Skagboys (64 page)

Alison passed under some scaffolding as four drunk, arm-in-arm girls waltzed by, singing as if on a hen night, though it was still morning. She turned, enviously, to watch them sashay up the road, desperate to know the story of their mysterious joy. It inspired her to keep her faith in impulse, propelling her into a functional bar in the shadow of the castle. It was early, and still devoid of custom. A heavyset, sulky girl, with judging eyes, dispensed her a glass of white wine. She sat down on a seat under the window, picking up a discarded
Scotsman
. The thought amused her:
I grabbed hold of a tatty old Scotsman in a grotty bar. Again
.

She rubbed the long stem of the glass between her thumb and forefinger, regarding the urine-coloured liquid nestled inside it. Then one sip of the sour vinegary substance almost made her puke. The second one was better, and the third seemed to satisfactorily reset her taste buds. She browsed the paper, arrested by an editorial:

The Scottish Office and Edinburgh District Council are to be commended for their timeous action in tackling the most serious epidemic to face Scotland’s capital. The rampant assault on our treescape, and thus our history and heritage, posed by the terrible Dutch elm threat concerns us all. The disease has taken its toll, but the casualties would have been so much higher had not the current strategy of felling and burning infected trees been so swiftly and decisively enacted.

Alison felt her eyes go down the newspaper to the readers’ letters. There was something from a general practitioner in one of Edinburgh’s big schemes. It warned that random testing had uncovered an inordinately high instance of infection by the Aids virus. She studied a sore track mark on her thin wrist.

A notion gnawed at her consciousness; trees rotting away on one side of West Granton Road, and people, inside the varicose-vein flats, so called because of their patched-up cladding, similarly decomposing. All that death. All that plague. Where did it come from? What did it mean?

What’s gaunny happen?

She left the bar, pondering this on the way home. A strong wind had started up, swirling through nooks and crannies, seeming to shake the city like it was a film set. Strange that a place built around a castle rock could seem so rickety, but that rock was now covered in scaffolding, as they tried to treat it and prevent it from crumbling. Cutting down Lothian Road, she walked to the east end through Princes Street Gardens. Heading down Leith Street, then Leith Walk and reaching her Pilrig flat, she hung up her jacket. Then she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Thought about her mum, how she loved to meet her for a coffee, to show her a top or shoes she’d bought, to gossip about neighbours or relatives, or talk about what they’d watched on the telly. Soaping and rinsing her hands, she recalled that she’d put the towels in the wash basket. She went to the press to get some fresh ones. Then it caught her eye, stuffed forlonly at the back of the cupboard; the shaving bag Alexander had left. She, unzipped it open and regarded the contents of brush, razor and block of shave stick. Picking up the brush, she held it against her chin, to see what she would look like with a goatee. Then she put it back in the bag and pulled out the bone-handled razor. Opened the blade. How light and lethal it felt in her hand. Alison rolled her sleeve up over her biceps and cut across the vein and artery. Warm blood splashed onto the tiled floor.

Mum
…

It felt good, like the pain in her was leaking out with the blood, like a terrible pressure was being removed. It was soothing. She slid down the wall.

Mum
…

But as she sat there, things quickly changed; there was too much blood. First she was gripped by a creeping nausea, then a desperate fear rose up inside her. Her thoughts faded, and she felt she was going to black out.

Dad Mhairi Calum
…

Tearing the towel from the rail, she wrapped it tightly around the wound, applying as much pressure as she could manage. She pushed herself up, staggered into the front room, lurching towards the phone. Her pulse battered in her skull as she dialled 999, and grunted for an ambulance. — I made a mistake, she heard herself gasp over and over again. — Please get here soon.

And that’s putting it mildly
…

The towel was already saturated in the blood. Crawling on her knees, she forced herself to the front door and opened it. Sat waiting by the door, feeling her eyes grow heavy.

…
mildly
…

Emerging into some kind of consciousness in the hospital, she was assailed by a procession of solemn faces who explained that they’d got to her in time, told her how close it had been, and stressed the luck she’d enjoyed on this occasion. — Please don’t tell my dad, she repeatedly begged, when they’d sternly asked about contact details and a next of kin.

