by Irvine Welsh
— That’s a five, buddy … it’s gone thru, the driver purses in disdain, — and we don’t give change. You jus wasted three and a half bucks, man.
Lennox nods and takes a seat. He looks at the blacks on the bus with the same furtive, curious glances they steal at him. The few black people he’d known growing up in Scotland had hith-erto seemed exotic, but he now sees just how Scots they are. The blacks here fascinate him, the way their bodies move to a different rhythm. Their voices so different from the whites and Latinos, it’s as if they’re from Mars. He feels something deep in his bones and prays it’s curiosity rather than racism.
Feelings in the bones. Gut feelings. Instinct.
Procedure. Designed to scientifically eliminate bias. Follow the force of probability. Seventy per cent of murderers know their victim. Thirty-three per cent come from the same family.
The bus jolts over a rough piece of road. Lennox shudders. He needs to be safe. He needs to be dangerous. They are everywhere, the nonces. On this bus there’s bound to be one. He looks around at the suspicious eyes. He can smell them, the stink of them.
The vehicle is going nowhere; after a bit it turns round heading back the way he’s just come. He keeps his gaze hawklike. There is pain to be fought. To be drunk through. Then he sees it, on 14th between Collins and Washington. Where he knows he wants to be. It’s a bar. The Club Deuce.
He gets to the front of the bus, panic rising in him as it accelerates for a stretch, and seems to go a long way past the bar, before it slows down and pulls over at a stop. Lennox alights and walks back towards the cream bunker that is Club Deuce. Outside it, a shopping trolley full of a homeless person’s possessions. The bar blacked out with blinds he guesses are permanently shut. He passes through a wooden-and-glass door and enters the club. It’s so dark that it takes him a few moments to order the objects in his vision.
Club Deuce is dominated by a long bar which meanders like a Formica river with two island lips, snaking in a double horseshoe at the front and running right round the back of the room. In the corner hangs a big plasma screen. Near the pool table at the rear, a homeless woman sits, occasionally peering out from behind the blind, checking on her trolley. It’s a real drinkers’ bar of social design; the bends mean that it would have to be almost empty to enable patrons to sit too far from each other. A mirror runs the length of the pub, making it doubly difficult to avoid eye contact with anyone. He checks the time on the clock framed by green light above the jukebox.
Two neon female forms, both lying prone, boobs and buttocks outlined in the glaring red, impress Lennox. They might have been mermaids, but a leg held up seductively announces both as terrestrials.
The effect is of a slightly seedy but classy joint, with an old clandestine atmosphere of speakeasy sex that its present-day incarnation as a drinkers’ den can’t quite dispel. Lennox sits at the bottom ‘U’ of the horseshoe, close to the door, behind a couple of portraits of Humphrey Bogart and one of Clark Gable. He looks at two old mirrors and their ornate carvings. He realises then that Club Deuce has to be one of the greatest and most beautiful bars of its type, indeed of any type, in the world.
The bartender is a large, tattooed guy, with long hair and a beard and moustache. An ex-biker type, long gone into civvy life, Lennox reckons. He has a big, but slightly shy smile.
— What’ll it be? he asks, arching his brows.
— A Stoli vodka and soda. Lennox rubs at his top lip for the moustache no longer there. He had it for years, and now, like an amputee with a missing limb, he feels it itch in its absence.
The barman looks approvingly at Lennox’s T-shirt as he pours the drinks. — English? he asks.
— Scottish.
— Burns, right?
— It certainly does. Lennox looks at the redness on his wrist that the bar lights have shown up, and takes a swig on the vodka.
The barman studies him, thinks about explaining; changes his mind.
The vodka is a good measure; Lennox liked that about the States, freepour. They didn’t fuck about with all that petty, penny-pinching weights-and-measures shite. That sort of stuff alone made the American Revolution worthwhile. He supplements this with a bottle of drinkable European imported beer.
