The remark had the suddenness of a gun going off, leaving you wondering where it came from or if that was what you had heard at all. The confirmation that it had happened was the solidity of the silence that followed it.
‘You hear me? You talka loada shite. Ah’m fed up listenin’ to you.’
Vince shuffled uncomfortably like a man looking for the way down from a platform. When he spoke, his voice had lost its rhetorical tone.
‘I’ve got my opinions.’
‘Shurrup!’
The pint Alan had been filling foamed, forgotten, over the rim of the glass.
‘Ah don’t want to hear yer opinions,’ Billy Fleming said. ‘You believe in violence? Come out here an’ Ah’ll show ye violence.’
Vince spoke quietly.
‘That’s not the kind of –’
‘Ah said shurrup! You’re not payin’ attention. Open yer mouth again and I’ll put a pint-dish down it.’
The others in the room watched helplessly while Vince went as still as if a block of ice had formed round him. Alan turned off the beer tap.
‘Hey!’
The word was out of Dan Scoular’s mouth before he knew he was going to say it. Some basic feeling had expressed itself beyond his conscious control. The trouble taking place in the pub wasn’t his and he would have preferred to have no part in it. But the injustice of the event was so blatant. His instincts had cast his vote for him. But nobody else voted with him or, if they did, the ballot was secret. He felt his isolation, and his head was left to work out how to follow where his heart had led.
The word had been quiet but it introduced a counter-pressure in the room, a careful groping for leverage. Billy Fleming turned slowly, almost luxuriously, towards where he felt the pressure coming from. He looked steadily at Dan Scoular.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Can Ah help ye?’
‘The boy’s just talkin’.’
‘Not any more he’s not.’
They watched each other.
‘An’ if he does open his mouth, he’ll get it.’
‘You’ll not touch the boy.’
‘Are you his daddy?’
The pressure was balanced evenly between them and, deliberately, with very measured calculation, Billy Fleming tilted it in his favour.
‘Well, you’ll get it as well, if ye interfere.’
Dan Scoular smiled, realising Vince had been a decoy. The smile was camouflage he knew couldn’t protect him much longer. He was angry with himself for having been so easily left with no options. He thought of something Betty had once said of him: ‘When you walk into a room, the only attitude that seems to occur to you is, “What game do you play here? I bet I can play that as good as you.” It never seems to occur to you to say, “I don’t believe in that game. I think it’s a rotten game. I’m not playing.” Why do you think you have to accept the rules?’ It looked as if he had done it again. But he was in the game now and all he could think of to do was try and play it with style.
‘You want it badly, don’t ye?’ he said.
He walked towards the other man and, as Billy Fleming tensed in preparation, walked past him. Billy Fleming was momentarily uncertain, thinking he was being walked out on. He was glancing towards Matt Mason as he heard Dan Scoular speaking from the door, which was open.
‘Alan doesny like fights in his pub,’ he said and went out.
As Billy Fleming followed, Matt Mason stood and went to the window. The assurance of his action, as if he had declared himself the promoter of this fight, magnetised the still-stunned reactions of the others into imitation. Nobody followed the two men out. Frankie White crossed towards the window and the three domino players rose and moved hurriedly after him. Alan came tentatively out from the carapace of his bar, paused, turned back for his glass, perhaps thinking he might need its assistance to get as far as the window, and slowly joined them. Vince Mabon, not knowing what else to do, took his place there, too. They had become an audience.
At first all they could see were their images reflected in the curtainless window, a motley group portrait straining into the darkness to look at themselves. Then the headlights of a car came on. They saw Billy Fleming take off his jacket and lay it across the bonnet of the car. Dan Scoular kept on his light jerkin.
The figures flickered briefly in the headlights of the car and it was over, like a lantern-slide show that breaks down just as it’s getting started. They were looking at an effect that didn’t appear to have had any very clear cause. Billy Fleming’s head hit the ground with a soundless and sickening jolt that some grimacing expulsions of breath in the bar provided the sound-track for. He lay with a peacefulness that suggested he had found his final resting place. A man came out of the car and Dan Scoular started to help him to lift Billy Fleming into the back seat. Billy Fleming had obviously regained consciousness before they got him there but he raised no objections to their assistance.
The realisation that he didn’t appear to be too seriously hurt opened a valve on the tension of what they had just seen and humour blew out, a gush of relief at not having to go on confronting seriously the reality of violence.
‘Ah’m glad Ah didny buy a ticket for that one,’ Sam MacKinlay said. ‘Ah wish it had been on the telly. At least we could see a slow-motion replay.’
Nearly everybody laughed. Dan Scoular walked back in to a festive atmosphere that caught him unawares. He had been involved in that mood of nervous recuperation that had always followed a fight for him, a dazed sense of having had his self- control mugged by his own violence. Their smiling faces seemed to him contrived. They couldn’t be feeling something as simple as their expressions showed. He felt like a man in quicksand with whom other people were leaning over to shake hands. Nobody had wanted the fight to happen and now everybody seemed delighted that it had. Even the man who had been with the one he hit was smiling.
‘Right!’ he was saying to Alan. ‘Everybody gets a drink. Give everybody what they’re having. And a gin and tonic for me.’
Frankie White was looking at him and saying, ‘What did Ah tell ye? One good hit!’
‘Come on,’ the man said. ‘Do it. And a double for yourself.’
The room was becoming a party and Dan Scoular was apparently the guest of honour. It seemed churlish not to attend. He shrugged.
‘Ye not want to get yer big bodyguard a pint on a drip?’ Sam MacKinlay shouted.
Everybody was laughing. Alan Morrison was hurrying about behind the bar as if the place was crowded.
‘A few folk will be sorry that they weren’t here the night,’ he said.
Before Dan Scoular had cleared his head, he was sitting at a table with Frankie White and the other man.
‘Dan,’ Frankie White was saying. ‘This gentleman is Matt Mason. Matt, you’ve seen who this is. Dan Scoular in person. A man with a demolition-ball at the end of each wrist.’
The talk of the others was like background music, all being played by special request for Dan Scoular. Matt Mason shook hands with him. The man who had been in the car came in and sat at their table. Matt Mason introduced him.
‘Ah think Big Billy has a slight case of concussion,’ Eddie Foley said. ‘His head hit the ground with a terrible wallop.’
The domino players were shouting over.
‘Thanks, mate.’
‘Cheers!’
‘All the best.’
Matt Mason gave them a regal wave.
‘A