city.
The atmosphere in the car intensified the feeling. They seemed to be travelling within where they had come from. The plush upholstery appeared foreign to the places they were passing through. With the exception of Billy’s jeans and trainers, their city clothes would have looked out of place outside, as if they had come dressed for the wrong event. The smoke from Matt Mason’s cigar surrounded them, cocooning them in themselves.
Negotiating the winding ways, Eddie felt himself subject to the unexpected nature of events, the way an outcrop of land suddenly threw the road to the left, the recalcitrance of a hill. These roads were less invention than discovery. They weren’t merely asphalt conveyor belts along which sealed capsules fired people from one identity to the next as if they had dematerialised in the one place and rematerialised in the other. These roads made you notice them, rushed trees towards you, flung them over your shoulder, laid out a valley, flicked a flight of birds into your vision. They made Eddie aware of a countryside his ignorance of which was beginning to oppress him with questions that baffled him. What kind of people would live in that isolated farm on the hill? What kind of trees were they?
‘Flowers,’ he said suddenly. ‘The names of flowers. Ah always wanted to know a bit about that. Ah canny tell one from another. That’s true. Ah’ve got bother tellin’ a daisy from a dandelion.’
‘Six,’ Billy Fleming said. ‘That was a cracker. Only thing that wasn’t mashed tae a pulp was its beak. Definitely the prize-winner.’
Eddie became aware of Matt Mason’s silence. He had learned to be wary of that silence. He decided to push his misgivings aside. He was here on a job for Matt Mason. It wouldn’t do to confuse his loyalties.
‘Fast Frankie’s not too hot on the directions,’ he said, reidentifying himself with the other two and their purposes. ‘Ah hope his information’s more reliable. Ye think the big man’s what he says he is?’
‘Frankie thinks he is,’ Matt Mason said, and remembered the time in the Old Scotia with Frankie talking.
Fast Frankie White was a handsome quick-eyed man with a smile as selective as a roller-towel. He had been born in Thornbank – so he should know what he was talking about – and had left it by way of petty theft. He still went back there from time to time, usually when he was in trouble, to wrap his widowed mother’s house round him like a bandage. He often said more than it was wise to believe but in the Old Scotia he had sounded convincing.
‘Okay. Ye’ve got a decision to make. Fast. Ah know. But Ah’m tellin’ ye. He’s yer man. No question. Ah’ve known him for years. He’s the man ye’re lookin’ for. And easily worked. A big, straight man. Straight as a die. That’s what ye need, isn’t it? Honesty’s the best raw material in the world. Especially the poor kind. He’s gold for you, Matt. A rough nugget, certainly. But you could shape him into anything ye want. What’s he got in Thornbank? What’s anybody got in Thornbank? He’s on his uppers. Been idle for months. Used to work in the pits. How many pits are there now? Was working up at Sullom Voe for a while. But the wife didn’t fancy the separation. See, that’s the secret. That’s how you’re goin’ to get him. He’s a great family man. An’ what’s he providin’ for his wife and weans? You can offer him a way to do that. He’ll bite, Matt. Ah’m tellin’ ye, he’ll bite. And once he’s got a taste, ye’ll have him for good. An’ all they’re goin’ to be able to do . . . With this man? Come on!’
Matt Mason remembered the image of Frankie with his arms crossed in front of him. He had swung his arms apart, hands up, with the brightness and activity of the pub behind him. It was the gesture of surrender we’re supposed to make when faced with a gun.
‘Different class,’ Frankie White had said.
In the almost dark a pit-bing loomed on their right. It was overgrown with rough grass, a man-made parody of a hill. The despoliation of the countryside around them made them feel more at home. Inside the car they enlivened into a conversation.
‘Not long now,’ Eddie said. ‘If he’s that good, what’s he doin’ living in a place like this?’
Matt Mason smiled to himself.
‘Maybe he likes the quiet life.’
‘He better learn not to like it then,’ Billy Fleming said.
‘We’ll find out how good he is,’ Matt Mason said.
Eddie put the lights on.
‘He’ll maybe not come,’ he said.
‘Same time every Sunday, Frankie says,’ Matt Mason said.
‘The Red Lion,’ Eddie said.
‘Funny name for a hotel,’ Billy Fleming said. ‘Ye wonder who thinks them up.’
The arrival of darkness had welded them into a group with a unified purpose. The variousness of the countryside was obliterated. It could have been anywhere. There was only the familiar interior of the car and the headlights blow-torching their own path through the night. Matt Mason looked at his watch.
‘We’ll be in good time,’ he said. He looked across at Billy Fleming. ‘You ready?’
‘Born ready.’
In the dim light he looked as if he might be telling the truth. The big shoulders seemed to be filling most of the back seat of the car. The face, planing intermittently out of obscurity, looked relentless as a statue. He carefully took off his wrist-watch and wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it in his jacket pocket.
Everybody knows and doesn’t know a Thornbank. It’s one of those places you’ve driven through and never been there. It occurs in conversations like parentheses. ‘It took us four hours to get there,’ someone says, ‘and the kids were fractious after two miles. We went the Thornbank road.’ Hearing it mentioned, outsiders who know of it may still have to think briefly to relocate it. It’s the kind of place people get a fix on by association with the nearest big town, knowing it as a lost suburb of somewhere else.
In Thornbank’s case the big town is Graithnock, the industrial hardness of which dominates the soft farmland of the Ayrshire countryside around it. Graithnock is a town friendly and rough, like a brickie’s handshake. It is built above rich coalfields which have long since run out, ominously.
By the time the coal was gone, Graithnock hardly noticed because it had other things to do: there was whisky-distilling and heavy engineering and the shoe factory and later the making of farm machinery. But the shoe factory closed and the world-famous engineering plant was bought by Americans and mysteriously run down and the making of farm machinery was transferred to France and the distillery didn’t seem to be doing so well.
Not much in the way of coherent explanation filtered as far as the streets. At meetings and on television men who looked as if they had taken lessons in sincerity read from the book of economic verbiage, the way priests used to dispense the Bible in Latin to the illiterate. All the workers understood was that there were dark and uncontrollable forces to which everyone was subject, and some were more subject than others. When the haphazardly organised industrial action failed, they took their redundancy money and some went on holiday to Spain and some drank too much for a while and they all felt the town turn sour on itself around them.
For, like John Henry, Graithnock had been born to work. It was what it knew how to do. It was the achievement it threw back into the face of its own bleakness. It liked its pleasures, and some of them
