The Big Man (22 page)

‘Who was that?’ somebody asked.

The phone, does that no’ ring a bell? An Alexander Graham Bell?’

‘Alexander Fleming fae Darvel. Penicillin.’

‘Sir Alexander Fleming.’

‘Simpson. Chloroform.’

‘Tar MacAdam.’

‘Naw, but listen. Yese’ve all missed out the greatest Scotsman of them all.’

‘Rabbie Burns!’

‘The autodidact.’

Nobody else seemed to have heard of him.

‘The self-taught man. That’s Scotland’s greatest tradition. There’s men walkin’ about these streets in boiler-suits wi’ mair knowledge o’ mair things than a lot o’ professors have. Little wonder we’ve inventit an’ discovered so mony things. We’re intae everythin’. A very restless an’ curious intelligence, the Scottish intelligence. Ask me any question.’

And he burst out laughing. With the obsessive desperation of the lost, Dan imagined a landmark in every casual observation. He had been listening to their talk as if he could deduce from it a fix on where he was. He had been thinking about how the Scots seemed to be curious about everything except themselves. The roster of names had come to him, like a surrogate identity, a list of aliases behind which it was possible to hide from the unexamined reality of your own experience. He understood the comfort of those familiar names. These talking men seemed to him like where he had been. He sensed them falling behind him like comfortable voices murmuring round a camp-fire while he moved on into a darkness disturbingly and unfamiliarly alive.

Like a brand aimlessly lifted from their fire, he took that one word: autodidact. His mind played with it. He was an autodidact who would be taking his official test on Sunday. But he was an autodidact of experience, and that was different from knowledge. Experience was an unlearning of certain kinds of knowledge, not a garnering but a stripping off.

He saw, perhaps because he had to in this moment of fearful vulnerability, a rough shape to his life. He had been preparing unselfconsciously for something like this. That instinctive boyhood decision to reject an academic course at school, that apparently casual turning away, had been a determined turning towards. He had chosen his own experience, undiluted, not filtered through the preconceptions of those who had gone before him. His parents had been wrong to see in his choice a rejection of his own intelligence. He had been choosing to develop his own intelligence, not as a career but as a way of life, something not compromised by its professional usefulness. What he had rejected was intellectuality, the force-feeding of intelligence in disjunction from personal experience.

From this distance that boy’s determination seemed not a wilful silliness or a fear of taking on a hard challenge but an act of surprising self-confidence. For he had even then believed in the reality of his own intelligence, had no doubts that it was there. He hadn’t felt the need to prove its existence to anyone else. Not much he had ever read had intimidated his mind, and he had read a lot. But he had always read in relation to his own life, using his intelligence to inform his experience, never to subvert it with unproven theory. Betty had often despaired of him. She said that he didn’t use his intelligence or his reading to any purpose that affected his life significantly. But the purpose had been there, if opaque. Perhaps, he reflected ruefully, this moment was a fulfilment of it.

He stood at the bar and considered where all that ferreting among books, that patient coexistence with his own experience, that rejection of what he thought were false certainties, had brought him. If you had to come at experience without too many illusions about yourself, he seemed to be succeeding. He didn’t know what his marriage was any more, he didn’t know what he believed in, he wasn’t sure who he was supposed to be. He felt he would be turning up on Sunday in a condition that would justify what Eddie said was the farmer’s name for that patch of grass: ‘no-man’s-land’. He would be arriving as a body and not much else, so insubstantial he wondered if he would leave footprints.

But some reflexes of identity stayed with him, like the twitchings of a dying insect. He knew he had been waiting for time to pass. He looked at the clock above the bar and decided he had waited long enough. Betty and the man had left early. That had given Dan hope because it might mean she was concerned about the boys and didn’t want to stay out too late. It might mean she was still as much their mother as she was whatever she was to the man. He wanted to check and hoped that she was home because he couldn’t bear to face the images that would be running in his head all night like a blue movie if she wasn’t. He crossed to the pay-phone and dialled. He had been phoning her from Glasgow every night. She would suspect nothing.

