The Big Man (2 page)

Negotiating the winding ways, Eddie felt himself subject to the unexpected nature of events, the way an outcrop of land suddenly threw the road to the left, the recalcitrance of a hill. These roads were less invention than discovery. They weren’t merely asphalt conveyor belts along which sealed capsules fired people from one identity to the next as if they had dematerialised in the one place and rematerialised in the other. These roads made you notice them, rushed trees towards you, flung them over your shoulder, laid out a valley, flicked a flight of birds into your vision. They made Eddie aware of a countryside his ignorance of which was beginning to oppress him with questions that baffled him. What kind of people would live in that isolated farm on the hill? What kind of trees were they?

‘Flowers,’ he said suddenly. ‘The names of flowers. Ah always wanted to know a bit about that. Ah canny tell one from another. That’s true. Ah’ve got bother tellin’ a daisy from a dandelion.’

‘Six,’ Billy Fleming said. ‘That was a cracker. Only thing
that wasn’t mashed tae a pulp was its beak. Definitely the prize-winner.’

Eddie became aware of Matt Mason’s silence. He had learned to be wary of that silence. He decided to push his misgivings aside. He was here on a job for Matt Mason. It wouldn’t do to confuse his loyalties.

‘Fast Frankie’s not too hot on the directions,’ he said, reidentifying himself with the other two and their purposes. ‘Ah hope his information’s more reliable. Ye think the big man’s what he says he is?’

‘Frankie thinks he is,’ Matt Mason said, and remembered the time in the Old Scotia with Frankie talking.

Fast Frankie White was a handsome quick-eyed man with a smile as selective as a roller-towel. He had been born in Thornbank – so he should know what he was talking about – and had left it by way of petty theft. He still went back there from time to time, usually when he was in trouble, to wrap his widowed mother’s house round him like a bandage. He often said more than it was wise to believe but in the Old Scotia he had sounded convincing.

‘Okay. Ye’ve got a decision to make. Fast. Ah know. But Ah’m tellin’ ye. He’s yer man. No question. Ah’ve known him for years. He’s the man ye’re lookin’ for. And easily worked. A big, straight man. Straight as a die. That’s what ye need, isn’t it? Honesty’s the best raw material in the world. Especially the poor kind. He’s gold for you, Matt. A rough nugget, certainly. But you could shape him into anything ye want. What’s he got in Thornbank? What’s anybody got in Thornbank? He’s on his uppers. Been idle for months. Used to work in the pits. How many pits are there now? Was working up at Sullom Voe for a while. But the wife didn’t fancy the separation. See, that’s the secret. That’s how you’re goin’ to get him. He’s a great family man. An’ what’s he providin’ for his wife and weans? You can offer him a way to do that. He’ll bite, Matt. Ah’m tellin’ ye, he’ll bite. And once he’s got a taste, ye’ll have him for good. An’ all they’re goin’ to be able to do . . . With this man? Come on!’

Matt Mason remembered the image of Frankie with his arms crossed in front of him. He had swung his arms apart, hands up,
with the brightness and activity of the pub behind him. It was the gesture of surrender we’re supposed to make when faced with a gun.

‘Different class,’ Frankie White had said.

In the almost dark a pit-bing loomed on their right. It was overgrown with rough grass, a man-made parody of a hill. The despoliation of the countryside around them made them feel more at home. Inside the car they enlivened into a conversation.

‘Not long now,’ Eddie said. ‘If he’s that good, what’s he doin’ living in a place like this?’

Matt Mason smiled to himself.

‘Maybe he likes the quiet life.’

‘He better learn not to like it then,’ Billy Fleming said.

‘We’ll find out how good he is,’ Matt Mason said.

Eddie put the lights on.

‘He’ll maybe not come,’ he said.

‘Same time every Sunday, Frankie says,’ Matt Mason said.

‘The Red Lion,’ Eddie said.

‘Funny name for a hotel,’ Billy Fleming said. ‘Ye wonder who thinks them up.’

The arrival of darkness had welded them into a group with a unified purpose. The variousness of the countryside was obliterated. It could have been anywhere. There was only the familiar interior of the car and the headlights blow-torching their own path through the night. Matt Mason looked at his watch.

