The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  The voice came at him like an echo of so many of his own thoughts. He was trying to believe it was a distorting echo. But he thought of the men he used to work with at Sullom Voe – how quickly, making good money, they had distanced themselves from the men they had worked with before. Given a taste of their own limited financial success, it became a self-fulfilling addiction. Some of them would still talk of their parents’ lives with a kind of wistful admiration for their belief in the solidarity of their class but there was almost a kind of condescension in that admiration, as if it had been similar to the touching beliefs children have in fairy tales. Also, their talk on those train journeys down from Aberdeen seemed to have no strong political focus. Among the talk of football and family and women and who had got a good deal on his car, politics might be mentioned, but never with the kind of righteous anger Dan had heard being voiced as a boy against the political principles that seemed to govern their lives. Where their fathers might have raged, these men shrugged. What else can you expect, they seemed to suggest. Dan had sometimes wondered if their music centres and their video machines and their foreign holidays were like hush money.

  He had to admit that he had seen himself how demands for social equality could be used as a confidence trick. There were phases of history when it worked well. People could use it as a ticket of admission to the party that was going on at the time and, once they were inside, get on with the serious business of filling their faces and their pockets. Maybe those mates who had worried him on those train journeys had been brought by unemployment and the hard terms of their lives to the point he had only reached in the fight.

  ‘You think I chose this, Dan? There is no choice. It’s all there is.’

  They sat in silence. Dan raised his glass to his mouth and put it back down without drinking. He didn’t know why he had done that. Perhaps it was because he sensed himself at a point of utter equilibrium in his experience, where nothing trivial must tip the balance, not even one sip of tequila. Whatever he did now would define him for the rest of his life to himself. He knew where Mason was going and he didn’t yet know how far he was prepared to follow him. He must wait very carefully and see. Mason had both hands on the vase, as if warming them at a fire.

  This house, Dan. I made this house. Oh, I didn’t put the bricks together, right enough, but I made it all right. See that room I showed you? The dining-room? Know where I got the idea for that room? Mainly at the pictures. The idea for the floor I got out a colour supplement. But mainly it’s from the pictures I saw when I was a wee snottery boy. I decided then I was going to have a house like them. If it was good enough for Ronald Colman, it was good enough for me. And I got it. Don’t you worry. This vase.’

  He lifted it gently and put it down on the desk in front of Dan.

  ‘Lift that. Feel the weight.’

  Dan did so.

  ‘You’re holding two thousand quid in your hands there.’

  Dan put it back down immediately and Mason smiled. He moved the silver box across to Dan.

  ‘Fifteen hundred pounds,’ he said. ‘Open it.’

  Dan fiddled with the box and it wouldn’t open. He felt beneath his hands the mysteriousness of old objects, their intimidatory history. The box didn’t just baffle him, it made him feel stupid. Its carvings seemed as mystifying as the Rosetta Stone. He felt around him the strangeness of the house as if emanating from this centre, his incomprehension of the lives that had been lived here, the dignity of the place like an identity no changes made by Mason could erase. He felt as if both of them were interlopers.

  ‘Careful,’ Mason said. ‘It’s delicate.’

  Dan’s hands came away as if from an electric shock. Mason leaned across and touched something and the lid of the box eased itself slightly and soundlessly from the body. Mason nodded. Dan gently prised it open. Inside was a yellowed piece of paper. Dan glanced at Mason. Mason took out the paper tentatively and unfolded it carefully, passed it to Dan, who held it as if it might powder in his hands. It was a note in faded, fancy handwriting, undated, no address. ‘Dear Mary Anne,’ it said. The matter is decided. There shall be no further trouble from that source. Discretion, however, is still to be advised. Until soon. Francis.’ Dan felt an eeriness in reading the words, as if he had heard whisperings from the grave. That long-irrelevant urgency seemed to put his own problems in a new perspective. Mason, putting the paper back in its box and closing the lid, appeared to catch his mood.