He eases himself round on the bar stool and looks up at the television screen. American Football; the Bears versus the Packers. Lennox can’t tell if it’s live or recorded. He feels like asking, but reasons that if it’s highlights he’ll find out soon enough. He puts the copy of Perfect Bride down on the bar, and stuffs the notebook and pen into the back pocket of his trousers. The first drink fails to banish the non-specific anxieties that shiver through his mind and body; merely crystallising them into a solid, tumorous lump inside him, which slips down through some psychic highway running in a rough tandem with his intestinal tract, coming to a leaden rest in his lower gut.
The bar is almost empty. Two skinny young white guys, who he reckons are drinking on fake IDs due to the nervous looks they shoot every time the door opens, play eight ball in the corner. Further down from him two women sit at the bar; probably only late twenties, but with life’s pummellings visible. A homeless lady sits in a corner, a hawk-like eye checking her possessions through the window. On the other side of Lennox, a fat guy talks to the bartender in a dissenting squeak about some tax that he reckons is unconstitutional.
Lennox orders another vodka. Then another. His decent tips ensure that the barman fills them up. This man evidently understands that some people, just because they come into a bar alone, and with their drinking heads on, don’t necessarily want company. They want to see if the shit they’ve been trying to think through straight plays any better drunk.
He is contemplating that he’d probably been wrong to walk out on the counselling. But he’d clammed up. He’d tell the sneaky, intrusive bastards nothing about himself, nothing that would go on his personal file, despite their claim that everything was confidential. Lennox had gone twice after they picked him off the floor of the Jeanie Deans pub. The woman, Melissa Collingwood, had only been trying to help, to make a point, but she’d angered him. It was when they had got talking about death. Britney’s death. — I can’t stand the thought of her dying alone, being frightened, he told her. — It’s that that does my nut in.
— But isn’t that how we all die, ultimately? Alone? Frightened? Collingwood had said, her eyes widening in a sincerity that seemed too pained to be anything other than contrived. And he’d reacted to that.
— She was a fuckin bairn, ya spastic, Lennox had shouted at her, and charged out the door, not stopping till he hit Bert’s Bar in Stockbridge. Where he had gone since the case started. Ignoring the messages on the voicemail from his NA sponsor, a cheerful fireman named Keith Goodwin, whose mounting pleas were a voice-over to his descent into oblivion.
Now he has no antidepressants and he wants cocaine.
A country and western song sparks up from the jukebox: a witty number about alcohol. Imperceptibly, the bar has gotten busier. Maybe fifteen people in the room. The homeless lady has gone. Lennox takes a swig of beer. First the talk is louder then the music takes over. It goes back and forth. A few people come and go, but most remain, their elbows on the bar.
From his peripheral vision, he sees one of the women looking at him, being egged on by her friend. He instantly discounts it: his senses are not his to trust. But she slides off her bar stool and approaches him. Slightly built, she wears a short denim skirt and a lime-green top, tied in the middle, supporting her breasts. Her white midriff is bare, and a lip of flab hangs over the waistband of her skirt, a piercing on her belly button drawing attention to it. — Got a light? She pronounces it ‘laht’. Her accent is distinctly Southern rather than the mainstream American that seems to dominate Miami.
— Aye. Lennox pulls out a lighter he picked up in the hotel. It has FLORIDA emblazoned on it, with some palm trees. He clicks on the flame that will draw her closer.
A bottle blonde with skin an almost
translucent white, her lipstick-red slash of a mouth is like a gaping wound. Her eyes are sunken, with dark bags under them, which Lennox thinks is bruising until her proximity to the light reveals it as fatigue. Her face is hollowed out. A bit more flesh might have heightened a good bone structure. Its almost total absence makes her look skeletal. Lennox sees a woman chiselled by drugs, though he supposes that bad diet – one based on coffee and cigarettes – could produce the same effect.
— Where’s that accent from? she asks in those smoky, honeyed tones.
— Scotland.
— That’s cool! she exclaims, with an excited verve that animates her to the extent that Lennox immediately feels like reframing his assessment. — Y’all on vacation?
