Filth (53 page)

The tunnel swirls around us, the stone configuration visible, starting to spin through the filthy, bruised darkness. We hear voices, but we are not tense.

Then we are sadly not in oblivion. We have no sensation of leaving the tunnel or the wooded glen, but know that we have somehow gone back up on to the main road through the noise of the occasional car and its lights.

Then, the Napier University and the rise of twilight and the chirping of birds up towards the gardens at Gilmore Place and then we are at the King’s Theatre.

Stacey and Carole and Stacey’s wee pal Celeste with us at the pantomine, to see
Mother Goose
featuring Stanley Baxter and Angus Lennie out of
Crossroads
.

We saw it.

Oh no we didn’t.

Oh yes we did.

It’s light and we are cold; our teeth chatter together. A jakey coughs an insult at us, or it could be a request for money. We look in our pockets and there is a twenty-pound note and some change.

We take out the twenty-pound note and hand it to the jakey who sees the pain in our eyes and his own eyes focus in a grateful then fearful sobriety as he takes the note and mumbles

We travel in the opposite direction, back the way we came. In a shop window we see our thick, dark growth. We should have shaved.

What is there to do but go home.

Home.

Home Is The Darkness

I don’t have any photographs. Only memories. I can still vividly recall the time I went in to see him.

My own father. The one who never abused me, never forced me to eat coal, never called me the spawn of the devil. But he was still the one I hated most.

I’d got used to places like this with my work. I’d started not to notice them. But not this place. You had to notice it, had to feel the omnipresent, sickening bleakness of it on your approach to it. That huge perimeter fence, seeming to run the length of the ugly void of shitehouse towns, schemes, industrial estates, factories and old mines which spread between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Inside, the smell. The disinfectant. No other smell like it. Similar to a hospital but staler and more rank.

I was shaking as the screw Josh Hartley opened the cell for me. All my data of him was gleaned from that one twisted photograph in the
Daily Record
. I thought he would look like the most evil thing I had ever seen. It was anticlimactic. My anxiety fell away but I felt loathing and contempt rise as I looked at this slight, old figure. Could this really be The Beast? His eyes. They were not the eyes of a killer, but the eyes of an auld sweetie wife, privvy to some malicious gossip. His nose, hooked, not like mine, mines is like my mother’s. I wanted to haul him down on to the floor and stomp on his head, to crush the life out of him, to take his just as he’d given me mine. I thought of my mother. I resented her weakness. How could she have let this pathetic thing do that to her? How could she have not fought him off?

Did she want it? Did she want
him
? Did she want
that
? No. Never.

How could she have grown the seed of this scum inside of her for some fuckin stupid church run by cunts who dinnae even get their fuckin hole? Or urnae fuckin
supposed
tae at any rate.

It’s against regulations.

It’s against regulations for a prisoner in this category to be left alone with one officer, let alone a visiting cop, but the screw was a craft stalwart. He gave me time alone. Just five minutes. More than enough when you’ve been schooled in the discipline of the slippery stairs. I thought that I would have wanted to say something. To accuse, or to question. But I never spoke. There was no point. I just moved towards The Beast.

– What de ye want! What dae ye want! he cackled at me, picking up the hatred and the focused intent.

When the officer returned my hands were round The Beast’s neck and his split head was bouncing off the wall.

The screw stopped me. Hauled me off. The Beast still rots away in the psychiatric prison. He is used to being assaulted by prison staff, but I hoped that he remembered that one as a little bit special. But probably not.

I change channels. A documentary on Margaret Thatcher.

I change channels.
Holiday
. Judith Chalmers explores the Great Barrier Reef . . .

I switch off the televsion.

I had Carole, but I fucked every other woman I could get my hands on. Didn’t matter what they were like; prostitutes, relatives, birds on a night out who were up for it, workmates. If I’m being honest, I liked quite a few of them, although it was always easier never to admit that. I did it all the time, at any opportunity.

Carole only did it once.

Carole got back at us through shagging that coon. She said she loved him. That was all I knew about him: he was black and she said she loved him. We couldn’t help it, finishing that cunt off. It was when we were with her, dressed in her clothes. In that club wearing her clathes with the specialist large shoes we ordered from the shop in Newcastle. These yobs had set upon the cunt, kicked him unconscious. We just had to finish him, we didn’t know whether or not it was the guy Carole was with. We did him with the claw hammer we used for our protection on the streets. We bought it in Chelmsford, on the way back from Tony and Diana’s. Drummond could search all over Scotland. We needed to have it; there were people who would try to hassle us. We needed to have it, Carole and I.

Aye, we were in Jammy Joe’s and we saw Efan Wurie dancing, drinking. We tried to talk to him but he was dismissive of us. We thought he was the same guy that Carole was with. We just wanted to talk to him, to find out if he knew her. But he dismissed us. Rejected Carole and me. He never loved her, he just used her. It was the principle of the thing. Fuck it, any one will dae. We wanted to hurt.

That Estelle Davidson lassie was looking at us all night, she had seen us in the women’s toilet. She had pointed us out to Gorman and Setterington and the other thugs present. That was when we had to leave.

We had to leave and wait on them. We had to do this in order to pay them back.

But they got the coon. They got him first. I finished him, but they got him first. I don’t know why, I don’t care why, probably just because he was there, perhaps he was chatting up their birds. I don’t care. I only care about me. Even that is a lie.