‘We’ll be in good time,’ he said. He looked across at Billy Fleming. ‘You ready?’

‘Born ready.’

In the dim light he looked as if he might be telling the truth. The big shoulders seemed to be filling most of the back seat of the car. The face, planing intermittently out of obscurity, looked relentless as a statue. He carefully took off his wrist-watch and wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it in his jacket pocket.

Everybody knows and doesn’t know a Thornbank. It’s one of those places you’ve driven through and never been there. It occurs in conversations like parentheses. ‘It took us four hours to get there,’ someone says, ‘and the kids were fractious after
two miles. We went the Thornbank road.’ Hearing it mentioned, outsiders who know of it may still have to think briefly to relocate it. It’s the kind of place people get a fix on by association with the nearest big town, knowing it as a lost suburb of somewhere else.

In Thornbank’s case the big town is Graithnock, the industrial hardness of which dominates the soft farmland of the Ayrshire countryside around it. Graithnock is a town friendly and rough, like a brickie’s handshake. It is built above rich coalfields which have long since run out, ominously.

By the time the coal was gone, Graithnock hardly noticed because it had other things to do: there was whisky-distilling and heavy engineering and the shoe factory and later the making of farm machinery. But the shoe factory closed and the world-famous engineering plant was bought by Americans and mysteriously run down and the making of farm machinery was transferred to France and the distillery didn’t seem to be doing so well.

Not much in the way of coherent explanation filtered as far as the streets. At meetings and on television men who looked as if they had taken lessons in sincerity read from the book of economic verbiage, the way priests used to dispense the Bible in Latin to the illiterate. All the workers understood was that there were dark and uncontrollable forces to which everyone was subject, and some were more subject than others. When the haphazardly organised industrial action failed, they took their redundancy money and some went on holiday to Spain and some drank too much for a while and they all felt the town turn sour on itself around them.

For, like John Henry, Graithnock had been born to work. It was what it knew how to do. It was the achievement it threw back into the face of its own bleakness. It liked its pleasures, and some of them were rough, but the joy of them was that they had been earned. The men who had thronged its pubs in its heyday were noisy and sometimes crude and sometimes violent, but they knew they were stealing from nobody. Every laugh had been paid in sweat. The man who had embarrassed himself in drink the night before would turn up next morning
where the job was and work like a gang of piece-work navvies.

When there was nowhere for him to turn up, what could he do? Like so many of the towns of the industrial West of Scotland, Graithnock had offered little but the means to work. It had exemplified the assumption that working men are workers. Let them work. In the meantime, other people could get on with the higher things, what they liked to call ‘culture’. At the same time, the workers had made a culture of their own. It was raw. It was sentimental songs at spontaneous parties, half-remembered poems that were admitted into no academic canon of excellence, anecdotes of doubtful social taste, wild and surrealistic turns of phrase, bizarre imaginings that made Don Quixote look like a bank clerk, a love of whatever happened without hypocrisy. In Graithnock that secondary culture had been predominant. While in the local theatre successive drama companies died in ways that J. B. Priestley and Agatha Christie and Emlyn Williams never intended, the pub-talk flourished, the stories were oral novels and the songs would have burst Beethoven’s eardrums if he hadn’t already been deaf. But it was all dependent on money. Even pitch-and-toss requires two pennies.

When the money went, Graithnock turned funny but not so you would laugh. It had always had a talent for violence and that violence had always had its mean and uglier manifestations. Besides the stand-up fights between disgruntled men, there had been the knives and the bottles and the beatings of women. The difference now was that contempt for such behaviour was less virulent and less widespread. Something like honour, something as difficult to define and as difficult to live decently without, had gone from a lot of people’s sense of themselves. Sudden treachery in fights had assumed the status of a modern martial art, rendering bravery and strength and speed and endurance as outmoded as a crossbow. An old woman could be mugged in a park, an old man tied and tortured in his home for the sake of a few pounds, five boys could beat up a sixth, a girl be raped because she was alone, the houses of the poor be broken into as if they had been mansions. This was not an epidemic. Few people were capable of these actions but those who weren’t were also significantly less capable of a justly held condemnation.
That instinctive moral strength that had for so long kept the financial instability of working-class life still humanly habitable, like a tent pitched on a clifftop but with guy-ropes of high-tensile steel, had surely weakened.

