The Big Man (17 page)

What did you trust these days? You couldn’t vaguely trust the historical future in which his parents had believed. Part of it was already here and it was unrecognisable as what had been foretold. Better material conditions hadn’t created solidarity but fragmentation. Working-class parvenus were at least as selfish as any other kind. You couldn’t simply vote Labour and trust that Socialism would triumph. The innocence of his parents’ early belief in the purity of Socialism couldn’t be transplanted to the time that followed Socialism’s exercising of power, however spasmodic. In power, Socialism had found it hard to recognise itself, had become neurotic with expediency, had forgotten that it had never merely been a policy but a policy growing from a faith founded in experience. Lose the faith that had been justly earned from the lives of generations of people and Socialism was
merely words and words were infinitely flexible. You couldn’t trust the modern generation of those who had formerly been the source at which Socialism had reaffirmed its faith. All around they were reaching private settlements with their society’s materialism in terms that contained no clauses to safeguard others of their own who might be less fortunate.

If you were honest, you couldn’t even trust yourself. He had often enough expressed his contempt for people he had known who, coming from his own background, had succeeded academically or in business and had turned their backs on where they came from. He had heard them at parties and in pubs preaching the worthlessness of their own heritage and he had despised them. But he also knew that you couldn’t trust yourself not to be like them until you had been to a place where the temptations were real, where you too had the opportunity to make a purely private enterprise of your life and the rewards were sufficient to put such principles as you had to the test. He had never been to such a place.

He sometimes wondered if part of his motivation for giving up his academic course at school had been to avoid making the kind of choice for which he had blamed others. If so, perhaps that choice had found him out in any case. For what was he doing here, if not moving towards it? When his own situation had been bad enough, he hadn’t taken long to conform to an arrangement that fitted no principles he had previously held.

He knew he was wise not to trust himself too much. That distrust helped to explain why he hadn’t reacted to the insults of Matt Mason and the others. He was far out in himself, out of touch with his own instincts, and waiting to find out what he really thought and felt. He had set out on his own small voyage of self-discovery and he wouldn’t predetermine his destination. He would suspect the glibness of his own habitual responses. He would put his pride in abeyance for the time being. He would wait and see where all this was leading, where he was going.

He listened for a moment to the muffled voices beyond the door but couldn’t make out what they were saying. In his preoccupation he had lifted from the desk in front of him a pile of what looked like old advertising leaflets, of a dim blue cardboard
that was stained and unevenly discoloured with age, stiff single sheets. He had been riffling them in his hands for minutes before he looked and became very still and slowly understood what they were. They had been lying among other papers and a couple of pencils and a few manila folders, as if someone had been clearing out the drawers of the desk.

Eddie McAvoy
v.
John Malloy (9 st 9 lbs). Mickey Macrae
v.
Andy Parvin (8 st 6 lbs). Bert Morrison
v.
Martin Shinoeth (8 st). Alec Corrigan
v.
Tony Bertelotti (12 st 7 lbs). John Wajda
v.
Iain McTavish (9 st 9 lbs). John McLintock
v.
Allan Devoy (11 st 6 lbs).

The names went on endlessly, it seemed to him, and no one today would have recognised one of them. The cards were boxing programmes from the Thirties. He read them avidly like some lost roll of honour, combatants in a war that had never officially been declared. Some had in brackets after the names odd, tantalising references: The Dancing Pole’, The Man Your Sister Couldn’t Take Home To Your Mother’, The Mad Miner’.

Each fight had both the fighters’ purses marked in pencil under their names. A common figure was five shillings. These must have been mainly scratch fights between men whose training had been the dole queue. There were several programmes in which a full bill of five fights was covered by fifty shillings in old money. Today’s £2.50 would have bought a night’s entertainment in which five men would box or batter another five into submission, or maybe the wiser ones would box a draw.

Dan found himself pondering impossible questions. What had those men been like? What had they felt towards one another in their circumstantially conditioned aggression? Out of what demolished tenements or lost miners’ rows had they come? No answer was the loud reply, he thought, remembering a saying of his father’s.

‘He’s still got a bit to go,’ he suddenly heard Tommy Brogan saying.

