The Big Man (6 page)

Eddie climbed back into the car, drove it towards the lighted
window and then backed against the opposite wall of the car park so that the Mercedes faced towards the window. He shut off the engine and doused the lights. Lighting a cigarette, he studied the other two through the windscreen.

He saw Billy Fleming watch Matt Mason attentively, like a trained retriever waiting for the signal. Seeing Billy’s preoccupation silenced by the windscreen and framed in it, as if through the lens of a microscope, Eddie thought what a strange thing he was – an expert in impersonal violence. He felt no compunction about contemplating Billy so coldly. Billy wasn’t his friend. He wasn’t anybody’s friend, as far as Eddie knew. If Matt Mason had given Billy his instructions and nodded him towards the car, he would have come for Eddie as readily as anyone else. It was how he made his living, being an extension of Matt Mason’s will.

He did it well. Eddie had several times been astonished by the agility of that hugeness. But the results of that dexterity had made Eddie look away. He remembered one man whose face looked as if it had been hit by a small truck. Could you talk about doing anything well the purpose of which was so bad?

Eddie would have felt contempt for him except that he was honest enough to admit to himself that he couldn’t afford it. His own position wasn’t so much different. He might spare a thought for the man who imagined he was just coming out for a quiet pint, but that was as useful as flowers on the grave.

Eddie might like to believe that he still had a conscience but the main effect of it at the moment was to make him glad he couldn’t hear what was being said. It meant he didn’t have to worry about it too much. He just sat, smoking his cigarette and knowing his place. He watched Matt Mason prepare what was going to happen. He looked like somebody setting a trap for a species he understands precisely.

TWO

The sign of the Red Lion had rebounded on itself a bit, like a statement to which subsequent circumstances have given an ironic significance. It seemed meant to be a lion rampant. But the projecting rod of metal to which the sign was fixed by two cleeks had buckled in some forgotten storm. The lion that had been rearing so proudly now looked as if it were in the process of lying down or even hiding, and exposure to rough weather appeared to have given it the mange.

That image of a defiant posture being beaten down was appropriate. The place still called itself a hotel, although the only two rooms that were kept in readiness stood nearly every night in stillness, ghostly with clean white bed-linen, shrines to the unknown traveller. The small dining-room was seldom used, since pub lunches were the only meals ever in demand. The Red Lion scavenged a lean life from the takings of the public bar.

Like alcohol for a terminal alcoholic, the bar was both the means of the hotel’s survival and the guarantee that it couldn’t survive much longer. It seemed helplessly set in its ways, making no attempt to adapt itself to a changing situation. There were no fruit-machines, no space-invaders. There was a long wooden counter. There were some wooden tables and wooden chairs set out across a wide expanse of fraying carpet. There was, dominating a room that could feel as large as a church when empty, the big gantry like an organ for the evocation of pagan moods. Quite a few empty optics suggested that the range of evocation now possible was not what it had been.

It had its regulars but they were mainly upwards of their thirties and there weren’t many women among them. Except for occasional freak nights when the pub was busy and briefly
achieved a more complicated sense of itself the way a person might when on holiday, its procedures were of a pattern. The people who came here were, after all, devotees of a dying tradition. They believed in pubs as they had been in the past and they came here simply to drink and talk among friends, refresh small dreams and opinionate on matters of national importance. It was a talking shop where people used conversation the way South American peasants chew coca leaves, to keep out the cold.

Most of the men who drank in the Red Lion couldn’t afford to drink much. Sometimes a pint took so long to go down you might have imagined each mouthful had to be chewed before it was swallowed. They had all known better times and were fearing worse. The room they stood in was proof of how bad things were. It was common talk that Alan Morrison’s hold on the premises was shaky and every other week, as the property mouldered around him, another rumour of the brewers buying him out blew through it like a draught. The more uncertain his tenure grew to be, the more determinedly his regulars came. It was a small warmth in their lives and they were like men reluctant to abandon their places round a fire, though they know it’s going out.

