Filth

by Irvine Welsh

  We’re on the ground. Only Bruce is taking the blows, the boots. He is protecting me, protecting Stevie, all the rest . . . no . . . no . . . Carole isnae here. Stevie isnae here. It’s just me. Bruce. Bruce and the Worm.

  – Mind ay that auld disco song? Doctor Kiss-Kiss? That’s me, he says strutting around. He offers his hand. I take it.

  He pulls me to my feet. His arm is around our shoulders. We can’t move.

  – Ah’ve always fuckin hated cops, he explains. – No in the normal way everybody hates cops. Ah’ve eywis hated the cunts in a special wey. You’re different though sweethert. You kin be saved. Ah’m gonny make an honest woman ay you yet!

  He yanks our head back and he’s looking at us in the eye. His long tongue licks his lips.

  – Fuckin wide poof polis! He smiles. – Now it’s time for you to learn something . . . He sticks his tongue in our mouth, mingling his saliva with our blood.

  He probes for a while, then withdraws and we hear his voice, – Sexy! Whoa hoah! You thought ye could take me, ya fuckin sick poof! Ye liked that, eh sexy, he pants softly. – Ye liked it, eh?

  Yes. We know that we want him to do this again, this is our last wish. We want to say, Please, let us be together like that again, just one last time, but we can’t shout, only think, only hope that he can somehow sense this wish.

  He does.

  He pushes his tongue into our head again, but now we raise our weary arms to embrace him. Our hands lock together behind his back to celebrate our own joining, our own communion, our brotherhood. A grip nothing can break . . . it’s Carole . . .

  Oh Carole

  we embrace her and bite hard into her tongue and she’s squealing and trying to push us away like she did when we just wanted to hold her after we confronted her about the nigger, but no my darling, you cannae get away this time, no, cause we’re hugging her tight and as she tries to pull free we’re moving forward, no no my darling, we can’t let you go, not now . . . because we need to be together Carole, you know that . . . it’s just how it always has to be . . . our eyes have shut but through the membrane of our eyelids we can still see the light and we move towards it.

  Move in tae the light Stevie . . . Carole . . . away from the filth, intae the light . . .

  But this isn’t Carole. This is excrement. What is this thing doing here, doing here with us instead of Carole!

  It has to go.

  At the right time we release our grip and push and watch him falling backwards, crashing through the rotten window panes, still holding on, but unable to pull himself back in, and trying to grab the old, worn curtains but the material just tears in his hands and he looks at us with hate and incomprehension, his own blood spilling from the severed tongue in his mouth, as he slides out the window and crashes down on to the concrete court below. We look out and down and we can tell by the way he’s bent and broken that he’s gone, and then, as if to confirm our suspicion, a huge heart-shape of blood forms around his head.

  The spastics are banging on the door screaming threats. Ha ha ha.

  I go to shout at them but there’s something in my mouth. I put my fingers in and take it out. A piece of his tongue. I reach down and see Carole’s handbag and put it in her purse.

  I’m screaming back at them through the door: – Who’s fuckin next spastics! We are the Edinburgh polis! We kill spastics! WE HATE NIGGERS! ESPECIALLY THE WHITE ONES THEY CALL SCHEMIES!

  Then it stops.

  It seems like an age.

  Then we smell burning. They have set the building on fire. We go to the window and see them running out of the stairway. They scream a death threat up at me as they clock their spastic pal and we shout back: – Youse die! Youse git the same as that fuckin spastic! YOUSE DIE!

  We get the key from the mantelpiece and open the door. There is a surge of heat and the flames are everywhere, tearing up from floor to ceiling along the old papered walls.

  We are trapped. The thick, filthy smoke is filling our lungs.

  Our only option is to go to the kitchen and climb out on to the back drainpipe. When we get outside the wind is flapping in our ears and we feel that we are so high. The sky above us is a lovely pale blue with a cloud formation the shape of a twisted beggar. The pipe is slippy, but we hold on. Then it wrenches from its brackets and we lose our grip and fall, and there is no time for us to brace for impact and we are crashing down into something which takes our weight as it cuts and rips all around us and we’re sinking into a filthy green brittle tomb, which is where we come to rest, in this fucking hedge and we are unable to move. The hedge grows over a spiked fence and one spike has missed our head by inches. We can’t move, all we can do is think of Carole and sob. We cry for ourselves, not for her. It is important to remember that we always cry for ourselves.