— Vacation … aye … Lennox says, thinking about Trudi. Would she be back at the hotel? Perhaps already on a flight home? Surely not. He can’t tell. His perspective has gone. He looks at the bandaged hand that grips his beer glass. It’s like a foreign body.
— I’m Robyn, she proclaims. — With a y.
— Ray-with-a-y, he retorts. — Funny, it’s only guys that get called your name back home, he tells her. He feels like explaining that it was usually just posh guys, but decides against it. — Are you from Miami?
Robyn-with-a-y shakes her head. — Nobody’s from Miami, everybody jus ends up here. My home town is Mobile, Alabama. She turns to her companion, compelling Lennox to do the same. — That’s my friend, Starry.
He faces a woman about five seven, with an elongated face and long, raven hair that curls down on to her shoulders. She has the classic Latin features he’s quietly appreciated in many of the women here since he’s gotten off the plane; brows sculpted into thinly plucked lines to highlight huge, striking dark orbs that could vaporise the unguarded. Her nose is long and straight, of the kind you rarely see in Scotland.
Age, lifestyle and possibly circumstance has almost driven out a classical beauty, but in its remnants a vivacious power has been retained. She wears her tight blue jeans well and Lennox notices the Converse All Star footwear only because it looks the same as the design worn by people in Oxgangs when he was growing up. His gaze goes back and forth from her eyes to a grey-silvery effect top that just about manages to master the formidable cleavage behind it.
Starry gives him a smile of slow, evaluating grace. It’s obviously manufactured but displays a calculating intelligence that in spite of himself elicits his respect. The woman is as tough as nails but something tells him her power is as much hard won as God-given.
A survivor, Lennox thinks. How cheap and bebased that term has become. I’m a Christmas shopping survivor. I’m a Holocaust survivor. I’m a holiday with the in-laws survivor. I’m a child sexual abuse survivor. He makes his own list: sex crimes, drug addiction, relationship breakdown, career frustration, mental breakdown, life.
It was too much. He’s tired of surviving. It’s time to live. Lennox sees that Robyn is standing waiting in open anticipation.
— Would either of you ladies care for a drink?
They nod in the affirmative and state their choice. As the barman pours, Lennox feels he’s been hustled but his only mild resentment comes from the girls’ apparent belief that he doesn’t realise this. — This here’s Ray-with-a-y from Skatlin, Robyn grins.
— What kind of work you in, Ray? Starry asks.
— Sales, Lennox lies. He never says he’s a cop when he’s in company. Not unless he wants rid of it.
Starry flashes a shit-eating grin as she accepts his drink. She steers Robyn, almost pushing her forward into Lennox. The women smile at each other. There is no doubt as to who’s in charge here, he thinks. The petty victories. He’s seen it so many times before, in so many of the women he’s encountered through his work.
Angela Hamil asked for so little. She was destroyed that her daughter had been abducted, raped, murdered. But there seemed no real anger. Life had long since defeated her; she acted like she expected and even deserved this horror that had been visited upon her, that it was her due. It was just another misery piled on top of the ones she’d already had to endure.
Serious Crimes.
Lennox thinks about the name of the department and the actual activities that gave it its title. Murder. Rape. Serious assault. Kidnapping. Armed robbery. Obviously, most people who committed serious crimes were in a bad way. But so many of the victims shared that characteristic. Too often it was the same set of circumstances that threw the victim and perpetrator together.
— Scotland must be a damn fine country, Starry is saying to him in her more generic American voice.
Lennox pulls a taut smile. — It’s okay.
— Cause it looks like your head’s still over there. Tell ya what I think, there’s usually only one thing makes a strange man come into a strange bar alone and throw back those drinks like you been doin. And that’s a strange woman.
Angela Hamil. Trudi Lowe.
— Strange women. Aye, there’s a few of them around, Lennox retorts.
— So, how are sales these days? Starry asks, imbuing the innocuous statement with cryptic sleaze.
