Irvine Welsh - Crime

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.