Читать книгу The Big Man - William McIlvanney - Страница 10

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.

Wullie Mairshall was an example. Coming out of the house tonight, with his sense of Betty’s growing disregard for him making him feel guilty, Dan had been met by Wullie.

‘Hullo. It’s Dan the Man. How’s the head man gettin’ on?’

Wullie was obviously coming from where Dan was going. Jim Steele had been with him. Steelie had a carry-out of cans of beer and they were at that stage of drunkenness of taking hostages.

‘Dan,’ Wullie said. ‘You come with us. We’re goin’ up tae see auld Mary Barclay. Discuss the state of the world. The world!’ he had suddenly declared to the houses around him. ‘Find out what happened. Where the working class went wrong. Was a day, Dan, men like you woulda been ten a penny. Now you stand alone. Steelie! He stands alone!’

‘Alone!’ Steelie confirmed and offered him a can from his carry-out with sombre dignity.

‘No, thanks, Steelie. Ah’m just goin’ for a drink. Take care, you two.’

But Wullie had gripped Dan’s arm.

‘Don’t let us down, Dan,’ Wullie said. ‘You know what Ah mean. Eh? You know, Steelie.’

‘Ah know. Don’t let us down.’

‘He won’t let us down!’ Wullie snarled at Steelie, as if it was a ridiculous idea Steelie had broached from nowhere. ‘Big Dan won’t let us down. Ye know what Ah mean, Dan. We all know. Steelie knows.’ His arms gathered them into a conspiracy. ‘We all know. We know.’

Steelie nodded. Wullie slapped his hands together like applause for their communal wisdom. Everybody seemed to know but him, Dan had thought. Yet his knowledge of Wullie Mairshall was a kind of sub-text to the ridiculousness of the conversation, a gloss that shed some meaning on its cryptic nature. Wullie Mairshall was a believer in the working-class past and how the present had failed it. He spoke of the thirties as if they were last week. In the pressure of those times he had been formed and it was in relation to what he had learned then that he judged everything else.

What he judged mainly was the present, and found it wanting. In his search for something to continue having faith in, for some residual sign that the quality of the past was not entirely lost, he had – for reasons that baffled the subject of his choice – picked Dan. If he were honest with himself, Dan Scoular understood quite clearly the meaning of that drunken exchange outside his house, the nudges, winks and loaded phrases, secret as passwords. He was being reminded that he had been entrusted with the heritage of Wullie Mairshall’s sense of working-class tradition and he must stay true to it. He had been given a commission.

But it was one he wasn’t sure he believed in any more. And he felt that he wasn’t the only deserter. Standing now in this pub, he felt alone. He knew most of these people he stood among. He liked them. But he no longer felt the sense of community he had once known with them. They had somehow grown apart. There was a time when he thought he could have gone into any pub like this in Scotland and sensed kinship, felt wrapped round him instantly the warmth of shared circumstances, of lives a central part of which was concern for how you were living. But he had lost his awareness of that. After his few years in the pits, he couldn’t find it. He was never sure how far the failure was his and how far his observation was the truth.

But he had looked hard enough. He had worked as a general labourer, he had worked in the brickworks, on the roads, on the high pylons, he had worked Sullom Voe. And he had progressively seen himself merely as an individual who happened to be working in these places, someone ‘on for himself as they said. He remembered some of those journeys on the train down from Aberdeen. Men whose parents had had the same kind of lives as his own talked among themselves of what they were individually getting out of it, compared themselves rather condescendingly with mates who had been made redundant at the same time as themselves and hadn’t done nearly as well. It was as if every man and his family were a private company. Once, thanks to a man he had made friends with in Fraserburgh, he had gone out to make some extra money on a boat that fished out of Mallaig. Even those fishermen, brave, and kind to him, had sounded like wealthier versions of the men on the train.

He had wondered often if he had all his life been pursuing the wrong dream, since it was supposed to be a shared dream and so few other people seemed to be having it. More and more, he understood Betty’s dismay at him. Lately, he had been thinking he should look more to his own perhaps, make what he could for Betty and the boys and forget anything else. It seemed a way he might win Betty back, for he dreaded he was losing her. Maybe it was just his preoccupation with that dread that had made him wonder if it was something about Betty Wullie Mairshall had been hinting at before Dan left them.

