Irvine Welsh - Filth

I head up to the South Side and think about calling in at Alan Anderson’s old boozer in Infirmary Street. I wonder what Alan’s doing now. One of our spectacularly average players of the seventies; there was a factory turning them out. It’s really busy up the Bridges with schemies purchasing shoddy goods from the wog discount stores and students between classes sniffing around the second-hand record shops.

I try to get a look at the scores in the window of a TV shop. In England Man U., Arsenal, Newcastle, Chelsea and Liverpool all won, so it’s as you were. I’m waiting on the Scottish results coming through when a raucous shriek fills the cold air, stripping the flesh from my back. I turn and see a crowd forming across the road. I go over to investigate, pushing past the stupefied ghouls and see a man, about mid-forties, well-dressed, twitching away on the ground in an ugly paroxysm, one arm stiff and clutching his side.

The boy is turning blue and a woman is screaming: – COLIN! COLIN! PLEASE HELP US! PLEASE!

I’m down on my knees at the prostrate figure’s side. – What’s wrong? I shout at her. He seems not to be breathing. He’s pissed himself; a black, wet patch is forming on his groin.

– It’s his heart . . . it must be his heart . . . he’s got a bad heart . . . oh Colin no OH GOD COLIN NO!

I’ve got the boy’s head back and I’m giving him mouth-to-mouth.

C’mon you bastard

I can feel the life draining from him, the heat leaving the body and I’m trying to force it back into him, but there’s no response. His face is white now, he looks like a manikin. I turn to the woman. There’s a wheezing birr coming from her own bleached-out face. – What is . . . what can . . .

– Do something . . . please . . . the words seem to aspirate from a hole in her throat.

I shout at the guy, – C’mon mate . . . you cannae just go . . . I turn to the gaping crowd, – Git an ambulance! JUST FUCK OFF OOTTHE ROAD!

I’m trying external heart compression, applying the pressure, thudding at the guy’s chest, respect and expectation giving way to malevolence as he refuses to respond. I feel his wrist.

There’s no pulse.

LIVE

LIVE

LIVE

– You have to live, I say softly to him. His eyes have rolled into his head.

The woman is screaming in my ear, – COLIN . . . OH NO GOD NO . . .

I don’t know how long passes as I sit alongside this formless thing lying in the stench of its secretions and I’ve got the woman’s hand in mine. I can hear the sirens and I feel the hand on my shoulder. – It’s alright mate. You did more than anybody could do. He’s gone. I look up and see a guy with red hair coming out of his nostrils. He’s wearing a luminous green waistcoat.

The ambulance guys are taking him away. In a sudden, strident motion, the woman grabs me round the waist, her sweet scent merging with his malodorous reek. – Why . . . he was a good man . . . he was a good man . . . why? At first it feels awkward and invasive, but our bodies settle into a natural convergence, we fit each other like a hand in a glove.

– Was he? Was he? I nod, feeling tears rolling down my cheek and I’m rubbing at my face. The woman is in my arms, her head in my chest. I want to hold her forever, to never let her go.

They take the dead man into the ambulance and we break our embrace and I feel the cold shallowness of isolation as she’s led away. I stand up and turn to face the ghouls. It’s the same faces all the time. Like that daft film where they all gather for a tragedy.

– What youse fuckin well looking at? What dae ye expect tae see! Go back tae yir shoppin! Gaun! I flash my badge at them, – Police! Disperse!

The dead man is on the trolley and the woman collapses across his chest. That’s what the ghouls want a shufti at, like at that Princess Diana’s funeral, they want to scrutinise those who really knew her, to drink the misery out of their faces.

Somebody’s talking to me. – Who are you?

– Bruce Robertson, D.S. Bruce Robertson, I shout at him. – Lothian’s Police.

– What happened?

I look at the guy, – I tried to save the boy . . . I tried, but he just went . . . he just went . . . I tried to save him.

