The Big Man (25 page)

From that first core of contact was spawned a complicated series of movements, a wild progression of punches and counter-punches, blocks, sidesteps and lunges, where chance and purpose fought each other in them. They had entered a labyrinth of possibilities down which they pursued each other, a place where the crowd’s understanding couldn’t follow them. The onlookers might catch fragments and force them into a shape but only the two men knew how lost they were, caught the sudden swerves of fortune, heard triumph in a grunt, panic in a whimper, convulsed in secret pain, saw fear down the tunnel of an iris.

Part of Dan still felt outside of the event. He was aware of the bystanders around them like a frieze, a clash of colours significantly brighter than he had noticed them to be before the fight. A face would suddenly detach itself in his vision with an etched clarity. Cutty’s pale body was blotched where the first punches had hit him, faint, ugly roses. It was as if the tension in which he functioned was the generator that lit up everything around him, putting it under bright lights.

Even the tactical conclusions he was coming to were coldly clear, came to him like ways of approaching an abstract problem. He was struck by how much room there was. This was unlike any fight he had ever been in before, where it had all been about immediacy and speed and tightness of movement and where first advantage was usually final. This was less a battle than a war. It was like the difference he had felt between playing indoor football and playing on a full-sized pitch, where your skills needed to be harnessed to energy and fitness because big distances always stood between them and their realisation.

He was glad of the training he had done, even of Tommy Brogan’s fanaticism. Cutty was heavier and slower and the covering of a lot of ground should cost him more than it would cost Dan. But his mind had barely assimilated that idea when a contradictory perception called it in question.

The ground was uneven, catching the foot every so often in
a trap, so that fluidity of movement would freeze without warning and you were left for a second longer in a place your reflexes had already abandoned. Twice within a minute, because of the ground, Cutty had found him, once on the head, once on the body, with big punches he had already foreseen and arranged to avoid. The punches were less powerful than they might have been because Cutty, noticing Dan’s evasion, had been redirecting them towards where their target should have been. Their glancing impact gave enough hurt to serve as a warning. This place was mined with risks for a fast mover.

But the first one the ground significantly helped was Dan. Trying to turn quickly in pursuit, Cutty found an unevenness that jarred his foot and left him standing square-on. Dan had hit him four times on the head before he went down.

The suddenness of it, the ease with which Cutty collapsed, drew an awed sound from the crowd, one of those reactions by which people create what has happened in preference to observing it. For a second of dazzled elation, Dan admitted the crowd’s sense of what was taking place into his own. But it was like introducing a shaft of light into a cave. It hadn’t clarified his vision, it had blinded him. Within a moment, Dan knew it was the imbalance that had put Cutty down more than the punches and that the very ease with which he fell had neutralised Dan’s impact. Cutty was rising again at once. All that had happened was a chance for a rest.

Dan didn’t sit down because he was surprised at how near to being tired he felt, and afraid to give in to the feeling. Matt Mason was saying something about ‘a walkover’ and Dan ignored him, since they didn’t seem to be present at the same event.

In those desperately inhaled seconds, Dan took in knowledge with each breath. How trivial our skills are, he understood. We choose where we deploy our skills and project from that our own sense of ourselves. Then we believe it. How often did the professor dare to live outside his special subject, the politician live in the streets, the poet forgo words? Dan, outside of that confrontation with his father, had never lost a fight in his life. Gifted with literally stunning reflexes, he had fabricated a fake sense of himself. A few minutes of different experience had
disproved it. He wasn’t who he was supposed to be. He’d better find out who he was.

He was glad he hadn’t sat down because there would hardly have been time. The shortness of the rest time made him almost plead for more. He hadn’t had long enough to settle his breathing before the referee was shouting, ‘Prepare!’ He decided he had better not get knocked unconscious or he would never make it back to the line where he now stood with Cutty smiling at him.

Time!’

