The Big Man (7 page)

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.