The Big Man by William McIlvanney

If he had stayed, everything would have been all right. The reason for Alec’s going became in his father’s mind something that he had caused. From there it was but a short tirade to Alan’s main theme, a sweeping dismissal of the young. They loved going to loud places. ‘Noise isny meaning’ was one of his darker utterances. They smoked strange cigarettes in groups. He would talk of the dangers of such practices while he was downing a double whisky. It was as if they, too, had emigrated, not geographically but socially, to other customs, to new attitudes, to more exotic pleasures.
    Like his son, they never came regularly to his place, except for one. Vince Mabon was a student. ‘Politics’ was his cryptic answer to anyone in the bar who asked him what he was studying. He often said it with a cupping gesture of his hands that seemed to imply a casual encompassing of the world and all it might contain. Vince had a kind of deliberate intensity, a way of turning forensically into any question, even if you were asking him the time. No conversation seemed trivial with him. He always gave the impression of being on a mission of some sort. He didn’t drink here so much as he came among them.
    He was in the bar that Sunday. He had explained to nobodyin particular that, as he had no lectures the next morning, he had managed to stay in Thornbank another night. The news was received without a display of fireworks. The only others present at the time, besides old Alan behind the bar, were the three domino players and Fast Frankie White.
    The domino players were always looking for a fourth because as purists they hated sleeping dominoes. With not all the dominoes in use, arguments frequently broke out among them, arguments that almost always came back to theatrical complaints about the impossibility of deploying the full complexity of their skills when not every domino was brought into play. They sounded like Grand Masters being asked to play without the queen. Tonight there seemed no possibility of their artistry being given full range. Alan was engaged in trying to get Vince Mabon to admit the folly of being young. Fast Frankie White was drinking with his customary self-consciousness, as if checking the camera-angles.
    He was an outsider in his home town, Frankie White, and perhaps everywhere. Nobody was even sure where the nickname ‘Fast’ had come from, maybe from the publicity agent he carried around in his head. Most people in Thornbank knew that whatever he did it wasn’t strictly legal. But since they knew of nobody he had harmed, except for breaking his mother’s heart (and what son didn’t?), they tolerated him. He might be able to sell the image he had made of himself elsewhere but they knew him too well to take him seriously. He was a performance and they let it happen, as long as it didn’t interfere significantly with them. Tonight he had kept to himself, drinking his whisky with a nervous expectation, and seeming to listen with sophisticated amusement to Vince and Alan.
    Vince’s mushroom hairstyle was nodding heatedly at Alan and he had spilled some of his light beer on his UCLA tee-shirt. Alan was holding his whisky glass to the optic and shaking his head.
    ‘Well, I wouldn’t go, anyway,’ Vince said. ‘And that’s for sure.’
    ‘But they’re payin’ his way,’ Alan said, and dropped a token bead of water in his glass. The whole trip won’t cost him a penny.’
    ‘Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.’
    ‘It’s his son and his wife, for God’s sake. Bert’s got two grand-daughters out there he’s never even seen.’
    ‘His son could bring them over.’
    ‘It’s not like he’s goin’ to stay in South Africa. Ah could see the force of yer objections then. It’s just a holiday.’
    ‘He’s still sanctioning an oppressive regime,’ Vince said.
    Alan emptied an ashtray that had nothing in it, wiped it with a cloth that made it slightly less clean and replaced it on the bar. He looked