  ‘Gives you a funny feeling, eh? That was in the box when I got it. I like that. I like to keep it there. It’s like it tells you there’s not much that changes. “Discretion, however, is still to be advised.” True, Dan.’

  He was still touching the box. They sat like conspirators, staring at it.

  ‘You’ve made some money today, Dan,’ Mason said. ‘But that’s nothing to what you could make. But to make the real stuff you’ve got to have a bit of iron in you. You’ve got that. I saw it today. Oh, I did.’ He looked up directly at Dan. ‘That’s something I can use, Dan. I want you to come and work with me.’

  Mason’s hand came away from the box, gestured at the room.

  ‘My sons,’ Mason said. They’ll be all right. With their elocution lessons. And their private school. Okay. But they’re being trained to live a charade. I can see it in them already. Well, let them get on with it. But some of us have to handle the real world. Not many of us equipped to do that, Dan. I think you’re one.’

  They looked at each other and Dan was aware of the hunger in Mason’s eyes, saw how important the making of this offer was to him.

  ‘I’m not talking about being a puncher, Dan. I’m talking about learning from me. I’m talking about more money than you ever thought you would see. I think you should come in where the real work’s done.’

  Dan remembered times when he had thought he was comfortably off and realised how naive he had been to think that. There hadn’t been a time in his life when more than a month or two separated him from being penniless. A week without work had always been enough to put him in financial bother. For the first time in his life, he saw security within his grasp. He thought of Betty. He felt that at the moment he needed every advantage in that area he could get.

  That party,’ Dan said. ‘Somebody told me ye were involved in drugs.’

  Mason smiled.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Ah can’t remember. Is it true?’

  ‘Not really. Been around the edges, right enough. Dabbled. Not too successfully so far. You thinking about Friday? Smithy?’

  Dan said nothing.

  ‘Friday was Friday, Dan. This is Sunday. I said what I thought would help you at the time. Drugs. That’s one of those words everybody gets hysterical about. Leaves the papers frothing at the mouth. Why? It’s a commodity, isn’t it? It’s the coming market. People take it by choice, at least to begin with. Great thing about drugs is you’ve really got a captive market. It’s a great commodity, isn’t it? You don’t even have to advertise. The consumer’s breaking your door down to buy it off you. Talk about a seller’s market.’

  ‘Whit wis the fight about?’

  ‘Just settling something.’

  ‘Who would kill somebody?’

  Mason studied him interestedly.

  ‘You’ve been doing a bit of talking, Dan, eh? No. Just about who would settle something. Collect a bad debt. Cam Colvin’s going to do that. Not my business any more. And definitely not yours. How he does it is how he does it. Well.’

  Dan felt the impossibility of his understanding the exact ramifications, from where he sat, of the events he had been involved in. The only way to understand them fully would be to become more strongly part of them. Mason stood up. Dan joined him, awkwardly.

  ‘I’ll give you a wee while to think it over. But not too long. Times move on. So do opportunities. It’s up to you to grab them.’

  He pointed to the picture of horses behind his desk.

  ‘You like the painting?’
>
  ‘Aye, it’s good.’

  “‘Jockeys sous la pluie.” Jockeys in the rain. A man called Degas painted it. The real one’s worth a fortune. Imagine that. You catch what it looks like, just horses and jockeys getting ready for a race in the rain. And it’s worth a lot of money. Hm. But it’s good. “Jockeys sous la pluie”.’

  He repeated the title like a magical formula. He gestured Dan round to his side of the desk. He put his hand up to touch the painting and swung it on a hinge. Behind it was a wall safe. Dan felt as if he was back in the front row of the Saturday matinee. Mason looked at him and smiled. This was a ceremony, to be conducted slowly.

  ‘Get it? Can you think of a better place for me to keep my money? The horses have always been the cover for where my money comes from.’

