by Irvine Welsh
Trudi. He can’t allow himself to be stupefied by Robyn’s kisses. Catching Starry’s eye and a nod to the coffee table, he breaks away and moves over to where some lines are racked up. She has set down the copy of Perfect Bride; it has melded into a pageant of women’s, television and celebrity magazines. Lennox picks up a thick glossy called Ocean Drive, which he suspects is a boutique-hotel freebie. A blonde woman who seemed to be famous for being an heiress and also for not really appearing to enjoy it much as her boyfriend fucked her on camera, was discussing her music, and how it was the thing she did best. Lennox recalls watching the commercially available video at a police stag do. It wasn’t up to much; he hoped the singing was better.
He rolls a note and fills his nostrils, using the generous cavity. The surf comes up inside his head. It’s good gear. He looks up at Robyn, who’s smiling at him. — How’s your voice? Can you carry a tune? he asks.
— Ah guess. She coyly cocks her head, provoking both attraction and nausea in him.
He heads to the bathroom, this time watching his urine, so thick you could stand a spoon in it, stain the water a deep orangey gold. Alone, his critical faculties replace his social ones. Now good intentions and weak wills are signalled everywhere: a dust-covered empty bottle of mouthwash has obviously lain there for months. An unopened tube of sealant sits next to a leaking shower trickling into a puddle of water on the terracotta floor tiles. A rusted gold-top battery hangs out the back of a broken electric ladyshave.
When he returns he sees Robyn seated and his eyes go up her thighs and between her legs. She catches his line of vision and settles back on the couch, smoothing short skirt to thigh in a parody of demure.
She’s a damage case: little-girl voice and vacuous flirtiness. A pathetic victim. Her kid will probably turn out the same way. But I have to watch myself on the gear: I’d fuck the hole in a dolphin’s heid.
Starry has set up the drinks; Millers all round with vodkas and Pepsi, and she’s racking out more lines of cocaine on the coffee table. More is good: first law of consumer capitalism. Second law: immediate is all. Lennox feels a binge coming on. Starry catches the hunger in his eyes. — Go on, Scattie, her manner is coquettish. He thinks of Braveheart the dog, and is about to test the more constricted vent, when a young girl wearing a nightdress appears in the doorway of the room.
Her skin is a tawny contrast to the paleness of her mother, yet the girl still cuts an almost spectral figure. Brown hair hangs down the sides of a longish face on to her shoulders. She rubs sleep from her eyes in a very obvious, theatrical manner. Shamed, Lennox immediately ceases his activity, and stands up. — Hi. I’m Ray, he says, getting between the kid and the stuff on the table.
— Tianna Marie Hinton … you get back to bed, young lady, this is grown-up time, Robyn declares in a panicky voice he can envisage one of the women on the South Beach real-estate commercials privately deploying, perhaps after hearing of a market slump. All the time she looks at Lennox with a stupidity teetering between sheepish and bovine. The kid briefly glances at him for the first time. It’s a cold look. Appraising rather than judging, but referencing that he’s something she’s seen before. Something not good.
It dawns on Lennox that she’s been alone while they were cavorting at the Club Deuce and Myopia over in Miami Beach. It wasn’t right. Kids shouldn’t be left alone like that. Britney Hamil should never have walked to school alone. He feels anger rise in him and fights to swallow it down with a gulp of his beer. All the time he keeps his frame between the girl and the table. As she’s distracted by her mother’s ministrations, Lennox places the copy of Perfect Bride over the white stripes. Catches Starry sneering at Robyn again.
— I couldn’t sleep, the girl says, — I heard you guys comin in. She looks at Lennox again and nudges her mother, seeking confirmation.
— This here’s Ray, honey. Ray’s a friend from Skatlin.
— Where men wear skirts, Starry laughs, — right, Ray?
— Right. Lennox practically ignores her, focusing again on the young girl. Her arms and legs are too long for her body. Her hair is a scraggy mop and she seems all angles. A kind of ungainly ugly duckling. But her eyes … he catches the brief glimpse of a terrible knowledge in her eyes. For a second Lennox has a sinking sense that they are asking the world for help. Then it’s gone, and she’s another tired kid, short-changed on affection, security and sleep.
— Y’all get yourself off to bed now, y’hear, honey, Robyn says.
