Skagboys

by Irvine Welsh

  So that wis me fuckin well chuffed; ma good deed fir the day, giein a bairn-shaggin cunt a dose ay thair ain medicine. It wis only later oan thit ah fuckin well found oot thit the cunt’s name wis Albert McLeod, no Arthur McLeod, whae wis the cunt that Rents meant, but whae seemingly goat huckled the other month by some wide cunt n sent up tae Peterheid nick for his ain safety.

  So, ah suppose, well, aye, ah fuckin well goat the wrong fuckin gadge but, eh. It wis an easy mistake tae make wi McLeod bein a common enough fuckin name n that. But that cunt ah done, ah mean, the radge jist looked like a fuckin short-eyes n aw, hud stoat written aw ower um. But whin ah git oot ah’ll tell Rents thit ah battered the wrong gadge. Still, every cunt makes mistakes n at least wi’ll aw be able tae sit doon wi a fuckin peeve n huv a good laugh aboot it later oan but, eh.

  Notes on an Epidemic 7

  Lothian Health Board

  Private and Confidential

  Instances of Reported HIV+ Cases in March

  Alasdair Baird, 28, Edinburgh North, teacher of English, father of one, intravenous drug use.

  Christopher Ballantyne, 20, Edinburgh North, unemployed furniture maker, intravenous drug use.

  Michelle Ballantyne, 18, Edinburgh North, hairdressing apprentice, intravenous drug use.

  Sean Ballantyne, 23, Edinburgh North, unemployed, former British Army solider, father of one, intravenous drug use.

  Donald Cameron, 26, East Lothian, part-time barman, father of two, intravenous drug use.

  Brinsley Collins, 17, Edinburgh North, school student, track and field and rugby player, intravenous drug use.

  Matthew Connell, 22, Edinburgh North, unemployed, father of one, intravenous drug use.

  Andrew Cuthbertson, 19, Edinburgh North, unemployed, father of one, intravenous drug use.

  Bradley Davidson, 17, Edinburgh South, YTS Edinburgh Council, intravenous drug use.

  Alex Foulis, 19, Edinburgh North, unemployed, haemophiliac, blood transfusion.

  George Frenchard, 20, Edinburgh North, unemployed, intravenous drug use.

  Andrew Garner, 23, Edinburgh South, unemployed, intravenous drug use.

  Colin Georgeson, 16, Edinburgh North, school student, intravenous drug use.

  David Harrower, 26, Edinburgh North, actor, intravenous drug use.

  Douglas Hood, 17, West Lothian, YTS bricklayer and building trades, intravenous drug use.

  John Hoskins, 30, Edinburgh North, unemployed waiter, intravenous drug use.

  Derek Hunter, 42, West Lothian, unemployed merchant seaman, father of four, intravenous drug use.

  Nigel Jamieson, 18, Edinburgh South, unemployed, intravenous drug use.

  Colin Jefferies, 22, Edinburgh South, clerical officer in GPO and singer/guitarist in rock ’n’ roll band, intravenous drug use.

  David McLean, 20, Edinburgh North, unemployed, intravenous drug use.

  Anna McLennan, 23, Midlothian, state registered nurse, intravenous drug use.

  Lillian McNaughton, 22, Edinburgh North, seamstress, intravenous drug use.

  Michael McQuail, 28, Edinburgh North, unemployed labourer, father of two, intravenous drug use.

  Lewis Manson, 21, Edinburgh North, unemployed, intravenous drug use.

  Deborah Marshall, 25, Edinburgh North, primary school teacher, sexual contact with intravenous drug user.

  Derek Paisley, 26, Edinburgh North, unemployed engineer, Ferranti’s electronics, student on part-time computer programming course, father of two, intravenous drug use.

  Greg Rowe, 18, Edinburgh North, YTS carpentry trainee, intravenous drug use.

  Scott Samuels, 27, Edinburgh South, karate instructor, unprotected sexual contact with intravenous drug user.

  Brian Scott, 19, Edinburgh North, YTS Edinburgh Council Direct Labour Organisation, intravenous drug use.

  Kenneth Stirling, 24, Edinburgh South, unemployed, intravenous drug use.

  Michael Summer, 20, Edinburgh North, pipe-fitter, intravenous drug use.

