by Irvine Welsh
I stopped going to the group meetings after they put Alan Venters in the hospice. It just depressed me and, anyway, I wanted to spend my time visiting him. Tom, my key worker and one of the group counsellors, reluctantly accepted my decision.
— Look Dave, I think that you seeing Alan in hospital is really great; for him. I’m more concerned about you at the moment, though. You’re in great health, and the purpose of the group is to encourage us to make the most of things. We don’t stop living just because we’re HIV positive . . .
Poor Tom. His first faux pas of the day. — Is that the royal ‘we’ Tom? When you’re HIV positive, tell me aw about it.
Tom’s healthy, pink cheeks flushed. He couldn’t help it. Years of intensive interpersonal skills practice had taught him to hide the nervy visual and verbal giveaways. No shifty eye contact or quavering voice from him in the face of embarrassment. Not old Tom. Unfortunately, Tom cannae do a thing about the glowing red smears which rush up the side of his face on such occasions.
— I’m sorry, Tom apologised assertively. He had the right to make mistakes. He always said that people had that right. Try telling that to my damaged immune system.
— I’m just concerned that you’re choosing to spend your time with Alan. Watching him wasting away won’t be good for you and, besides, Alan was hardly the most positive member of the group.
— He was certainly the most HIV positive member.
Tom chose to ignore my remark. He had a right not to respond to the negative behaviour of others. We all had such a right, he told us. I liked Tom; he ploughed a lonely furrow, always trying to be positive. I thought that my job, which involved watching slumbering bodies being opened up by the cruel scalpel of Howison, was depressing and alienating. It’s a veritable picnic however, compared to watching souls being wrenched apart. That was what Tom had to put up with at the group meetings.
Most members of ‘HIV and Positive’ were intravenous drug-users. They picked up HIV from the shooting galleries which flourished in the city in the mid-eighties, after the Bread Street surgical suppliers was shut down. That stopped the flow of fresh needles and syringes. After that, it was large communal syringes and share and share alike. I’ve got a mate called Tommy who started using smack through hanging around with these guys in Leith. One of them I know, a guy called Mark Renton, whom I worked with way back in my chippy days. It’s ironic that Mark has been shooting smack for years, and is, so far as I know, still not infected with HIV, while I’ve never touched the stuff in my life. There were, however, enough smack-heads present in the group to make you realise that he could be the exception, rather than the rule.
Group meetings were generally tense affairs. The junkies resented the two homosexuals in the group. They believed that HIV originally spread into the city’s drug-using community through an exploitative buftie landlord, who fucked his sick junky tenants for the rent. Myself and two women, one the non-drug-using partner of a junk addict, resented everyone as we were neither homosexual nor junkies. At first I, like everyone else, believed that I had been ‘innocently’ infected. It was all too easy to blame the smack-heads or the buftie-boys at that time. However, I had seen the posters and read the leaflets. I remember in the punk era, the Sex Pistols saying that ‘no one is innocent’. Too true. What also has to be said though, is that some are more guilty than others. This brings me back to Venters.
I gave him a chance; a chance to show repentance. This was a sight more than the bastard deserved. At a group session, I told the first of several lies, the trail of which would lead to my grip on the soul of Alan Venters.
I told the group that I had had unprotected, penetrative sex with people, knowing full well that I was HIV positive, and that I now regretted it. The room went deathly silent.
People shifted nervously in their seats. Then a woman called Linda began to cry, shaking her head. Tom asked her if she wanted to leave the meeting. She said no, she would wait and hear what people had to say, venomously addressing her reply in my direction. I was largely oblivious to her anger though; I never took my eyes off Venters. He had that characteristic, perpetually bored expression on his face. I was sure a faint smile briefly played across his lips.
— That was a very brave thing to say, Davie. I’m sure it took a lot of courage, Tom said solemnly.
Not really you doss prick, it was a fucking lie. I shrugged.
— I’m sure a terrific burden of guilt has been lifted from you, Tom continued, raising his brows, inviting me to come in. I accepted the opportunity this time.