The girl lopes away mumbling and waving a cursory goodbye without turning round. As she leaves the room, Starry changes the CD and turns up the volume as Cuban music fills the air. Lennox’s knowledge of this genre starts and stops at the Buena Vista Social Club, which he’d seen with Trudi, who had bought him the CD. He’d liked it, though he had been embarrassed when Ally Notman, the energetic young cop on his team with a penchant for womanising, had spied it and slagged him off for being a Guardian-reading liberal. Some of the boys had come back to his place for a late drink. He recollects the cold-eyed presence of Dougie Gillman, his sour and troubling nemesis, who’d tagged along all night. But this music is nothing like that. With its poignant beats, sweeping strings and muted brass, it’s the saddest he’s ever heard. Although with Spanish vocals and purporting to be Cuban, it somehow feels as if it’s been made locally, in this Miami neighbourhood. He stifles the temptation to enquire about the artist; he would be relieved never to hear its terrible beauty again.
Fitfully he wonders about Trudi. What will she be doing now? In the hotel room. Indulging in one of her two bathetic responses: ‘worried sick’ or ‘not giving a fuck’. Perhaps occupying both states simultaneously.
— This is fucked, Lennox whispers, bouncing down on the couch in melancholy laughter before Starry shimmies over and drags him back to his feet. They dance together a little, before Robyn moves in. The women are being sexy. Lennox thinks speculatively about threesomes. Isn’t that what he needs to feel his masculinity again: extremis? It worked last time job and drug had combined to cauterise his body and soul. But a nasty current now hangs between Starry and Robyn. They are harshly and nakedly competing for him. Grinding closer, suggestive eyes expanding with need, their mouths tight with aggression. He thinks about yesterday at the Torpedo. He feels Robyn move into him, her arms reaching up around his neck. Hanging from him like a charity-shop suit in a reckless bid to shut Starry out.
Then the doorbell buzzes and while he’s aware that more people have appeared, Lennox feels his nostrils, even as they bubble with snot, filling up with the scent of Robyn’s hair. The buzz of the coke works in a square throb with the beat, booze and jet lag. A wave of exhaustion, almost breathtaking, hits the back of his eyes. Letting them close for either seconds or minutes, he watches the exploding purple blotches swirl around the universe inside his head.
Then he feels Robyn pull away from him. He opens his eyes to be confronted by a lined ashen face, with short grey hair plastered back over the scalp; gelled and spiked enough to see comb lines. It belongs to a thin white man, yet who looks wiry and strong, and his ophidian eyes burn Lennox, and, he notes, Robyn too. The proximity moves him to take a backward step. Then he sees a denim shirt tucked into jeans of the same material. Looks down at brilliant white trainers, or, on this side of the loch, sneakers. Curtly nodding at Lennox with a smile so slight it would have needed a moving camera to record it, the newcomer then says to Robyn in a low-fi country accent, — You been out shoppin again?
—This here’s Ray, Robyn replies apologetically. Already Lennox scents not only history, but unfinished business.
— Name’s Lance, Lance Dearing. Pleasure to meet ya, Ray, he grins, extending his hand. Lennox strategically takes it in his good left, despite the awkwardness, relieved he’s presented that one due to the power he feels in the grip enclosing it. — Busted a mitt there? Dearing asks, nodding to his dangling right.
— Industrial accident, Lennox boldly retorts.
But Lance D
earing can evidently read the trepidation on his face, as he calmly says, — Don’ you worry none, Ray; you ain’t stepping on no toes here. We all been round the block enough times to know to take our pleasures where we find em. No questions asked. Ain’t that right, gals?
Starry’s pearly teeth flash, her brows arching like a corporate fast-food executive who has sold face as well as soul to the company store. Robyn smiles weakly, dutifully pouring some drinks for Lance and another man present. He’s squat and stocky, Latino, with collar-length, oily hair and a sandpaper chin. His gaze at Lennox is one of undisguised hostility. — This here’s Johnnie, Lance smiles.
