The Big Man (20 page)

For Tommy Brogan it might have been the chastisement of a sinner, repentance through mortification of the flesh. He seemed determined to find the place where Dan’s physical arrogance might yield and acknowledge a limit. While the others watched, he justified the name Dan had suggested for him to Frankie White – the mad monk. Every effort Dan gave him, he demanded more.

Yet Frankie noted that a perverse pleasure happened in Tommy’s eyes every time Dan Scoular refused to yield, every time he clenched harder on his determination and went on. It occurred to Frankie that he had perhaps been missing the point. Tommy’s purpose wasn’t to take Dan down a bit but the opposite. He was trying to tap Dan’s sense of his own strength, to take him to the point where he would realise what force was in him and be able to use it against others. It was impressive to watch how Dan responded.

Eddie Foley, his eyes steady in appreciation, was nodding as if in agreement with Frankie. He was thinking of Sunday. They had a real event on their hands. Watching Dan, he saw him in the setting they had chosen for him – the rough cup of the field with the trees around it. Whoever was there, the effort they had made to get the place wouldn’t be wasted. The mechanics of the whole event fascinated Eddie, gave him an aesthetic pleasure. Having long ago decided that it was fruitless, not to say unhealthy, to judge the terms by which he lived, he had
settled for being as competent a fixer as he could be. The efficiency with which things were worked out pleased him the way a well-made machine, whether it was a car or a gun, would.

He was glad the farmer had finally agreed. The other fields they had looked at hadn’t been right. This one was ideal – a small, natural arena hidden among farms, an uncultivatable remnant of the past that the developed, arable land hadn’t managed to obliterate. You could have imagined primitive champions meeting there, to settle the meaning of things, with the tribe and their elders looking on.

He was glad Matt had offered the extra money to clinch it. For a moment, as they talked to the farmer in the middle of the cattle market, Eddie had thought he wasn’t going to agree. He was a big, balding man with a moustache and one of those deceptively open faces that Eddie now associated with farmers. He wore his red cheeks and his crinkled forthright expression, which suggested he was used to looking into all kinds of weather, like make-up that was almost convincing. Ah, well, ye see, he was troubled by the fact that all this wasn’t strictly legal. His misgivings got higher and higher until the money managed to clear them. Eddie would never again take farmers for simple people. He supposed that if you had won arguments with the earth there weren’t a lot of other ones you were likely to lose.

That had been the second-last cog in the machine. The last one, with his jaw clamped like a vice to hold his will in place, was looking good. He had come a long way from a pub car park in Thornbank, and Eddie had played his part in it. He remembered with a smile something Matt Mason had said as they were leaving the cattle market with the venue fixed. Among the stench and the bellowing and the loud voices, Matt had slapped the haunch of a penned bull and said, ‘If Dan Scoular comes on all right, we might get him to take on one of these.’ They had laughed, but Cutty Dawson might be well within his range.

Matt Mason wasn’t so sure. He was looking for something he still wasn’t convinced he had seen. He remembered Roddy Stewart’s comment when he had seen Dan Scoular for the first time in the gym: The horse looks good but the jockey seems to have doubts.’ And he remembered Tommy Brogan’s question
on the same occasion: ‘Does he go for it?’ Well, did he? After the two weeks’ general training and fifteen hours locked in with Tommy Brogan, Matt Mason still couldn’t tell. Perhaps the answer could only come in ‘no-man’s-land’, as the farmer had called it. But, being a bookmaker, he would have liked to feel he could calculate the odds here and now, especially since he understood more and more that he wasn’t just gambling on a fight but on a way to control the future so that it would be a continuation of his past. He wanted Dan Scoular to prove something for him and so he watched him greedily, willing him to acknowledge that he would, through some secret sign that only Matt Mason himself would understand.

The nearest Mason had come to believing in such an indication had been when they were confronting each other before the training. Whatever the others had thought was happening, he had been pleased with Dan’s refusal to back off. It was the stance from which Mason himself had started out.

But since then only one moment had given him the same hope. It had come at the end of a punishing series of exercises. Tommy had slammed the medicine ball at Dan until he was tired. He had left Dan punching the heavy bag until Matt Mason could feel the pain in his own arms. He had him doing stretching exercises on the floor, again and again. Suddenly, Dan Scoular’s eyes, lit with a fierce incandescence, had raked everybody else in the room as he laboured. It was a vicious look, declared everybody else an enemy.