— Yes, Tom. Just to be able to share it with you all. It’s terrible . . . I don’t expect people to forgive . . .
The other woman in the group, Marjory, directed a sneering insult towards me, which I didn’t quite catch, while Linda continued crying. No reaction was forthcoming from the cunt who sat in the chair opposite me. His selfishness and lack of morality sickened me. I wanted to take him apart with my bare hands, there and then. I fought to control me senses, savouring the richness of my plan to destroy him. The disease could have his body; that was its victory, whatever malignant force it was. Mine would be a greater one, a more crushing one. I wanted his spirit. I planned to carve mortal wounds into his supposedly everlasting soul. Ay-men.
Tom looked around the circle: — Does anyone empathise with Davie? How do people feel about this?
After a bout of silence, during which my eyes stayed trained on the impassive figure of Venters, Wee Goagsie, a junky in the group, started to croak nervously. Then he blurted out, in a terrible rant, what I’d been waiting for from Venters.
— Ah’m gled Davie sais that . . . ah did the same . . . ah did the fuckin same . . . an innocent lassie that nivir did a fuckin thing tae naebody . . . ah jist hated the world . . . ah mean . . . ah thought, how the fuck should ah care? What huv ah goat fae life . . . ah’m twenty-three an ah’ve hud nothin, no even a fuckin joab . . . why should ah care . . . whin ah telt the lassie, she jist freaked . . . he sobbed like a child. Then he looked up at us and produced, through his tears, the most beautiful smile I have ever seen on anyone in my life. — . . . but it wis awright. She took the test. Three times ower six months. Nuthin. Shi wisnae infected . . .
Marjory, who in the same circumstances was infected, hissed at us. Then it happened. That cunt Venters rolled his eyes and smiled at me. That did it. That was the moment. The anger was still there, but it was fused with a great calmness, a powerful clarity. I smiled back at him, feeling like a semi-submerged crocodile eyeing a soft, furry animal drinking at the river’s edge.
— Naw . . . wee Goagsie whined piteously at Marjory, — it wisnae like that . . . waitin fir her test results wis worse thin waiting fir ma ain . . . yis dinnae understand . . . ah didnae . . . ah mean ah dinnae . . . it’s no like . . .
Tom came to the aid of the quivering, inarticulate mass he had become.
— Let’s not forget the tremendous anger, resentment and bitterness that you all felt when you learned that you were anti-body positive.
This was the cue for one of our customary, on-going series of arguments to shunt into full gear. Tom saw it as ‘dealing with our anger’ by ‘confronting reality’. The process was supposed to be therapeutic, and indeed it seemed to be for many of the group, but I found it exhausting and depressing. Perhaps this was because, at the time, my personal agenda was different.
Throughout this debate on personal responsibility, Venters, as was typical on such occasions, made his customary helpful and enlightening contribution. — Shite, he exclaimed, whenever someone made a point with passion. Tom would ask him, as he always did, why he felt that way.
— Jist do, Venters replied with a shrug. Tom asked if he could explain why.
— It’s jist one person’s view against the other’s.
Tom responded by asking Alan what his view was. Alan either said: Ah’m no bothered, or: Ah dinnae gie a fuck. I forget his exact words.
Tom then asked him why he was here. Venters s
aid: — Ah’ll go then. He left, and the atmosphere instantly improved. It was as if someone who had done a vile and odious fart had somehow sucked it back up their arsehole.
He came back though, as he always did, sporting that sneering, gloating expression. It was as if Venters believed that he alone was immortal. He enjoyed watching others trying to be positive, then deflating them. Never blatantly enough to get kicked out of the group, but enough to significantly lower its morale. The disease which racked his body was a sweetheart compared to the more obscure one that possessed his sick mind.
Ironically, Venters saw me as a kindred spirit, unaware that my sole purpose of attending the meetings was to scrutinise him. I never spoke in the group, and perfected a cynical look whenever anyone else did. Such behaviour provided the basis on which I was able to pal up with Alan Venters.
