The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  Dan didn’t sit down because he was surprised at how near to being tired he felt, and afraid to give in to the feeling. Matt Mason was saying something about ‘a walkover’ and Dan ignored him, since they didn’t seem to be present at the same event.

  In those desperately inhaled seconds, Dan took in knowledge with each breath. How trivial our skills are, he understood. We choose where we deploy our skills and project from that our own sense of ourselves. Then we believe it. How often did the professor dare to live outside his special subject, the politician live in the streets, the poet forgo words? Dan, outside of that confrontation with his father, had never lost a fight in his life. Gifted with literally stunning reflexes, he had fabricated a fake sense of himself. A few minutes of different experience had disproved it. He wasn’t who he was supposed to be. He’d better find out who he was.

  He was glad he hadn’t sat down because there would hardly have been time. The shortness of the rest time made him almost plead for more. He hadn’t had long enough to settle his breathing before the referee was shouting, ‘Prepare!’ He decided he had better not get knocked unconscious or he would never make it back to the line where he now stood with Cutty smiling at him.

  Time!’

  He heard someone shouting for him to finish it off and instead of encouraging him the shout angered him because its empty confidence diminished the reality of what was going on. They were still introducing themselves, finding their way past the surface gestures towards a real meeting between force and force at the centre of each. Cutty’s strength seemed undiminished and he twice broke past Dan’s attempts to parry him. Those were bad moments when Dan found himself struggling not to be overwhelmed. All he could do was try to keep moving and chip at Cutty’s strength with a persistence that was already beginning to lose confidence in itself. It was like trying to chop down a tree without being able to hit it twice in the same place.

  Cutty had started to talk in the wrestling clinches. ‘Ye’ve no chance, son,’ he was saying. ‘No chance.’ ‘Make it easy for yerself.’ ‘Go down, stay down.’ ‘Now or later, same thing.’

  A troubling realisation had entered Dan’s understanding of the fight. Basic talent wasn’t going to settle this. He had already brought to bear the skills that had always been enough for him before, the great natural reflexes that could take an opening almost before it was there or leave a thrown blow expended half an inch from his face, the instinctive correctness of punch that fed power every time up from the legs through the body’s leverage. He had found out already that he was simply better at this than Cutty was now. But that wasn’t going to be enough.

  An accident might be enough, coupled with exhaustion. Whichever of them lost his legs first would probably lose everything because the rough ground was full of bad places for tiredness, and fatigue would kill the ability to make fast readjustments and it would be like trying to dance in quicksand. Even as he struggled to hold Cutty’s body, greased with sweat, and, failing to throw Cutty off, threw himself off and staggered back, Dan was thinking that this fight would prove nothing that he believed in. They were both caught in it now, heading each other off into a happening it seemed to him they couldn’t significantly settle, both obliged to wait till accident or unearned circumstance swatted one or the other down, while the shouts of the crowd refined the meaningless raw material of their contest into the meaning they chose. He sensed the people undulate around the progress of their conflict like protoplasm.

  In a despondent panic, Dan poured himself on to Cutty. While his left hand buzzed distractingly around Cutty’s head, he hit him three times on the left biceps and, as the arm wilted, chopped down on Cutty’s jaw and deposited him on one knee. Cutty threw himself back up but the referee declared the end of a round.

  Dan felt like walking on past Mason and Tommy Brogan but they fussed round him with the towel. Mason was complimenting him and Dan’s head rejected the praise like counterfeit money. He was angry at everything, the way Tommy Brogan roughed his abraded cheek with the towel, the noise of the crowd like an appetite he was being forced to feed, the remorselessness of the referee’s voice. He felt nobody could give him anything that he could take back in there. Mason and Tommy Brogan didn’t know what was going on. He despised the crowd that needed their blood like a plasma-bank. He felt anger against Cutty for taking part in this.

  He had hit Cutty the moment after the word Time!’ was heard, and unloaded his banked rage in a cumulative fury of punches. Cutty stumbled back and fell.

  Matt Mason interpreted the shouts for him. That was the turning-point, big man.’ Dan was afraid he was right. Cutty had been on his feet again before his handlers could get to him. Dan felt more exhausted by his attack than Cutty seemed to be. He didn’t know where he was supposed to go from here. That line was somewhere he never wanted to go back to. He had done as much as he could do. Wasn’t that enough? He wanted to stay on this canvas seat for ever.

  Time!’ was a command to go to a place he had never been before but Cutty seemed familiar with it.

  Dan was listening for the voices of the crowd to lead him. They suggested, he imagined, that he was winning but he couldn’t believe that from the inside. He wondered if they were still seeing the previous round.

