by Laura Hird
‘You know these lamps you used to get in the seventies? Bowel-movement lamps?’
Jenny shook her head, clueless.
‘Oh you know, these hideous bright orange things with kidneys floating up and down, passing each other, bits breaking off?’
‘Are you tripping?’ she asked ‘… it sometimes happens with this stuff.’
‘No, no, no, no, no,’ he whined, determined to make her understand, taking another puff to steady him.
‘… no, no, it’s like I was just thinking, this music, you know, sometimes when I’m out in the boat and its just, like, me and the fish, me and that fish for hours. Everything else just goes …’
Oh shit. His facility for coherence was away.
Seemingly frustrated by her own lack of understanding she blew more smoke into his mouth.
Oh dear, oh dear. Trying to deal with the ensuing weakness, powerlessness he tried to focus on the room, the sink, the bottle and glass at his side, Jenny sitting between his legs, puzzled, out-of-it, waiting for him to act. It was alright. It would be alright. He was safe here. He could stay here.
Jenny ruffled his hair, staring into his eye sockets, looking for him.
‘Are you still in there?’
It was important to try and communicate with her, not to keep drifting off onto this strange parallel universe. Important to let himself know he really was still there and not just looking in.
‘Erm, I think I’m starting to feel something … er … how are you? … how do you feel? … am I talking shit? … do you feel funny? … I feel a bit funny.’
She reminded him that the grass they were now smoking was different from the stuff she’d given Jonah. David charged more for the flower heads because they were a lot stronger. She didn’t know why but he’d said they were well worth it. Worth it? The implications of her words made him panic. Perhaps it was mixed with something else. He hadn’t felt like this when he’d smoked it earlier, that’s for sure.
A creeping feeling of unease rubbed itself all over him, his stomach began rolling and he felt the blood draining from his head, then from the whole of his upper body to finally congeal in his legs. His legs! All sensation below the waist had gone. What if he needed the toilet? He’d better go for a piss now just in case.
On trying to stand up, the floor started moving, rocking from side to side like the inside of a galley on stormy seas. Holding onto the arm of the chair to stop himself from falling overboard, a voice echoed somewhere far off.
‘What are you doing? Are you OK?’
His heartbeat began thumping in his ears. It was going too far too fast. Was he going to have a heart attack? This must be what it felt like. Where was he? He was going to have a fucking heart attack and he’d no idea where he was. Wanting to cry out he knew there was a reason that he couldn’t though he’d no idea what it might be. Looking down in front of him he could see a road with lights on each side. There was a modern looking building with no windows and different coloured columns on top at the end of the street. The road reminded him of the Champs Elysées although he didn’t recognise the building at the bottom. What the fuck was that building? Had they built a new Pompidou Centre at the bottom of the Champs Elysées? Why hadn’t he heard about it? He’d had a strange dream that he was teaching in Edinburgh but he was still in fucking Paris.
The voice was echoing again. It sounded like someone was talking through a tube. ‘Do you want any more of this? What are you doing?’ It sounded like his mother but she was dead. He imagined his mother, naked, covered in ulcers with a great hairy fanny. Was it true? Did people come back to help you into the afterlife like all these psychic old women with names like Doris and Beryl had been saying for years? His heartbeat ticked through his head like some monstrous clock. He had to get to that building at the bottom of the street. He didn’t know why, he just knew he had to get there. On trying to stand up he realised he was completely numb below the waist. Was it a brain tumour? Some kind of aneurysm? He had to get to that building. Now he was crying. He was still in Paris and he was crying and dying. Placing his hands on the support at his side, he pulled himself up with all his strength. The effort of the move made him fart loudly. He hoped there was no-one else in the street. He had a brief vision of someone lying on a bed at his feet, masturbating and laughing hysterically. Making his way towards the building, it felt like he was walking up the side of a mountain although the road ahead looked flat. Taking one step at a time, pausing between each to catch his breath, tears burnt his face. The voice was calling him again. ‘Laissez moi seule, laissez moi seule,’ he shouted. He sensed someone stomping away and heard a door slamming. Although the building had looked like it was at least a mile away he made it there in six steps. Falling against it, his hands shot to each side of the roof to steady himself. The columns on top were painted to look like tins and bottles of brand-name toiletries. Fucking modern architecture. The roof itself had an empty swimming pool on it with two enormous carved taps at the side. Looking down as a fountain of sick sprayed from his trembling mouth, he tried stemming the flow with his hand but the vomit merely spurted through his fingers, down his chin and shirt. Four such ejaculations and the pool was half full. It reeked of whisky and garlic. Spaghetti floated about in the pottage like sea snakes.