As it hit Frankie White, he glanced away. That look had been like a sudden transformation of Dan Scoular before his eyes. Frankie had never seen that expression on Dan’s face before – not when he had dealt with Billy Fleming, not in Alan Morrison’s improvised gym, not last night when his anger had been ingoing, troubled. Frankie wondered what they had done to him. He felt like leaving, dissociating himself from the rest of what would happen. As Dan said, he had done his bit. He would have preferred to take his money now and just go.

While Tommy Brogan peeled off his singlet and put on boxing gloves, having told Dan he could take a couple of minutes’ rest, and while nobody else spoke, Frankie found the gym oppressive
with its smells of embrocation and resin and sweat, pungent as the incense he associated with the church services of his schooldays when he had had to endure explanations of the meaning of life he didn’t want to believe. Just as he had felt nothing was as serious as they had made out then, so he couldn’t accept that anything was as serious as this. He didn’t want to come too near to seeing clearly what the way he lived involved for he could only cope with his life as a series of unexamined, vaguely romantic gestures. But he was obliged to stay as Tommy Brogan led him nearer to the raw centre of what he had helped to bring about.

‘Right, big man,’ he said. ‘Enough of the kiddin’. Now the real stuff.’

They went into the ring. Frankie knew that Tommy fancied himself at that. He had good reason. They said of him that he had never lost a street fight in his life. Tommy was a physical freak, Frankie thought. He moved with a speed he should have lost years ago. Watching him, Frankie was wondering if there were people of such strong will that what they wanted badly enough they got. He remembered reading in a magazine about Gandhi and how he had believed later in his life that having sex took away the vital juices from a person. That fitted Tommy. Frankie could recall talking to him in a pub once and hearing him say, quite casually, something that had chilled Frankie to the bone. ‘See me when Ah was young,’ Tommy had said. ‘Ah would always rather fight than fuck. Always.’ He hadn’t changed. His reason for being was to perfect a single gift, the ability to destroy another man physically. If he could have split his private atom, he would have made himself into a bomb.

Yet he was completely and obviously outclassed by Dan Scoular, a man who had never tried as hard as he had and who, within a week, had surpassed him. Frankie didn’t believe it was merely a matter of age. There might be six or seven years in it but Tommy was a maniac for fitness, and today he had tried to sap Dan before taking him into the ring. Yet Dan made him miss by inches time and again and placed punches on him that he simultaneously pulled, like someone constructing diagrams for a book on boxing.

Frankie relaxed a little, seeing the Dan Scoular who was familiar to him. There was an element of the comic in the situation and Frankie felt comfortable with comedy. Eddie appreciated the grace of what Dan was doing. Matt Mason felt cheated. Dan wasn’t showing himself. You couldn’t tell what he was capable of.

Tommy Brogan, presumably aware of the impression he was failing to make, precipitated the exhibition into an event. He wrestled Dan roughly into a corner, held him with his left hand and hooked him on the jaw with his right. It was then Matt Mason found his sign, brief it was true, but brilliantly clear. In a blurred sequence of reflexes that Dan was as much a victim of as Tommy, Dan ducked away and, as Tommy turned to find him, spun him with a left into position and crossed his right precisely into the moving arc of Tommy’s head. Tommy volleyed on to his back.

‘Jesus!’

The word was pulled out of Eddie Foley’s mouth in compelled admiration. Frankie found his misgivings about what he had done temporarily suppressed yet again by the realisation that he might have picked a winner. Matt Mason believed he had seen what he was waiting for. The way Dan had confronted him when he had come in at first could be faked, was a gesture not an action. But in there with Tommy he had shown, however briefly, the unfakable will to fight that ignites the reflexes under pressure. Then, in the very giving of the sign, Dan erased it.

He was across immediately, helping Tommy up. Tommy let himself be helped and then, as consciousness came back, he angrily shook Dan off. The others’ awareness was still behind what was happening in the ring, trying to reconstruct the punch. It was like trying to remember where a flash of lightning has been that fuses as it happens.

‘Ah’m sorry,’ Dan said. ‘That wasn’t needed.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Tommy said.

‘Ah was worried about me,’ Dan said.

