by Irvine Welsh
Oh no we didn’t.
Oh yes we did.
It’s light and we are cold; our teeth chatter together. A jakey coughs an insult at us, or it could be a request for money. We look in our pockets and there is a twenty-pound note and some change.
We take out the twenty-pound note and hand it to the jakey who sees the pain in our eyes and his own eyes focus in a grateful then fearful sobriety as he takes the note and mumbles
We travel in the opposite direction, back the way we came. In a shop window we see our thick, dark growth. We should have shaved.
What is there to do but go home.
Home.
Home Is The Darkness
I don’t have any photographs. Only memories. I can still vividly recall the time I went in to see him.
My own father. The one who never abused me, never forced me to eat coal, never called me the spawn of the devil. But he was still the one I hated most.
I’d got used to places like this with my work. I’d started not to notice them. But not this place. You had to notice it, had to feel the omnipresent, sickening bleakness of it on your approach to it. That huge perimeter fence, seeming to run the length of the ugly void of shitehouse towns, schemes, industrial estates, factories and old mines which spread between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Inside, the smell. The disinfectant. No other smell like it. Similar to a hospital but staler and more rank.
I was shaking as the screw Josh Hartley opened the cell for me. All my data of him was gleaned from that one twisted photograph in the Daily Record. I thought he would look like the most evil thing I had ever seen. It was anticlimactic. My anxiety fell away but I felt loathing and contempt rise as I looked at this slight, old figure. Could this really be The Beast? His eyes. They were not the eyes of a killer, but the eyes of an auld sweetie wife, privvy to some malicious gossip. His nose, hooked, not like mine, mines is like my mother’s. I wanted to haul him down on to the floor and stomp on his head, to crush the life out of him, to take his just as he’d given me mine. I thought of my mother. I resented her weakness. How could she have let this pathetic thing do that to her? How could she have not fought him off?
Did she want it? Did she want him? Did she want that? No. Never.
How could she have grown the seed of this scum inside of her for some fuckin stupid church run by cunts who dinnae even get their fuckin hole? Or urnae fuckin supposed tae at any rate.
It’s against regulations.
It’s against regulations for a prisoner in this category to be left alone with one officer, let alone a visiting cop, but the screw was a craft stalwart. He gave me time alone. Just five minutes. More than enough when you’ve been schooled in the discipline of the slippery stairs. I thought that I would have wanted to say something. To accuse, or to question. But I never spoke. There was no point. I just moved towards The Beast.
– What de ye want! What dae ye want! he cackled at me, picking up the hatred and the focused intent.
When the officer returned my hands were round The Beast’s neck and his split head was bouncing off the wall.
The screw stopped me. Hauled me off. The Beast still rots away in the psychiatric prison. He is used to being assaulted by prison staff, but I hoped that he remembered that one as a little bit special. But probably not.
I change channels. A documentary on Margaret Thatcher.
I change channels. Holiday. Judith Chalmers explores the Great Barrier Reef . . .
I switch off the televsion.
I had Carole, but I fucked every other woman I could get my hands on. Didn’t matter what they were like; prostitutes, relatives, birds on a night out who were up for it, workmates. If I’m being honest, I liked quite a few of them, although it was always easier never to admit that. I did it all the time, at any opportunity.
Carole only did it once.
Carole got back at us through shagging that coon. She said she loved him. That was all I knew about him: he was black and she said she loved him. We couldn’t help it, finishing that cunt off. It was when we were with her, dressed in her clothes. In that club wearing her clathes with the specialist large shoes we ordered from the shop in Newcastle. These yobs had set upon the cunt, kicked him unconscious. We just had to finish him, we didn’t know whether or not it was the guy Carole was with. We did him with the claw hammer we used for our protection on the streets. We bought it in Chelmsford, on the way back from Tony and Diana’s. Drummond could search all over Scotland. We needed to have it; there were people who would try to hassle us. We needed to have it, Carole and I.
Aye, we were in Jammy Joe’s and we saw Efan Wurie dancing, drinking. We tried to talk to him but he was dismissive of us. We thought he was the same guy that Carole was with. We just wanted to talk to him, to find out if he knew her. But he dismissed us. Rejected Carole and me. He never loved her, he just used her. It was the principle of the thing. Fuck it, any one will dae. We wanted to hurt.
That Estelle Davidson lassie was looking at us all night, she had seen us in the women’s toilet. She had pointed us out to Gorman and Setterington and the other thugs present. That was when we had to leave.
We had to leave and wait on them. We had to do this in order to pay them back.
But they got the coon. They got him first. I finished him, but they got him first. I don’t know why, I don’t care why, probably just because he was there, perhaps he was chatting up their birds. I don’t care. I only care about me. Even that is a lie.
I only care about me and about why I don’t care about anybody else.
She thinks that she can do what she likes, well there’s no fuckin way, and she’s poisoned the bairn against us with these silly stupid lies that she tells, the festering hoor, and it’s all gone wrong and she has tae be shown, has tae be made tae pey cause this is nae fuckin use.
When we call her at her mother’s all we can say is that we want to see the bairn again, that we want to talk. Sort out the divorce.
Her voice is not the voice of the Carole we know. There is now no room for the words that she had waited for for so long, the words we were not capable of speaking, the ones that might have made a difference. In the absence of the words she became meat, a repository for my come. To be fucked, to be wanked over. To be made to do things she would not otherwise have done. In the sex clubs we joined. Bent by the will of my . . . need? It’s not her voice. I almost like this woman. She sounds like Carole before
Enough.
Now that we’ve told her to come, all we can do is sit and wait. And prepare. Prepare to do the cow.
For good.
I’ve made the t-shirt we are wearing. It has YOU CAUSED THIS on it in big, black letters. The noose feels tight around our neck. We look up at it, strung on the rafters of the attic and we’re now just waiting, ready to drop out of the hatch as soon as she turns the key in the lock and pushes the door open. We’ll land right in front of her in the hallway, so she’ll have that on her conscience for the rest of her fucking life the fuckin whore and liar.
We wait and think and doubt and hate.
How does it make you feel?
The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better.
We feel rage.
The feelings must be followed. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they’re your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate past, each one you brush against, ripping you a little more open and there are always more on the horizon. But you can’t face up to that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those that you instinctively know to be liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often enough and fervently enough you’ll attain the godlike status we accord to those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately.
But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn’t value it, you�
�d realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don’t really want and keep from us what we really do need.
Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we’re getting in touch with our condition at last. It’s horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone . . .
Now I’m ready and I hear the key. I jump and I’m falling, then I feel myself rising, I hear a crash, but there’s no pain and there’s a figure at the frosted glass of the door but it’s not her it’s too wee it’s Stacey no Stacey for fuck sake don’t open the door . . . don’t . . . and I care . . .
. . . I want more than anything for Stacey not to be there and see this and I’m trying to shout No go away and I hear her screaming Daddy and I want to live and make it up to her and Carole, I can hear her now too, screaming BRUCE because I care and I’ve won and beaten the bastards but what price victory
STACYE PLEASE GOD BE SOMETHING ELSE SOMEONE ELSE . . .
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