He sensed that there was someone with him. Trying to remember where he was or what he’d been doing before he’d taken ill, he heaved again. There was an appalling pain in his stomach and he could feel his windpipe burning where the vomit had scorched it, but somehow throwing up made him feel slightly better, slightly calmer despite his conviction that he was dying. By now he was only bringing up acidy bile. The swimming pool looked like a swamp. He negotiated the taps at the side. Were they merely ornamental? He twisted one until a gentle piddle of water ran into the vomit sending off shock waves of yellow, greasy film on the surface of the plum-coloured broth.
Someone or something was touching him, trying to drag him away. Unable to form a sentence he merely groaned. The pool was now overflowing, his watery vomit running down the sides of the building. He was being led back the way he’d come. The lights on the side of the road had gone out and there were now swirling patterns surrounded by a dimly lit tunnel. He let the arms guide him and steady him each time he stumbled. Since he was dying anyway it no longer mattered if this was friend or foe. He felt himself being turned around and thumped in the chest. This was it. Like falling backwards in a dream then waking just before you made impact, but he had made impact and hadn’t woken up. Now he felt strangely comfortable. Was it over? Was he dead? Closing his eyes, he basked in the silence, blowing out breath, blowing out life. He was slipping away now. He was probably lying in a hospital somewhere. The machine that monitored his heartbeat was about to go ‘Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’. His pulse was about to stop. A casualty nurse was about to sigh and say, ‘The pupils have fixed. That’s it.’ He waited behind the darkened silence. Had someone been with him? Hadn’t Jenny Russell been with him? No, he was still in Paris. There was no Jenny Russell. As he listened to his breath getting shorter and shorter, weaker and weaker, he blacked-out.
He came to on the armchair with a blanket over his head, delirious from the toxic fumes he’d been breathing in and out all night. His head throbbed from one temple to the other and he felt like he’d been pushed down a flight of stairs. His bladder was painfully full and an erection strained to be liberated from its corduroy captivity. Jenny was lying asleep on top of the bed by his side. Her knees were bent and her legs had fallen apart like a woman in stirrups waiting for a smear. Had he fucked her? The blanket over his head suggested not.
Finding the bathroom he gulped water from the tap then left it running while he masturbated unenthusiastically onto a few sheets of toilet paper, staring at his ravaged, bloodshot face and the large, purple love bite on his neck as the tension arched out of his cock. He threw the tissue into the pan and pissed onto it then washed the previous night’s debris from his face and unblocked his ca
ked eyelids. Breathing into the towel he squirmed with recollection then walked quietly back through to the bedroom.
The sink had been washed out but the carpet was still damp and the rank stench of his flamboyant failure hung in the air to taunt him. Jenny was snoring gently. Sunlight beamed through a chink in the curtains and spot-lit her soft pubic down and the glistening, wet indentation of her cunt. She’d slept that way deliberately he reckoned.
He knew he should probably wake her – apologise profusely, blame it all on a bizarre medical condition, fuck her into forgiveness then refuse to leave until he was convinced she’d keep quiet about the whole thing but the truth was he just couldn’t face facing her. Couldn’t bear the idea that this horribly confident little shit had seen him with his pants down in a sadly less than biblical sense. Again his mind was turned to Paris. That safe haven just the other side of revision periods and examinations, perhaps sooner. He cast a final glance upon her dignified indignity splayed on the bed, left a £20 note on the bedside table for the whisky, picked up his jacket and tiptoed downstairs.