When Betty said ‘Hullo’, the meaning of the call was over. There was nothing they could seriously say to each other. They briefly told each other everything was all right, sentries guarding separate but adjoining states of loneliness, exchanging passwords. Putting down the phone, he submitted to the rest of the evening because there was nothing else he could think of to do.

He drank the rest of his pint and caught a bus to Glasgow and returned to the Burleigh Hotel and sat in his room and responded to Frankie White’s remarks and lay in the darkness on his bed, through the wall from Frankie and far away from everyone, and wondered where he was to find enough will to clench a fist.

FIVE

He wakened into a block of structured sunlight, no casual place but one imprisoning him in an experience he must confront. The unfamiliar room told him his loneliness. Time on his travelling alarm pointed at him like a gun: empty yourself and let’s see what is there. The dull sounds in the hotel were too preoccupied to help him. He stirred his shoulders and arms and legs, probing for problems. There was none of the underwater sluggishness that sometimes held him on waking. His muscles responded instantly, gave him no excuse.

Necessity was waiting for him. But now, at this moment when he realised he must accept it, it seemed an invented necessity, not something he had discovered for himself. The happenings of the past three weeks, the money Matt Mason had given him, the companionship of Frankie White, the sessions with Tommy Brogan, all seemed an illusion of common purposes, a mirage of togetherness that dissipated leaving him only with himself, and in himself there was no discoverable reason for fighting Cutty Dawson. Who was Cutty Dawson?

The only way he could get himself out of bed towards what he would have to do was to imagine the reactions of the others if he didn’t. He thought of the outrage, the contempt, the accusations of fear from Matt Mason and his friends, from the people who would be coming to watch, from Thornbank. Out of those thoughts he patiently constructed a ladder of shame by which to climb out of his disbelief in what was ahead.

Upright, he tried to conjure normalcy out of small actions. He took a long time washing himself at the basin. He brushed his teeth three times, as if Cutty Dawson and he were to meet for a smiling contest. Examining his rough chin in the deceiving mirror, he wondered about leaving it as it was. But he shaved
because shaving was what he usually did. He did all of this very slowly and thoroughly because he was trying through the ceremony of habit to make the day real for him. It didn’t work.

Instead of familiar objects giving him back himself, his strangeness imparted itself to them. Soap was a weird thing. How had they arrived at manufacturing that? The structure of a razor was outlandish. Everything oppressed him with its arbitrariness. What did all this have to do with him? He felt imprisoned in inventions of which he was one. He felt separate from his own life, as if seeing it for the unreal thing it was. The feeling persisted when Frankie White came in.

‘Morning, morning, morning,’ Frankie began briskly. ‘We’ve got a good day for it.’

Dan nodded.

‘You ready for the big breakfast?’

Frankie was reminding him of the arrangements Matt Mason had made. They were to meet in a hotel in the city centre. The fight was to begin at two o’clock and it had been decided that Dan should eat a big, late breakfast so that he would have digested the food properly by the time he met Cutty. Frankie kept talking as Dan finished dressing. He seemed to sense Dan’s distance and was providing a running commentary of trivia as if to normalise things for him. But Dan was aware of how carefully Frankie was watching him. Frankie’s caution isolated Dan further.

His isolation extended to the hotel where Eddie Foley took them. The big dining-room was empty except for themselves. They sat at a long table and were served by a waitress who stood well away from them unless she was signalled over to be asked for more toast or another pot of tea. It required some effort for Dan to eat the two well-done steaks that were put before him but he chewed his way through them determinedly, as if they were a substance with magical powers that would see him through what was ahead. Only Tommy Brogan, looking uncomfortable in this setting and perhaps in need of a purpose to hide behind, was checking on what Dan was eating.

Roddy Stewart was dividing his time between his meal and
the
Observer.
Matt Mason, Eddie and Frankie were exchanging the sports pages of other papers. All strangers, Dan thought. He was a temporary adjunct to their lives, fuel for their own purposes. For Tommy Brogan, he was a test of his training skills, an experiment in how effectively Tommy could create a clone of himself within a week. For Matt Mason and Eddie Foley, he was an investment the point of which he didn’t understand himself. For Frankie White, he was a wage. He couldn’t be sure what he was for Roddy Stewart, perhaps a collector’s item, like a primitive painting the worth of which would be decided today.

