The Big Man (26 page)

‘His right eye. It’s dead. That’s what finished him wi’ boxing.’

Dan understood suddenly what he had noticed throughout the fight. He hadn’t missed Cutty with a left hand. Working on that, he began slowly to reassert himself and he knew what was going
to happen. His will envisioned his victory and moved his body towards it.

He would do nothing but try to keep moving and hit Cutty there. Purpose gave him energy. He would make that dismissive voice stop talking, admit its weakness in silence. He would punch the bastard blind. He was galvanised with venom. He swung weight remorselessly from both shoulders into Cutty’s eyes, drawing renewed strength from the juddering impact of his blows. He felt him go back and let himself be towed by the staggering bulk and, when the arms dropped, battered his face till he shuddered on to the ground.

Dan moved back and stood at the line, having held up his hand to warn off Matt Mason and Tommy Brogan. He wanted to waste no energy. He fed on the voices now. The line he stood at was some final marker of himself. He watched as they worked frantically on Cutty, throwing water on his face and standing him up and getting him to the line as time was called.

Dan stood and watched the handkerchief fall.

Cutty raised his hands by instinct. His beaten body sagged softly, looked unnatural, hardly like human flesh, more like a mollusc with its shell ripped off. His head moved, blind as a worm.

Dan felt only a rush of instinct, had tapped a force in himself that roared to fill his body, a dark greed of triumph that took him and Cutty to it like a chameleon’s tongue. Dan looked down the maw of another man’s exhaustion, saw a future. Cutty’s weakness was a feast he wanted. His fists fed on it as if enough wasn’t possible, wouldn’t be satisfied till Cutty could give him no more, and he fell as hollow as rind, discarded waste of Dan Scoular’s need.

The moment held its awe. Something was seen that held its watchers still, a black truth they had shared, a presence come that couldn’t be denied, and seconds passed in utter silence while they endured its passing out of them. And in those seconds, just in seconds, banality came back to cover their naked awareness in the decency of facts.

A man was lying unconscious, the wind making a waving frond of his hair. His body lay in mud. The mud was all that was left
of their intricacy and energy of movement, the infinite patterns that their feet had made, the courage of their efforts. Another man stood alone on the line. His face was cut and bleeding. He was leaning into the wind, eating chunks of the air.

Cutty was carried back to his canvas seat. Dan Scoular was alone at the line, crouched over the void his desperation had brought him to. The crowd was almost silent. Nobody approached him. He hung there wasted with effort, as dead to the meaning of what might have happened as Cutty Dawson was. Bleak emptiness was in his mind. The referee’s voice was meaningless. A white handkerchief drifted to the ground aimlessly.

The cheering tugged him slowly erect, pulled him away from an unbearable place. His eyes, blind from the pit of where he had been, reached determinedly towards focus. People were waving and moving towards him. Faces bobbed like lights through the darkness, showing him the human ordinariness of this place where he was. The wind was the wind, the grass was the grass, Cutty Dawson was beaten. But glancing down at himself, Dan saw his own body blotched bizarrely as if he wore the map of a strange place.

And in seconds – it only took seconds – he was standing solidly inside himself again, letting the voices and faces tell him what had happened. This had been a hard fight but he was the winner. This hadn’t been so bad. His smile answered the shouts of the crowd, so strongly, so clearly, it seemed as if no great distance had lain between them. He raised his right hand in the air, made a whinny of triumph.

The crowd broke towards him. He was their man, meant something they wanted to believe in. As he turned, Matt Mason was with him. He embraced Dan like a brother and they danced, hugging as if a lost member of the family had at last come home.

SIX

It was a long way back from where he had been. Images of the fight stayed with him like tendrils of vegetation clinging to a man who has nearly drowned: Cutty Dawson floundering before him, gaffed on his own exhaustion, a swell of biceps evoking a reek of sweat, a face from the crowd shouting up into air. These were what he was most strongly aware of while other things happened in a muffled way of which he was only half-conscious. Somewhere, he was being attended to, wrapped in the ministrations of other people. The first time he came fully to himself was in the water when, finding himself falling asleep, he snapped suddenly awake and it was as if he had come ashore in a strange land.