Dan had walked away several yards when Wullie followed him, leaving Steelie swaying on the pavement like a slightly top-heavy potted plant. Wullie put his hand on Dan’s arm and looked at him with maudlin affection. His words seemed surfacing from the bottom of a very deep pool.

‘Dan. Ah’ll need to see ye in private sometime. A quiet talk.’

‘What is it, Wullie?’

Wullie’s forefinger hovered in front of his own lips like an eyesight test.

‘Personal, Dan. Very personal.’

‘Ye can come to the house anytime, Wullie.’

‘Not suitable, Dan. Anyway, Ah’m not a hundred per cent sure of ma information yet. Let’s leave it the now. But remember. Ah’ve always got your interests at heart. Nobody takes liberties wi’ you on the fly while Ah’m around.’

‘Liberties? In what way, Wullie?’

‘Dan. Let’s leave it there. Enquiries will be made. Meantime, my lips are sealed. Ah’ll be sure before Ah speak. And when Ah am, it’ll be for your ears only.’ He winked. ‘Ah’m your man, Dan Scoular. Ah’m your man.’

The knowledge hadn’t reassured Dan. As he nodded to Frankie White in acknowledgment of his second pint, Dan hoped Wullie’s drunkenly decorous secrecy hadn’t been about Betty. He didn’t know how he could cope with hearing bad things about her. He tried to convince himself it would be about something a lot less important, perhaps that somebody had informed on him to the Inland Revenue for building a garden wall for a man in Blackbrae and not declaring the money he earned for it. It could be that. Wullie Mairshall, who was still only sixty-four but had taken early retirement with his redundancy money two years ago, did gardens in Blackbrae, for some of what Wullie called ‘the big hooses’, and Wullie always talked as much as he delved. He might have heard something.

He hoped, whatever it was, it didn’t impinge too immediately on his family. Being so insecure about himself, he felt an awareness of vulnerability spread to Betty and his children. He feared the susceptibility of Betty to another man. He worried about how his sons were supposed to grow up decent among the shifting values that surrounded them, when he wasn’t sure himself what he stood for any more. Sometimes just the sheer amount of undigested experience they were asked to deal with through watching television troubled him. It seemed to him that at their age his experience had come at him through a filter of shared, accepted values which they perhaps lacked, or which at least had more gaps. Their experience came at them more quickly and they rushed more quickly to meet it.

He remembered Raymond telling him last week about a dream he had had. Raymond was walking in a street alone when he saw a woman lying there. He had known, as you know in dreams without knowing how you know, that she was dead. She was dressed in a skirt and a blouse. ‘Maybe like an office worker,’ Raymond had said. He had knelt over her and noticed blood trickling from the side of her mouth. While he was studying her, he had heard a noise that frightened him. As he glanced up, a creature was running towards him, completely covered in hair. ‘But it was a woman,’ Raymond said. ‘It was an animal. But I knew it was a woman.’ He had tried to run away but she had trapped him against the wall. He had wakened with her about to sink her fanged teeth in his throat.

Dan had explained to Raymond that he thought the dream was just about growing up, about seeing women not as neutral adults but as something sexual. But what had reassured Raymond had troubled Dan. It had told him how much Raymond was growing up, the difficult places he was moving into, and it showed Dan his own time contracting. Whatever significant influence he was still to have on them, whatever coherent message his life was meant to convey, he had better find it quick. He thought of seeing Betty through the window today and knowing how much she meant to him. Whatever love was supposed to be, that was what he felt. But his love was somehow isolated in him, like a genie in a bottle. He had to find the means to release it, to show himself to them as he wanted to be.

He took a sip of his beer and decided that it wasn’t helping. One of the strangers over at the window rose and went through to the lavatory. When Dan turned a little later to see what Frankie White was having, he discovered that Frankie had gone as well. Dan set him up a drink in his absence.

Matt Mason was still urinating by the time Frankie White came through. Frankie took the stall beside him. Matt Mason didn’t look up. He seemed transfixed by the sight of his water.

