The Big Man. William McIlvanney

getting fit. The last week I’d get you up to Glasgow. Into a gym. You’d get another hundred quid for that.’

      Dan Scoular was seeing three hundred pounds on the table.

      ‘If that’s for trainin’, what would Ah get for fightin’?’

      That depends.’

      ‘On what?’

      ‘How you fight.’

      ‘So what’s the wee print?’

      ‘Winners win money. Losers lose it. I’d be betting a lot of money on you. You win, you get your percentage. Double what’s on the table. You lose, you get your bus money out of Glasgow. As far as the city boundary. The Tinto Firs.’

      ‘Ah don’t fancy that bit.’

      Then don’t.’ Matt Mason was getting impatient. ‘It’s a freelance job. It doesn’t have a pension scheme.’

      He lifted the notes and held them up, halfway between the table and his pocket, his rings glinting above the money like a promise of what it could lead to.

      ‘Money depreciates fast these days,’ he said. ‘Look. I’ve got things to do. Your first fight, big man, is with yourself. Can you win it? You’ve got thirty seconds – to come to the line.’

      He was smiling at his own pun. He was so sure of things. Dan couldn’t think at the moment of one certainty, except the feeling he had to use himself in some way for his family. He sensed that what he was being offered must separate him from where he had been. But perhaps he was already separated from there. He looked at Alan Morrison and the others in the bar. They hadn’t exactly rallied round when he challenged Billy Fleming. Why should he worry about distancing himself from them? He saw no particular merit in his ability to fight. It had meant something important to his father, almost a kind of sacred trust that you shouldn’t abuse. But if you had lost the way to think like that, if you didn’t believe in the gift, why not make money out of it? It was at least putting it to a use. If he wasn’t who Wullie Mairshall and others thought he was, why not be who he could be? How many chances was he going to get? And the offer was closing.

      ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Looks like either the money goes in your pocket or me.’

THREE

      Fast Frankie White was a person of great but misdirected enthusiasms, the sort of man who, if he had been of a more literary inclination, might have devoted two years of his life to learning Spanish in order to read Dante in the original. As a young man, he had been inexplicably to America and, though the trip was so short that people meeting him in the street on his return would ask him when he was going, the experience was something he always carried around with him, a fragment of fool’s gold he believed would lead him to the real thing. For the hurried vision of America he had glimpsed, the sense of how quickly and surprisingly money could be made, had left him with a kind of Klondyke mentality. Like a mad prospector who has lost his map, he stumbled around his life, looking for gold where there was none, following hunches that were hardly more than superstitions.