The walls were green. He felt the water and knew himself in a bath. The taps were gold-plated. There was a full-length mirror on the opposite wall, clouded with steam. In a tiled niche in the wall just above his head there was an array of shampoos and conditioners, talcum and deodorant. They looked for a moment like the mysterious paraphernalia of a strange civilisation, and then he was simply in a bathroom for which he felt a woman had been responsible. And he remembered Matt Mason’s wife running a bath for him. She had put some kind of herbal bath in the water and he felt as if the aches in his body were being massaged. He was in their house in Bearsden.

Two bath-towels hung on the chromium towel-rail. He imagined the touch of them on his skin. The thought reattached him to time, a sense of the future. He saw his crumpled track-suit, underpants, socks and trainer shoes lying sloughed like a skin he was finished with. They were strange with a past he couldn’t connect to this present.

Against the haunting pictures of the fight he tried to set his
memory of what had come between then and now. It was like trying to determine shape from touch alone. Disconnected sensations came back. He had been in a car. Margaret Mason’s perfume ravished his senses again, first smell of land for a sailor long at sea. ‘Jesus, was that a fight!’ was being said by Eddie Foley. A man in a field was saying, ‘Ah knew you at Sullom Voe.’ The man was a stranger. Everything was a stranger.

Talking and laughter came to him. He tried to relate them to himself. Roddy Stewart and his wife had followed them to the house and others had arrived. Melanie (the name jarred his mind) had come in and kissed him to applause from the rest. He tried to realise that he was the cause of how happy they were. He saw the glass on the edge of the bath and took a sip of the whisky, replaced it. The ice floated thin on the surface. He had been here some time.

The door of the bathroom opened and he realised he had forgotten to bolt it. Melanie came in. He stared at her smile.

She had unpacked some clothes from the travelling bag. They were like clues to who he was supposed to be. She laid trousers, shirt and underpants over the towel-rail after putting one of the towels on top of the other. On the closed, wooden lid of the lavatory she put a pair of socks. She put his shoes on the floor. She did it all slowly and methodically, letting him watch her.

She had changed her clothes, presumably in preparation for the party. There was to be a party. It seemed a bizarre idea to him. She was wearing stiletto heels and a red velvet dress with a cheongsam-style slit at one side. As she bent over the towel-rail, the dress moulded itself to her and her cheeks were offered to him like some fabulous peach, exotic fruit of the country. Her black hair swung as she leant over and looked like a good place to hide. The ordinariness of her actions, the unselfconsciousness of glamour, struck him. What he saw was incidental to the naturalness of how she had come in, the casualness of her shared presence, as if she were telling him to relax into what was happening. There was nothing inaccessible about the luxury of the room, the opulence of her body. It was all within his reach.

She turned and watched him watching her. She crossed towards him and very gently touched his face.

‘Your lovely bruises,’ she said.

Her scent caught and held him like a fine-meshed net. She mouthed his abraded cheek delicately.

‘I’ll suck all the pain out later. All you’ll have to do is rest. And I’ll suck till you feel no pain.’

Her hand moved slowly across his wet chest and he felt his nipples stiffen.

‘Mine feel the same,’ she said.

Her hand moved lower, hovering, and he was embarrassed by the colour of the water, muddied from his body. The hand stroked his lower chest and then smoothly, with hardly a disturbance of the surface, went under the water.

‘Oh,’ she said.

She threw her hair back and caught it behind her head in her other hand and was moving her face nearer the water when they heard Roddy Stewart shouting.

‘Melanie! What are you doing in there? You having a bath as well?’

There was laughter. She held him briefly and smiled at him, her eyes opaque.

‘I’m putting my marker on you. For later.’

She rose and dried her hand on one of the towels. She lifted his dirty clothes and, looking at him, held them against her cheek.

‘Your sweat’s just become my favourite perfume,’ she said.

When she went out, he lay still, waiting for the feeling in him to subside. He had accepted her attentions as if they were a rite of the unknown place where he found himself. He stood up and reached for a towel but the bathroom was too wide. He had to put one foot on the carpeted floor, grab the towel and step back. There were wet toe-prints on the bath-mat. They shouldn’t take long to dry. As he was drying himself, standing in the bath, his body, foreign with bruises, was something he looked at with curiosity. He stepped out on to the towel and finished drying himself. Putting on his underpants, he scrubbed at the bath with
a soaped sponge till he got rid of the tide-mark his washing had left.

