The Big Man (31 page)

What they seemed to be dealing with was a debating point and what he had in his mind was the intractable image of Cutty Dawson lying on his bed. In this room that was inadmissible evidence. He felt an echo of this morning, breakfasting in the hotel before the fight. The others had seemed to know the nature of the event before it happened. He thought of the things they had said to him afterwards, telling him what he had done. Like their conversation, they pre-empted the reality of events. They were as much manipulated by Matt Mason as he had been.

‘Anyway, I’m not cleaned out,’ Matt Mason said. He winked at Dan. ‘Margaret. You make sure the drink doesn’t dry up?’

He stood up and looked at Dan, raised his eyebrows. Dan put down his drink and followed him out.

In the hall he opened the door of a room and put on the light. ‘What do you think of this?’

It was a dining-room, wooden-floored and with a huge sideboard on which a hot-plate and metal serving dishes sat. A chandelier hung brilliantly from the ceiling. Dan studied it all and looked at Matt Mason. He was watching Dan expectantly. Dan nodded in a way he assumed was appreciative. Matt Mason put out the light and led him to another room. Dan recognised the study from which he had phoned Betty.

With the door closed, the room shut off the others’ conversation. It was surprisingly still in here, as if it was lined with cork. If the house had seemed to Dan on arriving the centre of the night, this room was the core of the core. Very much Matt Mason’s place, it was small and cluttered with objects in a way that intimidated sudden movement. The dominant feature was a big leather-topped desk with a cushioned wooden swivel-chair behind it and a deep leather chair in front of it. There was a painting of horses on the wall above the wooden chair and an abstract painting on the facing wall as you came in the door. On
the desk were a heavily ornate silver box and a big vase, the glaze filamented with age. Dan had stared at that vase while he was phoning Betty and the boys and, confronting him now, it was a kind of accusation.

Mason opened a cabinet and took out a bottle and two crystal glasses. He poured two drinks, making a ritual of it. He kept one, gave one to Dan.

Tequila Gold,’ he said. ‘To us.’

Dan sipped it carefully, felt its warmth. He was standing awkwardly like a guest who wasn’t sure what he had been invited to.

‘Sit down, Dan.’

The seat absorbed him in itself, was too comfortable, making him think he might need help to get back out of it. Mason sat behind his desk.

‘I owe you money, Dan,’ he said and smiled. ‘But there’s something else I want to talk to you about.’

He sipped his drink and seemed momentarily to have forgotten what it was he wanted to talk about.

‘What do you think of the house?’

‘Some house.’

‘It’s all right, isn’t it? It’ll do. For the moment, anyway. There’s a lot of snobbery about here. Who cares? I’ve got as big a house as any of them. And it’s paid for. But I think some of my neighbours don’t think I should be here. A boy from the Gallowgate. You know the Gallowgate?’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

Dan knew it was a district of Glasgow and not much more.

‘It’s not there now. Not the way it was. It’s not just people that move away, Dan. Places move away. That was some place. Funny mixture. I remember a day. I would be twelve. Two mates and me had booked half an hour on a snooker table. Had scuffled two days to get the money. Ninepence. For half an hour’s snooker. We were all keyed up for it. Like going on holiday. We set up the balls and broke. Two boys about nineteen said, “Right. We’ll take it from there.” They pushed us off the table and took over. We went outside. There was a man we knew standing there having a smoke. A wee man called Johnny
Fagan. “What’s the matter, boys?” he says. “Thought youse three were havin’ a frame.” We told him. Throws away his fag and went back in. Ten seconds later, a terrible noise. The two boys carried out. We played our game.’

In the silence and stillness of the room, the anecdote seemed to acquire a confessional significance. The moment reminded Dan of some of the early-hours drinking sessions he had been involved in when, with the rest of the world seeming to be asleep and reduced to a kind of abstraction, thoughts stumbled upon and moments remembered became enlarged, as by some trick of mental acoustics, like a whisper in a cave. You were amazed at the importance of the small things you knew. Mason’s brooding silence suggested the importance he was attaching to the story. He fingered the silver box on his desk thoughtfully.