‘Save it, save it. Start worryin’ when ye miss.’

It was an exchange in mutually incompatible idioms that translated into their opposites. Tommy offered a gruff
admiration and Dan heard a rejection. Dan extended a concern and Tommy received an insult. Tommy was deeply offended. The offence wasn’t in the blow but in the offer of help. The blow was what a man took from another man, the gentleness wasn’t. Matt Mason shared Tommy’s feeling of offence. He watched Dan bend out of the ring and Frankie White come forward to take off his gloves. Dan picked up his towel and sat down alone. Still unsure of what he had bought, Mason decided he had better use what he had been keeping in reserve to tilt the odds in his favour as far as he could. A discreetly applied stimulant might be in order.

There’s something I want to show you,’ he said.

Dan blinked away his sweat, looking up at him. Matt Mason turned towards Frankie White and winked. To Frankie it felt like an amnesty. Mason turned back towards Dan.

‘In the office here,’ he said.

Dan rose and followed him. As Mason closed the office door, he was studying Dan’s reaction to the fact that there was somebody there, somebody who had been there all the time. Benny Smith’s appearance matched that unobtrusiveness. He had moved the chair into the corner of the room beside the window and had almost managed to merge with the wall. Dressed in jeans and jerkin, he was very thin and his eyes were redrimmed. He didn’t look at Dan but his eyes took in Matt Mason briefly and then concentrated on the floor.

This is Smithy,’ Mason said.

Dan nodded to the downturned head.

‘Show him your arms, Smithy.’

The man struggled out of his jerkin and pulled up first one sleeve of his checked shirt and then the other. The skin was conspicuously punctured, the needle-marks most dramatic in the soft hollow where forearm and upper arm met.

‘You know what that means?’ Mason said to Dan.

Dan nodded.

‘You wondering why I’m showing you this?’

Dan didn’t answer.

‘Smithy. Tell the man who supplies you with that shite.’

‘Cam Colvin.’

‘And who put you on it in the first place?’

‘One of Cam’s operators.”

‘You ever tried to come off it?’

‘I’ve tried.’

‘You ever going to come off it, do you think?’

‘Oh aye. When they bury me.’

‘What age are you, Smithy?’

‘Twenty-six.’

Mason liked the way Smithy had responded, as if his only function was to illustrate the points Mason was making. But Dan Scoular’s face was still impassive. Mason went on deliberately to talk about Smithy as if he couldn’t hear what was being said, was only for their inspection like a specimen floating in formaldehyde.

‘And look at him. He looks older already than he will ever be. He’ll just go on till there’s nothing left of him to stick a needle into. You know what can happen with people like that at the end? They run out of places to jag. I’ve known them injecting themselves in the prick. Only place they could find a vein. There’s a lot of Smithy around. And getting more every year. What’s wrong, big man? You not like facing the truth?’

Dan turned as if he was going to go out. He swung back towards Matt Mason.

‘That’s a man ye’re talkin’ about. Not a tailor’s dummy. He can hear ye.’

‘Oh. You think I’m hurting his pride. Grow up. What pride? Why do you think he’s here?’

Dan looked back at Smithy.

‘He’s here for money. He’s earning money. Look.’ He took two ten-pound notes from his pocket and handed them to Smithy. ‘Put that in your veins, Smithy. Cheers!’

The man went out without a word.

‘What else do you want me to do? I’m doing him a favour. The quicker he gets to an overdose, the better it’ll be for everybody.’

He took out his cigar-case, selected one. Dan wasn’t going to speak but Mason held up his hand with the lighter in it as if to forestall him.

‘Before you start talking like a social worker, Dan. You can maybe afford pride but he can’t. It never occur to you that people get to places where pride can’t follow them? He’s there. Your worries about talking like that in front of him. That’s
your
pride you’re talking about. He doesn’t have any left to worry about. And he never will again. You know why I showed you that?’

He lit up his cigar.

To make something clear to you. That’s what you’re fighting, Dan. Cutty Dawson works for Cam Colvin. And that’s how Cam Colvin makes his money. That’s where we live. So I’ve bent a few rules myself. Because there’s no other way to work in this shit-heap. But never anything like that. Remember that on Sunday, Dan. You better have your shower before you get a chill. We want you fit for Cutty.’