  As Dan watched him make mystic passes with his fingers, unlocking the combination, he felt suddenly as if the safe were working Mason. He saw the way he stood before it, reaching towards it and wooing it with his fingers like an acolyte conjuring it to grant him access to its sanctum. The rapt, complacent concentration on his face was bestowed on him by its touch. The strangeness of the image distanced Dan from what was happening, made him an outsider to it. Like an unbeliever at a religious service, he felt the bizarreness of the rituals that had happened here, the weirdness of the assumptions that had underlain them. With the seductiveness of Mason’s voice gone silent, Dan was left to the discomfort of his own thoughts, the need to decide what he believed.

  As always, he didn’t know. He had never deliberately formulated his thoughts or his beliefs into a system, always having sensed that to do that would be false. He had never imposed a coherent shape upon his life but instead had allowed his life to elicit its changing shape from events as they happened.

  What was happening now would be proof of what he believed, not what his mind told him he believed. All he could do was abide the outcome of this event of which he was a part. He couldn’t pre-empt the moment’s force with any foreknowledge of how things ought to be. No moral precept surfaced in him to find firm footing where there was no solid ground and calm the doubts in him. You didn’t define happenings, they defined you.

  Matt Mason had taken money from the safe, began to count notes from a huge wad on to his desk.

  ‘Like a wee, dark womb,’ he said, smiling. That’s where all the social possibilities are born, Dan.’

  As he watched the money accumulate on the desk, Dan didn’t know what he thought or felt. As if his very sense of himself were in thaw, impulses that were part thought, part feeling, broke off unevenly from one another and swirled, colliding in him. He needed the money. He wanted the money. Matt Mason had reconstructed his house from dead ideas. Dan thought of him touching the vase constantly, touching the metal box. It was as if he had needed to keep doing that to recharge his sense of himself. But those things had only a financial value to him. Only the price mattered and the price was a meaningless invention. Frankenstein’s monster desperately re-plugging himself into dead generators. Dan wanted Betty to stay with him. What had happened to Cutty Dawson didn’t need to happen. What difference could Dan make to anything anyway? The man Dan had seen with Betty had looked well-off. Dan had taken the same chances as Cutty. He wanted the money.

  ‘Five hundred,’ Mason said. ‘A hundred for training with Tommy. Four for the fight.’

  The money was in tens. It made a small, uneven pile on the desk.

  ‘More than you bargained for, Dan, eh? Plus a wee bonus.’

  Mason began to lay more money, note by note, on top of the pile. ‘Hey!’ Dan remembered saying in the Red Lion. Mason’s story about the snooker could be seen as yielding a meaning different from the one Mason had given it. Johnny Fagan hadn’t put himself at risk against the two men for his own sake. Cutty was to get nothing. Dan thought of giving the money to Betty.

  ‘Seven hundred and fifty quid,’ Matt Mason said.

  Still holding the much larger wad of money in his left hand, he lifted the money from the desk with his right hand and formally presented it to Dan.

  ‘If you’re wise,’ he said, ‘you’ll take it as a down payment on your future.’

  Dan took the money, held it in his hand.

  ‘What about Cutty?’ he said.

  He hadn’t known he was going to say that. The words had happened and Dan was as surprised by them as Mason was. Why had he said it? Was he seriously trying to get money for Cutty? Were the words just a ritual for making himself feel better in taking it? If Mason gave him some money for Cutty, would that make it easier for him to accept Mason’s offer?

  ‘What about him?’ Mason asked.

  ‘He gets nothing?’

  ‘He lost.’

  ‘He was half o’ the fight.’

  ‘Not my half, he wasn’t.’

  ‘But you’re the man that won the money.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Ye could give him somethin’.’

  ‘Aye. And I could give something to a blind beggar if I wanted.’ He smiled. ‘Unfortunate comparison. But I don’t want to.’

  ‘Ah think ye should, though.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  They stood staring at each other. Mason was watching Dan expectantly, his eyebrows raised, his mouth slightly open. Dan knew in that moment that nothing he could say was going to change Mason’s mind. Mason knew the way it had to be and for him the interest of what Dan was saying lay only in the amazingness of hearing someone who thought it could be otherwise. But Dan couldn’t stop his mouth from talking. It was as if a part of him was still trying to redefine the terms on which one of them gave and one of them received the money, to haggle for a contract both of them could sign, to justify the fact that each of them stood there with shared money in his hand.