He heard someone shouting for him to finish it off and instead of encouraging him the shout angered him because its empty confidence diminished the reality of what was going on. They were still introducing themselves, finding their way past the surface gestures towards a real meeting between force and force at the centre of each. Cutty’s strength seemed undiminished and he twice broke past Dan’s attempts to parry him. Those were bad moments when Dan found himself struggling not to be overwhelmed. All he could do was try to keep moving and chip at Cutty’s strength with a persistence that was already beginning to lose confidence in itself. It was like trying to chop down a tree without being able to hit it twice in the same place.

Cutty had started to talk in the wrestling clinches. ‘Ye’ve no chance, son,’ he was saying. ‘No chance.’ ‘Make it easy for yerself.’ ‘Go down, stay down.’ ‘Now or later, same thing.’

A troubling realisation had entered Dan’s understanding of the fight. Basic talent wasn’t going to settle this. He had already brought to bear the skills that had always been enough for him before, the great natural reflexes that could take an opening almost before it was there or leave a thrown blow expended half an inch from his face, the instinctive correctness of punch that fed power every time up from the legs through the body’s leverage. He had found out already that he was simply better at this than Cutty was now. But that wasn’t going to be enough.

An accident might be enough, coupled with exhaustion. Whichever of them lost his legs first would probably lose everything because the rough ground was full of bad places for tiredness, and fatigue would kill the ability to make fast readjustments and it would be like trying to dance in quicksand. Even as he
struggled to hold Cutty’s body, greased with sweat, and, failing to throw Cutty off, threw himself off and staggered back, Dan was thinking that this fight would prove nothing that he believed in. They were both caught in it now, heading each other off into a happening it seemed to him they couldn’t significantly settle, both obliged to wait till accident or unearned circumstance swatted one or the other down, while the shouts of the crowd refined the meaningless raw material of their contest into the meaning they chose. He sensed the people undulate around the progress of their conflict like protoplasm.

In a despondent panic, Dan poured himself on to Cutty. While his left hand buzzed distractingly around Cutty’s head, he hit him three times on the left biceps and, as the arm wilted, chopped down on Cutty’s jaw and deposited him on one knee. Cutty threw himself back up but the referee declared the end of a round.

Dan felt like walking on past Mason and Tommy Brogan but they fussed round him with the towel. Mason was complimenting him and Dan’s head rejected the praise like counterfeit money. He was angry at everything, the way Tommy Brogan roughed his abraded cheek with the towel, the noise of the crowd like an appetite he was being forced to feed, the remorselessness of the referee’s voice. He felt nobody could give him anything that he could take back in there. Mason and Tommy Brogan didn’t know what was going on. He despised the crowd that needed their blood like a plasma-bank. He felt anger against Cutty for taking part in this.

He had hit Cutty the moment after the word Time!’ was heard, and unloaded his banked rage in a cumulative fury of punches. Cutty stumbled back and fell.

Matt Mason interpreted the shouts for him. That was the turning-point, big man.’ Dan was afraid he was right. Cutty had been on his feet again before his handlers could get to him. Dan felt more exhausted by his attack than Cutty seemed to be. He didn’t know where he was supposed to go from here. That line was somewhere he never wanted to go back to. He had done as much as he could do. Wasn’t that enough? He wanted to stay on this canvas seat for ever.

Time!’ was a command to go to a place he had never been before but Cutty seemed familiar with it.

Dan was listening for the voices of the crowd to lead him. They suggested, he imagined, that he was winning but he couldn’t believe that from the inside. He wondered if they were still seeing the previous round.

Pain had found its way past the anaesthesia of tension and every punch seemed to bring the aches from all the earlier punches out in chorus. He felt as if he was discovering for the first time the reality of violence. He seemed pitted against a force that was just naturally greater than his. There are no fair fights, it occurred to him. He heard the voices draw on his spilled blood. As he began to founder, he knew something with certainty and yet knew that his knowledge was discredited because of where it came from, because it would be seen as the excuse of a loser. And he was losing, he was certain. He knew he was giving as much as Cutty, the same in his own terms, that what was being demonstrated here wasn’t the superiority of one but the similarity of both, that they were expressing something jointly, not individually. The voices lied. What was there was as much as anybody could offer, was the same gift whoever made it. The voices lied, but he had accepted them and he was caught in them now.