– How did that make you feel?

– Eh? I ask the cunt. – What the fuck . . .

– Brian Scullion, the Evening News . I was watching you. You did really well D.S. Robertson. How did you feel when he didn’t make it?

I turn away from this spastic and push through the crowd. I slope down Infirmary Street and head mole-eyed into Alan Anderson’s old boozer.

The boy should have stayed alive. That woman, she loved him.

I’m shivering. It was cold out there.

A double whisky keeps the chill at bay. I change to voddy after that though; cunts can’t whiff it on your breath in the same way. I knock back of few of those. I’m thinking about the guy. Pushing the life into him, all the time pushing against a greater force. Trying to fill the plugless bath but it’s no use, it all just goes.

I leave the bar and find the motor. I swirl some mouthwash around my gob and spit it out on to the frozen snow, watching the clean blue solution indent the white. I rev up the motor and the end slides all over the place as I turn the corner. One spastic beeps me but I’m too pished to bother.

Work however has lost its appeal, not that it ever had any in the first place. I leave the car in the car park for appearances’ sake and I knock off early, trudging homewards through the snow before flagging a taxi. Back at the ranch, I watch the scores on the teletext, noting that Hearts have lost three– nil at Rugby Park. I make an effort to clean up, and I manage to throw out some old plates of food and tin foil cartons of curry and chinky. Chrissie arrives early, which annoys me, as the place is still a shithouse. I’m chuffed though, to see that cock-stirring mix of need and devotion in the hoor’s eyes. Chrissie’s about five-four. I doubt she’s above the six-stone mark. She’s not so much heroin chic as hospice chic, and looks somewhat less than resplendent in a gaudy yellow blouse and an above-the-knee black skirt which looks like it’s made from the same material as my flannels.

She expects me to say something. Wrong! It doesnae work that wey. Silence is golden and sometimes you have to struggle to control it. Any schemie convict’ll tell you the same.

– Bruce . . . did you really mean what you said to me earlier, about how you could fall in love with me? she asks.

I’m looking closely at her, at the burst blood vessels around her nose. Fuckin Wurzel Gummidge here. I’m thinking: No chance. – Of course I could, and you know it as well as I do. Don’t play the innocent with me. Sit down.

She takes off her coat, sits down on the couch and lights up a cigarette. She’s just like one of them, the ghouls that stood by and watched as I tried to bring that boy back. The sickening, passive, idle, grateful ghouls. How does it feel?

– I’m so confused Bruce. It’s not been an easy time, she says. I move on to the couch beside her. She’s going to see how it feels to have her breath taken away.

– Listen, there’s something you should know about me, about how I am . . . I open a button on the hoor’s blouse and stick my hand down it. She’s like a Belsen horror, all skin and bone. Her eyes have huge, black shadows under them. I look into the pupils and watch them widen in concert with the twinge in my troosers. I take the cigarette from her hand and stub it out in the ashtray. She twitches nervously and looks at me with a strange smile.

– Bruce . . . she says, looking at the smouldering fag.

– Ye ken the thing aboot fags? I ask, pointing to the ashtray with my free hand, sliding my other mitt under her bra and harshly tweaking her nipple. I watch her shut her eyes and gasp a wee bit. – What ye get from fags is an asphyxiation hit. It shuts oaf the oxygen tae the brain. That’s the high, I say, tapping her head. Pushing the life in, squeezing the life out. I take my hand out and start undoing her blouse, button by button, and then I take the top button from her skirt and unzip it and I stand up hauling her to her feet with me and the skirt slides off her to the floor, like a piece of doner kebab lamb from the greasy hunk of meat on the skewer. I pull her towards me and stick my hand inside her pants, cupping her arse cheeks, pulling her up against me. I push my mouth to her ear, getting a scent of cat’s-pish perfume. – Tell ye something, it’s as wild as fuck when ye make love, that oxygen starvation thing. You and Bob ever dae that?