Irvine Welsh - The Blade Artist

The stair is easily found. At one time he’d made fairly advanced plans to fire-bomb the house next door, which was occupied by Cha Morrison, his old nemesis. It astonishes him now to think that he cared enough about this guy to consider doing that. What great crime had Morrison committed against him, or he against Morrison? Nothing whatsoever sprang to mind. It had all been talk, which had then ramped up, becoming a bizarre sequence of threat and counter-threat. Otherwise there was zero basis for their rivalry. They had jointly manufactured this conflict to give their lives drama, imagining it into brutal reality.

He goes into the neighbouring stair and realises that of the six flats, he can’t recall which one is occupied by June. He has no idea what name she will be using. There is no sign of ‘Chisholm’, her maiden name, or, to his relief, ‘Begbie’, which she’d taken to calling herself, and had registered Sean and Michael’s births under, although she and Franco had never married. No door suggests great wealth, so he opts for the one that gives the strongest impression of teeming squalor. It is painted black, some of which has spilled onto the frame, and it looks battered, with a Sellotaped, yellowing piece of paper, indicating that a J. McNAUGHTON resides there. He taps on the door and, sure enough, June answers.

Even since he’d last briefly seen her at his mother’s funeral, surprisingly obese, June has massively expanded. It’s impossible to square this version with the thin, brittle one of his memory. She looks at him, and, for an excruciating second, seems as if she is going to hug him. Her lips quiver, and her eyes implore. But then she turns abruptly, and heads inside. Assailed by the smell of cats and old, congealed deep-fried fat and, most of all, stale tobacco, he follows her into the flat.

Franco finds it hard to believe that he is facing her. She has sat opposite him in a faded floral-pattern armchair, part of a suite that is way too big for the cramped council flat. He can barely fathom how small the homes are. The room seems to conspicuously flaunt poverty.

— The game’s no straight, aye, she says, obviously doped up on antidepressants. Her eyes seem dulled and set far back into a now-bulbous head, which was once little more than a skull.

— Aye, he agrees, as a wary boy of around fourteen comes in. He fixes June with a sneer of defiant belligerence as he picks up a packet of cigarettes from the coffee table, then swiftly leaves.

— Yours? Franco asks.

— THEY ARE MA FAGS! she shouts after the departing boy, as she sparks up again.

— No the fags, the laddie.

— Aye, that’s Gerard. June takes a drag, her cheeks buckling in. — Ah’ve goat Andrea and Chloe tae. As well as oor Michael and Sean. . Her eyes glaze over and a tissue, torn from a box on the coffee table, goes right to them. As she coughs raucously, Franco watches June shake: her fat wobbling inside shapeless, washed-out leisurewear garments. Her first pregnancy and Sean’s birth had seemed to wreck her body, but rather than bloat, June had shrunk into a Belsen skeleton, and he’d pretty much lost interest in her after that. He had muttered something like ‘fuck sake’ when she told him she was expecting Michael. There had been the jail, and their domestic life together, in which he recalled her swathed in blue light from the television set, through a fog of cigarette smoke. Although still a specialist in tobacco consumption, June is now obese and looks as grey-skinned as he’d done after his longest prison stretch. She inhales again, her chunky face caving in so radically it is as if her teeth have been extracted. — So you goat married again, ay?

— Aye, official, he announces, looking coolly at her, waving his rings, — no just common law. We had tae, for my immigrant status. Wanted tae as well but, ay. If you feel the love, why no make the statement?

June bristles a little. — Aye, they say it was that American lassie ye met in the jail.

— She was the art therapist, aye. She expects me to say, Ah ken how it looks. Fuck that. — She’s young, good-looking, intelligent, from a wealthy family. We’ve got two lovely daughters. So what about you? Any romantic ties?

June looks up at him and coughs, managing to shake her head before being beset with an eye-watering fit.

— That snout’ll kill ye, he observes.

June sucks in some air and wheezes, — Ye pack them in, likes?

— Aye. Stopped the peeve n aw. Got bored wi it aw, ay.

— What aboot aw the other stuff? The fightin?

— Aye, got fed up with the jail. This art thing’s a good living, and I enjoy it.

June shifts her head, and it seems to sink into her body. Franco can’t discern a neck. — You were eywis good at art. Back at the school.

— Right, Franco laughs.

— Angie Knight, when she heard ye were back, she goes tae me, and June’s expression takes on a coquettishness he finds grotesque, — ‘Tell ye what, June, ah widnae be surprised if you n Franco ended up back the gither.’

— Ah wid, Franco says brutally, thinking: She’s a fucking simpleton. Why didn’t I see it before? Probably because I was too.

June’s face suddenly and dramatically flushes red. It is such a violently abrupt transformation that for a second Franco believes that she’s having a seizure. Then she starts to cry. — Oor son, Frank, oor Sean, what are you daein aboot it? Somebody killed our laddie and you’re daein nowt aboot it!

— See ye, he says, getting up to leave. It was a familiar pattern. They would whisperingly condemn his violence with those sour, baleful expressions, until they wanted some cunt sorting out, then he would suddenly become the big hero. Manipulation. He’d discussed all this with Melanie, with his mentor, John Dick, the prison officer. It had suited them all to keep him as he was. It still suits them. He will leave them back here in Edinburgh. They can either shut the door in his face or seize him in a hypocritical embrace, it won’t matter; he will be walking away from them all.

— Find whae did it and hurt them, Frank, yir good at that, she shouts after him.

This stops him in his tracks. He turns to contemplate her. — I mind I battered you bad a couple ay times. Once when you were expecting him, Frank says. — That was just wrong.

— Christ, it’s a bit late tae apologise now!

— Who’s apologising? It was wrong, he accepts, — but I’m not sorry I hurt you . I’m just indifferent. Always was. I had no emotional connection to you whatsoever. So how can I be sorry?

— Ah’m the mother ay oor. . you. . June stammers, then explodes, — you’ve nae emotional connection tae anybody !

— Anger is an emotion, Franco says, opening the door and exiting.

He goes downstairs and out into the street, heading to the bus stop. Thinks of the nights in bed with June. She’d had a flush of desirable youth, her body had been lithe and firm, as arousing as the insolent whip of her fringe, and there was that slutty chewing of her gum that excited and irritated him in equal measures. Yet he can’t ever remember caressing her. Only fucking her hard.

In his pocket, two phones, the Tesco one, so cold and rough and dead. He pushes it aside and gently squeezes the sleek American iPhone. He thinks of Melanie, spooning with her in the night, the fragrance of her, as her blonde hair tickles his nostrils. The sickle-shaped birthmark on her wrist. The love flowing through the skin on their bodies like blood. How she was his tender underbelly. How if they wanted to plunge him with a knife they would go straight through her into him. Into that part rendered soft by loving.

I got to see the blonde American lassie they had all been talking about. The news of her had spread through the prison system like a virus. People flocked to take her art classes; looking for a smile, a whiff of perfume. All about the accumulation of wanking material. The violent sexuality of imaginative space, where you went when you were on lock-up in that box. The last freedom.