The Big Man. William McIlvanney
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‘Mum! He’s playin’ patience!’
‘Shurrup. So what?’ Raymond said.
‘Two canny play patience. Ya bam!’
‘You said you didn’t want to play.’ Raymond was now using carefully formal English, showing his mother how calm he was, how full of rectitude.
‘Ah said Ah didn’t want to play whist. But there’s other games.’
‘That’s right. Patience.’
‘Ah said Ah would play rummy.’
‘I’m not playin’ rummy. You don’t play right. You don’t even know the rules. You make a run outa clubs and spades and everything. You’re daft.’
Danny kicked away Raymond’s line of cards and Raymond lunged to hit him and Betty screamed, ‘Raymond! The two of you! Shut up! For God’s sake, shut your mouths!’ They both looked at her in a shocked way, as if they had just discovered that their mother was mad. Her own next remark made Betty think they might be right.
‘What’ve you had to eat, the two of you?’ she asked and couldn’t herself see how that related to the problem.
‘We had flakes,’ Danny said in passing. ‘Ye know what he did, Mum? He stopped playin’ because Ah was winnin’. Ye did so!’
‘Did not.’
‘Did sot.’
‘Not.’
‘Sot.’
‘Not, not, not.’
‘Sot, sot, sot, sot, sot. Sot, sot. Sot, sot, sot –’
‘Danny! Stop! Stop, Danny!’
In the silence she gathered up the cards and put them on the mantelpiece.
‘Aw, Mum!’ from Raymond.
She resentfully made them a breakfast of sausage and egg and toast, salving her rebellious conscience by making them lay the table. She tried not to let her affections take sides. But Raymond was so unfairly arrogant, playing his age advantage against Danny. He was thirteen against ten and he used those three years as a brutal birthright. His darkness of hair seemed to her for the moment sinister. Danny, still fair like herself, seemed an aggressed-on innocent, a small boy who sometimes gave the heart-wrenching impression that life was for him like jaywalking at Le Mans. She had a weakness for his passionate desire for justice, even when it was totally misguided.
While she fed them, she remembered an incident last year. She and Dan had been sitting in the house when Danny had rushed in from playing football in the street outside. His cheeks were florid from exertion and his eyes flamed with intensity.
‘Dad! Dad!’ he had been calling from the outside door.
He arrived in the room like the bearer of the news the world had been waiting for.
‘Dad, Dad! Ah told the boys you would know the answer.’
Dan had glanced up from his paper.
‘Twenty-two,’ he said.
‘Naw, naw. Listen, Dad. Andrew got hit in the face wi’ the ball.’
Dan looked at her and rolled his eyes.
‘Hit in the face wi’ the ball!’ Danny said.
‘In the face,’ Dan said. ‘With the ball. Correct.’
‘All right. He was goin’ to tackle Michael. And Michael lashed it. He really thumped it. An’ it hit Andrew right in the face. Full force.’
‘Amazin’,’ Dan said.
‘Naw. But listen, Dad. Is it a foul?’
Dan started to laugh.
‘What d’ye mean?’
‘Is it a foul?’
‘How can it be a foul?’
‘But it hit him right in the face!’
‘Danny! It’s not a foul. Because the ball hits somebody in the face. It’s mebbe an accident. But it’s not a foul.’
Betty remembered Danny’s disappointment and then the hope that rekindled his eyes, the counsel for the defence who has found the incontrovertible point of law.
‘But, Dad,’ he said. ‘Andrew’s cryin’. He’s really roarin’.’
While Dan explained that tears didn’t make a foul, Betty thought she had glimpsed the core of Danny and remembered why she loved him so much. He believed that circumstances had to yield to feeling. He was such a lover that he couldn’t understand why the deepest feeling didn’t make the rules. As Danny trailed disconsolately back out the house to announce the bad news from the adult world, Betty felt a compassion for him that was out of all proportion to a football match.
It was perhaps that memory that determined how she would decide when Raymond picked up the cards from the mantelpiece as soon as he had finished eating. He was about to play patience again.
‘Raymond,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Ah’m goin’ to play at cards.’
‘With Danny?’
‘No way. Danny’s a diddy.’
The venom of it annoyed her.
‘No he’s not,’ she said. ‘You want to play, Danny?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Danny put his last piece of toast in his mouth and crossed towards Raymond. Raymond threw the cards on to the floor. Danny painstakingly picked them up.
‘Right, Raymond,’ Betty said. ‘You don’t want to play with Danny, you don’t want to play. But just make sure you leave him alone.’
She heard Dan coming downstairs as Raymond brushed past her. When she went into the kitchen, Dan was standing, wearing only a pair of old trousers and looking drowsily into a packet of cornflakes as if there was a message there he must decipher. His rumpled presence somehow provoked her and one of those familiar quarrels over nothing already hung in the air around them. The rules for such quarrels were that the cause of them should be irrelevant and that the venom they evoked should be out of all proportion. Raymond had exiled himself to the back green and she could hear him kicking a ball steadily against the wall of the house as if he was trying to tell her something. Danny was pretending to play with the cards that had caused the trouble but he had put the television on. Dan shook the cornflake packet and its contents rustled faintly. The sound made her grit her teeth.
‘Oh-ho,’