  Oh Carole, I am but a fool

  Carole is nothing you see, I am the fool. Poor me.

  Then we hear voices. First we half-see the blurred figure of a uniformed spastic, asking us who we are.

  Darling I love you, though you treat me cruel

  You treat me cruel.

  At some point one of the voices becomes familiar: – Well Robbo, you’ve really fucked it up this time.

  We are torn to pieces in a woman’s dress, stuck in a hedge and we hear Toal talking to us, and in our present circumstances it has to be conceded that he may have a point.

  You hurt me, and you make me cry

  All we can say is, – You should see the other cunt.

  – We’re still scraping that particular piece of shit off the pavement at the front.

  But if you leave me, I will surely die.

  – Boss . . . I . . . don’t leave me . . . stay with me . . . we whine in a voice that is not our own.

  – Don’t try to talk Bruce, later. I’m here, Toal squeezes my hand. A good man Toal, I’ve always said it. He’s got a look in his eye, like my mother had when she was dying in that hospital bed. When we were trying to tell her that we were sorry for all the fuck-ups. Sorry that we were not somebody different. Sorry that we werenae like Stevie. A look like she understood. But she still pitied me.

  Toal’s alright, but I can see the pity in his eyes, a pity I detest more than anything.

  That is not true

  That is not

  true.

  The Tales Of A Tapeworm

  The hospital discharge procedures. The discharge in my pants. In my flannels. I wait for the taxi for Robertson in the A&E.

  – Is there nobody who can take you home? a concerned nurse asks.

  – No . . . I say.

  She looks at me with a sick pity and then leaves to attend to her duties. She’s replaced by a jakey who sits sucking on a purple tin. He hands it to me. I take a swig, expecting to wince as the sickening, syrupy liquid hits my gullet, but I feel nothing.

  – I’ve been comin here for ages, he tells me. – Got off the skag, but I was straight on this stuff.

  Tennents never advertise the purple tin. It’s not a recreational drug; they know it’s as strong a drug as heroin or crack. They know that you don’t need to market hard drugs like those. The desperate will always find them. Scotland’s greatest export next to whisky. The white man cometh. He take your land. He give the whisky. Just when you think it safe to go back in water he give you old purple tin. The white Caledonian Ku Klux Klan are coming.

  – Taxi for Robertson.

  I’m going home.

  The nurse is back. She has a nice smell. Not like the hospital. Not like the jakey. Not like me. – I wish there was someone you could stay with, she says, touching my wrist.

  I’m never really alone, but the voices are silent. For now.

  I smile and follow the cabbie. I wish there was someone I

  The purple tin will destroy America once they import it over there . . . those Russian jakeys begging in the streets under capitalism, we’ll do those cunts as well.

  Obliterate surplus labour!

  Obliterate them with the old pur
ple tin!

  Don’t give em Ecstasy! We don’t want them dancing! Keep them dulled, staggering and incoherent as they die! Make it glamorous. Put it on celluloid, put it on hoardings. Just keep the real thing as far away from us as possible.

  And the white race of Caledonia will stalk the Earth as juggernaut superbeings . . . like from that album by that shite heavy-metal band . . . who the fuck was it . . .

  Carole, you standing there and me bending your fingers back, loaded up with cocaine and alcohol and you looking at me with your large eyes in a weird state way beyond fear and me trying to think of why I should stop and trying to feel something that will make me stop before that crack

  that crack

  and your scream changing now; more broken and desperate than ever before, me making you feel but me still feeling

  nothing.

  How did it make you feel?

  But it wasn’t me that did it. We all have to take our share of the blame.