— You gotta be the guy from outta town, Johnnie says in a scratchy voice, looking Lennox up and down. His head seems way too big for the features squashed ungenerously into the middle of it. Age, Lennox senses, will enhance this effect, like a ratchet inside his brain will screw the top and sides of his skull and his jawbone outwards to the compass points. The big slaughterman’s hands look formidable; along with the dense body and shifty eyes, they suggest a man prepared to take what he wants without expecting much in the way of debate. This notion is countered by a flabby gut straining at a T-shirt bearing the slogan: WILL FUCK FOR COKE.
— I don’t think he’s the same guy you’re thinking of, Johnnie. Lance grins at Lennox. — But I do hear you’re in sales.
Fucking sales, Lennox thinks. What is this? — Yeah.
— Me too, Lance smiles, eliciting a giggle from Starry.
— But I guess that this fella ain’t the same type of salesman as you, Johnnie laughs.
— I guess he probably ain’t, Lance Dearing says in mock sorrow. — But then again, I reckon that there might just be two types of salesmen: good and bad. Ain’t that right, Ray?
Lennox remains silent, Starry’s capricious grin telling him it was them she had talked with on the phone earlier. Their presence is certainly a surprise to Robyn, and not, it seems, a pleasant one. Lennox moves away, sits down on the settee. Silence is always the best way, he has found, in such situations.
His eyes scan around the room, seeming always to wind up back at Robyn’s legs, hips or arse. He’s aware that he wants to fuck her, but considers, shamefully, this is probably just because the opportunity has receded with Lance and Johnnie’s presence. But now anyone will do. Something has gone off behind his cock.
Instead, he chops out another line from the big rock in a larger packet Starry has placed on the table, all the time on edge against the kid reappearing, and he takes it down. He looks at the print of a semi-nude woman on the wall. Then he considers Johnnie and Lance again. The concern he felt at their intrusion has gone. His fear evaporating, he fancies it kicking off. Now all that’s inside him is a black anger, still and even. He’s not thinking of Britney Hamil any more but he knows that when he does, he can kill anyone for her demise.
And he feels like killing. Just hurting would be insufficient. His dark mood creeps through his veins like a poison. He knows those faces: Dearing’s mocking reptilian smile, Johnnie’s pudgy, vacant stare. If only those men knew the danger they were in. He grinds his teeth till he imagines he hears the enamel crack. But he is a cop. Abroad. Calm the fuck down.
So he goes to the kitchen and gets another beer from the fridge. Dull those coke rushes. Robyn follows him. He wants to fuck her and kill the rest of them. Even Starry. Especially Starry. Something about her has disturbed him. That protean presence: one minute sexy, the next malign and controlling. She changed when those guys came in. He could feel it. See it in her eyes. Maybe it was just the coke. It was good stuff. Not too chemical. Maybe it was because he was doing all her gear. He wonders about offering her some cash. Feels a wad of twenties in his pocket.
He can’t think laterally. His thought pattern is linear, like a high-speed locomotive, careering towards one destination.
All he can do to stop this is to take some more coke. It helps. You can outrun your thoughts. He heads back into the living room, Robyn still pursuing him, ranting something about star signs, and he lifts up the copy of Perfect Bride. The lines he’d hidden from the kid are intact. Starry moves over and augments them for Lance and Johnnie. They are nothing now, the other three, no threat, just a source of drugs. A defiant sense of entitlement fuses him. On holiday. Prudey Trudi. Starry has another big bag of the stuff. A big rock. It might be a long night. A long, long night that lasts half an hour. They take another line each. Lennox needs the drug now more than ever. He recalls how they would sit near the toilet in the Grapes, the young coppers’ bar, or up in somebody’s flat, often his, snorting and boasting of how they had put away this cunt and threatened that cunt and done this cunt and would get that bastard. The real vitriol was not reserved for the criminals though, but the bosses: senior police officials, local and national politicians. It was these spastics that fucked everything up, that fucked up the job.
Lennox has done what he refers to as ‘the rehab thing’, and still goes to regular NA meetings. He knows how the drug presses you like a wild flower into something resembling yourself but a one-dimensional representation of it. Jagged and volatile, all sneers and jeers pushing back your boundaries of verbal and physical and sexual violence.
That lassie in Thailand; she was just a fucking kid.
The lads’ holiday in Bangkok. The girls were very young, but you could never tell with Asian lassies – so slender and petite. And, after all, we were on holiday. Drunk in that Patpong bar, the Thai girl with the dyed blonde hair who’d sat on my lap. Notman drunkenly whispering, — If you want tae ken the colour ay a bird’s minge, look at her eyebrows, no her hair.