That’s your man?’

That’s Dan Scoular.’

‘Seems a bit lost in himself.’

‘Ah told ye. He’s got a lot of problems. Who hasn’t around here these days?’

‘Who’s the gonk with the mouth like a megaphone?’

‘Vince Mabon. He’s a student.’

‘Big man likes him, does he?’

‘Dan likes most people. But, aye, he seems to like Vince.’

‘Uh-huh. We can maybe arrange to see how much. The gonk’ll do.’

‘How d’ye mean?’

Matt Mason was finished, waved his penis as if it were a large and cumbersome object. He went across to wash his hands and found no soap. He was fastidiously annoyed. Frankie finished and didn’t bother to wash his hands. He was too preoccupied.

‘How do you mean?’

Matt Mason was rubbing his hands together under the water, which, after testing, he had realised wasn’t hot. He tutted like an old maid. Finished, he made sure the tap was fully turned off and looked round for a towel. He noticed that it was a hot-air hand-dryer.

‘Daft old bastard,’ he muttered. ‘One modern convenience in his place and it’s a bummer.’

He hit the button angrily and felt the hot air play ineffectually on his hands.

‘Whoever invented these,’ he shouted above the noise of the machine, ‘should definitely not get a Nobel Prize.’

Standing amid the smell of his own urine, Frankie White suddenly realised where they were. Like a bank robber who has had his pocket picked, he felt outraged. The feeling gave him the courage to shout at Matt Mason above the sound.

‘No, no. Wait a minute. We don’t need any wee tests. Ah’ve told you what the man can do. That’s not what Ah thought the night was about.’

Matt Mason was turning his hands back and forward in the heat.

‘Come on, Matt! We don’t need this.’

Suddenly, the machine shut itself off. Frankie White cringed from the sound of his own voice. Matt Mason was rubbing the fingers of each hand on the palms, dissatisfied. Without warning, he leaned across and dried them on Frankie’s jacket.

‘I’m not a punter,’ he said. ‘I’m a bookie. Always check the odds.’ He turned at the door. ‘But it’s okay. I’ve warned Billy it’s a fair fight.’

He went back through to the bar. Frankie hung about for a moment until he admitted to himself that there was nothing he could do but follow. Going back to his whisky, he saw the scene begin to move under its own impetus, as if he had accidentally hit the start-button of a machine he didn’t know how to stop. Matt Mason was nodding to Billy Fleming. Billy Fleming lifted his pint and began to finish it.

‘We’ll never get anywhere,’ Vince Mabon was saying, ‘through the parliamentary system. It’s a set-up. The game’s rigged. Look at the last time. They brainwashed the public with a lotta lies.’

Billy Fleming walked up to the bar.

‘A pint of heavy,’ he said.

Preoccupied, Alan reached for the empty glass and made to put the next pint in it.

‘You not got two glasses, like?’ Billy Fleming said.

‘Sorry.’

Alan lifted a fresh glass and started to fill it.

‘I’m tellin’ ye, Alan. To hell with gradualism. It’s revolution we need. Violence is the only way we’ll go forward. Take the struggle into the streets.’

‘You talk shite!’

The remark had the suddenness of a gun going off, leaving you wondering where it came from or if that was what you had heard at all. The confirmation that it had happened was the solidity of the silence that followed it.

‘You hear me? You talka loada shite. Ah’m fed up listenin’ to you.’

Vince shuffled uncomfortably like a man looking for the way down from a platform. When he spoke, his voice had lost its rhetorical tone.

‘I’ve got my opinions.’

‘Shurrup!’

The pint Alan had been filling foamed, forgotten, over the rim of the glass.

‘Ah don’t want to hear yer opinions,’ Billy Fleming said. ‘You believe in violence? Come out here an’ Ah’ll show ye violence.’

Vince spoke quietly.

‘That’s not the kind of –’

‘Ah said shurrup! You’re not payin’ attention. Open yer mouth again and I’ll put a pint-dish down it.’

The others in the room watched helplessly while Vince went as still as if a block of ice had formed round him. Alan turned off the beer tap.

