Reheated Cabbage (15 page)

They went behind the couch. — Wi'll no look, honest, Gillian said.

This sparked off a laugh from Michelle which to Calum's ears had a disturbing predatory harshness to it, particularly with her dark eye sockets, but he pulled on his pants, then his jeans and handed Gillian the coat.

— Well, eh, cheers then . . . Michelle, eh, Gillian. Eh, Gillian, ye goat a number? he asked tentatively. Calum didn't know whether or not he wanted to see her again, but it seemed a good idea to at least offer. He thought that Gillian was a bit of a nutter.

— Yir no gittin ma number. You gie ays yours, she said, passing him a pen and a piece of scrap paper from her bag. It was a voucher for the Club 86 Hibernian Youth Development Christmas Draw. — Did ah flog ye one ay they raffle tickets? she asked.

— Aye, ah bought five, he replied, writing down his number on the back.

Gillian looked at Calum, then at Michelle, then back at Calum. — That wey if ah want tae see you, ah kin. Ah dinnae like laddies hasslin ays oan the phone: Come oan oot, Gilli-ihhnnn, she said scornfully in a creepy, insipid voice. Then she went over and kissed Calum and wrapped her arms around his naked torso. She whispered in his ear, — You're gaunny fuck me again, really soon. Right?

— Eh, mmh, he muttered incoherently, — eh, aye . . . yeah . . . likes. Calum remembered that point in a nature programme he'd seen where the female praying mantis ate the male praying mantis's head during sex. He watched Gillian departing with Michelle and could certainly imagine her French-kissing praying-mantis-style.

Alone in the front room, Calum sat watching morning television and smoking cigarettes. He rummaged in his jeans and pants, rubbing at his penis and balls and smelt Gillian on his hand. He thought of Helen and Boaby and started to feel depressed and lonely. Then he forced himself to make some tea before Crooky came in.

— Good night? he asked Crooky whose face was split by a hatchet-wound grin.

— The best, mate, the best. That Michelle, man; the Royal Bank, whoa, ya cunt ye! Takes it aw weys! She wis fuckin gantin oan it, bit Crooky wis up tae the joab.

— Gie her the message, aye? Calum asked, his face ashen.

— Ah fuckin split her right up the middle, man. The Royal Bank'll no be able tae sit oan a bicycle seat eftir that! Crooky here, he drummed his chest with his index finger, — ah'm well in credit wi the Royal Bank. Ah only made one withdrawal, but no before ah hud pit in quite a few fuckin big deposits, if ye catch ma drift. Wir talkin high interest n aw, ya cunt! Ah should've telt her, if ye want any ay yir mates sorted oot, take the address doon n send thum up tae Crooky . . . he's simply the best . . . do . . . do . . . Crooky burst into song, thrusting his hips: —
He's beh-rah thehn awwil
the rest . . . he's beh-rah thehn eh-eh-he-one, thehn eh-ne-one
ah've eh-eh-vah met . . . he's simply the best . . . do . . . do . . .

Calum left Crooky to his dancing. He couldn't be bothered slagging him off. A sadness had gripped him, Boaby relentlessly intruding into his thoughts. When had Boaby really died? Sometime long before last night.

— What aboot you, Cal? How wis it wi Gillian? Crooky suddenly asked, with a smirk on his face.

— No up tae much really, ma fault likes. The acid, ken?

Crooky shot him an expression of theatrical disdain. — That's a poor excuse, Cally ma man. Take Crooky here, he pointed at himself,— or tae gie him his official title: SIMPLY THE BEST, nae amount ay drugs kin knock this boy oot ay his stride. That's whit sorts oot the highly skilled time-served men fae the also-rans.

— Suppose yuv either goat it or yuv no, Calum acknowledged wearily.

— That's it, Cal, natural talent. Aw the coachin manuals in the world cannae instil that.

Calum was thinkin about Boaby, and about Gillian. — Ah once saw this documentary aboot insects, n thaire wis this prayin mantis, ken they big, radge insects?

— Aye . . . fuckin evil-lookin cunts, eh.

— Well, the lassie prayin mantis eats the laddie prayin mantis's heid whin thir shaggin . . . ah dinnae mean the lassie prayin mantis n the laddie prayin mantis . . . ah mean, like, male n female, ken?

Crooky looked at Calum. — What the fuck's that tae dae wi anything?

Calum bowed his head and put his hand in front of it. Crooky saw that he was trying to cover his face from him. When he finally spoke, Calum's voice was urgent and breathless. — We . . . saw Boaby . . . Boaby . . . we saw Boaby die . . . it shouldnae be like this, it shouldnae be like nowt's jist happened . . . ah mean . . .

