by Irvine Welsh
— He had a big heart attack a few days back. That almost did him, and the doctors telt him that a second yin was in the post. Listen, Mark, Danny left something for ye. A package.
— I’ll be back up tomorrow, I say as I see Vicky coming towards me. — Strangely enough, I’m at a funeral right now, down in England. I have tae go. Ah’ll call you later and see ye the morn.
I’m instantly at one wi the funeral party. No longer a tourist in their grief, but stewing in my ain bubble ay numbness. We head back into town, tae the King’s Head Inn for the reception, which, in my distraction, I can’t fucking well stop calling the after-party. I’ve been in clubland too long. Following a bit of small talk, Vicky says tae ays, — I need some air. Come and walk down Fisherton Street with me.
— Anywhere you want tae go, I tell her, taking her hand.
When we get outside, I start talking about Spud. I instantly apologise, telling her that I realise this isnae his or my time, but I just heard it and it’s hit ays hard. She takes it well, pulling me intae the doorway ay a wool shop, and wrapping her airms roond ays and squeezing. I whisper, — I’m not going to say I know how you feel, because I don’t. My brother Billy and I had a very different relationship fae the one you had with Hannah. But we were young when I lost him. I’d like to think we’d have been closer now, had he lived, I tell her. I can’t believe my own ears. I don’t understand why I’m mourning Billy now, after all these fucking years, as much as Spud. I’m snivelling thinking about them, and old mates like Tommy, Matty and Keezbo too.
— Hannah and I fought loads, she laughs. — We were only a year apart and had the same taste in boys. Can you imagine?
As we press on down the street, I’m thinking that Billy and me never really had the same taste in girls, although ah did fuck his pregnant fiancée in the toilet after his funeral. I rub my eyes as if trying tae erase the memory. Aye, I definitely would class that as iffy behaviour. Then Vicky suddenly shudders, as if reading my thoughts, but she’s reacting tae something else. It’s two girls, giggling, playful, walking down the shopping street of narrow white buildings. Probably going to a bar or somewhere else on that trail she and Hannah regularly traversed as teens, or when they returned home to catch up. Every gurgling fountain of their girlish laughter must be a devastating blow to her right now.
I stay the night at Victoria’s parents, sleeping with her in a single bed. It isn’t actually her old one, she explains; that was thrown out when they got the room done up, about a decade ago now. I tell her that Dad still has my room pretty much the same as when I left it, even though I never considered it home after the Fort. We whisper and kiss and make love tenderly, both having tested clear from chlamydia after the three months. It’s hard tae leave her the next day, I want us tae be together until we both go back tae California, but her parents need her time more than ah do right now. I can’t face even a short flight, so ah take the long train ride up tae Edinburgh, reasoning that it will gie me mair time tae think.
When I get intae the city early evening, I head tae my dad’s, letting myself in wi the spare key. He isnae in, it’s the night he goes tae the Dockers Club with some auld mates. His routine is etched into my consciousness from a million phone calls. Fuck knows how he would have reacted had he seen the contents ay the Sellotaped brown-paper package Alison brings round.
Alison looks quite different. She has put on weight, but carries it with an almost luxuriant swagger. Underneath her upset about Spud, she has an underlay of contentment. She was always a vivacious soul, though one permanently on the run from a dark cloud that hovered above her. That seems to have gone.
I contemplate the brown package on my lap. — Shall I open it now?
— No, Ali says urgently. — He said it was for your eyes only.
I put it under the bed and we head out tae the big Wetherspoons at the Fit ay the Walk for a drink. Ali’s done alright; went tae university as a single parent to study English, then Moray House, and now teaches at Firhill High School. Yet she doesnae see this as a triumph. — I’m massively in debt and will be forever, in an incredibly stressed job that’s killing me. And everybody tells me how successful I am, she chuckles.
— The only successful people are the one per cent. The rest ay us are just fighting over the crumbs those bastards spill fae the table. And their media are constantly telling us it’s all good, or it’s our ain fault anyway. Probably right about the second: ye get the pish ye put up wi.
— For fuck sake, Mark, this convo is depressing the fuck out ay me, ah hear it in the staffroom every day!