Dan didn’t know if the remark referred to him but he took it as doing so. What interested him as much as the distance he had to go was his recharging sense of the distance he was coming from. He studied the faded sheets painstakingly, aware of a
kinship. He no longer minded the closed door. It occurred to him that doors exclude from both sides.

Frankie White had been demoted to chaperon. He and Dan had adjoining rooms in the Burleigh Hotel, a place where the floors were so uneven with age that Frankie said it gave a new meaning to the term listed building’. All the time Dan wasn’t in the gym, he was supposed to be with Frankie. Apart from the early-morning training runs along Kelvin Walkway, their time together was amorphous. There was nowhere they had to go, nothing they must do. The first day in Dan’s hotel room, Frankie had started to worry.

Boredom always worried Frankie. It was time unshaped by imagination. All Frankie had to know himself by was the ability of his small but persistent fantasy to triumph over the banal facts of his life. In such moments as these the facts reasserted themselves, obliterating like drifting sand the shaky structure he had been maintaining. This time the feeling gained strength from the depressing image of Dan Scoular stretched out on his bed staring at the wall and from the room itself.

Sitting in that room, Frankie decided that the word people so often used of hotel rooms, ‘impersonal’, didn’t fit there. That was maybe true of new places where the rooms could seem just small architectures of assorted functions that reduced people to a series of processes. But in that old hotel room it was the proliferation of identities that was overwhelming. You could neither ignore those past presences nor imagine who they were and their meaninglessness seemed to talk to you of your own.

Dan Scoular’s room whispered endlessly of people who were no one. The stains around the place were a muted hubbub of the past that couldn’t be effectively silenced by the vaguely Arabian-looking woman Dan sometimes saw in the morning. He had tried to pass the time of day with her and she replied in what was presumably English, incantatory monosyllables that seemed to lack hard endings. He had wondered where she came from, what she was doing there. He wasn’t even sure what she did in the room. Coming back into it after she had been there, he had noticed ritual gestures, the dried streak of a cloth-mark
across the small, cobbled bedside table. One of the small squares of soap that looked made to fit the hand of a foetus might have been moved from one side of the washhand basin to the other. Perhaps she mainly just talked to the room in her strange language, telling the ghosts to keep their voices down.

Above the wooden bedhead there was a mark on the wall that looked like blood, a brown smear shaped not unlike Italy, with Sicily vanished. A drunken stumble, a quarrel, or maybe just a drink spilled? Along the edges of the bedside table were the black grooves of cigarette burns. They were numerous enough to suggest a casual attempt at furniture design or notches made to measure an endless boredom. Dan had soon learned to read those stains and scrapes and scratches like a secret map of where he was, a chart that led him unerringly to the same sense of his own smallness, with time passing and nothing achieved. Sometimes the feeling induced him to cross to the glass above the washhand basin, which didn’t help much, for it was so dim and striated and freckled with age, it was like a mirror that has lost its memory and gives you back an uncertain image of yourself, as if it is confusing you with some of the other mysterious faces stored in its dull recesses.

Dan Scoular, lying back with his head resting thoughtfully on clasped hands, seemed able to endure the sense of futility that seeped from the walls of this place like nerve gas slowly numbing self-delusion. For Frankie White, it was unbearable. It told him too insistently who he wasn’t. It also made him doubt if Dan Scoular was really what Frankie had taken him to be. Frankie began to wonder if big Dan, prostrate and still as a piece of fallen statuary, was the force Frankie, in his eagerness to make capital out of him with Matt Mason, had convinced himself he was. Sitting there with him in the shabby room that was like a locked compartment moving them inexorably towards an already fixed destination, Frankie was given to dreading what they would find when they got there. Maybe Dan simply wasn’t up to it. Where Dan was going, Cutty Dawson had been before. He knew the terrain. It was asking a lot to expect Dan to wander in from a softer place and, with the experience that had taught him his slow smile, wrest submission from the clenching purpose Cutty’s
harder experience had made of him. And if he failed, if Dan came apart at the final asking, and deep questions would be put to him in there, the status Frankie bought with Dan Scoular would rebound on him like bad currency.