  George Thake, 22, Edinburgh South, University of Edinburgh accountancy student and Duke of Edinburgh Award recipient, intravenous drug use.

  Eric Thewlis, 27, Edinburgh North, unemployed heating and ventilating engineer, intravenous drug use.

  Angela Towers, 20, Edinburgh South, retail worker, British Home Stores, route of transmission undisclosed.

  Andrew Tremenco, 21, Edinburgh North, BA business studies student at Heriot-Watt University, intravenous drug use.

  Norman Vincente, 45, Edinburgh South, wine bar proprietor, father of three, unprotected sexual contact with intravenous drug user.

  Susan Woodburn, 20, Edinburgh North, Whisky Bonds worker, mother of one, unprotected sexual contact with intravenous drug user.

  Kylie Woodburn, 6 months, Edinburgh North, antibodies through birth.

  Keith Yule, 22, Edinburgh North, unemployed bricklayer and amateur drummer, intravenous drug use.

  Trainspotting at Gorgie Central

  EVEN IN SLEEP’S domain, Renton sensed the onset of withdrawal, that point where his slumbering body gave notice of the critical imbalance in his junk-deprived cells. Through his fatigue he was experiencing his essence’s now unstoppable rise to the surface, from somewhere within the fabric of the mattress, or, deeper still, under the floorboards of the building, buried in the warm, soft earth, coming up, up up, into that wrecked, peeled body.

  He’d been dreaming (or was it thinking?) about heroin. About being blissed out, staring at walls, his thoughts slowly ebbing all over the place, like golden syrup spilling from an upturned tin. The sudden realisation of how unconnected those ruminations were was followed by the appearance of that one detested itch: the solitary twinge in a previously relaxed body, graciously satiated by a tranquil night’s sleep. Yet to scratch this itch would merely bring more, then the torture would begin in earnest. Still desperately tired, he can’t get comfy. The prickle is displaced by a severe cramp; the legs first, then the back. When the shivers arrive he knows for sure that it’s not his imagination, the gear is leaving him.

  He wakes up in the bed, trembling, next to another body. It’s Hazel. — What fuckin time …? he hears his hesitant, croaky voice plead.

  His next thought: we huvnae shagged. No way. At least that was impossible. For three weeks he’s been battering into the gear, having lasted about eight hours since his discharge from St Monans. On two occasions they managed the usual tense, unsatisfying couplings. But that was over a fortnight ago. Since then it’s been the ‘tap me, fix me, ninety-six me’ scenario that he and Sick Boy had come up with in gallows response to the ‘wine me, dine me, sixty-nine me’ slutty T-shirt that was doing the rounds.

  But she’s still here. Coming in from time to time, sometimes with food, occasionally more welcome paracetamol. In fleeting awe he looks at her asleep; beautiful, serene, temporarily removed from the source of her haunting.

  He smells her hair. It merges into less worthy scents in the bed that he and Sick Boy or Spud often share, feet to head. Considers how Hazel in some ways prefers him as a desexualised junky, no threat to her. Recalling that terrible conversation when she came round the first night he was bombed after rehab; how she’d probably have said nothing if he wasn’t.

  — Sex isnae good for me. It’s no you, or laddies … it’s just that my dad … he used to –

  Him hearing, but not wanting to: the information coming from miles away through drug and psychic mufflers. Saying to her repeatedly, — It’s okay. I’m sorry …

  — It’s no you. As long as you know that. I’ve tried tae like it but I cannae. I’m just sayin that cause ah ken you see other lassies.

  — Right … well, no really, he said, grateful for the out. She made him sound like some sort of stud, like Sick Boy. But he did meet more girls than, say, somebody like poor Spud. At that point he thought of Charlene, her pinched features contrasting with the extravagant generosity of the locks that framed them. Fiona, with that oily patch on her forehead he’d loved, and how she got rid of it whe
n she got rid of him. The way he’d been too scared to accept the love she’d offered him.

  A coward and a waster.

  — So what happened wi her in Aberdeen? Youse seemed really close.

  — Oh, you know … drugs, he lied. A coward and a waster. — She wisnae intae it. He looked at Hazel’s sad, pale green eyes. You’d think they’d be brown, he always thought. Maybe it was her hair, she might have been born with a thick head of brown hair. That sudden thought made him almost physically sick: her mother presenting the baby to the smiling nonce father, who’d perhaps observed, ‘She’s got lovely brown hair. We should call her Hazel.’ Renton felt his throat constrict, and quickly asked her, — Why do you see me, ah mean, keep hangin aboot wi us?