As he opened the front door to let himself out he noticed Jonah sitting in his boxer shorts in the living room smoking a joint. This vision which cruelly reaffirmed that it had not all been a bad dream gave him a painful lump in the pit of his stomach. The sinewy Asian, noticing him, held up the joint and opened his mouth to speak, but before he had a chance to he ran out the house, slamming the door behind him. He kept running until he got to the end of her street then walked the rest of the way home in the blinding sunlight, despising her and her sort.
The Rosewell Incident
IRVINE WELSH
For Kenny, Craig and Woody
1
ANOTHER CONVOY OF travellers hustled along through the busy traffic which clogged the city’s arteries, rolling onto the slip-road off the congested by-pass and snaking painstakingly towards the mobbed field which rumbled with the buzz of small competing sound systems.
From the disused railway bridge overhead, a sweating PC Trevor Drysdale kept a watchful eye on the scene. Drawing a wheezy breath of the baked, mucky air, Drysdale whipped his brow and gazed heavenwards at ragged clouds which failed to block out the sun’s leery heat.
Out off the range of Drysdale’s vision and earshot, in a stinking enclave underneath the concrete by-pass, the local young team were also filling their lungs with the chemicals the traffic spewed out, to complement the ones they voluntarily ingested.
Despite the heat, Jimmy Mulgrew felt himself shudder. It was the bevvy and the drugs, he reasoned. It always kept a part of you from being warm. That, and lack of sleep. He embarked on another flinching spasm, more severe than the last, as Clint Phillips, standing over a prostrate Semo, brought the heavy hammer crashing down on the side of the boy’s strong, square, jaw. This jaw was concealed by the pillow Semo had wrapped around his head and secured with tape over his face, which left only his eyes and mouth visible. Even with this protection, Semo’s head still jolted to the side under the impact of Clint’s blow.
Jimmy looked across at Dunky Milne, who raised his brows and shook his shoulders. He took a step forward and wondered whether or not he should intervene. Semo was his best mate. But no, Clint was staying cool and checking on him. – Awright Semo? Is it away? Is that it broke, aye?
Semo looked up at Clint, registered his ugly smile. Even wasted on a Temazapam capsule and some superlager, Semo could still feel the pain in his jaw. He moved it around. It was sore, but still intact. – It isnae broke yit, he drawled, his spittle dribbling into the pillow.
Clint bristled, taking on a prize fighter’s gait. He turned and shrugged to Jimmy and Dunks, who looked back neutrally at him. There was something moving uneasily in Jimmy’s chest, and he wanted to say ‘that’s enough’ but nothing came out as Clint crashed the hammer with viscious force, into the side of Semo’s head.
On impact, Semo’s head jerked again, but then the boy staggered to his feet. An old man walking a labrador dog looked startled as he turned the corner and came upon them. The young team’s stares burned him and he pulled the pissing, whining beast along the road as it tried to urinate on one of the concrete support pillars. The man disappeared around the other bend that led up from the slip road to the old village, before he had the chance to witness the youth with the pillow taped around his head tear the hammer from the other boy’s grasp and smash him full in his unprotected face with it.
– FUCKEN RADGE! Semo roared, as Clint’s cheekbone shattered and part of his top row of teeth were scattered in a sickening splintering sound which fused Jimmy with a nauseous but uplifting feeling. Jimmy didn’t really like Clint, basically because Clint worked in the garage and Shelley hung around there, but he also wasn’t enthusiastic about this scam.
Clint was holding his face in his hands, looking up at Semo and screaming like a demented Hyena, spitting blood and teeth. He turned to Jimmy and Dunks in tearful appeal, – It wisnae meant tae be me! he bleated, – It wis meant tae be that cunt! He hud the fuckin jelly! He hud the pillay!
Semo looked completely away with it. He wasn’t letting go of the hammer, nor was he removing his rapacious gaze from Clint.
– It’s done now but, eh, Jimmy shouted. – Moan, lit’s goan see the polis! He winked at Semo, who let the hammer rest by his side.
– Fuck youse! Clint whined, – ah’m gaun hame!
