The Big Man by William McIlvanney Page A

at his glass for advice.
    ‘You ever been to Prestwick for the day?’ he asked.
    ‘What?’
    ‘You ever been to Prestwick for the day?’
    Vince looked round, appealing to a non-existent public. He smiled to himself since nobody else was available.
    ‘I think that’s what they call a non sequitur, Alan,’ he said.
    ‘That’s maybe what you call it. Ah just call it a question. Fuckin’ answer it.’
    ‘Yes. Guilty. I’ve been to Prestwick for the day. A lot of times.’
    ‘Well. Don’t go again. It’s a Tory council.’
    Vince was contemptuous and Frankie White was laughing into his glass when Matt Mason and Billy Fleming walked in. Matt Mason came in first and Billy Fleming followed close, like a consort. Everybody else in the bar paid attention but not much. Strangers dropped in from time to time, on their way from somewhere to somewhere, but seldom stayed long.
    ‘Yes, sir?’ Alan said.
    ‘A gin and tonic,’ Matt Mason said, ‘and a pint of heavy.’
    A small, barely perceptible event occurred in the room. Sam MacKinlay, one of the domino players, lifted his pint and sipped it briefly with his pinky out. Amusement almost happened between the other two domino players but didn’t quite manage to survive the look that Billy Fleming sent over like a sudden frost. Matt Mason, watching Alan put tonic in the gin and begin to pull the pint, added to the chill with his preoccupied stare. The occurrence had been fiercely concentrated, was over in a moment, but it was as if the others had been shown a capsule it would be dangerous to swallow. In case they had missed thesignificance of their experience, Matt Mason imprinted his voice on it quietly.
    This it?’ he said.
    Alan was confused. He looked at the gin with half of the bottle of tonic poured into it and the pint, which had a perfect head on it.
    ‘A gin and tonic and a pint of heavy,’ he said.
    ‘You never heard of lemon?’
    Alan bristled for a second, looked and understood what he was seeing.
    ‘We’re just out of lemon, sir.’
    ‘Ice?’
    ‘Ah’ll get ye some.’
    He did. Matt Mason paid and walked over to the table beside the window, with Billy Fleming following. On his way, he glanced briefly at Frankie White, who was watching him. Before sitting down, he looked out of the window.
    ‘A ringside seat,’ he said quietly to Billy Fleming as they sat down.
    They didn’t have long to wait. Dan Scoular came in. He brought a change of atmosphere with him. He tended to make other people feel enlarged through his presence, through his physical expansiveness to make expansiveness seem natural. He never intimidated. When he came in, you felt he was for sharing. Coming in this time, he was the occasion for talk about the rain, which hadn’t happened. Frankie White joined in the conversation pleasantly. The room relaxed. The domino players rediscovered how involving dominoes were. Alan and Vince stalked each other again through separate labyrinths of preconception. Dan Scoular tried to drown his sadness in his pint.
    The beer seemed to turn sour as it touched his lips. He felt at once as if coming to the pub had been a mistake, one of the many things he did these days without being sure why he did them. It was as if habit was keeping appointments at which the largest part of him didn’t turn up. Frankie White’s calling him ‘big man’ hadn’t helped. Big man. The implied stature beyond the physical the words sought to bestow on him was an embarrassment. He remembered an expression his mother had usedto cut him down to size when he was in his arrogant teens and impressed by the status he felt himself acquiring. ‘Aye, ye’re a big man but a wee coat fits ye.’ She hadn’t been wrong. His sense of his own worth at the moment could have been comfortably contained in a peanut-shell. But the people he came from kept stubbornly dressing him up in regal robes of reputation, not seeming to realise he had abdicated.
    Wullie Mairshall was an example.