The Big Man by William McIlvanney Read Free Book Online Page A

outhouse, the purpose of which he wondered about.
    He breathed in deeply and, finding himself put down here outside his routine, remembered being younger. There had been a time in his early twenties when he and a group of friends used to look for out-of-the-way places like this. One of them could get the use of a car. They had all finally admitted to one another how amazing women were and it felt like a shared secret. Weekends were for them what an unexplored coast might have been to a Viking. They piled into the car and went ‘Somewhere’ and talked among themselves and talked to girls and drank and the password of their group was ‘we’ll see what happens’. He wished he were coming here now on those terms. He wanted just to go into the place and have a drink and see what happened. He wished they hadn’t a purpose in coming. But Matt Mason didn’t seem to have noticed the place as itself, looking up at the lighted window that faced out into the car park.
    ‘Move the car up to opposite the window.’
    Eddie climbed back into the car, drove it towards the lightedwindow and then backed against the opposite wall of the car park so that the Mercedes faced towards the window. He shut off the engine and doused the lights. Lighting a cigarette, he studied the other two through the windscreen.
    He saw Billy Fleming watch Matt Mason attentively, like a trained retriever waiting for the signal. Seeing Billy’s preoccupation silenced by the windscreen and framed in it, as if through the lens of a microscope, Eddie thought what a strange thing he was – an expert in impersonal violence. He felt no compunction about contemplating Billy so coldly. Billy wasn’t his friend. He wasn’t anybody’s friend, as far as Eddie knew. If Matt Mason had given Billy his instructions and nodded him towards the car, he would have come for Eddie as readily as anyone else. It was how he made his living, being an extension of Matt Mason’s will.
    He did it well. Eddie had several times been astonished by the agility of that hugeness. But the results of that dexterity had made Eddie look away. He remembered one man whose face looked as if it had been hit by a small truck. Could you talk about doing anything well the purpose of which was so bad?
    Eddie would have felt contempt for him except that he was honest enough to admit to himself that he couldn’t afford it. His own position wasn’t so much different. He might spare a thought for the man who imagined he was just coming out for a quiet pint, but that was as useful as flowers on the grave.
    Eddie might like to believe that he still had a conscience but the main effect of it at the moment was to make him glad he couldn’t hear what was being said. It meant he didn’t have to worry about it too much. He just sat, smoking his cigarette and knowing his place. He watched Matt Mason prepare what was going to happen. He looked like somebody setting a trap for a species he understands precisely.

TWO
    The sign of the Red Lion had rebounded on itself a bit, like a statement to which subsequent circumstances have given an ironic significance. It seemed meant to be a lion rampant. But the projecting rod of metal to which the sign was fixed by two cleeks had buckled in some forgotten storm. The lion that had been rearing so proudly now looked as if it were in the process of lying down or even hiding, and exposure to rough weather appeared to have given it the mange.
    That image of a defiant posture being beaten down was appropriate. The place still called itself a hotel, although the only two rooms that were kept in readiness stood nearly every night in stillness, ghostly with clean white bed-linen, shrines to the unknown traveller. The small dining-room was seldom used, since pub lunches were the only meals ever in demand. The Red Lion scavenged a lean life from the takings of the public bar.
    Like alcohol for a terminal alcoholic, the bar was both the means of the hotel’s survival and the