Out Wide

by Jim Clark, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The horn went at the road end below Whinrig at eight o'clock, and again at five past, and at ten past Ally Brydon got out of the van and walked up.

The track to Whinrig ran between two dykes with the lambing parks on either side, and the ewes lifted their heads and watched him go by the way ewes watch anything that is not carrying a bucket. There was frost still in the shadow of the dykes. The steading was at the top, and on the back of it, against the hill, was the lambing shed, a long lean-to of corrugated iron with a hurricane lamp burning inside, though it had been light for two hours.

Dand Purves was on his knees in the end pen with his jersey sleeve pushed up to the shoulder and his arm in a ewe to the elbow.

"Ye're late," Ally said.

Dand did not look round. His face had gone still, with his eyes on nothing, on the corrugated iron a foot in front of him.

"It's backwards," he said. "Both legs back."

Ally leaned on the hurdle. He was a joiner from the town and he had been coming up to Whinrig for three springs now, and he knew no more about lambing than he had the first time, except that when Dand's face went like that you did not talk to him.

The ewe strained. Dand did nothing while she strained. He kept his arm where it was and let her push against it, and when she stopped he pushed back, slowly, the whole lamb back into her the width of a hand. Then his arm moved, a little, searching. Ally watched the muscle in his forearm. He found what he was after and brought it round with his hand cupped over it, and out came a small yellow hoof and a leg, folded, and then he went back in for the other.

"Ye've got to cover the foot," he said, to nobody, "or it tears her."

The second leg came. He took the two of them in one hand and waited. The ewe strained, and he drew with her strain, not before it, not harder than she pushed, and the lamb came out all at once in a slither onto the straw.

He cleared its mouth with his finger. He lifted it by the back legs and gave it one swing and laid it down at the ewe's head, and the ewe put her nose to it and began to talk to it, low, in her throat. The lamb sneezed.

Dand sat back on his heels.

Geordie Purves came in at the door with two buckets. He was a broad short man with a face like a closed gate. He put the buckets down and nodded at Ally, as he would nod at the weather, and looked along the pens.

"Seven's no right," he said.

Dand looked at pen seven. A gimmer stood in it with her head down, and every so often she lay down and got up again.

"She's a while to go," Dand said.

"Aye."

"I'll be back by dark."

His father did not answer that. He picked up a bucket and went down the pens with it, filling the water tins one by one, and did not look round. Dand washed his arm in the other bucket. The water went pink and then brown. He dried it on a sack and rolled his sleeve down, and they went out, and at the door he stopped and looked back at seven for a moment, and then came on.

---

There were six of them in the back of the van, on the wheel arches and on Ally's toolboxes, with their boots in their laps and the smell of dubbin and wintergreen, and Dand in the front. Jock Hogarth, who was eighteen stone and played in the middle of the scrum because there was nowhere else to put him, leaned forward between the seats.

"Did he bring his boots?"

"He's got his boots," Ally said.

Dand had them in a meal sack between his feet. His hands were brown to the wrist with iodine.

"Four trainings ye've missed," Ally said to the windscreen. He had not meant to say it. "Four. Since Christmas."

Dand had his head against the window and his eyes shut.

"Ye'll no miss me till I'm gone," he said.

In the back somebody laughed. Ally said nothing. Dand had told him in September that this was the last year. He had told him the September before that as well, and the one before that.

By Greenlaw he was asleep.

---

The ground was on the haugh by the river, roped on three sides, with a bank on the fourth where the people stood. By eleven the bank was black with them. There was a tannoy on a pole that whistled when the man spoke into it, and a hut with a tea urn, and a van selling pies, and a cold wind coming down the valley from the west with the sun in it, so that the flags on the corner posts stood straight out and cracked.

Whiteadder were in the first tie after the dinner hour, against a Selkirk side that had come down in a bus.

Ally had played with Dand for six seasons and he still could not have told anybody what it was. You could stand on that bank and watch the whole tie and come away thinking that Dand Purves was a nice tidy footballer who did not like to exert himself. He did not look fast. That was the first thing, and the thing that people from outside never got over. In the second minute Ally put the ball out to him off a scrum, near enough on their own twenty-five, and Dand took it in one hand and held it by his hip like a loaf, and went off down the touchline at what looked like three-quarter pace, upright, the way a man runs for a bus he is fairly sure he will catch.

Their wing came across at him flat out. Then their centre. Then their full-back, from the far side, cutting the angle, with his head down and his arms going.

Somewhere in the middle of the field it became plain to everybody on the bank, all at the same moment, that none of them was going to get there. You could hear it. The noise changed. They had not been beaten for pace, exactly. Their wing had been closing the whole way. It was only that he had been closing on where Dand was going to be, and Dand, when he got there, was not quite there, but a yard further out, or a yard further on, and the wing had to put a foot down and change, and every time he changed he lost a yard. Dand never changed. He leaned. He went past the full-back on the outside with a little drift of his shoulders, without a sidestep, without anything you could have pointed at, and the full-back's feet went from under him on the turn and he sat down.

Dand put the ball down behind the posts and walked back.

They won that one by eleven points, and the next one, against a Berwick side, by six.

---

He was not in the hut at half time in the semi-final, nor after it. Ally found him at the telephone box by the gate, hunched in it with the door wedged open with his boot and four pennies in his fingers, waiting for the operator.

Ally waited outside.

"She's had them," Dand said, when he came out. "Twins. The second one wasnae breathing and he got it going."

"Good," Ally said.

"Aye."

They walked back across the car park together. Dand had his jersey on under his jacket, the green and white hoops, and he kept his hands in his jacket pockets, and he did not look at the bank.