  ‘He made you money,’ Dan said.

  Mason shook his head.

  ‘He made you money,’ Dan said. ‘You made money from him.’

  ‘I made money from me. I arranged it. I picked my man. I got him ready. I made the bet. So who made me money? Me. Cutty Dawson was just an incidental factor. Something I had to calculate for. And I got it right. The same way I got you right. If it hadn’t been him, it would’ve been somebody else. If it hadn’t been you, it would’ve been somebody else. This was between Cam Colvin and me. We’re the ones who invested in it. We’re the ones who say where the wages go.’ He nodded at Dan’s hand. ‘I’ve paid you.’

  ‘But Cutty helped tae make it happen.’

  ‘Cutty did what he was told. Well, nearly. Except that he didn’t win.’

  ‘He should still get somethin’.’

  Mason was getting impatient.

  ‘So you’ve got money,’ he said. ‘You give him something.’

  Dan hesitated briefly.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But then you match it?’

  Mason’s hand paused on its way back to the safe.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look. Ah’ll give Cutty what ye called the bonus.’ Dan counted two hundred and fifty pounds out on the desk. He looked back at Mason. Mason’s lips were pursed, as if he were trying not to smile. ‘Two hundred and fifty pounds. You double it. Fair enough?’

  ‘Sure,’ Mason said. ‘But that’s all you want? You don’t think I should pay him a pension? As well as a lump sum.’

  Mason was smiling. He reached into the safe and left the rest of the money there. As his hand went to the door of the safe to push it shut, Dan knew this meant Cutty was locked out for good and that Dan himself was finally defined and from the confusion in him, instinctive as if some primitive sense of himself were calling out its name, came one word.

  ‘No!’ he said.

  The word seemed to work his arm, and his hand, still clutching five hundred pounds, swung on the axis of his conviction, quenched Mason’s smile. Mason fell, and his head made dull contact with the wooden back of his chair as he settled clumsily on the floor. He didn’t move.

  Dan listened to the silence
– no one was coming – and stared into the darkness of the choice he had made, alive with unseen implications. But he had made it. The obliteration of a lot of vague possibilities clarified the real ones. Thought and action became fused, began to happen as one.

  He stepped gingerly round Matt Mason, bent to check his breathing. He might have been peacefully asleep. Dan’s hand paused at the mouth of the open safe. He couldn’t see inside that small black hole. He found his hand reluctant to go inside, as though it might get bitten off. He had never stolen anything in his life. Even when his friends at school used to make the traditional group raids on Woolworth’s, it was a rite of passage he had never engaged in. But he forced his hand into the darkness and groped there. He came out with something wrapped in plastic and took a second or two to realise it was a gun. He briefly imagined it pointed at himself. Holding the gun in his left hand, he stretched into the safe again and brought out the wad of money from which Mason had paid him. He replaced the gun. He quickly counted out twenty-five tenners on top of the money he had left on the desk and replaced the rest in the safe. He pushed the safe shut gently, hearing it click. He put the thousand pounds together and stuffed it into his pocket. He made sure Mason was still unconscious, came out of the room and closed the door very quietly.

  He checked that the keys were still on the hall table and moved, almost at a run, towards the lounge. Clamping a smile on his face, he pushed the door open.

  ‘Here, Frankie,’ he said.

  The faces that simultaneously turned in response seemed to him threatening, but he nodded to them and winked.

  ‘Matt wants ye tae come through here wi’ us for a minute.’

  ‘Oh-ho,’ Roddy Stewart said. ‘Serious business being discussed. ‘

  ‘When ye gotta go, ye gotta go,’ Frankie said.

  Sandra raised a mock protest.

  ‘Don’t worry, ladies,’ Roddy Stewart said. ‘I’ll keep you entertained.’

  ‘That’s what’s worrying me,’ Frankie said as he came out.

  Dan closed the door.

  ‘So what’s this? You two need to call in expert advice? I knew it would happen.’