– Come back tae mines, Jimmy said.
Clint was in no position to refuse, allowing himself to be led back to Jimmy’s house. They went upstairs to Jimmy’s room, and listened to some tapes. Clint managed to swallow two jellies and passed out on Jimmy’s floor. Jimmy went downstairs for a binliner and put it under Clint’s head, to stop the blood from getting everywhere.
Jimmy started to relax when he heard his father turning up the volume on the telly’s handset downstairs, so he increased the output from his Bass Generator tape. As the telly volume nudged up an increment, so Jimmy corresponded. It was a familiar ritual. He smiled at Dunky, and gave the thumbs up and they opened a tube of Airfix. Clint was out for the count, and Semo was also asleep. Jimmy tenderly cut the tape and let the pillow flap back and his friend’s head rest naturally. Semo’s jaw was badly swollen, but his injuries were minor in comparison to the mess Clint’s coupon was in. Letting a couple of drops of the nippy, burning liquid drip onto his tongue, Jimmy felt himself satisfyingly struggle for breath as the vapour filled his lungs.
2
Shelley Thomson had six toes. When she was wee her father told her that she was an alien from outer space and that she was found abandoned by her parents when a UFO dumped her in a field outside Rosewell. The truth however, was that it was her father who had abandoned Shelley. When she was six years old, he simply did not come home one day from work. Her mother, Lillian, refused to tell Shelley whether she knew anything at all about her dad’s disappearance.
As a result, Shelley somewhat idealised the memory of her father, and this was particularly the case in times of her adolescent battles with Lillian. Growing up into a dreamy, speculative fifteen year old, Shelley had developed a fascination for UFO’s.
When she realised that she was pregnant after missing two periods and then scoring two positive tests on a Boots’ home testing kit, Shelley claimed that the father was a seven-foot alien who came to her in the night and took her semi-conscious to a place which may or may not have been a spacecraft and lay on top of her. She told her friend Sarah that there was the ‘feeling of doing it’ without any genital interaction.
– Aw aye? Sarah scoffed, – what was eh like? Keanu Reeves? Liam Gallagher?
Sarah tried not to show that she was impressed that her friend did not allow herself that kind of indulgence. Instead Shelley described the alien in classical terms: a long, thin hairless body, large slanted eyes etc. Impressed though she was, Sarah was far from convinced.
– Aye, right Shelley, she disdained. – It’s Alan Devlin’s fae the garage, eh?
– Nuhp!
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br /> Alan Devlin was an attendant at the local garage at the bottom of the slip-road which led onto the by-pass. He had a charming manner with young girls from the local school, whose grounds backed onto the filling station. Clint Phillips, Alan’s bashful seventeen year old YT would wait nervously outside and keep watch while the senior attendant indulged himself in the backshop with the local youngsters, Shelley and Sarah being amongst those whom he numbered in his schoolie harem. Clint longed for a piece of the action but was too shy in himself, due mainly to his bad spots, and therefore too unexotic to the girls, and Devlin would tease him mercilessly about it. Many times Clint wished that Mr Marshall, the garage manager, who was never there, would come by and surprise them, but he never did. Marshall was an alcoholic and always on the piss in one of the local pubs come lunchtime. Clint liked to infer that he’d fucked Shelley; this annoyed the fuck out off his mate Jimmy Mulgrew, who had the hots for her in a big way.
Alan Devlin came from the city and had been involved with a gang of football casuals known as the Capital City Service in his teens, but gave up when his older brother Mikey mysteriously vanished one evening, never to return. Mikey Devlin had been a top boy and it had been five years since his disappearance. Alan Devlin’s strengths with young girls were his charm and persistence. Shelley had allowed Alan to fuck her after hearing this story. As her father had vanished, she felt a bond to Devlin. Previously, this tall, thin schoolgirl had only let him touch her small, pubescent breasts, often as he and Sarah had full intercourse. Devlin had re-evaluated life since the vanishing of his big brother, whom he had idolised. The gig was basically fucked, you were here one minute and gone the next. The point was to take what you can get. For him, this meant shagging as many birds as possible.