He had to move back and he could find no further to go, in the field or in himself. He knew nothing but hurt coming at him. He thought every noise, every shout, the crowd, the whole day was attacking and the world was just vendettas against him. He hated them all. He hated them all and found there in the sheerness of his hate a hardness that defiantly didn’t want to yield, clenched fist of his rage, marrow of his will. He found some small, last seed of himself still needing to flower. He must let it be fulfilled but he was stunned and stumbling. His feet groped along a maze of edges, trying to find footholds in air, until he stepped off suddenly into blackness.

Weights pressed against him at various parts and he felt himself tilt and plane awkwardly, find different angles in air. He couldn’t tell himself upright or not, what position he held. The darkness was spiral. There was sound.

‘Twenty seconds.’

‘Twenty-five seconds.’

His mind held the voice like a rope to pull him out of the pit.

‘Prepare.’

And he burst into dizzying light. The day was in pieces. Pressure was pushing his body out of shape towards somewhere. His knees couldn’t hold. Ground bobbled, trees spun, the sky slowly turning.

‘Time!’

He was moving. But he had surfaced again into pain, volleyed forces.

‘Bedtime, son,’ Cutty was saying.

‘Only a matter of time.’

‘No chance.’

The voice helped him. It was an assumption about what he was and he was determined not to allow that. Its glibness located the last of his anger. The anger came because he felt Cutty betraying both of them, aligning himself with the lie that was the crowd’s sense of what had been happening. However this ended, Dan had fought honestly to the limits of himself. Nobody was going to take that from him. This fight wasn’t over yet because he felt as if he had just discovered what he was fighting. He knew that stony certainty, had heard it since childhood from so many other voices. It came from the same place as Cutty’s smile, it was an echo of all those corner-standers who had peopled his boyhood. It was the voice that had spoken inside himself for years. And he knew now that he didn’t agree with it. It spoke as if it knew the truth and it was hiding from the truth. It overruled those who couldn’t meet the terms it demanded. In declaring its own strength it trampled on the weakness of others.

Trying to focus on the fragmentary images of Cutty that felt as if they were coming at him from every angle, Dan seemed to himself to be fighting all those working-class hardmen who had formed the pantheon of his youth, men who in thinking they defied the injustice of their lives had been acquiescing in it because they compounded the injustice by unloading their weakness on to someone else, making him carry it. Dan’s past self
was among them. So was his father on the back green. Like an argument Dan was still involved in, his father’s voice came from somewhere: ‘Whit is it you believe in, boay?’ As he stumbled about the field, being flayed of his arrogance, he was looking for an answer.

He tried to rally against Cutty. He couldn’t but as he felt himself stagger and fall again, even as he pitched sickeningly on to the ground with a jolt that threatened to bring his bones out through the skin, a part of his mind hung on to consciousness like a cliff-edge bush it wasn’t sure would hold, and he was already struggling to rise when Matt Mason and Tommy Brogan found him and half-carried him to the canvas seat.

Their voices were talking to themselves. Dan sat staring at Cutty while the referee counted off the time and the sounds of the crowd were like translations of what was happening into different languages. Dan felt a terrible coldness spreading through his mind, an ice killing off everything but the most basic thought, the crudest life-forms. He was waiting to see what survived to take with him when he rose. Suddenly his own voice came to him from the past, something he had once said, he couldn’t remember where. ‘Living’s the only game in town and it’s fucking crooked.’ Thinking that now, he felt the prodigious strength of despair. The whole thing was unbearable. To bear it, he wanted his wife and his family. He must have them. To have them, he must win.

‘Time!’

As Cutty crowded him again at once, Dan’s bleak decision that he must win stayed with him and the fixity of his will revealed to him at last the way he might do it. He heard, as if in a time-lock, Tommy Brogan saying something that mattered, as he sat on the canvas seat. His mind, while Cutty buffeted his body, was crouched patiently, waiting for the remark to come back. It was something Tommy Brogan had been saying since the beginning and Dan had been too tense to register it.