‘Hey!’

The word was out of Dan Scoular’s mouth before he knew he was going to say it. Some basic feeling had expressed itself beyond his conscious control. The trouble taking place in the pub wasn’t his and he would have preferred to have no part in it. But the injustice of the event was so blatant. His instincts had cast his vote for him. But nobody else voted with him or, if they did, the ballot was secret. He felt his isolation, and his head was left to work out how to follow where his heart had led.

The word had been quiet but it introduced a counter-pressure in the room, a careful groping for leverage. Billy Fleming turned slowly, almost luxuriously, towards where he felt the pressure coming from. He looked steadily at Dan Scoular.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Can Ah help ye?’

‘The boy’s just talkin’.’

‘Not any more he’s not.’

They watched each other.

‘An’ if he does open his mouth, he’ll get it.’

‘You’ll not touch the boy.’

‘Are you his daddy?’

The pressure was balanced evenly between them and, deliberately, with very measured calculation, Billy Fleming tilted it in his favour.

‘Well, you’ll get it as well, if ye interfere.’

Dan Scoular smiled, realising Vince had been a decoy. The smile was camouflage he knew couldn’t protect him much longer. He was angry with himself for having been so easily left with no options. He thought of something Betty had once said of him: ‘When you walk into a room, the only attitude that seems to occur to you is, “What game do you play here? I bet I can play that as good as you.” It never seems to occur to you to say, “I don’t believe in that game. I think it’s a rotten game. I’m not playing.” Why do you think you have to accept the rules?’ It looked as if he had done it again. But he was in the game now and all he could think of to do was try and play it with style.

‘You want it badly, don’t ye?’ he said.

He walked towards the other man and, as Billy Fleming tensed in preparation, walked past him. Billy Fleming was momentarily uncertain, thinking he was being walked out on. He was glancing towards Matt Mason as he heard Dan Scoular speaking from the door, which was open.

‘Alan doesny like fights in his pub,’ he said and went out.

As Billy Fleming followed, Matt Mason stood and went to the window. The assurance of his action, as if he had declared himself the promoter of this fight, magnetised the still-stunned reactions of the others into imitation. Nobody followed the two men out. Frankie White crossed towards the window and the three domino players rose and moved hurriedly after him. Alan came tentatively out from the carapace of his bar, paused, turned back for his glass, perhaps thinking he might need its assistance to get as far as the window, and slowly joined them. Vince Mabon, not knowing what else to do, took his place there, too. They had become an audience.

At first all they could see were their images reflected in the curtainless window, a motley group portrait straining into the darkness to look at themselves. Then the headlights of a car came on. They saw Billy Fleming take off his jacket and lay it across the bonnet of the car. Dan Scoular kept on his light jerkin.

The figures flickered briefly in the headlights of the car and it was over, like a lantern-slide show that breaks down just as it’s getting started. They were looking at an effect that didn’t appear to have had any very clear cause. Billy Fleming’s head hit the ground with a soundless and sickening jolt that some grimacing expulsions of breath in the bar provided the sound-track for. He lay with a peacefulness that suggested he had found his final resting place. A man came out of the car and Dan Scoular started to help him to lift Billy Fleming into the back seat. Billy Fleming had obviously regained consciousness before they got him there but he raised no objections to their assistance.

The realisation that he didn’t appear to be too seriously hurt opened a valve on the tension of what they had just seen and humour blew out, a gush of relief at not having to go on confronting seriously the reality of violence.

‘Ah’m glad Ah didny buy a ticket for that one,’ Sam MacKinlay said. ‘Ah wish it had been on the telly. At least we could see a slow-motion replay.’

Nearly everybody laughed. Dan Scoular walked back in to a festive atmosphere that caught him unawares. He had been involved in that mood of nervous recuperation that had always followed a fight for him, a dazed sense of having had his self- control mugged by his own violence. Their smiling faces seemed to him contrived. They couldn’t be feeling something as simple as their expressions showed. He felt like a man in quicksand with whom other people were leaning over to shake hands. Nobody had wanted the fight to happen and now everybody seemed delighted that it had. Even the man who had been with the one he hit was smiling.