— We need to inform somebody, a short, middle-aged nurse explained.

All she could think to do was give them Alexander’s number.

They stitched her up and gave her a pint and a half of blood. Alexander came round later, and took her home to the Pilrig flat the next day. He brought her Chinese food and spent the night on her couch. She was asleep in the morning when he checked on her before he went to work. As he left, he looked at the picture in his wallet of his two children. He and Tanya, they had to be there for them. But he came by to check on Alison that evening, telling her he’d signed her off on two weeks’ leave, informing her with a grim smile that he’d ignored her resignation request. — I didn’t get a formal letter.

They’d sat up, her on the couch, him in the armchair, and started talking about their own bereavement experiences. Alexander was conscious that his had been more limited than hers. — Tanya’s father died three years ago. Massive coronary. She’s been really angry since; principally, it seems, with me. But what can I do? I didn’t kill him. It’s not
my
fault.

— It’s no hers either.

Alexander thought about this. — No, it isn’t, he conceded, — and neither is it your fault that your mum died. So you shouldn’t be punishing yourself as if it was.

It was then she looked at him, in mounting anxiety, letting him see her cry for the first time ever. It didn’t make him feel the way he’d envisaged it would; big, manly and protective. Her face was horribly distorted, and he shared her wretched pain, and powerlessness at being unable to make it go away. — I never wanted to die, Alison said, looking really scared, then tightly shutting her eyes, as if confronting the possibility. — No for one second … The doctor telt us if the arterial cut had been a millimetre deeper, I’d probably have bled tae death in a few minutes. I just wanted tae take the pressure off …

— You can’t get rid of the pressure. Nobody can. It’s horrible, but all we can do is try and learn to carry its burden.

She glanced miserably at him when he said that. She was thankful he’d been there for her, but was relieved when he was getting ready to go. Hoping he wouldn’t come back. He seemed to understand. — I really wish you well, Alison, he said to her.

When he left, she was content to lie on the couch in the dark, still able to smell his aftershave in the room, to feel the soft burn on the back of her hand where he’d gently touched her. Then Alison fell into a bruising sleep, ignoring the calls racking up on her answer machine. At some point she rose, eventually pulling herself through to the bedroom, and slipping under the duvet. She slumbered in some kind of peace till midday, rising and feeling stronger. Then she heated up a tin of soup, ate, put on a long-sleeved cardigan and headed down Leith Walk to visit her father.

The Rehab Diaries

Day 1

Stoned like a slug after Johnny’s hit. I knew it would be my last for a while and it started to leave my system almost as soon as I’d gained an awareness of how good I was feeling. Within a few hours I was writhing in discomfort. Lay most of the day on the wee bed, trying to catch my breath, sweating like a backshift hooker, as the vigour boiled out of my blood
.

The narrow windows, which you can’t open, are surrounded by big, forbidding trees that overhang the walled back garden, shutting out most of the light. The building seems airless; the only sound the disturbing moans of some poor fucker from an adjacent room. I’m evidently not the only cunt in detox
.

As the leaden dusk takes hold, bats dance outside in a small illuminated patch the trees can’t get at. I go from bed to window to bed, pacing like a madman but too scared to leave this room
.

Day 2

FUCK THEM ALL
.

Day 5

They’ve left this big, ring-bound, loose-leaf diary on the desk, but I’ve been too fucked to write anything the last couple of days. There have been times when I’ve really wanted to die, the pain
and
misery of withdrawal so fucking intense and incessant. They’ve given me some painkillers, which are probably useless placebo shite. You sense they want you to experience the torment of it all
.

If I’d had the means and the energy to dispatch myself yesterday, I’d have been seriously tempted. For the last few days I’ve been feeling like I could drown in my own sweat. My fucking bones … it’s as if I’m inside a car that’s being crushed in a breaker’s yard. It’s just so fucking relentless. And I think about Nicksy and Keezbo, and how I’d have jumped in their circumstances if I was feeling like this. Why the fuck put up with it?

I NEED A FUCKING FIX
.

I need it bad
.