Theorists rode in from time to time from their outposts of specialisation, bearing news that was supposed to make all clear. Television was setting bad examples. Society had become materialistic. Schools had abdicated authority. The hydrogen bomb was everyone’s neurosis. What was certain was that Graithnock didn’t know itself as clearly any more.

Even physically, the town had been not so much changed as disfigured. Never a handsome place, it had had at its centre some fine old buildings that had some history. They were demolished and where they had been rose a kind of monumental slum they called a shopping precinct. As a facelift that has failed leaves someone looking out from nobody’s face in particular so Graithnock had become a kind of nowhere fixed in stone. The most characteristic denizens of its new precinct, like the ghosts of industry past, were alcoholics and down-and-outs.

Thornbank, as the child copes with the parents’ problems, was suffering too. A lot of the redundancies from Graithnock had come here. But there were apparent differences. The same television programmes reached Thornbank, the schools had much the same problems, the hydrogen bomb had been heard of there too. But a stronger and continuing sense of identity remained. One reason was, perhaps, its size. It was a place where people vaguely felt they knew nearly everybody else. This absence of anonymity meant that in Thornbank they were often, paradoxically, more tolerant of nonconformism than people might have been in bigger places. Difference was likely to become eccentricity before it could develop anti-social tendencies.

There was in the small town, for example, a group of punks, working-class schismatics who had seceded from their parents’ acceptance of middle-class conventions. Their changing hair colours, purples, greens and mauves, their earrings that were improvised from various objects, their clothes that looked as if they were acting in several plays at once, all of them bad, were
not admired. But they were mainly confronted with a slightly embarrassed tolerance, like a horrendous case of acne. Of Big Andy, who led a local punk group called Animal Farm and whose Mohican haircut stood six-feet-three above the ground and seemed to change colour with his mood, it was often mentioned in mitigation that his Uncle Jimmy had been a terrible fancy dresser. Genes, the implication was, were not to be denied.

This communal sense of identity found its apotheosis in a few local people. Thornbank knew itself most strongly through them. They were as fixed as landmarks in the popular consciousness. If two expatriates from that little town had been talking and one of them mentioned the name of one of that handful of people, no further elaboration would have been necessary. They would have known themselves twinned. Those names were worn by Thornbank like an unofficial coat of arms. These were people to whom no civic monuments would ever be erected. They were too maverick for that. Part of their quality was precisely that they had never courted acceptance, refused to make a career of what they were. They were simply, and with an innocent kind of defiance, themselves.

There was Mary Barclay. She was in her seventies and fragile as bell metal. They called her Mary the Communist and although nearly everyone in the town thought Communism something historically discredited, a bit like thalidomide, the epithet as it applied to her carried no opprobrium. It wasn’t that the term defined her so much as she qualified the term. She was Marx’s witness for the defence in Thornbank. Her life had been an unsanctimonious expression of concern for others. While helping everybody she could, she had also helped herself without inhibition to what in life injured nobody else. She had lived with three men and married none. She had buried the one who died on her, decently, and been loving to her two daughters who, as far as anybody knew, had never reproached her. She was who she was and you could take it or leave it, but you would have been a fool to leave it.

There was Davie Dykes, known as Davie the Deaver, which meant if you listened long enough he would talk you deaf. But it was mainly good talk. He told elaborate and highly inventive
lies. Each day he reconstructed his own genealogy. His ancestry was legion. At sixty, he still refused to be circumscribed by his circumstances. Here was just a route to anywhere.

There was Dan Scoular. His place in the local pantheon was more mysterious. He was young for such elevation, thirty-three. His most frequently commented on talent was a simple one. He could knock people unconscious very quickly, frequently with one punch. It wasn’t easy to see why such a minimal ability and of such limited application should have earned him so much status. It was true that Thornbank, like a lot of small places which may feel themselves rendered insignificant by the much-publicised wonders of the bigger world, had a legendising affection for anything local that was in any way remarkable. There were those who kept a Thornbank version of
The Guinness Book of Records:
the heaviest child that had been born here, the fastest runner in the town, the man who had been arrested most for breach of the peace. But that hardly explained that converging ambience of something achieved and possibilities to come in which Dan Scoular moved for them.