from his own house the fifth column of careless self-interest he felt infiltrating all around him.

Dan felt a liberating affection for his father. Poor, old, hard, honest bastard. Having lashed himself to his principles to survive, he couldn’t be blamed for not being able to move, though the times did. Dan’s love of his mother, never compromised, came back to him. He wished he could speak to them now to reassure them that he wasn’t lost entirely to the past they had believed in, that he hadn’t quite forsaken what they stood for, that he, too, had his pride. It wouldn’t have been an elaborate speech – they never were in his parents’ house. It would have been something gruffly cryptic, in a code they would have understood, something like: ‘Don’t panic, Feyther. Mither, Ah’m still me.’

But he had to admit to himself that his pride, if it was still there, was in a funny place. His parents’ pride had been like a medal they could wear, one they had earned. His own was something he felt was still with him but he couldn’t have pointed to it. The explicitness of their experience had bestowed on them a kind of brute heroism. His experience had been different, still was. If their lives had been as clear-cut as trench-warfare, his was as confusing as espionage, a labyrinth of double-agents.