He was going there alone, Dan thought. No supporters would be going with him.

The car was a 1965 Hillman and seemed old for its years. It had been loaned to them for the day by Geordie Parker, who bought old cars less as a means of transport than as challenges to his engineering skills. He had cars the way a womaniser might have relationships, only holding on to them for as long as they offered scope for his orgiastic love of mechanical experimentation: ‘Now if we put this bit here an’ that bit there an’ switched the cylinder-heads on her, that might be interesting.’ Referring to any car by the feminine pronoun (‘Ah handled ‘er that rough, she blew a gasket’; ‘Ye’ve got to double-declutch her or she’ll give ye nothin”), his conversation could sound like an esoteric translation of the Kamasutra for garage mechanics.

Seeing them off in it, with Harry Naismith driving, Geordie made a small, formal speech, a bit like a Victorian father letting his daughter out without a chaperon.

‘She doesn’t do over fifty, Harry. It’s not her style. She begins tae get the shakes. Soon as ye feel her doin’ that, you ease up. Use her handbrake as little as possible. She’s delicate there. An’ when ye use it, gentle with her. Or the spring pops out an’ ye’ll have to throw bricks in front of the wheels to hold her. An’ she’s not keen on turnin’ left. Ye’ll find she won’t keep the indicator there. As soon as ye let it go, it flicks back down. But you keep movin’ it up an’ down an’ she’ll be flashin’ all right, though ye won’t hear any o’ that tickin’ noise inside. By the way,
she’s champion for turning right. You’ll be fine, boys. Just treat her nice an’ ye’ll find that she’s a lady.’

Geordie’s determined personalising of the car made more sense to Harry Naismith once he had started on the road. It felt less like driving than trying to please a crotchety old maid. Successive owners had attempted to remodel it to their own specifications, most notably changing what must once have been the back window of a shooting brake. It was now a hardboard hatchback, gone so spongy with weathering that to lean your hand on it was to leave your fingerprints for posterity. The back window had shrunk to a kind of Perspex porthole in the middle of the hardboard, and looking through it via the driver’s mirror, you could just about work out whether it was day or night back there. More detailed information was hardly possible. Yet in spite of the efforts to reshape it, the car had retained a stubborn independence.

Not only did it not take kindly to going over fifty but when the needle stuttered nervously above forty a chill wind blew up the accelerator trouser leg in a very discouraging way. It also seemed to have a circulation problem and would cut out without warning when Harry was changing down, unless he coaxed it very carefully. Once, when they stopped to get cigarettes at a petrol station, they discovered that the back doors didn’t open from the inside.

But such problems only added to the spirit of adventure that was among them. They were going to see something they had never seen before – a bare-knuckle fight – and they had more right to identify with one of the contestants than anybody else who would be there and it was a bright, crisp day and, in spite of or perhaps because of Frankie White’s directions, they weren’t sure of the way. That compound of circumstances acted upon their natural capacity for enjoying things like the elixir of youth. The car was full of boyish enthusiasm. The uncertainty of the car’s progress was just the necessary element of mild hazard (Would they make it in time? Would they make it at all?) that made a journey out of what might have been merely a trip.

As they went, they spontaneously developed their roles in the drama of the situation. Alan Morrison was the world-weary
traveller whom everything reminded of the past. He had been around all right but he was getting old and who knew how many such undertakings he had left in him? Sam MacKinlay was the leader of the expedition, not officious with it but never quite able to relax as much as the rest. He had to keep a careful eye on Harry Naismith, who was the driver who had once been good but who had been out of it for so long that his nerve was maybe gone. Alistair Corstorphine was the nervous newcomer and couldn’t have played it any other way, with a face that seemed only able to express varying degrees of surprise. He got into character early on by telling Harry at a side road that all was clear and they pulled out in front of a bus. The blare of the horn heightened the atmosphere.