‘Right!’ he was saying to Alan. ‘Everybody gets a drink. Give everybody what they’re having. And a gin and tonic for me.’

Frankie White was looking at him and saying, ‘What did Ah tell ye? One good hit!’

‘Come on,’ the man said. ‘Do it. And a double for yourself.’

The room was becoming a party and Dan Scoular was apparently the guest of honour. It seemed churlish not to attend. He shrugged.

‘Ye not want to get yer big bodyguard a pint on a drip?’ Sam MacKinlay shouted.

Everybody was laughing. Alan Morrison was hurrying about behind the bar as if the place was crowded.

‘A few folk will be sorry that they weren’t here the night,’ he said.

Before Dan Scoular had cleared his head, he was sitting at a table with Frankie White and the other man.

‘Dan,’ Frankie White was saying. ‘This gentleman is Matt Mason. Matt, you’ve seen who this is. Dan Scoular in person. A man with a demolition-ball at the end of each wrist.’

The talk of the others was like background music, all being played by special request for Dan Scoular. Matt Mason shook hands with him. The man who had been in the car came in and sat at their table. Matt Mason introduced him.

‘Ah think Big Billy has a slight case of concussion,’ Eddie Foley said. ‘His head hit the ground with a terrible wallop.’

The domino players were shouting over.

‘Thanks, mate.’

‘Cheers!’

‘All the best.’

Matt Mason gave them a regal wave.

‘A lucky hit, you think?’ he asked Eddie Foley teasingly.

Eddie Foley laughed.

‘Came out a telescopic rifle, that punch. If that was lucky, beatin’ the Light Brigade was a fluke. This man can go a bit.’

‘He would have to against Cutty.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Dan Scoular said. He looked at Frankie White. ‘What did you set me up for here?’

Matt Mason held up his hands.

‘I can explain,’ he said. ‘You want to give me a minute?’

‘Ah don’t know.’

Dan Scoular was trying to work out what had happened to bring him here. He had said ‘Hey!’ and the word had been as mysterious in effect as ‘Open Sesame’. His night had been transformed. The result was slightly dazzling but he didn’t like being dazzled and beyond the surface laughter and brightness he had already glimpsed shadows that troubled him. Frankie White had been standing at the bar when Dan came in but he hadn’t just been standing at the bar. Matt Mason had been sitting with the man Dan hit and now he hadn’t even asked about him. It was as if the man had served the purpose he was brought for. He was expendable. Someone had been waiting in the car to switch on the lights. Dan had thought he had been getting involved in a spontaneous fight but it had only been a controlled experiment. In doing what he had thought was winning for himself and Vince Mabon, Dan had been winning, it seemed, for Matt Mason. It had been a fight Matt Mason couldn’t lose. The rules were strange here.

‘Dan,’ Frankie White said. ‘Just listen to the man a minute, will you? Please?’

Alan had brought the drinks across, rested a stepfatherly hand on Dan’s shoulder as he put down his pint.

‘That’s how we used to breed them in these parts,’ he said, staking an early claim to proprietorship of this evening’s legend.

Dan sipped his pint and waited. Realising Alan had gone off without giving him anything, Eddie Foley passed a pound to Frankie White.

‘Get us a whisky and a half pint, Frankie.’

Dan Scoular watched Frankie White’s receding back with thoughtfulness.

That was Billy Fleming you saw away there,’ Matt Mason said.

‘How is he?’ Dan asked Eddie Foley.

‘Beat,’ Matt Mason said. ‘You ever lost a fight?’

‘Aye.’

‘How many?’

‘Just the one. But Ah haven’t had too many.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Ma feyther.’

‘Your father? What age were you?’

‘Ah would be nineteen.’

‘How did that come about?’

Dan Scoular looked at him, decided that whatever his reasons for asking were, he had no reasons for not telling.

‘Ah was a cocky boy. Ah hit a man for no reason. Just because Ah felt like it. He didny want to fight. Ah broke his jaw. Ma feyther took me out the back door. An’ hammered me.’

Matt Mason gave the event his expert consideration, offered the balm of his wisdom to the dead wound.