Would upright George Marsden with the pressed blazer have behaved like us? Or would he have behaved like cops were supposed to behave? And how were law enforcement officers meant to behave off duty? Work together. Play together.
Then I saw the one with Gillman: she was just a kid. I told him to leave her. — She’s fuckin peyed fir, so she’s gittin it, he said. I was drunk. We argued. I pushed the blonde away. Pulled the other one, the kid, off Gillman’s lap. He got to his feet. Then his head was in my face and I was on the deck, before being helped into a taxi by Notman. Waited ages at the Bangkok hospital to get my nose badly reset. Later on I heard that he’d taken my half-arsed intervention out on the girl. She was just a kid. Once a girl, then made like Britney was, reduced …
You have to stop thought.
The line goes up his nose. Britney’s face dissolves, becomes the attractively sluttish woman opposite him.
Robyn. The cloying, irritating girlish voice somehow grows sexy. A Southern belle: Scarlett O’Hara to his Rhett Butler. Way down in Alabama. Milky tones enquiring, — Y’all wanna go lie down for a while, honey?
And Lennox knows that even feeling like fucking the world, it will take extremity, violent, perverse extremity, to make his floppy penis anything like hard enough to do the job. — In a bit, he says, charging his glass with the bottle of vodka. He feels trapped, in a skanky vortex of his own making.
Lance Dearing has swooped down to rant at him. Ostensibly telling him about fishing, but Lennox knows the charged power of words on cocaine and that Dearing is trying to establish presence, power and dominance. — Pulled a big ol bastard out of the sea yesterday. Took a while and I thought he’d bust the line at one point, but I stayed on his ass. That was the thing: I stayed on his ass. Sucker was goin nowhere once he bit on my hook.
So Ray Lennox kicks back with a skinny smile on his lips and gives monosyllabic answers. As he looks into this man’s leathery face, watches the spittle shoot from the corner of his mouth, he feels nothing now; he neither likes nor dislikes Lance. How can he? They are strangers, on cocaine. Grinding their teeth. Obstacles for each other to navigate: Formula One drivers trying to go round traffic cones at high speed. They rant in short bursts at each other in an ugly intimacy, each exposing the same raw nerve of ego to the other. Then Lance gets up to dance with Robyn, who obviously fears him, and a smiling Starry, as
Lennox considers his lot.
He can’t marry Trudi. If they were ever going to get married then they would have been by now. He met her when she was eighteen and he was twenty-seven. Eight years ago. He’d just got his second big promotion. Detective Inspector Lennox. He’d be the youngest Chief Constable in Scotland, they’d only half joked. But after that, nothing. Treading water. Snorting more cocaine. Then Trudi and him had split up.
Three years later, though, they started going together again. He had come back from Thailand and was cleaning up, going to NA, and was back at the kick-boxing. They met at a new gym he was trying out. Unbeknown to him, she was a member. A coffee. Catching up. Both free agents. The spark. Still there. Catching up. Dinner. A film. Coffee. Bed. Catching up. The sex; it was better than before. Trudi: now a sleek, confident mid-twenties gym rat rather than a slightly pudgy teenager. Him: a sober shagging machine; the carnal obsession dominating everything. Shrugging aside the words of several guys on the force: reheated cabbage. Beware. Bad move.
But she loved him. She loved him because he was a lost cause and her own vanity was strong enough to convince her that with her brand of tough love, Ray Lennox, Project Lennox, could be successfully realised. He could become a superannuated superman, a breeder of good Scottish Protestant children who would excel not just academically but at the BBs and school sports, and be model citizens of the world as the Scots always were. Or at least the ones designated for export.
Trudi saw how he’d changed. Matured, was the term she frequently used. The first time she’d touched him again was to run her finger down his nose. — It’s bent a little, she’d said.
— Accident in Thailand. Broke it, he’d explained, looking into her eyes. — That was what made me give up the gear. I realised what it was doing. What I’d lost.
She liked what she saw.
But she’d seen what she’d wanted to see. He was a mess. Affecting a seen-it-all blasé front, when his insides were like chopped liver. Cool Lennox with the shredded nerves. His old associate Robbo always saw through him.