The familiar clothes brought him back to himself a little but, seeing the facial bruises against the blueness of the laundered shirt, he sensed again the unfamiliarity of where he had been. He knew it was still waiting to be understood. Watching the stranger in the mirror, he heard the others talking. He walked through and their voices, as if they knew what had happened, gave him an identity.

The conquering hero.’

‘Welcome back to civilisation.’

‘Where’s your drink?’

‘The big man himself.’

Situation overtook self-doubt. He felt as if, by his walking into it, the room had bloomed on his presence. He remembered two occasions from his childhood with which this formed a trinity. One had been looking up from reading a book and seeing his mother sewing and his father fiddling with a broken watch. A last, fading patch of sunlight lay on the floor. The clock was talking quietly to itself. And he had known the lightness of his being here. He effortlessly belonged. The other was in his primary school. It was towards the end of a winter afternoon. The class were writing and the teacher suddenly put the lights on. He glanced up and was aware of everyone writing and himself among them and the teacher with her pink twin-set and the suspirations of his friends around him and he felt the physical joy of it.

It was what he felt now, as if his body had become a perfect fit. The french windows showed a lawn beyond them and against it the people in the room seemed as natural as flowers. He was aware of how attractive Matt Mason’s wife was, smiling at him. There was no acquisitiveness in the awareness, just a gladness to be sharing her presence. Eddie Foley winked at him from the arm of the wide leather chair in which Melanie was sitting. The wink was an expression of instant friendship. Frankie White blew him a kiss and ruffled Sandra’s hair.

‘How you feeling?’ Matt Mason said.

‘Almost human again.’

‘You should be feeling superhuman,’ Frankie said.

‘Let me get you another drink,’ Melanie said.

The voices jingled in his ears like charms that were round his wrist. He could see the different-coloured drinks that were in the glasses as bright as jewels in the soft sunlight. Melanie gave him his own like a piece of gold and the others raised their drinks to him. He had joined them in drinking before he realised he was toasting himself. Roddy Stewart transformed his mistake by colluding in it.

‘To us,’ he said. ‘The winners.’

They all laughed.

He withdrew from their feeling. He didn’t know why. Something had happened in him that troubled his sense of what was going on. It wasn’t a memory. It was an awareness of something he must remember. With his glass almost touching his mouth, he stood and was stubborn. There was something he wanted to know. He made the memory come. It came as panic, a wondering if he had spoken to Cutty Dawson after the fight. Then he remembered leaning over Cutty and Cutty gripping his arm but not looking up or rising from the canvas seat. ‘You’ll do,’ Cutty had said. The generosity of it made him feel guilty, as if a drowning man had pushed him into the lifeboat. He owed his own sense of where he had been to whoever was there with him. These people hadn’t been there. He was in foreign country. He didn’t belong.

‘Okay,’ Matt Mason said. ‘Let’s drink these and get on our way. There’s a party on. They’re waiting for the guest of honour. Here, Dan. Your mates are going to be there. The boys from Thornbank. That boy Sam MacKinlay’s a bit of a case, isn’t he?’

Dan nodded and in the reflex response he found something, like an amnesiac having a flash of who he might be.

‘Ah want to make a phone call,’ Dan said.

‘Just now?’ Roddy Stewart said.

His expression suggested it was a strangely naive thing to want to do. The others smiled tolerantly.

‘Sure he does,’ Matt Mason said.

He took Dan out of the room and showed him into what he called his ‘study’. He left the door ajar and Dan could still hear
the murmur of voices as he dialled. Matt Mason put his hand on Dan’s arm.

‘I want to talk to you tonight,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a proposition for you. It means a lot more money than you made today.’

He patted Dan’s arm affectionately and went out.

‘Hello?’

The effect Betty’s voice had on him took him by surprise. The ordinary human warmth and familiarity of it created complicated sensations in him. The voices from the other room and the sound of someone laughing were like a conspiracy from which Betty was excluded. He felt excluded from it, too, as well as from the place where Betty was.