Crooky slid onto the couch beside Calum. He felt stiff and awkward. He tried to speak a couple of times but he was gripped by a paralysis. Maybe that was to stop you from rabbiting, from talking shite, he thought. Maybe it was right that he couldn't say anything to his friend, who kept his face turned away from him. After a long silence he looked at the telly and asked, — What's this shite?

Calum lifted his head up, and turned it towards his friend. — Breakfast telly. Now aw wi need is breakfast, eh?

— Aye, aye, aw right, ya cunt! Ah'll go doon for some rolls n milk in a bit. Then Crooky looked at Calum, glad that the tension between them had ebbed. — Wonder what'll happen aboot last night?

Calum thought about Boaby, about how you could never ever tell that arrogant little cunt anything, how he always strode along with that petulant twist to his lip, as though the world owed the stupid wee fucker a living. — Fuck knows. Nowt tae dae wi us though. We jist say thit we thoat thit Boaby wis fucked; we tried tae help um doon the road, eh? Gillian n Michelle'll vouch fir that. We jist huv tae say thit we goat chased by they boys. They'll be the ones tae git done.

— Bit Boaby OD'd, Crooky said.

— Bit it serves they cunts right. They nutters, they might've killed um. Whaes tae say? It's thaim or us, n it's better thaim.

Crooky watched the sunlight rise from behind the tenements opposite. The city was coming back to life. The demons he and Calum always talked about were in retreat: the guys at the party, the gang of nutters, Boaby, Gillian and Michelle the Royal Bank, even. Especially that slag the Royal Bank. It was just the acid. He should've fucked the slut though, she wisnae bad-lookin, he thought bitterly. But now the nightmare was over. The sun was here, they were still here.

— Aye, Crooky agreed, — better thaim thin us.

Calum thought that he heard a car pull up outside. He was convinced that there were at least a couple of sets of heavy footsteps coming up the stair. Paranoia, he thought, it's just the residue of the acid, he told himself, just the comedown.

She should have been enjoying herself.

The light blue wall, the back of the old, brown corduroy settee in front of her, her elbows on its cushions and him behind her, his large hands not that far from circling her entire waist. His prick inside her, moving in a strange insistent rhythm and his encouraging sounds.

Sarah was thinking that she should have been enjoying herself.

She should have been enjoying herself but she most certainly wasn't. When she thought why, Sarah reckoned that it could have been because it was too cold to be naked. But that shouldn't have been an issue, and it wouldn't have been an issue, not if her tooth hadn't been hurting. Now she was feeling self-conscious, aware of herself on this couch, sprawled out in front of Gavin, like an extension of his prick, and the whole point of sex was
not
to feel self-conscious. It was difficult, though, when your tooth was hurting and you were the recipient of Gavin's Hollywood-style seduction techniques; so obviously gleaned from the sections in formula videos when the music changes and the leading couple get it on. First, the foreplay; second, the penetration; third, the positions; fourth, the orgasms (simultaneous of course). When Gavin mumbled 'you're gorgeous' or 'you've got a great body', Sarah imagined that she should have been flattered, but this was done with the concentrated detachment of a wooden actor trying to remember his lines.

Gavin hoped that the sheer force of ceremony and ritual, the expression of the appropriate word and gesture, was going to weave together the new suit that would take pride of place in that wardrobe crammed with his life's social fabric. While he was imaginative enough, Gavin knew that he possessed the exclusive imagination of the only child quietly amusing himself by setting up armies of soldiers for battles on the carpet and that this training had not given him the essential speed of thought to enable him to make contingency plans if anything went amiss in his psychologically storyboarded seduction routine.

In the club last night he had been full of Ecstasy, which always helped. Gavin had made the point of kissing every girl in the company (which on this particular night meant every girl in the club), but with Sarah he'd slipped a bit of tongue into her mouth, soul into her eyes and let his hand linger on the small of her back where it seemed determined to set up residence.

To Sarah, such attentions were a welcome source of affirmation since her split from Victor. She'd recently grown half aware that guys were mistaking her pissed-off look for the less ambiguous 'keep-the-fuck-away-from-me' variety. So as the clubbers danced under the flashing lights and the loudspeakers pumped the latest throbbing bass lines through their bodies, Gavin and Sarah found themselves in an embrace as welcoming as it was surprising.

Gavin was entranced by the fluid suggestiveness of Sarah's eyes and the mesmerising movement of her red-glossed lips as she spoke. She, in turn, was surprised by how much she fancied Gavin, his big, soulful eyes, his easy, if slightly cheesy grin, simply because she had always disliked him when he was with that Linsey.

But last night she had enjoyed his touch. Although often intimate, it had no sense of the sewer in it. She reciprocated by giving him a massage, starting off by gently stroking the tendons of his neck, then increasing with an imperceptible force to knead the MDMA through his body until it pulsed like an open wound.

