Irvine Welsh - Filth

Move in tae the light Stevie . . . Carole . . . away from the filth, intae the light . . .

But this isn’t Carole. This is excrement. What is this thing doing here, doing here with us instead of Carole!

It has to go.

At the right time we release our grip and push and watch him falling backwards, crashing through the rotten window panes, still holding on, but unable to pull himself back in, and trying to grab the old, worn curtains but the material just tears in his hands and he looks at us with hate and incomprehension, his own blood spilling from the severed tongue in his mouth, as he slides out the window and crashes down on to the concrete court below. We look out and down and we can tell by the way he’s bent and broken that he’s gone, and then, as if to confirm our suspicion, a huge heart-shape of blood forms around his head.

The spastics are banging on the door screaming threats. Ha ha ha.

I go to shout at them but there’s something in my mouth. I put my fingers in and take it out. A piece of his tongue. I reach down and see Carole’s handbag and put it in her purse.

I’m screaming back at them through the door: – Who’s fuckin next spastics! We are the Edinburgh polis! We kill spastics! WE HATE NIGGERS! ESPECIALLY THE WHITE ONES THEY CALL SCHEMIES!

Then it stops.

It seems like an age.

Then we smell burning. They have set the building on fire. We go to the window and see them running out of the stairway. They scream a death threat up at me as they clock their spastic pal and we shout back: – Youse die! Youse git the same as that fuckin spastic! YOUSE DIE!

We get the key from the mantelpiece and open the door. There is a surge of heat and the flames are everywhere, tearing up from floor to ceiling along the old papered walls.

We are trapped. The thick, filthy smoke is filling our lungs.

Our only option is to go to the kitchen and climb out on to the back drainpipe. When we get outside the wind is flapping in our ears and we feel that we are so high. The sky above us is a lovely pale blue with a cloud formation the shape of a twisted beggar. The pipe is slippy, but we hold on. Then it wrenches from its brackets and we lose our grip and fall, and there is no time for us to brace for impact and we are crashing down into something which takes our weight as it cuts and rips all around us and we’re sinking into a filthy green brittle tomb, which is where we come to rest, in this fucking hedge and we are unable to move. The hedge grows over a spiked fence and one spike has missed our head by inches. We can’t move, all we can do is think of Carole and sob. We cry for ourselves, not for her. It is important to remember that we always cry for ourselves.

Oh Carole, I am but a fool

Carole is nothing you see, I am the fool. Poor me.

Then we hear voices. First we half-see the blurred figure of a uniformed spastic, asking us who we are.

Darling I love you, though you treat me cruel

You treat me cruel.

At some point one of the voices becomes familiar: – Well Robbo, you’ve really fucked it up this time.

We are torn to pieces in a woman’s dress, stuck in a hedge and we hear Toal talking to us, and in our present circumstances it has to be conceded that he may have a point.

You hurt me, and you make me cry

All we can say is, – You should see the other cunt.

– We’re still scraping that particular piece of shit off the pavement at the front.

But if you leave me, I will surely die .

– Boss . . . I . . . don’t leave me . . . stay with me . . . we whine in a voice that is not our own.

– Don’t try to talk Bruce, later. I’m here, Toal squeezes my hand. A good man Toal, I’ve always said it. He’s got a look in his eye, like my mother had when she was dying in that hospital bed. When we were trying to tell her that we were sorry for all the fuck-ups. Sorry that we were not somebody different. Sorry that we werenae like Stevie. A look like she understood. But she still pitied me.

Toal’s alright, but I can see the pity in his eyes, a pity I detest more than anything.

That is not true

That is not

true.

The Tales Of A Tapeworm

The hospital discharge procedures. The discharge in my pants. In my flannels. I wait for the taxi for Robertson in the A&E.

– Is there nobody who can take you home? a concerned nurse asks.

– No . . . I say.

She looks at me with a sick pity and then leaves to attend to her duties. She’s replaced by a jakey who sits sucking on a purple tin. He hands it to me. I take a swig, expecting to wince as the sickening, syrupy liquid hits my gullet, but I feel nothing.

– I’ve been comin here for ages, he tells me. – Got off the skag, but I was straight on this stuff.

Tennents never advertise the purple tin. It’s not a recreational drug; they know it’s as strong a drug as heroin or crack. They know that you don’t need to market hard drugs like those. The desperate will always find them. Scotland’s greatest export next to whisky. The white man cometh. He take your land. He give the whisky. Just when you think it safe to go back in water he give you old purple tin. The white Caledonian Ku Klux Klan are coming.

– Taxi for Robertson.

I’m going home.

The nurse is back. She has a nice smell. Not like the hospital. Not like the jakey. Not like me. – I wish there was someone you could stay with, she says, touching my wrist.

I’m never really alone, but the voices are silent. For now.

I smile and follow the cabbie. I wish there was someone I

The purple tin will destroy America once they import it over there . . . those Russian jakeys begging in the streets under capitalism, we’ll do those cunts as well.

Obliterate surplus labour!

Obliterate them with the old purple tin!

Don’t give em Ecstasy! We don’t want them dancing! Keep them dulled, staggering and incoherent as they die! Make it glamorous. Put it on celluloid, put it on hoardings. Just keep the real thing as far away from us as possible.

And the white race of Caledonia will stalk the Earth as juggernaut superbeings . . . like from that album by that shite heavy-metal band . . . who the fuck was it . . .

Carole, you standing there and me bending your fingers back, loaded up with cocaine and alcohol and you looking at me with your large eyes in a weird state way beyond fear and me trying to think of why I should stop and trying to feel something that will make me stop before that crack