— Oh, not so bad. You know how it is, Lennox enigmatically rejoins, getting into her game.
She looks at him as if prompting him to say more. Then she asks, — So what do you sell?
— I never talk about work when I’m socialising, he says. All I will say is that it’s not the commodity that’s important, it’s the customer.
Starry seems to glow at his bland response. She pulls her friend forward again, and Lennox tries to figure out what the game is as the girls shuffle around him with the nervous energy of punch-drunk, traumatised old contenders in a seedy gym, evidently ready to sing for their supper. — You’re cute, Robyn giggles. Lennox knows that she’s drunk, they probably both are, but Starry is holding it better.
As they chat, his ears quickly become desensitised to the superficial glamour of the American accent, and he can now see these women in any scuzzy backstreet Edinburgh pub. A lifetime of cigarette consumption seems to induce all the bar’s smoke to congregate around Robyn’s grey skin and cheap, flashy clothing like iron filings to a magnet.
— So you know a few strange women, Starry says, her eyes going to his bandaged hand. — Does that make you a strange man? Who am I kidding, is there any other kind?
Lennox has sparred in too many Edinburgh meat markets to be wrong-footed by some apolitical feminist jibes. — We do stupid very well, he says, then adds, — but you girls beat us hands down when it comes to crazy. That’s just the way we are.
Starry laughs, opening her jaws so wide it seems she could swallow up the bar and everybody in it. Lennox stares into the ribbed, pink cavern of that mouth, the protruding red tongue a welcome mat, quickly coiling into a threatening snake. — And don’t you forget it!
— Excuse me a second, ladies, while I answer the call of nature. Lennox slides from his stool and makes for the restrooms in the corner of the bar.
Why did they call it a restroom?
Lennox feels like he really wants to rest. To lie down on the tiled floor covered in men’s pish, shoe leather, dirt, cigarette ash, and sleep like a baby. Instead, he stretches out his bad hand and starts to unwrap the elasticised bandage with his good one. The dressing is discoloured and a stink rises from it. A spasm of fear seizes him, and he almost expects to be confronted by a withered, black and green gangrenous object. In the event his hand is stiff, red and a little swollen and angry-looking around the knuckles, and his eyes water when he tries to make a fist of it. But it’s still visibly his hand, and is probably on the mend. He entrusts it with the holding and pointing of his penis and can’t bear to watch his dark and stagnant urine splash against the metal of the latrine.
Lennox washes his hands with care, welcoming the other back into the family.
It took him thirty-five seconds to grab her, bundle her into the van, gag and secure her with electrical tape and drive off.
Puts his hands under a dry
er. Enjoys the heat sensation against the numbed, sore paw.
The two women face Lennox as he emerges back into the pub. Starry has picked up the copy of Perfect Bride and is leafing through it. But now there is someone else on the scene, another man who has emerged from the shadows at the back of the bar and who approaches the women at the same time as the returning Lennox. He looks at Starry in confusion.
Lennox realises that the guy is about the same height as him, around six two, and also in his mid-thirties. — I’m in sales, he beams at Starry and Robyn, ignoring Lennox, who gently seethes. This cunt has been listening in to me talking, and now he’s taking the piss.
Pulling on his shoulder, Lennox pivots him round. — I’ll tell what you’re in if you don’t fuck off right now. Trouble. Big fucking trouble. Is that clear?
The guy blinks, taken aback.
— Hey … Starry begins, laying down the magazine on the bar, — no need for that!
— Listen, buddy … the guy starts, but Lennox can see that any certainties he has are evaporating.
He feels himself smouldering with violence. This guy has rubbed him up the wrong way. — I’m no your buddy. Got that?
— Have it your way –
— I intend tae. Now fuck off.
The man shrugs, raises his palms in appeal and skulks back into the corner of the bar.
— What was that about? Starry says, evidently upset.
— I didn’t like him, Lennox tells her, as he keeps his eyes on the man, who promptly finishes his drink and leaves.
