Irvine Welsh - The Blade Artist

SFB 1338 LARRY 685 FF 593

Despite Larry’s labours in working to get the highest score, he is some way behind the top shooter. SFB had to be Sean Francis Begbie.

Franco rises to the cabinet under the TV, regards the series of home-made DVDs. Scanning the girls’ names on the spines, he picks up the one marked ‘Frances’, extracting the disc and pushing it into the hydraulic slit on the player. The image of the game is replaced by more human action.

It is badly filmed, one camera position, showing two bodies in wide shot, an unedited continuous one of Larry fucking Frances Flanagan. As he winds the action forward at speed, Franco realises that Frances seems to be drugged. He discerns this from the way she is compliantly pulled into different positions by Larry, and fastened up in bondage and a ball gag, before having certain implements inserted into her. Again, he winds on, stopping it when he sees Larry crouched behind her, the lesions visible on his chest. Franco finds it hard to be blasé about the heinous nature of this; he can’t help thinking of his own daughters. Was there a possibility that they could turn out like Frances, becoming victims of men like Larry? He swallows down the bile, and switches off, removing the disc and replacing it back in the case. He wouldn’t have bothered had Larry come in and found him watching this, but it’s probably better that he doesn’t know.

Then Larry returns to the room, only briefly registering Franco’s presence at the TV, as both men sit back on the couch. Larry picks up the console again. — The auld girl, he says.

— How’s she daein? Franco enquires, knowing that he’s lying.

— Still nippin ma heid, so same auld, Larry says, getting back into the game. — You’ll git that Anton cunt, Franco, he announces, as he shoots at an oncoming robot. — A leper never changes his spots. He’s your man.

Franco isn’t thinking of Anton, but his own mother, Val, or rather her funeral, which was the last occasion he was home. She was a good woman, he reflects, but her sons and husband were all Begbies, who brought her nothing but different versions of hell. He recalls how when Elspeth had phoned to inform him of her death, he’d wanted to cry, but couldn’t, and how that desire had strangely been more for the benefit of Melanie, who had squeezed his hand throughout the call. Sometimes it’s hard to fit in with people, he considers, looking at Larry. — Ah’m gaun oot.

Larry glances at him, then points at the DVDs. — That’s some ay the birds ah’ve been ridin. That wee Frances n aw. Set ye up wi any ay them, if ye like.

— Ah’m married, Franco says.

— Nivir stoaped ye before!

— Wisnae married before.

— As good as!

— That was before, ay, and he leaves the flat, Larry’s sly smile buried into his psyche.

Outside, Franco walks the grey streets, sees people heading home from their offices, or on to pubs, theatres and cinemas. The wind starts to bite and clouds loom ominously. He feels isolated, shut out by the city, and is soon bored. Where can you go in Scotland in the evening if you don’t want to have a drink? He’s averse to owning up, but he already misses chatting to his nephews and Greg, and, yes, even Elspeth.

He calls Melanie from the Tesco phone and it goes through, but straight to her voicemail. He should send a text, or an email, but he hates that method of communication more than any other. His dyslexia means that even now it’s a laboured process, bundled with inherent frustrations. And he feels the relentless magnetism of the pub and alcohol, tugging at him like it never did when he was back in the USA. Who can he call when he experiences this pull?

The Santa Barbara Dance Center was downtown, on the corner of De La Vina and West Canon Perdido. Jim and Melanie Francis had enrolled to come along for an introductory salsa session. To their surprise, the woman they met there was familiar. She’d been with the dancing couple at the club that memorable evening; they would soon agree that Sula Romario was the sexiest person they had ever met in their lives. The athletic Ecuadorian woman, with the luxuriant tumble of dark curls, had a low, husky voice that stripped layers from your skin, while her luminous ebony eyes burrowed into your soul. Sula had looked them both over, walking around them in that small ballroom, before her pouting, dark-red lips declared, — It’s good. Now we dance, and she taught first Jim, then Melanie, the basic steps on a count of eight; left foot forward, right foot back. Then she let them try it out together.

Jim had never been a dancer, but the steps were not unlike boxing ones, and he took to it quickly. Melanie loved to dance, and soon they were increasing the tempo and moving smoothly across the studio’s polished wooden floor, to Sula Romario’s approval. They mastered the right turn and cross-body lead so slickly that Sula decided to put them immediately into the class. — You dance well, she said to Melanie, and then turned to Jim, — but you. . you have the fire in your soul!

— Aye, is that right? Jim smiled.

Then the lights flicker on, but Melanie keeps her eyes shut, trying to force herself back into the satisfying stew of memory and dream. It isn’t working; Jim’s face fades under the glow burning through her lids and she blinks awake to note that, thankfully, she’s missed breakfast. The remains of a croissant are visible down the front of the fat man.

Disembarking at Terminal 5 in Heathrow, she heads to the Plane Food restaurant, orders some eggs and checks her phone. There is a call from a Santa Barbara number she doesn’t recognise, and a message on her voicemail. She plays it and her blood runs cold.

— I’ve been drinking. I may even have a problem . Harry’s voice is sullied by bitterness. — So now maybe I’ll be interesting enough for you to acknowledge that I fucking exist . Wouldn’t that be something? People like you. . women like you. . you know nothing . Nothing!

Melanie can feel the noise of the fork in her hand rattling involuntarily against the plate. She wants to erase the message, obliterate those dumb, sneering tones. But she doesn’t, she plays it again, empowered by the fact that he has compromised himself. She calls Jim, but there’s still nothing except a strange tone that’s meaningless to her. Boarding the connecting flight to Edinburgh, Melanie has only a vague idea as to where Elspeth’s place is, having been there with Jim several years ago, before Grace was born.

Landing at her destination, her neck and spine sore after all the flying, she finds herself almost hallucinating from the combination of jet lag, exhaustion and the curious exhilaration of being back. She had never planned to go to Edinburgh to work, it had been an exchange programme for a year between the Scottish prison service and the California correctional system. But Melanie had taken to it. Yes, the city is as cold and grey as she remembers, but it is also breathtakingly beautiful. Sitting in the taxi, listening to the driver’s banter, she recalls why she loved the place; the majestic vistas, the fresh air, but most of all the militant, almost paradoxically dramatic, unpretentiousness of the locals.

She has to find Frank, and curses herself for not getting the number for Elspeth, or even his exes. The mothers of his sons. It still astonishes Melanie, given the strong, warm, gentle and exclusive way he is with her and the girls, that there are other women with whom he had children. That he’d previously led a different, more desperate life was something she had known from them meeting in prison; this had been intellectually and emotionally absorbed. But the hardest bit is acknowledging the existence of, and dealing with, those who had shared that life.