They went out into the early-morning chill and took a taxi to his place where they sat up hugging, kissing and talking, removing articles of clothing as they went, losing themselves in long, shared journeys as they snogged. Gavin explained that penetrative sex would be out of the question for a while, which Sarah felt less than chuffed about, but accepted. Later, with the MDMA running down and the tiredness setting into their bodies, they fell into a comatose sleep on the couch in front of the gas fire.

Sarah awoke to Gavin's caresses. Her body immediately responded but something was not right in her head. This was now post-MDMA, another set of circumstances, and Gavin, she felt, hadn't acknowledged this. She didn't want to start all over again, but she did want Gavin to make some sort of affirmation that things were now different, terms had to be restated as much as renegotiated. And her toothache. She thought it had left her alone, this wisdom tooth problem. But those things never went away, you just got a bit of remission.

And now it was back.

It was back alright, with a persistent, spiteful vengeance.

Gavin had woken up with his cock stiff and throbbing. He pulled the throw cover from them, at first mildly surprised at his and Sarah's nakedness. Then he drew in a deep breath and felt a surge of wonder rise in him. It was like winning the lottery. Then mild paranoia that his inarticulacy and arousal would take off on different tangents settled into his psyche. It had to happen now, otherwise she would think there was something weird about him. He has to show her a good time as well, especially after all the things they had said last night. The way he hadn't been able to go for it, in a penetrative sense, and was there really any other? he considered, the thought disturbing him slightly. He knew that women liked guys who had a bit of imagination and who knew how to use their tongues and their fingers, but at the end of the day they still wanted fucking and he hadn't been able to deliver the goods last night. Yes, he had to show her a good time. That was crucial. Gavin's tongue ripped his dry lips apart as he felt consciousness submerge and movement take over, his hands gliding like heat-seeking missiles towards her.

So it was that Sarah found herself being bent and moved like a mechanical doll while Gavin thrust himself into her from different angles, all the time with his accompanying banal bleatings, which jarred at any sense of abandon. Worse, every time she threatened to get into it and just as it seemed to be transcending the pain of her toothache, he would stop, withdraw and change positions like an assembly worker on job rotation. At one point she wanted to scream with frustration. Almost to her surprise, they did achieve close to simultaneous orgasm, her coming first and Gavin just after, her thrashings against him, against the toothache, against the frustrations of the situation, telling him, — Don't fuckin move and don't fuckin come!

Gavin dug in, thinking that it would be a brave man who did either in the face of such ferocity, as she brought herself off against him.

So while the eventual destination was satisfactory, the nagging toothache prevented Sarah from basking in the afterglow and forced her to reflect that she wasn't sure whether or not she wanted to make this particular kind of trip in Gavin's company again.

She twisted and writhed in his proprietary arms, then pulled away and sat on the couch.

— What is it? he moaned in a drowsy petulance, like a child confronted by a bigger kid with designs on his sweets.

Sarah put her hand to her jaw, and let her tongue probe the back of her mouth. A spasm of sharp pain shot through the dull, omnipresent ache. — Ughhhh . . . she groaned.

— Eh? Gavin prompted, his eyes widening.

— I've got toothache, she said. It hurt to talk, but as soon as she stated this, she realised that it was unbearable.

— Want a paracetamol?

— Ah want a fuckin dentist! she snapped through the agony, holding her jaw to support that effort. That was the worst thing about pain of this sort: it seemed to draw strength from the first acknowledgement of how bad it was. Now it was becoming as bad as she could imagine pain getting.

— Aye . . . eh, right . . . Gavin stood up. The toothache, he remembered, she had mentioned it last night. It was okay then, but it must be kicking in now. — I'll see if ah kin git a number. It'll need tae be one ay they emergency punters, this bein a Sunday n that.

— I just need a dentist, she howled.

Gavin sat down on a chair and started thumbing through a Thomson Local. There was a tatty notepad with numbers and some doodlings on it. He had put a thick box round the bold lettering FEED SPARKY. His mother's cat. He had said he would. The poor bastard was probably starving.

He found a number in the Thomson's and dialled it. The book flipped shut. The cat on the cover picture of the directory seemed to judge him on Sparky's behalf.

Then there was a voice on the end of the line.

He looked strange, just sitting there naked, Sarah thought, talking on the phone to the dentist or a receptionist. His circumcised cock. The first time she had ever been with a guy with a circumcised cock, the first time she had
seen
a circumcised cock. She wanted to ask him why he'd got it done. Religious reasons? Medical ones? Hygiene? Sexual? She'd read in magazines that women enjoyed it better with circumcised cocks, but it hadn't felt different to her. She would ask –

A spasm of pain
–

The fuckin pain
. . .

Gavin still talking on the phone.— Yes, it
is
an emergency. No way can it wait.