Alan Morrison shared their feeling. He was simply holding out as long as he could. He knew that his monthly accounts were an unanswerable argument, but buying the hotel twenty years ago, after years of careful saving, had never been primarily an act of commercial logic. It had been the fulfilment of a dream for him and, being a stubborn man, he simply refused to wake up, though these days it was taking more and more whisky to keep him like that. For a while, knowing how badly things were going and lacking sufficient belief in new ways to change, he had settled for being a pedant of his own condition, a theorist about why things were so bad.

At one time he had blamed the Miners’ Welfare Club. Everybody wanted to be a capitalist, he said. When that closed down, he decided that television was the cause. People sat at home drinking out of cans, he said. That annoyed him for a while. Some evenings in the quietness of the pub, he would stand with
an abstracted air, tuned out of whatever muffled conversation was taking place, as if listening for the chorus of beer cans hissing open in all the houses of the town. When the television set he installed in the bar didn’t help, he retired further into his whisky for deeper contemplation of the problem.

The answer he came out with was an old man’s frozen reflex to the changes in the world, not so much a rational process as a mental snarl, the rictus of an animal that has died trying to intimidate the trap which has caught it. He became a kind of King Lear with a hotel, dismissive of all the world except his clientele. The commercial failure of his hotel wasn’t the reason for his baffled anger, merely its rostrum. His wife had died of cancer. His only son emigrated. His own heart was giving out. The state of his trade was just external confirmation, like an official letter from the fates.

His son became his scapegoat. Alan Morrison somehow managed to hallucinate a great inheritance for his son if he hadn’t gone to Australia. If he had stayed, everything would have been all right. The reason for Alec’s going became in his father’s mind something that he had caused. From there it was but a short tirade to Alan’s main theme, a sweeping dismissal of the young. They loved going to loud places. ‘Noise isny meaning’ was one of his darker utterances. They smoked strange cigarettes in groups. He would talk of the dangers of such practices while he was downing a double whisky. It was as if they, too, had emigrated, not geographically but socially, to other customs, to new attitudes, to more exotic pleasures.

Like his son, they never came regularly to his place, except for one. Vince Mabon was a student. ‘Politics’ was his cryptic answer to anyone in the bar who asked him what he was studying. He often said it with a cupping gesture of his hands that seemed to imply a casual encompassing of the world and all it might contain. Vince had a kind of deliberate intensity, a way of turning forensically into any question, even if you were asking him the time. No conversation seemed trivial with him. He always gave the impression of being on a mission of some sort. He didn’t drink here so much as he came among them.

He was in the bar that Sunday. He had explained to nobody
in particular that, as he had no lectures the next morning, he had managed to stay in Thornbank another night. The news was received without a display of fireworks. The only others present at the time, besides old Alan behind the bar, were the three domino players and Fast Frankie White.

The domino players were always looking for a fourth because as purists they hated sleeping dominoes. With not all the dominoes in use, arguments frequently broke out among them, arguments that almost always came back to theatrical complaints about the impossibility of deploying the full complexity of their skills when not every domino was brought into play. They sounded like Grand Masters being asked to play without the queen. Tonight there seemed no possibility of their artistry being given full range. Alan was engaged in trying to get Vince Mabon to admit the folly of being young. Fast Frankie White was drinking with his customary self-consciousness, as if checking the camera-angles.

He was an outsider in his home town, Frankie White, and perhaps everywhere. Nobody was even sure where the nickname ‘Fast’ had come from, maybe from the publicity agent he carried around in his head. Most people in Thornbank knew that whatever he did it wasn’t strictly legal. But since they knew of nobody he had harmed, except for breaking his mother’s heart (and what son didn’t?), they tolerated him. He might be able to sell the image he had made of himself elsewhere but they knew him too well to take him seriously. He was a performance and they let it happen, as long as it didn’t interfere significantly with them. Tonight he had kept to himself, drinking his whisky with a nervous expectation, and seeming to listen with sophisticated amusement to Vince and Alan.

Vince’s mushroom hairstyle was nodding heatedly at Alan and he had spilled some of his light beer on his UCLA tee-shirt. Alan was holding his whisky glass to the optic and shaking his head.

‘Well, I wouldn’t go, anyway,’ Vince said. ‘And that’s for sure.’