‘Johnny Fagan,’ he said, with a kind of reverence. He seemed to be naming one of his spiritual fathers. ‘He taught me a couple of things that my old man didn’t. My old man. Drunk as a monkey most of the time. And spouting politics. He was useless. My mother kept us alive. I used to look at her and think this was her life. All she was ever going to get. And so it was. I helped her a wee bit before the end. But she died before I had made the real money.’ His hand came away from the silver box and gestured at the room. ‘If I’d brought her into this place, she’d probably have got down on her knees and started to clean it. Nah. She died trapped in what she had been. Harnessed to my old man’s life. Social progress, Dan. Let all the lazy, gutless bastards hitch themselves up to the ones that get things done and get a free ride through their lives. The theories are maybe nice but that’s how it works. Truth is, God’s a hard case. He has to be, no? Look at the way he works. He doesn’t hang about when he’s foreclosing on lives. No redundancy payments there. Doesn’t matter whether it’s children or young men or pregnant mothers. When your contract’s terminated, it’s terminated. Try another universe.’

Dan remembered the moment in the fight when he had thought about something he had once said himself: ‘Living’s the only game in town and it’s fucking crooked.’

It was a thought which had clarified for him what he had to
do, which had helped to bring him through the fight. He couldn’t now simply pretend it wasn’t there. He had to follow where it appeared to lead. He didn’t want the quiet, compelling voice to go on but it did.

That’s what I’ve got against all the fancy theories. They don’t work. You’re not changing the truth. You’re just giving it a fancy shroud. It’s still a fuck-up. The nice ideas don’t fit us. How many do you know that died poor and tried it?’

The voice came at him like an echo of so many of his own thoughts. He was trying to believe it was a distorting echo. But he thought of the men he used to work with at Sullom Voe – how quickly, making good money, they had distanced themselves from the men they had worked with before. Given a taste of their own limited financial success, it became a self-fulfilling addiction. Some of them would still talk of their parents’ lives with a kind of wistful admiration for their belief in the solidarity of their class but there was almost a kind of condescension in that admiration, as if it had been similar to the touching beliefs children have in fairy tales. Also, their talk on those train journeys down from Aberdeen seemed to have no strong political focus. Among the talk of football and family and women and who had got a good deal on his car, politics might be mentioned, but never with the kind of righteous anger Dan had heard being voiced as a boy against the political principles that seemed to govern their lives. Where their fathers might have raged, these men shrugged. What else can you expect, they seemed to suggest. Dan had sometimes wondered if their music centres and their video machines and their foreign holidays were like hush money.

He had to admit that he had seen himself how demands for social equality could be used as a confidence trick. There were phases of history when it worked well. People could use it as a ticket of admission to the party that was going on at the time and, once they were inside, get on with the serious business of filling their faces and their pockets. Maybe those mates who had worried him on those train journeys had been brought by unemployment and the hard terms of their lives to the point he had only reached in the fight.

‘You think I chose this, Dan? There is no choice. It’s all there is.’

They sat in silence. Dan raised his glass to his mouth and put it back down without drinking. He didn’t know why he had done that. Perhaps it was because he sensed himself at a point of utter equilibrium in his experience, where nothing trivial must tip the balance, not even one sip of tequila. Whatever he did now would define him for the rest of his life to himself. He knew where Mason was going and he didn’t yet know how far he was prepared to follow him. He must wait very carefully and see. Mason had both hands on the vase, as if warming them at a fire.

This house, Dan. I made this house. Oh, I didn’t put the bricks together, right enough, but I made it all right. See that room I showed you? The dining-room? Know where I got the idea for that room? Mainly at the pictures. The idea for the floor I got out a colour supplement. But mainly it’s from the pictures I saw when I was a wee snottery boy. I decided then I was going to have a house like them. If it was good enough for Ronald Colman, it was good enough for me. And I got it. Don’t you worry. This vase.’

He lifted it gently and put it down on the desk in front of Dan.

‘Lift that. Feel the weight.’

Dan did so.

‘You’re holding two thousand quid in your hands there.’

Dan put it back down immediately and Mason smiled. He moved the silver box across to Dan.

‘Fifteen hundred pounds,’ he said. ‘Open it.’