  Pain had found its way past the anaesthesia of tension and every punch seemed to bring the aches from all the earlier punches out in chorus. He felt as if he was discovering for the first time the reality of violence. He seemed pitted against a force that was just naturally greater than his. There are no fair fights, it occurred to him. He heard the voices draw on his spilled blood. As he began to founder, he knew something with certainty and yet knew that his knowledge was discredited because of where it came from, because it would be seen as the excuse of a loser. And he was losing, he was certain. He knew he was giving as much as Cutty, the same in his own terms, that what was being demonstrated here wasn’t the superiority of one but the similarity of both, that they were expressing something jointly, not individually. The voices lied. What was there was as much as anybody could offer, was the same gift whoever made it. The voices lied, but he had accepted them and he was caught in them now.

  He had to move back and he could find no further to go, in the field or in himself. He knew nothing but hurt coming at him. He thought every noise, every shout, the crowd, the whole day was attacking and the world was just vendettas against him. He hated them all. He hated them all and found there in the sheerness of his hate a hardness that defiantly didn’t want to yield, clenched fist of his rage, marrow of his will. He found some small, last seed of himself still needing to flower. He must let it be fulfilled but he was stunned and stumbling. His feet groped along a maze of edges, trying to find footholds in air, until he stepped off suddenly into blackness.

  Weights pressed against him at various parts and he felt himself tilt and plane awkwardly, find different angles in air. He couldn’t tell himself upright or not, what position he held. The darkness was spiral. There was sound.

  ‘Twenty seconds.’

  ‘Twenty-five seconds.’

  His mind held the voice like a rope to pull him out of the pit.

  ‘Prepare.’

  And he burst into dizzying light. The day was in pieces. Pressure was pushing his body out of shape towards somewhere. His knees couldn’t hold. Ground bobbled, trees spun, the sky slowly turning.

  ‘Time!’

  He was moving. But he had surfaced again into pain, volleyed forces.

  ‘Bedtime, son,’ Cutty was saying.

  ‘Only a matter of time.’

  ‘No chance.’

  The voice helped him. It was an assumption about what he was and he was determined not to allow that. Its glibness located the last of his anger. The anger came because he felt Cutty betraying both of them, aligning himself with the lie that was the crowd’s sense of what had been happening. However this ended, Dan had fought honestly to the limits of himself. Nobody was going to take that from him. This fight wasn’t
over yet because he felt as if he had just discovered what he was fighting. He knew that stony certainty, had heard it since childhood from so many other voices. It came from the same place as Cutty’s smile, it was an echo of all those corner-standers who had peopled his boyhood. It was the voice that had spoken inside himself for years. And he knew now that he didn’t agree with it. It spoke as if it knew the truth and it was hiding from the truth. It overruled those who couldn’t meet the terms it demanded. In declaring its own strength it trampled on the weakness of others.

  Trying to focus on the fragmentary images of Cutty that felt as if they were coming at him from every angle, Dan seemed to himself to be fighting all those working-class hardmen who had formed the pantheon of his youth, men who in thinking they defied the injustice of their lives had been acquiescing in it because they compounded the injustice by unloading their weakness on to someone else, making him carry it. Dan’s past self was among them. So was his father on the back green. Like an argument Dan was still involved in, his father’s voice came from somewhere: ‘Whit is it you believe in, boay?’ As he stumbled about the field, being flayed of his arrogance, he was looking for an answer.

  He tried to rally against Cutty. He couldn’t but as he felt himself stagger and fall again, even as he pitched sickeningly on to the ground with a jolt that threatened to bring his bones out through the skin, a part of his mind hung on to consciousness like a cliff-edge bush it wasn’t sure would hold, and he was already struggling to rise when Matt Mason and Tommy Brogan found him and half-carried him to the canvas seat.

  Their voices were talking to themselves. Dan sat staring at Cutty while the referee counted off the time and the sounds of the crowd were like translations of what was happening into different languages. Dan felt a terrible coldness spreading through his mind, an ice killing off everything but the most basic thought, the crudest life-forms. He was waiting to see what survived to take with him when he rose. Suddenly his own voice came to him from the past, something he had once said, he couldn’t remember where. ‘Living’s the only game in town and it’s fucking crooked.’ Thinking that now, he felt the prodigious strength of despair. The whole thing was unbearable. To bear it, he wanted his wife and his family. He must have them. To have them, he must win.

  ‘Time!’

  As Cutty crowded him again at once, Dan’s bleak decision that he must win stayed with him and the fixity of his will revealed to him at last the way he might do it. He heard, as if in a time-lock, Tommy Brogan saying something that mattered, as he sat on the canvas seat. His mind, while Cutty buffeted his body, was crouched patiently, waiting for the remark to come back. It was something Tommy Brogan had been saying since the beginning and Dan had been too tense to register it.

  ‘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-towe
ls 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.