The Big Man. William McIlvanney
neurosis. What was certain was that Graithnock didn’t know itself as clearly any more.
Even physically, the town had been not so much changed as disfigured. Never a handsome place, it had had at its centre some fine old buildings that had some history. They were demolished and where they had been rose a kind of monumental slum they called a shopping precinct. As a facelift that has failed leaves someone looking out from nobody’s face in particular so Graithnock had become a kind of nowhere fixed in stone. The most characteristic denizens of its new precinct, like the ghosts of industry past, were alcoholics and down-and-outs.
Thornbank, as the child copes with the parents’ problems, was suffering too. A lot of the redundancies from Graithnock had come here. But there were apparent differences. The same television programmes reached Thornbank, the schools had much the same problems, the hydrogen bomb had been heard of there too. But a stronger and continuing sense of identity remained. One reason was, perhaps, its size. It was a place where people vaguely felt they knew nearly everybody else. This absence of anonymity meant that in Thornbank they were often, paradoxically, more tolerant of nonconformism than people might have been in bigger places. Difference was likely to become eccentricity before it could develop anti-social tendencies.
There was in the small town, for example, a group of punks, working-class schismatics who had seceded from their parents’ acceptance of middle-class conventions. Their changing hair colours, purples, greens and mauves, their earrings that were improvised from various objects, their clothes that looked as if they were acting in several plays at once, all of them bad, were not admired. But they were mainly confronted with a slightly embarrassed tolerance, like a horrendous case of acne. Of Big Andy, who led a local punk group called Animal Farm and whose Mohican haircut stood six-feet-three above the ground and seemed to change colour with his mood, it was often mentioned in mitigation that his Uncle Jimmy had been a terrible fancy dresser. Genes, the implication was, were not to be denied.
This communal sense of identity found its apotheosis in a few local people. Thornbank knew itself most strongly through them. They were as fixed as landmarks in the popular consciousness. If two expatriates from that little town had been talking and one of them mentioned the name of one of that handful of people, no further elaboration would have been necessary. They would have known themselves twinned. Those names were worn by Thornbank like an unofficial coat of arms. These were people to whom no civic monuments would ever be erected. They were too maverick for that. Part of their quality was precisely that they had never courted acceptance, refused to make a career of what they were. They were simply, and with an innocent kind of defiance, themselves.
There was Mary Barclay. She was in her seventies and fragile as bell metal. They called her Mary the Communist and although nearly everyone in the town thought Communism something historically discredited, a bit like thalidomide, the epithet as it applied to her carried no opprobrium. It wasn’t that the term defined her so much as she qualified the term. She was Marx’s witness for the defence in Thornbank. Her life had been an unsanctimonious expression of concern for others. While helping everybody she could, she had also helped herself without inhibition to what in life injured nobody else. She had lived with three men and married none. She had buried the one who died on her, decently, and been loving to her two daughters who, as far as anybody knew, had never reproached her. She was who she was and you could take it or leave it, but you would have been a fool to leave it.
There was Davie Dykes, known as Davie the Deaver, which meant if you listened long enough he would talk you deaf. But it was mainly good talk. He told elaborate and highly inventive lies. Each day he reconstructed his own genealogy. His ancestry was legion. At sixty, he still refused to be circumscribed by his circumstances. Here was just a route to anywhere.
There was Dan Scoular. His place in the local pantheon was more mysterious. He was young for such elevation, thirty-three. His most frequently commented on talent was a simple one. He could knock people unconscious very quickly, frequently with one punch. It wasn’t easy to see why such a minimal ability and of such limited application should have earned him so much status. It was true that Thornbank, like a lot of small places which may feel themselves rendered insignificant by the much-publicised wonders of the bigger world, had a legendising affection for anything local that was in any way remarkable. There were those who kept a Thornbank version of The Guinness Book of Records: the heaviest child that had been born here, the fastest runner in the town, the man who had been arrested most for breach of the peace. But that hardly explained that converging ambience of something achieved and possibilities to come in which Dan Scoular moved for them.
Their name for him was, perhaps, a clue. They called him ‘the big man’. It was an expression used of other men in the town, of course. But if the words were used out of any explanatory context, they meant Dan Scoular. Though he was six-feet-one, the implications were more than physical. They meant stature in some less definable sense. They had to do with his being, they suspected, in some way more inviolate than themselves, more autonomously himself. They had to do, perhaps most importantly, with the generosity and ease with which they felt he inhabited what was special about himself, his refusal to abuse a gift or turn it unfairly to his own advantage. For he could be quietly kind.
Yet the image the people of Thornbank had of him was false. They had mythologised his past and falsified his present. They had made him over into something that they wanted him to be. ‘He’s never picked on anybody in his life,’ was a remark so often made in Thornbank in relation to Dan Scoular that it had acquired a seeming immutability, like a rubric carved on a plinth. It was a lie. It conveniently excised from public recollection a few years of his youth when his prodigious capacity for aggression had functioned on his whim and no casual encounter in a pub or at a dance was safe from its explosive arbitrariness.
‘He’s never looked at another woman,’ the oral history said. Perhaps they should have asked his wife Betty, an attractive and spirited woman, about that.
‘He’s his own man, that one,’ was a refrain that no one contradicted. But it was more an appearance than a fact. Dan Scoular didn’t know who he was. He felt daily that people were giving him back a sense of him that in no way matched what was going on. His statue didn’t fit.
But what they needed him to be they had partly accustomed him to pretend to be. He meant something in the life of Thornbank and he tried to live inside that meaning as best he could, like a somnambulist pacing out someone else’s dream. They looked to him to confirm that things were more or less all right. If he was as he had been, living along among them, coping quietly, things couldn’t be that bad. Like the Mount Parish Church clock, he was a familiar fixture by which they checked how things were going. Like that notoriously erratic timepiece, he was misleading. Thornbank was in no better state than Graithnock. It was just less aware of its condition. Dan Scoular was becoming desperately aware of his.
Failing marriages are haunted. They have lost the will for mastery of the present and the future looms as re-enactment of the past. Every day is full of the ghosts of other days, most of them emitting unassuaged rancour at small and large betrayals. New possibilities drown in their lamentations.
That Sunday Betty had wakened first. She heard the voices of the boys downstairs, beginning the statutory quarrel. The sound pulled at her mind like a tether: did you imagine your thoughts could wander off for a moment by themselves? She wondered briefly if their noise had wakened her or if they had been waiting poised like demonic actors, cued into automatic conflict by her consciousness. She rose and put on her housecoat, careful not to waken Dan. It wasn’t something done out of consideration but because it postponed the time when they would have to talk. That was the first small, renewed betrayal, confirmation of where they had come. It was a message in code, delivered to him though he was asleep. He would understand it when he woke.
As she crossed to find her slippers under the dressing-table, the noise downstairs subsided to a civilised murmur and she paused, having lost her motive for getting out of bed. She knelt in front of the mirror, picked up the hairbrush and made a couple of passes at her hair. She noticed herself in the glass and stopped. She was aware of the dishevelled heap of Dan’s body on the bed, reflected from behind her. It was perhaps his humped image beside her face which triggered the memory.
‘And