Dan fiddled with the box and it wouldn’t open. He felt beneath his hands the mysteriousness of old objects, their intimidatory history. The box didn’t just baffle him, it made him feel stupid. Its carvings seemed as mystifying as the Rosetta Stone. He felt around him the strangeness of the house as if emanating from this centre, his incomprehension of the lives that had been lived here, the dignity of the place like an identity no changes made by Mason could erase. He felt as if both of them were interlopers.

‘Careful,’ Mason said. ‘It’s delicate.’

Dan’s hands came away as if from an electric shock. Mason leaned across and touched something and the lid of the box
eased itself slightly and soundlessly from the body. Mason nodded. Dan gently prised it open. Inside was a yellowed piece of paper. Dan glanced at Mason. Mason took out the paper tentatively and unfolded it carefully, passed it to Dan, who held it as if it might powder in his hands. It was a note in faded, fancy handwriting, undated, no address. ‘Dear Mary Anne,’ it said. The matter is decided. There shall be no further trouble from that source. Discretion, however, is still to be advised. Until soon. Francis.’ Dan felt an eeriness in reading the words, as if he had heard whisperings from the grave. That long-irrelevant urgency seemed to put his own problems in a new perspective. Mason, putting the paper back in its box and closing the lid, appeared to catch his mood.

‘Gives you a funny feeling, eh? That was in the box when I got it. I like that. I like to keep it there. It’s like it tells you there’s not much that changes. “Discretion, however, is still to be advised.” True, Dan.’

He was still touching the box. They sat like conspirators, staring at it.

‘You’ve made some money today, Dan,’ Mason said. ‘But that’s nothing to what you could make. But to make the real stuff you’ve got to have a bit of iron in you. You’ve got that. I saw it today. Oh, I did.’ He looked up directly at Dan. ‘That’s something I can use, Dan. I want you to come and work with me.’

Mason’s hand came away from the box, gestured at the room.

‘My sons,’ Mason said. They’ll be all right. With their elocution lessons. And their private school. Okay. But they’re being trained to live a charade. I can see it in them already. Well, let them get on with it. But some of us have to handle the real world. Not many of us equipped to do that, Dan. I think you’re one.’

They looked at each other and Dan was aware of the hunger in Mason’s eyes, saw how important the making of this offer was to him.

‘I’m not talking about being a puncher, Dan. I’m talking about learning from me. I’m talking about more money than you ever
thought you would see. I think you should come in where the real work’s done.’

Dan remembered times when he had thought he was comfortably off and realised how naive he had been to think that. There hadn’t been a time in his life when more than a month or two separated him from being penniless. A week without work had always been enough to put him in financial bother. For the first time in his life, he saw security within his grasp. He thought of Betty. He felt that at the moment he needed every advantage in that area he could get.

That party,’ Dan said. ‘Somebody told me ye were involved in drugs.’

Mason smiled.

‘Who told you that?’

‘Ah can’t remember. Is it true?’

‘Not really. Been around the edges, right enough. Dabbled. Not too successfully so far. You thinking about Friday? Smithy?’

Dan said nothing.

‘Friday was Friday, Dan. This is Sunday. I said what I thought would help you at the time. Drugs. That’s one of those words everybody gets hysterical about. Leaves the papers frothing at the mouth. Why? It’s a commodity, isn’t it? It’s the coming market. People take it by choice, at least to begin with. Great thing about drugs is you’ve really got a captive market. It’s a great commodity, isn’t it? You don’t even have to advertise. The consumer’s breaking your door down to buy it off you. Talk about a seller’s market.’

‘Whit wis the fight about?’

‘Just settling something.’

‘Who would kill somebody?’

Mason studied him interestedly.

‘You’ve been doing a bit of talking, Dan, eh? No. Just about who would settle something. Collect a bad debt. Cam Colvin’s going to do that. Not my business any more. And definitely not yours. How he does it is how he does it. Well.’

Dan felt the impossibility of his understanding the exact ramifications, from where he sat, of the events he had been involved in. The only way to understand them fully would be to
become more strongly part of them. Mason stood up. Dan joined him, awkwardly.