I take the point. Nae sense in dwelling on the world’s shit, even though it’s pilling up mair every day. — Hibs won the Cup! Impossible not tae believe in the revolutionary, transformative potential ay the human citizenry in such circumstances!
— My brother was on the pitch. He’s worried cause he’s already on a life ban from Easter Road. I’m glad Andy never had much interest in football. It’s like everything else in working-class culture now, a route tae jail for doing practically nothing.
— Now who’s the depressing yin? I laugh. She joins in, and it rolls years off her face.
It’s great to see Ali again, and we have a decent drink, both a little tipsy when we leave. We exchange emails and swap hugs and kisses. — See ye at the funeral, I say.
She nods and I head down Great Junction Street. This stretch of Leith has struggled since as long as I recall; my auld girl and Auntie Alice taking ays up to the Clocktower Cafe in Leith Provy Co-op for juice; the auld State Cinema, long closed, where I watched the matinees on Saturday with Spud and Franco; Leith Hospital, where I got my first stitches, above my eye, after some cunt smashed the swing seat in my pus at the playground. All ghost buildings. Crossing over the bridge at the river, a place of phantoms.
Dad’s still out, the boozy auld fucker, so I open the package.
On top, a card. It just says:
Mark
Sorry, mate. Did not think at the time that it would mean so much to your folks.
Love
Danny (aka ‘Spud’) x
The card sits on a pair of jeans. Levi’s. 501s. Washed and folded. My first thought is: what the fuck, and then I see it all. The Nick Kamen advert. Billy getting dressed in them, pulling them on, the cool stud who fancied himself, going out tae fuck Sharon or some other wee bird. While me, the reluctant virgin, lay on my bed, reading the NME, thinking aboot the lassies fae the school, and ma burning desire to pop ma cherry up the goods yard. Where no goods trains had run through for years. Willing the posing cunt tae leave so that I could pull the end oaf it tae the images of Siouxsie Sioux and Debbie Harry, kindly provided by IPC magazines.
Then my mum, storming in fae the drying green, teary mascara eyes like Alice Cooper, screaming, speaking her first words I remember since Billy’s death, about how they’ve taken everything, they’ve even taken ma bairn’s jeans …
Spud had kept them all this time. Couldnae even flog them or gie them away. Too shamed tae hand them back, the sentimental snowdropping gyppo cunt. I could see him in my mind’s eye, sitting shivering with junk withdrawal in a back pew at St Mary’s Star ay the Sea, watching ma old girl light another candle for Billy, maybe overhearing her say, Why did they have tae take his clathes, his jeans …?
Billy was always a thirty-four, me a thirty-two. I’m thinking that they bastards’ll fit me now. — Who knows the mystery ay the Murphy mind, I muse. Ah cannae tell Ali aboot this, at least no now. It’s her son’s dad.
Then, the packet underneath the jeans. I open it up. It’s a thick manuscript, typed, with some handmade corrections. Astonishingly, it’s written in the same style of my old junk diaries, the ones I always thought I might do something with one day. In that sort of Scottish slang that takes a wee while tae get on the page. But after a few pages of struggle I realise that it’s good. Fuck me, it’s very good. I lie back on my pillow, thinking about Spud. I hear my auld man come in, so I put the chunky document
under the bed, go through and greet him.
We put the kettle on and talk about Spud, but I can’t tell him about Billy’s jeans. When he turns in, I find sleep impossible, and I need to converse more, to share all this grim news. I can’t talk to Sick Boy. It’s pathetic, but I just can’t. For some reason the only person I can think ay telling the now is Franco, no that he’ll gie a fuck. But ah send him a text for old times’ sake:
No good way of saying this, but Spud died this morning. His heart gave out.
The fucker bats it right back at me:
Too bad.
And that’s the extent tae which he cares. What a first-class cunt. I’m enraged, and I text Ali to tell her.
A charitable response comes back immediately:
It’s just his way. Go to bed. Goodnight. x
34
THE FORT VERSUS THE BANANA FLATS
The sun beams obstinately in the cloudless sky, as if offering any potential troublemakers planning to drift in from the North Sea or the Atlantic a pre-emptive square go. Summer has bubbled its usual promise, but now there are signs of real traction. The old port of Leith seems to sprawl in heat’s lazy vulgarity around the churchyard of St Mary’s Star of the Sea, from the run-down 1970s Kirkgate shopping centre and flats on one side, to the dark lung of dock-bound Constitution Street on the other.