‘Maybe you weren’t trying. I mean, fighting your father. That’s bound to put brakes on you.’

‘Oh, Ah was tryin’ all right. But Ah was in the wrong. That’s a bad corner to come out of.’

‘You superstitious?’

‘What’s that got to do wi’ superstition? Ah walk under ladders an’ everythin’.’

‘I mean, having less chance if you’re in the wrong?’

Frankie White had returned from the camaraderie at the bar. He put down Eddie Foley’s two drinks. Eddie held out his hand and Frankie remembered the change. Dan Scoular watched the handing over of the silver. He took a sip of his pint.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Ah just believe in certain things. Like what ma feyther told me that day. If ye can’t fight for the right reasons, keep yer hands in yer pockets.’

‘And what are the right reasons?’

‘Ah’m not always sure. But he seemed to be.’

Matt Mason held up his glass and paused before taking a drink. He might have been showing off his rings.

‘You want to make some money?’

Dan Scoular looked slowly round the group at the table. His look separated himself from them, as if they were a conspiracy.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Was that an interview for a job?’

‘In a way.’

‘But, mister, Ah didny apply.’

‘All right. But I’m asking you. Do you want to make some money?’

‘Who doesny want to make some money? But there’s money and money.’

Matt Mason looked at Frankie White.

‘Does he like talking in riddles?’ he said and looked back at Dan. ‘There’s only one kind of money. The good stuff. Unless it’s home-made. And this won’t be. All right?’

‘Ah just mean some money’s dearer than others. Some just costs sweat. Some costs yer self-respect. What do Ah do for it?’

‘You do what you’re good at. You fight.’

‘For money? You mean in a ring?’

Matt Mason was enjoying the revelation to come. He took out a leather cigar-case and offered Dan Scoular a cigar. Dan shook his head. Eddie, who had taken out his cigarettes, didn’t seem to notice Frankie White about to take one. He held out the packet to Dan Scoular.

‘Ah don’t smoke.’

‘Ah told ye,’ Frankie said.

But he missed the point. It wasn’t a matter of checking on his information. It was improvised stage-business, self-taught management technique for controlling situations. Matt Mason’s timing was a matter of instinct but what he used it to promote was a well-rehearsed performance. He lit Eddie’s cigarette with his gold lighter and then his own cigar. He re-emerged looking at Dan from behind a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, Merlin of the cigar.

‘I’m arranging a bare-knuckle fight,’ he said.

Dan Scoular looked across towards the others in the bar as if checking his location in normalcy. Having confirmed his fix on where he was, he looked back at these three as if they were somewhere else, maybe inhabiting their own fantasy or just trying to take the mickey out of him. Frankie White was nodding reassuringly.

‘What for?’ Dan said.

‘It’s a complicated story,’ Matt Mason said. ‘Frankie White’ll tell you. If you agree to do it. If you don’t, you won’t have to know, will you?’

‘Ye’re kiddin’.’

‘I stopped kidding when I came out of the pram.’

Dan took a sip of his pint. It seemed to feel strange in his mouth. The idea was so bizarre that he came at it tangentially.

‘Ah’ve had a few scuffles,’ he said. ‘But they were always for a reason.’

‘Money’s not a reason?’

‘A fight in the street’s different.’

‘What’s different? You’re doing the same thing, aren’t you? It’s man against man.’

‘Naw. It’s different. Ah’ve watched a lot of boxing on the telly. That’s a different game. More complicated. Street fightin’s just two things.’

‘What would they be?’

‘Suddenness. And meanin’ it. Ye go fast. If ye can, ye go first. An’ ye stop when it’s over. That’s all Ah can do.’

‘Should be enough.’

‘Anyway,’ Eddie Foley said, ‘that’s not true, big man. Listen –’

Vince Mabon had come over to their table. Matt Mason looked up as if wherever he sat he was booking a private room and Vince hadn’t knocked. Eddie Foley cut his sentence dead. It was less polite than talking on and ignoring Vince’s presence would have been.

‘Excuse me, Dan,’ Vince Mabon said. ‘Ah want to thank you for what you did there.’

