Ирвин Уэлш - Dead Men's Trousers

— What the fuck, I hiss, crossing past the old snooker hall, now a shit club venue, copping a lungful of exhaust fumes. A solitary jakey extends a styrofoam and croaks hopefully. His face contorts in a bitter sneer as he sees it’s only coppers and a 5p I’ve deposited. — He must have said when he’s planning on returning?

— He told her all this in one email, Lou says breathlessly, — then cancelled his account and shut down his Facebook page. He’s even pit off his phone, Simon. She’s goat no way ay getting in touch wi him!

The office is located in a backstreet behind Pentonville Road, on the side that has escaped redevelopment. It’s a shabby old building above a minicab office and kebab shop, its days numbered with the sweeping post-Eurostar gentrification of the area. I let myself in and feel my feet stick to the carpet as I mount a stair so narrow it could be in Renton’s stomping ground of Amsterdam.

In the meantime, Lousia has managed to get Carlotta back on the blower. Of course, her and Ross, to say nothing of Euan’s auld mammy back in Wee Free cattle-cowpin land, are worried sick. The audacity of those self-indulgent pansy bourgeois drama queens on their menopausal breakdowns in saying that I don’t know how to treat women!

A wave of heat hits me as I open the office door. I left the fucking radiator on, and the power bill will be extravagant. Some privatised utility-shareholding one per cent public-school Nazi fuck will be getting wanked blind by a Third World child on a luxury yacht right now. Thank heavens for Renton’s money. I tell Carlotta to calm down and assure her I’ll be up next week. I ask her if there’s anybody else Euan would be in touch with, but she’s tried all his workmates and he’s just cut them off too. The cunt really has gone native. I never thought he’d have the balls.

Getting her off the phone feels like the psychic version of doing a pish you’ve long been bursting for. I open the window to let the cold air seep in, then move to my raised standing desk to check my emails and the website. A few lassies have left notices and shots. I’m enjoying their portfolios, and phoning to make appointments, when VICTOR SYME flashes up on caller ID, providing not so much a sinking feeling, as a bitter, rancorous surge of nausea, convincing you that the world is fucking finished.

The snide-couponed sex offender is talking about his urgent desire to meet ‘this surgeon felly’. Of course, I have to spill the disturbing news. Inevitably, he’s far from chuffed. — Call me as soon as he’s back! Ah dinnae like surprises, he whinges.

That’s a cliché all arseholes use: Ah dinnae like surprises . Fucking soulless control freaks. And gangsters are just the politicians of the schemes. Now the psychotic fishwife Syme thinks that I’m some kind of PA for this vanishing podiatrist! Fuck me, that cunt’s feet must be in bad shape! — He’s fled the country, Vic, on a hooring expedition, I’m wagering.

— Well, you’d better git um fuckin well back!

When you’re as much of a cunt as Syme, you don’t need to be logical, far less reasonable. — Well, Vic, if I knew where the fucker was I’d be right over there, dragging him back myself. But he’s gone off the radar.

— As soon as ye hear fae him, ah want tae ken aboot it!

— You’ll be the second to know, after my sis, his wife.

— Ah dinnae dae second, Syme says, and I can feel the spiteful malice down the line. Fuck sake, this is one creepy imbecile!

— Did I say second? I meant my sister will be second, I say, examining the profile of Candy from Bexleyheath, 20, student at Middlesex University, tweaking the head of my cherry through black brushed denim and boxers. — You, of course, will be numero uno.

— Count oan it, he snaps. — And dinnae think you’re oot ay ma range doon there in London, he says, in that queasy, smug voice that chills me. — Be seein ye.

I cough a goodbye into a dead line.

I cannae ignore it any longer; that itching and the watery, milky discharge fae my cock every time I take a single fish. That tenderness around the hee-haws, and now augmented by those sharp abdominal pains. A present from Edinburgh. One that Marianne probably got fae fucking Sick Boy!

The Sexually Transmitted Infections Outpatient Clinic is on the Weesperplein. I inform Muchteld, sitting opposite me, peering over her specs into her laptop, that I have tae nip out for a couple ay hours. There’s no reaction from her, as nothing is suspicious about this. She’s been with me long enough. When we worked together on my club night, Luxury, I was always sneaking away to pay people off in cash, or even meeting associates tae get fucked up.

We’re (appropriately) based in the heart of the red-light district, which retains a strange sleaze during the day. I stroll in the welcome brisk air towards Nieumarket, planning to jump on the Metro 54. I shuffle past two young holiday jakeballs fae the north ay England, preoccupied with ogling a hefty black lass in a window, as their mates urge them tae come doon the street. — This is where Jimmy Savile started out, I tell one. A salty retort comes my way, which I miss as a shivering junky asks ays for cash, and I slip him a two-euro coin. He tears off without recognition, sick wi need. I dinnae take offence, I’ve been there, and however his condition compels him tae act, he’ll be glad ay it. Weaving off tae the sounds ay a hurdy-gurdy, I head underground. The station is calm and sterile compared tae the chaos above it. As I board the chunky train to ride the two stops I’m thinking of Vicky and there’s an ominous tug in my chest.

When I get off, I emerge into bright sunlight. I’ve always liked this part of town, without realising that the clap clinic was based here. The Nieuwe Achtergracht is one ay ma favourite canals tae walk. It’s full ay quirky things to look at, and a real houseboat community; as it’s outside ay the four horseshoes in the centre ay toon, tourists rarely meander it. The clinic is housed in an ugly 1970s precast structure oan the corner. It’s joined to a block ay purple-bricked eighties-style apartments, which at least try tae nod tae Amsterdam’s nautical heritage with a few porthole windaes, aw looking oantae the bustling street. There’s a twisted dark canopy ay shame, which ironically looks like a vagina wi open piss flaps, urging ‘Come in, big boy!’ as ye walk through the doors below. I think ay aw the scabby cocks and putrid fannies of shaggers, innocent and prolific, who have walked underneath it, tae – often temporary – salvation.

The doctor’s a young woman, which is embarrassing, but the tests are nowt like the auld Ward 45 ay Edinburgh popular culture, where the wire test-tube brush soaked in Dettol is rammed down the cock hole. Nothing more than blood and pish samples, and a swab of the discharge. But she kens what it is straight away. — It looks likes chlamydia, which the tests will no doubt confirm in a couple of days. Do you wear condoms when you have intercourse?

Fuck sake…

I’ve picked up a fuckin Bonnyrigg Rose, for the second time in my life. At my fucking age, it feels beyond embarrassing, just totally ridiculous. — Generally, yes, I tell her. — Though there has been a recent exception, and I’m thinking ay Marianne.

— The risk, with chlamydia, as with all sexually transmitted diseases, is greatly decreased by use of a condom, but not eliminated. Condoms aren’t foolproof, for many reasons, and you can still get sexually transmitted infections despite using one. They sometimes break, she says.

Fuckin tellin me… I’m now thinking aboot bein wi Vicky and my cock bursting through the tip ay the rubber, and her scrambling in panic for the morning-after pill. For fuck sake.