Authors: William McIlvanney
The Big Man
Also by William McIlvanney
Fiction
Remedy is None
Gift from Nessus
The Big Man
Walking Wounded
The Kiln
Weekend
The Detective Laidlaw trilogy
Laidlaw
The Papers of Tony Veitch
Strange Loyalties
Poetry
The Longships in Harbour
In Through the Head
These Words: Weddings and After
Non Fiction
Shades of Grey – Glasgow 1956–1987, with Oscar Marzaroli
Surviving the Shipwreck
‘A splendid and utterly convincing portrayal of Scottish working-class life’
Stephen Glover, in the Daily Telegraph
‘An absorbing study of a man and the small economically depressed Scottish town that has formed him. At his best Mcllvanney digs deep and fruitfully into a class unconscious, into the way men dispossessed not only of jobs but of their belief in past or future, struggle to make – and unmake – their own heroes’
Margaret Walters, in the Observer
‘His LAIDLAW thrillers brilliantly marry tension and acute observation with a style that would do justice to the best urban tradition. They’re his most successful books, but DOCHERTY and THE BIG MAN are no small achievements. His people are powerful creations, his dialogue a crisp slap in the face for defeat’
Nick Kimberley, in City Limits
‘As so often his work surprises, jolts, impresses, THE BIG MAN is the work of a thoroughly intelligent and adult novelist writing at the height of his powers. (It is) the book that will make 1985 a pivotal year in our fiction . . . it tackles unemployment and its psychological wounds, and illuminates the roots and roles of violence in Scottish notions of manhood’
Isobel Murray, in the Scotsman
‘A brilliant study, truly beautiful . . . Mcllvanney makes most of his contemporaries seem effete and ineffectual; a massively gifted, totally aware, compassionate writer’
Bob Flynn, in New Musical Express
‘An exciting blend of violent action and perceptive character study’
Glasgow Herald
‘When Mcllvanney allows his characters freedom in the lives he has created for them, THE BIG MAN succeeds both as moral drama and first-rate entertainment’
James Campbell in The Times Literary Supplement
‘Brilliant... A commentary on the state of Scotland itself’
Kevin Dunion, Radical Scotland
THE BIG MAN
William McIlvanney
This edition published in Great Britain in 2014
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in Great Britain in 1985 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
Sceptre edition 1986
Copyright © 1985 by William McIlvanney
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 1955
Contents
For Siobhàn
What is a rebel? A man who
says no: but whose refusal
does not imply a renunciation.
ALBERT CAMUS
ONE
‘Look,’ one of the three boys in a field said as the white Mercedes slid, silenced by distance, in and out of view along the road. The boy had bright red hair which the teachers at his school had learned to dread appearing in their classrooms for it meant mischief, a spark of social arson.
‘A shark. A great white.’
His two companions looked where his finger pointed and caught the melodrama of the gesture. The one who was holding the greyhound said, ‘Kill, Craigie Boy, kill,’ and the big, brindled dog barked and lolloped on the leash. The red-haired boy started imitating the theme music from the film
Jaws
and the other two joined in. Their voices hurried to crescendo as they saw the car disappearing over the top of a hill.
The car moved on under a sky where some cloud-racks looked like canyons leading to infinity and others were dissolving islands. There, floating in the air, were the dreams of some mad architect, wild, fantasticated structures that darkness would soon demolish. They were of a variousness you couldn’t number.
‘Five,’ the biggest man in the car said. He was called Billy Fleming. He spoke without expression. His face looked mean enough to grudge giving away a reaction.
There was no immediate response from the other two. A boring journey had made reactions in the car sluggish. Each was in his own thoughts like a sleeping-bag.
‘Five what?’ the driver said after a time, thinking it wouldn’t be long until he needed the lights. His name was Eddie Foley.
‘Dead crows. That’s five Ah’ve counted. Two on the road. Three at the side of it. They should take out insurance. What are they? Deaf or daft? Always pickin’ on passin’ cars.’
They came to a village called Blackbrae. The council houses
at the edge of it, badly weathered but with well-kept gardens, led on to private houses lined briefly along each side of the street. These sat slightly further off the road, solidly and unelaborately built. Designed less to please the eye than persuade it to look elsewhere, they were squat fortresses of privacy. It was hard to imagine much vanity in possessing them. Yet the meticulous paintwork or the hanging plant in a doorway or the coach-lamp on the wall beside a recently added porch suggested a pleased possessiveness. The names, too, had a cosy complacency. There was Niaroo and Dunromin and, incredibly enough, Nirvana. A passer-by might have wondered at how modest the dreams had been that had found their fulfilment here.
The street turned left towards a hill that climbed back into the countryside. Changing gears, Eddie Foley hesitated in neutral and gently braked.
‘I think we’re lost,’ he said. ‘Did Fast Frankie mention this place?’
‘Has anybody ever?’ Billy Fleming asked from the back seat.
‘Ask,’ the third man in the car said.