‘Any time, Vince. We’ve got to protect the nation’s intellectuals.’

But the demon of sloganising that was in Vince had to climb on to even his gratitude like a soap-box.

‘But I still don’t agree with that kind of violence. That wasn’t the kind of violence I was talking about.’

‘Maybe,’ Matt Mason said, ‘he should’ve left you to explain that to Big Billy. In the dummy alphabet.’

Perhaps Vince was learning from humiliation but this second time around he found a response. With a slightly unsteady hand, he put his partly drunk pint on their table.

‘I don’t think I want your drink, mister,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t taste right.’

Matt Mason looked as if he was going to get up. Dan took hold of Vince’s arm with his left hand and held up his right, palm towards Mason.

‘Okay, Vince,’ he said. ‘Cheers.’

He let go of Vince’s arm and Vince walked straight out of the pub.

‘He’s only a boy,’ Dan said.

‘He’s only a shitehead.’

‘He’s only a boy. You’re maybe big where you come from, sir. But this is his pub.’

‘His pub?’ Matt Mason smiled. ‘Does he own it? Mind you, who would want to? It’s your pub when you own it. Not when you buy a couple of beers in it. I should know. I own more than one.’

‘Matt,’ Eddie Foley said. ‘Anyway, we came for a reason. Listen, Dan. As Ah wis sayin’. Ye’re wrong about all it is that ye can do. Suddenness and meanin’ it? Against Big Billy, Ah could be just as sudden and mean it more. And it wouldn’t do me a lotta good. It would still be a short-cut to the blood bank. You’ve got somethin’ special. Ah’m tellin’ ye. Ah’ve seen a few. It’s just that ye haven’t explored it yet. And you’re a mug if ye don’t. A mug! It’s a talent like anythin’ else. Maybe the only one ye’ve got. It might amaze ye what ye can do with it. It might amaze ye the money it could get ye. You never considered that?’

He had, of course. He had wondered about how good he really was many times. It would have been strange if he hadn’t. Whoever hasn’t dreamt of uniqueness must have achieved it by that. Dan Scoular, when he was younger, had had his share of ridiculous dreams, those adolescent imaginings that thrive on impossibility till they overdose on it. But he had come quickly to understand how few his real choices were.

By the time his early physical prime was passing, he knew there was only one thing he was especially good at. He didn’t pretend to himself that it was a talent that mattered much. But he didn’t have intellectual contempt for it either. It was for him related to pride and some kind of integrity. Not the use of it but the sense of himself it gave him meant a kind of wholeness. He couldn’t understand politics too well or carve out an impressive career or say things that reduced other people to silence. But he had something that was quietly and relaxedly his own.

Lately, it had felt like all he had. With his job gone and no prospect of another and his marriage baffled, he had been forced to look steadily at the dwindling possibilities in his life. Faced with the blankness of the future, he had taken to wondering about the past. He had wondered if he could have been a boxer, if that would have changed their lives and made things better.

Eddie Foley had, without knowing it, opened a door on Dan Scoular’s small, pathetic cache of hope. He had put a light on there and said that it was maybe more than he had thought, that it might not be too late. They were now talking to a different man, had activated something in him, like accidentally giving a drink to an alcoholic on the wagon. It meant so much to him that he didn’t want to let them know.

‘Ah don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Ah need to mean it. Why would Ah fight another man without a reason?’

‘You fought Billy fast enough,’ Matt Mason said.

‘He was claiming Vince, wasn’t he?’

‘So what?’

‘So Ah know Vince. That woulda been a liberty. The only damage Vince could do ye would be give ye cauliflower ears with talkin’.’

‘So imagine the man you’re fighting insulted Vince. Shouldn’t be hard. Most people would.’

Dan moved another way.

‘Anyway, Ah’m thirty-three. What do Ah need with this?’

Matt Mason shrugged and took a sip of his drink, as if it might be the end of the interview.

‘What ye workin’ at just now?’ Eddie Foley asked.

‘Not at answerin’ questions you know the answer to already.’

‘How d’ye mean?’

‘Ye don’t have to enter for Mastermind to know that Frankie here put ye up to this. An’ if he did, he would’ve told ye certain things. Like Ah’m idle.’