Ally had asked him once. Two seasons ago, in the hut at Earlston, with the rain on the roof. Not how he did it. Ally was not daft enough to ask that. He had asked him what he was doing, out there, when he got the ball.

Dand had thought about it for a long time, unlacing his boots.

"I wait," he had said, "till they've made their minds up."

"And then?"

"Then I go where they're no."

Ally had told it since to every young wing that came to Whiteadder. Stay out wide and wait till they've made their minds up. Every one of them had nodded, and gone out, and run as hard as he could straight at the first man he saw.

---

The final was against Ettrickbank, and Ettrickbank had been watching.

They were a town side and they had won it the two years before. Their forwards had necks like bullocks. On their wing they had a red-headed boy called Ormiston who had been the Scottish schools' champion at the hundred yards, and before the kick-off Ally saw their captain take Ormiston by the elbow and point down the field at Dand, and say something, and Ormiston nod.

The sun was down on the hills at the river end by then and coming straight up the ground, so that everybody on the field had a shadow three times his length. The wind had not dropped.

It was hard from the start. Ettrickbank did not give the ball away, and when they had it they kept it among their forwards and walked it up the field a yard at a time, and when Whiteadder had it Ormiston stood off his own wing and came across into the space in front of Dand and stayed there. Twice Ally put it wide. Twice Ormiston was on Dand as the ball arrived, and Dand gave it back inside, and the move died.

Jock Hogarth got a try for Whiteadder out of a heap of bodies on the line, and nobody converted it. Ettrickbank scored through the middle and converted theirs. Five points to three.

Then there was not much time left. You could tell by the bank. The noise had gone thin and high.

Ettrickbank had a scrum on the Whiteadder twenty-five. Their scrum-half put it in and it came back to them clean and went along their line, and their centre dropped it. It went bouncing back towards the Whiteadder posts, turning over on the hard ground the way a rugby ball does, and Ally went down on it, and got up with it, with an Ettrickbank forward arriving on top of him, and threw it out blind.

He did not see where it went. He was on his back. He heard the bank.

When he got up, Dand was thirty yards away and going down the left touchline, not fast, the ball in one hand at his hip, his shadow running out in front of him. Ormiston was with him.

Ormiston was running as fast as Ally had ever seen anybody run. You could see it in his face, which was red and set, and in his arms, which were going like pistons, and in his feet, which hit the ground very hard. For thirty yards he stayed level. He was on Dand's inside, a yard off, and once he reached for him, and Dand was not there. Ally never saw Dand go any faster. He saw the yard between them become two, and then three. It was not that Dand had got away. It was that Ormiston, every time he looked across to see where Dand was, lost a little.

Dand never looked at him.

At halfway the Ettrickbank full-back came off his line to meet him. He was an old hand, that full-back. He did not rush. He came across at an angle and slowed, and set himself, and waited, the way you are taught.

Dand came on at him at the same pace. Then, ten yards out, he slowed. Only a shade. Ally saw the full-back see it and go for it, the weight going onto his front foot, his hands coming up for the tackle.

Dand went past him on the outside. There was no swerve in it at all. The full-back's front foot was down and his weight was on it, and by the time he had got it back under him and turned, Dand was ten yards on with nobody in front of him but his own shadow, which was long by then and went before him all the way to the posts.

He put the ball down between them. The bank came over the rope.

Wull Fairbairn kicked the conversion with the ball in a little nest of earth he had scraped with his heel, and it was eight points to five, and the whistle went.

---

The cup was presented from a trestle table in front of the hut by the wife of the man who owned the tweed mill. Ally went up for it. There were people all round, pressing, and boys climbing on the rails, and the man on the tannoy saying the name of the club and saying it again, and Jock Hogarth weeping openly with a towel round his neck.

When Ally turned round with the cup to hold it up for the bank, he looked for Dand, and Dand was not there.

He was not in the hut. His clothes were gone from the peg. Ally went out to the car park with the cup still in his hands, because he did not know what else to do with it, and the van was where he had left it, and Dand was in it, in the passenger seat, in his own clothes, with the window up and mud drying on the side of his neck, looking straight ahead through the windscreen at the river.

Ally opened the door.

"Can we go," Dand said.

"There's the dinner."

"There's the yowes."

Ally stood there holding the door with one hand and the cup in the other. Across the car park they had started singing in the hut.

He went back in and gave the cup to Jock and found Wull and told him to see them all home on the bus with Ettrickbank, and came back out and got in the van, and drove.

They did not talk. It was dark by Earlston. At the road end at Whinrig Dand got out and stood in the headlights a moment with his meal sack.

"Thanks, Ally."

"Aye."

He went off up the track between the dykes. He went at a walk, and did not look as though he was hurrying, and Ally sat with the engine running and watched him, and he was out of the lights and gone, and up at the top of the hill a light came on in the lambing shed.

---

On the first Tuesday in September there were nine of them at training, on the field behind the school, with the light going and Ally's van parked at the corner with the headlamps on. Dand had not come. Ally had not expected him to. Geordie Purves had done his knee at the clipping in July and could not get up the hill.

There was a new boy on the left wing. His name was Hume, and he was seventeen, and he was quick. Ally had seen him run.

"Stay out wide," Ally told him, "and wait till they've made their minds up."

The boy nodded.

"Then what?" he said.

Ally opened his mouth. He looked down the field at the dark coming up out of the river, and at the headlamps, and at Jock Hogarth standing in the beam of them with his hands on his knees.

He threw the boy the ball.

The boy caught it and put his head down and ran as hard as he could, straight at Jock, and Jock put him on his back.

Ally walked over and gave him a hand up, and picked up the ball, and put it in his hands again.

"Again," he said.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Iacōbō Clark per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Jim Clark, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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