  We can cope with this nothingness. We know it too well to be disabled by it. But it’s so cold. The central heating seems to have broken down. The pilot light has blown out. Carole knew how to fix it. We, I, we consider getting a fire together, but it all seems too much: the fetching of coals, the finding of firelighters (is there a new pack?), the kindling, the lighting.

  No.

  We have knocked on Tom Stronach’s door a couple of times, but there is no reply. We once heard the television, so we know that Julie is in. The New Year’s Day game. Stronach will be playing in that. But no, the papers said that he was dropped. I would think that he would attend though. Surely. We venture out to Safeway’s for food.

  We cannot move our head as we walk.

  We hear our breathing in the cold air: rhythmic, deep. It puts us into a kind of a trance. We are still alive. We are in the supermarket. Breathing.

  The tins and packets on the shelves are just colours and shapes to us. We cannot recognise the products, cannot read the labels. If we take one of each then the chances are that we will have enough of the right things.

  This one.

  That one.

  This one.

  – Detective Ser . . . Mister Robertson . . . I hear a voice at my side.

  I turn round to see her, a woman. She looks . . .

  . . . she has a large smile on her face. Her hair is nice and her teeth are so white. She wears jeans and a beige polo-neck sweater under a brown lined leather jacket. There’s a sadness in her eyes.

  Who is she? I’m befuddled and besotted by lack of sleep and all those voices in my head, clamouring for attention . . . for recognition . . .

  All I can say is, – How have you been doing?

  – Not bad . . . not good, her face screws up and she laughs bitterly. I really want to see her smile again. She looks so beautiful when she smiles. – I’m really missing him. Why is it only the good die young? she asks me, and she asks it in a real way, as a real question, looking at me as if she thinks that I might know the answer.

  – Eh . . . I . . . eh . . .

  Now she’s seeing me for the first time. She sees my surgical support collar from where I hurt my neck in the fall. She sees the six-pack of the old purple tin in my shopping basket. I hadn’t realised it was there. It was like they just jumped in of their own accord. She’s seeing me now. She’s seeing a jakey with a four-day growth, a manky overcoat, stained flannels and old trainers.

  – Are you alright? she asks.

  – Eh? Oh, this, I laugh, looking down at myself. – Undercover, I whisper conspiratorially.

  – Isn’t it a bit extreme for shoplifting?

  – Ha! This isnae shoplifting. This is huge-scale corporate fraud I’m investigating. I nod over to the staff offices at the back of the supermarket.

  – I see, she says vaguely, as her son comes over to her side. – You remember Mister Robertson. The policeman. He tried to help your dad.

  – Hiya, the wee guy smiles, but as he clocks me he takes a step back. I smell my flannels. Wafting up the inside of my coat under my nose.

  – It’s okay Euan. Mister Robertson’s doing detective work. He’s dressed up as a tramp. It must be exciting being undercover, eh Euan?

  The wee guy forces another smile.

  – Hiya, I smile back. I look at his Hearts tracksuit. The new one. A Christmas present. I point at the crest. – So you’re a jambo eh? Did you go yesterday?

  – Naw . . . he says sadly.

  – Colin used to . . . his mother begins.

  – Who’s your favourite player? I ask, expecting a Neil McCann or a Colin Cameron.

  – Tom Stronach, I suppose, he says, then smiles doubtfully, – but he’s no as good as he used to be.

  – My next-door neighbour! I’ll have to get Tom to sort us out with some special tickets for Tynecastle. Would you like that?

  – Aye, that would be barry.

  – Speak properly Euan, his mother says. She looks at me. – You’re really kind, but I couldn’t let you . . .

  – It’s no problem. Honestly.

  We exchange addresses and phone numbers.

  – That’s a really kind man. Mister Robertson. A good man, I, we, hear her tell the kid as they depart.

  Our hands are almost cut in two by the handles on the plastic bags, but we are unaware of this until we reach home.

  Who are we?

  Who are we?

  How did we feel?

  We put the hands under the warm tap to help our circulation, but the water is boiling from the electric immersion. We flinch with the scalding pain and shed tears at the iniquity of the situation: that transgressors are living better lives than we are currently able to. More festive television, and a load of fuckin

  So we watch television. At some point Toal comes tae the hoose. My first foot. At least he comes here, rather than compelling us go in there. That evil, evil place. Some of them would have, Niddrie would have. We have been officially on the sick, our neck in a surgical support collar.