Despite the grimmest of circumstances, Mark Renton and his girlfriend Victoria Hopkirk are powerless to resist a nervy onset of levity occasioned by her first meeting with Davie Renton. Mark’s father has never set foot inside the Catholic church. As a Glasgow Protestant, he initially resented it on ecclesiastical grounds, but when his stubborn sectarianism finally started to wane, he grew to see it as a rival for his wife’s affections. It was his Cathy’s place of refuge, indicative of a life he couldn’t share, a competitor. Guilt wracks him, as it all seems so trivial now. To calm his nerves Davie has taken one nip too many. On seeing his son, in the churchyard with his English, American-based girlfriend, he undertakes a rakish Bond impression, kissing Vicky’s hand and stating, — My son never showed good taste in women, then adding the waspish punchline, — until now.
It is so ludicrous they both laugh out loud, forcing Davie to join in. However, this reaction excites a chastising look from Siobhan, one of Spud’s sisters, and they rein in their mirth. They greet the other mourners sombrely, filing into the church. In the icon-laden camp palace of unreformed Christianity, Victoria is struck by the contrast to her sister’s cremation. In the coffin, the body of Daniel Murphy lies out on display in an open casket, in preparation for the full requiem Mass.
Renton can’t avoid running into Sick Boy, who is present with Marianne. After a terse nod of acknowledgement, they are silent. Each wants to speak, but neither can bypass the powerful saboteur of pride. They studiously avoid meeting each other’s eyes. Renton registers that Vicky and Marianne have exchanged glances, and is keen to keep them at a distance.
They file past the coffin. Renton notes uneasily that Daniel Murphy looks positively wholesome, better than he’s done in about thirty years – the undertakers deserve a medal for their craft – the Hibs scarf he found at Hampden folded on his chest. Renton thinks of the DMT trip, and wonders where Spud is. It brings home how life-changing that experience was, as he’d previously simply have thought of him as completely extinguished; like Tommy, Matty, Seeker and Swanney before him. Now he genuinely doesn’t know.
The priest gets up and gives a standard speech, Spud’s extended family shivering under the meagre psychic comfort blanket he provides. The proceedings are uneventful, until Spud’s son, Andy, gets up into the polished pulpit to make a testimony to his father.
To Renton, Andrew Murphy looks so like a young Spud, it’s uncanny. The voice coming from him instantly undermines this impression though, a more educated, blander Edinburgh, with a hint of north of England. — My dad worked in furniture removals. He liked that manual labour, loved the optimism people felt when they were moving into a new home. As a young man, he was made redundant. A whole generation were, when they shed all the manual jobs. Dad wasn’t an ambitious man, but in his own way he was a good one, loyal and kind to his friends.
At these words, Renton feels an unbearable tug in his chest. His eyes glass over. He wants to look at Sick Boy, who is sitting behind him, but he can’t.
Andrew Murphy continues. — My dad wanted to work. But he had no skills or qualifications. It was important to him that I got an education. I did. Now I’m a lawyer.
Mark Renton looks to Alison. Through her tears, she glows with pride at her son’s performance. Who, he thinks, will provide a testimony to him? Thinking of Alex, something catches in his throat. When he’s gone, his son will be alone. He feels Vicky’s hand squeezing his.
Andrew Murphy changes the mood. — And in a few years, maybe five, maybe ten, I’ll be as redundant as he ever was. The lawyer will be gone, like the labourer before him. Made obsolete by big data and artificial intelligence. What will I do? Well, then I’ll find out just how much like him I am. And what will I say to my child, he points at his girlfriend, her belly swollen, — in twenty years’ time, when there are no labourers’ or lawyers’ jobs? Do we have a game plan for all this, other than wrecking our planet in order to give away all its wealth to the super-rich? My father’s life was wasted, and yes, a lot of it was his own fault. Still more of it was the fault of the system we’ve created, Andrew Murphy contends. Renton can see the priest tense up to the point where the pressure in his arsehole could crush a solar system. — What is the measure of a life? Is it how much they’ve loved and been loved? The good deeds they’ve done? The great art they’ve produced? Or is it the money they’ve made or stolen or accumulated? The power they’ve exerted over others? The lives they’ve negatively impacted upon, cut short or even taken? We need to do better, or my father will soon seem a really old man, because we’ll all start dying again before we reach fifty.