To escape the thought, Frankie had suggested they go out as much as they could and walk, see a bit of the city. Dan seemed happy enough to do that. He knew Glasgow as a place to visit occasionally or to pass through from Queen Street Station to Central Station or the Anderston Bus Station. But Frankie knew it as a place to live in. Dan let the other man’s desperate chattiness play across the places they walked through but mostly without paying it much attention. Some of us, faced with the prospect of new experiences, like to send our own or other people’s preconceptions ahead of us like couriers who will process the strangeness of things into the comfort of familiarity, however contrived. Dan Scoular wasn’t like that. He let things happen to him, introduce themselves until he could work out his own sense of them.

Glasgow came at him with bewildering variety. The handsomeness surprised him. There were whole terraces of buildings he found beautiful, big solid acts of pride. There was more greenery than he had imagined, parks that grew expanses of sudden grass among the stonework. There were streets he wouldn’t have thought anybody could bear to live in, most strikingly for him in the place Frankie called Possil, which he seemed to know well. There was an area they walked once, along the riverside, that depressed him with the size of its emptiness, like an abandoned warehouse.

There was an elusive but coherent unity he sensed behind the fragmentary impressions he took in, a feeling that identified Glasgow for him as distinct from other places he’d been in. To try to fix it for himself, he groped for a comparison. He knew Edinburgh slightly. He tried to lay his impression of one against the other, wondering where he felt the difference was. He had heard often enough of the supposed rivalries of the two places, familiar crutches for stand-up comedians, how Edinburgh was cold and Glasgow warmer, both in climate and people; how Edinburgh was snooty and Glasgow coarse. He didn’t believe
it. He had always liked both places and the people in them. But for him there was a difference, just as physical places, that had always made him feel more at home in Glasgow.

Walking with Frankie, he worked out without saying it what he thought this was. It went back to something he had felt when they had taught him Scottish history at school. He had been aware of no continuity in it, just a series of jumps from one dramatic figure to another, until the figures became English. It had been as if nobody wanted to try to link the gaps or find out what they meant. It was almost as if Scotland didn’t have any history or, if it did, not many people knew what it was. And he realised suddenly that was where he felt he was when he was walking through Glasgow, in the truth of Scottish history, the living reality of it. It seemed to him that of the few cities he had been in, it was the most serious one, the one that spoke to you most directly. It wasn’t solemn. A lot of times as they walked, they had heard its laughter and its banter on the street. But the genuineness of that laughter was itself the clue, Dan thought. Those who had come to their own difficult understanding with reality were the best laughers. Perhaps that was why Frankie, strolling beside him, laughed like a rattle somebody else was turning.

That was the difference of the two cities for him. He liked being in Edinburgh but he could never take its beauty quite seriously. It was a monument to a false sense of Scotland. Glasgow bothered him in its own way, the way its handsomeness was pitted with harshness, but it seemed to say without pretence: this is where we’ve really been, this is where we are.

Where he was had a particular relevance for him at the moment. It was where Cutty Dawson had come from. The half-remarks he had managed to pick up about Cutty Dawson had troubled him and made him more than a little nervous. They were shadows that made it hard to judge the size of the substance that had cast them. All you could tell was that it seemed to be very formidable. He wanted to admit his fear enough to be able to deal with it but not enough to have it overwhelm him. He absorbed Glasgow like a background report on Cutty Dawson, trying to read the signs.

He had to admit they didn’t look too promising. He saw in the place something he decided was simply true of cities but which hadn’t occurred to him before. Cities perfected individual violence in a way that country places didn’t. It wasn’t just that the competition was greater. It was also because anonymity released violence, not just the anonymity of the victim, the sense that the other might be nobody in particular, but the anonymity of the perpetrator, the loss of inhibiting roots, of the importance of others’ awareness of you and how they might react. Dan sensed that this could be a catchweights contest if Cutty Dawson had learned through his experience here how to free his violence fully. Dan knew himself from Thornbank and he didn’t know how far that sense of a shared morality, however hypocritically or imperfectly shared, might put bindings on his arms when the chances came, if they came at all.