‘For a man that’s unemployed, ye’ve still got a taste for luxuries.’

‘Ye mean what Ah think ye mean?’

‘Ah mean it’s a luxury to want to fight for a reason.’

‘Ah would’ve thought it was a luxury tae dae anythin’ else.’

But Dan was talking automatically, as if from a script he had learned a long time ago. Matt Mason leaned forward suddenly and took a wad of money from his inside pocket. He started carefully to count tenners on to the table. He stopped at twenty and put the rest of the money back in his pocket.

‘Two hundred quid,’ he said. ‘Tax free. Just to train for two weeks. Where are you going to get a better offer?’

Dan Scoular looked at the money. It was fanned out on the table so that each separate note was at least partly visible.

‘What would be the rules of this fight?’

‘Bare knuckles. No feet, no butting, no weapons. A knockdown ends a round. You get thirty seconds’ rest – to be back at the line. First man to fail to make it loses. Last man standing at the line’s the winner.’

‘Who made the rules?’

‘That’s not your business. You get paid for obeying them. You take it or leave it. They’re just the rules.’

‘When would this be?’

‘Three weeks today. He’s got his man. I’ve got to get mine in a hurry. Have I got him?’

Dan Scoular waited.

‘Why me?’ he said. ‘Ah’m just a boy from the country. A man like you must know a lotta harder men than me.’

‘Oh, I do,’ Matt Mason said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I know men could take you out while you were still wondering if there was something wrong. But we need fresh blood for this one. Somebody who only knows how to fight fair. That way we won’t get disqualified. There’ll be people watching. We’ve got to make it look right.’

‘Where would this fight be?’

‘In a place. You don’t worry about that. In a safe place.’

‘But this isn’t legal.’

Matt Mason overdid his expression of horror.

‘Away you go. I’ll have to fire that lawyer of mine. He’s misled me again. Look, if I want a holy text, I’ll go to a wayside pulpit. You’re not being asked to pass judgment on the thing. Just to participate.’

Dan Scoular thoughtfully riffled the notes.

‘Training?’

‘You would train two weeks with Frankie. Down here in your own backyard. We would want you kept out of the way. You would be our secret weapon. Running. Eating right. Staying off that stuff.’ He pointed at the beer in the bottom of Dan’s glass. ‘Just getting fit. The last week I’d get you up to Glasgow. Into a gym. You’d get another hundred quid for that.’

Dan Scoular was seeing three hundred pounds on the table.

‘If that’s for trainin’, what would Ah get for fightin’?’

That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘How you fight.’

‘So what’s the wee print?’

‘Winners win money. Losers lose it. I’d be betting a lot of money on you. You win, you get your percentage. Double what’s on the table. You lose, you get your bus money out of Glasgow. As far as the city boundary. The Tinto Firs.’

‘Ah don’t fancy that bit.’

Then don’t.’ Matt Mason was getting impatient. ‘It’s a freelance job. It doesn’t have a pension scheme.’

He lifted the notes and held them up, halfway between the table and his pocket, his rings glinting above the money like a promise of what it could lead to.

‘Money depreciates fast these days,’ he said. ‘Look. I’ve got things to do. Your first fight, big man, is with yourself. Can you win it? You’ve got thirty seconds – to come to the line.’

He was smiling at his own pun. He was so sure of things. Dan couldn’t think at the moment of one certainty, except the feeling he had to use himself in some way for his family. He sensed that what he was being offered must separate him from where he had been. But perhaps he was already separated from there. He looked at Alan Morrison and the others in the bar. They hadn’t exactly rallied round when he challenged Billy Fleming. Why should he worry about distancing himself from them? He saw no particular merit in his ability to fight. It had meant something important to his father, almost a kind of sacred trust that you shouldn’t abuse. But if you had lost the way to think like that, if you didn’t believe in the gift, why not make money out of it? It was at least putting it to a use. If he wasn’t who Wullie Mairshall and others thought he was, why not be who he could be? How many chances was he going to get? And the offer was closing.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Looks like either the money goes in your pocket or me.’