  Now he watches the shaft of light laser across her face from between those dark blue curtains that never quite pull together. Her eyes shut, her small, slightly protruding teeth glinting. — I really like ye, Mark, she told him.

  — But how can you like me, he pressed, pained and confused.

  — You’re a nice guy. Always were.

  This had given Renton cause to contemplate that no matter how shite you felt about yourself, some people would never play the game. He said to her that night, — Sleep here wi me. Ah willnae touch ye.

  She knew he meant it.

  And they’d lain in bed together most nights since then, the junky and the incest victim, the voluntary and conscripted recruits to the army of the sexually dysfunctional, and helped themselves to sleep. They didn’t know if they were in some kind of love. They certainly knew they were gripped by a sort of need.

  Renton fills his nostrils. Silvikrin, Vosene or Head & Shoulders? He recalls, in grim shame, how he once tried to encourage her to take heroin. He thought it would be something they could share. She point-blank refused and he was actually quite offended at the time. Not now though. Now he’d give nobody a single thing. There was nothing to give.

  He gently strokes her hair, marvelling at how fine it feels. Remembering the first time Hazel approached him; she was in first year, he in second. She’d kept smiling at him in the corridors, playground and street. Then, through a friend in his registration class, she’d slipped him a note:

  Mark,

  Be my boyfriend.

  Hazel xxx

  After this, she and her mates would giggle in nervy conspiracy whenever he passed them. His own pals started laughing, and took the pish out of him. People began saying that they were boyfriend and girlfriend; that they were ‘going out’ together.

  Mark n Hazel, up a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G …

  This mortified him; they’d barely spoken. Hazel was a sweet, slight wee lassie with specs, who at thirteen looked aboot nine.

  — Fuck the erse of it, he recalled Sick Boy threatening, – or I will.

  But the infatuation passed. He didn’t see her much again till the end of her second year. She’d changed physically; tits, make-up, cooler specs, ones which set up the horn in him (the contact lenses would come later), had all been acquired, and her legs had achieved that definition at the calves that re-routed the flow of blood from brain to cock. But she’d lost something as well. Gone was the sass, and she didn’t seem to want a boyfriend any more. Instead, she wanted a friend. And that was what they’d become. They made tapes for each other, went to gigs, developed an emotional intimacy, while pretending to the outside world that they were conventional girlfriend and boyfriend; eighteenth-birthday parties, twenty-firsts, weddings, funerals, they attended together in a strange closeness and awkward resentment. That fucking animal had wrecked her, his own child. Renton was so glad he’d put that call into Begbie. That stoat would be feeling real pain now.

  Renton crawls out the bed. Hazel’s started to do little whistle-snores. He grabs his jeans like a bouncer would a renegade, windmilling youth in a disco, pinning them down and interrogating them, addressing each pocket with lunges like blows. The first produces some change, a crumpled fiver and a Hibs fixture list, the second a wrap, which causes his spirits to soar, before he sees that it’s not only empty, but licked clean. He looks back to Hazel; now he’s too sick to be a friend to anybody. He’ll have to go, to find gear.

  He pulls himself into the discarded clothes and goes through to the front room to be confronted by the crumpled presence of Sick Boy, shivering under a duvet, an instant visual memo of his own condition. As is his mysterious habit, when denied the bed, he’s sleeping on the floor rather than the couch, angled across the ripped beanbag that has scattered its polystyrene beads over the worn brown carpet; they’re like maggots spilling from him. In case there has been any doubt, Simon Williamson’s eyes instantly flick open into an alert rage, taking in Renton’s form for a beat, before demanding, — Call Seeker again!

  — It’ll be the same fuckin story as last night. Renton picks his overcoat from the back of the door and places its weight around his protesting shoulders. The electric bar fire, obtained following the cutting off of the gas for unpaid bills, has been on all night, chucking out a dry heat into the fusty room. But he’s shivering.

  — Jist call um!

  Sick Boy’s words are unnecessary; Renton’s nerves are singing the same song more effectively. Ghosting across the room, he picks up the plastic phone and stabs out the number. His astonished relief when Seeker’s harsh voice growls in his ear: — Aye?

