Irvine Welsh - The Blade Artist

— Cheers, Larry, Franco notes, still scanning the crowd, — but ah’m fine at ma sister’s.

Michael stands a little apart from the groups, chatting with another young guy, flinty-eyed and with a fistful of sovereign rings. Franco sees them staring at the young woman, Frances Flanagan. But she doesn’t notice, as she is gazing at him and Larry. Larry turns and winks at Frances, beckoning her over.

— Frances here kent Sean tae, Larry informs him as she joins them, — ay, doll?

— Aye. Sorry like, she says to Franco. He concedes the girl’s beauty. A long, angular jaw gives her a sharpness and intensity perfectly congruent with her piercing eyes and their unusually arresting emerald green.

— Heard ye were there at the time.

Frances looks at him as if he’d just told her that she is standing in a field full of landmines. Frank Begbie can almost see a speeded-up movie playing in those expressive eyes. — Well, ah wis and ah wisnae. . she says sheepishly.

According to Fat Tyrone, though not known to the police, she had been with Sean when he was in the room, wasted on a cocktail of drugs so formidable it might well have destroyed him had his adversary not got there first. It seemed likely, as she explains to Franco, that she had woken up, after passing out with Sean, to find him dead in a spillage of blood, the door of the flat unlocked. She had understandably got the fuck out, then called the ambulance. — We should talk aboot this later, Frances says, aware of the proximity of Larry’s rapacious gaze.

Franco sees the sense in that, but his brain is buzzing. Was her story true? Or did she know the killer and was protecting him, or was scared of him? Was it her? A lovers’ tiff over drugs or money? She’s slight and slender, but Sean was so wasted, as the cop, Notman, had said, he’d have been easy enough to finish off. — Aye, he agrees, — we should.

— Right, she nods. Franco watches her depart, joining two other young women. She certainly is a good-looking girl. In the USA she would have perhaps taken the Greyhound bus to West Hollywood, done some waitressing jobs while she took acting classes and waited to be discovered or married. He thinks of young women like her whom he’s known, and what a strange currency feminine beauty back here could be. Many women were thankful that they had it, but were then determined to spend it as quickly as possible. It was more often treated like any other windfall, something to be pissed away before anybody else got their hands on it. Here, Frances would drink and drug her looks into a haggard mess. Despair seemed to cling to her. Then, he supposed, looking around the crowd, most men did the same with their own pleasing youthful features, and he was beset with a sudden awareness that it was only prison that had stopped him from peeving himself into a jakey mess. People led tough lives; they worked, were tired, often depressed, and didn’t have the time or money for spas or gyms or sensible diets. Over her shoulder, he gets a glimpse of Tyrone, with Franco’s old friend Nelly. A few feet away he hears a woman say something about the place being full of ‘hooks, crooks, hoors and comic singers’. That seemed about right.

June is suddenly back at his side, pointing to the chapel. — We huv tae go in.

The service tells Frank nothing about his dead son. The minister’s speech is all bland platitudes. Yet some draw obvious relief and comfort; June’s soft wails break out in gentle intervals, through the fug of her medication, flanked as she is by him and Michael. Throughout the proceedings, his second son’s lower lip sags, his eyes tarnished in sullen suspicion. Michael never looks at him, and Franco concedes to himself that he can hardly blame him, given how their last meeting had played out. Otherwise, there are plenty of old faces. Some are genuine friends, like Mickey and boys from the boxing club; others, many of whom he’s crossed over the years, seem basically along for a thinly disguised gloat.

As well as June and Michael he has Elspeth, Greg and Olivia sharing the front pew with him. Joe sits behind them, looking bedraggled, pished and spoiling for a fight. The only alleviation from the minister’s dreary recitations comes from the Tesco phone; it suddenly explodes into a hurdy-gurdy ringtone, compelling Franco to answer it. — Aye?

— Are you paying too much interest on your loans? a robot voice enquires. Franco snaps it off, June looking at him in her old-school wounded way. Then it’s time for everybody to leave. He sees Kate, another of his exes, who looks well, with her two sons, Chris, about fourteen, and River, around twelve, who is his own. More than any of Franco’s offspring, the kid, whom he’s never seen outside some infant pictures she’d sent him in prison, looks disconcertingly like him. He shakes the boy’s hand, asks him about school, tells him to work hard at it, and be good to his mum. It’s about all he can run to, and he’s relieved to be interrupted by his old neighbour, Stevie Duncan, and his wife Julie. He hasn’t seen them for years, and is delighted to hear that Stevie’s mum, old Mrs Duncan, is still alive and living in the sheltered housing complex at Gordon Court. It is the same one his grandad Jock died in. He recalls that she’d knitted him his first ever green-and-white Hibs scarf. They are good people. — She would have been along, Frank, Stevie tells him, as they file outside into the cold. — It’s her legs, she cannae stand about for long.

— That’s a shame. Ah’d love tae pop up and see her.

— She’d like that, Frank.

The funeral is followed by a reception in a hotel on Leith Links. People come up to him, many of them barely recognisable as old acquaintances. Gavin Temperley has ballooned. — Pittin oan the Coral, Gav, Franco observes playfully.

— Good livin, Temperley smiles back with a faintly suppressed air of desperation.

Then another voice in his ear, hesitant and cagey. — Awright, Franco. .

He turns to see a thin and haggard man, with a greasy mop of sandy-grey hair, under which sit two large dark eyes with a dull sheen, set far back into a face of ghostly pallor. — Awright. . Franco warily responds. — How’s it gaun?

— Ye see it aw, Franco.

Spud Murphy looks so old and wizened to him that if he hadn’t spoken Franco wouldn’t have been able to confirm his identity. — Cannae be as bad as that, surely!

A gallows smile pushes Spud’s features into some kind of animation. Then they tumble south again. — Sorry aboot Sean. It’s a bad toon, Franco. Aw changed. A bad toon now, likesay, Spud warns.

Franco nods, as that couldn’t really be disputed. All towns have their bad sides; this one is no worse or better than any other. In California, they lived only a few miles away from where a film director’s privileged son had recently gone on a rampage, shooting people dead because he couldn’t get his hole. Thank fuck they don’t have guns here , he thinks mischievously, looking at poor Spud. Despite its movie representation, militaristic foreign policy and creeping racism, he finds America generally such a mannered place compared to here, but then they let lunatics buy guns, and that could change everything.

Over Spud’s shoulder, he can see June, still tearful, being comforted by Olivia, with Michael looking on, seeming almost nonchalant. Franco feels a strange reverberation coming from deep inside him. Breathe. .

One. . two. . three. . who are we. .

To think that this was once his family, and these were once his bosom buddies. He contemplates Mel and Grace and Eve, trying to isolate details of their faces as they slither through his mind, their friends Ralph and Juan, and even his in-laws and his agent, Martin, back in the sun of California. And they call this grey place Sunny Leith. It was bizarre. Life often seemed like a meaningless joke. You either got the custard pie in the face, or you got to giggle at those who did. — Right enough, Spud, Franco almost bellows, fighting back a gurgling laugh.