  – It might no really seem appropriate Bruce, but Happy New Year.

  – Happy New Year Bob, I hear a voice coming from my stiff, cold, numb lips.

  Toal explains to us that we are now suspended following an inquiry of the internal variety, the type of all our inquiries.

  – Don’t worry, we’ll do what we can, he tells us, looking around our hoose. He’s not taken his expensive-looking camel coat or his leather gloves off. He looks like a football manager. Like the guy who manages Wimbledon, him that played for Spurs. Steaming breath comes from his mouth. A few feet away in our fireplace lie the ashes of his manuscript.

  We cannot nod while we are wearing our support collar. – Appreciate it, we say meekly.

  Toal is trying to be firm and compassionate at the same time. He must make us aware of the gravity of the situation, but also offer hope that things will improve. We cannot even feel sorry for ourselves any more. This is a bad sign. We think.

  – Listen Bruce, we’ve obviously had to withdraw your application . . . for the promotion. Now is not the right time for you to meet with the promotion board. You see that, don’t you?

  We understand what Toal is saying. We cannot be bothered responding. They’ve now taken the job we coveted, the one which was ours by right, but the sense of loss that we feel is strangely negligible.

  Toal’s looking around the house with distaste. It’s a mess: aluminium takeaway cartons, chip-shop wrappers, beer cans (purple? aye, it’s found us at last!), plates with rotting scraps of food on them, even a pile of dried sick in one corner. – Listen Bruce, Toal’s face pinches as he allows his nostrils to acknowledge the stench we have long been oblivious to, – you can’t live like this. Is there nobody we can get in touch with, to make sure you’re being looked after?

  – No . . .

  BUNTY

  SHIRLEY

  CHRISSIE

  CAROLE

  Carole. The only one who could give us anything. The rest would just take. We have nothing to g
ive them. But Carole will never return.

  – You sure?

  – I’ll sort it out boss, we tell Toal. His face looks sourly down at us. – Honest, I try to force a smile.

  – I want you to Bruce. The police welfare people will be round to see you soon. They’ll be able to offer professional help. I know things seem pretty bleak at the moment, but you’re not the first officer on the job who’s lost it and you won’t be the last. Busby’s had his problems. Then there was Clell. He seems on the mend now. Bruce . . .

  Toal looks a bit sheepish. He’s rubbing his gloved hands together.

  – Aye?

  – You’ve got friends you know, he says softly. Then he smiles slightly. – We’re no as daft as you think. Your wife. We know she was having an affair with a black guy. It’s no a big city Bruce, and it’s a very white one. Things like that get noticed, no matter how discreet the parties are. But, as I said, you’ve got friends. We look after our own.

  His words hit me in a slow, stupefying flood. I feel like a test-crash dummy on low impact. I’m trying to work out what he means. – You mean you knew . . . all the time . . . you . . .

  – Don’t say anything Bruce, Toal says sternly, – Don’t say a word to me.

  He turns and pulls the net curtains and looks out the window. Then he faces me, keen-eyed: – Sometimes things are best left the way they are. There’s reputations, morale and careers at stake. In some ways, aye, it’s penny wise and pound foolish. We’re a bit short-termist in our thinking. But then again, we’re burdened wi this wee problem of three score and ten. Needs must, he grins.

  Same rules apply. I try to smile but I feel my face frozen, as if all the muscles and nerves in it have been severed.

  – You know, all this stuff about a mystery woman? I wasted a lot of time on her, he laughs and shakes his head looking at me, slightly embarrassed. – I overheard Bob Hurley saying to you in the bar one time: They’re all fucking Jackie Trent. You know, I thought that this Jackie Trent girl was involved and was having it off with most of the guys on the investigation in order to get them to cover things up. I spent ages looking for a Jackie Trent to run checks on. Then I realised it was all just some canteen in-joke, a bit of silly rhyming slang.