It had been easy to befriend this guy. Nobody else wanted to know him; I simply became his friend by default. We started drinking together; him recklessly, me carefully. I began to learn about his life, accumulating knowledge steadily, thoroughly and systematically. I had done a degree in Chemistry at Strathclyde University, but I never approached my studies of that subject with anything like the rigour or enthusiasm with which I approached the study of Venters.
Venters had got HIV infection, like most people in Edinburgh, through the sharing of needles while taking heroin. Ironically, prior to being diagnosed HIV positive, he had kicked the junk, but was now a hopeless pisshead. The way he drank indiscriminately, occasionally stuffing a pub roll or toastie into his face during a marathon drinking bout, meant that his weakened frame was easy prey to all sorts of potentially killer infections. During his period of socialising with me, I confidently prophesied that he would last no time.
That was how it turned out; a number of infections were soon coursing through his body. This made no difference to him. Venters carried on behaving as he had always done. He started to attend the hospice, or the unit, as they called it; first as an outpatient, then with a berth of his very own.
It always seemed to be raining when I made that journey to the hospice; a wet, freezing, persistent rain, with winds that cut through your layers of clothing like an X-ray. Chills equal colds and colds can equal death, but this meant little to me at the time. Now, of course, I look after myself. Then, however, I had an all-consuming mission: there was work to be done.
The hospice building is not unattractive. They have faced over the grey blocks with some nice yellow brickwork. There is no yellow brick approach road to the place, however.
Every visit to Alan Venters brought my last one, and my final revenge, closer to hand. The point soon came when there was no time left to try and illicit heartfelt apologies from him. At one stage I thought that I wanted repentance from Venters more than revenge for myself. If I got it, I would have died with a belief in the fundamental goodness of the human spirit.
The shrivelled vessel of skin and bone which contained the life-force of Venters seemed to be an inadequate home for a spirit of any sorts, let alone one in which to invest your hopes for humanity. However, a weakened, decaying body was supposed to bring the spirit closer to the surface, and make it more apparent to we mortals. That was what Gillian from the hospital where I worked told me. Gillian is very religious, and it suits her to believe that. We all see what we want to see.
What did I really want? Perhaps it was always revenge, rather than repentance. Venters could have babbled for forgiveness like a greetin-faced bairn. It might not have been enough to stop me from doing what I planned to do.
This internal discoursing; it’s a by-product of all that counselling I got from Tom. He emphasised basic truths: you are not dying yet, you have to live your life until you are. Underpinning them was the belief that the grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life. I didn’t believe that at the time, but now I do. By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.
The nurse at the hospital looked a bit like Gail, a woman I’d once gone out with, pretty disastrously, as it happens. She wore the same cool expression on her face. In her case she had good reason, as I recognised it as one of professional concern. In Gail’s case, such detachment was, I feel, inappropriate. This nurse looked at me in that strained, serious and patronising way.
— Alan’s very weak. Please don’t stay too long.
— I understand, I smiled, benign and sombre. As she was playing the caring professional, I thought that I had better play the concerned friend. I seemed to be playing the part quite well.
— He’s very fortunate to have such a good friend, she said, obviously perplexed that such a bastard abomination could have any friends. I grunted something noncommittal and moved into the small room. Alan looked terrible. I was worried sick; gravely concerned that this bastard might not last the week, that he might escape from the terrible destiny I’d carved out for him. The timing had to be right.
It had given me great pleasure, at the start, to witness Venters’s great physical agony. I will never let myself get into a state like that when I get sick; fuck that. I’ll leave that engine running in the lock-up garage. Venters, shite that he is, did not have the guts to leave the gig of his own accord. He’d hang on till the grim end, if only to maximise the inconvenience to everyone.
— Awright Al? I asked him. A silly question really. Convention always imposes its lunacy on us at such inappropriate times.
— No bad . . . he wheezed.
Are you quite sure, Alan, dear boy? Nothing wrong? You look a bit peaky. Probably just a touch of this little bug that’s doing the rounds. Straight to bed with a couple of disprins and you’ll be as right as rain tomorrow.