  — Seeker. It’s me: Mark. Nowt happenin yet?

  The long exhalation down the line; Renton can almost see it rising from the holes in the receiver, scalding his ear. — Look, ah telt ye ah’d phone ye soon as ah kent. Ah’m no fuckin hudin oot oan ye. This is my livelihood. There is nothing at aw in this fuckin toon. Goat that?

  — Aye … sorry. Jist thought ah’d gie ye a wee tinkle –

  — Skreel says Glesgey’s the same. Phone who ye like, it’s no fuckin go. Ah’ll tell ye when ah git some news. Now dinnae bug me, Mark, right?

  — Sound. See ye.

  The line clicks dead.

  It’s okay for that cunt, Renton considers; he really has stuck with the programme and stopped using. With the cash he’s salted away, he’s buying an apartment in Gran Canaria. His plan is to head there from November to March, to avoid the weather’s assault on his body. Since leaving rehab, Seeker dismissively describes skag as a fool’s game and does his best to make it so; selling well-cut gear to boys for cash and bartering it to lassies for fucks and blow jobs.

  One night when Renton shakily traipsed along to his flat in Albert Street to score, he disturbed Molly, rattling around in the kitchen in a vesty top and washed-out knickers, scrambling eggs. Her edgy vivaciousness was gone; scattered into dark places even way beyond those desolate, practically deserted streets. She looked old and worn out, curly hair stretched to a limp frizz by whatever greasy substance was in it, face pale but sweaty; she glanced at him with tombstone eyes, before proffering a faint smile of recognition. He averted his gaze, mindful that if you stare for too long into an abyss, it will reciprocate. Anyway, Seeker’s icy smile told him that there was a new sheriff in town. To ensure there was no misunderstanding, he informed Renton that he’d ‘had a wee word’ with her ex-pimp/dealer boyfriend. Once his fractured cheekbones had healed up, he’d come to work for Seeker.

  Seeker was more of a gym-hewn mountain than ever. He squeezed Renton’s vanishing biceps and told him he should get off the gear and back onto the weights. Although he’d become a valued customer, Seeker made Renton feel as if he was somehow disappointed in him for being on junk, that he was better than that. — Mark Renton, he smiled, — you’re a strange yin. Can never quite figure you oot.

  Like everything Seeker said, Renton was aware it carried a barely suppressed element of threat. But this, he supposed, was as close to friendship and respect as it was possible for Seeker to get. Renton declined his offer of some business with Molly, and was relieved that Hazel had refused the gear. He didn’t want her around any of them. Her wounds might have been made for skag but would only be deepened by it; he�
�d strive to keep her away.

  Sick Boy stands up, pulling the duvet around him like a cape. Then he falls onto the couch, issuing a miserable plea of despair: — What are we gaunny dae?

  — Fuck knows. I’ll try Swanney again … Renton picks up the phone, dials, hearing nothing but the same empty ring. Replaces the receiver on the cradle.

  — We go roond there!

  — Okay … Hazel’s asleep …

  — Leave her, Sick Boy says, — naebody’s gaunny bother her here, and he looks at Renton acerbically. – Cavoli riscaldati, or reheated cabbage, as we say in Italy. It never works oot.

  — Ta for the advice, he cheerlessly replies, heading through to the bedroom. Hazel’s still asleep, though her soft snores have ebbed into silence, and he scratches out a note for her:

  Hazel,

  Had to go out with Simon on a wee message. Don’t know when we’ll be back, so see you later.

  Thanks for taping all those records for me. It means a lot. You’ve given me back something precious, that I lost through my own stupidity. I used to think that I loved albums as artefacts, for their gatefold sleeves, the track listings, production notes, artwork, etc. But now I realise that a cassette tape with the tracks written out in your hand with one of your drawings and your wee reviews is what I love owning more than anything.

  Love

  Mark xxx

  PS I really do think that you are the most beautiful person I’ve ever known.

  He drops it on the pillow by her head, and goes back to Sick Boy with a crushed, jagged heart. They’re embarking on a quest both recognise as futile, but it seems preferable to doing nothing. They take two Valium each and leave the flat, walking down towards Leith. It’s daunting but they find a grim, mute stride, which they don’t even break with a giggle or ironic nod as they pass the Bendix.