At the top of the hill a small obelisk with a railing round it was outlined against the sky. On a bench beside it two men sat and a third stood with his foot on the bench, nodding towards the others. In the hollow of the hill, where the car was, there were mainly closed shops. A building that claimed to have been a garage was empty and derelict. Asphalt patches in front of it might have been where the pumps were. The owner’s name was a conundrum of missing letters – Mac- something. The only indication of life between them and the men at the top of the hill was outside the Mayfair Café. The name was carried on a white electric sign, not yet lit, projecting from the wall. The letters declaring the name were slightly smaller than those beneath, which announced a brand of cigarettes, so that it was as if the identity of this place, obviously a focal point of the village, was dependent on a company that had no connections here.
Five teenagers were standing outside the café, two boys and three girls. One of the boys, the smaller one, was doing an intricate but very contained soft-shoe shuffle with his hands out,
palms towards his friends. He was wearing jeans and a black tee-shirt, sleeves rolled up to show his biceps. The others were laughing. Eddie Foley put the car in gear, eased along the kerb towards them and stopped. He loosened his seat-belt, leaned across the empty passenger seat and pressed a button. The window hummed down slowly enough for the group on the pavement to become aware of it. The dancer gave his friends a theatrical display of amazement and leaned down towards the open window.
‘That was terrific, mister,’ he said. ‘Could ye do it again?’
‘Thornbank?’ Eddie Foley said.
‘Naw,’ the dancer said. ‘My name’s Wilson.’
‘I’m looking for Thornbank.’
‘If ye give us a lift, we’ll take ye.’
‘It’s either right or left or straight on,’ one of the girls said.
The wit of it crippled the others with laughter. They leaned helplessly on one another and the girl herself had to admit how good it was, her pink hair coming to rest on the shoulder of the taller boy. Eddie Foley pressed the button and the window went up as the car moved off.
‘The natives don’t seem very friendly,’ he said.
‘Maybe we shoulda brought some coloured beads,’ Billy Fleming said.
‘Children,’ the third man said, ‘grow up into shites quicker every year.’
He was a small man with thinning hair. He wore nice rings and he had grey eyes that were so cold the flecks in them could have been crushed ice. He was Matt Mason.
Eddie Foley took the car up the hill and stopped across the road from the three men at the bench. He got out of the car and went over to them. Two of them looked about forty. The one with his foot on the bench must have been over sixty. He was the one who spoke.
‘Yes, sir. Can we help ye?’
‘I’m looking for Thornbank.’
‘Ye’re well out yer way here,’ one of the men on the bench said. ‘Where ye comin’ from?’
‘Glasgow.’
‘Ye woulda been better holding the dual carriageway tae outside Ayr,’ the third man said.
‘Ye’re wrong, Rab,’ the older man said.
In the car Matt Mason and Billy Fleming watched but couldn’t hear what was being said. They saw the conspiratorial noddings of the three men before they formed into an advisory committee for Eddie. They saw the pointing gestures, one of the seated men standing up and doing an elaborate mime of directions. They saw Eddie nodding towards the obelisk. In the soft light of late evening the scene had a simple dignity, four men silhouetted against the vastness of the sky in a mime of small preoccupations.
‘What’s he doing?’ Matt Mason said. ‘Getting a history of the place?’
Eddie came back across and got in the car. He waved as he drove away and the three men waved back.
‘Ah know where we’re goin’ now,’ he said. ‘They were nice men.’
‘We’re not here to socialise,’ Matt Mason said.
‘That was a monument they were sittin’ beside. To the men from the village. Died in the First and Second World Wars. One of them was holdin’ somethin’. Some kinda tool. Ah hadny a clue what it was for. Imagine that. Ye would think ye would know what it was for. Ah mean, this isny Mars.’
‘Is it not?’ Billy Fleming said and glanced across at Matt Mason for confirmation of his sneer.
Matt Mason looked back at him and then looked down at Billy Fleming’s trainer shoe resting on the back of the driving seat. The foot came off the seat and rested on the floor. Billy Fleming checked that the fawn upholstery wasn’t marked.
The black and white trainer shoes were part of a strange ensemble. They were topped by jeans and then a black polo-neck cashmere sweater, over which he wore an expensive-looking grey mohair jacket. It gave him an appearance as dual as a centaur. Above, he was a kind of sophistication; below, he was all roughness and readiness to scuffle. The face linked the two: a bland superciliousness overlaid features that bore the traces of impromptu readjustment.
‘Ah was goin’ to ask what it was,’ Eddie said. That tool thing. But Ah felt such a mug, Ah didn’t bother.’
Neither of the other two responded, and Eddie pursued the subject in his mind. The strange object the man had held and the solemnity in the darkening air of those names carved on the obelisk – names he imagined would mean much to most people in the village – had combined to make him feel what strangers they were here, the carelessness of their coming, rough and sudden as a raiding-party. He had sensed in the talk with them a formed and complicated life about the place, a strong awareness among them of who they were, mysterious yet coherent with a coherence he couldn’t understand. It was an uncomfortable feeling, as if he were a hick from the city.
The atmosphere in the car intensified the feeling. They seemed to be travelling within where they had come from. The plush upholstery appeared foreign to the places they were passing through. With the exception of Billy’s jeans and trainers, their city clothes would have looked out of place outside, as if they had come dressed for the wrong event. The smoke from Matt Mason’s cigar surrounded them, cocooning them in themselves.