— Any pain? I ask hopefully.
— Naw . . . they goat drugs . . . jist ma breathin . . . I held his hand and felt a twinge of amusement as his pathetic, bony fingers squeezed tightly. I thought I was going to laugh in his skeletal face as his tired eyes kept shutting.
Alas poor Alan, I knew him Nurse. He was a wanker, an infinite pest. I watched, stifling smirks, as he groped for breath.
— S awright mate. Ah’m here, I said.
— You’re a good guy, Davie . . . he spluttered. — . . . pity we nivir knew each other before this . . . He opened his eyes and shut them again.
— It was a fuckin pity awright you trash-faced little cunt . . . I hissed at his closed eyes.
— What? . . . what was that . . . he was delirious with fatigue and drugs.
Lazy cunt. Spends too long in that scratcher. Should get off his hole for a wee bit of exercise. A quick jog around the park. Fifty press-ups. Two dozen squat thrusts.
— I said, it’s a shame we had to meet under such circumstances.
He groaned contentedly and fell into a sleep. I extracted his scrawny fingers from my hand.
Unpleasant dreams, cunt.
The nurse came in to check on my man. — Most anti-social. Hardly the way to treat a guest, I smiled, looking down on the slumbering near-corpse that was Venters. She forced a nervous laugh, probably thinking it’s the black humour of the homosexual or the junky, or the haemophiliac or whatever she imagines me to be. I don’t give a toss about her perception of me. I see myself as the avenging angel.
Killing this shitebag would only do him a big favour. That was the problem, but one which I managed to resolve. How do you hurt a man who’s going to die soon, knows it, and doesnae give a toss? Talking, but more crucially, listening to Venters, I found out how. You hurt them through the living, through the people they care for.
The song says that ‘everybody loves somebody sometime’, but Venters seemed to defy that generalisation. The man just did not like people, and they more than reciprocated. With other men Venters saw himself in an adversarial role. Past acquaintances were described with bitterness: ‘a rip-off merchant’, or derision: ‘a fuckin sap�
��. The description employed depended on who had abused, exploited or manipulated whom, on the particular occasion in question.
Women fell into two indistinct categories. They either had ‘a fanny like a fish supper’, or ‘a fanny like a burst couch’. Venters evidently saw little in a woman beyond ‘the furry hole’, as he called it. Even some disparaging remarks about their tits or arses would have represented a considerable broadening of vision. I got despondent. How could this bastard ever love anybody? I gave it time, however, and patience reaped its reward.
Despicable shite though he was, Venters did care for one person. There was no mistaking the change in his conversational tone when he employed the phrase: ‘the wee felly’. I discreetly pumped him for information about the five-year-old son he had by this woman in Wester Hailes, a ‘cow’ who would not let him see the child, named Kevin. Part of me loved this woman already.
The child showed me how Venters could be hurt. In contrast to his normal bearing, he was stricken with pain and incoherent with sentiment when he talked about how he’d never see his son grow up, about how much he loved ‘the wee felly’. That was why Venters did not fear death. He actually believed that he would live on, in some sense or other, through his son.
It hadn’t been difficult to insinuate myself into the life of Frances, Venters’s ex-girlfriend. She hated Venters with a vitriol which endeared her to me even though I wasn’t attracted to her in any other way.
After checking her out, I cruised her accidentally-on-purpose at a trashy disco, where I played the role of charming and attentive suitor. Of course, money was no object. She was soon well into it, obviously having never been treated decently by a man in her life, and she wasn’t used to cash, living on the breadline with a kid to bring up.
The worst part was when it came to sex. I insisted, of course, on wearing a condom. She had, prior to us getting to that stage, told me about Venters. I nobly said that I trusted her and would be prepared to make love without a condom, but I wanted to remove the element of uncertainty from her mind, and I had to be honest, I had been with a few different people. Given her past experience with Venters, such doubts were bound to be present. When she started to cry, I thought I had blown it. Her tears were due to gratitude however.