‘But they’re payin’ his way,’ Alan said, and dropped a token bead of water in his glass. The whole trip won’t cost him a penny.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.’

‘It’s his son and his wife, for God’s sake. Bert’s got two grand-daughters out there he’s never even seen.’

‘His son could bring them over.’

‘It’s not like he’s goin’ to
stay
in South Africa. Ah could see the force of yer objections then. It’s just a holiday.’

‘He’s still sanctioning an oppressive regime,’ Vince said.

Alan emptied an ashtray that had nothing in it, wiped it with a cloth that made it slightly less clean and replaced it on the bar. He looked at his glass for advice.

‘You ever been to Prestwick for the day?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘You ever been to Prestwick for the day?’

Vince looked round, appealing to a non-existent public. He smiled to himself since nobody else was available.

‘I think that’s what they call a non sequitur, Alan,’ he said.

‘That’s maybe what you call it. Ah just call it a question. Fuckin’ answer it.’

‘Yes. Guilty. I’ve been to Prestwick for the day. A lot of times.’

‘Well. Don’t go again. It’s a Tory council.’

Vince was contemptuous and Frankie White was laughing into his glass when Matt Mason and Billy Fleming walked in. Matt Mason came in first and Billy Fleming followed close, like a consort. Everybody else in the bar paid attention but not much. Strangers dropped in from time to time, on their way from somewhere to somewhere, but seldom stayed long.

‘Yes, sir?’ Alan said.

‘A gin and tonic,’ Matt Mason said, ‘and a pint of heavy.’

A small, barely perceptible event occurred in the room. Sam MacKinlay, one of the domino players, lifted his pint and sipped it briefly with his pinky out. Amusement almost happened between the other two domino players but didn’t quite manage to survive the look that Billy Fleming sent over like a sudden frost. Matt Mason, watching Alan put tonic in the gin and begin to pull the pint, added to the chill with his preoccupied stare. The occurrence had been fiercely concentrated, was over in a moment, but it was as if the others had been shown a capsule it would be dangerous to swallow. In case they had missed the
significance of their experience, Matt Mason imprinted his voice on it quietly.

This it?’ he said.

Alan was confused. He looked at the gin with half of the bottle of tonic poured into it and the pint, which had a perfect head on it.

‘A gin and tonic and a pint of heavy,’ he said.

‘You never heard of lemon?’

Alan bristled for a second, looked and understood what he was seeing.

‘We’re just out of lemon, sir.’

‘Ice?’

‘Ah’ll get ye some.’

He did. Matt Mason paid and walked over to the table beside the window, with Billy Fleming following. On his way, he glanced briefly at Frankie White, who was watching him. Before sitting down, he looked out of the window.

‘A ringside seat,’ he said quietly to Billy Fleming as they sat down.

They didn’t have long to wait. Dan Scoular came in. He brought a change of atmosphere with him. He tended to make other people feel enlarged through his presence, through his physical expansiveness to make expansiveness seem natural. He never intimidated. When he came in, you felt he was for sharing. Coming in this time, he was the occasion for talk about the rain, which hadn’t happened. Frankie White joined in the conversation pleasantly. The room relaxed. The domino players rediscovered how involving dominoes were. Alan and Vince stalked each other again through separate labyrinths of preconception. Dan Scoular tried to drown his sadness in his pint.

The beer seemed to turn sour as it touched his lips. He felt at once as if coming to the pub had been a mistake, one of the many things he did these days without being sure why he did them. It was as if habit was keeping appointments at which the largest part of him didn’t turn up. Frankie White’s calling him ‘big man’ hadn’t helped. Big man. The implied stature beyond the physical the words sought to bestow on him was an embarrassment. He remembered an expression his mother had used
to cut him down to size when he was in his arrogant teens and impressed by the status he felt himself acquiring. ‘Aye, ye’re a big man but a wee coat fits ye.’ She hadn’t been wrong. His sense of his own worth at the moment could have been comfortably contained in a peanut-shell. But the people he came from kept stubbornly dressing him up in regal robes of reputation, not seeming to realise he had abdicated.