Renton thinks about Spud’s manuscript. How Spud’s life wasn’t all wasted. How he sent it off to that publisher in London, with some minor modifications. He imagines he can feel Sick Boy’s gaze, rapacious, on the back of his neck. However, his old friend and nemesis has averted his eyes to the floor. Sick Boy fights down a poignant, undermining reasoning that significance in life is only found in relationships with others, and we’ve been cruelly hoaxed into believing that it’s all about us. A pain is intensifying behind his eyeballs, a sour sickness curdling in his guts. It shouldn’t be like this; Spud dead, Begbie absent, him and Renton estranged. He’s trying to convince himself that he tried to save Spud but his friend was let down by two people: his brother-in-law Euan McCorkindale, and brothel-keeper Victor Syme. — They fucking killed Spud, he raises his head and whispers to Marianne, — that two who urnae here.
— Begbie?
— No, not Begbie. Sick Boy scans the mourners. — Euan. He shat out of doing his duty as a doctor, couldnae even stop Spud getting infected. And I reunited that cunt with my sister!
‘Sunshine on Leith’ strikes up as the mourners rise and file past the coffin, paying their last respects. Spud, strangely, scarily, doesn’t even look deceased. There isn’t that lifeless, soulless, toneless quality dead bodies generally have. He looks like he could spring up and demand an ecky, Sick Boy thinks. He crosses himself as he looks at his friend’s face for the last time, and heads outside the church, lighting up a cigarette.
He overhears a conversation between Mark and Davie Renton, and Renton’s girlfriend, whom he annoyingly finds exceptionally fit. He’s surprised that she’s English, rather than American. When he hears his old rival mutter something about his flight to LA, he cringes, and steers Marianne away. Renton will make the money back, he bitterly considers, scum rises to the top. Of course, Syme wouldn’t show his face, but Sick Boy is disappointed at Mikey Forrester’s absence.
Marianne asks him about attending the reception at the hotel on Leith Links, where the mourners are all heading. — No, I’ll spa
re myself the bleatings of victim plebs. Embittered anger and self-pitying grief love a spurious mission, and pissing it up with losers now has zero appeal. You move forward in life or you don’t move at all, he scoffs as they head into the Kirkgate. — Even the church was almost unbearable, despite the palatial holy surroundings. The Murphy family, though, they always did embrace the wrong elements of Catholicism. To me the only part that makes sense is confession, emptying the sin bin when it gets full, to make room for new, incoming ones.
— His son gave a really nice speech, Marianne observes.
— Aye, a bit too close to communism for the old priest, decidedly not a liberation theologist.
She looks thoughtfully at him. — Do you ever think about dying, Simon?
— No, of course not. Though as long as there’s a priest by my side I couldn’t give a toss how or when.
— Really?
— The deathbed repentance, the Davie Gray winner in the game of life deep in stoppage time, as I think ay it. No prods need apply.
— Hey! Marianne pushes into him. — I was christened Church of Scotland!
— Nothing sexier than a Scottish proddy bird with an arse like yours. Wait till I get you in the sixteen-ninety position.
— Aw aye, what’s that then?
— It’s the sixty-nine but with a really skinny fucker and a fat cunt standing on either side of youse, just watching as you go at it, maybe frigging themselves off.
The lovers double-back down Henderson Street, opting for a fish restaurant on the Shore. In a favoured surrounding, overlooking the river, Sick Boy continues to grow more effusive, after his moment of reflection. — Alas poor, skint Renton, he pours the Albariño, — now penniless despite his cowardly attack on me. I’m betting he actually thinks that it bothers me: it was a pleasure to finally out him as the Fort yob he really is, strip him of his pathetic, cultured affectations. Leith south of Junction Street bred only thuggery; north of that great cultural divide was all port sophistication.