Sarah looked up and felt good about Gavin, his positiveness, his lack of wavering, his resolute putting of her needs first in this situation. She tried to flash some message of gratitude, but her gaze didn't catch his eye and her hair fell over her face.

— Right, that's 25 Drumsheugh Gardens. Twelve o'clock. Is that as soon as ye can manage? Okay . . . right, thank you.

He put the phone down and looked up at her.— They kin take ye in an hour, doon the New Town. It wis the quickest the guy oan call could git oot tae the surgery. If we head off now we can stop at Mulligan's for a drink. Dae ye think ye could swallay a paracetamol?

— I don't know . . . aye, ah could.

— Ye swallayed enough pills last night, Gavin laughed.

Sarah tried to smile, but it hurt too much. She did, however, manage to swallow a pill and they made their way down the road, Sarah moving in a grim deliberation, Gavin in a tense symbiosis.

The bright autumn sun nipped their eyes as they walked down Cockburn Street. Gavin looked at the street sign, Cockburn Street. Though it was pronounced Co-burn Gavin felt the rawness in his genitals. Cock-burn right enough. He looked at Sarah; she had taken her hand from her face. She was fuckin lovely, sure she was. He didn't even want to look at her tits or her arse or anything, although they were fuckin beautiful, as he'd seen last night, but now they were just swamped by the essence of her. When you can feel the essence, not visualise the constituent parts, Gavin considered, that's when you know you are falling in love. Fuck, when did it happen? Maybe when he was on the phone. You could never tell with these things! Fuckin hell. Sarah!

Sarah.

He wanted to take care of her, help her through this.

Just to be there with her. For her.

Gavin 4 Sarah.

Maybe he should hold her hand. But he was jumping ahead of himself. God, he'd just fucked her every way! Why couldn't he hold her hand? What was wrong with this fucking world? How had we come to get so perverse that holding the hand of a lassie you were in love with was a heavier deal than shagging her doggy-style across your settee?

And what was he doing saying that they'd go to Mulligan's? The whole posse would be there, carrying on, keeping it going, some of them buying more pills. A few had probably been in the Boundary Bar since five this morning. Gavin tried to distance himself from a growing unease by loftily considering that he had all the chemicals he needed, the natural chemicals of love. The self-loathing was growing though. It wouldn't go away. It was like toothache. Was he really such a bastard that he wanted to parade her like a trophy in Mulligan's? I FUCKED SARAH MCWILLIAMS LAST NIGHT. No, it wasn't like that; he just wanted the world to know that they were, as they say, an item. But were they? What did she think?

Maybe he should take her hand, just do it.

Sarah thought
dentist dentist dentist.
The steps that had to be taken, the streets that needed to be crossed in order to narrow that terrifying distance between pain and treatment. There was one bad, traffic-infested roundabout in the way. She didn't know if she could do, if she could cross over that roundabout. The cars seemed to slow down and speed up, play a cat-and-mouse game with you, dare you to try and cross. It was just the way they came down to it off the steep hill. But they were over in no time. Sunday. It was quieter. Then there was Princes Street, then Mulligan's. She couldn't go to Mulligan's! What the fuck was she thinking about? But Louise and Joanne would be there. They'd chum her. Yes, Mulligan's.

Then she felt him grab her hand. What was he doing?

— Ye okay? he asked, concern scribbled on his face in the broad strokes of a crayon in an infant's fist. Expressions of sincerity were something she always found painful in men she didn't know that well. There was something so obvious about Gavin, so overplayed, not so much that of a person who was false as of one who had never learned to be comfortable being real and –

AGHHHH!

A bigger spasm of pain,
real
pain; and her squeezing on his hand.

— It's okay, we'll be there soon. Yir really suffering, eh? Gavin asked. Of course she was. He should shut up. Inappropriate, that was him, everything about him. His friends were inappropriate. His friends.

He never saw Renton now, nobody did, nor that much of Begbie, thank fuck, or Sick Boy or Nelly or Spud or Second Prize. His core mates he grew up with had evaporated from being a tight wee crew into stars of their own psychodramas. It happened to everybody. But they were inappropriate. Higher Executive Officers in the Department of Employment do not have friends like that. Executive Officers perhaps, at one time, before they find their limits, but HEOs have never had friends like that. No HEO has ever had a pal like Spud Murphy. He would never be an HEO, he was tainted by associations he didn't even have any more! They'd made their mark on him though. This manifested itself by him drinking too much, coming in obviously cunted on a Monday. But it was the Tuesday that did you. You can go through Monday still on a bit of a high, especially if other drugs were in the weekend picture, but the comedown always kicked in on the Tuesday. And they noticed. They always noticed. They had to have noticed, over the years. It was their
raison d'être.
Thus no HEO. Perhaps he shouldn't have stayed a weekend waster. Perhaps he should have gone full-time like the others, he thought bitterly.