The Big Man by William McIlvanney Page B

not. Maybe ye just notice it more because we’re out and about so much.’
    ‘Naw. It’s different.’
    Frankie White shrugged and Dan Scoular didn’t enlarge on what he was trying to say. Those casual scatterings of litter meant something to him he wouldn’t have found it easy to translate. They were like the place rejecting its sense of itself and therefore his own sense of it as well. People said you couldn’t go back. More than that, it seemed to him, you couldn’t stay. He wondered if he had been trying to stay in a place that was no longer there. The suspicion of its absence made him question if it ever had been there. He remembered Betty’s disbelief in it early in their marriage.
    A scene had stayed in his mind from their time in the rented flat. They had been sitting on the carpet in front of the fire. He was drinking from a can of beer. She was sipping coffee. It was one of those moments when a theme develops spontaneously out of random conversation. He had stumbled on her incredulity about his past and he had started to feed it scraps from his memory.
    ‘Oh, come on,’ became her refrain.
    ‘Naw, it’s true.’
    ‘You don’t expect me to believe that.’
    ‘Cross ma heart an’ hope for to die. Better still, Ah’ll cross yours. It’s more fun that way. There was another bloke. Sammy Ramsay. Stayed down the road from us. Know what he did one night? He had fags but no matches. Right? Desperate for a smoke. All the shops are shut. All the other houses in darkness. Know what Sammy does? True. Stands on a chair, holds his head up to the light wi’ the fag in his mouth. Smashes the light bulb. Tryin’ to get a light off the filament. That’s gen. Pickin’ Mazda out his heid for a fortnight, he was. The bold Sammy.’
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘Then there was Freddie Taylor. Lookin’ for eight draws on the treble chance. Got to seven. Waitin’ for the eighth and afortune. A home win. He fired the wireless out through the windae on to the front green. We were a passionate people.’
    ‘I think you make them up.’
    Now he wondered himself if he had made something up, not the substance of the incidents but the significance they had come to have for him. His former sense of his past seemed to him now about as incredible, as untrustworthy as it had to Betty. He found himself questioning the shared identity he had found there. But even as he questioned it, he was confronted daily with the stubbornness of place, the hauntingness of its familiar associations.
    Passing every day the house where he had lived with his parents, he felt it most strongly. That small council cottage-type was his private museum of a past he seemed to understand less every day. He had been an only child, born when his mother and father were already in their thirties. That had at first made them even closer to him than they might have been, for they were ready for a child, whetted with longing and bored with the unrestricted time they had, and they had made their lives around him. But when he came into his teens, things changed. It seemed they couldn’t follow him, even in imagination, into the newness of his experience. They had conceived him to be an extension of their own lives, not a contradiction of them.
    The first time it had become clear to all of them that he was becoming a stranger in the house was when he gave up his academic course at school. His parents were incredulous. They saw education as self-evidently the most important thing in his life, the culmination of their efforts on his behalf. For days they threatened, cajoled, bullied, and he refused. When the noise of argument subsided, something irrevocable had happened in their three-fold relationship. It was as if a betrayal had taken place.
    He had lived with that awareness ever since, still did. His motivation at the time, he now knew, had been partly emotional and instinctive, but only partly. It may have been to some extent compounded simply with impatience. But there