I only leave my room for the toilet, or for breakfast, the one time detoxers are required to join the others. I take my tea with five sugars, and Coco Pops and milk, scranning it back as quick as I can. It’s about all I can eat here; I usually have the same for lunch and dinner, which I always take in my room
.

Last night, or the night before, I got up for a piss. There’s a couple of thin-glowing night lights in the corridor, at skirting level, and I very near shat myself as this uplit, sweating beast came lumbering towards me. Some part of my brain told me to just keep walking, and the monster looked briefly at me, mumbling something as we passed each other. I said, ‘Awright?’ and carried on. When I came out of the bogs the thing had thankfully gone. I don’t know if this was a dream or hallucination
.

Day 6

Woken from a jaggy, nightmare-stuffed sleep by an aggressive storm of birdsong. I force myself to rise. Can barely look in the mirror. I’ve been way too uncomfortable to try and shave and I’ve grown
a
thin, scraggy ginger beard which looks redder and thicker than it is, cause of the spots on my face. The yellowheads are repulsive enough, but it’s two big boil-like fuckers on my cheek and forehead that cause the distress. They throb under the surface of my skin like a Peter Hook bassline, hurting my face every time I try to move it. But my eyes provide the real shock; they seem pushed right back into my skull sockets, a deathly, defeated look to them
.

The ‘monster’ the other night was that big biker gadgie, Seeker. Cunt doesn’t look any better in the daylight
.

Sick Boy’s been chatting up that hostile Molly lassie. ‘Love’s the most dangerous drug of all,’ he solemnly declared, eyes full of seriousness. Of course, she’s falling for this garbage, nodding away. I was too fucked to enjoy his shite and Spud was rabbiting in my ear, about how detox isn’t so bad. ‘Ah jist keep thinkin thit it’s barry somebody cares but, Mark
.’

As I left the table I heard some smirking cunt, probably Swanney or Sick Boy, referring to me as Catweazle, after the crazed jakey on telly. With my straggly hair and beard and stooping gait, I sense that’s
exactly
how I look. I’m happy and relieved to get back to my room
.

Get assessed again by that Dr Forbes, who came in from the community drug clinic. He basically asked the same shite questions as before. Couldn’t stop looking at his head; it’s too big for his body, the Gerry Anderson puppet look
.

More Coco Pops for dinner, before retiring to my suite. Happy days. Len comes in and talks for a wee bit, mainly about music. We have a half-hearted Beefheart discussion on the merits of
Clear Spot
(me — a barry record) versus
Trout Mask Replica
(him – a shite album). He tells me again aboot the guitar in the recky room
.

Day 8

At breakfast I had a wee bit of porridge. With salt. Skinny-Specky made some comment about salt in porridge (she took sugar in hers) and we playfully derided her English habits. She insisted that she was Scottish, but Ted and Skreel told her that posh Scots were, to all intents and purposes, the same as the English. I mentioned that there were actually working-class people in England, and social class supplanted nationality as the parameters of our discussion. (Fuck sake – check the student cunt here!)

The Tom gadgie listened intently, as did Seeker, and a new, dark-heided, pointy-jawed, blue-eyed lassie who was introduced by Skinny-Specky as ‘Audrey, from Glenrothes’, as if she was a contestant on the
Generation Game.

NOICE TA SEE YA, TA SEE YA, NOICE!

Audrey has replaced Greg ‘Roy’ Castle, who was the first dropout of the rehab programme. Apparently, he couldn’t handle it and opted instead for residency courtesy of Her Majesty at Saughton. Audrey gave us a fretful nod, then sat in silence biting her nails. I felt for her, just shakily emerging from the detox cocoon of her room, the only lassie but one in the group. She looked even worse than I felt, rattling like a bairn’s toy
.

‘
I’m sure you’ll be very happy here, Audrey,’ Swanney said, sarcasm trickling from his tongue, then added, ‘You don’t have to be addicted to hard drugs to stay here, but it helps!
’

Day 9

I take in another dull, fearsome morning. Outside, the white of the daisies on the dewy lawn, and crocuses, yellow, white and purple, spreading like a
wave
along the bottom of the stone wall. It’s not so bad
.